TrueCrypt makes an encrypted OS, though, doesn't it? eCryptFS lets you just have one encrypted directory. The way it's being used is that people can put their ~/.evolution as a symlink to one inside ~/Private/ so most things aren't encrypted (thereby using less resources) while the necessary things are.
Truecrypt creates a file somewhere on your drive. It even offers the feature to forget where it is. When you want access, you open truecrypt, point it to your file, and it mounts it onto a directory you select. Not as easy as an automaticly opening directory, but different. Also more secure.
Don't know what you mean about network profile. NM does 3G now though. Supposedly it works (but I don't have the hardware to test).
Network profiles means I come into my office, plug in my network cable, tell my laptop I'm in my office and it sets up the appropriate static IP address and the like. I go home, plug in my network cable, tell it I'm in my apartment and it looks for a DHCP server. Ideally, this would be extended to wireless networks as well i.e. I could tell the software "When if office mode, connect to wired network with this IP address, or if that's not available, then connect to this wireless network or this one" and when I'm home "Use dynamic address with wired network, or use this wireless network"
I'm using Kubuntu 8.04 right now. The article claims "The last six months of development have brought tons of new functionality that make running Linux easier for all users". I hardly see anything awe-inspiring. Here's my perspective as a current KDE user:
1. GNOME: I see nothing revolutionary or even exciting here. Ekiga is their picture for this. That's definitely a niche app. Better bluetooth support and resolution controls are good I guess. I've had the on KDE for a few years now I believe.
2. X.org: Hotplugging mice/keyboards "works now"? Well, it works now for me with 8.04. They must've had to dig deep to find something like that. So does resolution switching and xrandr support for multiple displays (which is a huge deal, but has already been around for a year).
3. New kernel: always good for my laptop which typically get a few more things running more smoothly with each kernel release
4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.
5. Guest account: I see no point for this. Either you trust the person or you don't. And you can create your own guest account if you really want to and switch to it. At least I can do that from KDE. I suppose one click is nicer than click, type in guest/guest, and log in. So maybe a worthwhile feature, though hardly earth-shattering
6. Flash video: Eh, what was stopping things from working before? I assume this just means version 10 is supported. Which is great, but 64 bit support is still lacking so I'll still have problems with it. No, not an ubuntu problem, but I can complain anyway.
7. Secret hidden folders: Just use truecrypt. This doesn't even encrypt your home directory based on the article. And you need to go to the terminal to set it up?
8. Config-less x.org: Now this is nice. Hopefully it'll work well. I haven't had to use an xorg config file for a few years now beyond the default, though to support multiple monitors I've had to include a virtual screen line. Hopefully this will fix that problem.
Personally, I'm more intereted in Kubuntu dropping KDE3 in 8.10. KDE4 can be set up well, but it certainly doesn't support everything that's in KDE3 and still isn't quite as smooth (though I actually like it a lot).
Most cars make their best fuel economy somewhere between 1800 to 2200 rpm. Ah ha! My car has a 6 speed stick. If I'm in 6th gear it's turning about 2000rpm at 85mph.
Unfortunately, the problem is that 6 speed transmissions are considered "sporty" and thus are not included in anything but "sporty" or "luxury" vehicles. To the point that manufacturers will even leave space for a 6th gear but not install one.
For example, Honda CR-Vs (at least before 07) and Elements can be modified using parts from an Acura TSX or Civic Si to upgrade from a 5-speed to a 6-speed. The total cost is several hundred. Seeing as my CR-V needs to go at 3500 rpm around 75 mph, my fuel economy is definitely worse, and a 6th gear would definitely help. But it's not a sports car, so Honda doesn't want to increase the price by a few hundred to add the extra gear in (plus I'm sure that there's no benefit to the EPA highway testing as it'll only benefit people going over the speed limit).
IAAAP (actually a grad student). I'm actually not sure if there is such a package, but basically all this stuff is done by grad students and its fairly routine nowadays for uncomplicated objects. For anything complicated, a computer program wouldn't be able to do a think for you.
You're right, it appears that the energy peaked in the infrared spectrum. Which is not at all consistent with antimatter annihilation.
This is actually not accurate. The article contains a spectrograph from 4000 to 10000 angstroms. It does not contain any shorter wavelengths. The way you find an object's redshift is by matching known absorption/emission lines with the object's emission lines. The offset is the redshift. As the article points out, there's no obvious match to the few narrow lines, thus, we don't know what the redshift is. For some reason (possibly because the object was too faint), they did not observe in the UV or X-ray ranges, which would've been helpful for higher energy events, especially if it was galactic.
Keep in mind that Russia attacked on two fronts: one in South Ossetia, and one in Abkhazia
This is incorrect. Russia actually only attacked in South Osetia. The military actions in Abkhazia were (supposedly) only done by Abkhazians. Russia probably contributed air support but likely no troops.
What is unsettling is that, according to a New York Times piece, the information attacks began weeks before the actual hostilities. It's clear that the Russians were just waiting for an excuse to go into Georgia.
Russia and Georgia have been itching to fight for a long time. As long as the status quo remained, fighting in South Osetia was low key. The fact that Georgia decided to launch an offensive to retake South Osetia triggered this conflict, and I see no reasonable way to defend Georgia.
Did Georgia behave irresponsibly? Sure. But Russia's response- launching a second front in Abkhazia, driving deep into Georgia and cutting the country in half by occupying Gori, bombing the airport in Tblisi, and hitting civilian targets (intentionally or not)- is disproportionate.
If you defend Georgia in this conflict then you should also be against Kosovo's independence. The fact of the matter is that South Osetia and Abkhazia are ethnically different from Georgians and each wants independence. Saakashvili made it a point of his policies to reintegrate the two areas into Georgia against their wishes. Then, right at the start of the Olympics, he had his military move in and start shelling the capital. The Russian response has been to destroy the capacity of Georgia to engage in military actions in South Osetia. As in most wars, the civilian population is hurt. However, compared to what Russia could have done had it wanted to (carpet bombing of civilian areas), they seem to have done a good job of trying not to hurt the civilian population of Georgia. At last reports regarding Gori, the Russian military has been demilitarizing and letting all civilians go. While I don't support the Russian advance farther into Georgia, I can also completely understand why they want this to end once and for all.
In fact, I personally find Saakashvili to be the person to blame in this situation. Not only did he order the invasion of South Osetia, but he has consistenly used scaremongering as a tactic to draw support for Georgia. In fact, his own government has directly contradicted him in his claims that Russia is advancing on Tbilisi. If anyone has to go, it's him.
On the other hand, America's international policy is almost guaranteed to improve in November, whereas there is no indication that Putin is surrendering his grasp on power anytime soon.
Unlike with Bush though, Putin/Medvedev are held in high regard by a good majority of the population. Their actions have helped most average Russians from what I've seen and have brought Russia back from collapse. Whether or not all of their actions and policies have been good for the world or Russia, the majority of them have helped Russia and I seriously doubt they would be voted out even in a completely free election. As for the US, quite frankly, neither of the candidates is much better than Bush and I doubt that our standing in the world will change much.
China has fulfilled very little of its obligations for the Olympics. The one advantage of a centralized government with dictatorial powers is that if they say "Jump!" people jump. If the government had ever wanted to officially change its policies it could have and would have gotten pollution under control, had only minor protests on the torch route, and no issues with the Internet. The price would have been much lower economic growth. But instead of dealing with this, it could have become a much greener country and actually leap frogged over the rest of the world in at least some ways. But they didn't. Instead their primary goal was to show off Chinese power. The problem for them was they didn't count on what the rest of the world would think of it.
If the media actually does its job, these Olympics will be completely ruined for the Chinese government. I doubt it will, but you never know. On the other hand, if the IOC did its job, it would have moved the Olympics somewhere else and penalized China. But that didn't happen and I doubt it will happen.
Instead of using a colo server or shared hosting, get a VPS. You get someone else dealing with the hardware and network side of things while you get the benefits of a dedicated server with the price of shared hosting. The only restriction is the inability to change the kernel, but good providers will set up a kernel for you with the features you need.
This also means that they don't have easy access to your server unless you want them to. Granted, they could always mount the virtual drives, but unless you have complete physical control over server access, you can never fully control everything.
I've used KDE 4.1 RC1, but its just not there yet. First, it's still not as stable or bug-free as KDE 3.5. This is partially due to packaging (since Ubuntu hasn't quite figured out all the dependencies yet) and partially due to the code itself. An even bigger problem, however, is the lack of core system applications that just aren't there yet. For example, KPowerSave and KNetworkManager are essentially requirements for any laptop. Neither of these is present nor, for example, does 4.1 let me suspend the system. The backend (Solid) for a lot of these things is present, but now someone has to write the front end that someone can actually control.
And, as others have commented, amarok, digikam, and koffice aren't ready yet either. I think it's going to take until at least 4.2 or 4.3 for it to be really usable and 4.5 until its actually fully polished.
Maybe the US will now leapfrog from an antiquated power distribution system to the most advanced in the world. Maybe. One positive aspect of this is the reduction of energy loss due to the superconductivity. This may also allow long distance lines to be run (even though the cooling will be a problem) which might help balance out the grid when needed.
According to Wikipedia, super conducting cables will use roughly half the energy saved for cooling, but since losses are around 7%, that's still a rather high amount of energy saved.
Why didn't Obama try to stop this? He could have spoken out and got the rest of the dems behind him. Instead he voted in favor of it.
I have come to realize that Obama is just another politician who is nothing new. I was willing to support him, even though I did not agree with almost any of his policies (I'm fiscally conservative), until he started changing his views and becoming like most other politicians. When even the NY times has an editorial criticizing him, you know something is going wrong.
Unfortunately for me, this leaves McCain. And while I agree with him on how he wants to handle the economy, I don't believe he's what the country needs to recover from the politicians currently in DC.
But from what I understand (not being a Windows developer but having read articles) is that the NT kernel isn't really all that bad. I'm sure its not perfect, but it is supposedly fairly well designed. The problem is the APIs and the huge amount of backwards compatibility. If Microsoft wanted to, they could dump everything but the kernel, redesign everything else including (and most importantly) the APIs, and produce a nice OS. Old apps could run in a Wine like emulation layer that MS could make perfect. I doubt there would be much, if any, slowdown and it would keep full legacy support. NT already has the capability to do this.
The question is is whether Microsoft is willing to do this. It would be a huge change and would require a lot of work on their part. I think if they did it developers would follow. But I'm not sure if MS has the initiative and determination to do it anymore, especially after the person who could've done it has left.
KDE shot itself in the foot by making the KDE 3.x so polished. KDE 3.5 is essentially 9 years of evolutionary development from KDE 1.0. Unfortunately, its impossible to recreate 9 years of development and polish in only 3. I think that the long term prospects for KDE 4.x are great, but short term I'll continue to use 3.5. I've tried the first beta of 4.1 and while its much more functional than 4.0, its still not there and probably won't be for a few more releases. On the other hand, I remember that KDE 3.0 was, while more functional than 4.0, also much rougher than 3.5, so I can't complain too much.
With regards to the first post, the author is apparently a master's student who has completed his degree and is now leaving. More specifically, he's interested in science education and while I confess I'm not sure what E/PO Coordinator & Evaluator stands for, there's a good chance (with his background) that it means Education/Public Outreach. In which case its not a critical position and his leaving, if it was already planned (which it seems to have been), this is not a serious issue.
As for taking the weekend off, the people on the project have probably been working almost continuously ever since Phoenix landed. If they take 2 days off out of 90 its not the end of the world.
I have a feeling far more people LIKE the new address bar than dislike it.
I'm one of the people who, for the most part, really likes the new address bar. Being able to type in a site's title to get to the url is a great time saver for me. However, there is one thing I can't stand about it, which is that sometimes it takes a second or two for it to load (especially if I'm on battery power and the hard drive is spun down) and in the meantime firefox freezes. If they could just sort that problem out I'd be very happy.
I've spent a lot of time looking into this since I'm an amateur photographer and have quite a large number of photographs that I want to archive. Based on what I've read, a lot of pros are following a three tier storage system: 1. Active RAID array 2. Backup RAID array (copied every night for example) 3. Offsite hard drives rotated every so often and updated with the latest data (one at home, one in safe deposit box)
Personally, since I'm going kind of low budget, I'm currently using one drive plus DVD backups with the eventual goal of picking up external hard drives to supplement the DVD backups.
I think it is more important to make sure the whole population is well educated and informed than distilling every year's Nobel prize winners while leaving the masses in ignorance. While this will increase the overall level of education, the people who will truly shine and propel forward are the Einsteins of the world. If we don't give them support, the US will be stuck slowly moving along while the rest of the world leapfrogs over us.
The worst thing about not challenging the top end of the bell curve is that those people don't get pushed enough to get good study habits and thus be able to do well in college. I barely studied for anything in high school (even taking only AP classes my senior year) and had a hard time when I did need to study while in college. The only reason I did well in high school is because I could mostly do it without studying and because I could avoid a lot of the homework and still do well (>A average). At least I got some work ethic having to deal with 5 AP exams in one year. I'm scared to think how I would have turned out if my school did not offer that many AP classes.
The major question that the US needs to answer is do we a) prioritize the high end of the bell curve to push the really smart kids or b) prioritize the low end of the bell curve to at least establish a minimum education standard. In an ideal world, the parents should be pushing their kids to at least be at the minimum and schools would not be afraid of saying "You fail". Unfortunately, in the US this is not the case and thus the question remains.
If we do want to prioritize the high end, that means really pushing kids and funneling money into college level course availability (and not community college but actual hard classes). This would, in an ideal world, make sense because the parents should be able to help get their kids to a minimum level but they shouldn't be expected to know enough about advanced topics. But, this would require hiring many teachers who are much smarter or at least more advanced than the teachers today which means that any attempt to push the boundaries will never work.
I'm sure they could install a special system that interfaces with the plane's electronics and GPS system and shuts down the plane's engine upon receiving an encrypted request from the Pentagon. The only problem with this is how are you going to install this on all private planes? Who's going to pay for it and are they going to pay for electronic upgrades for all planes as well?
As for boats, how in the world are they planning on stopping sail boats? Most smaller boats (16-24 feet or so) don't even have outboard motors let alone any electronics. Are they going to require motorized sails on the boats that will roll the sails up on command? Or an anchor dropping mechanism? How do you deal with small boats that are just a fiberglass hull, mast, and sail?
small animals while the car is parked The car is parked in a driveway. A cat jumps onto the hood expecting a nice warm sunny place. Next thing it knows, the hood opens up, swallows the cat, the car emits a nice burp, and your gas tank increases by a few gallons. Sounds good to me:).
The article states that the researchers were able to get 400 DMCA letters just by monitoring the P2P networks. So what happens if many, many more users all simultaneously start monitoring the networks. Not downloading. Just monitoring. I'm curious what the RIAA/MPAA would do. If we could get 10,000 people involved, will they send out 4,000,000 letters? What if every P2P client started including the monitoring software and one million users started doing this? At some point the RIAA/MPAA just won't be able to handle the load and the people actually downloading will just be a small signal in the overwhelming noise.
I've wondered about this: if the technology improved to the point where you could feel all the sensations with a prosthetic arm as with your original arm, but the materials were stronger, faster and more flexible, why not replace them voluntarily? I think a good reason would be power requirements. All prosthetics I believe require batteries. I suppose you could have enough batteries that you could just charge your arms and legs overnight. But, quite frankly, I feel powerless enough when I can't see anything when I first wake up. Not having any arms would be even worse.
If anything, I think that concentrating on either exoskeletons (as has been reported in recent articles) or maybe on strengthening the body itself with implants would be much more productive and useful. Maybe there would be a way to augment the body's muscles to make them stronger, for example. However, I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
The key to getting America back into shape is not pre-kindergarten. Improving education is the key to a better future for us, but this won't do that. To improve education, you need to do the following things:
1. Make parents be parents. They need to get involved in their children's lives and they need to help them learn. They need to instill the spirit to learn in their children. This is not the job of the government. 2. Don't teach to the common denominator. The top 10% of people will probably do 90% of the great achievements in a generation. Unfortunately, when you don't challenge the top 10%, many of them will get bored and not do well in school. The other problem with this is that in those 10% there will be great writers, great scientists, great leaders, and many other types, and they all need different educational paths. 3. Don't be afraid to tell a child they did something wrong. If someone doesn't understand something, they need to be told that. And if a parent complains that their child got a C instead of an A, they shouldn't be allowed to win. 4. Give teachers more money and give them the supplies they need. Then recruit from the top people in the country and offer them a position where they'll get good money. Otherwise you lose the best people to law schools, financial markets, etc... 5. Figure out some way to make learning be cool. How many posters of Einstein do you see in kids' rooms? Compare that to the number of posters of actors and musicians. Learning is not cool and so no one should do it.
The problem is, no politician will do this. Why? Well first, these problems are tough to solve. You can't just send in the military. Second, telling people they're dumb won't get you any votes. Finally, many people just don't care about education. All they care about is who won the latest NASCAR race.
With regards to moving money from NASA to education, no politician will ever win a vote for saying "We need to spend more money on science". Scientists are not cool and most people are wary of them. Most people probably can't imagine dedicating their lives to something and actually enjoying work. And most people just don't understand the science we are doing. Thus, when, as a politician, you face the decision "Do I cut medicare or do I cut NASA?" you always choose cutting NASA because no one cares about NASA except scientists and the few who understand what NASA is doing.
Finally, you state that we'll just putter around in space. That is not the case and if we actually did dedicate some more resources we would do extraordinary things. Probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn can give us an idea of how life started and might give us biological advances. LISA (space-based gravitational wave antenna) will quite literally open up a completely different band (like EM radiation, i.e. light) to observation that will let us get crucial information about the universe we live in. Better solar observatories will give us more information about radiation cycles and might help with global warming research. The list goes on... Unfortunately, people don't understand this, don't care, and would rather not pay for daycare than fund things that could revolution our knowledge of where we live. And that's why Obama is doing this and that's why the US will fail if we don't change these motivations.
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TrueCrypt makes an encrypted OS, though, doesn't it? eCryptFS lets you just have one encrypted directory. The way it's being used is that people can put their ~/.evolution as a symlink to one inside ~/Private/ so most things aren't encrypted (thereby using less resources) while the necessary things are.
Truecrypt creates a file somewhere on your drive. It even offers the feature to forget where it is. When you want access, you open truecrypt, point it to your file, and it mounts it onto a directory you select. Not as easy as an automaticly opening directory, but different. Also more secure.
Don't know what you mean about network profile. NM does 3G now though. Supposedly it works (but I don't have the hardware to test).
Network profiles means I come into my office, plug in my network cable, tell my laptop I'm in my office and it sets up the appropriate static IP address and the like. I go home, plug in my network cable, tell it I'm in my apartment and it looks for a DHCP server. Ideally, this would be extended to wireless networks as well i.e. I could tell the software "When if office mode, connect to wired network with this IP address, or if that's not available, then connect to this wireless network or this one" and when I'm home "Use dynamic address with wired network, or use this wireless network"
I'm using Kubuntu 8.04 right now. The article claims "The last six months of development have brought tons of new functionality that make running Linux easier for all users". I hardly see anything awe-inspiring. Here's my perspective as a current KDE user:
1. GNOME: I see nothing revolutionary or even exciting here. Ekiga is their picture for this. That's definitely a niche app. Better bluetooth support and resolution controls are good I guess. I've had the on KDE for a few years now I believe.
2. X.org: Hotplugging mice/keyboards "works now"? Well, it works now for me with 8.04. They must've had to dig deep to find something like that. So does resolution switching and xrandr support for multiple displays (which is a huge deal, but has already been around for a year).
3. New kernel: always good for my laptop which typically get a few more things running more smoothly with each kernel release
4. Network manager: Anyway who has a 3G connection probably has a laptop. And laptop's need network profile. I need one for work and one for my apartment. Ubuntu doesn't support these and this article doesn't mention anything new. Everything listed is minor improvements. Personally, I have to use wicd, which is decent, but isn't quite as well integrated as networkmanager.
5. Guest account: I see no point for this. Either you trust the person or you don't. And you can create your own guest account if you really want to and switch to it. At least I can do that from KDE. I suppose one click is nicer than click, type in guest/guest, and log in. So maybe a worthwhile feature, though hardly earth-shattering
6. Flash video: Eh, what was stopping things from working before? I assume this just means version 10 is supported. Which is great, but 64 bit support is still lacking so I'll still have problems with it. No, not an ubuntu problem, but I can complain anyway.
7. Secret hidden folders: Just use truecrypt. This doesn't even encrypt your home directory based on the article. And you need to go to the terminal to set it up?
8. Config-less x.org: Now this is nice. Hopefully it'll work well. I haven't had to use an xorg config file for a few years now beyond the default, though to support multiple monitors I've had to include a virtual screen line. Hopefully this will fix that problem.
Personally, I'm more intereted in Kubuntu dropping KDE3 in 8.10. KDE4 can be set up well, but it certainly doesn't support everything that's in KDE3 and still isn't quite as smooth (though I actually like it a lot).
Most cars make their best fuel economy somewhere between 1800 to 2200 rpm. Ah ha! My car has a 6 speed stick. If I'm in 6th gear it's turning about 2000rpm at 85mph.
Unfortunately, the problem is that 6 speed transmissions are considered "sporty" and thus are not included in anything but "sporty" or "luxury" vehicles. To the point that manufacturers will even leave space for a 6th gear but not install one.
For example, Honda CR-Vs (at least before 07) and Elements can be modified using parts from an Acura TSX or Civic Si to upgrade from a 5-speed to a 6-speed. The total cost is several hundred. Seeing as my CR-V needs to go at 3500 rpm around 75 mph, my fuel economy is definitely worse, and a 6th gear would definitely help. But it's not a sports car, so Honda doesn't want to increase the price by a few hundred to add the extra gear in (plus I'm sure that there's no benefit to the EPA highway testing as it'll only benefit people going over the speed limit).
IAAAP (actually a grad student). I'm actually not sure if there is such a package, but basically all this stuff is done by grad students and its fairly routine nowadays for uncomplicated objects. For anything complicated, a computer program wouldn't be able to do a think for you.
You're right, it appears that the energy peaked in the infrared spectrum. Which is not at all consistent with antimatter annihilation.
This is actually not accurate. The article contains a spectrograph from 4000 to 10000 angstroms. It does not contain any shorter wavelengths. The way you find an object's redshift is by matching known absorption/emission lines with the object's emission lines. The offset is the redshift. As the article points out, there's no obvious match to the few narrow lines, thus, we don't know what the redshift is. For some reason (possibly because the object was too faint), they did not observe in the UV or X-ray ranges, which would've been helpful for higher energy events, especially if it was galactic.
Keep in mind that Russia attacked on two fronts: one in South Ossetia, and one in Abkhazia
This is incorrect. Russia actually only attacked in South Osetia. The military actions in Abkhazia were (supposedly) only done by Abkhazians. Russia probably contributed air support but likely no troops.
What is unsettling is that, according to a New York Times piece, the information attacks began weeks before the actual hostilities. It's clear that the Russians were just waiting for an excuse to go into Georgia.
Russia and Georgia have been itching to fight for a long time. As long as the status quo remained, fighting in South Osetia was low key. The fact that Georgia decided to launch an offensive to retake South Osetia triggered this conflict, and I see no reasonable way to defend Georgia.
Did Georgia behave irresponsibly? Sure. But Russia's response- launching a second front in Abkhazia, driving deep into Georgia and cutting the country in half by occupying Gori, bombing the airport in Tblisi, and hitting civilian targets (intentionally or not)- is disproportionate.
If you defend Georgia in this conflict then you should also be against Kosovo's independence. The fact of the matter is that South Osetia and Abkhazia are ethnically different from Georgians and each wants independence. Saakashvili made it a point of his policies to reintegrate the two areas into Georgia against their wishes. Then, right at the start of the Olympics, he had his military move in and start shelling the capital. The Russian response has been to destroy the capacity of Georgia to engage in military actions in South Osetia. As in most wars, the civilian population is hurt. However, compared to what Russia could have done had it wanted to (carpet bombing of civilian areas), they seem to have done a good job of trying not to hurt the civilian population of Georgia. At last reports regarding Gori, the Russian military has been demilitarizing and letting all civilians go. While I don't support the Russian advance farther into Georgia, I can also completely understand why they want this to end once and for all.
In fact, I personally find Saakashvili to be the person to blame in this situation. Not only did he order the invasion of South Osetia, but he has consistenly used scaremongering as a tactic to draw support for Georgia. In fact, his own government has directly contradicted him in his claims that Russia is advancing on Tbilisi. If anyone has to go, it's him.
On the other hand, America's international policy is almost guaranteed to improve in November, whereas there is no indication that Putin is surrendering his grasp on power anytime soon.
Unlike with Bush though, Putin/Medvedev are held in high regard by a good majority of the population. Their actions have helped most average Russians from what I've seen and have brought Russia back from collapse. Whether or not all of their actions and policies have been good for the world or Russia, the majority of them have helped Russia and I seriously doubt they would be voted out even in a completely free election. As for the US, quite frankly, neither of the candidates is much better than Bush and I doubt that our standing in the world will change much.
China has fulfilled very little of its obligations for the Olympics. The one advantage of a centralized government with dictatorial powers is that if they say "Jump!" people jump. If the government had ever wanted to officially change its policies it could have and would have gotten pollution under control, had only minor protests on the torch route, and no issues with the Internet. The price would have been much lower economic growth. But instead of dealing with this, it could have become a much greener country and actually leap frogged over the rest of the world in at least some ways. But they didn't. Instead their primary goal was to show off Chinese power. The problem for them was they didn't count on what the rest of the world would think of it.
If the media actually does its job, these Olympics will be completely ruined for the Chinese government. I doubt it will, but you never know. On the other hand, if the IOC did its job, it would have moved the Olympics somewhere else and penalized China. But that didn't happen and I doubt it will happen.
Instead of using a colo server or shared hosting, get a VPS. You get someone else dealing with the hardware and network side of things while you get the benefits of a dedicated server with the price of shared hosting. The only restriction is the inability to change the kernel, but good providers will set up a kernel for you with the features you need.
This also means that they don't have easy access to your server unless you want them to. Granted, they could always mount the virtual drives, but unless you have complete physical control over server access, you can never fully control everything.
I've used KDE 4.1 RC1, but its just not there yet. First, it's still not as stable or bug-free as KDE 3.5. This is partially due to packaging (since Ubuntu hasn't quite figured out all the dependencies yet) and partially due to the code itself. An even bigger problem, however, is the lack of core system applications that just aren't there yet. For example, KPowerSave and KNetworkManager are essentially requirements for any laptop. Neither of these is present nor, for example, does 4.1 let me suspend the system. The backend (Solid) for a lot of these things is present, but now someone has to write the front end that someone can actually control.
And, as others have commented, amarok, digikam, and koffice aren't ready yet either. I think it's going to take until at least 4.2 or 4.3 for it to be really usable and 4.5 until its actually fully polished.
What happens when a 'Terrorist' finds a way to purge/rupture the coolant? *POOF*
What happens if lightning directly strikes the conductor's coolant jacket? Could that cause a coolant jacket leak?
It's liquid nitrogen. I doubt that much would happen besides it evaporating and the power line failing.
Maybe the US will now leapfrog from an antiquated power distribution system to the most advanced in the world. Maybe. One positive aspect of this is the reduction of energy loss due to the superconductivity. This may also allow long distance lines to be run (even though the cooling will be a problem) which might help balance out the grid when needed.
According to Wikipedia, super conducting cables will use roughly half the energy saved for cooling, but since losses are around 7%, that's still a rather high amount of energy saved.
Why didn't Obama try to stop this? He could have spoken out and got the rest of the dems behind him. Instead he voted in favor of it.
I have come to realize that Obama is just another politician who is nothing new. I was willing to support him, even though I did not agree with almost any of his policies (I'm fiscally conservative), until he started changing his views and becoming like most other politicians. When even the NY times has an editorial criticizing him, you know something is going wrong.
Unfortunately for me, this leaves McCain. And while I agree with him on how he wants to handle the economy, I don't believe he's what the country needs to recover from the politicians currently in DC.
But from what I understand (not being a Windows developer but having read articles) is that the NT kernel isn't really all that bad. I'm sure its not perfect, but it is supposedly fairly well designed. The problem is the APIs and the huge amount of backwards compatibility. If Microsoft wanted to, they could dump everything but the kernel, redesign everything else including (and most importantly) the APIs, and produce a nice OS. Old apps could run in a Wine like emulation layer that MS could make perfect. I doubt there would be much, if any, slowdown and it would keep full legacy support. NT already has the capability to do this.
The question is is whether Microsoft is willing to do this. It would be a huge change and would require a lot of work on their part. I think if they did it developers would follow. But I'm not sure if MS has the initiative and determination to do it anymore, especially after the person who could've done it has left.
KDE shot itself in the foot by making the KDE 3.x so polished. KDE 3.5 is essentially 9 years of evolutionary development from KDE 1.0. Unfortunately, its impossible to recreate 9 years of development and polish in only 3. I think that the long term prospects for KDE 4.x are great, but short term I'll continue to use 3.5.
I've tried the first beta of 4.1 and while its much more functional than 4.0, its still not there and probably won't be for a few more releases. On the other hand, I remember that KDE 3.0 was, while more functional than 4.0, also much rougher than 3.5, so I can't complain too much.
Personally I find it strange that a member of the Mars Phoenix team left the project while the vehicle was still operating on Mars, and that the most of the team are taking the July 4 holiday off as if Phoenix will still be there in a years time.
With regards to the first post, the author is apparently a master's student who has completed his degree and is now leaving. More specifically, he's interested in science education and while I confess I'm not sure what E/PO Coordinator & Evaluator stands for, there's a good chance (with his background) that it means Education/Public Outreach. In which case its not a critical position and his leaving, if it was already planned (which it seems to have been), this is not a serious issue.
As for taking the weekend off, the people on the project have probably been working almost continuously ever since Phoenix landed. If they take 2 days off out of 90 its not the end of the world.
I have a feeling far more people LIKE the new address bar than dislike it.
I'm one of the people who, for the most part, really likes the new address bar. Being able to type in a site's title to get to the url is a great time saver for me. However, there is one thing I can't stand about it, which is that sometimes it takes a second or two for it to load (especially if I'm on battery power and the hard drive is spun down) and in the meantime firefox freezes. If they could just sort that problem out I'd be very happy.
I've spent a lot of time looking into this since I'm an amateur photographer and have quite a large number of photographs that I want to archive. Based on what I've read, a lot of pros are following a three tier storage system:
1. Active RAID array
2. Backup RAID array (copied every night for example)
3. Offsite hard drives rotated every so often and updated with the latest data (one at home, one in safe deposit box)
Personally, since I'm going kind of low budget, I'm currently using one drive plus DVD backups with the eventual goal of picking up external hard drives to supplement the DVD backups.
New defense tactic: send out naked, beautiful women. Shoot the Americans while they can't see anything else.
The worst thing about not challenging the top end of the bell curve is that those people don't get pushed enough to get good study habits and thus be able to do well in college. I barely studied for anything in high school (even taking only AP classes my senior year) and had a hard time when I did need to study while in college. The only reason I did well in high school is because I could mostly do it without studying and because I could avoid a lot of the homework and still do well (>A average). At least I got some work ethic having to deal with 5 AP exams in one year. I'm scared to think how I would have turned out if my school did not offer that many AP classes.
The major question that the US needs to answer is do we a) prioritize the high end of the bell curve to push the really smart kids or b) prioritize the low end of the bell curve to at least establish a minimum education standard. In an ideal world, the parents should be pushing their kids to at least be at the minimum and schools would not be afraid of saying "You fail". Unfortunately, in the US this is not the case and thus the question remains.
If we do want to prioritize the high end, that means really pushing kids and funneling money into college level course availability (and not community college but actual hard classes). This would, in an ideal world, make sense because the parents should be able to help get their kids to a minimum level but they shouldn't be expected to know enough about advanced topics. But, this would require hiring many teachers who are much smarter or at least more advanced than the teachers today which means that any attempt to push the boundaries will never work.
I'm sure they could install a special system that interfaces with the plane's electronics and GPS system and shuts down the plane's engine upon receiving an encrypted request from the Pentagon. The only problem with this is how are you going to install this on all private planes? Who's going to pay for it and are they going to pay for electronic upgrades for all planes as well?
As for boats, how in the world are they planning on stopping sail boats? Most smaller boats (16-24 feet or so) don't even have outboard motors let alone any electronics. Are they going to require motorized sails on the boats that will roll the sails up on command? Or an anchor dropping mechanism? How do you deal with small boats that are just a fiberglass hull, mast, and sail?
The article states that the researchers were able to get 400 DMCA letters just by monitoring the P2P networks. So what happens if many, many more users all simultaneously start monitoring the networks. Not downloading. Just monitoring. I'm curious what the RIAA/MPAA would do. If we could get 10,000 people involved, will they send out 4,000,000 letters? What if every P2P client started including the monitoring software and one million users started doing this? At some point the RIAA/MPAA just won't be able to handle the load and the people actually downloading will just be a small signal in the overwhelming noise.
If anything, I think that concentrating on either exoskeletons (as has been reported in recent articles) or maybe on strengthening the body itself with implants would be much more productive and useful. Maybe there would be a way to augment the body's muscles to make them stronger, for example. However, I doubt this will happen anytime soon.
The key to getting America back into shape is not pre-kindergarten. Improving education is the key to a better future for us, but this won't do that. To improve education, you need to do the following things:
1. Make parents be parents. They need to get involved in their children's lives and they need to help them learn. They need to instill the spirit to learn in their children. This is not the job of the government.
2. Don't teach to the common denominator. The top 10% of people will probably do 90% of the great achievements in a generation. Unfortunately, when you don't challenge the top 10%, many of them will get bored and not do well in school. The other problem with this is that in those 10% there will be great writers, great scientists, great leaders, and many other types, and they all need different educational paths.
3. Don't be afraid to tell a child they did something wrong. If someone doesn't understand something, they need to be told that. And if a parent complains that their child got a C instead of an A, they shouldn't be allowed to win.
4. Give teachers more money and give them the supplies they need. Then recruit from the top people in the country and offer them a position where they'll get good money. Otherwise you lose the best people to law schools, financial markets, etc...
5. Figure out some way to make learning be cool. How many posters of Einstein do you see in kids' rooms? Compare that to the number of posters of actors and musicians. Learning is not cool and so no one should do it.
The problem is, no politician will do this. Why? Well first, these problems are tough to solve. You can't just send in the military. Second, telling people they're dumb won't get you any votes. Finally, many people just don't care about education. All they care about is who won the latest NASCAR race.
With regards to moving money from NASA to education, no politician will ever win a vote for saying "We need to spend more money on science". Scientists are not cool and most people are wary of them. Most people probably can't imagine dedicating their lives to something and actually enjoying work. And most people just don't understand the science we are doing. Thus, when, as a politician, you face the decision "Do I cut medicare or do I cut NASA?" you always choose cutting NASA because no one cares about NASA except scientists and the few who understand what NASA is doing.
Finally, you state that we'll just putter around in space. That is not the case and if we actually did dedicate some more resources we would do extraordinary things. Probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn can give us an idea of how life started and might give us biological advances. LISA (space-based gravitational wave antenna) will quite literally open up a completely different band (like EM radiation, i.e. light) to observation that will let us get crucial information about the universe we live in. Better solar observatories will give us more information about radiation cycles and might help with global warming research. The list goes on... Unfortunately, people don't understand this, don't care, and would rather not pay for daycare than fund things that could revolution our knowledge of where we live. And that's why Obama is doing this and that's why the US will fail if we don't change these motivations.