I'm happy with AvantGo; it may not be perfect for content creators (since they have to pay for a channel), but as a user I get quite a nice bunch of information. Replaces a daily newspaper.
AvantGo has LONG been surpassed by better, smaller, faster, more-capable, feature-rich, free tools.
Take a look at Plucker for the current leader in this space. Runs on everything (Windows, Linux, OSX) and on PalmOS, PocketPC, Linux PDAs. Has Python, perl, Java, C++ distillers, dozens more options than AvantGo, lots of third-party support and add-ons, and is significanly more visually appealing than the bloated, wasted space of AvantGo.
Feel free to read the (slightly old) comparison of AvantGo, Plucker and iSilo over here for more details.
Lots of screenshots of Plucker examples over here and Google's new RSS feeds in Plucker over here.
The new feeds look GREAT in Plucker on my PDA. I wrote a little web-based tool that takes any rss/rdf/atom/opml/nntp resource and converts it to validated HTML, which I can then directly manipulate (and in my case, turn into Plucker format).
Actually the dev kits cost $999 but the subscription to the ADC is only $500 not $1500 like you said.
They must have dropped the price. Select is $500.00 and Premiere is $3,500. The only one that really makes sense (if you're making money selling Apple software; enough money to need the pre-release lease on a DevKit) is Premiere though, bringing the total price to $4,499.
You missed my point entirely. I'm not talking about running PowerPC binaries on the Intel/OSX machines (which is precisely what Rosetta does for them).
I'm talking about providing the Intel builds of OSX in a VMware.vmdk image to developers, instead of providing a $2,499 hardware kit that does the same thing for developers who do not need direct access to the physical hardware to complete their ports.
...will jump on the vmware bandwagon. With Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server (especially Mac OS X Server in the context of what I'm about to discuss) supporting x86, it would be trivially easy to have Mac OS X Server run in a supported fashion in a vmware environment on any variety of hardware.
More-importantly, why Apple isn't shipping their "Developer Kits" as VMware.vmdk images instead of on actual hardware. When you simply need to develop/port an application over, and aren't using any hardware-specific calls (SSE3), you can get by with a.vmdk running in VMware instead of on a $999.00 + $1,5000 developer kit and subscription.
Not only could they reach a wider market of developers who can't afford the $2,499 DevKit cost, but they can also reduce their own operating expenses (and tie the OS tightly to the VMware BIOS if they wanted to). It strikes me as odd why they didn't consider this. People are already hacking the DevKit builds to run in VMware now, successfully.
Also, they access your/robots.txt file before crawling.
Take a read at my lastthreeposts on this subject for some detailed results.
Yahoo's crawlers (the ones asking for robots.txt) do not return that information to the other crawlers that are fetching the content. As a result, content that you ask not be indexed, is indexed, because the crawler doing the crawling, has no idea that the content exists in a robots.txt that another crawler already requested.
Further analysis shows that msnbot has 29 unique IPs requesting content, but their total number of hits for today is DOUBLE what Yahoo has requested, for a total of 5,011 hits in just short of 8 hours.
But to their credit, Yahoo isn't nearly as misbehaved as msnbot. Yahoo's spiders simply don't share their information with each other. msnbot reads and parses robots.txt, then ignores it anyway, and crawls anything you happen to include in it.
I see msnbot repeatedly going after content that it is explicitly forbidden from reaching. Yes, I know that robots.txt is a guideline and not a rule, but a search engine of that size should consider adhering to those guidelines.
Then again, when has Microsoft ever followed the standards.
I should also add that Yahoo has 336 separate crawlers all running in parallel (based on today's logs), and those are all coming from unique IPs.
In comparison, Google's crawlers (in the ^66.249.x.x range) have 85 separate crawlers and they listen to the "Crawl-delay: 300" directive we have defined, for a total of 887 hits today (7:40am as I type this).
"Indexing" content is not the same as "Finding" content.
I'll take Google's very specific, targeted, mostly-accurate results over having to sift through pages and pages of "sorted" results from Yahoo any day. I NEVER have to go beyond the first page of SERPS on Google, where I'm into the 2nd, 3rd and 4th page at Yahoo for the same exact search.
Also, as a website host, we see a LOT of abuse from Yahoo's spiders quite often. Employees of Yahoo deny this is happening, but it is.
For example, based on today's logs: there are 69 unique separate Yahoo crawlers (in the ^68.142.x.x range) requesting robots.txt. 287 other unique IPs (in the same ^68.142.x.x range) that are requesting other content. The total number of hits and requests for content from our servers today, from Yahoo's spiders, is 2,351 hits. Its only 7:26am too!
Google's crawlers are much more well-behaved, and don't hammer the server to get to content. I've locked out lots of our urls and resources in robots.txt, and because those 69 crawlers requesting robots.txt don't talk to the other 287 crawlers requesting content (they don't even share the same datasource), the content we don't want indexed, gets indexed anyway. I may end up blocking the whole ^68.142.0.0/24 soon just to stop the abuse.
Just my 0.02c on the matter, but I'll stick with Google thanks.
So we develop space weapons. They develop space weapons. We all develop space weapons. We decide to blow the 1,800 satellites out of the sky in some sort of stellar turf war.
What nobody has considered, is the gravity of the situation (literally, or lack thereof). Now you have billions of little pieces of satellite material flying around in all directions without any gravity to stop them.
You think some foam sticking out of the bottom of the shuttle has problems now, try plucking it out of there with billions of pieces of metal, plastic, glass, wire and other satellite debris flying around you in all directions at 16,000 miles per-hour.
Sure, some of it will orbitally degrade into the atmosphere, but much of it will not, and it will continue to fly in all directions at full-speed, until it either collides with something to slow it down, or it deflects off of something (such as the other billion pieces of debris) to change its path.
Forget going to the moon, other shuttle launches, Mars missions, all of it. Not without some major retrofit to the hull and other materials used in the manufacturing of them (i.e. adding weight, potentially).
Yes, lets all just blow ourselves out of the sky too, and keep our upper orbital atmosphere a nice fence of shrapnel traveling at thousands of miles per-hour.
The parabolic flight curve actually makes this a harder task. If the equations of motion were purely linear, then it would be a simple task to calculate future position. The second order nature of the trajectory mean that a little more maths is needed to predict where to catch it. Much of the maths for this sort of thing uses matrices (read linear algebra) which would fall over for this task.
If there was a parabolic flight curve involved in 2 metres at 186mph of speed, that ball must be AMAZINGLY heavy, and judging by the fact that it is caught "soft" and dropped without a huge "CLUNK!", makes me believe that we're not seeing the speed we think we are.
Watch the video again... the photo-electronic equipment is not in the Palm, its above the robot arm (the orange "disc" of lights above it). The Palm itself has no cameras at all in it (look closely at it in the close-up shots when its catching).
This isn't really that fascinating at all, when you consider that its simply "reacting" to the ball breaking the "curtain" of camera fields pointed downward. When you can guage the speed that the ball is traveling, you can guage how soon you need to grasp to catch the ball. No magic, just math.
The other thing I thought this video would show, was the hand actually MOVING to catch/intercept the thrown object, not having the object shot AT the hand directly. If you notice the "curve" where the ball is shot, directly intercepts the camera "curtain" in an identical way, every time.
Yes, this is kind of neat in a safty situation (falling objects or automotive manufacturing), but it isn't something you'll see in a "robot" like the books "I, Robot".
Neat, but not anything magical happening here. Put the hand on an arm, and shoot the ball to the sides, top, bottom randomly, and let that arm play "goalie" and then I'll be impressed.
Let me be the first to say that we already have a system in place that solves this exact problem. Its called the MedicAlert System (commonly found in a metal bracelet).
My wife, a diabetic and celiac, wears one, and it works perfectly for identifying and retrieving the medical records of the patient in seconds. No need for an invasive, implantable chip, and the best part... you can take it off if you don't want to wear it (such as when attending rallies where carrying identification can be a problem).
Why should we enforce people who are not sick or those who do not have a "rough" medical history, to have a chip implanted in them?
I'll be the first in line to be gouging this out of my arm with a very sharp scalpel or other object. Sorry, I prefer my 4th Amendment Rights to remain true:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No thank you, you can't have my encryption keys (and yes, I would rather die before giving up those keys, even if they simply secured my cornbread recipe), and you most-certainly can NOT have my medical history, without my direct consent or approval, even in life-or-death situations.
biofuel is great AND sustainable, and we actually don't need to have that much more farmland to produce enough to meet the countries energy needs!
Sure, so we maintain our existing petroleum industry, consuming 60 billion barrels of oil and 120 billion barrels of natural gas per-year, while we spend at least $354.2 BILLION dollars in the first year to build the algae ponds required, and then $46.2 billion dollars every year after that to maintain them ($12,000/year/acre, per the article you linked to).
Is it cheaper than spending $100B to $105B per-year buying oil from the Middle East? Absolutely. Will it ever happen in today's economy? No way. We've spent $206B on the war so far, and that's 2 years back-to-back, with strong resistance. Do you think the US economy can sustain another $308 billion on top of that to turn it around? Not likely.
Do you really think the multi-billion dollar oil industry is going to just roll over and do something else, while we take the wind out of their sails? Do you really think politicians being padded by their "donations" are going to vote for something else?
Sure, alternative solutions exist, but they're not where making the money is, and hence they won't be developed.
Now, if some enterprising individual like say... Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, etc., dumped $100B+ into the development, we'd see a rapid shift in that direction.
But it won't happen, not in our lifetimes, and further to that point... if the price of oil goes up so the people in the US can no longer afford to use it, there will be significantly less money in the pipeline to fund development of these alternative fuel solutions.
Its a rapid spiral, and the only way is down.. given our current state of affairs. Unless it became mandatory for US millionaires and billionaires to invest in its development, it isn't going to happen. There are enormous financial, political and social walls to climb first.
My invention uses 220V to make hydrogen which is burned to heat water which drives a turbine that generates electricity.
Have you measured how much natural gas and petroleum is used to supply you with the 220V that is required to power your "invention", and tried to factor that out?
Since your wife is a research biologist, I guess you ought to know that a cancerous tumor doesn't eventually grow into a human child. I think that's the difference that you were looking for.
Thank you for trying to make my decisions for me, but I'll reserve that right for myself.
Back on topic, removing a clump of cells that are dividing, whether it be a tumorous lesion due to apoptosis or an egg fertilized with a gamete splitting into a clump of cells dividing, is the same thing at that early stage of cellular division.
At 1-day after conception, how can you tell 4 cells apart, if they haven't differentiated themselves yet? Answer: You can't.
I'm not talking about comparing a tumor with a 3-month old fetus here, but apparently you were.
2) Information doesn't "want" anything. It's a thing.
When taken literally, you could say that.
However, the phrase is a metaphor and is shorthand because "wants to be..." sounds a lot less complicated than "has a tendency to move towards becoming...".
Information as a non-sentient "thing" does not "want" anything at all, but its mere existance has a tendency to "move towards becoming" free.
Make sense now?
Let's use a better one: "Information wants to be anthropomorphized."
I am troubled by abortion rights -- even in the absence of religious motivation -- because I can't answer the question, "When is it no longer OK to kill a baby?" At the moment of viability outside the mother's body? No; that fails as a test because technology will eventually make in vitro incubation a reality. At the moment of conception? Yeah, that would be fine, except for the point I just made. At the moment of discernible brain activity? Same problem. At the moment of birth? Only a barbarian would be OK with that. At the onset of conscious awareness? That happens after birth.
Many scientists make this very clear (and my wife is a research biologist, so we talk about this quite often):
There is a very distinct, provable, cellular and molecular difference between "Life" and "Human Life" in the normal process of cellular growth between a sperm and an egg. There is a very predictable period where that cell-that-is-dividing, can be told to become something other than a fetus. This is "Life". The cell is growing, dividing, becoming something larger than what it started as.
Beyond that point, where the cell has decided to continue to grow into a fetus and can no longer be repurposed as a non-fetal cell, it becomes "Human Life".
We seem to have no problem taking out cancerous tumors from our bodies, and those are also cells which are dividing and being nourished by the human bloodstream (technically, they are cells which are programmed to die, and ignore that signal, while new cells are put into place to replace them, hence the "tumor"). Why is killing one set of human cells wrong, and killing others ok? Who makes that decision? The state? The government? Where does it stop?
Personally, I see people deciding who should live and who should die all the time, without a single care for the larger body of humanity that will be affected (as well as their own life as a result of that crime), from all facets; economic, social and political.
I too am completely unreligious, and have my own beliefs about life, the world and the number 42.
Don't you think this might have something to do with the fact that the former kills an innocent baby while the latter executes a convicted murder who's perhaps raped, tortured and killed several people?
Or perhaps is completely innocent, and has not committed any crime at all. There are many people on death row that have been executed while evidence after their death proves their innocence.
What if the "infant" you save grows up to be that same criminal you claim "raped, tortured and killed several people"? What then?
I'm not taking a stand here on either side, just that its not (nor EVER) as black and white as many people make it out to be.
I don't get this. Firefox and OpenOffice and the OpenCD and running Apache or MySQL or whatever from Windows are universally considered to be Good Things, because they encourage people to run free applications on an unfree platform, and hook people onto free software from the application end.
Actually this is universally considered to be a Bad Thing, if you speak to anyone who writes, maintains, hosts or supports Open Source or Free Software.
When you provide all of the same applications that you do for Linux for Microsoft Windows, there is ZERO INCENTIVE for those users to migrate away from Microsoft Windows. We're doing all the work for them, and reaping none of the benefits. They stay on Microsoft Windows, never migrating to Linux, and they keep sucking our community dry for all of this "freeware" they get.
How many Microsoft Windows users have you seen reporting bugs with the Free Software they're running on their Windows machines? How many contribute code fixes back? How many actually donate or support the Free Software projects they're using in ANY way? I'd venture to guess less than 1% overall.
Why should we continue to spoonfeed them when there is no benefit coming back our way? They aren't supporting our community, they aren't supporting our development, they aren't supporting anything we do, other than bitch that "Project Fu" sucks compared to Microsoft's alternative.
No thank you, when you take the "Fun" out of Free Software development, you can keep it. I'll just move on to another project instead.
Sure it has secuirty holes. All systems do. In fact any system in use by more than 90% of the population will be exploited by some script kiddies or hackers. Thats just the way the cookie crumbles.
But with MY cookie, I get the recipe, and I can make it much more durable so it doesn't crumble as quickly as yours.
Why would I want to pay $129 for a Linux distro that tries to emulate Windows when I can buy the current top-of-the-line version of Windows for $11 more?
Now add to that, the cost of Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop and about 200 other commercial applications for which Linux has dozens of alternatives that ship in that core OS, and you'll see why $129 vs. $5,000 or more makes much more sense.
Linux (as a distribution) is much more than just an OS + Notepad. Its an entire environment of productivity tools, entertainment tools, development tools and many other things that come with it, standard.
"I've had numerous problems with a wireless card. It wouldn't work with prism54 and with ndiswrapper it just stayed up for a short while. Yeah, it's up to my vendor to create drivers for it, but guess what, most users aren't even going to go through the hassels I did in getting it to work, let alone contact anyone to complain on the lack of drivers."
You've hit the problem right on the head! The users have come to expect (in the Windows world) that everything they buy that "fits" in their PC, will "work" in their PC, at the highest level of performance and optimization.
They've grown comfortable in their propritary softwareship. The problem here is that these same vendors are PROHIBITED (by contract in many cases) from opening up their APIs to non-Microsoft partners if they wish to continue to use the "Certified for Windows" stamp of approval on their hardware.
Do you go out to Sears, buy tires that "look like they'll fit", and then complain when you bring them home to find they don't fit on your Mini-Cooper? No, you find out what kind of hardware your Cooper takes, you bring those specs to Sears and you ask them which tires meet those specifications.
In Linux, since vendors refuse to support the hardware or software through proper drivers (ATI, NVidia, 3Com, etc.), you find out (via the Linux HCL) which hardware is supported by which vendors, and you support THOSE vendors with your wallet.
But I stand by my statements. None of this is a Linux problem. There is more than enough code, talent and time in the Free Software community to write perfected drivers for every single piece of hardware out there that fits in a computer (embedded, PC, workstation, server and mainframe). The problem is that the vendors don't provide docs or APIs, or the ones they DO provide are incorrect, false or just plain wrong.
Trust me, I've been on this side of the fence, working for a Linux company that 3Com approached to ask us to write drivers for their WinModem in Linux, because IBM insisted they "fix it" for their Thinkpad line of laptops (this was back in 2000/2001). 3Com assumed we could just write 100% compatible drivers in a WEEKEND and have a fully-debugged, functional equivalent of their Win32 WinModem driver shipped to them by Monday. No docs from them, no APIs, nothing more than a binary copy of their Win32 WinModem driver.
We insisted they give us docs or APIs or something, and what they gave us... and you'll love this (I still have a copy in my email archives), was a slightly-blurry digital picture of a whiteboard, where their engineers described how they "thought" the Linux version of their WinModem driver would work.
Needless to say, we laughed at them and told them to find someone else. They never did.
So the problem is NEVER on the Linux side when it comes to hardware not functioning properly.
BTW, Xandros isn't a pretty looking dektop. And, it is not FREE as in FREE BEER
Nor should it be free as in free beer. It includes proprietary (well, for-pay) software in the install... CrossOver Office.
Free Software is not free, and it probably never will be until our core society changes dramatically at the community and economic level.
Power costs money, bandwidth for hosting the project cost money, domains cost money, developer time costs money, hardware and backups cost money, distribution cost money, and many other aspects of the Free Software-production machine cost money.
Slashdot Mirror
AvantGo has LONG been surpassed by better, smaller, faster, more-capable, feature-rich, free tools.
Take a look at Plucker for the current leader in this space. Runs on everything (Windows, Linux, OSX) and on PalmOS, PocketPC, Linux PDAs. Has Python, perl, Java, C++ distillers, dozens more options than AvantGo, lots of third-party support and add-ons, and is significanly more visually appealing than the bloated, wasted space of AvantGo.
Feel free to read the (slightly old) comparison of AvantGo, Plucker and iSilo over here for more details.
Lots of screenshots of Plucker examples over here and Google's new RSS feeds in Plucker over here.
The new feeds look GREAT in Plucker on my PDA. I wrote a little web-based tool that takes any rss/rdf/atom/opml/nntp resource and converts it to validated HTML, which I can then directly manipulate (and in my case, turn into Plucker format).
You can see some screenshots of what it looks like on my Palm.
They must have dropped the price. Select is $500.00 and Premiere is $3,500. The only one that really makes sense (if you're making money selling Apple software; enough money to need the pre-release lease on a DevKit) is Premiere though, bringing the total price to $4,499.
Ouch.
You missed my point entirely. I'm not talking about running PowerPC binaries on the Intel/OSX machines (which is precisely what Rosetta does for them).
I'm talking about providing the Intel builds of OSX in a VMware .vmdk image to developers, instead of providing a $2,499 hardware kit that does the same thing for developers who do not need direct access to the physical hardware to complete their ports.
More-importantly, why Apple isn't shipping their "Developer Kits" as VMware .vmdk images instead of on actual hardware. When you simply need to develop/port an application over, and aren't using any hardware-specific calls (SSE3), you can get by with a .vmdk running in VMware instead of on a $999.00 + $1,5000 developer kit and subscription.
Not only could they reach a wider market of developers who can't afford the $2,499 DevKit cost, but they can also reduce their own operating expenses (and tie the OS tightly to the VMware BIOS if they wanted to). It strikes me as odd why they didn't consider this. People are already hacking the DevKit builds to run in VMware now, successfully.
Oracle does it, why not Apple?
Take a read at my last three posts on this subject for some detailed results.
Yahoo's crawlers (the ones asking for robots.txt) do not return that information to the other crawlers that are fetching the content. As a result, content that you ask not be indexed, is indexed, because the crawler doing the crawling, has no idea that the content exists in a robots.txt that another crawler already requested.
Replying to myself again here..
Further analysis shows that msnbot has 29 unique IPs requesting content, but their total number of hits for today is DOUBLE what Yahoo has requested, for a total of 5,011 hits in just short of 8 hours.
But to their credit, Yahoo isn't nearly as misbehaved as msnbot. Yahoo's spiders simply don't share their information with each other. msnbot reads and parses robots.txt, then ignores it anyway, and crawls anything you happen to include in it.
I see msnbot repeatedly going after content that it is explicitly forbidden from reaching. Yes, I know that robots.txt is a guideline and not a rule, but a search engine of that size should consider adhering to those guidelines.
Then again, when has Microsoft ever followed the standards.
Anyway, FWIW.. those are our results.
I should also add that Yahoo has 336 separate crawlers all running in parallel (based on today's logs), and those are all coming from unique IPs.
In comparison, Google's crawlers (in the ^66.249.x.x range) have 85 separate crawlers and they listen to the "Crawl-delay: 300" directive we have defined, for a total of 887 hits today (7:40am as I type this).
"Indexing" content is not the same as "Finding" content.
I'll take Google's very specific, targeted, mostly-accurate results over having to sift through pages and pages of "sorted" results from Yahoo any day. I NEVER have to go beyond the first page of SERPS on Google, where I'm into the 2nd, 3rd and 4th page at Yahoo for the same exact search.
Also, as a website host, we see a LOT of abuse from Yahoo's spiders quite often. Employees of Yahoo deny this is happening, but it is.
For example, based on today's logs: there are 69 unique separate Yahoo crawlers (in the ^68.142.x.x range) requesting robots.txt. 287 other unique IPs (in the same ^68.142.x.x range) that are requesting other content. The total number of hits and requests for content from our servers today, from Yahoo's spiders, is 2,351 hits . Its only 7:26am too!
Google's crawlers are much more well-behaved, and don't hammer the server to get to content. I've locked out lots of our urls and resources in robots.txt, and because those 69 crawlers requesting robots.txt don't talk to the other 287 crawlers requesting content (they don't even share the same datasource), the content we don't want indexed, gets indexed anyway. I may end up blocking the whole ^68.142.0.0/24 soon just to stop the abuse.
Just my 0.02c on the matter, but I'll stick with Google thanks.
So we develop space weapons. They develop space weapons. We all develop space weapons. We decide to blow the 1,800 satellites out of the sky in some sort of stellar turf war.
What nobody has considered, is the gravity of the situation (literally, or lack thereof). Now you have billions of little pieces of satellite material flying around in all directions without any gravity to stop them.
You think some foam sticking out of the bottom of the shuttle has problems now, try plucking it out of there with billions of pieces of metal, plastic, glass, wire and other satellite debris flying around you in all directions at 16,000 miles per-hour.
Sure, some of it will orbitally degrade into the atmosphere, but much of it will not, and it will continue to fly in all directions at full-speed, until it either collides with something to slow it down, or it deflects off of something (such as the other billion pieces of debris) to change its path.
Forget going to the moon, other shuttle launches, Mars missions, all of it. Not without some major retrofit to the hull and other materials used in the manufacturing of them (i.e. adding weight, potentially).
Yes, lets all just blow ourselves out of the sky too, and keep our upper orbital atmosphere a nice fence of shrapnel traveling at thousands of miles per-hour.
If there was a parabolic flight curve involved in 2 metres at 186mph of speed, that ball must be AMAZINGLY heavy, and judging by the fact that it is caught "soft" and dropped without a huge "CLUNK!", makes me believe that we're not seeing the speed we think we are.
Watch the video again... the photo-electronic equipment is not in the Palm, its above the robot arm (the orange "disc" of lights above it). The Palm itself has no cameras at all in it (look closely at it in the close-up shots when its catching).
This isn't really that fascinating at all, when you consider that its simply "reacting" to the ball breaking the "curtain" of camera fields pointed downward. When you can guage the speed that the ball is traveling, you can guage how soon you need to grasp to catch the ball. No magic, just math.
The other thing I thought this video would show, was the hand actually MOVING to catch/intercept the thrown object, not having the object shot AT the hand directly. If you notice the "curve" where the ball is shot, directly intercepts the camera "curtain" in an identical way, every time.
Yes, this is kind of neat in a safty situation (falling objects or automotive manufacturing), but it isn't something you'll see in a "robot" like the books "I, Robot".
Neat, but not anything magical happening here. Put the hand on an arm, and shoot the ball to the sides, top, bottom randomly, and let that arm play "goalie" and then I'll be impressed.
Let me be the first to say that we already have a system in place that solves this exact problem. Its called the MedicAlert System (commonly found in a metal bracelet).
My wife, a diabetic and celiac, wears one, and it works perfectly for identifying and retrieving the medical records of the patient in seconds. No need for an invasive, implantable chip, and the best part... you can take it off if you don't want to wear it (such as when attending rallies where carrying identification can be a problem).
Why should we enforce people who are not sick or those who do not have a "rough" medical history, to have a chip implanted in them?
I'll be the first in line to be gouging this out of my arm with a very sharp scalpel or other object. Sorry, I prefer my 4th Amendment Rights to remain true:
No thank you, you can't have my encryption keys (and yes, I would rather die before giving up those keys, even if they simply secured my cornbread recipe), and you most-certainly can NOT have my medical history, without my direct consent or approval, even in life-or-death situations.
Sure, so we maintain our existing petroleum industry, consuming 60 billion barrels of oil and 120 billion barrels of natural gas per-year, while we spend at least $354.2 BILLION dollars in the first year to build the algae ponds required, and then $46.2 billion dollars every year after that to maintain them ($12,000/year/acre, per the article you linked to).
Is it cheaper than spending $100B to $105B per-year buying oil from the Middle East? Absolutely. Will it ever happen in today's economy? No way. We've spent $206B on the war so far, and that's 2 years back-to-back, with strong resistance. Do you think the US economy can sustain another $308 billion on top of that to turn it around? Not likely.
Do you really think the multi-billion dollar oil industry is going to just roll over and do something else, while we take the wind out of their sails? Do you really think politicians being padded by their "donations" are going to vote for something else?
Sure, alternative solutions exist, but they're not where making the money is, and hence they won't be developed.
Now, if some enterprising individual like say... Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, etc., dumped $100B+ into the development, we'd see a rapid shift in that direction.
But it won't happen, not in our lifetimes, and further to that point... if the price of oil goes up so the people in the US can no longer afford to use it, there will be significantly less money in the pipeline to fund development of these alternative fuel solutions.
Its a rapid spiral, and the only way is down.. given our current state of affairs. Unless it became mandatory for US millionaires and billionaires to invest in its development, it isn't going to happen. There are enormous financial, political and social walls to climb first.
Have you measured how much natural gas and petroleum is used to supply you with the 220V that is required to power your "invention", and tried to factor that out?
Thank you for trying to make my decisions for me, but I'll reserve that right for myself.
Back on topic, removing a clump of cells that are dividing, whether it be a tumorous lesion due to apoptosis or an egg fertilized with a gamete splitting into a clump of cells dividing, is the same thing at that early stage of cellular division.
At 1-day after conception, how can you tell 4 cells apart, if they haven't differentiated themselves yet? Answer: You can't.
I'm not talking about comparing a tumor with a 3-month old fetus here, but apparently you were.
When taken literally, you could say that.
However, the phrase is a metaphor and is shorthand because "wants to be..." sounds a lot less complicated than "has a tendency to move towards becoming...".
Information as a non-sentient "thing" does not "want" anything at all, but its mere existance has a tendency to "move towards becoming" free.
Make sense now?
Let's use a better one: "Information wants to be anthropomorphized."
Many scientists make this very clear (and my wife is a research biologist, so we talk about this quite often):
There is a very distinct, provable, cellular and molecular difference between "Life" and "Human Life" in the normal process of cellular growth between a sperm and an egg. There is a very predictable period where that cell-that-is-dividing, can be told to become something other than a fetus. This is "Life". The cell is growing, dividing, becoming something larger than what it started as.
Beyond that point, where the cell has decided to continue to grow into a fetus and can no longer be repurposed as a non-fetal cell, it becomes "Human Life".
We seem to have no problem taking out cancerous tumors from our bodies, and those are also cells which are dividing and being nourished by the human bloodstream (technically, they are cells which are programmed to die, and ignore that signal, while new cells are put into place to replace them, hence the "tumor"). Why is killing one set of human cells wrong, and killing others ok? Who makes that decision? The state? The government? Where does it stop?
Personally, I see people deciding who should live and who should die all the time, without a single care for the larger body of humanity that will be affected (as well as their own life as a result of that crime), from all facets; economic, social and political.
I too am completely unreligious, and have my own beliefs about life, the world and the number 42.
Or perhaps is completely innocent, and has not committed any crime at all. There are many people on death row that have been executed while evidence after their death proves their innocence.
What if the "infant" you save grows up to be that same criminal you claim "raped, tortured and killed several people"? What then?
I'm not taking a stand here on either side, just that its not (nor EVER) as black and white as many people make it out to be.
Of course this series of menu options doesn't exist in any (including the latest) MSIE versions.
I'm not sure what version of MSIE you're using, but the latest one from XPSP2 + updates does not include this. Where did you find it?
Actually this is universally considered to be a Bad Thing, if you speak to anyone who writes, maintains, hosts or supports Open Source or Free Software.
When you provide all of the same applications that you do for Linux for Microsoft Windows, there is ZERO INCENTIVE for those users to migrate away from Microsoft Windows. We're doing all the work for them, and reaping none of the benefits. They stay on Microsoft Windows, never migrating to Linux, and they keep sucking our community dry for all of this "freeware" they get.
How many Microsoft Windows users have you seen reporting bugs with the Free Software they're running on their Windows machines? How many contribute code fixes back? How many actually donate or support the Free Software projects they're using in ANY way? I'd venture to guess less than 1% overall.
Why should we continue to spoonfeed them when there is no benefit coming back our way? They aren't supporting our community, they aren't supporting our development, they aren't supporting anything we do, other than bitch that "Project Fu" sucks compared to Microsoft's alternative.
No thank you, when you take the "Fun" out of Free Software development, you can keep it. I'll just move on to another project instead.
But with MY cookie, I get the recipe, and I can make it much more durable so it doesn't crumble as quickly as yours.
Now add to that, the cost of Office, Visual Studio, Photoshop and about 200 other commercial applications for which Linux has dozens of alternatives that ship in that core OS, and you'll see why $129 vs. $5,000 or more makes much more sense.
Linux (as a distribution) is much more than just an OS + Notepad. Its an entire environment of productivity tools, entertainment tools, development tools and many other things that come with it, standard.
Stop comparing Apples to Porsches.
You've hit the problem right on the head! The users have come to expect (in the Windows world) that everything they buy that "fits" in their PC, will "work" in their PC, at the highest level of performance and optimization.
They've grown comfortable in their propritary softwareship. The problem here is that these same vendors are PROHIBITED (by contract in many cases) from opening up their APIs to non-Microsoft partners if they wish to continue to use the "Certified for Windows" stamp of approval on their hardware.
Do you go out to Sears, buy tires that "look like they'll fit", and then complain when you bring them home to find they don't fit on your Mini-Cooper? No, you find out what kind of hardware your Cooper takes, you bring those specs to Sears and you ask them which tires meet those specifications.
In Linux, since vendors refuse to support the hardware or software through proper drivers (ATI, NVidia, 3Com, etc.), you find out (via the Linux HCL) which hardware is supported by which vendors, and you support THOSE vendors with your wallet.
But I stand by my statements. None of this is a Linux problem. There is more than enough code, talent and time in the Free Software community to write perfected drivers for every single piece of hardware out there that fits in a computer (embedded, PC, workstation, server and mainframe). The problem is that the vendors don't provide docs or APIs, or the ones they DO provide are incorrect, false or just plain wrong.
Trust me, I've been on this side of the fence, working for a Linux company that 3Com approached to ask us to write drivers for their WinModem in Linux, because IBM insisted they "fix it" for their Thinkpad line of laptops (this was back in 2000/2001). 3Com assumed we could just write 100% compatible drivers in a WEEKEND and have a fully-debugged, functional equivalent of their Win32 WinModem driver shipped to them by Monday. No docs from them, no APIs, nothing more than a binary copy of their Win32 WinModem driver.
We insisted they give us docs or APIs or something, and what they gave us... and you'll love this (I still have a copy in my email archives), was a slightly-blurry digital picture of a whiteboard, where their engineers described how they "thought" the Linux version of their WinModem driver would work.
Needless to say, we laughed at them and told them to find someone else. They never did.
So the problem is NEVER on the Linux side when it comes to hardware not functioning properly.
Nor should it be free as in free beer. It includes proprietary (well, for-pay) software in the install... CrossOver Office.
Free Software is not free, and it probably never will be until our core society changes dramatically at the community and economic level.
Power costs money, bandwidth for hosting the project cost money, domains cost money, developer time costs money, hardware and backups cost money, distribution cost money, and many other aspects of the Free Software-production machine cost money.