If you did chemistry at highschool surely you did the gold fish in liquid nitrogen and then done the table spoon of dancing liquid nitrogen on your hand?
Like I get that this would be kind "geeky / cool" in MAD magazine or FHM.... But seriously I kinda thought slashdot played to a higher educated audience....
My favourite ones are ones that go along the lines of. "My email is all gobbledy gook, can you fix it" "Ok, forward the email to it@blah.com and I will have a look" "How do I forward an email?" "Push the button that says forward and has an arrow pointing right. It is on the right hand side of your email about half way up" "No it's not" "Ok. Can you see a menu up the top marked message" "No - where would that be" "If you start at the top left corner you will see File, then Edit, View, and finally Message" "Oooo the forward button has appeared! It wasn't there before!"
Understood and sorry that you are having problems. I have just been lucky then but my experience with commodity hardware has always been flawless. The exceptions have always been in random peripherals such as USB 3g modems.
Yes it is. But only because it is a brand that has a limited number of choices and the brand is huge to make up for it. It is also something which is essentially a closed platform that is not intended to have another OS installed upon it. Though it is X86 and windows may work on it, it is a little like saying Android won't work on an iPhone. There is no incentive for the manufacturer of the hardware to support anything other than OSX. You would be running the same risk buying a surface.
That is a mac book right? I've never had a system where the wifi hasn't worked out of the box, nor the bluetooth. As for the graphics processors I don't know. I've run SLI Nvidia fine.
Reply to myself - Buy this - Gigabyte G1-SNIPER-M5 - it is the most stupidly over the top motherboard (it even has green bits) with all the latest fandangly bits and it works out of the box with linux.
Pick up random relatively recent motherboard. Plug random pin compatible CPU in. Plug in random crap ram that fits. Wow it works with Linux. I haven't had a machine in YEARS that had incompatibility with a modern distro. I've had to screw around with a FreeNAS machine to get a crap highpoint controller card working but that is about it.
Agreed WTF? All my machines are Gigabyte / AMD or Gigabyte Intel. I have absolutely no problems running linux on any other them. I also have a SteamOS test box just because I could.
My experience with Linux in general is it will "just work". And worst case scenario is turning off UEFI which if you can't do you shouldn't be putting a machine together anyway.
Further to this. If we do see self driving vehicles any time soon I would have thought that would have been infinitely preferable to drones. Some kind of system that gets you to meet the truck - calling or texting minutes before arrival. A bay that only has your parcel in it.
A lot of parcels are shipped in standard boxes these days so that shouldn't be too difficult a system to build. It wouldn't replace a driver with odd or bulky parcels of course.
Whether or not the separatist movement was supported by the Russians or not is one thing. What I can absolutely tell you is there is no desire to go to war with Europe. Putin may be aggressive, but each move is carefully thought out. And no matter what you think at the moment he has been right every time. NATO is not willing to deploy forces to support The Ukraine, so he can do as he pleases there.
However as soon as there is conflict with a NATO member directly the shit would royally hit the fan. And Putin knows this. It would draw in all the major powers into a war almost instantly. NATO treaties would be triggered and we would be looking at a MAD situation. There is more chance of Russia directly invading Alaska.
It is more than a little bit more complicated then that and I would also suggest that the US where anything but very quick when it came to the break up of Yugoslavia.
Firstly as a general rule the existing countries are very very slow to recognise a break-away province as a country in its own right. This can be seen with the Basque in Spain for example. Even Catalan, an autonomous region in Spain is extremely unlikely to become a country in its own right despite being perhaps the most capable. As a whole the status quo holds.
Add into that the fact that countries like Ukraine were meant to be buffer states. States that didn't hold too closely to the west but weren't part of Russia to give Russia a sense of security. Historically Russia has seen pressure from two major geopolitical areas, Europe and China. It has become a relatively paranoid country.
When the coup occurred in Kiev it shifted the Ukraine heavily westward. Talks of become members of NATO were even brought up. To Russia this is seen as a huge threat (whether it is or not is a different argument). The perception is also that the only reason this happened was due to western agitation. As a result there is really no question that Russia began to agitate the heavily Russian parts of Ukraine to split away. It may not quite be the buffer thickness that Ukraine whole was but it is still better than nothing from their perspective.
What we are seeing here is a return to cold war mentality. This dispute is now being split along east / west lines. US good, Russia Bad or vice versa.
Unfortunately I think it is distracting the major powers from what really is posing the biggest threat and that is ISIS in the middle east. We are running the real risk of having a large militant religious state coming into existence in an already politically fragile area. And the worst thing is that Assad if the best option to stop it.
Sorry wasn't meant to be pedantic. Moving to autosteering vehicles is going to happen simply because will be safer (though they may not be currently). We have already shifted a lot of the finer controls to computers anyway and steering is the next step. We trust computerised systems to be better at putting power to the ground, to be better a braking. Auto braking, line sensing, changes to the steering gearing as your speed rises. All of these are in place to fix the unpredictability of meatware. You still have GROSS control but a lot of the fine points have been removed.
I wasn't driving in the city. I was driving in a semi rural area that at night is pretty well unlit. The high beams were on because it was dark and there was no other traffic around.
But in Australia we have a lot of signage in those areas as well. Things like watch out for wildlife signs and speed limit signs. Whenever the highbeams went across those it would dip the headlights, I'm assuming from the reflection.
Also where I live (semi-rural acreage blocks) you have 1 street light every 500m or so. It would assume that these single lights were oncoming cars and dip the head lights. The car was a 2010 E-class so it is only one model old now (new model was released last year). And while I loved that car I found the way it lowered the headlight, motorised pan up & down, hard to get used to and not enough of a bonus to just not go with manual high beam. Unfortunately that car lost a fight with a full size semi so I don't have it anymore, but it saved my family.
I know you said in some places but it really does depend on where you live and the attitude of your parents.
Where I am every kid wants a car or a motorbike as soon as they can. The reason is public transport sucks and the blocks are too large to make walking a viable option.
If I lived somewhere where a car wasn't necessary I would still be pushing my kids HARD to get their license asap. It's the same reason I keep $100 in my wallet even though I always pay with card. You never know when you need it.
And I tell you now the FIRST thing you will do is turn the auto headlights off! I had an E class Mercedes that had the auto dim highbeam and it would get confused by street lights and reflections from signs. It is actually really really disconcerting.
This is neither really news or particularly surprising. The News behemoth went through a restructure recently which pushed all its low performing assets into a different vehicle. Basically Rupert is in love with newspapers and he continues to support them even though the ROI is not there. When he leaves expect the papers to disappear as well.
The Universal Service Principal is hardly a common concept yet there is the capability of other countries to allow competition both at an infrastructure and access level. I think you will also find that there is absolutely no USP for internet access above an abysmally low level.
I'm not even sure how this is relevant. In other countries, they throw acid in the face of women who do not cover their face and execute gays. What do we learn from this? Other countries do things differently and some things may pass as appropriate but it doesn't mean it will here.
And no, I'm not comparing torturing women or killing gays to giving away the internet, I'm saying that their structures are different, their governments are different, so what they do doesn't always line up with ours.
Are you serious? This is the stupidest most arrogant statement I have read in a long time. If you are too myopic to see that things can be learnt from countries outside of the USA then there is no helping you. There are many many things that I look at in the USA and say "I cannot believe they do that, it's barbaric" it doesn't however mean I decide nothing can be learnt from there.
The Universal Service Principal is hardly a common concept yet there is the capability of other countries to allow competition both at an infrastructure and access level. I think you will also find that there is absolutely no USP for internet access above an abysmally low level.
More fundamentally though I do not understand why you feel there should be no competition at a municipal level. A township has no requirement, legally or morally, to support a different township through subsidisation. And that is exactly what you are arguing by saying the cash cows need to exist to fund other areas. If a local government feels that its population is being inadequately served then it actually HAS the moral imperative to fix that if it can. Now if it invests in infrastructure which it then operates itself or sells to a private entity and as a result improves the standards for its constituents it has done EXACTLY what it exists to do.
The fact that there is corruption in any organisation, or that the decision on what to build may not have been your choice is a completely different argument all together.
I also don't really understand the thought process as to how it would be a barrier to infrastructure. I kinda thought a major part of a governments role was to build infrastructure the private sector wasn't. If there is a push for a municipal level rollout then the private sector has failed in that case. Surely the logical thing is for the municipal to roll out the fibre and then, once in place, sell it to the private sector. That way you get your infrastructure, you get a ROI, you get competition for services and government stays out of providing random services.
In principal there is nothing wrong with a PPP (public, private, partnership) structure to build infrastructure. It is a way for a government to get infrastructure built that it otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. But the devil is in the detail. Why would there be a government guarantee of profitability is a big question. Right to toll is a pretty standard option for a long period of time 20 - 50 years. But if you screw up your traffic forecasts or you go over budget on the build well that is your problem, not the Governments. If you want to see a pretty spectacular example of that in Australia have a look at the North South Bypass Tunnel (Clem 7) which went bankrupt 11 months after the tunnel opened because traffic was only 30% of the projected flow.
Also if they are done well the ownership rights should return to the government after a period of time. At that stage the government can decide if they want to sell that asset for a cash injection or remove the toll. Usually they choose to resell the tolling rights but I have seen them remove tolls as well.
Slashdot Mirror
In general auto-playing video is awful. I particularly hate it on news sites. For me it was the biggest reason for noscript.
If you did chemistry at highschool surely you did the gold fish in liquid nitrogen and then done the table spoon of dancing liquid nitrogen on your hand?
Like I get that this would be kind "geeky / cool" in MAD magazine or FHM.... But seriously I kinda thought slashdot played to a higher educated audience....
My favourite ones are ones that go along the lines of.
"My email is all gobbledy gook, can you fix it"
"Ok, forward the email to it@blah.com and I will have a look"
"How do I forward an email?"
"Push the button that says forward and has an arrow pointing right. It is on the right hand side of your email about half way up"
"No it's not"
"Ok. Can you see a menu up the top marked message"
"No - where would that be"
"If you start at the top left corner you will see File, then Edit, View, and finally Message"
"Oooo the forward button has appeared! It wasn't there before!"
Calm. Calm. Deep Breaths....
Understood and sorry that you are having problems. I have just been lucky then but my experience with commodity hardware has always been flawless. The exceptions have always been in random peripherals such as USB 3g modems.
Yes it is. But only because it is a brand that has a limited number of choices and the brand is huge to make up for it. It is also something which is essentially a closed platform that is not intended to have another OS installed upon it. Though it is X86 and windows may work on it, it is a little like saying Android won't work on an iPhone. There is no incentive for the manufacturer of the hardware to support anything other than OSX. You would be running the same risk buying a surface.
That is a mac book right? I've never had a system where the wifi hasn't worked out of the box, nor the bluetooth. As for the graphics processors I don't know. I've run SLI Nvidia fine.
Yes I suppose a new type of letter box. Might be hard in areas with preservation orders or heritage listing but easy everywhere else.
Reply to myself - Buy this - Gigabyte G1-SNIPER-M5 - it is the most stupidly over the top motherboard (it even has green bits) with all the latest fandangly bits and it works out of the box with linux.
Pick up random relatively recent motherboard. Plug random pin compatible CPU in. Plug in random crap ram that fits. Wow it works with Linux. I haven't had a machine in YEARS that had incompatibility with a modern distro. I've had to screw around with a FreeNAS machine to get a crap highpoint controller card working but that is about it.
Agreed WTF? All my machines are Gigabyte / AMD or Gigabyte Intel. I have absolutely no problems running linux on any other them. I also have a SteamOS test box just because I could.
My experience with Linux in general is it will "just work". And worst case scenario is turning off UEFI which if you can't do you shouldn't be putting a machine together anyway.
Further to this. If we do see self driving vehicles any time soon I would have thought that would have been infinitely preferable to drones. Some kind of system that gets you to meet the truck - calling or texting minutes before arrival. A bay that only has your parcel in it.
A lot of parcels are shipped in standard boxes these days so that shouldn't be too difficult a system to build. It wouldn't replace a driver with odd or bulky parcels of course.
Whether or not the separatist movement was supported by the Russians or not is one thing. What I can absolutely tell you is there is no desire to go to war with Europe. Putin may be aggressive, but each move is carefully thought out. And no matter what you think at the moment he has been right every time. NATO is not willing to deploy forces to support The Ukraine, so he can do as he pleases there.
However as soon as there is conflict with a NATO member directly the shit would royally hit the fan. And Putin knows this. It would draw in all the major powers into a war almost instantly. NATO treaties would be triggered and we would be looking at a MAD situation. There is more chance of Russia directly invading Alaska.
Sorry to clarify then - since the advent of the cold war and more modern history.
Italy used to control what was most of the known world for an extensive period. They are now subservient economically to the French and the Germans.
It is more than a little bit more complicated then that and I would also suggest that the US where anything but very quick when it came to the break up of Yugoslavia.
Firstly as a general rule the existing countries are very very slow to recognise a break-away province as a country in its own right. This can be seen with the Basque in Spain for example. Even Catalan, an autonomous region in Spain is extremely unlikely to become a country in its own right despite being perhaps the most capable. As a whole the status quo holds.
Add into that the fact that countries like Ukraine were meant to be buffer states. States that didn't hold too closely to the west but weren't part of Russia to give Russia a sense of security. Historically Russia has seen pressure from two major geopolitical areas, Europe and China. It has become a relatively paranoid country.
When the coup occurred in Kiev it shifted the Ukraine heavily westward. Talks of become members of NATO were even brought up. To Russia this is seen as a huge threat (whether it is or not is a different argument). The perception is also that the only reason this happened was due to western agitation. As a result there is really no question that Russia began to agitate the heavily Russian parts of Ukraine to split away. It may not quite be the buffer thickness that Ukraine whole was but it is still better than nothing from their perspective.
What we are seeing here is a return to cold war mentality. This dispute is now being split along east / west lines. US good, Russia Bad or vice versa.
Unfortunately I think it is distracting the major powers from what really is posing the biggest threat and that is ISIS in the middle east. We are running the real risk of having a large militant religious state coming into existence in an already politically fragile area. And the worst thing is that Assad if the best option to stop it.
Sorry wasn't meant to be pedantic. Moving to autosteering vehicles is going to happen simply because will be safer (though they may not be currently). We have already shifted a lot of the finer controls to computers anyway and steering is the next step. We trust computerised systems to be better at putting power to the ground, to be better a braking. Auto braking, line sensing, changes to the steering gearing as your speed rises. All of these are in place to fix the unpredictability of meatware. You still have GROSS control but a lot of the fine points have been removed.
Traction control? ABS? Auto-stiffening suspension? Electronic fuel injection. Automatic gearboxes.
You are going to have to keep yourself to pretty old vehicles to be in true full control.
I wasn't driving in the city. I was driving in a semi rural area that at night is pretty well unlit. The high beams were on because it was dark and there was no other traffic around.
But in Australia we have a lot of signage in those areas as well. Things like watch out for wildlife signs and speed limit signs. Whenever the highbeams went across those it would dip the headlights, I'm assuming from the reflection.
Also where I live (semi-rural acreage blocks) you have 1 street light every 500m or so. It would assume that these single lights were oncoming cars and dip the head lights. The car was a 2010 E-class so it is only one model old now (new model was released last year). And while I loved that car I found the way it lowered the headlight, motorised pan up & down, hard to get used to and not enough of a bonus to just not go with manual high beam. Unfortunately that car lost a fight with a full size semi so I don't have it anymore, but it saved my family.
I know you said in some places but it really does depend on where you live and the attitude of your parents.
Where I am every kid wants a car or a motorbike as soon as they can. The reason is public transport sucks and the blocks are too large to make walking a viable option.
If I lived somewhere where a car wasn't necessary I would still be pushing my kids HARD to get their license asap. It's the same reason I keep $100 in my wallet even though I always pay with card. You never know when you need it.
And I tell you now the FIRST thing you will do is turn the auto headlights off! I had an E class Mercedes that had the auto dim highbeam and it would get confused by street lights and reflections from signs. It is actually really really disconcerting.
This is neither really news or particularly surprising. The News behemoth went through a restructure recently which pushed all its low performing assets into a different vehicle. Basically Rupert is in love with newspapers and he continues to support them even though the ROI is not there. When he leaves expect the papers to disappear as well.
And I am not in Europe.
I'm not even sure how this is relevant. In other countries, they throw acid in the face of women who do not cover their face and execute gays. What do we learn from this? Other countries do things differently and some things may pass as appropriate but it doesn't mean it will here.
And no, I'm not comparing torturing women or killing gays to giving away the internet, I'm saying that their structures are different, their governments are different, so what they do doesn't always line up with ours.
Are you serious? This is the stupidest most arrogant statement I have read in a long time. If you are too myopic to see that things can be learnt from countries outside of the USA then there is no helping you. There are many many things that I look at in the USA and say "I cannot believe they do that, it's barbaric" it doesn't however mean I decide nothing can be learnt from there.
The Universal Service Principal is hardly a common concept yet there is the capability of other countries to allow competition both at an infrastructure and access level. I think you will also find that there is absolutely no USP for internet access above an abysmally low level.
More fundamentally though I do not understand why you feel there should be no competition at a municipal level. A township has no requirement, legally or morally, to support a different township through subsidisation. And that is exactly what you are arguing by saying the cash cows need to exist to fund other areas. If a local government feels that its population is being inadequately served then it actually HAS the moral imperative to fix that if it can. Now if it invests in infrastructure which it then operates itself or sells to a private entity and as a result improves the standards for its constituents it has done EXACTLY what it exists to do.
The fact that there is corruption in any organisation, or that the decision on what to build may not have been your choice is a completely different argument all together.
I also don't really understand the thought process as to how it would be a barrier to infrastructure. I kinda thought a major part of a governments role was to build infrastructure the private sector wasn't. If there is a push for a municipal level rollout then the private sector has failed in that case. Surely the logical thing is for the municipal to roll out the fibre and then, once in place, sell it to the private sector. That way you get your infrastructure, you get a ROI, you get competition for services and government stays out of providing random services.
In principal there is nothing wrong with a PPP (public, private, partnership) structure to build infrastructure. It is a way for a government to get infrastructure built that it otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. But the devil is in the detail. Why would there be a government guarantee of profitability is a big question. Right to toll is a pretty standard option for a long period of time 20 - 50 years. But if you screw up your traffic forecasts or you go over budget on the build well that is your problem, not the Governments. If you want to see a pretty spectacular example of that in Australia have a look at the North South Bypass Tunnel (Clem 7) which went bankrupt 11 months after the tunnel opened because traffic was only 30% of the projected flow.
Also if they are done well the ownership rights should return to the government after a period of time. At that stage the government can decide if they want to sell that asset for a cash injection or remove the toll. Usually they choose to resell the tolling rights but I have seen them remove tolls as well.