The HTML 5 spec does not dictate that H.264 video be used for the tag. In fact, the W3C state that web browsers are free to implement whatever video codecs they choose, and actually recommend they support a free and open codec.
Whilst I share your concern on the use of H.264 with regard to free and open access to all, this has nothing to do with HTML 5 in the slightest. The codec issue has been with us for years, regardless of platform or delivery method. Your rant should be directed at browser and web developers instead.
I'd go as far to say HTML5 is pretty much the only hope you have for a free and open codec to become widely adopted, in that it does not discriminate between formats. Only web developers (the encoders) and web browsers (the decoders) do that, so we should go bitch at them.
I've been interested in all things 'space' since I was a young kid and consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about the universe, galaxies, star systems, etc, but I still get blown away when thinking about the scale of things some times.
One of the main things I try to put across to people when I talk about space, is just how big it is. Sometimes people can't get their head around the numbers, which is quite understandable seeing as we typically don't have much experience dealing with these kind of measurements, so if I have the chance I will point them to the following links containing fantastic visualisations of such scales. They cover the very big and the very small equally well I think, and are simple and engaging enough for kids to follow too.
Powers of Ten - very interesting short video commissioned by IBM back in 1968.
The Scale of The Universe - interactive flash applet that allows you to zoom in and out of the universe (an updated version of one done a year or two back by the same authors).
Relative size of stars and planets - I have no idea who originally made this set of images but they have propogated around the web over the years and this just happens to be first link to it I found in Google results.
If there's one thing in the second and third links that I think will surprise a lot of people, it's how insanely large the biggest stars are compared to our Sun (in diameter, not necessarily in mass).
I've read Slashdot for a few years now, and every once in a while I see articles posted that directly or indirectly refer to Christianity. And every single time, it ends up being a sounding board for the Slashdot "community" to boast about how proudly atheistic they are and criticize the few Christians Slashdotters that give their point of view.
Like you, I've read Slashdot for many years and I agree with you that there is a fair amount of criticism against religion within these types of articles. However, as the rest of my post hopefully suggests, a fair amount of this criticism is attributable to rational thought and questioning rather than malice (although I'm not denying the latter does crop up).
I'm a devout Christian, and I can't quite fully express how saddened I am to see some of these comments. For someone to mock my faith, a faith that I've seen work miracles in people's lives and help them go from a place of pain and destruction to a place of life and peace, is something that literally makes me shake with sadness.
I do not mock you, and I'm always happy to hear about people who have found peace in their lives, but I do question whether it is the work of God that has helped these people or if it's simply down to having people close to them to help them through the hard times, along with a good dose of time to help things heal. Everyone has endured some pain and suffering during their lifetimes, and most of us get through it eventually, whether or not we are religious. Are you able to provide some more information on the miracles you have witnessed? And by definition of miracle, I mean 'a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is considered to be divine.'
Were the Crusades not very Christian-like at times? You betcha. Modern Christians don't condone many of the acts that were committed "in the name of" Christianity hundreds of years ago. If you see anyone killing someone else in the name of Christ, they're not true Christ-followers. So do NOT lump us all together. It's like blaming the existence of nuclear weapons on every physicist that ever lived. It's not a fair accusation. (I know somebody's going to comment on that statement and bash it somehow - so go right ahead, prove to yourself that you're not reading this comment for your own benefit, but rather just to find ways to knock down a Christian).
I don't think Christians are inherently bad people at all. I also do not think they are inherently good people. At least, no more and no less than people of other faiths, or of atheists. Last time I checked, the percentage of prisoners in US prisons that label themselves as Christian, is very much the same as the percentage of people outside of prison who are Christian. Of all my friends, a few of whom are Christian, we all share the same general morals and by Christian view, have also committed similar 'sins'. From my experience, Christians, as individuals, are on par with anyone else in terms of how 'good' they are. Christianity as an organisation, however, has and still does indulge in bad behaviour that can very fairly be criticised. The Catholic stance on use of condoms has some extremely unfortunate repercussions for the health of many third world citizens for example.
Secondly, some of you have made comments about how the Bible doesn't apply to modern day or that it's too cryptic for us (or even its original authors) to understand. Is this difficult to understand? "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." (Matthew 6:34) Does this next verse have no applicability to the present day?
Or, "Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need." (Ephesians 4:28)
Or just read the book of Proverbs (which is even in the Old Testament
I don't think you've grasped what type of markets this will be selling to, namely, nerds and education. Everyone I know who's interested in this and counting down the days to availability, knows what it is, what it's generally capable of and more importantly, have a thousand and one potential uses for it already. The types of people buying these are the types of people who will put them to good use, or at least have a lot of fun playing with them.
A cheap as chips Linux box, with HDMI, audio, USB, networking, SD card reader, GPIO, small enough to fit almost anywhere and consuming just a few watts under full load. Isn't this nerd heaven for Slashdot readers?
So, just for future reference, I'll also put my "told you so" stake in the ground here and predict that in just a few months there will be many thousands of happy customers and a thriving community of developers, modders and hobbyists.
I'm not completely sold on how far reaching these will go within the education system, but I'm sure we'll be reading about some pretty cool Raspberry Pi projects by school kids in the not too far distant future too.
I think it's more to do with what suited our genes chances of reproducing. The average lifespan of a human (and any organism) is a result of evolution's fine tuning. If we live for too long, we ultimately compete for resources that our offspring (carriers of our genes) require to survive. If we don't live for long enough, we either can't reproduce at all or don't have the maturity / experience to nurture our young. It made sense that it's in our genes interest for us to be mortal.
It's all about the genes, even nowadays with our increasing life expectancy (compared to a relatively stable 30s for many thousands of years). Technology, science, healthcare, knowledge - it all helps us to increase our lifespan somewhat, but it's our genes that provide the building blocks for us to do that and to have the capacity to learn.
I fully recommend anyone read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It really put a few things into perspective for me.
Main reason I find most Linux distros run better on older hardware compared to Windows, is driver support. Linux driver support is like wine, in that it generally gets better with age (apart from the occasional 'corked' bottle) and it's rare I have any issues whatsoever nowadays putting Linux on any PC made in the last several years or so. I certainly can't say the same thing about Windows - lack of drivers for older devices can rule out Win7, and if it's an older PC but does have SATA, it makes XP arkward to install too (IIRC).
I have put Linux distros on many a machine over the years though, and feel I can honestly say it gets more out of an older machine than Windows does. Even with KDE4.
Problem w/ Linux is that no company has figured out a way to make money out of GPL software
Apart from that not actually being true, at least not universally, I don't think it's a problem at all. Why does a Linux distribution or any other piece of GPL software need to make money? Ok, yes, most distributions or big GPL projects do need funding of some sort, but they don't have to be a for-profit company to be of use or to be successful. The ones that do decide to go the commercial route are suddenly in the same boat as an other company - if you can't sell a service or product, you're dead. Many do well, many don't.
One of the things I love about GPL (and other FOSS) is that if the software is truly useful to enough people, it will live on, regardless of whether any parent company folds or acts like a dick (LibreOffice springs to mind).
No offence, but is there any good reason to use domain name shorteners when posting links in forums / blogs? Surely it's easier and quicker to just copy and paste the original url, which actually has the additional benefit of giving us a clue as to where it leads to? Or maybe you're interested in the click stats Goo.gl provides?
Having said that, I can see from your/. comments history that you're not an idiot so I did follow the link, which for anyone else interested, resolves to http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Ball/.
At least here in the UK, the main PC / electronics retailers already have their own SKUs for essentially the same product available elsewhere. Only last week when browsing netbooks at my local Comet / PC World / Currys, I found several models of interest that I could find no information online for. I got chatting to one of the sales assistants about this and he admitted the main stores all do this now to combat customers going elsewhere. He also said it's very useful for them avoiding having to fulfill their price match guarantees because although the product may be identical elsewhere, it's a different SKU on their books.
It may have some uses but I just don't see it being that big a deal aside from some casual gaming, although even that makes more sense on a console in front of the TV.
It's the same with touch screens on PCs; it's just not comfortable to sit in front of a keyboard and hold your arms up to perform gestures on screen (or in the air) when you can just rest your arm on your desk and use a mouse.
The voice recognition aspects of Kinect could have lots of uses though, if it's far better than alternative systems we already have available to us.
Most consumers use the version of Windows that came with their PC so the vast majority of buyers of new PCs will be using Windows 8. And seeing as Windows 7 appears to have gone down rather well with most Windows users, I think Windows 8 probably will too. It's not drastically different on the outside compared to Windows 7 except for the inclusion of Metro UI, which today's average smartphone / tablet type user might actually like.
I would guess that customers receiving faulty goods are more likely to post feedback than the customers who were happy with their purchase.
From my own experience, if I'm not happy with a purchase, I generally want to have a good moan about the supplier / manufacturer and let everyone else know about it too. On the flip side, when I am perfectly happy with my purchase, I sometimes leave good feedback but generally am too engrossed playing with my new toy to bother doing so.:)
I couldn't agree more. KDE 4 is solid, full featured and for me at least, very quick. It's also very pretty if you're into that sort of thing.
I understand people having their own preferences but if your view of KDE 4.x was jaded by the first few releases, please look again and give it some serious playtime. I don't miss KDE 3.x any more and Gnome feels very basic in comparison. It's great!
I'm a long time KDE user but had forgotten about the way the old KPager displayed the window contents. It is strange they don't at least have that as an option now, although personally I do find the icon display much quicker to recognise apps by. Seems such a minor thing to prevent someone from upgrading though!
Is that from a DVD install? I usually install from their CD ISOs which come with most things I need out of the box. After downloading updates and a few extras, my VM of Kubuntu 11.10 is just over 3GB in size.
No, they are not a threat to consoles or other handheld gaming devices. At least not yet anyway. They may steal a little market share from handheld gaming devices, but without decent hardware d-pads and other buttons for fire, jump, etc, laid out in a useable fashion for gaming, you can pretty much rule out any serious gaming. And yes, I now most Android phones have a d-pad of some sort, but they're next to useless for anything like a FPS.
Some decisions need to be made (or at least influenced) by experts in whatever field is relevant to the law in question.
For example, If a random sample of the general public was asked to vote on what to do about aspects of the economic crisis at a time when a not insignificant percentage of the sample may happen to be suffering unemployment, the outcome could be heavily biased to 'fix' the problem with a short term goal to create jobs fast as possible, possibly at the detriment to a longer term solution that would really be better for all in the long run.
I'm not saying we shouldn't look at involving the general public more (I'm actually all for it), but just that on it's own it risks missing the bigger picture that only experts may be fully aware of. It works both ways though, experts can be too involved with details and miss the point that government is meant to serve the people.
I'd love to see the general population much more involved in policy and decision making overall, with experts (not necessarily government figures) putting the various cases to us for us to decide on. It would probably need to be weighted to strike a balance between public opinion and expert opinion but I can't help but think it would be better overall.
I live in a supposedly democratic country (UK) but what can I actually vote on? Red, blue or yellow every few years and not much else. There have only ever been two referendums here in the UK, the first in 1975 regarding EU membership, the second in 2011 regarding the electoral system. Yes, I know I can talk to my local government 'representative' but in my experience that is next to useless in practice, especially if it concerns something my representative has no personal interest in following.
The sad fact is that the only people with much say these days is big business. And big business gets big from hunting down avenues of profit, not for the good of mankind.
If a domain cannot be found, the service redirects users to a search page with search results and advertising unless the user has paid for an upgraded service. Users can switch this off via the OpenDNS Control Panel, or specify another page to use for missing domains. This behavior is similar to that of many large ISPs who also redirect failed requests to their own servers containing advertising.
OpenDNS started resolving requests to Google.com. Some of the traffic is handled by OpenDNS typo-correcting service which corrects mistyped addresses and redirects keyword addresses to OpenDNS's search page, while the rest is transparently passed through to the intended recipient.
Also, a user's search request from the address bar of a browser that is configured to use the Google search engine (with a certain parameter configured) may be covertly redirected to a server owned by OpenDNS (which is within the OpenDNS Terms of Service).[24] Users can disable this behavior by logging in to their OpenDNS account and unchecking "OpenDNS proxy" option.
I'm sure they're no worse than other DNS providers and at least they do appear to have options to opt-out of the above behaviour, but if your DNS provider is fooling with your encrypted DNS requests, what's the point?
And on top of that, I suspect email usage will start decreasing in the not too distant future, or that it already has. Most people I know use social networks, IM, Dropbox, etc, for file transfers these days.
I think this is the best idea. I can see the beneifts of a binary, hashed log but I also think it would be a step backwards to lose the plain text log most of us probably access frequently and fluently using standard GNU tools and the like.
The sylog daemon should always output plain text logs, no matter what. It's dead simple to access and manipulate, especially when time is of the essence. A config option (probably on by default) would also enable writing to a hashed, binary format. For many uses we can carry on reading the plain text event log as we always have. For the times we need to ensure integrity of the log events, we can access the hashed version with some additional tools, or do something like a 'chklog' to validate the plain text log or snippet we're reading against the hashed version.
Downside is some increased IO but other than that, seems a win-win solution?
Slashdot Mirror
The HTML 5 spec does not dictate that H.264 video be used for the tag. In fact, the W3C state that web browsers are free to implement whatever video codecs they choose, and actually recommend they support a free and open codec.
Whilst I share your concern on the use of H.264 with regard to free and open access to all, this has nothing to do with HTML 5 in the slightest. The codec issue has been with us for years, regardless of platform or delivery method. Your rant should be directed at browser and web developers instead.
I'd go as far to say HTML5 is pretty much the only hope you have for a free and open codec to become widely adopted, in that it does not discriminate between formats. Only web developers (the encoders) and web browsers (the decoders) do that, so we should go bitch at them.
I've been interested in all things 'space' since I was a young kid and consider myself reasonably knowledgeable about the universe, galaxies, star systems, etc, but I still get blown away when thinking about the scale of things some times.
One of the main things I try to put across to people when I talk about space, is just how big it is. Sometimes people can't get their head around the numbers, which is quite understandable seeing as we typically don't have much experience dealing with these kind of measurements, so if I have the chance I will point them to the following links containing fantastic visualisations of such scales. They cover the very big and the very small equally well I think, and are simple and engaging enough for kids to follow too.
Powers of Ten - very interesting short video commissioned by IBM back in 1968.
The Scale of The Universe - interactive flash applet that allows you to zoom in and out of the universe (an updated version of one done a year or two back by the same authors).
Relative size of stars and planets - I have no idea who originally made this set of images but they have propogated around the web over the years and this just happens to be first link to it I found in Google results.
If there's one thing in the second and third links that I think will surprise a lot of people, it's how insanely large the biggest stars are compared to our Sun (in diameter, not necessarily in mass).
I've read Slashdot for a few years now, and every once in a while I see articles posted that directly or indirectly refer to Christianity. And every single time, it ends up being a sounding board for the Slashdot "community" to boast about how proudly atheistic they are and criticize the few Christians Slashdotters that give their point of view.
Like you, I've read Slashdot for many years and I agree with you that there is a fair amount of criticism against religion within these types of articles. However, as the rest of my post hopefully suggests, a fair amount of this criticism is attributable to rational thought and questioning rather than malice (although I'm not denying the latter does crop up).
I'm a devout Christian, and I can't quite fully express how saddened I am to see some of these comments. For someone to mock my faith, a faith that I've seen work miracles in people's lives and help them go from a place of pain and destruction to a place of life and peace, is something that literally makes me shake with sadness.
I do not mock you, and I'm always happy to hear about people who have found peace in their lives, but I do question whether it is the work of God that has helped these people or if it's simply down to having people close to them to help them through the hard times, along with a good dose of time to help things heal. Everyone has endured some pain and suffering during their lifetimes, and most of us get through it eventually, whether or not we are religious. Are you able to provide some more information on the miracles you have witnessed? And by definition of miracle, I mean 'a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is considered to be divine.'
Were the Crusades not very Christian-like at times? You betcha. Modern Christians don't condone many of the acts that were committed "in the name of" Christianity hundreds of years ago. If you see anyone killing someone else in the name of Christ, they're not true Christ-followers. So do NOT lump us all together. It's like blaming the existence of nuclear weapons on every physicist that ever lived. It's not a fair accusation. (I know somebody's going to comment on that statement and bash it somehow - so go right ahead, prove to yourself that you're not reading this comment for your own benefit, but rather just to find ways to knock down a Christian).
I don't think Christians are inherently bad people at all. I also do not think they are inherently good people. At least, no more and no less than people of other faiths, or of atheists. Last time I checked, the percentage of prisoners in US prisons that label themselves as Christian, is very much the same as the percentage of people outside of prison who are Christian. Of all my friends, a few of whom are Christian, we all share the same general morals and by Christian view, have also committed similar 'sins'. From my experience, Christians, as individuals, are on par with anyone else in terms of how 'good' they are. Christianity as an organisation, however, has and still does indulge in bad behaviour that can very fairly be criticised. The Catholic stance on use of condoms has some extremely unfortunate repercussions for the health of many third world citizens for example.
Secondly, some of you have made comments about how the Bible doesn't apply to modern day or that it's too cryptic for us (or even its original authors) to understand. Is this difficult to understand? "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." (Matthew 6:34) Does this next verse have no applicability to the present day?
Or, "Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need." (Ephesians 4:28)
Or just read the book of Proverbs (which is even in the Old Testament
I don't think you've grasped what type of markets this will be selling to, namely, nerds and education. Everyone I know who's interested in this and counting down the days to availability, knows what it is, what it's generally capable of and more importantly, have a thousand and one potential uses for it already. The types of people buying these are the types of people who will put them to good use, or at least have a lot of fun playing with them.
A cheap as chips Linux box, with HDMI, audio, USB, networking, SD card reader, GPIO, small enough to fit almost anywhere and consuming just a few watts under full load. Isn't this nerd heaven for Slashdot readers?
So, just for future reference, I'll also put my "told you so" stake in the ground here and predict that in just a few months there will be many thousands of happy customers and a thriving community of developers, modders and hobbyists.
I'm not completely sold on how far reaching these will go within the education system, but I'm sure we'll be reading about some pretty cool Raspberry Pi projects by school kids in the not too far distant future too.
Why do these organisms have longer lives than us?
Fewer moving parts?
I think it's more to do with what suited our genes chances of reproducing. The average lifespan of a human (and any organism) is a result of evolution's fine tuning. If we live for too long, we ultimately compete for resources that our offspring (carriers of our genes) require to survive. If we don't live for long enough, we either can't reproduce at all or don't have the maturity / experience to nurture our young. It made sense that it's in our genes interest for us to be mortal.
It's all about the genes, even nowadays with our increasing life expectancy (compared to a relatively stable 30s for many thousands of years). Technology, science, healthcare, knowledge - it all helps us to increase our lifespan somewhat, but it's our genes that provide the building blocks for us to do that and to have the capacity to learn.
I fully recommend anyone read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It really put a few things into perspective for me.
Main reason I find most Linux distros run better on older hardware compared to Windows, is driver support. Linux driver support is like wine, in that it generally gets better with age (apart from the occasional 'corked' bottle) and it's rare I have any issues whatsoever nowadays putting Linux on any PC made in the last several years or so. I certainly can't say the same thing about Windows - lack of drivers for older devices can rule out Win7, and if it's an older PC but does have SATA, it makes XP arkward to install too (IIRC).
I have put Linux distros on many a machine over the years though, and feel I can honestly say it gets more out of an older machine than Windows does. Even with KDE4.
Problem w/ Linux is that no company has figured out a way to make money out of GPL software
Apart from that not actually being true, at least not universally, I don't think it's a problem at all. Why does a Linux distribution or any other piece of GPL software need to make money? Ok, yes, most distributions or big GPL projects do need funding of some sort, but they don't have to be a for-profit company to be of use or to be successful. The ones that do decide to go the commercial route are suddenly in the same boat as an other company - if you can't sell a service or product, you're dead. Many do well, many don't.
One of the things I love about GPL (and other FOSS) is that if the software is truly useful to enough people, it will live on, regardless of whether any parent company folds or acts like a dick (LibreOffice springs to mind).
No offence, but is there any good reason to use domain name shorteners when posting links in forums / blogs? Surely it's easier and quicker to just copy and paste the original url, which actually has the additional benefit of giving us a clue as to where it leads to? Or maybe you're interested in the click stats Goo.gl provides?
/. comments history that you're not an idiot so I did follow the link, which for anyone else interested, resolves to http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Ball/.
Having said that, I can see from your
At least here in the UK, the main PC / electronics retailers already have their own SKUs for essentially the same product available elsewhere. Only last week when browsing netbooks at my local Comet / PC World / Currys, I found several models of interest that I could find no information online for. I got chatting to one of the sales assistants about this and he admitted the main stores all do this now to combat customers going elsewhere. He also said it's very useful for them avoiding having to fulfill their price match guarantees because although the product may be identical elsewhere, it's a different SKU on their books.
It may have some uses but I just don't see it being that big a deal aside from some casual gaming, although even that makes more sense on a console in front of the TV.
It's the same with touch screens on PCs; it's just not comfortable to sit in front of a keyboard and hold your arms up to perform gestures on screen (or in the air) when you can just rest your arm on your desk and use a mouse.
The voice recognition aspects of Kinect could have lots of uses though, if it's far better than alternative systems we already have available to us.
Most consumers use the version of Windows that came with their PC so the vast majority of buyers of new PCs will be using Windows 8. And seeing as Windows 7 appears to have gone down rather well with most Windows users, I think Windows 8 probably will too. It's not drastically different on the outside compared to Windows 7 except for the inclusion of Metro UI, which today's average smartphone / tablet type user might actually like.
I would guess that customers receiving faulty goods are more likely to post feedback than the customers who were happy with their purchase.
:)
From my own experience, if I'm not happy with a purchase, I generally want to have a good moan about the supplier / manufacturer and let everyone else know about it too. On the flip side, when I am perfectly happy with my purchase, I sometimes leave good feedback but generally am too engrossed playing with my new toy to bother doing so.
Fair enough. :)
I wish I had spare time to work on KPager now, to add the older behaviour back in!
I couldn't agree more. KDE 4 is solid, full featured and for me at least, very quick. It's also very pretty if you're into that sort of thing.
I understand people having their own preferences but if your view of KDE 4.x was jaded by the first few releases, please look again and give it some serious playtime. I don't miss KDE 3.x any more and Gnome feels very basic in comparison. It's great!
I'm a long time KDE user but had forgotten about the way the old KPager displayed the window contents. It is strange they don't at least have that as an option now, although personally I do find the icon display much quicker to recognise apps by. Seems such a minor thing to prevent someone from upgrading though!
Is that from a DVD install? I usually install from their CD ISOs which come with most things I need out of the box. After downloading updates and a few extras, my VM of Kubuntu 11.10 is just over 3GB in size.
No, they are not a threat to consoles or other handheld gaming devices. At least not yet anyway. They may steal a little market share from handheld gaming devices, but without decent hardware d-pads and other buttons for fire, jump, etc, laid out in a useable fashion for gaming, you can pretty much rule out any serious gaming. And yes, I now most Android phones have a d-pad of some sort, but they're next to useless for anything like a FPS.
Not that I have any problem with it but Canonical do distribute some proprietary software, albeit not installed by default. Off the top of my head:-
Oracle Java, Adobe Flash, nVidia and AMD graphics drivers. Probably lots more too in the restricted and multiverse repositories.
Maybe initial analysis could be done on site and data dumped to storage media to be couriered elsewhere every few days?
Anything with higher priority could be transmitted by satellite uplink, presuming the cost of such bandwidth is not prohibitive.
I'd never heard about OWASP before but I found the Top Ten you refer to well worth taking in.
Direct link here for anyone interested: OWASP Top 10 Application Security Risks
Some decisions need to be made (or at least influenced) by experts in whatever field is relevant to the law in question.
For example, If a random sample of the general public was asked to vote on what to do about aspects of the economic crisis at a time when a not insignificant percentage of the sample may happen to be suffering unemployment, the outcome could be heavily biased to 'fix' the problem with a short term goal to create jobs fast as possible, possibly at the detriment to a longer term solution that would really be better for all in the long run.
I'm not saying we shouldn't look at involving the general public more (I'm actually all for it), but just that on it's own it risks missing the bigger picture that only experts may be fully aware of. It works both ways though, experts can be too involved with details and miss the point that government is meant to serve the people.
I'd love to see the general population much more involved in policy and decision making overall, with experts (not necessarily government figures) putting the various cases to us for us to decide on. It would probably need to be weighted to strike a balance between public opinion and expert opinion but I can't help but think it would be better overall.
I live in a supposedly democratic country (UK) but what can I actually vote on? Red, blue or yellow every few years and not much else. There have only ever been two referendums here in the UK, the first in 1975 regarding EU membership, the second in 2011 regarding the electoral system. Yes, I know I can talk to my local government 'representative' but in my experience that is next to useless in practice, especially if it concerns something my representative has no personal interest in following.
The sad fact is that the only people with much say these days is big business. And big business gets big from hunting down avenues of profit, not for the good of mankind.
I'm sure they're no worse than other DNS providers and at least they do appear to have options to opt-out of the above behaviour, but if your DNS provider is fooling with your encrypted DNS requests, what's the point?
And on top of that, I suspect email usage will start decreasing in the not too distant future, or that it already has. Most people I know use social networks, IM, Dropbox, etc, for file transfers these days.
I think this is the best idea. I can see the beneifts of a binary, hashed log but I also think it would be a step backwards to lose the plain text log most of us probably access frequently and fluently using standard GNU tools and the like.
The sylog daemon should always output plain text logs, no matter what. It's dead simple to access and manipulate, especially when time is of the essence. A config option (probably on by default) would also enable writing to a hashed, binary format. For many uses we can carry on reading the plain text event log as we always have. For the times we need to ensure integrity of the log events, we can access the hashed version with some additional tools, or do something like a 'chklog' to validate the plain text log or snippet we're reading against the hashed version.
Downside is some increased IO but other than that, seems a win-win solution?
FTA: "it cannot be turned off without rooting the phone and replacing the operating system"
So even more reason to flash your droid with CyanogenMod or custom ROM of your choice.