Who knows what profitable product there might be on mars? Nobody knew what profitable products existed in the New World until they came here. Are you really going to claim that in the entire solar system there isn't one single resource that could be profitably exploited by mankind
There could definitely be valuable resources on Mars. So valuable resources it's profitable to refine them, build a rocket that'll either have to come from Earth (veeeeeeeeeery expensive) or be made locally (veeeeeeeeeeeeery complicated), fuel it which there's at least hope of making locally, escape Mars' gravity well and recover on Earth? That's very debatable.
Of precious metals, it tops out at 40-50,000$/kg with platinum and rhodium. There's other far out ideas like He3 from the moon for the fusion reactors we haven't got, maybe if there's some extreme crystals or diamonds but it's tough to see what would cost more than that. Anything we need zero-G like some special crystal growing we'd obviously do in local orbit.
Now, even if we take SpaceX pricing to Mars we're talking 15000$/kg for every kilo to get up there so we'll need to recover a lot of precious metal, which is probably still fairly rare on Mars too. So you got a base, mining machinery, consumables like drills, oils, refinery and has produced your first kilo pure platinum. Launching at 1/3rd G should cost about 1/3rd so about 5000$/kg right? Well not if you brought it since there's a 100:1 payload to mass ratio for bringing it to Mars in the first place, more like 500,000$/kg. So we need local fuel, let's say that's 95% of the rocket and fuel is free, it costs nearly nothing Earth and hopefully the same in volume on Mars. Still you're looking at 25000$/kg just for bringing up the rocket to take it home, and I'm not counting assembly. Nor have I counted the overhead that you're not releasing a satellite in space, you need to actually land in a reasonable fashion which probably involes lots of guidance systems, padding and chutes and whatnot. That alone probably drives the net cost of actual Mars surface payload an order of magnitude up from the SpaceX estimate.
Let's face it, it'll be tough even if you found pure platinum bullion on Mars. Getting a rocket there, landing, picking it up and blasting off again is likely to eat that 40-50000$/kg budget alone. The only estimates that don't assume some absurdly low costs all aorund and ignore plenty of the complexity. Heavy mining is well, heavy and things don't last forever on Mars either. You can't just assume fuel and consumable costs and try to somehow say rockets, bases and machinery are free. Or you can, but I'd fail you in any economics class.
ESA plans: Another proposal for a joint mission with ESA is based on two spacecraft being sent to Mars, one carrying a six-person crew and the other the expedition's supplies. The mission would take about 440 days to complete with three astronauts visiting the surface of the planet for a period of two months.
Longest human single flight Valeri Polyakov, launched 8 January 1994 (Soyuz TM-18), stayed at Mir LD-4 for 437.7 days
Sure he was only going round and round and round Earth, but he was just as weightless as you'd be on the trip to Mars. So we already have had people in space for that long, and they didn't have two months at 1/3rd G in the middle to break up the zero-G stretch.
Not to mention a rather nifty virus scanner in the transporter buffer... Oh yeah and you can patch it too. They even unintentionally made a backup copy of commander Riker. It's easy when you can just throw out every crazy idea you got.
Why do both you and the parent focus so much on fear?
From what I've read about suicidals of pretty much every kind, it's about purpose. Like, what's the point of going on? Do you have something to live for? You can endure a lot of pain before it becomes insufferable crippling pain, if you have a purpose. You can sacrifice your own life, if you have a purpose. It's when you don't really have anything to live for but being comfortable and that is that taken away from you that you're out of good options.
Sure, we'd all like a beatiful sunset on life. But if it's full of rain and wind and only making you miserable, you can either stay up or head to bed early. Just do whatever you feel like.
If you mean Java, Flash etc. as normally meant by that then yes.
If you mean if it's a DIY framework of a browser that you'll need/want to assemble with a bunch of extensions, no. Certain parts of vanilla Firefox I think suck bigtime, like the download manager. I guess the only reason they get away with it, is because they tell people to install one of the many download manager extensions.
Who cares? I guess everyone that wants a good browser by doing "sudo apt-get install [browser]" and not spend time finding plugins on every machine. Getting one good bundled package in Opera is simply more convienient. I don't need my browser to be another little microcosmos of package management.
Just because there's a difference between the system's tray icons and the system tray area, doesn't really prove anything. In fact it's more good reason to say it's called "tray" than anything else. Windows signals too used the name tray in signals. In Qt, the class implementing it is called QSystemTrayIcon. In short, maybe it's official name is "General Notification Area" or whatever like it's "Microsoft Windows XP". I'll continue to call it tray and xp, respectively.
I've seen it before, usually used in a context where you have 2P, 4P, 8P = dual-processor, quad-processor, octo-processor machines because noone wants to go around remembering what that should be abbreviated like. Of course, with cores per chip varying widely just saying you have a DP/2P machine says little these days.
For everything except WoW that model sucks. Most every game has one release - EAs recurring yearly games are even an exception from that and it's what's there that counts. It's about making the biggest possible splash, getting the most attention, scoring the rave reviews. It doesn't matter if you tag on cool features and plenty bugfixes later, what will be over the net are a thousand bad reviews and comments. Nobody re-reviews games to see if they actually got better. So it all adds up to this gigantic waterfall model where everything is supposed to be finished at the same time. Or so one would hope, and then the mythical man month sets in...
Do you think the world will see serious war against major powers in the near future? When was the last time we had real out-and-out dog fights? Gulf War I? I keep thinking that the future of warfare is basically going to be these anti-terrorism wars, where global powers are fighting villagers getting financed by someone.
The lack of a world war since 1945 isn't exactly stunning evidence, two in ~30 years had better be an exception. Maybe we should at least outlast the Roman empire with 200+ years of essentially peace first. I don't see many credible scenarios for WWIII though as the US and EU won't, Japan, Russia and India I think can't and that really only leaves China and some kind of pebbles-into-avalanche Muslim vs Christian war. Sure, India and Pakistan might have another go, Israel and the Arabs likewise and there's room for wars in Africa and South America but it wouldn't be a world war of any sort. Still, I'm sure it's looked many times in history like we've become "too civilized" for war...
This is also why GTK gained so much momentum at Qt's expense.
At the same time, what would Qt be without the license income from commercial licenses? Nokia can justify putting money into it to support their products, but Trolltech was a software company. I did look at both GTK and Qt for hobby development and Qt was much higher quality in my personal opinion, and that's because they had real income to hire dedicated developers and make a kick-ass development platform. McDonald's is cheap and popular, that's what GTK is to companies but it doesn't imply that it's good food.
I often find the development of open source projects painfully slow (yes, this is from the and-I-want-a-free-pony-too department) but Qt has always been a positive high note. I love how they take top notch things like WebKit and make them incredibly easy to use in QtWekKit. They're a little bit like Apple, except for developers - they take what's out there and really everybody's doing already but is difficult, package it up in a great way to make it easy for the win.
One thing I really like is that they have, unlike much other open source stuck in the 20th century, embraced long function names and code completion. I just tried to check what the longest function name was and "availableAudioOutputDevicesChanged()" is pretty close. But since it's object oriented, you type the./-> and the autocomplete list appears. Unlike the fcntl vs iocntl or whatever article that was here recently, it's retarded naming for people still using text editors (let the flamewars begin).
In short, you talk about how much momentum Qt would make, I'm hoping it won't lose any of the momentum it has had. It's basically the standard library C++ should have had to compete with Java/C#...
In the same way the light switches in my house don't? Yes, each one has a binary state on/off which means there's 2^n states the house can be in, but there's no particular reason why I can't have 3 or 11 or 75 switches instead of only having 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc. light switches. Though I don't quite see when I'd need the "kiloswitch" unit, I'd expect it to be 1000 not 1024.
Except when they don't, like floppies, CDs, DVDs, BluRays, HDDs, dial-ups speeds, networks or any of the many other places where they don't. Eventually you run into issues where there's a GigE (1,000,000,000) network adapter running a 3GHz (3,000,000) processor which is processed in 512 MB (512*1024*1024) RAM before being stored over a 3 Gbit (3,000,000,000) SATAII connection to a 1TB (1,000,000,000,000) hard disk. Every time you run into other sciences like "we need to process 1000 samples/second at 16 bits, that's 16 kbits right?" you run into trouble.
On the other hand, I can go into the details and say that in order to fit the CPU L1 cache it's 64 kB (64*1024) and textures can be maximum 2048*2048 pixels and there are exactly 512 stream processors to work with, you can handle 2^32 bits in an integer and so on and so forth. We're never going to get to where we can ditch base 2 sizes either, they're vital on almost every level once you get into the details.
Everytime you say "this is not a problem, because computers don't interact with the rest of the world and/or it's always trivial to tell" you are seriously deluding yourself. All the people saying "you should all use kB = 1000 and forget the rest" or "you should all use kB = 1024 and forget the rest" are both deluding themselves. We need both and we need clearly defined units for both. That's why I now say use kB = 1000 where it's correct. "Losing" the battle over kB is the only way we'll have kB and KiB, because clearly it's impossible to change the meaning of kilo = 1000 in everything else.
These IEEE recomendations seam like common sense to me.
1 KB = 1,000 bytes
Can you at least quote the page right?
Note the capital 'K' for the kibi- symbol: while the symbol for the analogous SI prefix kilo- is a small 'k', a capital 'K' has been selected for consistency with the other prefixes and with the widespread use of the misspelled SI prefix (as in 'KB').
Ah, the classic "-1, I disagree" mod. Enjoy your groupthink, I'm sure it'll make you feel better to have the "discussion" consist only of people that agree with you.
...and I think quite many are, but there's sane and insane ways of doing it.
Sane: 1. If it beeps, pick it out of your pocket or whatever without looking. This is no more dangerous than finding a breath mint or whatever. 2. Bring it up to wheel height. Don't keep it in your lap so you really have to look down, it's too dangerous for more than a glance. 3. If something happens, grab the wheel with your phone hand too. You can hold both, or in a real emergency let the phone drop. 4. Glance-read like if you were looking at the GPS screen. You are able to do that right, or should we ban those too? 5. When you reply, reply only with one hand. It's really useful for lots of things to be able to do that anyway. 6. Reply only in brief. My three favorite responses are "k", "yes", "no" or any of the text shorthands like "lol", "ttyl".
From my observations I'm a way safer driver than say anyone with kids in the back seat. But I guess I'm pretty screwed if I end up in one of those really inavoidable accidents, like the guy in the other lane doing a front-on-front collision with me or whatever. And I do understand why it's forbidden. I've noticed so many people that are writing a text message down in their lap, with both hands and apparently composing a novel while they're at it. But the only reason it's punished so hard on that fact that you sent a text at all is because that can verify that. "Your phone company records show that at 3:42 PM you send a text" unlike "At 3.42 PM you were busy fiddling with the radio or gps or kids or finding a mint". Then tough shit for you even if you did do it in a way that's perfectly reasonable.
What's critical? During 9/11, how much fun do you think it'd be if they had someone able to shut down the air traffic control network? Normally that'd only be "Hey, we're working to fix that just hang tight and don't crash into each other" and not THAT big a deal. On 9/11 there's not four planes flying towards big city centers there's hundreds that might be kamikaze pilots.
Communication and reconnaissance is critical in an emergency and not having it could make things 100x worse. Considering how much goes over the Internet, including VPN'd over the Internet and as such not directly visible anything other than making sure the backbone stays up is irresponsible. This is basically the government saying "For the patient to live, we reserve the right to amputate if we have to".
Of course the really, really important stuff shouldn't be online at all and have dedicated lines whereever possible, but if you're DoS'ing a megarouter that handles both - I doubt there's a complete end-to-end separate private net around the world - then it might still be in trouble.
In short, there usually has been things like this in place to make sure you got water, power, phones, all the vital things to keep the infrastructure going. Internet is now part of that, stop going all panicky over it. It's more a sign of "Even in an emergency, it's too important to really shut down. It HAS to stay up."
I think it's a great move and a well made app & service like this can only help Apple.
Unfortunately, I've got the distinct impression that Apple approved this app because it was poised to give them a lot of bad press if they didn't approve it. Maybe if their track record for app approval was a bit better, I'd be throwing kudos Apple's way, but at this point I'm pretty jaded.
Actually, Apple refusing and Spotify signing on with other mp3 players and saying "Sorry, you had your chance" is one of the few things that really could unseat the iPod. Like, "I got an iPod and iTunes store" vs "I got a Creative Zen with Spotify!"
You can't have the FSF or the GPL without talking down proprietary software. (...) The GPL says writing proprietary software is evil, and if making writing open software a bit more difficult is a side effect then that's fine.
The FSF yes, the GPL no. It's reciprocity in its simplest form, I share with you so you share with me. It does nothing more than enforce very common and accepted ethical and social behavior, because there are corporations and other soulless entities that do not respond in kind. There's nothing in it that says it's wrong to not share, just don't expect to take and not share.
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Who knows what profitable product there might be on mars? Nobody knew what profitable products existed in the New World until they came here. Are you really going to claim that in the entire solar system there isn't one single resource that could be profitably exploited by mankind
There could definitely be valuable resources on Mars. So valuable resources it's profitable to refine them, build a rocket that'll either have to come from Earth (veeeeeeeeeery expensive) or be made locally (veeeeeeeeeeeeery complicated), fuel it which there's at least hope of making locally, escape Mars' gravity well and recover on Earth? That's very debatable.
Of precious metals, it tops out at 40-50,000$/kg with platinum and rhodium. There's other far out ideas like He3 from the moon for the fusion reactors we haven't got, maybe if there's some extreme crystals or diamonds but it's tough to see what would cost more than that. Anything we need zero-G like some special crystal growing we'd obviously do in local orbit.
Now, even if we take SpaceX pricing to Mars we're talking 15000$/kg for every kilo to get up there so we'll need to recover a lot of precious metal, which is probably still fairly rare on Mars too. So you got a base, mining machinery, consumables like drills, oils, refinery and has produced your first kilo pure platinum. Launching at 1/3rd G should cost about 1/3rd so about 5000$/kg right? Well not if you brought it since there's a 100:1 payload to mass ratio for bringing it to Mars in the first place, more like 500,000$/kg. So we need local fuel, let's say that's 95% of the rocket and fuel is free, it costs nearly nothing Earth and hopefully the same in volume on Mars. Still you're looking at 25000$/kg just for bringing up the rocket to take it home, and I'm not counting assembly. Nor have I counted the overhead that you're not releasing a satellite in space, you need to actually land in a reasonable fashion which probably involes lots of guidance systems, padding and chutes and whatnot. That alone probably drives the net cost of actual Mars surface payload an order of magnitude up from the SpaceX estimate.
Let's face it, it'll be tough even if you found pure platinum bullion on Mars. Getting a rocket there, landing, picking it up and blasting off again is likely to eat that 40-50000$/kg budget alone. The only estimates that don't assume some absurdly low costs all aorund and ignore plenty of the complexity. Heavy mining is well, heavy and things don't last forever on Mars either. You can't just assume fuel and consumable costs and try to somehow say rockets, bases and machinery are free. Or you can, but I'd fail you in any economics class.
One big problem with that is that after a couple of years in zero G and 1/3 G the crew may not be able to move around on Earth without medical help.
One non-problem, actually. A few quotes from WP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_mission_to_Mars:
ESA plans: Another proposal for a joint mission with ESA is based on two spacecraft being sent to Mars, one carrying a six-person crew and the other the expedition's supplies. The mission would take about 440 days to complete with three astronauts visiting the surface of the planet for a period of two months.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records
Longest human single flight
Valeri Polyakov, launched 8 January 1994 (Soyuz TM-18), stayed at Mir LD-4 for 437.7 days
Sure he was only going round and round and round Earth, but he was just as weightless as you'd be on the trip to Mars. So we already have had people in space for that long, and they didn't have two months at 1/3rd G in the middle to break up the zero-G stretch.
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
Actually you were checking out Paris on a completely different site, but the same principle applies.
Not to mention a rather nifty virus scanner in the transporter buffer... Oh yeah and you can patch it too. They even unintentionally made a backup copy of commander Riker. It's easy when you can just throw out every crazy idea you got.
Why do both you and the parent focus so much on fear?
From what I've read about suicidals of pretty much every kind, it's about purpose. Like, what's the point of going on? Do you have something to live for? You can endure a lot of pain before it becomes insufferable crippling pain, if you have a purpose. You can sacrifice your own life, if you have a purpose. It's when you don't really have anything to live for but being comfortable and that is that taken away from you that you're out of good options.
Sure, we'd all like a beatiful sunset on life. But if it's full of rain and wind and only making you miserable, you can either stay up or head to bed early. Just do whatever you feel like.
By definition, only half of articles can be duplicates. If you go beyond that, they become "trips".
Well, I wouldn't be too surprised if the editors have sometimes been on "trips"...
If you mean Java, Flash etc. as normally meant by that then yes.
If you mean if it's a DIY framework of a browser that you'll need/want to assemble with a bunch of extensions, no. Certain parts of vanilla Firefox I think suck bigtime, like the download manager. I guess the only reason they get away with it, is because they tell people to install one of the many download manager extensions.
Who cares? I guess everyone that wants a good browser by doing "sudo apt-get install [browser]" and not spend time finding plugins on every machine. Getting one good bundled package in Opera is simply more convienient. I don't need my browser to be another little microcosmos of package management.
Just because there's a difference between the system's tray icons and the system tray area, doesn't really prove anything. In fact it's more good reason to say it's called "tray" than anything else. Windows signals too used the name tray in signals. In Qt, the class implementing it is called QSystemTrayIcon. In short, maybe it's official name is "General Notification Area" or whatever like it's "Microsoft Windows XP". I'll continue to call it tray and xp, respectively.
I've seen it before, usually used in a context where you have 2P, 4P, 8P = dual-processor, quad-processor, octo-processor machines because noone wants to go around remembering what that should be abbreviated like. Of course, with cores per chip varying widely just saying you have a DP/2P machine says little these days.
For everything except WoW that model sucks. Most every game has one release - EAs recurring yearly games are even an exception from that and it's what's there that counts. It's about making the biggest possible splash, getting the most attention, scoring the rave reviews. It doesn't matter if you tag on cool features and plenty bugfixes later, what will be over the net are a thousand bad reviews and comments. Nobody re-reviews games to see if they actually got better. So it all adds up to this gigantic waterfall model where everything is supposed to be finished at the same time. Or so one would hope, and then the mythical man month sets in...
Do you think the world will see serious war against major powers in the near future? When was the last time we had real out-and-out dog fights? Gulf War I? I keep thinking that the future of warfare is basically going to be these anti-terrorism wars, where global powers are fighting villagers getting financed by someone.
The lack of a world war since 1945 isn't exactly stunning evidence, two in ~30 years had better be an exception. Maybe we should at least outlast the Roman empire with 200+ years of essentially peace first. I don't see many credible scenarios for WWIII though as the US and EU won't, Japan, Russia and India I think can't and that really only leaves China and some kind of pebbles-into-avalanche Muslim vs Christian war. Sure, India and Pakistan might have another go, Israel and the Arabs likewise and there's room for wars in Africa and South America but it wouldn't be a world war of any sort. Still, I'm sure it's looked many times in history like we've become "too civilized" for war...
By that bytes == seriousness logic, violating the license of the entire Linux kernel is about as bad as violating the license of a CDs worth of mp3s.
However, I do agree you have a problem when the collected hits in history can fit on a USB stick.
This is also why GTK gained so much momentum at Qt's expense.
At the same time, what would Qt be without the license income from commercial licenses? Nokia can justify putting money into it to support their products, but Trolltech was a software company. I did look at both GTK and Qt for hobby development and Qt was much higher quality in my personal opinion, and that's because they had real income to hire dedicated developers and make a kick-ass development platform. McDonald's is cheap and popular, that's what GTK is to companies but it doesn't imply that it's good food.
I often find the development of open source projects painfully slow (yes, this is from the and-I-want-a-free-pony-too department) but Qt has always been a positive high note. I love how they take top notch things like WebKit and make them incredibly easy to use in QtWekKit. They're a little bit like Apple, except for developers - they take what's out there and really everybody's doing already but is difficult, package it up in a great way to make it easy for the win.
One thing I really like is that they have, unlike much other open source stuck in the 20th century, embraced long function names and code completion. I just tried to check what the longest function name was and "availableAudioOutputDevicesChanged()" is pretty close. But since it's object oriented, you type the ./-> and the autocomplete list appears. Unlike the fcntl vs iocntl or whatever article that was here recently, it's retarded naming for people still using text editors (let the flamewars begin).
In short, you talk about how much momentum Qt would make, I'm hoping it won't lose any of the momentum it has had. It's basically the standard library C++ should have had to compete with Java/C#...
Well... I think that depends a lot on the reason why it's old code. I've met my share of code with the warning "There be dragons!".
How do they not "work" in powers of 2?
In the same way the light switches in my house don't? Yes, each one has a binary state on/off which means there's 2^n states the house can be in, but there's no particular reason why I can't have 3 or 11 or 75 switches instead of only having 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc. light switches. Though I don't quite see when I'd need the "kiloswitch" unit, I'd expect it to be 1000 not 1024.
Because computers work in powers of 2.
Except when they don't, like floppies, CDs, DVDs, BluRays, HDDs, dial-ups speeds, networks or any of the many other places where they don't. Eventually you run into issues where there's a GigE (1,000,000,000) network adapter running a 3GHz (3,000,000) processor which is processed in 512 MB (512*1024*1024) RAM before being stored over a 3 Gbit (3,000,000,000) SATAII connection to a 1TB (1,000,000,000,000) hard disk. Every time you run into other sciences like "we need to process 1000 samples/second at 16 bits, that's 16 kbits right?" you run into trouble.
On the other hand, I can go into the details and say that in order to fit the CPU L1 cache it's 64 kB (64*1024) and textures can be maximum 2048*2048 pixels and there are exactly 512 stream processors to work with, you can handle 2^32 bits in an integer and so on and so forth. We're never going to get to where we can ditch base 2 sizes either, they're vital on almost every level once you get into the details.
Everytime you say "this is not a problem, because computers don't interact with the rest of the world and/or it's always trivial to tell" you are seriously deluding yourself. All the people saying "you should all use kB = 1000 and forget the rest" or "you should all use kB = 1024 and forget the rest" are both deluding themselves. We need both and we need clearly defined units for both. That's why I now say use kB = 1000 where it's correct. "Losing" the battle over kB is the only way we'll have kB and KiB, because clearly it's impossible to change the meaning of kilo = 1000 in everything else.
These IEEE recomendations seam like common sense to me.
1 KB = 1,000 bytes
Can you at least quote the page right?
Note the capital 'K' for the kibi- symbol: while the symbol for the analogous SI prefix kilo- is a small 'k', a capital 'K' has been selected for consistency with the other prefixes and with the widespread use of the misspelled SI prefix (as in 'KB').
Ah, the classic "-1, I disagree" mod. Enjoy your groupthink, I'm sure it'll make you feel better to have the "discussion" consist only of people that agree with you.
...and I think quite many are, but there's sane and insane ways of doing it.
Sane:
1. If it beeps, pick it out of your pocket or whatever without looking. This is no more dangerous than finding a breath mint or whatever.
2. Bring it up to wheel height. Don't keep it in your lap so you really have to look down, it's too dangerous for more than a glance.
3. If something happens, grab the wheel with your phone hand too. You can hold both, or in a real emergency let the phone drop.
4. Glance-read like if you were looking at the GPS screen. You are able to do that right, or should we ban those too?
5. When you reply, reply only with one hand. It's really useful for lots of things to be able to do that anyway.
6. Reply only in brief. My three favorite responses are "k", "yes", "no" or any of the text shorthands like "lol", "ttyl".
From my observations I'm a way safer driver than say anyone with kids in the back seat. But I guess I'm pretty screwed if I end up in one of those really inavoidable accidents, like the guy in the other lane doing a front-on-front collision with me or whatever. And I do understand why it's forbidden. I've noticed so many people that are writing a text message down in their lap, with both hands and apparently composing a novel while they're at it. But the only reason it's punished so hard on that fact that you sent a text at all is because that can verify that. "Your phone company records show that at 3:42 PM you send a text" unlike "At 3.42 PM you were busy fiddling with the radio or gps or kids or finding a mint". Then tough shit for you even if you did do it in a way that's perfectly reasonable.
Sad thing is the tinfoilers are actually starting to make sense thee days and it scares the crap out of me.
Or you'll soon find yourself wearing one...
What's critical? During 9/11, how much fun do you think it'd be if they had someone able to shut down the air traffic control network? Normally that'd only be "Hey, we're working to fix that just hang tight and don't crash into each other" and not THAT big a deal. On 9/11 there's not four planes flying towards big city centers there's hundreds that might be kamikaze pilots.
Communication and reconnaissance is critical in an emergency and not having it could make things 100x worse. Considering how much goes over the Internet, including VPN'd over the Internet and as such not directly visible anything other than making sure the backbone stays up is irresponsible. This is basically the government saying "For the patient to live, we reserve the right to amputate if we have to".
Of course the really, really important stuff shouldn't be online at all and have dedicated lines whereever possible, but if you're DoS'ing a megarouter that handles both - I doubt there's a complete end-to-end separate private net around the world - then it might still be in trouble.
In short, there usually has been things like this in place to make sure you got water, power, phones, all the vital things to keep the infrastructure going. Internet is now part of that, stop going all panicky over it. It's more a sign of "Even in an emergency, it's too important to really shut down. It HAS to stay up."
I think it's a great move and a well made app & service like this can only help Apple.
Unfortunately, I've got the distinct impression that Apple approved this app because it was poised to give them a lot of bad press if they didn't approve it. Maybe if their track record for app approval was a bit better, I'd be throwing kudos Apple's way, but at this point I'm pretty jaded.
Actually, Apple refusing and Spotify signing on with other mp3 players and saying "Sorry, you had your chance" is one of the few things that really could unseat the iPod. Like, "I got an iPod and iTunes store" vs "I got a Creative Zen with Spotify!"
Well, since KB is a kibibyte
Are you playing "taunt the pendant"? The buttugly kilo-binary-byte is abbriviated KiB, but yes it's with a capital K.
kB, MB, GB, TB, PB... you can let the base 2 vs base 10 fans battle to the death but kilo is an odd exception to the rule.
You can't have the FSF or the GPL without talking down proprietary software. (...) The GPL says writing proprietary software is evil, and if making writing open software a bit more difficult is a side effect then that's fine.
The FSF yes, the GPL no. It's reciprocity in its simplest form, I share with you so you share with me. It does nothing more than enforce very common and accepted ethical and social behavior, because there are corporations and other soulless entities that do not respond in kind. There's nothing in it that says it's wrong to not share, just don't expect to take and not share.
We don't care.
Sincerely,
The Internet