If I really had something to hide, I'd use key files on a very old USB dongle (128 MB dongle or so). Truecrypt and Bitlocker support this. Then police will most likely raid your house during this whole action. But even if not, when asked to provide the key I'd simply say "this was in a USB dongle. It was laying on my table, so now you tell me where you've put it after messing up my whole house". Or "I had it with me and after my spontaneous arrest I had no idea where you made me forget it". Police might eventually find the donlge, but if they ask what that is, I'd say "that was some old key, no idea for what or what the decryption password is. The key you are looking for was on a new dongle.
Thing is, it is easy to doubt that you know something. But you can get naked and show that you don't have anything hidden between your legs.
I think that we need to separate the magazines into categories. Are we talking about computer mags, porn, lifestyle, cartoons, or what? I can give some insight on some of them. My personal opinion is that computer magazines in Germany are "more insightful" than those in the US. For instance, many magazines in the US contain information that are available online. Magazines like the German C't are really pioneer in the sense that they contain *new* information, written in a professional way and well researched. When it comes to a job interview, if you say that you've written an article on C't, that gives you extra points. Not like Nature or Science, but it does bring some reputation. On the other hand, magazines in the musical field are, in my opinion, better in the US. For instance the US Magazine "Keyboard" is really good. I'm not sure if there is a Rolling Stone's equivalent in Germany, but these magazines have definitely renown names and to me anything similar is just a copy. You have many Linux magazines in Europe. They are ok, but nothing that you couldn't find online. Buying them saves you a lot of research time, but they are not really innovative. Other magazines are quite local and it is impossible to compare. These include business, cars, or lifestyle magazines. I would say that with online availability of magazines, any magazine that survives is either laundrying money or has a reader-base. And as long as some people enjoy readying them, and you are not obliged to subsidize them with taxes like you do with BBC in UK or ZDF in Germany, then we cannot really talk about better or worse. Just buy what you like, and enjoy the read.
I don't wanna get into a patriotic fight or compare political programs. I just want to point out that many countries (not USA of course) finance the education of its citizens. It might be good or bad education, don't know, but they do at least consider education to be an essential part of human rights. Some examples that I'm aware of are countries in South America (Argentina) and Europe (Germany, Spain, Netherlands). I'm sure there are many more around the world.
I know that in Germany for instance, until not long ago even foreigners could study for almost free. My understanding is that this has changed though, and now only EU residents have that privilege.
Carrier tracking does not require a very precise model of the earth.
correct. Carrier tracking doesn't. But my understanding though, is that a 1 cm-accurate *positioning* does. This is at least what our survey-grade equipment vendor claimed.
Real Time Kinnematic GPS has been done for well over a decade with rather sane processing requirements. It also isn't unstable. So long as the L1 and L2 signal of five satellites are tracked one can initialize on the fly, and you only need to track four continuously to maintain said initialization
Which essentially means, that anything that is not surveying, driving on a highway, or airborne will be unstable. I didn't want to get into the details, but Slashdot readers should understand that you can't obtain cm accuracy when driving with trees and water reflections on the side of the road, trucks passing by that reflect signals, etc. For the reasons you've mentioned above, it is difficult to be continuously locked to 5 or more satellites, particular since re-syncing can take up-to 20 seconds even if the lock is lost for a very short period of time.
Yes. This has been done for many years in survey equipment. a typical combination of Navstar (U.S. GPS)/GLONASS increases the number of satellites in view and therefore the accuracy. The biggest problem with combinging Navstar and GLONASS is that Navstar is CDMA (code division multiple access) while GLONASS is FDMA (frequency division multiple access). The former technique makes each satellite use a different "language" sort to say, while the later one uses different frequencies. The result is that a dual receiver needs two independent receivers, making them more expensive. New GLONASS satellites will start using CDMA signals in addition to the FDMA, so that legacy receivers work, and some time in the future new CDMA receivers can use both Navstar and GLONASS with a single type of tuner. Galileo was from the ground up designed to use CDMA and as a result, it is much easier to design a Navstar/Galileo dual receiver. As a matter of fact, many survey devices designed for Navstar can be upgraded via a firmware update to use Galileo as well. You can't upgrade to use GLONASS with a simple firmware update, you also need another tuner. Regarding accuracy, the thing is that you can't go much less than 5m by just adding more satellites. This is because this error is part of ionosphere delays, and more satellites can't correct this error. It is like trying to do a measurement by averaging 1000 readings, but all done with a bad ruler. At some point, you need to figure out how good your ruler is. And the problem is that this changes dynamically so standard Kalman filter techiques also stop being effective for better than 5m accuracy. There are two approaches for this: the first one is dual frequency, and this is in part how Galileo achieves better accuracy. The idea here is to exploit the dispersion property of the ionosphere. It works like this: different frequencies have different delays, so you send the same signal using different frequencies, measure the delay different, and solve for the ionosphere error. This is what survey-grade equipment do, but they do this by tracking the encrypted military P(Y) code, which is encrypted. The result is a dual frequency solution but full of hacks that make it unstable. This means, as soon as the signal is interrupted for a short time, you need to re-sync. The other approach for sub meter accuracy come from differential GPS. This technique uses to close receivers, one with a fixed known location. By measuring the error on the known location, you can apply corrections to the moving rover. But for this you need a link between the two (radio, UMTS, GSM, etc) or some post-processing. In addition, you need receivers capable of recording RAW data and then doing some complex math. The cream of the desert comes from using carrier-phase measurements. With this technique you can go up to cm accuracy. This requires tracking the actual carrier wave, and a very precise model of the earth or post-processing software. The accuracy comes at a price: very very unstable. You need clear blue sky and uninterrupted signals. Plus about 20 seconds to lock the signal, even after small interruptions. So to answer your question: more satellites guarantee better consistency and readings, particularly in cities and urban landscape. But you can't go below 5m unless you enter differential GPS or dual frequency measurements.
Here. I've tried to do a better translation from the Spanish article, which is actually quite well-written
Andreyev: "In the nuclear industry there are no independent organisms"
"The most dangerous reactor in Fukushima is 3, because it uses a fuel that combines uranium and plutonium," he states.
He spent five years at Chernobyl. He was vice-director of Spetsatom, the Soviet body for the fight against nuclear accidents, and he knows deep internals of how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) works.
Yuri Andreyev (1938) is one of the most knowledgeable scientists in this area. For the case of Fukushima, he considers four potential scenarios of varying degrees of severity, from mild to very severe.
"In Fukushima, the most dangerous reactor is number three. This reactor uses MOX, a type of nuclear fuel that combines plutonium and uranium. France is currently using this type of fuel experimentally in two Japanese plants," says this expert.
In 1991 everything fell apart in Moscow. With the salary of a vice-minister of atomic energy --the position that was offered to Andreyev--, it was not enough to afford anything. Andreyev was invited by the Academy of Sciences of Austria to hold some conferences, and he eventually ended up settling in Vienna as an adviser of the minister of environment, at universities, and in the IAEA itself.
Chernoby is still surrounded by lies, he explains. The accident was not the responsibility of plant operators, as originally stated, but rather a clear design flaw in the RBMK reactors that resulted from cost savings. A proper design of those Soviet reactors would have required a large amount of zirconium --a rare metal--, as well as a maze of pipes, special techniques for welding zirconium, stainless steel, and huge amounts of concrete. It would have been a fortune, so they decided to reduce costs, said Andreyev.
Since uranium enrichment is a complicated and expensive process, one of the ways to achieve cost reduction was by feeding the reactor with relatively low-enriched uranium. All this effectively increased the risks, and it was against safety rules. However, the supervision of nuclear activities in the USSR was belonged to the Ministry of Atomic Energy. Something similar is happening today with the IAEA, as the UN agency "depends on the nuclear industry," said Andreyev. Under his view, the lies and secrets of Chernobyl are now fully present in Fukushima.
Security, money, irresponsibility
"Those who design nuclear power plants depend on two things: safety and cost. The problem is that security costs money. If you spend too much on security, the power plant it is not competitive. The accident at Three Mile Island is the perfect example. After the accident, it was clear that in order to convincingly prove that these type of accidents would not occur again would have required an improvement of security that would dramatically increase the cost of power plants, effectively rendering them useless. Not a single reactor was built in America for (the following) thirty years. Everything was very complicated in Chernobyl, but it also had to do with economy. Academician Rumyantsev showed that all RBMK reactors should have been shut down, but he was simply ignored. There are always people interested in hiding something... "
What are they hiding?
They compromise on security in exchange for selfish interests. In the USSR, because of the cost of uranium enrichment, and in Japan simply for money. The location of central Japan, near the sea is the cheapest. Emergency generators were not buried and, of course, were flooded instantly.... Behind all this there is corruption. I have no proof, but they will not take long to show up. How can I design a nuclear power plant in an area of high seismic risk, near the ocean, with emergency generators at the surface?. The wave arrived and everything went out of service. This is not an error, but rather a crime.
Is the speed at which an OS gets compromised a viable metric for its security? I mean, imagine (I'm talking hypothetically here) MacOS had 1 open bug that allows someone to compromise the system in 10 min, and Windows had 15 open holes, which of which would require 1 day to circumvent. Which OS is more secure? If you ask me, I'd say Windows because right now the MAC OS would be a better target. But that can change overnight if Apple released a patch.
Quite often people also say that Mac OS is not targeted because of their market share. That IS a security advantage, even if it was given to them for free. For the average Joe, measuring security in a product should boil down to how likely is that his machine gets compromised, with all factors involved, including likelihood that someone cares.
I think my Mint box is much more secure that my Windows box. Not because Mint is free of holes, but because no one really cares to hack me. And to me, at the end of the day that's all that matters.
I'm by no means implying that you are wrong, just that my experience is usually different so I wanted to share that.
Guys typically listen carefully for advice and if they're buying online, they tend to get what you recommend them. But if they go to the store and the sales guy tells them "this is like the one you wanted but cheaper", then they buy their suggestion without consulting back.
Women are in my experience a complete different story. I have been asked many times for advice when purchasing a computer, digital camera, external hard drive, etc, and the experience can be quite frustrating. Sometimes I spend hours researching the best option of them. Then they go to the store and buy a Casio camera because it was a nice "red" color or a Sony Vaio because it was slim, purple, and has a nice pattern on the lid.
Now I don't spend so much time researching for them anymore. I let them get advice from the store and ask them to just double check with me. If the product is acceptable, I tell them to go ahead as long as they like it. I don't let them buy crap, but I don't fight for what I consider the best option either. And not because I've become a jerk or something, but because I've learned that the most important thing is that *they* are happy. And if a red camera makes them happy, then they should go for it.
>> Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to borrow from the F-22 and other U.S. stealth aircraft.
Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to steal from the F-22 and other U.S. stealth aircraft.
There. Much better. Now it goes inline with previous discussion in Slashdot regarding Chinese high-tech.
I think that everyone should take voting seriously. It is our way of expressing our opinion and in the end it decides many aspects of your life. Not voting kind of takes the right to complain later.
I do understand that you might hate all parties and decide not to vote as a way of complaining. But in such situations, an empty envelope (blank vote) would be a better way to protest. Not voting can be seen as lazy rather and the message lost and statistics do mix both to their will.
Don't know... I'm coming from a country where we had many years of dictatorship and now that we have democracy, I see voting as a luxury that we must fight for. It can be gone one day and you'll miss it, so don't take it for granted.
There are a handful of providers which cover the whole EU continent. They are in every land. If I call from my German Vodafone to Codafone in Greece, I still pay this ridiculous roaming charge.
Roaming fees are purely artificial, not technical.
Warning! McAfee and Symantec have reported a new computer virus that is spreading widely over internet and snail mail. Actually it is not a virus, but an antibiotic, which will kill all your hard drive bacteria.
Security companies are working hand-on-hand with hard drive manufacturers for injecting the N-1 gene into the affected bacteria, with the hope of making them resistant to the virus or antibiotics, depending on how you want to call it. The medical community is getting nuts with the new definitions, and some people have even compared them to the Gb vs Gib war. There has also been discussion regarding the potential dangers of such bacteria mutating into a self-aware being. Oh wait, never mind. Please, every one move to SSD storage ASAP
Good points. I just wanted to add a comment from a friend working on the European Parliament on global warming. He mentioned that all reports he has read comparing the cost of nuclear power vs the rest, always fail to account for the cost of surveillance for the nuclear waste. Don't know how much that could be, but something to think about.
You are right, but in my experience setting up adblocking on Opera has been been a pain compared to Adblock. So not exactly needed in the theory. But if users use another browser because of this, then for Opera, it is really needed. This has been the case with me at least.
Quite often GPS also measures velocity directly. They typically do it by means of tracking the Doppler shifts, which they anyway need to do due to the high velocity of the satellite and position changes in the sky. By doing this, you get very accurate velocities, much better than what you'd get from differentiating position. It's very cool stuff, check it out.
Chinese technology is once again on its way to prove that they don't only make junk toys, but also state of the art machines, trains, space vehicles, and now airplanes. I wish them all the best.
The only thing that scares me a bit is who will certify their aircraft, and who will regulate and protect against the counterfeit of replacement parts. I trust the skills of Chinese scientists, but I don't trust the transparency of their government.
China is a country known for producing fake products and imitations of everything. This can be a serious issue in aerospace, and many accidents have been attributed to counterfeit parts in the past. But we won't see this until a few years beyond the first flights.
Things become more relevant if you roam a lot. I live in Europe, but the concept can be generalized. For me, when I go on vacation to visit relatives in Greece, I wanna be reachable by them. Roaming fees are plain ridiculous, plus no one will call me if they need to call an international number. So the standard thing to do is buy a cheap pre-paid card from Vodaphone for about 15 Euro~17 US$
My wife used to live in Dublin and would travel back and forth from Ireland to Germany, almost every week. Swapping SIM cards was the way to go because no one wants to carry two phones, maintain two address books, etc.
If it didn't make a difference, carriers would allow it. Because locking a phone must be more expensive than not locking it. So it must make a difference that is profitable to them.
In Europe, all cell phones will need to be chargeable via micro USB interface starting January 2011. This might sound like manufacturers have become all green and nice and wanted to cooperate, but it was really the result of pressure put by the commission. They do a lot of bad shit, but some things they do are worth noting, like this one. Link to article.
another potential hole here is the social aspect of the deployment: it is only for Germans. And you have a large percent of foreigners living there, who use the same services as Germans. And I don't people from far away countries. I mean even other europeans who happen to live in Germany in accordance to all European rules.
These people use credit cards, do bank transactions, on-line shopping, etc. For these people, of which I belong to, our only means of authenticating is the passport. So in the end every single procedure that does not wish to lock out non-Germans must have a way to not use this ID.
So yes, this new Id might protect some Germans, but if there is a workaround, loop-holes will always be there.
Just give them your passport. They will happily accept it. That's what I and most foreigners living in Germany use to authenticate, because we don't have an ID card.
Slashdot Mirror
If I really had something to hide, I'd use key files on a very old USB dongle (128 MB dongle or so). Truecrypt and Bitlocker support this. Then police will most likely raid your house during this whole action. But even if not, when asked to provide the key I'd simply say "this was in a USB dongle. It was laying on my table, so now you tell me where you've put it after messing up my whole house". Or "I had it with me and after my spontaneous arrest I had no idea where you made me forget it". Police might eventually find the donlge, but if they ask what that is, I'd say "that was some old key, no idea for what or what the decryption password is. The key you are looking for was on a new dongle.
Thing is, it is easy to doubt that you know something. But you can get naked and show that you don't have anything hidden between your legs.
I think that we need to separate the magazines into categories. Are we talking about computer mags, porn, lifestyle, cartoons, or what? I can give some insight on some of them. My personal opinion is that computer magazines in Germany are "more insightful" than those in the US. For instance, many magazines in the US contain information that are available online. Magazines like the German C't are really pioneer in the sense that they contain *new* information, written in a professional way and well researched. When it comes to a job interview, if you say that you've written an article on C't, that gives you extra points. Not like Nature or Science, but it does bring some reputation.
On the other hand, magazines in the musical field are, in my opinion, better in the US. For instance the US Magazine "Keyboard" is really good. I'm not sure if there is a Rolling Stone's equivalent in Germany, but these magazines have definitely renown names and to me anything similar is just a copy.
You have many Linux magazines in Europe. They are ok, but nothing that you couldn't find online. Buying them saves you a lot of research time, but they are not really innovative. Other magazines are quite local and it is impossible to compare. These include business, cars, or lifestyle magazines.
I would say that with online availability of magazines, any magazine that survives is either laundrying money or has a reader-base. And as long as some people enjoy readying them, and you are not obliged to subsidize them with taxes like you do with BBC in UK or ZDF in Germany, then we cannot really talk about better or worse. Just buy what you like, and enjoy the read.
I don't wanna get into a patriotic fight or compare political programs. I just want to point out that many countries (not USA of course) finance the education of its citizens. It might be good or bad education, don't know, but they do at least consider education to be an essential part of human rights. Some examples that I'm aware of are countries in South America (Argentina) and Europe (Germany, Spain, Netherlands). I'm sure there are many more around the world.
I know that in Germany for instance, until not long ago even foreigners could study for almost free. My understanding is that this has changed though, and now only EU residents have that privilege.
Close.
Carrier tracking does not require a very precise model of the earth.
correct. Carrier tracking doesn't. But my understanding though, is that a 1 cm-accurate *positioning* does. This is at least what our survey-grade equipment vendor claimed.
Real Time Kinnematic GPS has been done for well over a decade with rather sane processing requirements. It also isn't unstable. So long as the L1 and L2 signal of five satellites are tracked one can initialize on the fly, and you only need to track four continuously to maintain said initialization
Which essentially means, that anything that is not surveying, driving on a highway, or airborne will be unstable. I didn't want to get into the details, but Slashdot readers should understand that you can't obtain cm accuracy when driving with trees and water reflections on the side of the road, trucks passing by that reflect signals, etc. For the reasons you've mentioned above, it is difficult to be continuously locked to 5 or more satellites, particular since re-syncing can take up-to 20 seconds even if the lock is lost for a very short period of time.
Yes. This has been done for many years in survey equipment. a typical combination of Navstar (U.S. GPS)/GLONASS increases the number of satellites in view and therefore the accuracy. The biggest problem with combinging Navstar and GLONASS is that Navstar is CDMA (code division multiple access) while GLONASS is FDMA (frequency division multiple access). The former technique makes each satellite use a different "language" sort to say, while the later one uses different frequencies. The result is that a dual receiver needs two independent receivers, making them more expensive. New GLONASS satellites will start using CDMA signals in addition to the FDMA, so that legacy receivers work, and some time in the future new CDMA receivers can use both Navstar and GLONASS with a single type of tuner. Galileo was from the ground up designed to use CDMA and as a result, it is much easier to design a Navstar/Galileo dual receiver. As a matter of fact, many survey devices designed for Navstar can be upgraded via a firmware update to use Galileo as well. You can't upgrade to use GLONASS with a simple firmware update, you also need another tuner.
Regarding accuracy, the thing is that you can't go much less than 5m by just adding more satellites. This is because this error is part of ionosphere delays, and more satellites can't correct this error. It is like trying to do a measurement by averaging 1000 readings, but all done with a bad ruler. At some point, you need to figure out how good your ruler is. And the problem is that this changes dynamically so standard Kalman filter techiques also stop being effective for better than 5m accuracy. There are two approaches for this: the first one is dual frequency, and this is in part how Galileo achieves better accuracy. The idea here is to exploit the dispersion property of the ionosphere. It works like this: different frequencies have different delays, so you send the same signal using different frequencies, measure the delay different, and solve for the ionosphere error. This is what survey-grade equipment do, but they do this by tracking the encrypted military P(Y) code, which is encrypted. The result is a dual frequency solution but full of hacks that make it unstable. This means, as soon as the signal is interrupted for a short time, you need to re-sync.
The other approach for sub meter accuracy come from differential GPS. This technique uses to close receivers, one with a fixed known location. By measuring the error on the known location, you can apply corrections to the moving rover. But for this you need a link between the two (radio, UMTS, GSM, etc) or some post-processing. In addition, you need receivers capable of recording RAW data and then doing some complex math.
The cream of the desert comes from using carrier-phase measurements. With this technique you can go up to cm accuracy. This requires tracking the actual carrier wave, and a very precise model of the earth or post-processing software. The accuracy comes at a price: very very unstable. You need clear blue sky and uninterrupted signals. Plus about 20 seconds to lock the signal, even after small interruptions.
So to answer your question: more satellites guarantee better consistency and readings, particularly in cities and urban landscape. But you can't go below 5m unless you enter differential GPS or dual frequency measurements.
Yes!! Yes!!! After this post, this might finally be the year of the FreeBSD Desktop!!!
Didn't you notice that I took the time to translate the article more or less two hours before you did? What's the point of doing it twice?
Here. I've tried to do a better translation from the Spanish article, which is actually quite well-written
Andreyev: "In the nuclear industry there are no independent organisms"
"The most dangerous reactor in Fukushima is 3, because it uses a fuel that combines uranium and plutonium," he states.
He spent five years at Chernobyl. He was vice-director of Spetsatom, the Soviet body for the fight against nuclear accidents, and he knows deep internals of how the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) works.
Yuri Andreyev (1938) is one of the most knowledgeable scientists in this area. For the case of Fukushima, he considers four potential scenarios of varying degrees of severity, from mild to very severe.
"In Fukushima, the most dangerous reactor is number three. This reactor uses MOX, a type of nuclear fuel that combines plutonium and uranium. France is currently using this type of fuel experimentally in two Japanese plants," says this expert.
In 1991 everything fell apart in Moscow. With the salary of a vice-minister of atomic energy --the position that was offered to Andreyev--, it was not enough to afford anything. Andreyev was invited by the Academy of Sciences of Austria to hold some conferences, and he eventually ended up settling in Vienna as an adviser of the minister of environment, at universities, and in the IAEA itself.
Chernoby is still surrounded by lies, he explains. The accident was not the responsibility of plant operators, as originally stated, but rather a clear design flaw in the RBMK reactors that resulted from cost savings. A proper design of those Soviet reactors would have required a large amount of zirconium --a rare metal--, as well as a maze of pipes, special techniques for welding zirconium, stainless steel, and huge amounts of concrete. It would have been a fortune, so they decided to reduce costs, said Andreyev.
Since uranium enrichment is a complicated and expensive process, one of the ways to achieve cost reduction was by feeding the reactor with relatively low-enriched uranium. All this effectively increased the risks, and it was against safety rules. However, the supervision of nuclear activities in the USSR was belonged to the Ministry of Atomic Energy. Something similar is happening today with the IAEA, as the UN agency "depends on the nuclear industry," said Andreyev. Under his view, the lies and secrets of Chernobyl are now fully present in Fukushima.
Security, money, irresponsibility
"Those who design nuclear power plants depend on two things: safety and cost. The problem is that security costs money. If you spend too much on security, the power plant it is not competitive. The accident at Three Mile Island is the perfect example. After the accident, it was clear that in order to convincingly prove that these type of accidents would not occur again would have required an improvement of security that would dramatically increase the cost of power plants, effectively rendering them useless. Not a single reactor was built in America for (the following) thirty years. Everything was very complicated in Chernobyl, but it also had to do with economy. Academician Rumyantsev showed that all RBMK reactors should have been shut down, but he was simply ignored. There are always people interested in hiding something ... "
What are they hiding?
They compromise on security in exchange for selfish interests. In the USSR, because of the cost of uranium enrichment, and in Japan simply for money. The location of central Japan, near the sea is the cheapest. Emergency generators were not buried and, of course, were flooded instantly .... Behind all this there is corruption. I have no proof, but they will not take long to show up. How can I design a nuclear power plant in an area of high seismic risk, near the ocean, with emergency generators at the surface?. The wave arrived and everything went out of service. This is not an error, but rather a crime.
What problems do you see with the poo
Is the speed at which an OS gets compromised a viable metric for its security? I mean, imagine (I'm talking hypothetically here) MacOS had 1 open bug that allows someone to compromise the system in 10 min, and Windows had 15 open holes, which of which would require 1 day to circumvent. Which OS is more secure? If you ask me, I'd say Windows because right now the MAC OS would be a better target. But that can change overnight if Apple released a patch. Quite often people also say that Mac OS is not targeted because of their market share. That IS a security advantage, even if it was given to them for free. For the average Joe, measuring security in a product should boil down to how likely is that his machine gets compromised, with all factors involved, including likelihood that someone cares. I think my Mint box is much more secure that my Windows box. Not because Mint is free of holes, but because no one really cares to hack me. And to me, at the end of the day that's all that matters.
I'm by no means implying that you are wrong, just that my experience is usually different so I wanted to share that. Guys typically listen carefully for advice and if they're buying online, they tend to get what you recommend them. But if they go to the store and the sales guy tells them "this is like the one you wanted but cheaper", then they buy their suggestion without consulting back. Women are in my experience a complete different story. I have been asked many times for advice when purchasing a computer, digital camera, external hard drive, etc, and the experience can be quite frustrating. Sometimes I spend hours researching the best option of them. Then they go to the store and buy a Casio camera because it was a nice "red" color or a Sony Vaio because it was slim, purple, and has a nice pattern on the lid. Now I don't spend so much time researching for them anymore. I let them get advice from the store and ask them to just double check with me. If the product is acceptable, I tell them to go ahead as long as they like it. I don't let them buy crap, but I don't fight for what I consider the best option either. And not because I've become a jerk or something, but because I've learned that the most important thing is that *they* are happy. And if a red camera makes them happy, then they should go for it.
>> Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to borrow from the F-22 and other U.S. stealth aircraft.
Several experts said the prototype's body appeared to steal from the F-22 and other U.S. stealth aircraft.
There. Much better. Now it goes inline with previous discussion in Slashdot regarding Chinese high-tech.
I think that everyone should take voting seriously. It is our way of expressing our opinion and in the end it decides many aspects of your life. Not voting kind of takes the right to complain later.
I do understand that you might hate all parties and decide not to vote as a way of complaining. But in such situations, an empty envelope (blank vote) would be a better way to protest. Not voting can be seen as lazy rather and the message lost and statistics do mix both to their will.
Don't know... I'm coming from a country where we had many years of dictatorship and now that we have democracy, I see voting as a luxury that we must fight for. It can be gone one day and you'll miss it, so don't take it for granted.
There are a handful of providers which cover the whole EU continent. They are in every land. If I call from my German Vodafone to Codafone in Greece, I still pay this ridiculous roaming charge.
Roaming fees are purely artificial, not technical.
Why did your post get rejected? I find it very informative and well supported with links. Thanks for bringing it back.
Warning! McAfee and Symantec have reported a new computer virus that is spreading widely over internet and snail mail. Actually it is not a virus, but an antibiotic, which will kill all your hard drive bacteria.
Security companies are working hand-on-hand with hard drive manufacturers for injecting the N-1 gene into the affected bacteria, with the hope of making them resistant to the virus or antibiotics, depending on how you want to call it. The medical community is getting nuts with the new definitions, and some people have even compared them to the Gb vs Gib war. There has also been discussion regarding the potential dangers of such bacteria mutating into a self-aware being. Oh wait, never mind. Please, every one move to SSD storage ASAP
Good points. I just wanted to add a comment from a friend working on the European Parliament on global warming. He mentioned that all reports he has read comparing the cost of nuclear power vs the rest, always fail to account for the cost of surveillance for the nuclear waste. Don't know how much that could be, but something to think about.
You are right, but in my experience setting up adblocking on Opera has been been a pain compared to Adblock. So not exactly needed in the theory. But if users use another browser because of this, then for Opera, it is really needed. This has been the case with me at least.
Quite often GPS also measures velocity directly. They typically do it by means of tracking the Doppler shifts, which they anyway need to do due to the high velocity of the satellite and position changes in the sky. By doing this, you get very accurate velocities, much better than what you'd get from differentiating position. It's very cool stuff, check it out.
Some description here:
http://www.aprs.net/vm/gps_cs.htm
by now, most people who wanted it so badly to be willing to pay 150 dollar for it have probably downloaded it illegally already.
Chinese technology is once again on its way to prove that they don't only make junk toys, but also state of the art machines, trains, space vehicles, and now airplanes. I wish them all the best.
The only thing that scares me a bit is who will certify their aircraft, and who will regulate and protect against the counterfeit of replacement parts. I trust the skills of Chinese scientists, but I don't trust the transparency of their government.
China is a country known for producing fake products and imitations of everything. This can be a serious issue in aerospace, and many accidents have been attributed to counterfeit parts in the past. But we won't see this until a few years beyond the first flights.
Things become more relevant if you roam a lot. I live in Europe, but the concept can be generalized. For me, when I go on vacation to visit relatives in Greece, I wanna be reachable by them. Roaming fees are plain ridiculous, plus no one will call me if they need to call an international number. So the standard thing to do is buy a cheap pre-paid card from Vodaphone for about 15 Euro~17 US$
My wife used to live in Dublin and would travel back and forth from Ireland to Germany, almost every week. Swapping SIM cards was the way to go because no one wants to carry two phones, maintain two address books, etc.
If it didn't make a difference, carriers would allow it. Because locking a phone must be more expensive than not locking it. So it must make a difference that is profitable to them.
In Europe, all cell phones will need to be chargeable via micro USB interface starting January 2011. This might sound like manufacturers have become all green and nice and wanted to cooperate, but it was really the result of pressure put by the commission. They do a lot of bad shit, but some things they do are worth noting, like this one. Link to article.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5852237,00.html
another potential hole here is the social aspect of the deployment: it is only for Germans. And you have a large percent of foreigners living there, who use the same services as Germans. And I don't people from far away countries. I mean even other europeans who happen to live in Germany in accordance to all European rules.
These people use credit cards, do bank transactions, on-line shopping, etc. For these people, of which I belong to, our only means of authenticating is the passport. So in the end every single procedure that does not wish to lock out non-Germans must have a way to not use this ID.
So yes, this new Id might protect some Germans, but if there is a workaround, loop-holes will always be there.
Just give them your passport. They will happily accept it. That's what I and most foreigners living in Germany use to authenticate, because we don't have an ID card.
>> The language itself is not yet open source,
ok, call me back once it is. I don't really need another programming language, let alone a closed-source once.