Linux the kernel is an astonishing success, no doubt about that. But the rest of the FLOSS community? To use a little FSF notation Android is as much GNU/Linux as BSD is OS X. Everything but the kernel is rewritten from scratch and doesn't contain one bit of GPL or LGPL code, it's all Apache 2.0 licensed. Many people have Android phones that can't be rooted and if you do, you lose access to a lot of services that demand that it isn't. If Google rolled out the Android desktop it'd be a huge victory to open source, but for the free desktop? That your OEM might give you root, and even if they feel like it a lot of apps will stop working. The kernel is only tolerated because it's GPLv2 so it doesn't prevent the lock down and with the userspace separation it is isolated and doesn't affect the license of anything else. It's in a quarantine zone in a non-*GPL world.
I don't think you quite got it, as I understand it they have more error states internally than they do in the kernel API. The patch was designed to pass an internal error state that should have been replaced by the one in the kernel API before being returned but was accidentally pushed to userspace as well and the bug in the compliance tool meant they didn't notice. So far nothing majorly wrong, a poor patch and a testing tool with less than 100% coverage which caused a nasty bug to reach the first RC, a little sloppy but nothing that obviously should have been caught. The reason Linus gets so fired up is because it just doesn't matter what pulseaudio/tumbleweed is doing, there's zillions of applications out there who may be doing something crazy. If you broke one application you probably broke many more and it just doesn't matter, it's the kernel's fault.
It's been a cornerstone of Linux for as long as I can remember, you can always upgrade your kernel and all your applications will continue to work, period. New APIs are of course added but old userspace APIs are forever. It just doesn't matter how crazy the userspace code is, you don't break it anyway and even if they fixed their crazy code it doesn't solve the problem which is that there'd be two kernels with different behavior So even if he was right, he's still wrong.
Meh, you have many people who'd block ads no matter how nice they were, after all they're interrupting or distracting you from what you're trying to do and trying to sell you something you didn't ask for and that's taking up your bandwidth and your screen real estate and minutes of your life. Asking how many would like to be without ads is like asking how many would like to shop without paying. No, I'm not talking about breaking the law but if you got the choice. But if you find the site has too much ads, do people boycott the site? No, they try finding ways to use the site without the ads. Now don't pretend like I said it was a legal contract or the law or anything, but the social contract is to exchange content for ad views. And it's the consumers pulling a "I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further" moment.
However, I'm still having trouble seeing where this all fits in to be anti "Web 2.0". If anything sites like Facebook have taken things in the opposite direction, making it more difficult to be anonymous (or at the very least, encourage the majority of people to simply use their actual identity online). At the end of the day there isn't any "real" ramification to these "poison seeds" of anonymity.
Agreed, if anything the anonymous voice is being shut out from more and more of the public debate because sites increasingly use debate systems with a real name policy. You could of course register a fake Facebook account but that only lasts until someone cares to report it as possibly fake. People's perception of what the public opinion is, is now formed more and more on places like Facebook and less and less on places like slashdot where nicks are the norm. Sure it cuts down on the spam and trolling and generally obnoxious behavior but it also cuts down on the truth, but is presented as just as good or even better than the real thing.
Not "FU..! How DARE they put this crap on the device I dump on my five year old without even taking half a look at it first to see if it's ok for him".
If it comes neatly wrapped in a box from the store, I'm not going to unpack it, fiddle around with it for 30 seconds then pack it back in so my kid can pack it out again a bit later or if I did I'd probably just check that it powers up and isn't DOA before putting it back in the box. It's a 3DS, not a mystery box so of course it should be ok. If it had been bought second hand then sure, but not at the store. That some people here seem to think that's something you're "supposed to do" is the real WTF to me, do you also have a hazmat team sweep the playground before you let the kids play there? Because you know, there's always a 0.000001% risk an HIV-infected drug addict left a needle there last night and if you did it's totally your fault for not making sure it's safe...
Those are all just numbers you pulled out of thin air. You don't know the average DD order size, the average number of orders placed by a customer, the conversation rate of this ad, or any of the other information you need to determine if this ad is profitable. So just STOP. The people who DO KNOW those numbers -- DD marketing employees -- ran those numbers and determined this ad was worth it. In fact it was SO worth it, that they purchased an ENTIRE YEAR up front.
Neither do they, no really. Maybe they can somewhat say how many will directly go have a coffee after seeing the bill board, but even those aren't really certain unless you try without it as maybe now most people know you're there anyway. But all the other potential halo effects of people maybe thinking about finding a Dunking Donut the next time they want coffee are mostly wild guesses at sales go up and down as things get trendy and less trendy and competition comes and goes and hold sales and habits change from fiscal crisis to boom years and good press and bad press and whatever. Sure they have some more numbers to work with to estimate what an ad campaign meant for their sales but it's a very inaccurate science.
The same is often true for customer satisfaction, yes the company does make a survey and they absolutely care very much what those numbers say but for example one big production outage can destroy any useful data on whether those usability improvements you did actually had any effect at all and by the next survey it's way too late. A lot of the time you simply have to go with the subjective and qualitative measure and say that we think we did the right thing. Sometimes those beliefs are very, very wrong. One example I remember from a class was a car manufacturer that spent lots of money on only getting the finest and most perfect leathers for their leather seats. Turns out the customers were more happy with less perfect seats that showed it was real leather and not blemishless seats that looked almost artificial.
As a good example, many quite reputable companies spent a lot of money to get a Second Life presence to be so "Web 2.0" and yeah... I don't think any of them actually paid off but for a time marketeers thought they'd work - and placebo is almost as good as empirical data in marketing.
He said exactly the opposite. He said: the wiring is important. O_o
No, just reading comprehension fail on your end. The post I replied to by Taco Cowboy clearly argued it wasn't and that it is only a "will" to use your full mind.
The grey matter in between your ears contains similar amount of chemicals as the ones inside the head of those so-called "prodigies".
So if I put your brain in a blender, it should work the same afterwards right? Silly argument.
Unless it is proven that that deceased Indian math genius suffered from some acute type of "savant syndrome", I seriously doubt his brain has any "unique wiring" of any kind.
Perhaps not unique in that you'd see a difference on a brain scanner at the macro level, but I think it's more about being wired right or wrong. Look at people playing chess, the poor players aren't making any less of an effort but they're just overlooking moves or forgetting what paths they have and haven't explored or miscalculating because they don't see the piece is pinned. Your average player has an early botched Pentium and flaky non-ECC RAM, the grandmasters an Xeon with RAS features and ECC RAM. They very rarely think wrong or remember wrong, of course there's also training but I think it's also a lot what you're given from nature's side. It doesn't help if the same number of neurons are firing if in one brain it only leads to noise and nonsense and in the other to answers and solutions.
The "wiped off the map" quote is not correct. It would help your argument if you didn't repeat nonsense.
Here's the exact quote from a senate resolution against President Ahmadinejad:
The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map
Iran has made many other public statements that have been only slightly less blatant over the last decade, that you think it isn't true must mean you have your head stuck waaaaaay deep in the sand.
Yes, Americans do have some serious issues with nudity in non-sexual context but from TFA there's every indication that this was porn or at least erotic images and we don't let kids have that in Europe either. I wouldn't care at all if my kid got a half second nipple flash during the Superbowl, for all I care we could go to a nude beach but I would get pretty pissed if I bought a 3DS for my kid and it had porn on it. As for violence, there's degrees to everything - I don't remember exactly how old I was when we first started pointing plastic guns and saying "bang bang you're dead" but I wasn't that old yet it wasn't exactly like seeing Saving Private Ryan. I wouldn't worry one bit if my kid was laughing his ass off at the Road Runner tricking Wile E. Coyote to fall down a cliff, there will come a time and place where it's natural to talk about the difference between play violence and reality.
I'm guessing a good time would be around the first time I find - or hear a wish for some semi-realistic FPS game, if you're old enough to pretend running around shooting people/monsters you're old enough for that talk too. About real people that don't respawn, that don't have magic medikits to fix them, that experience genuine fear and terror at gunpoint, that end up crippled or scarred for life or die bleeding out in the gutter, about widows and orphans, friends and family left behind. But there's a time and place for that talk, just like when your five year old want to play house with a mommy and a daddy it's still not time for the "okay, but remember to use a condom" talk. What next, are you going to point out the electric car track I had wasn't realistic because the car would be totaled and the driver dead if it crashed like that? Reality will get gritty enough in time.
In other words: many commercial enterprises, that are in it for the money and fighting each other in the marketplace, but working together to improve something that's out there in the open, free for all to use. So that what's common to all, is the best it can be, and each vendor can focus its resources on what makes their product different from the rest of the pack. Sigh - how much better life could be if that principle were applied more often...
Before you go bubbling over with the nobility of it all, I'd say its a pretty ruthless business decision based on "near" and "far" competition. All the ARM companies are competing between themselves, but they also know ARM as a whole is competing with Intel and x86 so they're allies in fighting the bigger enemy. The same way RHEL and SLES and Ubuntu LTS and whatnot are competing for server support, but they're also all fighting Microsoft in the grander OS market. It happens very often in business that your competitor is both your friend and your enemy depending on context, often shifting depending on what seems the most immediate and dangerous threat. When cooperation is necessary open source has proven an useful means to that end, but I doubt they care much about the same things you care about. This is all still about trying to improve their bottom line.
That was my idea as well, I saw what an uncle of mine spent on a fancy new smart TV, I was thinking "so... this is like a TV + a $99 AppleTV in one, except it is less flexible and costs way more". Personally I got myself a dumb TV, no 3D, apparently no buzzword-compliance because it was on a huge going-out sale but it's a 60" LCD. For one my fiber company has a smart set top box, I have a PC hooked up and for some reason I thought I could use an AppleTV and I recently got a Wii U that can browse the Internet too so I already have four "smart" devices to hook up, why would I need a 5th one in the TV itself? Personally I'm just hoping 4K can come down from lottery winner to semi-reasonable prices, I'd like both a 4K monitor and a 4K TV, dumb as a brick thank you.
U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: 2012 Congressional Report - Christopher Olver | April 26, 2012....I realize the US trade empire has a vested interest in a friendly outpost in the middle east, but when will Israel be considered strong enough to stop getting what amounts to charity?
Considering that the Arab Spring is getting hijacked by Islamists who have more in common with Iran ("lsrael should be wiped off the map") than the various dictators they replaced, I'm guessing Israel will find itself even more in the middle of hostile territory now. As for when the US will stop backing them up, they're best buddies. When the UN voted 188-3 to condemn the US trade embargo against Cuba, who were the three? The US, Israel and Palau. Even their usual lapdog the UK wouldn't side with US on that one, but Israel would.
I'd divide the current revolution into several stages: 1. The computer revolution - electronics over mechanics 2. The Internet revolution - connecting the world together 3. The mobile revolution - always online, anywhere 4. The bandwidth revolution - zero cost information
I think we're just seeing the tip of the last one, I'm feeling I'm on the verge of it with my 60/60 Mbit line that in the not so distant future fiber connections will be the norm rather than the exception and for all practical purposes people will have all the bandwidth they need. That you won't care if someone is borrowing 100 Mbps on your wireless of your 1 Gbps line. Or if you have 100 Mbps of torrent seeds in the background. Maybe I have just a tiny SSD and rent HDD space at my fiber provider like a SAN, or maybe I have all my stuff in the cloud (well not me, but... people) or whatever. I certainly don't think we've stopped changing yet.
The Peace Prize, the only one awarded from Norway by Nobel's wishes is highly political due to the retards in the committee who think it should be awarded as an incentive to act in its spirit instead of a recognition of actual accomplishment. It's no coincidence that the EU got the prize now as relations between many of the members are heavily strained and not 5 years ago when it was all flowers and sunshine. Unfortunately this has lead to many embarrassing awards when the recipients don't do anything worthy of the prize, or even contrary to it. It has been more than suggested that the recent awards to Obama and EU is ass kissing to further some of their member's international political careers. The committee currently consists only of ex-politicians, lead by a former prime minister. The other Nobel prizes awarded from Sweden are much, much less political.
So, we learned nothing of value except that studies like this have inconclusive results. Oh, and teenagers can experience psychosis before, during and after using drugs.
And if we knew the results of the study up front, we wouldn't have needed to do the study in the first place. As much as some people like to believe this is some sort of conspiracy theory to keep grant money flowing it's completely natural that at times you find that the results are inconclusive, it's only with 20/20 hindsight you can say it was pointless.
It's still far more just to reach the desktop than most of us used to have as total system RAM. Of course comparing it to the DOS era isn't exactly fair but we sure had a full GUI in far less too.
Hmm where have I heard this somewhere before, oh yeah a bit further down on the page where Lockheed was crying that SpaceX couldn't possibly be doing anything this much cheaper and better than them without compromising safety. Sure, if you go look at the crap they deliver to Wal-Mart your idea of Chinese quality might be low but they also do rocket science putting men in space and probes orbiting the moon and I'm pretty sure they do brain surgery too. That they often ignore emissions is not the same as being ignorant of them, unless it's say the Olympics in Beijing where they make a huge temporary clean-up effort. They might be more willing to trample the individual's rights than in other countries but the progress they make is very much real. Real income has more than tripled for over a billion people in the last decade:
GDP per capita measured in purchasing power terms more than tripled from $2,800 in 2002 to a forecast $9,100 in 2012 according to the International Monetary Fund.
If you're paranoid enough to ask those questions, then I'd suggest an air-gapped computer. Anything you want to install on it use a USB stick, so what if it has or installs a backdoor? There's no way to talk to that backdoor anyway. Unless you think somebody is going to create a custom trojan to infect the machine, extract whatever it wants and store it on the USB stick, then upload it to the mothership next time you plug it into an Internet-enabled computer. But if that's a concern you should probably put your computer in a Faraday cage in a vault too, because then you must have a three letter agency on your tail.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
It's more of a design choice, are your applications designed to primarily run as a single-instance, multi-document application or as multi-instance, single-document application? Personally I'm on Win7 and I've found that I prefer the combined taskbar/launcher icons over the old way where I'd scan the taskbar and if I didn't see it I'd go launch it or I'd launch it and then realize oh I got two copies open. Implied in that is that I want one instance of the application to cover my needs, like multiple tabs in my browser, multiple images in my photo editor and so on. In particular I seem to remember "Konsole" let me have many terminal windows in tabs when I ran KDE so I'd run one instance of Konsole with 8 tabs rather than 8 terminal windows. And if I really want to launch a second instance it's just a right-click away.
I think you vastly underestimate how many Muslims who may not be the frothing rabid extremists of Al-Qaeda and Taliban but who have the same kind of backwards attitude that your average Christian had 100-200 years ago and would like to turn back time to when women were uneducated housewives and child-breeders hiding behind tons of clothes, homosexuals and other deviants should be whipped, jailed or killed, anyone criticizing Allah should have a fatwa on them and that all Muslims must follow a 1400 year old legal system unchanged. Yes, there are moderate Muslims but they're not going to stand up to their fundamentalist brethren, they'll be like the non-Nazi Germans paying lip service while praising their luck that they're not the victims. Non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries often have it far worse than the other way around.
The name "Ubuntu" has its roots in Africa, but I fail to see how either Canonical or indeed any significant part of Ubuntu has their origins there. Despite how people have talked about how Linux would be a good fit for poor countries, market share in Africa has been way lower than in the rest of the world, ranging from 0.2% in 2008 to 0.5-0.6% today - download as CSV for the numbers. Pretty much all the drive in the OSS community has come from high-bandwidth countries where downloading hundreds of megabytes of distros/patches/source code has been relatively easy. I doubt it's much of a coincidence Linus started his work at the University of Helsinki, probably one of the only fat pipes in the country at the time. So they're "abandoning" a market they never had in the first place.
I'm sure it's more important to you, but what's in it for Canonical? I'm thinking there's very few people who'll spend $1699 (minimum) on a rMBP in the first place. And Linux has around 1% market share, so at best I'm thinking one in hundred of those few people are interested in putting Linux on it. Actually my gut feeling is that the intersection between people willing to buy a very expensive Mac and insisting on putting a $0 operating system on it is even less than that. But yes, let us say it could marginally increase desktop *bunbu market share.
Since we're talking Apple it'd be a cold day in hell before it shipped with *buntu OEM option, so it'd be all self-installs. Does Canonical make any money on the people who download and install it themselves? Well they tried now recently with their Ubuntu lens to great uproar, but I'd say the answer is no. They certainly seem to focus on everything else like smart phones, tablets and smart TVs to make money. Maybe they're getting something from OEM deals like Dell, maybe they're making a bit on desktop support contracts - server support contracts is another thing entirely - but on the whole I doubt getting proper Retina support would contribute anything to Canonical's bottom line. Trying to be a contender to Android has more potential, but honestly they're now far, far behind Google on that.
Tracking technologies, to permit a totally transparent process for artists and intermediaries to find out who is looking at what artwork when and to distribute revenues accordingly.
Tell me, do we really want a database of "who is looking at what artwork when"? Aren't they in fact talking about even more invasive surveillance and control, not less? They just want it to be so built into the system that it's transparent to the end user.
Most of us slashdotters work in the software industry and it is the Intellectual Property protection is responsible in large part to the size and security of our pay checks. Let use look at it objectively.
Objectively, they want to be able to shop for labor, products and services globally while we can't. Do you think your pay check is any more secure against outsourcing just because they can force people to buy expensive "Not for sale outside the US" editions instead of cheap "Not for sale outside Taiwan" editions? Hell no, they'll go where it's cheapest but would very much like to stop you doing the same. And you bought it hook, line and sinker...
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Linux the kernel is an astonishing success, no doubt about that. But the rest of the FLOSS community? To use a little FSF notation Android is as much GNU/Linux as BSD is OS X. Everything but the kernel is rewritten from scratch and doesn't contain one bit of GPL or LGPL code, it's all Apache 2.0 licensed. Many people have Android phones that can't be rooted and if you do, you lose access to a lot of services that demand that it isn't. If Google rolled out the Android desktop it'd be a huge victory to open source, but for the free desktop? That your OEM might give you root, and even if they feel like it a lot of apps will stop working. The kernel is only tolerated because it's GPLv2 so it doesn't prevent the lock down and with the userspace separation it is isolated and doesn't affect the license of anything else. It's in a quarantine zone in a non-*GPL world.
I don't think you quite got it, as I understand it they have more error states internally than they do in the kernel API. The patch was designed to pass an internal error state that should have been replaced by the one in the kernel API before being returned but was accidentally pushed to userspace as well and the bug in the compliance tool meant they didn't notice. So far nothing majorly wrong, a poor patch and a testing tool with less than 100% coverage which caused a nasty bug to reach the first RC, a little sloppy but nothing that obviously should have been caught. The reason Linus gets so fired up is because it just doesn't matter what pulseaudio/tumbleweed is doing, there's zillions of applications out there who may be doing something crazy. If you broke one application you probably broke many more and it just doesn't matter, it's the kernel's fault.
It's been a cornerstone of Linux for as long as I can remember, you can always upgrade your kernel and all your applications will continue to work, period. New APIs are of course added but old userspace APIs are forever. It just doesn't matter how crazy the userspace code is, you don't break it anyway and even if they fixed their crazy code it doesn't solve the problem which is that there'd be two kernels with different behavior So even if he was right, he's still wrong.
Meh, you have many people who'd block ads no matter how nice they were, after all they're interrupting or distracting you from what you're trying to do and trying to sell you something you didn't ask for and that's taking up your bandwidth and your screen real estate and minutes of your life. Asking how many would like to be without ads is like asking how many would like to shop without paying. No, I'm not talking about breaking the law but if you got the choice. But if you find the site has too much ads, do people boycott the site? No, they try finding ways to use the site without the ads. Now don't pretend like I said it was a legal contract or the law or anything, but the social contract is to exchange content for ad views. And it's the consumers pulling a "I have altered the deal. Pray that I do not alter it further" moment.
However, I'm still having trouble seeing where this all fits in to be anti "Web 2.0". If anything sites like Facebook have taken things in the opposite direction, making it more difficult to be anonymous (or at the very least, encourage the majority of people to simply use their actual identity online). At the end of the day there isn't any "real" ramification to these "poison seeds" of anonymity.
Agreed, if anything the anonymous voice is being shut out from more and more of the public debate because sites increasingly use debate systems with a real name policy. You could of course register a fake Facebook account but that only lasts until someone cares to report it as possibly fake. People's perception of what the public opinion is, is now formed more and more on places like Facebook and less and less on places like slashdot where nicks are the norm. Sure it cuts down on the spam and trolling and generally obnoxious behavior but it also cuts down on the truth, but is presented as just as good or even better than the real thing.
Not "FU..! How DARE they put this crap on the device I dump on my five year old without even taking half a look at it first to see if it's ok for him".
If it comes neatly wrapped in a box from the store, I'm not going to unpack it, fiddle around with it for 30 seconds then pack it back in so my kid can pack it out again a bit later or if I did I'd probably just check that it powers up and isn't DOA before putting it back in the box. It's a 3DS, not a mystery box so of course it should be ok. If it had been bought second hand then sure, but not at the store. That some people here seem to think that's something you're "supposed to do" is the real WTF to me, do you also have a hazmat team sweep the playground before you let the kids play there? Because you know, there's always a 0.000001% risk an HIV-infected drug addict left a needle there last night and if you did it's totally your fault for not making sure it's safe...
Those are all just numbers you pulled out of thin air. You don't know the average DD order size, the average number of orders placed by a customer, the conversation rate of this ad, or any of the other information you need to determine if this ad is profitable. So just STOP. The people who DO KNOW those numbers -- DD marketing employees -- ran those numbers and determined this ad was worth it. In fact it was SO worth it, that they purchased an ENTIRE YEAR up front.
Neither do they, no really. Maybe they can somewhat say how many will directly go have a coffee after seeing the bill board, but even those aren't really certain unless you try without it as maybe now most people know you're there anyway. But all the other potential halo effects of people maybe thinking about finding a Dunking Donut the next time they want coffee are mostly wild guesses at sales go up and down as things get trendy and less trendy and competition comes and goes and hold sales and habits change from fiscal crisis to boom years and good press and bad press and whatever. Sure they have some more numbers to work with to estimate what an ad campaign meant for their sales but it's a very inaccurate science.
The same is often true for customer satisfaction, yes the company does make a survey and they absolutely care very much what those numbers say but for example one big production outage can destroy any useful data on whether those usability improvements you did actually had any effect at all and by the next survey it's way too late. A lot of the time you simply have to go with the subjective and qualitative measure and say that we think we did the right thing. Sometimes those beliefs are very, very wrong. One example I remember from a class was a car manufacturer that spent lots of money on only getting the finest and most perfect leathers for their leather seats. Turns out the customers were more happy with less perfect seats that showed it was real leather and not blemishless seats that looked almost artificial.
As a good example, many quite reputable companies spent a lot of money to get a Second Life presence to be so "Web 2.0" and yeah... I don't think any of them actually paid off but for a time marketeers thought they'd work - and placebo is almost as good as empirical data in marketing.
He said exactly the opposite. He said: the wiring is important. O_o
No, just reading comprehension fail on your end. The post I replied to by Taco Cowboy clearly argued it wasn't and that it is only a "will" to use your full mind.
The grey matter in between your ears contains similar amount of chemicals as the ones inside the head of those so-called "prodigies".
So if I put your brain in a blender, it should work the same afterwards right? Silly argument.
Unless it is proven that that deceased Indian math genius suffered from some acute type of "savant syndrome", I seriously doubt his brain has any "unique wiring" of any kind.
Perhaps not unique in that you'd see a difference on a brain scanner at the macro level, but I think it's more about being wired right or wrong. Look at people playing chess, the poor players aren't making any less of an effort but they're just overlooking moves or forgetting what paths they have and haven't explored or miscalculating because they don't see the piece is pinned. Your average player has an early botched Pentium and flaky non-ECC RAM, the grandmasters an Xeon with RAS features and ECC RAM. They very rarely think wrong or remember wrong, of course there's also training but I think it's also a lot what you're given from nature's side. It doesn't help if the same number of neurons are firing if in one brain it only leads to noise and nonsense and in the other to answers and solutions.
The "wiped off the map" quote is not correct. It would help your argument if you didn't repeat nonsense.
Here's the exact quote from a senate resolution against President Ahmadinejad:
The skirmishes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land. As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map
Iran has made many other public statements that have been only slightly less blatant over the last decade, that you think it isn't true must mean you have your head stuck waaaaaay deep in the sand.
Yes, Americans do have some serious issues with nudity in non-sexual context but from TFA there's every indication that this was porn or at least erotic images and we don't let kids have that in Europe either. I wouldn't care at all if my kid got a half second nipple flash during the Superbowl, for all I care we could go to a nude beach but I would get pretty pissed if I bought a 3DS for my kid and it had porn on it. As for violence, there's degrees to everything - I don't remember exactly how old I was when we first started pointing plastic guns and saying "bang bang you're dead" but I wasn't that old yet it wasn't exactly like seeing Saving Private Ryan. I wouldn't worry one bit if my kid was laughing his ass off at the Road Runner tricking Wile E. Coyote to fall down a cliff, there will come a time and place where it's natural to talk about the difference between play violence and reality.
I'm guessing a good time would be around the first time I find - or hear a wish for some semi-realistic FPS game, if you're old enough to pretend running around shooting people/monsters you're old enough for that talk too. About real people that don't respawn, that don't have magic medikits to fix them, that experience genuine fear and terror at gunpoint, that end up crippled or scarred for life or die bleeding out in the gutter, about widows and orphans, friends and family left behind. But there's a time and place for that talk, just like when your five year old want to play house with a mommy and a daddy it's still not time for the "okay, but remember to use a condom" talk. What next, are you going to point out the electric car track I had wasn't realistic because the car would be totaled and the driver dead if it crashed like that? Reality will get gritty enough in time.
In other words: many commercial enterprises, that are in it for the money and fighting each other in the marketplace, but working together to improve something that's out there in the open, free for all to use. So that what's common to all, is the best it can be, and each vendor can focus its resources on what makes their product different from the rest of the pack. Sigh - how much better life could be if that principle were applied more often...
Before you go bubbling over with the nobility of it all, I'd say its a pretty ruthless business decision based on "near" and "far" competition. All the ARM companies are competing between themselves, but they also know ARM as a whole is competing with Intel and x86 so they're allies in fighting the bigger enemy. The same way RHEL and SLES and Ubuntu LTS and whatnot are competing for server support, but they're also all fighting Microsoft in the grander OS market. It happens very often in business that your competitor is both your friend and your enemy depending on context, often shifting depending on what seems the most immediate and dangerous threat. When cooperation is necessary open source has proven an useful means to that end, but I doubt they care much about the same things you care about. This is all still about trying to improve their bottom line.
That was my idea as well, I saw what an uncle of mine spent on a fancy new smart TV, I was thinking "so... this is like a TV + a $99 AppleTV in one, except it is less flexible and costs way more". Personally I got myself a dumb TV, no 3D, apparently no buzzword-compliance because it was on a huge going-out sale but it's a 60" LCD. For one my fiber company has a smart set top box, I have a PC hooked up and for some reason I thought I could use an AppleTV and I recently got a Wii U that can browse the Internet too so I already have four "smart" devices to hook up, why would I need a 5th one in the TV itself? Personally I'm just hoping 4K can come down from lottery winner to semi-reasonable prices, I'd like both a 4K monitor and a 4K TV, dumb as a brick thank you.
U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: 2012 Congressional Report - Christopher Olver | April 26, 2012 ....I realize the US trade empire has a vested interest in a friendly outpost in the middle east, but when will Israel be considered strong enough to stop getting what amounts to charity?
Considering that the Arab Spring is getting hijacked by Islamists who have more in common with Iran ("lsrael should be wiped off the map") than the various dictators they replaced, I'm guessing Israel will find itself even more in the middle of hostile territory now. As for when the US will stop backing them up, they're best buddies. When the UN voted 188-3 to condemn the US trade embargo against Cuba, who were the three? The US, Israel and Palau. Even their usual lapdog the UK wouldn't side with US on that one, but Israel would.
I'd divide the current revolution into several stages:
1. The computer revolution - electronics over mechanics
2. The Internet revolution - connecting the world together
3. The mobile revolution - always online, anywhere
4. The bandwidth revolution - zero cost information
I think we're just seeing the tip of the last one, I'm feeling I'm on the verge of it with my 60/60 Mbit line that in the not so distant future fiber connections will be the norm rather than the exception and for all practical purposes people will have all the bandwidth they need. That you won't care if someone is borrowing 100 Mbps on your wireless of your 1 Gbps line. Or if you have 100 Mbps of torrent seeds in the background. Maybe I have just a tiny SSD and rent HDD space at my fiber provider like a SAN, or maybe I have all my stuff in the cloud (well not me, but... people) or whatever. I certainly don't think we've stopped changing yet.
The Peace Prize, the only one awarded from Norway by Nobel's wishes is highly political due to the retards in the committee who think it should be awarded as an incentive to act in its spirit instead of a recognition of actual accomplishment. It's no coincidence that the EU got the prize now as relations between many of the members are heavily strained and not 5 years ago when it was all flowers and sunshine. Unfortunately this has lead to many embarrassing awards when the recipients don't do anything worthy of the prize, or even contrary to it. It has been more than suggested that the recent awards to Obama and EU is ass kissing to further some of their member's international political careers. The committee currently consists only of ex-politicians, lead by a former prime minister. The other Nobel prizes awarded from Sweden are much, much less political.
So, we learned nothing of value except that studies like this have inconclusive results. Oh, and teenagers can experience psychosis before, during and after using drugs.
And if we knew the results of the study up front, we wouldn't have needed to do the study in the first place. As much as some people like to believe this is some sort of conspiracy theory to keep grant money flowing it's completely natural that at times you find that the results are inconclusive, it's only with 20/20 hindsight you can say it was pointless.
It's still far more just to reach the desktop than most of us used to have as total system RAM. Of course comparing it to the DOS era isn't exactly fair but we sure had a full GUI in far less too.
Hmm where have I heard this somewhere before, oh yeah a bit further down on the page where Lockheed was crying that SpaceX couldn't possibly be doing anything this much cheaper and better than them without compromising safety. Sure, if you go look at the crap they deliver to Wal-Mart your idea of Chinese quality might be low but they also do rocket science putting men in space and probes orbiting the moon and I'm pretty sure they do brain surgery too. That they often ignore emissions is not the same as being ignorant of them, unless it's say the Olympics in Beijing where they make a huge temporary clean-up effort. They might be more willing to trample the individual's rights than in other countries but the progress they make is very much real. Real income has more than tripled for over a billion people in the last decade:
GDP per capita measured in purchasing power terms more than tripled from $2,800 in 2002 to a forecast $9,100 in 2012 according to the International Monetary Fund.
If you're paranoid enough to ask those questions, then I'd suggest an air-gapped computer. Anything you want to install on it use a USB stick, so what if it has or installs a backdoor? There's no way to talk to that backdoor anyway. Unless you think somebody is going to create a custom trojan to infect the machine, extract whatever it wants and store it on the USB stick, then upload it to the mothership next time you plug it into an Internet-enabled computer. But if that's a concern you should probably put your computer in a Faraday cage in a vault too, because then you must have a three letter agency on your tail.
Then there's the fact that Apple seems to have merged the concepts of "show me the programs that are on this computer and let me launch them" with "show me the windows that are open and let me switch to them", with the result that figuring out which of 8 terminals is the one I want is more involved than it needs to be. I'm not sure why it does this; is the differentiation between the actions "switch to my Firefox window" and "launch Firefox" really too complicated for the average user?
It's more of a design choice, are your applications designed to primarily run as a single-instance, multi-document application or as multi-instance, single-document application? Personally I'm on Win7 and I've found that I prefer the combined taskbar/launcher icons over the old way where I'd scan the taskbar and if I didn't see it I'd go launch it or I'd launch it and then realize oh I got two copies open. Implied in that is that I want one instance of the application to cover my needs, like multiple tabs in my browser, multiple images in my photo editor and so on. In particular I seem to remember "Konsole" let me have many terminal windows in tabs when I ran KDE so I'd run one instance of Konsole with 8 tabs rather than 8 terminal windows. And if I really want to launch a second instance it's just a right-click away.
I think you vastly underestimate how many Muslims who may not be the frothing rabid extremists of Al-Qaeda and Taliban but who have the same kind of backwards attitude that your average Christian had 100-200 years ago and would like to turn back time to when women were uneducated housewives and child-breeders hiding behind tons of clothes, homosexuals and other deviants should be whipped, jailed or killed, anyone criticizing Allah should have a fatwa on them and that all Muslims must follow a 1400 year old legal system unchanged. Yes, there are moderate Muslims but they're not going to stand up to their fundamentalist brethren, they'll be like the non-Nazi Germans paying lip service while praising their luck that they're not the victims. Non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries often have it far worse than the other way around.
The name "Ubuntu" has its roots in Africa, but I fail to see how either Canonical or indeed any significant part of Ubuntu has their origins there. Despite how people have talked about how Linux would be a good fit for poor countries, market share in Africa has been way lower than in the rest of the world, ranging from 0.2% in 2008 to 0.5-0.6% today - download as CSV for the numbers. Pretty much all the drive in the OSS community has come from high-bandwidth countries where downloading hundreds of megabytes of distros/patches/source code has been relatively easy. I doubt it's much of a coincidence Linus started his work at the University of Helsinki, probably one of the only fat pipes in the country at the time. So they're "abandoning" a market they never had in the first place.
I'm sure it's more important to you, but what's in it for Canonical? I'm thinking there's very few people who'll spend $1699 (minimum) on a rMBP in the first place. And Linux has around 1% market share, so at best I'm thinking one in hundred of those few people are interested in putting Linux on it. Actually my gut feeling is that the intersection between people willing to buy a very expensive Mac and insisting on putting a $0 operating system on it is even less than that. But yes, let us say it could marginally increase desktop *bunbu market share.
Since we're talking Apple it'd be a cold day in hell before it shipped with *buntu OEM option, so it'd be all self-installs. Does Canonical make any money on the people who download and install it themselves? Well they tried now recently with their Ubuntu lens to great uproar, but I'd say the answer is no. They certainly seem to focus on everything else like smart phones, tablets and smart TVs to make money. Maybe they're getting something from OEM deals like Dell, maybe they're making a bit on desktop support contracts - server support contracts is another thing entirely - but on the whole I doubt getting proper Retina support would contribute anything to Canonical's bottom line. Trying to be a contender to Android has more potential, but honestly they're now far, far behind Google on that.
Of course, it also included gems like:
Tracking technologies, to permit a totally transparent process for artists and intermediaries to find out who is looking at what artwork when and to distribute revenues accordingly.
Tell me, do we really want a database of "who is looking at what artwork when"? Aren't they in fact talking about even more invasive surveillance and control, not less? They just want it to be so built into the system that it's transparent to the end user.
Most of us slashdotters work in the software industry and it is the Intellectual Property protection is responsible in large part to the size and security of our pay checks. Let use look at it objectively.
Objectively, they want to be able to shop for labor, products and services globally while we can't. Do you think your pay check is any more secure against outsourcing just because they can force people to buy expensive "Not for sale outside the US" editions instead of cheap "Not for sale outside Taiwan" editions? Hell no, they'll go where it's cheapest but would very much like to stop you doing the same. And you bought it hook, line and sinker...