I use POP3, so I can have local copies of all emails. I keep messages on the server too, so it's easy to sync up several machines - that way I can have them on both my notebook and my desktop. All my music is local, and I keep local copies of any videos, documents, etc. that I care about. Occasionally I even save Web pages as HTML so I can have access to the content even after it changes in or disappears from the wild.
As far as I'm concerned The Cloud is a sometimes-convenient augmentation to local storage, not a replacement for it.
At the very least forcing the incumbents to provide access like they have to do in Canada would be the very minimum for a proper functioning ISP market.
Mod parent up!
I'm a Canadian. Right now I use Bell because my GF wants to keep her Sympatico address. But I miss the days when I had an ISP called TekSavvy, which delivered DSL service via the Bell phone lines, while the phone service on those same lines was provided by Bell.
I wasn't totally satisfied with the service, (though I felt it was way better than Bell's had been), and was about to switch to another ISP when I ended up moving. But that was the beauty of it - I could choose from among several ISP's with just a few phone calls. (Plus a minor interruption of service while Bell 'accidentally' messed up the changeover).
I shudder to think of living someplace where I have NO choice of ISP, or am forced to choose between a 'wired' monopolist bully and a 'wireless' monopolist bully.
Thanks for the informative reply! I'll take that info into account during future rants. However, I'd still prefer there to be a greater awareness on the part of Joe Public that an electric car isn't magically an emission-free vehicle.
One of the articles cited says the car "produces zero emissions". Perhaps we can coin a new phrase for electric cars: "zero direct emissions".
Most people reading this implicitly understand that if an electric car is charged using electricity from a coal- or gas-fired power plant it really doesn't have zero emissions. But a very large percentage of the public simply doesn't get that, and thinks of electric cars as an immediate way to address the greenhouse gas problem.
Sure, electric cars probably, (depending on a host of factors), result in fewer emissions per mile driven. But if every car in North America magically became an electric vehicle overnight, we'd need a huge amount of electricity to charge them all, and the energy would have to come from fossil fuel, (not zero emissions), or nuclear, (huge political problem) - never mind the insane costs of the required infrastructure buildout in either scenario. The general public needs more information to help them understand these things, not more "zero emissions" spin.
they have the gall to project their xenophobia onto quebecois and make claims about how racist we are...
I'm Canadian, I like Quebec, and I've met some fine, fun people in Montreal, which is mostly pretty welcoming to Anglophones like me. But more than once I've gotten a surly "maudit Anglais" attitude from people in less populated areas when I stop at a gas station or a depanneur.
Way too obvious a troll - you're clearly an amateur. Come back after you've learned to bait a hook and cast a line without scaring off every fish in the lake.
I get what you're saying, and to some extent I agree. I'm just not entirely convinced that inertia fully explains what I perceive as a major drop in quality of education since I was a kid. I'd like to believe the problems are just a hangover from an earlier age. However, I've known teachers who would like to do an effective job but have had their hands tied by government-mandated curricula. I think that if governments aren't actively furthering that century-old agenda, they are at least knowingly allowing it to take its course and are only too happy to take advantage of its consequences.
My first thought was 'really fast transistors, and indeed the article preview refers to 'high-speed transistors'. I wonder how fast they are, and how easy it would be to parallell them to gain higher power without sacrificing too much speed; too bad it would cost me $32 to find out... Anyway, this development could lead to faster logic and microprocessors, or even just faster and more efficient switching transistors for power supplies and the like. They might even be good for THz amplification. Any thought that this might extend the validity of Moore's Law?
Educator John Taylor Gatto has explained both in writing, (PDF link), and in Death by Pedagogy, as well as in many interviews available on YouTube, that the purpose of the education system is to extend childhood and discourage critical thinking. This is done in order to produce more compliant citizens; otherwise their innovation and inventiveness would both disrupt capitalists' ability to control markets, and deny corporations a complacent and pliable workforce.
Before you dismiss this as just another wild-eyed conspiracy theory you should check out what he has to say. For one thing he gives copious references, most of which can be checked, and most of which use such direct language that there is no possible ambiguity as to the intent of the authors. For another thing, it is perhaps the best and simplest explanation for why the Ohio legislature might enact such otherwise inexplicable legislation.
Ask yourself 'cui bono'. Who will be best served by a citizenry that is less and less critical, and less and less scientifically competent? Then look back at the education you received, look at what has happened to schooling in the meantime, look at what is happening to education now, and place it all into the context that Gatto creates. if after that you can honestly call it a conspiracy theory, go in peace.
Of course they will, while comcast is telling them this, they are stuffing wads of money in the senators pockets.
You know that talking point is total bullshit, right? What you describe would be a felony offense in the United States. Nor can corporations give money directly to campaigns...
In the first place the fact that it's a felony doesn't mean it doesn't happen - crimes are committed every day without the perpetrators being caught. And there are ways for the money to change hands other than campaign contributions - offshore accounts being one example. In the second place there are non-monetary means of payment, such as promises of jobs - witness the 'revolving door' between government and corporations.
I realize such intricacies don't make for good talking points but it would be extremely helpful if people would at least learn how the system works rather than spreading FUD that only serves to undermine the tenuous amount of faith we have left in our system.
Learning "how the system works" is only useful if you are learning "how the system REALLY works", (a subject not taught in most curricula), as opposed to how the system was designed to work. As for the 'tenuous amount of faith', it's tenuous for a reason. Besides, faith is misplaced in this context; what counts is trust, which can only be earned or divested. And most people realize that the government has divested itself of a huge amount of the trust which it had formerly earned.
Mandatory panic! Alert the police! Search EVERYTHING! Connect the dots!
How can you make such sarcastic references indicating that you clearly understand the issue and disapprove of what happened, then proceed to "blame the teacher for not sufficiently explaining the limits of the assignment"?
Personally, I blame witless school officials, over-reaching law enforcement, and a military-industrial complex that has propagandized and brainwashed the populace into believing that even just a fictional description of violence is tantamount to a crime. This is 'thoughtcrime' straight out of Orwell's '1984'.
BTW, your post reminds me of another Orwellian concept, namely "doublethink".
...If only there was a Debian based distribution which did not force the systemd into their users.
Ubuntu doesn't use systemd. Yes, I know it might be a stretch these days to call it "Debian based", but at least it still uses Debian packages, and I've even pulled stuff in from Debian repos with no trouble so far. I've uninstalled the cutesy 'Software Center', and I either use apt/aptitude from the command line, or Synaptic, depending on what I'm doing. My Xubuntu setup 'feels' very 'Debian' to me, without the downside of systemd.
why I haven't addressed your specific issue with networking? I have no idea what it might be and without lots more detail -totally out of the purview of this forum- no one would.
Thanks, but I wasn't looking for that anyway. I used to love doing things TO my computer, but I've gotten to the stage where I'd rather concentrate on doing stuff WITH it, and I no longer have much patience for tracking down this kind of problem. Changing to Xubuntu was simpler, and aside from the Windows-like rebooting after updates, it's been pretty good.
Missing a driver for new hardware is hardly limited to Linux... An alternative approach is to use a well supported USB network adapter to complete the install, then load an out of tree driver for the network hardware.
I considered doing that so I could install Wheezy, but I didn't really want to jump through hoops to install an older version that would have required me to try backporting for the newer versions of Kicad. And in Wheezy, Suspend functionality didn't even work on my old box, so I wasn't keen to try it on a new one.
As for Jessie, it's called testing for a reason:-)
I know, I know... But I ran what became Squeeze and Wheezy when they had only spent a few months in Testing, and I only ever had minor issues, so I came to think of Testing as being pretty solid. I guess I got complacent...
I had already long-ago banished Pulse from my system - I've never liked it and always had problems with it. (Not surprising that systemd and pulseaudio are from the same developer). Anyway, I actually got desperate enough to ADD pulseaudio to try to fix the audio. It restored functionality in some programs but not others, and I was unable to sort out the 'default device' problems. (Not that I was too motivated - having broken two critical functions with one update had soured me on Jessie).
And now I'm on Xubuntu, which comes with Pulse installed by default. I don,t love it, but sound works now so I'm inclined not to dick with it.
Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.
Robert Heinlein defined the difference between a physicist and an engineer as something like this - warning, mild misogyny ahead:
"Put an engineer and a physicist across the room from a beautiful woman, and tell them that if they approach the woman each step must be no larger than half the distance of the previous step. The physicist gives up because he knows he can never reach her, while the engineer starts walking because he knows he can get close enough for all practical purposes".
I once worked for an engineer who previously had a physicist working for him. The physicist couldn't understand why a couple of 6-volt lantern batteries in series wouldn't start his car - after all, they were putting out 12 volts...
There's more than one Linux, and it's very easy to choose a stable distro that doesn't live on the bleeding edge.
Do you mean like Debian Testing, (Jessie), that broke both my sound and my ability to suspend during the last dist-upgrade? Or do you mean like Debian Stable, (Wheezy), which won't work with my wired network hardware so I can't even install it in my new machine without a bunch of CD's and a few prayers? Or perhaps you mean Ubuntu, (I moved to Xubuntu when I got fed up with trying to get Debian working), which prompts me to reboot after updates a couple of times a week like some crappy Windows box?
I don't think I could ever really go back to Windows, (especially given my recent experiences with 8.1 on my GF's new laplet), but recently there have been days when I've toyed with the idea...
Your lawyers and their lawyers can argue about fair use, while your bank account is drained.
That's why we need crowdfunding campaigns in the 'free' world that are directed at collecting money to fight 'everything you see are belong to us' law suits like the one this bit of nonsense is just begging for. And while we're at it maybe we can crowdfund campaigns to convince people to boycott organizations run by shitheads who try to claim ownership of the whole world by raising their hind legs and pissing on everything in sight like dogs that need obedience training.
BTW, the irony of a crowdfunding campaign to convince the crowd to do something is not lost on me.
I suppose this qualifies as News for Nerds, but really, don't we have better things to talk about than the "premium feel" of a gadget? I don't see much in the way of fun so far in the comments, and it's not like this latest bit of shiny is going to have any significant impact on anyone beyond Samsung's shareholders.
TFA seems more like a Slashvertisement than a news piece to me.
No one seems to take the other approach--raspberry pi with hostapd. You can do whatever you want with it then, including anything beyond simply routing and firewalling.
You can also do something you probably DON'T want to do with it, namely waiting for what seems an eternity while it reboots on those occasions when a reset is required or you have a brief power failure.
Slashdot Mirror
I still come here looking for insightful articles and thought-provoking discussions.
Funny, and at least a little bit true, yet you were modded down. That kind of makes your point for you, doesn't it?
They'll pry that from my cold dead fingers.
I use POP3, so I can have local copies of all emails. I keep messages on the server too, so it's easy to sync up several machines - that way I can have them on both my notebook and my desktop. All my music is local, and I keep local copies of any videos, documents, etc. that I care about. Occasionally I even save Web pages as HTML so I can have access to the content even after it changes in or disappears from the wild.
As far as I'm concerned The Cloud is a sometimes-convenient augmentation to local storage, not a replacement for it.
At the very least forcing the incumbents to provide access like they have to do in Canada would be the very minimum for a proper functioning ISP market.
Mod parent up!
I'm a Canadian. Right now I use Bell because my GF wants to keep her Sympatico address. But I miss the days when I had an ISP called TekSavvy, which delivered DSL service via the Bell phone lines, while the phone service on those same lines was provided by Bell.
I wasn't totally satisfied with the service, (though I felt it was way better than Bell's had been), and was about to switch to another ISP when I ended up moving. But that was the beauty of it - I could choose from among several ISP's with just a few phone calls. (Plus a minor interruption of service while Bell 'accidentally' messed up the changeover).
I shudder to think of living someplace where I have NO choice of ISP, or am forced to choose between a 'wired' monopolist bully and a 'wireless' monopolist bully.
subwoofers ...causing headaches and annoying bystanders.
Subwoofers - causing annoying bystanders for over 50 years!
Don't you just love the playful ambiguities of the English language?
Thanks for the informative reply! I'll take that info into account during future rants. However, I'd still prefer there to be a greater awareness on the part of Joe Public that an electric car isn't magically an emission-free vehicle.
X-Wing deliveries?
Sorry, but that was just begging for a Star Wars reference.
One of the articles cited says the car "produces zero emissions". Perhaps we can coin a new phrase for electric cars: "zero direct emissions".
Most people reading this implicitly understand that if an electric car is charged using electricity from a coal- or gas-fired power plant it really doesn't have zero emissions. But a very large percentage of the public simply doesn't get that, and thinks of electric cars as an immediate way to address the greenhouse gas problem.
Sure, electric cars probably, (depending on a host of factors), result in fewer emissions per mile driven. But if every car in North America magically became an electric vehicle overnight, we'd need a huge amount of electricity to charge them all, and the energy would have to come from fossil fuel, (not zero emissions), or nuclear, (huge political problem) - never mind the insane costs of the required infrastructure buildout in either scenario. The general public needs more information to help them understand these things, not more "zero emissions" spin.
they have the gall to project their xenophobia onto quebecois and make claims about how racist we are...
I'm Canadian, I like Quebec, and I've met some fine, fun people in Montreal, which is mostly pretty welcoming to Anglophones like me. But more than once I've gotten a surly "maudit Anglais" attitude from people in less populated areas when I stop at a gas station or a depanneur.
Bill 101 and its revisions, (Bill 14 in particular), can also be a sore point, especially when taken to the extreme of ordering businesses to translate English Facebook pages into French.
Way too obvious a troll - you're clearly an amateur. Come back after you've learned to bait a hook and cast a line without scaring off every fish in the lake.
I get what you're saying, and to some extent I agree. I'm just not entirely convinced that inertia fully explains what I perceive as a major drop in quality of education since I was a kid. I'd like to believe the problems are just a hangover from an earlier age. However, I've known teachers who would like to do an effective job but have had their hands tied by government-mandated curricula. I think that if governments aren't actively furthering that century-old agenda, they are at least knowingly allowing it to take its course and are only too happy to take advantage of its consequences.
My first thought was 'really fast transistors, and indeed the article preview refers to 'high-speed transistors'. I wonder how fast they are, and how easy it would be to parallell them to gain higher power without sacrificing too much speed; too bad it would cost me $32 to find out... Anyway, this development could lead to faster logic and microprocessors, or even just faster and more efficient switching transistors for power supplies and the like. They might even be good for THz amplification. Any thought that this might extend the validity of Moore's Law?
Educator John Taylor Gatto has explained both in writing, (PDF link), and in Death by Pedagogy, as well as in many interviews available on YouTube, that the purpose of the education system is to extend childhood and discourage critical thinking. This is done in order to produce more compliant citizens; otherwise their innovation and inventiveness would both disrupt capitalists' ability to control markets, and deny corporations a complacent and pliable workforce.
Before you dismiss this as just another wild-eyed conspiracy theory you should check out what he has to say. For one thing he gives copious references, most of which can be checked, and most of which use such direct language that there is no possible ambiguity as to the intent of the authors. For another thing, it is perhaps the best and simplest explanation for why the Ohio legislature might enact such otherwise inexplicable legislation.
Ask yourself 'cui bono'. Who will be best served by a citizenry that is less and less critical, and less and less scientifically competent? Then look back at the education you received, look at what has happened to schooling in the meantime, look at what is happening to education now, and place it all into the context that Gatto creates. if after that you can honestly call it a conspiracy theory, go in peace.
Of course they will, while comcast is telling them this, they are stuffing wads of money in the senators pockets.
You know that talking point is total bullshit, right? What you describe would be a felony offense in the United States. Nor can corporations give money directly to campaigns...
In the first place the fact that it's a felony doesn't mean it doesn't happen - crimes are committed every day without the perpetrators being caught. And there are ways for the money to change hands other than campaign contributions - offshore accounts being one example. In the second place there are non-monetary means of payment, such as promises of jobs - witness the 'revolving door' between government and corporations.
I realize such intricacies don't make for good talking points but it would be extremely helpful if people would at least learn how the system works rather than spreading FUD that only serves to undermine the tenuous amount of faith we have left in our system.
Learning "how the system works" is only useful if you are learning "how the system REALLY works", (a subject not taught in most curricula), as opposed to how the system was designed to work. As for the 'tenuous amount of faith', it's tenuous for a reason. Besides, faith is misplaced in this context; what counts is trust, which can only be earned or divested. And most people realize that the government has divested itself of a huge amount of the trust which it had formerly earned.
Mandatory panic! Alert the police! Search EVERYTHING! Connect the dots!
How can you make such sarcastic references indicating that you clearly understand the issue and disapprove of what happened, then proceed to "blame the teacher for not sufficiently explaining the limits of the assignment"?
Personally, I blame witless school officials, over-reaching law enforcement, and a military-industrial complex that has propagandized and brainwashed the populace into believing that even just a fictional description of violence is tantamount to a crime. This is 'thoughtcrime' straight out of Orwell's '1984'.
BTW, your post reminds me of another Orwellian concept, namely "doublethink".
...both copyright holders, Internet service providers, and other parties are examining what they can do to optimize the process.
The solution is not to optimize the process. The solution is to scrap the process, and the DMCA along with it.
...If only there was a Debian based distribution which did not force the systemd into their users.
Ubuntu doesn't use systemd. Yes, I know it might be a stretch these days to call it "Debian based", but at least it still uses Debian packages, and I've even pulled stuff in from Debian repos with no trouble so far. I've uninstalled the cutesy 'Software Center', and I either use apt/aptitude from the command line, or Synaptic, depending on what I'm doing. My Xubuntu setup 'feels' very 'Debian' to me, without the downside of systemd.
why I haven't addressed your specific issue with networking? I have no idea what it might be and without lots more detail -totally out of the purview of this forum- no one would.
Thanks, but I wasn't looking for that anyway. I used to love doing things TO my computer, but I've gotten to the stage where I'd rather concentrate on doing stuff WITH it, and I no longer have much patience for tracking down this kind of problem. Changing to Xubuntu was simpler, and aside from the Windows-like rebooting after updates, it's been pretty good.
Missing a driver for new hardware is hardly limited to Linux... An alternative approach is to use a well supported USB network adapter to complete the install, then load an out of tree driver for the network hardware.
I considered doing that so I could install Wheezy, but I didn't really want to jump through hoops to install an older version that would have required me to try backporting for the newer versions of Kicad. And in Wheezy, Suspend functionality didn't even work on my old box, so I wasn't keen to try it on a new one.
As for Jessie, it's called testing for a reason :-)
I know, I know... But I ran what became Squeeze and Wheezy when they had only spent a few months in Testing, and I only ever had minor issues, so I came to think of Testing as being pretty solid. I guess I got complacent...
I had already long-ago banished Pulse from my system - I've never liked it and always had problems with it. (Not surprising that systemd and pulseaudio are from the same developer). Anyway, I actually got desperate enough to ADD pulseaudio to try to fix the audio. It restored functionality in some programs but not others, and I was unable to sort out the 'default device' problems. (Not that I was too motivated - having broken two critical functions with one update had soured me on Jessie).
And now I'm on Xubuntu, which comes with Pulse installed by default. I don,t love it, but sound works now so I'm inclined not to dick with it.
Engineering is merely the slow younger brother of physics.
Robert Heinlein defined the difference between a physicist and an engineer as something like this - warning, mild misogyny ahead:
"Put an engineer and a physicist across the room from a beautiful woman, and tell them that if they approach the woman each step must be no larger than half the distance of the previous step. The physicist gives up because he knows he can never reach her, while the engineer starts walking because he knows he can get close enough for all practical purposes".
I once worked for an engineer who previously had a physicist working for him. The physicist couldn't understand why a couple of 6-volt lantern batteries in series wouldn't start his car - after all, they were putting out 12 volts...
There's more than one Linux, and it's very easy to choose a stable distro that doesn't live on the bleeding edge.
Do you mean like Debian Testing, (Jessie), that broke both my sound and my ability to suspend during the last dist-upgrade? Or do you mean like Debian Stable, (Wheezy), which won't work with my wired network hardware so I can't even install it in my new machine without a bunch of CD's and a few prayers? Or perhaps you mean Ubuntu, (I moved to Xubuntu when I got fed up with trying to get Debian working), which prompts me to reboot after updates a couple of times a week like some crappy Windows box?
I don't think I could ever really go back to Windows, (especially given my recent experiences with 8.1 on my GF's new laplet), but recently there have been days when I've toyed with the idea...
Your lawyers and their lawyers can argue about fair use, while your bank account is drained.
That's why we need crowdfunding campaigns in the 'free' world that are directed at collecting money to fight 'everything you see are belong to us' law suits like the one this bit of nonsense is just begging for. And while we're at it maybe we can crowdfund campaigns to convince people to boycott organizations run by shitheads who try to claim ownership of the whole world by raising their hind legs and pissing on everything in sight like dogs that need obedience training.
BTW, the irony of a crowdfunding campaign to convince the crowd to do something is not lost on me.
I suppose this qualifies as News for Nerds, but really, don't we have better things to talk about than the "premium feel" of a gadget? I don't see much in the way of fun so far in the comments, and it's not like this latest bit of shiny is going to have any significant impact on anyone beyond Samsung's shareholders.
TFA seems more like a Slashvertisement than a news piece to me.
No one seems to take the other approach--raspberry pi with hostapd. You can do whatever you want with it then, including anything beyond simply routing and firewalling.
You can also do something you probably DON'T want to do with it, namely waiting for what seems an eternity while it reboots on those occasions when a reset is required or you have a brief power failure.
...miniscule is too a word, stupid spellbot...
'minuscule', (with a 'u'), is the original spelling, and is still preferred: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...