The same U.N. that chose Gaddafi's Libya to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Blah blah blah. You're just repeating the Fox News faux-anger headlines.
Actually I "repeated" the first thing a google search came up with, which was the BBC.
"Libya has been elected chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, despite opposition from the United States.
In a secret ballot, Libyan Ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji was backed by 33 members, with three countries voting against and 17 members abstaining.
Human rights groups have been protesting at Libya assuming the chairmanship." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2672029.stm
THINK about the subtle politics of such appointments. Take someone from an oppressive nation and make them chairman of the commission on Human Rights, so that they end-up saying things directly contradictory to their leader's policies. It's a very clever method of instigating change.
I strongly suggest you follow your own advice and think. The oppressive leader ultimately supplied the person who will be the chair. Why would you believe such a person who may also have blood on their hands, may fear reprisal against themselves personally, may have family vulnerable to reprisals back in the home country,... would say anything the oppressive leader would find objectionable? Why do you think the oppressive leader himself does not say things in public regarding human rights that contradict his actions? Such leaders and their spokespeople often *say* one thing in public and *do* something completely different in private. The strategy you propose is not clever at all, it is naive.
One person can make a choice... this makes no difference anymore these days...
BULL. It is still one person one vote in the US. The problem is that voters make very poor choices. Voters are easily "bought", too easily swayed by talk and are reluctant to throw out incumbents whose actions don't match their talk. Basically voters do not hold politicians accountable for their actions. Politicians only have to say the "right thing" on the campaign trail. There is the illusion of corporate control only because voters are overly influenced by TV commercials. What would happen if politicians started getting thrown out if their actions did not match their campaign speeches, if voters voted based upon performance rather than likability or political alignment? I'd wager politicians would be more attentive to the voters.
Its co-opted. It started with those on the left and right who were concerned about financial mismanagement by government and private corporations. Now unions are co-opting it because they fear union money will be restricted along with corporate money, democratic party operatives are co-opting it trying to create a "tea party" like organization that is shadow group for the democratic party, etc. Much like the tea party started with those legitimately concerned with fiscal mismanagement and an ever encroaching federal government and has subsequently been co-opted to some extent by republican social issues and republican party operatives. It will be interesting to see if the tea party can regain its original focus and it will be interesting to see if the occupy wall street movement can avoid the same mistake. Unfortunately it looks like history repeating itself, the only difference being tightly aligned with a different mainstream political party. Sad, since the tea party founders and the occupy wall street founders had an incredible amount of overlap in their concerns and grievances, although you would never really see that given only the incredibly shallow coverage of the "main stream media".
How many startups would have been crushed by server OS costs without GNU/Linux as an option, even just by driving down the price of competitors?
To be fair, probably zero. Nature hates an empty "ecological niche". BSD would probably have fulfilled that role. BSD would have simply used a different compiler as well.
The technology and technological options would most likely be the same, merely the politics of open source would be different.
Generally it is trolls and people that lose track of their passwords.
I know several people who create new accounts whenever they change jobs, schools, organizations, etc. That makes them a little more anonymous in case they post something regarding the former employer.
I've even known people that just got bored with an old account name. Wanted something to match (or no longer match) an account name on a gaming service, etc.
It takes a monumental denial of reality to say something that stupid...
Its the United Nations. The same U.N. that chose North Korea to head the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. The same U.N. that chose Gaddafi's Libya to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
(Yes, pedants, I'm aware we don't get to vote for them)
Which is reason enough that the folks in the UN should not be dictating Internet policy.
Where are the/.'s who said the UN should control internet governance a couple of weeks ago in an article regarding such governance? Maybe they will reconsider now.
I'd also look at the various civilian spacecraft efforts going on. They seem more innovative than the traditional aerospace companies. Of course to be fair these traditional aerospace behemoths have been working to NASA specs and have not done anything on their own like the little guys out at Mohave and elsewhere.
Composite aircraft components have been used in military aircraft for quite some time. I believe the AV-8 Harrier of the 1980s is one example. While these aircraft may not have the mass of a commercial airliner keep in mind their high G maneuvering. The loads/stresses on these smaller aircraft may be comparable or greater than those on a commercial airliner.
How much longer will the zombie corpse of Napster be flogged? Just let the damn thing die already.
IIRC it takes 3 to 10 years for zombies to disintegrate depending on the environment, plus the activity level of the zombie accelerates things. Of course colder climates with long freezes really lengthen the process. Napster is headquartered in Los Angeles so the hot dry climate could suggest something closer to 10 years. Thanks to Max Brooks for his research.;-)
Cool! My dad can finally download 8-tracks legally!
Not quite. None of the downloads contain the mid song fade out, the THUNK noise, and then the song fading back in. Its not quite the same experience.;-)
Even though I don't agree with his liberal bashing, he is right about the offending part.
Its not just people's interpretation of offending behavior, it their interpretation of threatening behavior. I knew a professor who did computer vision research and had a round bulls-eye target (*not* a silhouette target, ie it was the type of target you would find in the Olympics not on a police or military range) shot full of holes on his wall. This target was used in a computer vision project and the professor would occasionally glance at it while thinking of algorithms to apply to its image. He joked he'll have to complete the project quickly because someone will invariably walk by in the hallway and see the target on his *interior office wall* and file a complaint saying the target created a threatening environment. He was serious, he was quite confident he will eventually be asked to take it down.
She's not a rent-a-cop or a mall-cop. She's the chief of an actual police department. Many universities have their own police department.
University of California campus police are real police, state police in fact so they may have wider jurisdiction than the local police department. I recall that every fall quarter, and often in the winter and spring quarters, the same story appeared in the campus paper. A student new to campus ignores instructions from a UC police officer while saying something to the effect of "I don't have to listen to a rent-a-cop", the stories then continues with that student's arrest.
I also recall that UC Police often responded to emergencies near campus, not just on campus. An armed bank robbery occurred near campus, the UC police were first on the scene and "contained" the robber. A local Sheriff's deputy was shot during a "routine" traffic stop 10+ miles away, the suspect fled into an industrial park. While various SWAT teams from the region maintained a perimeter around the park three K-9 teams searched the complex, one was from the UC police.
Macs, for instance, made a huge campaign of their products' new ability to finally support Microsoft Windows
New? Finally? Apple's Boot Camp utility has been installing MS Windows and Apple supplied drivers on Mac hardware since 2006.
made
In the past tense.
Past tense as in when you made your post a few minutes ago? "Made" can be vague with respect to time, when used with "new" and "finally" it seems to be referring to something in the recent past.
There may be reasons to run Windows or Linux natively on a Mac,...
Games, or some other app that wants to squeeze every possible CPU cycle out of the hardware.
... but for me VMware Fusion does the job. Much better together than apart.
I definitely agree for most apps. One nice thing about VMWare Fusion is that you can have it both ways, it does not require a VMWare virtual machine for Windows. Fusion can run Windows from the Boot Camp harddrive partition normally used to dual boot into Windows at startup. So when you need to run the occasional "productivity app" you can stay in Mac OS and fire up Windows in a virtual machine. However if you want to run a modern game you can restart the machine and dual boot.
Camouflage is the oldest and most natural form of security on the planet.
Carrying a bigger stick then your opponent is the oldest and most natural form of security.
Actually its camouflage *plus* the bigger stick. The camouflage gives one the potential advantage of deciding if and when the bigger stick comes into play.
In a relative sort of perspective a $10 loss is not that bad at product launch. A little cost reduction over time, the sale of a book or two, the project could turn profitable in the not so distant future.
Not my neck of the woods, I'm in California. I'm not defending Texas, I'm just correcting uninformed politically biased statements. Apologies if you find this offensive.
Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.
Stock prices are not meaningless, they are simply misunderstood and misused. They are not a measurement of how a company is currently doing, they are an estimate of how a company will be doing in the future. The current state is just one of several variables that goes into that estimate. Regrettably when an estimate reflects a relatively large change in either direction, good or bad, speculators pile on and inflate or deflate that price. Apple is far more vulnerable to such speculation than IBM. As suggested by their respective beta's, 0.7 for IBM and 1.3 for Apple.
While far from perfect stock prices are meaningful in a normalized form like the P/E ratio. Apple at a P/E of 15, IBM at 14, Microsoft at 9, HP at 5,... You don't see anything meaningful or reflective of the real world in these numbers?
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but for current health I like metrics based upon cash flows. A little more difficult to engineer than EBITDA.
No offense to Texans; really meant Texan politicians.
FWIW the state government is involved. I'd wager there are quite a few texas politicians that are all for developing new in-state energy sources, state infrastructure, products to export to other states, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
The same U.N. that chose Gaddafi's Libya to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
Blah blah blah. You're just repeating the Fox News faux-anger headlines.
Actually I "repeated" the first thing a google search came up with, which was the BBC.
"Libya has been elected chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, despite opposition from the United States. In a secret ballot, Libyan Ambassador Najat Al-Hajjaji was backed by 33 members, with three countries voting against and 17 members abstaining. Human rights groups have been protesting at Libya assuming the chairmanship."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2672029.stm
THINK about the subtle politics of such appointments. Take someone from an oppressive nation and make them chairman of the commission on Human Rights, so that they end-up saying things directly contradictory to their leader's policies. It's a very clever method of instigating change.
I strongly suggest you follow your own advice and think. The oppressive leader ultimately supplied the person who will be the chair. Why would you believe such a person who may also have blood on their hands, may fear reprisal against themselves personally, may have family vulnerable to reprisals back in the home country, ... would say anything the oppressive leader would find objectionable? Why do you think the oppressive leader himself does not say things in public regarding human rights that contradict his actions? Such leaders and their spokespeople often *say* one thing in public and *do* something completely different in private. The strategy you propose is not clever at all, it is naive.
One person can make a choice ... this makes no difference anymore these days ...
BULL. It is still one person one vote in the US. The problem is that voters make very poor choices. Voters are easily "bought", too easily swayed by talk and are reluctant to throw out incumbents whose actions don't match their talk. Basically voters do not hold politicians accountable for their actions. Politicians only have to say the "right thing" on the campaign trail. There is the illusion of corporate control only because voters are overly influenced by TV commercials. What would happen if politicians started getting thrown out if their actions did not match their campaign speeches, if voters voted based upon performance rather than likability or political alignment? I'd wager politicians would be more attentive to the voters.
Its co-opted. It started with those on the left and right who were concerned about financial mismanagement by government and private corporations. Now unions are co-opting it because they fear union money will be restricted along with corporate money, democratic party operatives are co-opting it trying to create a "tea party" like organization that is shadow group for the democratic party, etc. Much like the tea party started with those legitimately concerned with fiscal mismanagement and an ever encroaching federal government and has subsequently been co-opted to some extent by republican social issues and republican party operatives. It will be interesting to see if the tea party can regain its original focus and it will be interesting to see if the occupy wall street movement can avoid the same mistake. Unfortunately it looks like history repeating itself, the only difference being tightly aligned with a different mainstream political party. Sad, since the tea party founders and the occupy wall street founders had an incredible amount of overlap in their concerns and grievances, although you would never really see that given only the incredibly shallow coverage of the "main stream media".
How many startups would have been crushed by server OS costs without GNU/Linux as an option, even just by driving down the price of competitors?
To be fair, probably zero. Nature hates an empty "ecological niche". BSD would probably have fulfilled that role. BSD would have simply used a different compiler as well.
The technology and technological options would most likely be the same, merely the politics of open source would be different.
Who makes more than 1 /. account?
Generally it is trolls and people that lose track of their passwords.
I know several people who create new accounts whenever they change jobs, schools, organizations, etc. That makes them a little more anonymous in case they post something regarding the former employer.
I've even known people that just got bored with an old account name. Wanted something to match (or no longer match) an account name on a gaming service, etc.
It takes a monumental denial of reality to say something that stupid ...
Its the United Nations. The same U.N. that chose North Korea to head the U.N. Conference on Disarmament. The same U.N. that chose Gaddafi's Libya to chair the U.N. Human Rights Commission.
(Yes, pedants, I'm aware we don't get to vote for them)
Which is reason enough that the folks in the UN should not be dictating Internet policy.
Where are the /.'s who said the UN should control internet governance a couple of weeks ago in an article regarding such governance? Maybe they will reconsider now.
Perhaps they are referring to a gov't sponsored competition. I believe the X-Prize competition was sponsored by a private organization.
I'd also look at the various civilian spacecraft efforts going on. They seem more innovative than the traditional aerospace companies. Of course to be fair these traditional aerospace behemoths have been working to NASA specs and have not done anything on their own like the little guys out at Mohave and elsewhere.
Composite aircraft components have been used in military aircraft for quite some time. I believe the AV-8 Harrier of the 1980s is one example. While these aircraft may not have the mass of a commercial airliner keep in mind their high G maneuvering. The loads/stresses on these smaller aircraft may be comparable or greater than those on a commercial airliner.
Who can't do math? 20,000,000,000 / 30,000,000 = 666.67
FWIW its 30.5M not 30M.
;-)
So 20,000M / 30.5M = 655.74.
Apologies to the Iron Maiden fans who were liking the earlier calculation.
How much longer will the zombie corpse of Napster be flogged? Just let the damn thing die already.
IIRC it takes 3 to 10 years for zombies to disintegrate depending on the environment, plus the activity level of the zombie accelerates things. Of course colder climates with long freezes really lengthen the process. Napster is headquartered in Los Angeles so the hot dry climate could suggest something closer to 10 years. Thanks to Max Brooks for his research. ;-)
Cool! My dad can finally download 8-tracks legally!
Not quite. None of the downloads contain the mid song fade out, the THUNK noise, and then the song fading back in. Its not quite the same experience. ;-)
Even though I don't agree with his liberal bashing, he is right about the offending part.
Its not just people's interpretation of offending behavior, it their interpretation of threatening behavior. I knew a professor who did computer vision research and had a round bulls-eye target (*not* a silhouette target, ie it was the type of target you would find in the Olympics not on a police or military range) shot full of holes on his wall. This target was used in a computer vision project and the professor would occasionally glance at it while thinking of algorithms to apply to its image. He joked he'll have to complete the project quickly because someone will invariably walk by in the hallway and see the target on his *interior office wall* and file a complaint saying the target created a threatening environment. He was serious, he was quite confident he will eventually be asked to take it down.
She's not a rent-a-cop or a mall-cop. She's the chief of an actual police department. Many universities have their own police department.
University of California campus police are real police, state police in fact so they may have wider jurisdiction than the local police department. I recall that every fall quarter, and often in the winter and spring quarters, the same story appeared in the campus paper. A student new to campus ignores instructions from a UC police officer while saying something to the effect of "I don't have to listen to a rent-a-cop", the stories then continues with that student's arrest.
I also recall that UC Police often responded to emergencies near campus, not just on campus. An armed bank robbery occurred near campus, the UC police were first on the scene and "contained" the robber. A local Sheriff's deputy was shot during a "routine" traffic stop 10+ miles away, the suspect fled into an industrial park. While various SWAT teams from the region maintained a perimeter around the park three K-9 teams searched the complex, one was from the UC police.
Macs, for instance, made a huge campaign of their products' new ability to finally support Microsoft Windows
New? Finally? Apple's Boot Camp utility has been installing MS Windows and Apple supplied drivers on Mac hardware since 2006.
made In the past tense.
Past tense as in when you made your post a few minutes ago? "Made" can be vague with respect to time, when used with "new" and "finally" it seems to be referring to something in the recent past.
There may be reasons to run Windows or Linux natively on a Mac, ...
Games, or some other app that wants to squeeze every possible CPU cycle out of the hardware.
... but for me VMware Fusion does the job. Much better together than apart.
I definitely agree for most apps. One nice thing about VMWare Fusion is that you can have it both ways, it does not require a VMWare virtual machine for Windows. Fusion can run Windows from the Boot Camp harddrive partition normally used to dual boot into Windows at startup. So when you need to run the occasional "productivity app" you can stay in Mac OS and fire up Windows in a virtual machine. However if you want to run a modern game you can restart the machine and dual boot.
Macs, for instance, made a huge campaign of their products' new ability to finally support Microsoft Windows
New? Finally? Apple's Boot Camp utility has been installing MS Windows and Apple supplied drivers on Mac hardware since 2006.
Camouflage is the oldest and most natural form of security on the planet.
Carrying a bigger stick then your opponent is the oldest and most natural form of security.
Actually its camouflage *plus* the bigger stick. The camouflage gives one the potential advantage of deciding if and when the bigger stick comes into play.
In a relative sort of perspective a $10 loss is not that bad at product launch. A little cost reduction over time, the sale of a book or two, the project could turn profitable in the not so distant future.
Not my neck of the woods, I'm in California. I'm not defending Texas, I'm just correcting uninformed politically biased statements. Apologies if you find this offensive.
Apple is the largest tech company followed by IBM and Microsoft, if measured by how much the stock market thinks each company is valued at. It is a completely meaningless metric that does not say anything about either company. The stock market is detached from the real world and how well a company's stock is doing is not proportional to how well that company is doing.
Stock prices are not meaningless, they are simply misunderstood and misused. They are not a measurement of how a company is currently doing, they are an estimate of how a company will be doing in the future. The current state is just one of several variables that goes into that estimate. Regrettably when an estimate reflects a relatively large change in either direction, good or bad, speculators pile on and inflate or deflate that price. Apple is far more vulnerable to such speculation than IBM. As suggested by their respective beta's, 0.7 for IBM and 1.3 for Apple.
... You don't see anything meaningful or reflective of the real world in these numbers?
While far from perfect stock prices are meaningful in a normalized form like the P/E ratio. Apple at a P/E of 15, IBM at 14, Microsoft at 9, HP at 5,
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but for current health I like metrics based upon cash flows. A little more difficult to engineer than EBITDA.
Can we realistically hope to achieve better efficiency in storing energy in carbon based structures than with the technique that nature provides us?
Yes. Plants did not evolve in order to capture carbon, that is just a side effect of the other things they did evolve for.
That doesn't seem like enough. What will you do when those two characters are killed brutally and unexpectedly?
This happens all the time in video games, revert to a saved game. :-)
Yes I get the reference to the books which are atypical in that the casualty rate of main characters is quite high.
No offense to Texans; really meant Texan politicians.
FWIW the state government is involved. I'd wager there are quite a few texas politicians that are all for developing new in-state energy sources, state infrastructure, products to export to other states, etc.