The biggest problem I see with these systems is very rapid obsolescence. You'll generally replace a phone or tablet a lot more often than a car. There should be a standard port to attach a tablet to and the car manufacturer can offer software for all the major platforms, or you can choose to use something else. Instead we seem to be getting a bunch of built in tablets running code that we have no control over and can't replace. Is anybody sorting this out?
Those kinds of controls have all moved to on-the-steering-wheel buttons. And presumably most of the controls are going to be voice activated soon, via all this fancy computing you seem so opposed to (on/. FFS).
Of course the plants can be made safer. Everything can be made safer. We could all wear crash helmets 24/7. All cars could be made crash proof (take the wheels off). "All the dams in France bursting at once and flooding the plants", if that happens the least of your problems is the nuclear reactor. Just like the problems at Fukushima were the least of the worries of the 20,000 killed by the earthquake and tsunami. No industry in the world spends money on preventing staggeringly unlikely events causing harm like the nuclear industry has to. Do you want to double your electricity bill so that the chances of a disaster move from 1 in 10 million years to 1 in 20 million according to the design calcs? Humans are staggering bad at risk assessment and the nuclear (and terrorism) panic proves it conclusively. You would think that a bunch of geeks could figure some basic stats.
Don't you think that you might be asking for the impossible? How exactly is Linux supposed to keep up with the latest hardware developments and support legacy hardware and stay small? Linux can be paired down to be tiny and run with very little resources but it can't to that as part of a mainstream distro trying to cater for everyone from your gran to a linux gamer to a developer. I think you might have your rose-tinteds on about the good old days when hardware compatibility was a nightmare and the amount of linux software was a tiny fraction of what we have today.
I don't think it's the testing that makes UK drivers better, it's the tiny roads with cars parked on both sides. You have to be aware of the size of your car and what is going on around you all the time or you hit something (I learned to drive in the UK). Here in Western Australian (and in the US from what I've seen) the roads and lanes are wide, long and straight and half the drivers are asleep.
For most of history (and for most people in the world today) if they want to get enough nutrition to survive they eat meat, that's why we're evolutionarily equipped for it. Our own survival tends to come before the pain and death of animals that we have control over. I get that, and under the same conditions I would kill and eat a pig. Frankly in extremis I might eat a person.
The difference is that in our hermetically sealed, mollycoddled, western lives we can get all the nutrition we need without the pain and death of other animals (other than the poor sods breaking their backs in the production of veggie food of course). Some of us make that choice. You can argue about what constitutes morality until you are blue in the face, we all draw lines in arbitrary places about the stuff we think is right and wrong.
I have to wonder why you are so angry about this. Nobody is threatening to take your steak away. I think the point that some people are making is simply that if you care about how an animal lives or dies, which Zuckerburg seems to be claiming he does, you could simply choose not to eat them.
If I remember correctly the reported levels of contamination in the food and water supply in Japan were, even at their peek, in the order of a couple of 100Bq per kg. You need to put a sample in a counter or spectrometer for some time to be able to tell those levels from background. Pointing a GM tube at pieces of spinach to see if one is contaminated more than another is futile, all you are going to notice is variations in background. You can have fun finding all sorts of slightly radioactive things with a counter if you like but unless you are willing to spend >$10k on a portable gamma spectrometer which _might_ be able to distinguish tiny amounts of I-131 or Cs-137 from background you are not going to find anything in the food.
You can detect (and identify) the radiation from the atmospheric bomb testing that took place decades ago! Radiation detection equipment is extremely sensitive. Without numbers (and units) "detected" means absolutely nothing. Please/. stop reporting this non-news, it's just infuriating to anyone with even a basic understanding of radiation safety/physics.
It'll be interesting how the governments of the world choose to deal with self driving cars. They are bound to be statistically much better than humans but I bet it will be a long time before you don't need a license holding, sober, able-bodied person behind the wheel even though most of them will be checking their Facebook updates on the dashboard screen rather than "supervising" the car.
When you go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning how do you know that you are still you? Sounds like a silly question but if somebody copied you perfectly and took the original away you would still wake up in your bed. The fact there there is now another you doesn't change that. The fact that you are the copy doesn't change that either. As both of you experience more then you become more and more separated in the same way that you today are separated from the you of a few years ago. So if I can get me consciousness copied to a machine which is functionally equivalent (or superior) then I get to survive in the machine even if I also get to die in this meatbag, better than the just dying option.
One problem. MeeGo isn't ready for release. How long do you think Apple worked on iOS (or whatever it was called back then) behind closed doors not telling anyone they were even working on a phone? The worst thing they could do would be to release phones with a broken, half-finished OS and set up the impression that MeeGo is broken, they would never recover from that. MeeGo being open-source means that they have to tell everyone about it long before there will be devices for sale. My guess is that with Intel they will push MeeGo out on lots of other devices (tablets, netboks, in-car systems) and then people will have heard of and used/seen MeeGo when they come to buy their next phone. Will it work? I don't know. But I will be supporting them because I want a real Linux computer in my pocket not a closed-off gadget full of fart apps.
I know I'm being a pedant but MeeGo isn't Fedora under the hood. It uses rpm packages but it has no upstream distribution. They've made that choice to concentrate on optimising it for portable devices without all the desktop/server baggage of the main distributions.
Doctors are often not as fit as "Law Enforcement or Military Personnel" if you've got a bad back standing around in a lead gown for hours at a time can take quite a toll.
Having said that this seems like the sort of thing that one interventional radiologist will insist on having installed at huge cost to the hospital and it'll get used twice then pushed off into the corner. We've seen this kind of thing before. The last one was nick-named the pope-mobile, it was basically a lead phone box on wheels with arm holes and lead acrylic windows.
The main problem is that people won't look at the situation rationally. Even if the cars are statistically safer drivers than people the general public will not accept deaths from equipment malfunction. The resulting law-suits will probably kill off the idea never allowing the cars to get really good. The result - continued carnage on the roads.
Maemo isn't Symbian. They are both mostly-open phone OSs but Symbian has been around for years and is probably on its way out. Maemo has come from the UMPC direction and has just made it to a phone (N900). Nokia claim that they are going to support both but I think it's obvious that as hardware gets cheaper whilst able to meet the higher requirements of Maemo, Symbian will fade away from thier product line-up. I think Nokia are lookin to the FOSS community to reduce thier costs in maintaining an aging platform while they concentrate on developing a new one. I don't have a problem with that. Better than simply letting it stagnate.
Evolution doesn't have a purpose. There is no destiny. If they get made, survive and out reproduce us it will be because they are better at surviving and reproducing than we are not because the universe wants it.
It's this attitude that really pisses off technical users. Not everyone in a company can work with a locked down PC with nothing but bloody Office(TM) on it. Some of us do more that write letters and powerpoint presentations. And no, I don't know what software I'm going to need for the lifetime of my PC when it's supplied, and I can't afford to wait 3 weeks to get each piece of software I want to install approved because it's not on your list. If I install something and it doesn't work you have every right to say "Not an approved app I can't do anything" but don't stop me from spending 5 mins of company time downloading and installing a free app to save a crapload of paperwork (and work for the IT department). If I install unlicensed software sack me, if I bring the network to it's knees name and shame me but don't cut me off at the knees so that your job is easier.
I know that it's not a real law but it does give strength to any country who wants to make it in to a law in their country. Wouldn't this make talking about why you are an atheist illegal? I guess this would be seen as a bonus to the countries which proposed it anyway. What I really don't understand are the abstainers, who couldn't have an opinion on this?
I'm pretty sure what they mean is that minimal fast booting distros dished out with netbooks are crap and people equate them to linux and so think linux is crap. Clearly if you can make a full distro boot quickly that's a good thing.
I've never used a netbook so I can't comment on their distros.
Slashdot Mirror
The biggest problem I see with these systems is very rapid obsolescence. You'll generally replace a phone or tablet a lot more often than a car. There should be a standard port to attach a tablet to and the car manufacturer can offer software for all the major platforms, or you can choose to use something else. Instead we seem to be getting a bunch of built in tablets running code that we have no control over and can't replace. Is anybody sorting this out?
Those kinds of controls have all moved to on-the-steering-wheel buttons. And presumably most of the controls are going to be voice activated soon, via all this fancy computing you seem so opposed to (on /. FFS).
Being a hypocrite doesn't automatically make everything you say wrong.
GKOS is another open-source chorded keyboard, originally for homemade hardware devices but more recently ported to touchscreens.
http://gkos.com/gkos/index-gkos-com.html
Of course the plants can be made safer. Everything can be made safer. We could all wear crash helmets 24/7. All cars could be made crash proof (take the wheels off). "All the dams in France bursting at once and flooding the plants", if that happens the least of your problems is the nuclear reactor. Just like the problems at Fukushima were the least of the worries of the 20,000 killed by the earthquake and tsunami. No industry in the world spends money on preventing staggeringly unlikely events causing harm like the nuclear industry has to. Do you want to double your electricity bill so that the chances of a disaster move from 1 in 10 million years to 1 in 20 million according to the design calcs? Humans are staggering bad at risk assessment and the nuclear (and terrorism) panic proves it conclusively. You would think that a bunch of geeks could figure some basic stats.
Don't you think that you might be asking for the impossible? How exactly is Linux supposed to keep up with the latest hardware developments and support legacy hardware and stay small? Linux can be paired down to be tiny and run with very little resources but it can't to that as part of a mainstream distro trying to cater for everyone from your gran to a linux gamer to a developer. I think you might have your rose-tinteds on about the good old days when hardware compatibility was a nightmare and the amount of linux software was a tiny fraction of what we have today.
I don't think it's the testing that makes UK drivers better, it's the tiny roads with cars parked on both sides. You have to be aware of the size of your car and what is going on around you all the time or you hit something (I learned to drive in the UK). Here in Western Australian (and in the US from what I've seen) the roads and lanes are wide, long and straight and half the drivers are asleep.
The point I think you are missing is choice.
For most of history (and for most people in the world today) if they want to get enough nutrition to survive they eat meat, that's why we're evolutionarily equipped for it. Our own survival tends to come before the pain and death of animals that we have control over. I get that, and under the same conditions I would kill and eat a pig. Frankly in extremis I might eat a person.
The difference is that in our hermetically sealed, mollycoddled, western lives we can get all the nutrition we need without the pain and death of other animals (other than the poor sods breaking their backs in the production of veggie food of course). Some of us make that choice. You can argue about what constitutes morality until you are blue in the face, we all draw lines in arbitrary places about the stuff we think is right and wrong.
I have to wonder why you are so angry about this. Nobody is threatening to take your steak away. I think the point that some people are making is simply that if you care about how an animal lives or dies, which Zuckerburg seems to be claiming he does, you could simply choose not to eat them.
If I remember correctly the reported levels of contamination in the food and water supply in Japan were, even at their peek, in the order of a couple of 100Bq per kg. You need to put a sample in a counter or spectrometer for some time to be able to tell those levels from background. Pointing a GM tube at pieces of spinach to see if one is contaminated more than another is futile, all you are going to notice is variations in background. You can have fun finding all sorts of slightly radioactive things with a counter if you like but unless you are willing to spend >$10k on a portable gamma spectrometer which _might_ be able to distinguish tiny amounts of I-131 or Cs-137 from background you are not going to find anything in the food.
You can detect (and identify) the radiation from the atmospheric bomb testing that took place decades ago! Radiation detection equipment is extremely sensitive. Without numbers (and units) "detected" means absolutely nothing. Please /. stop reporting this non-news, it's just infuriating to anyone with even a basic understanding of radiation safety/physics.
It'll be interesting how the governments of the world choose to deal with self driving cars. They are bound to be statistically much better than humans but I bet it will be a long time before you don't need a license holding, sober, able-bodied person behind the wheel even though most of them will be checking their Facebook updates on the dashboard screen rather than "supervising" the car.
When you go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning how do you know that you are still you? Sounds like a silly question but if somebody copied you perfectly and took the original away you would still wake up in your bed. The fact there there is now another you doesn't change that. The fact that you are the copy doesn't change that either. As both of you experience more then you become more and more separated in the same way that you today are separated from the you of a few years ago. So if I can get me consciousness copied to a machine which is functionally equivalent (or superior) then I get to survive in the machine even if I also get to die in this meatbag, better than the just dying option.
Any reason why this couldn't be used to repair damage from other forms of radiation or carcinogens?
One problem. MeeGo isn't ready for release. How long do you think Apple worked on iOS (or whatever it was called back then) behind closed doors not telling anyone they were even working on a phone?
The worst thing they could do would be to release phones with a broken, half-finished OS and set up the impression that MeeGo is broken, they would never recover from that.
MeeGo being open-source means that they have to tell everyone about it long before there will be devices for sale. My guess is that with Intel they will push MeeGo out on lots of other devices (tablets, netboks, in-car systems) and then people will have heard of and used/seen MeeGo when they come to buy their next phone. Will it work? I don't know. But I will be supporting them because I want a real Linux computer in my pocket not a closed-off gadget full of fart apps.
I know I'm being a pedant but MeeGo isn't Fedora under the hood. It uses rpm packages but it has no upstream distribution. They've made that choice to concentrate on optimising it for portable devices without all the desktop/server baggage of the main distributions.
Doctors are often not as fit as "Law Enforcement or Military Personnel" if you've got a bad back standing around in a lead gown for hours at a time can take quite a toll.
Having said that this seems like the sort of thing that one interventional radiologist will insist on having installed at huge cost to the hospital and it'll get used twice then pushed off into the corner. We've seen this kind of thing before. The last one was nick-named the pope-mobile, it was basically a lead phone box on wheels with arm holes and lead acrylic windows.
The main problem is that people won't look at the situation rationally. Even if the cars are statistically safer drivers than people the general public will not accept deaths from equipment malfunction. The resulting law-suits will probably kill off the idea never allowing the cars to get really good. The result - continued carnage on the roads.
Maemo isn't Symbian. They are both mostly-open phone OSs but Symbian has been around for years and is probably on its way out. Maemo has come from the UMPC direction and has just made it to a phone (N900). Nokia claim that they are going to support both but I think it's obvious that as hardware gets cheaper whilst able to meet the higher requirements of Maemo, Symbian will fade away from thier product line-up. I think Nokia are lookin to the FOSS community to reduce thier costs in maintaining an aging platform while they concentrate on developing a new one. I don't have a problem with that. Better than simply letting it stagnate.
The frets tell it which note/chord to play while the touchscreen controls the effect(s) added and the timing. (from watching the video)
Small problem with that idea in the physical sciences, a simulated lab isn't much use for hands on experience.
Evolution doesn't have a purpose. There is no destiny. If they get made, survive and out reproduce us it will be because they are better at surviving and reproducing than we are not because the universe wants it.
It's this attitude that really pisses off technical users. Not everyone in a company can work with a locked down PC with nothing but bloody Office(TM) on it. Some of us do more that write letters and powerpoint presentations. And no, I don't know what software I'm going to need for the lifetime of my PC when it's supplied, and I can't afford to wait 3 weeks to get each piece of software I want to install approved because it's not on your list. If I install something and it doesn't work you have every right to say "Not an approved app I can't do anything" but don't stop me from spending 5 mins of company time downloading and installing a free app to save a crapload of paperwork (and work for the IT department). If I install unlicensed software sack me, if I bring the network to it's knees name and shame me but don't cut me off at the knees so that your job is easier.
I know that it's not a real law but it does give strength to any country who wants to make it in to a law in their country. Wouldn't this make talking about why you are an atheist illegal?
I guess this would be seen as a bonus to the countries which proposed it anyway.
What I really don't understand are the abstainers, who couldn't have an opinion on this?
"Your God is dead, and no-one cares..." NIN
"I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours but I think that God has got a sick sense of humour..." Depeche Mode
I'm sure that there are thousands more
I'm pretty sure what they mean is that minimal fast booting distros dished out with netbooks are crap and people equate them to linux and so think linux is crap. Clearly if you can make a full distro boot quickly that's a good thing.
I've never used a netbook so I can't comment on their distros.