This is hilarious. That ban explicitly only includes digital SLR cameras, which would allow anyone to bring in a MILC (with the same high-quality, high-res sensors) simply because it doesn't have a mirror. Or, hell, a film SLR, with the results to be later digitalized on a high-res photographic scanner, essentially with the same output as a DSLR.
If you own several thousand houses, you're unlikely to be bothered by the fee to the guy who has to check them once in every 12 years. Make it two or three guys and you remove the cousin problem.
I'd like you to explain to me the relevance of being able to fiddle with a dangerous piece of machinery (try engaging reverse at 70) while driving
You cannot shift into reverse at 70 - the transmission won't allow it. If you try, all you'll get will be a lot of grinding noises. I think old Saabs might be an exception, but I'm not sure if they'd let you disengage the clutch once rear was shifted into. Besides, engaging reverse is always made harder than engaging a normal gear. Some cars require you to lift a ring on the shifter, others to push down on the same. Others (BMWs for sure, dunno about others) require you to push the shifter to the side with considerably more force. Regardless of method, you don't just shift into reverse by mistake.
For a given skill level, the auto is always safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment. When you brake, you brake; no remembering the "clutch" or to "change down".
If you were a native stickshift driver you'd know that after a while shifting and operating the clutch become automatic acts that don't interfere with the rest of the driving experience. The act of braking, for instance, automatically involves two pedals instead of just one; the brain does not actively think about this unless you want it to. This becomes so automatic that a manual driver starting on an auto will often stomp on empty air with the left foot when stopping; you don't do things like that unless they're so deeply ingrained in your habits that you don't even think about them. Besides, an auto transmission requires to use the brake very often, which I personally found a bit weird - but that surely comes from being used to a manual. My point is, you are always required to automatize certain gestures when driving. Now I'll admit that learning on a manual is harder; the clutch is the main nightmare for people who attend the first driving school lessons. On the other hand, it also offers somewhat of an entry barrier: if you're scared of the clutch you're going to have a hard time coping with the other mental stimuli of driving, and it's a good sign that the world is safer with you off the road.
As for the whole argument about stick drivers being better drivers: in order to drive a manual transmission, one by definition has to have more control of the car. All other things being equal, a driver with more control is a better driver, even if just at a subconscious level, than one with less control, simply because they know better how to handle the vehicle.
And on a wholly personal level, I love manual shifting. You can tell me anything you want about the comfort of autos, or the ease of use of paddle shifters, but operating a stick shift feels a bit like operating a rifle bolt. There is a lot of satisfaction in using the right gears at the right time, I feel.
Think about the consumer electronic devices you own. How many were made in China? How many were shipped to you directly from China?
Since I discovered DealExtreme (and the like), a whole lot of them. The Pi people could reach some sort of agreement with DX or some other HK-based (and not China-based - Chinese postal services are awful) site of that kind to distribute worldwide.
Man, wouldn't it be just awesome if loads of websites in other countries blocked us? -.-
This is actually fairly likely. File hosters, and plenty of other sites targetable by inane legislations like SOPA/PIPA, are likely at some point to figure out that it costs them less to give up the US market entirely than to fight its legal system and possibly risk forced shutdown. I think Uploaded.to is just one of a long series of sites that'll do that.
This could go well, though. For starters, seeing the US shut out of increasingly large parts of the internet could serve as a warning for other countries attempting similar stupidity. And then, as more and more of the Internet is precluded to them, perhaps the US will start seeing the error in their ways and come back to sanity.
And in the meantime, those of us who live in more civilized countries won't have to endure rules that a government entirely owned by megacorps forces upon those that aren't.
More importantly: MU is visited by millions of people, gets shut down, causes problems to said people. Now I'm not american so I dunno about the DOJ, but who ever goes to the *AA websites? How is their enforced lack of presence from the net a damage to the corporations behind them? What's the point, other than "waahh, waaahh, stop messing with our toys"?
They would spin it into a story to make the law pass. SOPA supporters are terrorists - they killed $congressperson! Support them and you support terrorism! Blah blah blah.
Problem is, this time they couldn't be argued against - doing what you suggest would actually make you a terrorist.
You can't just kill people whose opinion is opposite to common sense. Yeah, the world would probably be much better off without them, and if we had a magical button that would instantly dematerialize all corrupt politicians into nothingness I'd be the first to slam it with my whole fist, but we don't. Violence always has consequences, and they're usually not the ones you foresaw when you used it.
The usual market. It typically doesn't work on the default firmware, but if you flash a romhack (and really, why would one buy a Chinese tablet and not hack it) it works as it would on a normal Google-certified device (not sure if it gets cracked or what).
Does "pretty good hardware" include a capacitive digitizer so that 1. I can run applications that require Android Market, and 2. I don't have to either borrow my DS's stylus or press so hard I feel like I'm running the risk of breaking it?
Yes. Not all of them come with capacitive screens, but many do.
If I may, I'd like to ask y'all a question I haven't found a satisfactory answer to on Google: how do you get rid of "social DRM" on ebooks (typically epubs) that have it? The net has plenty of posts about people removing Amazon-style encrypting DRM, but very little about how to strip your name and credit card number from your ebooks.
When nuke plants create problems, they do so in flashy and dramatic ways, and instantly give major problems to thousands of people. Oil- and coal-fired powerplants do much more damage to many more people, but since it happens in a boring, long-term way that doesn't attract the media as much, people are much less afraid of them.
Yes, nuclear can cause immense amounts of trouble, and finding where to keep the spent fuel is a major problem all by itself, but we have no choice - not as half of the world is starting to finally wake up and demand more and more energy. Unless someone makes cold fusion workable in a very short time, which seems exceedingly unlikely, OR someone finds out how to harvest solar power in a much (much much) more efficient way, we can either go nuclear or starve of energy.
Agree for general desktop and notebook machines, but many netbooks still run better on XP than on 7. I've had users ask me to switch their netbooks to 7 (for a variety of reasons, most silly, some good), and they've always complained that XP was snappier and more responsive. Cue requests to switch back, which I'm all for as they're paying for every operation I do on the computer.
7 might be stabler, and there may be completely unauthorized "lite" pirated versions around that might in fact run decently even on low-power hardware (at the likely price of stability), but I still warn people against running it on netbooks.
For perfect ergonomy you want a Maltron. If that's too expensive, a split board. One that can be regulated, like the hyper-rare IBM clicky split, is better; failing that, a cheaper fixed split (imagine the old Microsoft Natural Keboard) will do. There are now curved board that claim to be ergonomic without the split in the middle, but I'm unconvinced as to their effectiveness. Whatever you do, don't use a standard rectangular keyboard - they're an ergonomic nightmare.
The only case where you should still do that is when there is some sort of internal statistics being kept of how long the battery is estimated to last, which is out of sync with the actual battery.
It's worth noting that even in this case, the cells don't actually go to zero - in LiIon batteries, the circuitry cuts out at about 3V per cell. Lower than that, and damage WILL occur.
...as was the StarForce rootkit on their CDs. No Sony or StarForce people went to jail in any other country either.
You're confusing DRM fuck-ups. Sony CDs weren't infected with Starforce, they had XCP and Mediamax. Starforce created their own problems, but they were unrelated with Sony.
We’ve said elsewhere that our dream scenario is that someone in China decides to copy our design and start knocking out millions of clones. Remember we’re a not-for-profit organization under English law, and all our trustees have other jobs, so we don’t have the same set of incentives as a regular company.
The Pi itself is already supercheap, but if Chinese cloners start cranking out clones we might be able to buy even cheaper versions on DealExtreme. They'll also probably have features added, as the cloners usually do.
They indeed are. Sat dishes are fantastic for leeching wifi from a location where you can see half the city, because you can *literally* reach wherever you can see, but you'll have to move the dish around a lot. And if you live in a second-floor flat you won't be doing much leeching at all. Also keep in mind that you need to keep
Of course, one needs a hydrogen-powered car, which currently are not in any sort of production beyond prototypes and limited beta testing.
Technically, only fuel-cell vehicles are in that status. Internal combustion engines can be easily modified to burn hydrogen instead of gasoline - BMW did that for their first hydrogen-powered 7-series a few years ago. This would have the benefit of burning clean fuel while letting us keep piston engines, whose inefficiency would suddenly matter a lot less. I like the concept of the electric vehicle for everyday slow movements, but there's something inherently sad in a race car that goes "VMMMMM" instead of "WROOM".
I see M$ intends to keep up with the tradition of alternatively releasing systems that more-or-less work and systems that really suck. Let's get ready for another round of "OMG the world isn't buying 8 and is staying with 7!!!1!".
A fully functional general-purpose computer with decent power for $35 is absolutely groundbreaking. I can't wait to be doing productive work (and maybe retrogaming!) on a little stick of circuitry that eats less power than a freakin' christmas light. My only gripe with it is that it runs Ubuntu; I'd much prefer it to run Debian - though I guess it'll be a question of (little) time before someone makes Debian work on it.
WANT WANT WANT. I think I'll buy two or tree $35 ones. Hell, it's the first computer you can buy more than one of just because, hell, why not?
The author, who goes by the initials S.H., also used the blog to vent his frustrations with inept supervisors and unreasonable schedules, though he maintains a sense of humor, describing in one post how he punched a hole on a wall while driving a robot and, in another entry, how a drunken worker slept in his room by mistake
Is it just me, or does this seem very, very soviet? Bureaucratic impediments, incompetent people in high positions, drunken workers around highly dangerous areas, and a weird sense of humor around all of it... haven't we seen this already?
There will be a $30-35 version with 256 megs of RAM and an Ethernet port. I think the slight price increase is well worth it just for the RAM - 256 megs makes a big difference in the amount of OS and application tweaking necessary.
I'm sick of people proffering this and only this as a reason to Google+ growth.
You may be sick of it, but it doesn't make it any less true.
There is something more to it, after all, iTunes Ping isn't Facebook either. Why didn't they balloon up to 20 million in two weeks?
Most facebook users hate facebook, for a variety of reasons (some very valid). Many people, not all of them nerds, also hate iTunes or other Apple products - though they may still use them. But a lot less people hate Google - and Google has a way of making its products look much less corporate-evil-like than other firms (whether they actually are is beyond the point). That counts for a lot when there's a crowd of several millions looking for an alternative to Facebook that doesn't suck.
Slashdot Mirror
This is hilarious. That ban explicitly only includes digital SLR cameras, which would allow anyone to bring in a MILC (with the same high-quality, high-res sensors) simply because it doesn't have a mirror. Or, hell, a film SLR, with the results to be later digitalized on a high-res photographic scanner, essentially with the same output as a DSLR.
If you own several thousand houses, you're unlikely to be bothered by the fee to the guy who has to check them once in every 12 years. Make it two or three guys and you remove the cousin problem.
I'd like you to explain to me the relevance of being able to fiddle with a dangerous piece of machinery (try engaging reverse at 70) while driving
You cannot shift into reverse at 70 - the transmission won't allow it. If you try, all you'll get will be a lot of grinding noises. I think old Saabs might be an exception, but I'm not sure if they'd let you disengage the clutch once rear was shifted into.
Besides, engaging reverse is always made harder than engaging a normal gear. Some cars require you to lift a ring on the shifter, others to push down on the same. Others (BMWs for sure, dunno about others) require you to push the shifter to the side with considerably more force. Regardless of method, you don't just shift into reverse by mistake.
and now a Prius
Congratulations, you just lost all your credibility.
For a given skill level, the auto is always safer because your attention is never distracted at a crucial moment. When you brake, you brake; no remembering the "clutch" or to "change down".
If you were a native stickshift driver you'd know that after a while shifting and operating the clutch become automatic acts that don't interfere with the rest of the driving experience. The act of braking, for instance, automatically involves two pedals instead of just one; the brain does not actively think about this unless you want it to. This becomes so automatic that a manual driver starting on an auto will often stomp on empty air with the left foot when stopping; you don't do things like that unless they're so deeply ingrained in your habits that you don't even think about them.
Besides, an auto transmission requires to use the brake very often, which I personally found a bit weird - but that surely comes from being used to a manual. My point is, you are always required to automatize certain gestures when driving.
Now I'll admit that learning on a manual is harder; the clutch is the main nightmare for people who attend the first driving school lessons. On the other hand, it also offers somewhat of an entry barrier: if you're scared of the clutch you're going to have a hard time coping with the other mental stimuli of driving, and it's a good sign that the world is safer with you off the road.
As for the whole argument about stick drivers being better drivers: in order to drive a manual transmission, one by definition has to have more control of the car. All other things being equal, a driver with more control is a better driver, even if just at a subconscious level, than one with less control, simply because they know better how to handle the vehicle.
And on a wholly personal level, I love manual shifting. You can tell me anything you want about the comfort of autos, or the ease of use of paddle shifters, but operating a stick shift feels a bit like operating a rifle bolt. There is a lot of satisfaction in using the right gears at the right time, I feel.
On the other hand, your country is the only one with its own entry in TVTropes' Everything Trying To Kill You page. :P
Think about the consumer electronic devices you own. How many were made in China? How many were shipped to you directly from China?
Since I discovered DealExtreme (and the like), a whole lot of them.
The Pi people could reach some sort of agreement with DX or some other HK-based (and not China-based - Chinese postal services are awful) site of that kind to distribute worldwide.
Man, wouldn't it be just awesome if loads of websites in other countries blocked us? -.-
This is actually fairly likely. File hosters, and plenty of other sites targetable by inane legislations like SOPA/PIPA, are likely at some point to figure out that it costs them less to give up the US market entirely than to fight its legal system and possibly risk forced shutdown. I think Uploaded.to is just one of a long series of sites that'll do that.
This could go well, though. For starters, seeing the US shut out of increasingly large parts of the internet could serve as a warning for other countries attempting similar stupidity. And then, as more and more of the Internet is precluded to them, perhaps the US will start seeing the error in their ways and come back to sanity.
And in the meantime, those of us who live in more civilized countries won't have to endure rules that a government entirely owned by megacorps forces upon those that aren't.
More importantly: MU is visited by millions of people, gets shut down, causes problems to said people.
Now I'm not american so I dunno about the DOJ, but who ever goes to the *AA websites? How is their enforced lack of presence from the net a damage to the corporations behind them? What's the point, other than "waahh, waaahh, stop messing with our toys"?
They would spin it into a story to make the law pass.
SOPA supporters are terrorists - they killed $congressperson! Support them and you support terrorism! Blah blah blah.
Problem is, this time they couldn't be argued against - doing what you suggest would actually make you a terrorist.
You can't just kill people whose opinion is opposite to common sense. Yeah, the world would probably be much better off without them, and if we had a magical button that would instantly dematerialize all corrupt politicians into nothingness I'd be the first to slam it with my whole fist, but we don't. Violence always has consequences, and they're usually not the ones you foresaw when you used it.
Are they certified by Google?
Most likely not.
If not, then what market do they come with?
The usual market. It typically doesn't work on the default firmware, but if you flash a romhack (and really, why would one buy a Chinese tablet and not hack it) it works as it would on a normal Google-certified device (not sure if it gets cracked or what).
Does "pretty good hardware" include a capacitive digitizer so that 1. I can run applications that require Android Market, and 2. I don't have to either borrow my DS's stylus or press so hard I feel like I'm running the risk of breaking it?
Yes. Not all of them come with capacitive screens, but many do.
If I may, I'd like to ask y'all a question I haven't found a satisfactory answer to on Google: how do you get rid of "social DRM" on ebooks (typically epubs) that have it? The net has plenty of posts about people removing Amazon-style encrypting DRM, but very little about how to strip your name and credit card number from your ebooks.
When nuke plants create problems, they do so in flashy and dramatic ways, and instantly give major problems to thousands of people.
Oil- and coal-fired powerplants do much more damage to many more people, but since it happens in a boring, long-term way that doesn't attract the media as much, people are much less afraid of them.
Yes, nuclear can cause immense amounts of trouble, and finding where to keep the spent fuel is a major problem all by itself, but we have no choice - not as half of the world is starting to finally wake up and demand more and more energy. Unless someone makes cold fusion workable in a very short time, which seems exceedingly unlikely, OR someone finds out how to harvest solar power in a much (much much) more efficient way, we can either go nuclear or starve of energy.
Yes, a boycott from a bunch of nerds on Slashdot will definitely hit them, it's not like they have a planetload of users.
Oh, wait...
Agree for general desktop and notebook machines, but many netbooks still run better on XP than on 7. I've had users ask me to switch their netbooks to 7 (for a variety of reasons, most silly, some good), and they've always complained that XP was snappier and more responsive. Cue requests to switch back, which I'm all for as they're paying for every operation I do on the computer.
7 might be stabler, and there may be completely unauthorized "lite" pirated versions around that might in fact run decently even on low-power hardware (at the likely price of stability), but I still warn people against running it on netbooks.
For perfect ergonomy you want a Maltron. If that's too expensive, a split board. One that can be regulated, like the hyper-rare IBM clicky split, is better; failing that, a cheaper fixed split (imagine the old Microsoft Natural Keboard) will do. There are now curved board that claim to be ergonomic without the split in the middle, but I'm unconvinced as to their effectiveness. Whatever you do, don't use a standard rectangular keyboard - they're an ergonomic nightmare.
The only case where you should still do that is when there is some sort of internal statistics being kept of how long the battery is estimated to last, which is out of sync with the actual battery.
It's worth noting that even in this case, the cells don't actually go to zero - in LiIon batteries, the circuitry cuts out at about 3V per cell. Lower than that, and damage WILL occur.
...as was the StarForce rootkit on their CDs. No Sony or StarForce people went to jail in any other country either.
You're confusing DRM fuck-ups. Sony CDs weren't infected with Starforce, they had XCP and Mediamax. Starforce created their own problems, but they were unrelated with Sony.
We’ve said elsewhere that our dream scenario is that someone in China decides to copy our design and start knocking out millions of clones. Remember we’re a not-for-profit organization under English law, and all our trustees have other jobs, so we don’t have the same set of incentives as a regular company.
The Pi itself is already supercheap, but if Chinese cloners start cranking out clones we might be able to buy even cheaper versions on DealExtreme. They'll also probably have features added, as the cloners usually do.
They indeed are. Sat dishes are fantastic for leeching wifi from a location where you can see half the city, because you can *literally* reach wherever you can see, but you'll have to move the dish around a lot. And if you live in a second-floor flat you won't be doing much leeching at all. Also keep in mind that you need to keep
Of course, one needs a hydrogen-powered car, which currently are not in any sort of production beyond prototypes and limited beta testing.
Technically, only fuel-cell vehicles are in that status. Internal combustion engines can be easily modified to burn hydrogen instead of gasoline - BMW did that for their first hydrogen-powered 7-series a few years ago.
This would have the benefit of burning clean fuel while letting us keep piston engines, whose inefficiency would suddenly matter a lot less. I like the concept of the electric vehicle for everyday slow movements, but there's something inherently sad in a race car that goes "VMMMMM" instead of "WROOM".
I see M$ intends to keep up with the tradition of alternatively releasing systems that more-or-less work and systems that really suck. Let's get ready for another round of "OMG the world isn't buying 8 and is staying with 7!!!1!".
Even better. I remember reading it would run Ubuntu and haven't gotten more recent info since then. Now I want four.
A fully functional general-purpose computer with decent power for $35 is absolutely groundbreaking. I can't wait to be doing productive work (and maybe retrogaming!) on a little stick of circuitry that eats less power than a freakin' christmas light. My only gripe with it is that it runs Ubuntu; I'd much prefer it to run Debian - though I guess it'll be a question of (little) time before someone makes Debian work on it.
WANT WANT WANT. I think I'll buy two or tree $35 ones. Hell, it's the first computer you can buy more than one of just because, hell, why not?
The author, who goes by the initials S.H., also used the blog to vent his frustrations with inept supervisors and unreasonable schedules, though he maintains a sense of humor, describing in one post how he punched a hole on a wall while driving a robot and, in another entry, how a drunken worker slept in his room by mistake
Is it just me, or does this seem very, very soviet? Bureaucratic impediments, incompetent people in high positions, drunken workers around highly dangerous areas, and a weird sense of humor around all of it... haven't we seen this already?
There will be a $30-35 version with 256 megs of RAM and an Ethernet port. I think the slight price increase is well worth it just for the RAM - 256 megs makes a big difference in the amount of OS and application tweaking necessary.
Why is Google+ growing so quickly?
Because it's not Facebook...
I'm sick of people proffering this and only this as a reason to Google+ growth.
You may be sick of it, but it doesn't make it any less true.
There is something more to it, after all, iTunes Ping isn't Facebook either. Why didn't they balloon up to 20 million in two weeks?
Most facebook users hate facebook, for a variety of reasons (some very valid).
Many people, not all of them nerds, also hate iTunes or other Apple products - though they may still use them.
But a lot less people hate Google - and Google has a way of making its products look much less corporate-evil-like than other firms (whether they actually are is beyond the point). That counts for a lot when there's a crowd of several millions looking for an alternative to Facebook that doesn't suck.