Pardon me, but I just have to laugh at this gem that manages to claim that "free software" is so much clearer than "open source software"
However, the obvious meaning for the expression open source softwareand the one most people seem to think it meansis You can look at the source code.
The term free software has two natural meanings, one of which is the intended meaning, so a person who has grasped the idea of free speech, not free beer will not get it wrong again.
I just have to ask, why? Free speech is a permission to express yourself, like how the is the GPL different? Can't you express yourself under any open source license? And most speech isn't very copyleft-free, under the Berne convention everything copyrightable is copyrighted unless specifically released. About the only good thing it does is say that it doesn't mean free as in beer - an expression I doubt is very popular among English-speaking in muslim countries - but not much anything else. Try saying to random semi-technical people "Imagine what you think of if I say free software, free as in speech not free as in beer". I think you'd get very strange answers that has very little to do with the four freedoms. I think OSS is much simpler to explain as it is essentially public code everyone can use for any purpose. I've not yet met anyone that has used more than 30 seconds to understand the concept, "free software" on the other hand...
That it's not an EULA and so I don't even have to accept any terms at all to read the source code, unless there's an exclusive right in copyright law. The only question is whether the work is derivative or not, and if it isn't the GPL can't apply. If it is derivative, the GPL and all its terms does apply but again it's got nothing to do with the GPL per se, just the scope of copyright law. Since they seem to have secured the rights to the name and most of the overall look and feel, that sounds like and uphill battle unless there's evidence of copy-paste.
Don't forget that this is the beta. Normally these are the sort of things that are fixed by a late (for Ubuntu)/ early (for the driver) binary release. That has at least been the case several times before, I wouldn't be surprised if it is the same now. I'm pretty sure this is considered a release critical bug.
Before, messages traveled hand to hand via couriers. Eventually we replaced much of it with the telegraph, faxes and Internet where only the message is going but the people stay put. We didn't stop exploring space, neither did we stop bringing the knowledge home. I have seen far more of Mars via the Mars rovers than I ever saw of the moon from the moon landing. We have gone from 0 to ~443 known exoplanets in the last 15 years. We have sent many probes to places humans surely could not survive and that'd be certain death even if they could because it was a one-way trip, and they perform admirably.
Humans are becoming redundant to the mission. Even those that claim astronauts could have done the job of the Mars rovers in a few days ignore that we could have built and sent a fleet of robots for the estimated cost of a manned Mars mission. It's not like "we choose to go to the moon..." it's more like "we choose to include a passenger seat to Mars...". Even if we went, the biggest achievement would be in the technology and robotics that'd make the trip survivable. It's putting a man in a tin can on Mars for the sake of putting a man in that tin can, not because of what a human on Mars can do.
I guess it could make sense if we really needed a forward base on Mars, but we don't. We could equally well control a bunch of robots from Earth rather than Mars, despite the delay it'd just take more intelligent handling by the robot or earlier "stop and wait for instructions" that'd be somewhat more inefficient but not enough to offset the cost. Not to mention all the times you'd have to let a huge team of scientists review the data before deciding what to do anyway. And as long as we're doing exploring and not mining or something like that there's little point in a repair shop, we'll drop them far far away and have them go further. Imagine on Earth saying "Hey, that robot we sent to explore Argentina broke down. Damn, well the tow truck is leaving New York now."
It could make sense if we were to catch up, but in this case it's like breeding a faster horse to catch up with the telegraph. Humans are bulky, poorly radiation resistant, poorly g-force resistant, poorly temperature resistant, require oxygen and air pressure, require food and water, suffer from muscle atrophy and so on. Meanwhile robots are getting better technologically and programmatically all the time to deal with various contingencies. Humans are pretty much stuck the way we are, to survive on Mars we will need to rely heavily on robots as adding as human labor is just too expensive.
I don't think we need a net ROI, it could be either a science station or indeed if they could just be a settlement to mostly sustain itself on Mars. If we could, with a reasonable up-front investment and supplies of the really exotic stuff start a Mars settlement, I'd be all for it. I'd say a minimum should be that they should be able to construct/replace dome material and solar panels, recycle or have a water supply, be able to sustainably grow their own food to get food and oxygen and have a radiation shield strong enough that people could stay permanently. Radiation-hardened processors I could see us supplying them with in bulk for the forseeable future, not just the "bread and butter" of operating it.
. With enough sensitivity everything gives off infrared radiation, even things we would normally think is pitch black. Certainly at least enough for soldiers to operate at night without any artificial lighting at all already, and I'm guessing this could make them much better. The lens cover is different, no light is really no light. But even in the absence of sun, moon, stars, fire and artificial light it is never totally dark, just pitch dark.
But you must admit forking your own tree is more like being told "If you don't like how the country is run, emigrate" than working within the system. Like you say everyone is free to run their own mini-dictatorship over their own tree, but we wouldn't get very far if people weren't mostly merging it together. That's why we have pseudodemocracies where you give people a huge influence on the project. The whole point is that these voices aren't created equal, though I don't see where anyone would get that impression in the first place. Most every project has senior people whose opinions weigh more than their headcount, patches aren't committed based on democratic polls where one man is one vote in any project I can think of.
A check? Really? On first buy? WTF? If someone new buys from me, he pays 100% upfront, or he can GTFO.
Which they also warn you against, because people take the money and disappear never to deliver. Nothing is really secure unless you have an escrow service that makes sure both the funds and the goods are transferred as intended, otherwise somebody has to trust somebody. In fact that's how professional second hand ebayers essentially make their business, they have the reputation that people feel comfortable selling to them knowing they'll get their cash and the reputation to feel comfortable buying from them knowing they'll get their product. I would never send 100% up front to a first time seller, but I guess some people are more risk-taking than me as it seems first time buyers and sellers do it all the time.
You should know then that checks never clear. They just fail to bounce. (...) I know a guy who was scammed out of an exotic car - the 'buyer' gave him a bogus cashiers check. His bank took nearly three weeks before notifying him that they were "having difficulties" processing the check.
Trying to google around, there seems to normally be a 30 day limit for the customer to notify the bank of fraudulent checks towards their account and a 60 day limit for the banking system to bounce checks so it's not entirely unlimited. But who waits two months to see if the money is *really* good? And even so that is not a protection that you won't be sued for cashing a fraudulent check, only that they can't take it from your account anymore.
Classic scam: 1, Scammer pretends to be a buyer for some fairly expensive product, e.g. a car 2. Scammer sends false cashier's check to client 3. Scammer asks to cancel the deal because of some crisis, offers to cover any expenses he's had and a compensation for wasting their time 4. Many people will have compassion for their situation and agree to undo the sale 5. They wire the reminder - maybe 90% of the purchase price - back 6. The check sent in #2 bounces, the money returned in #5 gone and they're out a ton of money 7. Profit, for the scammer. No ??? here.
What's creepy to me is the number of people that think "hey, it turned out he's actually guilty so that's great". The court could not possibly know this when issuing the warrant, which means that you really want to remove the right altogether.
The thing is, this is business as usual at many places. Being nimble is how IT departments survive, if you get people skilled in some tools you hand them those tools instead of retraining. If there's money in the budget to buy new hardware you might upgrade your laptops and use a new OS, if you don't you stay and the old OS stays. Companies split and merge and reorganize and there's never the one unified global perfect IT solution.
I have met companies where it was utterly impossible to get the tools you needed because they had to be run up and down the whole chain of command and tested to work for all users and often they'd try to give you something else that didn't do the job. Everything was raised to the level of Policy with capital P, it was full of absurdities like we could only get machines with the new corporate image but vital software was not approved, only for the old but we couldn't get the old image because that was Policy straight from the top. My estimate, just from the time they were messing us around - and we were consultants and billing - I suspect they lost at least 10,000$ between the three of us.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for systems handled by a competent system administrator, with proper images and procedures to operate like a real department and not hodgepodge central. But this "you can have any software you want, as long as it's a black T-Ford" is not productive at all. Most of the time, it works quite fine for all of them even though they different solutions, because they've all been adapted to what they're doing and whatnot. The only real problem is when you try coming in and think we'll replace all of this with a Linux solution. Then you discover that there's thousands of little gotchas everywhere and you're "one system to rule them all" is almost as unworkable as the old system. Or you manage to pull it together for a short while only to see people tearing it apart in ten different directions again.
It's always safer to make changes you know the impact of. Maybe there's some magical company out there that's avoided it, but in every company I've been to there's been a gray mass of "I don't know enough about who and how is using this to say if we can change it." even from the people who should be the most authoritative on it. There's no real way of making sure everyone's been asked, but you can bet the screaming will start once something breaks. And so people don't want to do it, they don't want to do the big corporate-wide changes. Run it by the local IT department, make the changes locally and if it works, great. No need to wake the slumbering beast of trying to push it into the standard application list unless you got a fetish for paperwork and meetings and writing documentation.
Reality check: Nobody buys a company and just carries on because unless it was really mispriced in the market, you've gained nothing. You might as well have put the money in a stock fund. In closed source companies this means projects get canceled, reprioritized, product portfolios are aligned and they search high and low for the claimed synergies they were supposed to get. What happens in open source companies? Exactly this same. There's been quite a few of these stories now and they're all full of trivial projects and tin foil hat conspiracy. I just checked Digg and THEY got better stories than this. I'm quite the geek but still... stuff that matters. Or is at least cool, interesting or funny in a nerdy way. But not "Minor corporate politics" for 100$, I'll pass Alex.
The funny thing is, I never saw any software like that for 386s or even 286s speeds - and I still had a turbo on my 486 I think. I did use the turbo on my 286 that would turn it down to 8086 speeds, because I had some games that depended on that. For all the other computers it was just a meaningless "reduced speed" mode that wasn't standard in any way.
The same economist would probably also tell them that this is usually only true if the market is so that lowering them price would open up the market to a much larger part of the population or that people would consume vastly more. Neither is really true, almost everyone everywhere listens to some music already and most people won't be dedicating much more time to listen to it nor can they listen to more than one song at once. And there's always free radio 24/7 if everything else is not enough, or Spotify if you're lucky enough to have that. There's tons of budget bin music, but nobody's buying it.
The simple truth is that most people are cheap. Even with free Spotify everybody's talking about how annoying the ads are, yet extremely few want to pay to make them go away. It's like going on and on about your toothache and yet you never go see a dentist. It costs 17$/month (99 NOK) to cure in a country with a nominal GDP of 76,692$. Compared to US incomes that's 10$/month for practically near limitless access to music, offline access and so on and it annoys them and still they don't pay. For comparison, you'd get about four rides with the city bus/tram/subway here for the same. At the local fastfood I'd get two kebabs or somewhat less than a pizza. But that's not what people want, they want it for free and continue to be annoyed.
i'll read the wiki page too, but i'm hoping someone here will take a crack at explaining in it plain English.
Some math doohickey is similar to some other math doohickey. Seriously, how much more "in plain English" than the linked wiki can you get without losing the point of trying? The only thing you end up with are misunderstandings like the other guy modded up replying to your post saying "As for implications, as far as I can see, it just tells us that lots of things can be deformed into spheres" even though the 3-sphere has about as little to with regular spheres as a sphere has to do with circles.
To use a car analogy, it doesn't matter if everything but the brakes on the Toyota works or everything but the gas tank on the Pinto was great. It doesn't help that it could become a great car when what you're buying is fatally flawed and Vista was fatally flawed. I use Windows 7 for my gaming machine and I'm happy for all the paying beta testers, the final release is very good.
Oh god, the horror. We've had that since forever on VISA cards here in Norway, the banks have authority to issue government approved ids so some banks will issue a double function card with id on the back above the magnetic stripe. It's quite practical for people that don't have a driver's license or one card less if you're getting drunk and won't be driving anyway. Unless you really have anonymous bank accounts putting the information the bank has on file on your card is a convienience, not a problem. The money flows via the banks not the government though, pretty important point.
I would go into specifics on what those are, but let me instead mention what they aren't. Public indecency. Sex in public
I'd say flashing your dick at little girls probably should qualify as a sex crime, just not taking a piss in a back alley. Same with sex in public, there are ways that would be really creepy and ways that wouldn't.
So three categories of sexual offenders: One who rapes adults, and essentially should be able to do whatever he wants. (You can hardly keep people away from adults.)
So you have this person who is convicted of sexually forcing himself upon others. I don't understand what drives rapists but I figure it's some kind of power / humiliation / warm hole kick. I mean they're not looking to talk to them. They're not looking for a sexual partner who responds. To put it bluntly, I don't see what rapists get out of raping women that they couldn't get from raping minors which is why I wouldn't trust one to be around them.
The sad thing about rapes is the huge number of false positives and false negatives. Both the number of real rapes that go unsolved and the number of false accusations sometimes by malice or greed but most commonly from regrets the next day from girls who didn't intetd to get so drunk/high and did far more than they wanted to do or even remember agreeing to.
Onw - 1 - person being arrested for murder does not mean murder is "solved" for all time. The only real metric is a persistent lowering not caused by underreporting. That is far more complicated than most companies think.
Why then do for example the people that have fiber normally get "only" 10-50 Mbit/s, even though the cable can easily carry >1 Gbit? Because it costs lots of money to actually deliver gigabit internet speed, and routers like this are vital to cutting down costs. It might not matter for those that enjoy the "free" market in the US, but the rest of the world cares. Already 10% of Internet connections here in Norway are fiber and it's rising sharply. Thousand people with gigabit in a central and you're already theoretically at terabyte speeds. Even if just 10% use it at any time and only 10% of the capacity on average (easily offset by the few that use 100%) then it's only enough for 100,000 people. There's 1.8 billion people online and rising.
However, they've only recently gained the ability to do more than one thing at a time (dual core processors) (...) I've simplified it a bit for the sake of explanation, but that's the gist of it.
Actually, I think you simplified away probably the most important bit about why a 1 GHz stream processor is nothing like a 3 GHz CPU for general computing, because it all sounded like a CPU light. Stream processors are the computer version of dragster cars, they are extremely good in a straight line but very poor at code branching and have extremely limited memory access. CPUs on the other hand will do everything possible to prepare for turns and predict calculations down every turn you might make and has a huge caching system to access any memory, they're more of an extremely maneuverable terrain vehicle. If you tried running your OS from a stream processor you would find it very slow, not 1/3rds slow but more like "wtf am I back in the 80s?" slow because it'd be stalled most of the time.
Talking on the phone isn't encrypted, having a conversation isn't encrypted, regular envelopes are the digital equivalent of ROT-13 and only protects against casual observation. "Expectation of privacy" is not something that applies only to unbreakable cryptographic safes, if it did it wouldn't have existed until the PC age.
You may not have any expectation of privacy from the recipient, but if you consider that "voluntary disclosure" then the fourth amendment doesn't protect any communication at all. You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when making a phone call because it's hard to listen in - people do that in phone conferences every day - but because you generally don't expect anybody listening in. Likewise, when you send or recieve mail I don't expect people to be reading through my mail. Sure, it's technically trivial for a mail server to BCC away a copy of everything, just like it's trivial to make every phone call a conference call with the government but that would grossly violate the privacy I was expecting.
Of course I can provide it myself via encryption by the digital equivalent of writing coded letters, but nobody claims that the fourth amendment protection only applies to coded letters. Why then do you set a standard that is so much higher for what you must do and so much lower for the government? I understand that it's preferable to rely on yourself rather than the government, but that has limits. If the only thing the government won't do are the things it can't do you're in big trouble, because I'm fairly sure they could find a cell to throw you in. If you don't expect them to care about your right to privacy, why do ytu expect them to care about any other?
Yes, it's possible that the contents of an unencrypted mail will end up being seen by some system administrator. But to me, that is the equivalent of a postal package being damaged in handling and the contents spilling all over the floor. Though shit, if that's kiddie porn all over the floor I fully expect you to go to jail anyway, expectation of privacy or not. But that is entirely different than a government that will open everything on purpose, that is exactly why the amendment was created. Not to stop the government from doing the impossible, but from doing the very possible act of reading your (e)mail.
Hardly any ruling in the Supreme court would prevent them from passing a new law based on ACTA. Actually I think it's more like the DVD-Jon case. They also lost twice, then dropped appealing to the Supreme court because they would be blasted. Then they waited for the EUCD and Norway passed a new copyright law with DMCA-style protections. I highly suspect they drop it now because there's no provisions to force ISPs to cut off web sites now, but I'm sure they'll try changing that.
Norway is the red, white and blue flag that is part of EEA, EFTA and the Schengen area. It's our participation in the EEA which means that we must implement EU directives, to be part of the "inner market" there must be equal market conditions in all countries - a clause interpreted at least as wide as "interstate commerce" in the US constitution. Technically we have a reservation right, but we've never used it. As you can see, there's only two countries left in our bubble, and the other is Iceland that is tiny to begin with, has mostly financially collapsed and is now applying for EU membership. The initial agreement (1994) was good but since the renegotiation in 2004 we gain nothing by standing on the outside. The EU decides, and Norway follows willingly or unwillingly and there's no economic incentive either, we pay the same as if we were EU members.
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Pardon me, but I just have to laugh at this gem that manages to claim that "free software" is so much clearer than "open source software"
However, the obvious meaning for the expression open source softwareand the one most people seem to think it meansis You can look at the source code.
The term free software has two natural meanings, one of which is the intended meaning, so a person who has grasped the idea of free speech, not free beer will not get it wrong again.
I just have to ask, why? Free speech is a permission to express yourself, like how the is the GPL different? Can't you express yourself under any open source license? And most speech isn't very copyleft-free, under the Berne convention everything copyrightable is copyrighted unless specifically released. About the only good thing it does is say that it doesn't mean free as in beer - an expression I doubt is very popular among English-speaking in muslim countries - but not much anything else. Try saying to random semi-technical people "Imagine what you think of if I say free software, free as in speech not free as in beer". I think you'd get very strange answers that has very little to do with the four freedoms. I think OSS is much simpler to explain as it is essentially public code everyone can use for any purpose. I've not yet met anyone that has used more than 30 seconds to understand the concept, "free software" on the other hand...
That it's not an EULA and so I don't even have to accept any terms at all to read the source code, unless there's an exclusive right in copyright law. The only question is whether the work is derivative or not, and if it isn't the GPL can't apply. If it is derivative, the GPL and all its terms does apply but again it's got nothing to do with the GPL per se, just the scope of copyright law. Since they seem to have secured the rights to the name and most of the overall look and feel, that sounds like and uphill battle unless there's evidence of copy-paste.
Don't forget that this is the beta. Normally these are the sort of things that are fixed by a late (for Ubuntu)/ early (for the driver) binary release. That has at least been the case several times before, I wouldn't be surprised if it is the same now. I'm pretty sure this is considered a release critical bug.
Before, messages traveled hand to hand via couriers. Eventually we replaced much of it with the telegraph, faxes and Internet where only the message is going but the people stay put. We didn't stop exploring space, neither did we stop bringing the knowledge home. I have seen far more of Mars via the Mars rovers than I ever saw of the moon from the moon landing. We have gone from 0 to ~443 known exoplanets in the last 15 years. We have sent many probes to places humans surely could not survive and that'd be certain death even if they could because it was a one-way trip, and they perform admirably.
Humans are becoming redundant to the mission. Even those that claim astronauts could have done the job of the Mars rovers in a few days ignore that we could have built and sent a fleet of robots for the estimated cost of a manned Mars mission. It's not like "we choose to go to the moon..." it's more like "we choose to include a passenger seat to Mars...". Even if we went, the biggest achievement would be in the technology and robotics that'd make the trip survivable. It's putting a man in a tin can on Mars for the sake of putting a man in that tin can, not because of what a human on Mars can do.
I guess it could make sense if we really needed a forward base on Mars, but we don't. We could equally well control a bunch of robots from Earth rather than Mars, despite the delay it'd just take more intelligent handling by the robot or earlier "stop and wait for instructions" that'd be somewhat more inefficient but not enough to offset the cost. Not to mention all the times you'd have to let a huge team of scientists review the data before deciding what to do anyway. And as long as we're doing exploring and not mining or something like that there's little point in a repair shop, we'll drop them far far away and have them go further. Imagine on Earth saying "Hey, that robot we sent to explore Argentina broke down. Damn, well the tow truck is leaving New York now."
It could make sense if we were to catch up, but in this case it's like breeding a faster horse to catch up with the telegraph. Humans are bulky, poorly radiation resistant, poorly g-force resistant, poorly temperature resistant, require oxygen and air pressure, require food and water, suffer from muscle atrophy and so on. Meanwhile robots are getting better technologically and programmatically all the time to deal with various contingencies. Humans are pretty much stuck the way we are, to survive on Mars we will need to rely heavily on robots as adding as human labor is just too expensive.
I don't think we need a net ROI, it could be either a science station or indeed if they could just be a settlement to mostly sustain itself on Mars. If we could, with a reasonable up-front investment and supplies of the really exotic stuff start a Mars settlement, I'd be all for it. I'd say a minimum should be that they should be able to construct/replace dome material and solar panels, recycle or have a water supply, be able to sustainably grow their own food to get food and oxygen and have a radiation shield strong enough that people could stay permanently. Radiation-hardened processors I could see us supplying them with in bulk for the forseeable future, not just the "bread and butter" of operating it.
Wow ... is that like the photoshop filter that can take photos taken with the lense cap on and convert them to full colour pictures ?
Take a look at the pictures on the right:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_body#Radiation_emitted_by_a_human_body
. With enough sensitivity everything gives off infrared radiation, even things we would normally think is pitch black. Certainly at least enough for soldiers to operate at night without any artificial lighting at all already, and I'm guessing this could make them much better. The lens cover is different, no light is really no light. But even in the absence of sun, moon, stars, fire and artificial light it is never totally dark, just pitch dark.
But you must admit forking your own tree is more like being told "If you don't like how the country is run, emigrate" than working within the system. Like you say everyone is free to run their own mini-dictatorship over their own tree, but we wouldn't get very far if people weren't mostly merging it together. That's why we have pseudodemocracies where you give people a huge influence on the project. The whole point is that these voices aren't created equal, though I don't see where anyone would get that impression in the first place. Most every project has senior people whose opinions weigh more than their headcount, patches aren't committed based on democratic polls where one man is one vote in any project I can think of.
A check? Really? On first buy? WTF? If someone new buys from me, he pays 100% upfront, or he can GTFO.
Which they also warn you against, because people take the money and disappear never to deliver. Nothing is really secure unless you have an escrow service that makes sure both the funds and the goods are transferred as intended, otherwise somebody has to trust somebody. In fact that's how professional second hand ebayers essentially make their business, they have the reputation that people feel comfortable selling to them knowing they'll get their cash and the reputation to feel comfortable buying from them knowing they'll get their product. I would never send 100% up front to a first time seller, but I guess some people are more risk-taking than me as it seems first time buyers and sellers do it all the time.
You should know then that checks never clear. They just fail to bounce. (...) I know a guy who was scammed out of an exotic car - the 'buyer' gave him a bogus cashiers check. His bank took nearly three weeks before notifying him that they were "having difficulties" processing the check.
Trying to google around, there seems to normally be a 30 day limit for the customer to notify the bank of fraudulent checks towards their account and a 60 day limit for the banking system to bounce checks so it's not entirely unlimited. But who waits two months to see if the money is *really* good? And even so that is not a protection that you won't be sued for cashing a fraudulent check, only that they can't take it from your account anymore.
Classic scam:
1, Scammer pretends to be a buyer for some fairly expensive product, e.g. a car
2. Scammer sends false cashier's check to client
3. Scammer asks to cancel the deal because of some crisis, offers to cover any expenses he's had and a compensation for wasting their time
4. Many people will have compassion for their situation and agree to undo the sale
5. They wire the reminder - maybe 90% of the purchase price - back
6. The check sent in #2 bounces, the money returned in #5 gone and they're out a ton of money
7. Profit, for the scammer. No ??? here.
What's creepy to me is the number of people that think "hey, it turned out he's actually guilty so that's great". The court could not possibly know this when issuing the warrant, which means that you really want to remove the right altogether.
There are companies that really should resist being taken over at low-ball prices. (...) It was a great deal for the stockholders of Company N,
So... who exactly should resist?
The thing is, this is business as usual at many places. Being nimble is how IT departments survive, if you get people skilled in some tools you hand them those tools instead of retraining. If there's money in the budget to buy new hardware you might upgrade your laptops and use a new OS, if you don't you stay and the old OS stays. Companies split and merge and reorganize and there's never the one unified global perfect IT solution.
I have met companies where it was utterly impossible to get the tools you needed because they had to be run up and down the whole chain of command and tested to work for all users and often they'd try to give you something else that didn't do the job. Everything was raised to the level of Policy with capital P, it was full of absurdities like we could only get machines with the new corporate image but vital software was not approved, only for the old but we couldn't get the old image because that was Policy straight from the top. My estimate, just from the time they were messing us around - and we were consultants and billing - I suspect they lost at least 10,000$ between the three of us.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for systems handled by a competent system administrator, with proper images and procedures to operate like a real department and not hodgepodge central. But this "you can have any software you want, as long as it's a black T-Ford" is not productive at all. Most of the time, it works quite fine for all of them even though they different solutions, because they've all been adapted to what they're doing and whatnot. The only real problem is when you try coming in and think we'll replace all of this with a Linux solution. Then you discover that there's thousands of little gotchas everywhere and you're "one system to rule them all" is almost as unworkable as the old system. Or you manage to pull it together for a short while only to see people tearing it apart in ten different directions again.
It's always safer to make changes you know the impact of. Maybe there's some magical company out there that's avoided it, but in every company I've been to there's been a gray mass of "I don't know enough about who and how is using this to say if we can change it." even from the people who should be the most authoritative on it. There's no real way of making sure everyone's been asked, but you can bet the screaming will start once something breaks. And so people don't want to do it, they don't want to do the big corporate-wide changes. Run it by the local IT department, make the changes locally and if it works, great. No need to wake the slumbering beast of trying to push it into the standard application list unless you got a fetish for paperwork and meetings and writing documentation.
Reality check: Nobody buys a company and just carries on because unless it was really mispriced in the market, you've gained nothing. You might as well have put the money in a stock fund. In closed source companies this means projects get canceled, reprioritized, product portfolios are aligned and they search high and low for the claimed synergies they were supposed to get. What happens in open source companies? Exactly this same. There's been quite a few of these stories now and they're all full of trivial projects and tin foil hat conspiracy. I just checked Digg and THEY got better stories than this. I'm quite the geek but still... stuff that matters. Or is at least cool, interesting or funny in a nerdy way. But not "Minor corporate politics" for 100$, I'll pass Alex.
The funny thing is, I never saw any software like that for 386s or even 286s speeds - and I still had a turbo on my 486 I think. I did use the turbo on my 286 that would turn it down to 8086 speeds, because I had some games that depended on that. For all the other computers it was just a meaningless "reduced speed" mode that wasn't standard in any way.
The same economist would probably also tell them that this is usually only true if the market is so that lowering them price would open up the market to a much larger part of the population or that people would consume vastly more. Neither is really true, almost everyone everywhere listens to some music already and most people won't be dedicating much more time to listen to it nor can they listen to more than one song at once. And there's always free radio 24/7 if everything else is not enough, or Spotify if you're lucky enough to have that. There's tons of budget bin music, but nobody's buying it.
The simple truth is that most people are cheap. Even with free Spotify everybody's talking about how annoying the ads are, yet extremely few want to pay to make them go away. It's like going on and on about your toothache and yet you never go see a dentist. It costs 17$/month (99 NOK) to cure in a country with a nominal GDP of 76,692$. Compared to US incomes that's 10$/month for practically near limitless access to music, offline access and so on and it annoys them and still they don't pay. For comparison, you'd get about four rides with the city bus/tram/subway here for the same. At the local fastfood I'd get two kebabs or somewhat less than a pizza. But that's not what people want, they want it for free and continue to be annoyed.
i'll read the wiki page too, but i'm hoping someone here will take a crack at explaining in it plain English.
Some math doohickey is similar to some other math doohickey. Seriously, how much more "in plain English" than the linked wiki can you get without losing the point of trying? The only thing you end up with are misunderstandings like the other guy modded up replying to your post saying "As for implications, as far as I can see, it just tells us that lots of things can be deformed into spheres" even though the 3-sphere has about as little to with regular spheres as a sphere has to do with circles.
To use a car analogy, it doesn't matter if everything but the brakes on the Toyota works or everything but the gas tank on the Pinto was great. It doesn't help that it could become a great car when what you're buying is fatally flawed and Vista was fatally flawed. I use Windows 7 for my gaming machine and I'm happy for all the paying beta testers, the final release is very good.
Oh god, the horror. We've had that since forever on VISA cards here in Norway, the banks have authority to issue government approved ids so some banks will issue a double function card with id on the back above the magnetic stripe. It's quite practical for people that don't have a driver's license or one card less if you're getting drunk and won't be driving anyway. Unless you really have anonymous bank accounts putting the information the bank has on file on your card is a convienience, not a problem. The money flows via the banks not the government though, pretty important point.
I would go into specifics on what those are, but let me instead mention what they aren't.
Public indecency.
Sex in public
I'd say flashing your dick at little girls probably should qualify as a sex crime, just not taking a piss in a back alley. Same with sex in public, there are ways that would be really creepy and ways that wouldn't.
So three categories of sexual offenders:
One who rapes adults, and essentially should be able to do whatever he wants. (You can hardly keep people away from adults.)
So you have this person who is convicted of sexually forcing himself upon others. I don't understand what drives rapists but I figure it's some kind of power / humiliation / warm hole kick. I mean they're not looking to talk to them. They're not looking for a sexual partner who responds. To put it bluntly, I don't see what rapists get out of raping women that they couldn't get from raping minors which is why I wouldn't trust one to be around them.
The sad thing about rapes is the huge number of false positives and false negatives. Both the number of real rapes that go unsolved and the number of false accusations sometimes by malice or greed but most commonly from regrets the next day from girls who didn't intetd to get so drunk/high and did far more than they wanted to do or even remember agreeing to.
Onw - 1 - person being arrested for murder does not mean murder is "solved" for all time. The only real metric is a persistent lowering not caused by underreporting. That is far more complicated than most companies think.
Why then do for example the people that have fiber normally get "only" 10-50 Mbit/s, even though the cable can easily carry >1 Gbit? Because it costs lots of money to actually deliver gigabit internet speed, and routers like this are vital to cutting down costs. It might not matter for those that enjoy the "free" market in the US, but the rest of the world cares. Already 10% of Internet connections here in Norway are fiber and it's rising sharply. Thousand people with gigabit in a central and you're already theoretically at terabyte speeds. Even if just 10% use it at any time and only 10% of the capacity on average (easily offset by the few that use 100%) then it's only enough for 100,000 people. There's 1.8 billion people online and rising.
However, they've only recently gained the ability to do more than one thing at a time (dual core processors) (...) I've simplified it a bit for the sake of explanation, but that's the gist of it.
Actually, I think you simplified away probably the most important bit about why a 1 GHz stream processor is nothing like a 3 GHz CPU for general computing, because it all sounded like a CPU light. Stream processors are the computer version of dragster cars, they are extremely good in a straight line but very poor at code branching and have extremely limited memory access. CPUs on the other hand will do everything possible to prepare for turns and predict calculations down every turn you might make and has a huge caching system to access any memory, they're more of an extremely maneuverable terrain vehicle. If you tried running your OS from a stream processor you would find it very slow, not 1/3rds slow but more like "wtf am I back in the 80s?" slow because it'd be stalled most of the time.
Talking on the phone isn't encrypted, having a conversation isn't encrypted, regular envelopes are the digital equivalent of ROT-13 and only protects against casual observation. "Expectation of privacy" is not something that applies only to unbreakable cryptographic safes, if it did it wouldn't have existed until the PC age.
You may not have any expectation of privacy from the recipient, but if you consider that "voluntary disclosure" then the fourth amendment doesn't protect any communication at all. You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy when making a phone call because it's hard to listen in - people do that in phone conferences every day - but because you generally don't expect anybody listening in. Likewise, when you send or recieve mail I don't expect people to be reading through my mail. Sure, it's technically trivial for a mail server to BCC away a copy of everything, just like it's trivial to make every phone call a conference call with the government but that would grossly violate the privacy I was expecting.
Of course I can provide it myself via encryption by the digital equivalent of writing coded letters, but nobody claims that the fourth amendment protection only applies to coded letters. Why then do you set a standard that is so much higher for what you must do and so much lower for the government? I understand that it's preferable to rely on yourself rather than the government, but that has limits. If the only thing the government won't do are the things it can't do you're in big trouble, because I'm fairly sure they could find a cell to throw you in. If you don't expect them to care about your right to privacy, why do ytu expect them to care about any other?
Yes, it's possible that the contents of an unencrypted mail will end up being seen by some system administrator. But to me, that is the equivalent of a postal package being damaged in handling and the contents spilling all over the floor. Though shit, if that's kiddie porn all over the floor I fully expect you to go to jail anyway, expectation of privacy or not. But that is entirely different than a government that will open everything on purpose, that is exactly why the amendment was created. Not to stop the government from doing the impossible, but from doing the very possible act of reading your (e)mail.
Hardly any ruling in the Supreme court would prevent them from passing a new law based on ACTA. Actually I think it's more like the DVD-Jon case. They also lost twice, then dropped appealing to the Supreme court because they would be blasted. Then they waited for the EUCD and Norway passed a new copyright law with DMCA-style protections. I highly suspect they drop it now because there's no provisions to force ISPs to cut off web sites now, but I'm sure they'll try changing that.
This is one of those times where I really like wikipedia:
Supranational European Bodies
Norway is the red, white and blue flag that is part of EEA, EFTA and the Schengen area. It's our participation in the EEA which means that we must implement EU directives, to be part of the "inner market" there must be equal market conditions in all countries - a clause interpreted at least as wide as "interstate commerce" in the US constitution. Technically we have a reservation right, but we've never used it. As you can see, there's only two countries left in our bubble, and the other is Iceland that is tiny to begin with, has mostly financially collapsed and is now applying for EU membership. The initial agreement (1994) was good but since the renegotiation in 2004 we gain nothing by standing on the outside. The EU decides, and Norway follows willingly or unwillingly and there's no economic incentive either, we pay the same as if we were EU members.