Netty looks real nice but is Java only, which is a shame. ZeroMQ also does non-blocking IO and lock-free communication between IO threads and application threads. It's nowhere as rich as Netty however.
You don't even need Erland, you can use a lightweight message-passing library like ZeroMQ that lets you build fast concurrent applications in 20 or so languages. It looks like sockets but implements Actors that connect in various patterns (pubsub, request-reply, butterfly), and works with Ruby, Python, C, C++, Java, Ada, C++, CLisp, Go, Haskell, Perl, and even Erlang. You can even mix components in any language.
You get concurrent apps with no shared state, no shared clock, and components that can come and go at any time, and communicate only by sending each other messages.
In hardware terms it lets you run one thread per core, at full efficiency, with no wait states. In software terms it lets you build at any scale, even to the scale of the human brain, which is basically a message-passing concurrent architecture.
Collusion... I recall, and I'm sorry to not be able to provide a reference, discussing with someone from DG Competition (the EU's anti-trust authority) in 2007, who said, more or less, "we were able to get the operators to agree to lower roaming voice rates, but in return we had to allow them to continue their high prices on roaming data".
The mobile operators negotiate collectively with the regulator to set rules on end user prices.
So what gives these operators freedom to control prices, collectively, over 20 years, beating off several attempts by anti-trust authorities? What legalises collusion and price-fixing? In any other market the very notion that regulators would have to accept continued high prices (artificially high, as is trivial to prove) in one segment in return for lower prices in another, would be shocking.
Let's see... we allow electricity companies to charge us 1000x the normal rate in exchange for keeping voltages to agreed levels. Or, we allow all the bars in a city to raise their prices by 1000x in exchange for allowing free access to their restrooms.
What legal tool is trumping regulation oversight and allowing the operators to continue to charge obscene amounts for roaming data?
Carriers do break away and start price wars, but it happens locally, in smaller countries. Clearly 3G licenses are not the factor since those break away carriers also paid expensive licenses.
Presumably the cartel agreements allow this kind of local flexibility, to satisfy national anti-trust issues. The French carriers were investigated for collusion and price fixing around 2000, iirc.
Do you have an alternative explanation as to why even the EU's anti-trust authorities have been unable to cut roaming costs, even though these are clearly harming inter-EU trade, and have no technical basis?
When a group of companies that effectively control a market maintain consistently high prices, this is illegal. It should have been broken up over 10 years ago.
Why do high roaming data and voice costs still exist? What actually stops the regulators from fixing this? You've not provided an explanation.
Yes, it's pretty clear from (failed) anti-trust proceedings in the EU against the telecoms operators that patents are the underlying long term reason for high costs that even regulators cannot correct. Patent licensing makes legal a cartel that would be criminal in any other case. There are no technical reasons for high mobile voice/data costs. Landline costs are low. Internet costs are low. GSM infrastructure is now 10+ years old in Europe.
The cost of spectrum might be responsible for short term high costs but those licenses are long paid off.
ITSUG controls who can and cannot do business with GSM in Europe and USA. Competition is excluded, prices are defined between members, and anti-trust authorities are powerless to intervene because it's all legal, thanks to patent licensing.
It does not even matter what the patents actually say. They simply enable the cartel, that's their key role here.
It is a legal tool designed to reduce competition in some area of business, in exchange for documenting that specific knowledge so that future generations can reuse it.
So two questions. One, do we need such documentation for software, in the form of patents? One might argue that patents do document, for example, steam engines from the 19th century. Are patents conceivably a proper form of documentation for software knowledge?
Second question, is the stopping of competition worth this documentation? For example, patents on the GSM stack are why we pay so much for mobile data and calls. Patents allow a cartel (ITSUG) that controls prices, legally. The only justification for ITSUG's existence is that future generations will receive a neat stack of over 500 patent families documenting how to build GSM networks and phones. Is this better than, for example, the unpatented RFC stack which allows the Internet to function, without cartels, and at a cost that is as much as 1M times less?
If you can answer YES to both these questions, go ahead with ways to improve software patent quality. If either answer is NO, abolish all legal monopolies on trade in software knowledge.
The reason software patents are described as funny kinds of machines is to get around the disgust with which most people feel when maths and logic are turned into private possessions by force of lobbying.
However, no matter how bizarre the patent language, and no matter whether or not the patent is granted or not, the final decision lies with a judge who determines whether or not the patent applies to a product being imported or sold. At this stage it is extremely simple to distinguish what is "software" from what is not. If you can download it and run it, it's software. So take for example a media player accused of infringing MP3 patents. If I can download and run a new codec, that is software.
Now, who decides whether or not software is patentable? Clearly this clique of US firms trying to control the NZ market are cheating by referring to "Europe", since the same clique hacked the EPC over so many years, fighting EU civil society for years as it then tried to make that hack into EU-wide law.
What they are now doing in Europe is to try to create a separate non-EU patent court that will decide on what is patentable, and what is not. Where judges are chosen by the patent industry. Which works for its clients, i.e. patent holders. I.e. Big pharma, big software, and big telco will be, indirectly but still in a controlled fashion, choosing the judges, and deciding on the outcome of patent arguments.
It seems relatively cheap to buy lawmakers.
The real issue here is simply democracy, and who makes the laws, and how.
Most likely Microsoft is paying friendly companies, as it paid Novell. The goal is to establish credibility for its "Linux patents" so that it can then attack its real enemies and convince a judge that since many other firms licensed these patents, they are valid. It's a fairly standard way of working.
The targets of these patents are most likely (a) Google, (b) Red Hat, and (c) large firms who are migrating their data centers to Linux. "Nice data center you have here, guv. Shame if something nasty, like errr... patents... were to 'appen to it. Can I interest you in this 'ere patent license? Only a thousand quid a day, guv!"
That "international civil liberties alliance" site you link to is a sewer of racism and worse. I *live* in Molenbeek, according to you a hotbed of intifada. Across the street a mosque, my neighbours North African like many here. And? I like it here. It's a bit dirty like much of Belgium but you would have to be insane, and I mean that literally, to claim that there is a muslim underground preparing to take over here.
The idea is... astounding. Brussels, like many European cities, is hugely diverse, with 70% immigration from all across the globe. People come here to get away from extremism and oppression.
The attacks on open wifi and anonymous internet access in EU came from the UK government, run by a bunch of Scottish labour thugs. They pushed this through in 2006 as the EU Data Retention Directive, after the UK parliament had rejected it by an 80% majority vote.
Now how you link that to muslims in Molenbeek really escapes me.
It's fine to use PHP and MySQL for Internet-facing applications but it's not fine to try that without caching. Hint: cache the page. If you really get heavy load, create a static HTML cache of it. The language and database have nothing to do with it, design has everything to do with it.
Wow. I've lived in Belgium since 1985, and bought perhaps 100 mobiles phones here, for myself and my company. Locked mobile phones (tied sales) were illegal in Belgium until recently, due to consumer protection laws. And even today the majority of phones are sold unlocked. Saying "everything in the Benelux is locked" is utter rubbish, sorry.
For what it's worth my last two phones were a Chinese phone ($50 touchscreen dual sim, great but dropped and broke) and a Samsung dual sim, bought in Poland. Poland BTW has a fair split 50-50 between locked and unlocked.
It is quite easy to upgrade the secondary (and primary) drives in the Eee 901 or Eee 1000 with fast SSDs. I've done this on two machines including my main travel machine, the Eee 1000.
Without that upgrade, running anything at all from the secondary (larger) SSD is horrible. E.g. FireFox, which continually writes to disk, just blocks for seconds at a time, over and over.
With the upgrade, it all works beautifully.
OpenOffice is, by the way, more than fast enough for working on large 200-page documents. The main known problem with OOo is in editing large spreadsheets. But for documents, and presentations, it's been fast on Linux boxes since 1999.
The main advantage of Google Docs is easy collaboration between different people, and automatic backup. Losing data on random portable devices is a serious problem that hurts more people than performance or feature changes.
So Google Docs is probably a good choice for beginners, and since most buyers of netbooks in my recent experience (after the geeks all bought theirs) are women with little previous experience... it makes perfect sense.
Anyhow, it's Ubuntu! One click and you install OpenOffice.org.
If you've ever tried a KIRF $50 Chinese smartphone you'll see that all that has been missing is Android. The Shanzai ability to innovate in hardware is so powerful that I predict this is the future model for building phones, computers, and such.
All that's been missing is a decent free OS.
While the Shanzai firms take over most of the world's production of smartphones, and sell their designs and models to Nokia, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft, they will also be taking over PMPs, netbooks, and god knows what else.
And finally we'll all be using $20 smartphones and $75 computers. I cannot wait.
"This site is the home for the new Global Patent Litigation Agreement.
Our mission:
Patent anything in the world Sue anyone in the world Our slogan:
One Court to Rule them All What is the GPLA?
The setting up of a Global Patent Judiciary by international treaty The construction of a Global Patent Court with full jurisdiction over all patent matters GPLA is cheap, easy, effective litigation for any WIPO patent. GPLA turns WIPO patents from worthless paper into money machines.
Note: GPLA is would be run by the WIPO Administrative Council."
PDF indeed has the advantage of being a fairly reliable way to deliver formal documents to end users. I get e-tickets as PDFs, and I send out invoices as PDFs.
There has always been a burden of turning information into knowledge, and Word used to be one of the better ways of doing this, as an individual author.
But more and more we prepare such formal documents mechanically, and we use other ways to create the really interesting works, which today are collaborative, not individual.
For me, the advent of cheap wiki platforms like Wikidot.com show the future. No paper, no heavy editors, but very rich collaborative tools that let us build knowledge bases through massive collaboration. In other words Wiki is killing Word.
Now, I am hoping for a simple wiki-based replacement for spreadsheets and presentations. Not emulation, but replacement.
Is there any scenario in which losing this case incompetently and ending up with an outlandish fine actually works against the RIAA? They do in the end need to win over public support and judgements like this one tell people, "piracy is dangerous but the recording industry are massively evil."
It swings the argument away from "piracy is theft and you'll be punished" to "piracy is an act of resistance against a fascist state and you'll be crucified".
The point being that there is no shortage of young guys willing to take the risk of getting figuratively killed if it potentially brings them the great glory of attacking an evil regime.
IMO the motivation of the PirateBay Three was fame and glory more than anything else.
Such judgements thus make it inevitable that the sharing of copyrighted music, movies, and TV will intensify.
The amazing thing is that we consider individual brains to be "intelligent" when it seems pretty clear we're only intelligent as part of a social network. None of us are able to live alone, work alone, think alone. The concept of "self" is largely a deceit designed to make us more competitive, but it does not reflect reality.
So how on earth can a computer be "intelligent" until it can take part in human society, with the same motivations and incentives: collect power, knowledge, information, friends, armies, territories, children...
Artificial intelligence already exists and it's called the Internet: it's a technology that amplifies our existing collective intelligence, by letting us connect to more people, faster, cheaper, than ever before.
The idea that computers can become intelligent independently and in parallel with this real global AI is insane, and it has always been. Computers are already part of our AI.
Actually, the telegraph was already a global AI tool.
The most likely consequence of this sentence is that clips of Jesus having sex with an angel will soar in popularity and previously uncool notions of what to put where, and with whom, dressed how, will become cool and fashionable.
Having one's product banned for being immoral is usually very good for business.
They'll probably earn more by being in jail for a year and a day than if they were found innocent.
...do not piss off the judge! It really is batshit stupid to do things like destroy evidence and make witnesses vanish (even temporarily). Why not go to court naked except for a t-shirt that says "Guilty as Hell" on the front and "Kiss my hairy butt" on the back?
The only way to handle such things is to find a way to be the victim of the situation, to prove that you did what you could to help, and that the case is unfair, aggressive, and misplaced.
And, if you don't like the law, work to change it, don't sell ways to get around it. Bad laws exist because people pretend they are helpless to change them.
Both Iran and China show dramatically how the Internet has become a tool of political change. This was already happening much earlier but not reported by main stream media.
For instance, web-based activists have been hitting politically in Europe since 1999, to prevent software patents. I've argued that Obama was the first "Internet president" since his campaign was heavily driven by Internet communities.
The fight by political elites to retain power, and the use of ever more sophisticated communications to break their grip, is a worldwide pattern.
So far, the Net has proven it will win such fights.
This will become a truism in future times: software is the expression of a social intelligence and the more people are involved, the better that works. FOSS is simply better at solving complex problems (like "how to build an operating system") than closed source development.
Ironically, while Google depends on FOSS for its most innovative attacks on Microsoft (Android, for example, which has leapt over WinCE and Symbian with what appears little effort), Google keeps its most valuable technology (searching) completely closed.
Thus, one can conclude that this is also Google's long term weakness. Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Belgian politics are not always polite. There is endless infighting. There is no monopoly of power, every government is a coalition and always fragile.
This makes election fraud very hard to organise and probably impossible to keep a secret. One would need to buy too many people, for too long.
So not because I trust the Belgian political establishment, but because I trust their incompetence and greed, I'm pretty satisfied that every vote is counted, and accurately.
Why is a voting system doing any kind of math at all? I voted yesterday in Belgium on a computer that puts my vote onto a card, which is then tallied separately. This same system has been working since at least 1995 with zero reports of fraud or failure (except normal "computer is broken" style failures).
How can a computer "add phantom ballots"? Software does not just "glitch", it breaks in ways that depend entirely on how it was built.
I've been using Chromium for some time on my Eee 1000, since FireFox hangs intermittently (slow SSD, which does not like apps that write a lot of stuff).
Chromium is a pleasant experience, fast and snappy. It used to crash all the time (e.g. when doing a copy/paste) but has been improved daily, and is now stable and usable. I don't know what the Google branded version would add on top. "DON'T DOWNLOAD" sounds like reverse psychology. Definitely, download, and use if you have a machine that is a little slower than the average desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Netty looks real nice but is Java only, which is a shame. ZeroMQ also does non-blocking IO and lock-free communication between IO threads and application threads. It's nowhere as rich as Netty however.
You don't even need Erland, you can use a lightweight message-passing library like ZeroMQ that lets you build fast concurrent applications in 20 or so languages. It looks like sockets but implements Actors that connect in various patterns (pubsub, request-reply, butterfly), and works with Ruby, Python, C, C++, Java, Ada, C++, CLisp, Go, Haskell, Perl, and even Erlang. You can even mix components in any language.
You get concurrent apps with no shared state, no shared clock, and components that can come and go at any time, and communicate only by sending each other messages.
In hardware terms it lets you run one thread per core, at full efficiency, with no wait states. In software terms it lets you build at any scale, even to the scale of the human brain, which is basically a message-passing concurrent architecture.
Collusion... I recall, and I'm sorry to not be able to provide a reference, discussing with someone from DG Competition (the EU's anti-trust authority) in 2007, who said, more or less, "we were able to get the operators to agree to lower roaming voice rates, but in return we had to allow them to continue their high prices on roaming data".
The mobile operators negotiate collectively with the regulator to set rules on end user prices.
So what gives these operators freedom to control prices, collectively, over 20 years, beating off several attempts by anti-trust authorities? What legalises collusion and price-fixing? In any other market the very notion that regulators would have to accept continued high prices (artificially high, as is trivial to prove) in one segment in return for lower prices in another, would be shocking.
Let's see... we allow electricity companies to charge us 1000x the normal rate in exchange for keeping voltages to agreed levels. Or, we allow all the bars in a city to raise their prices by 1000x in exchange for allowing free access to their restrooms.
What legal tool is trumping regulation oversight and allowing the operators to continue to charge obscene amounts for roaming data?
Answer: patents.
Carriers do break away and start price wars, but it happens locally, in smaller countries. Clearly 3G licenses are not the factor since those break away carriers also paid expensive licenses.
Presumably the cartel agreements allow this kind of local flexibility, to satisfy national anti-trust issues. The French carriers were investigated for collusion and price fixing around 2000, iirc.
Do you have an alternative explanation as to why even the EU's anti-trust authorities have been unable to cut roaming costs, even though these are clearly harming inter-EU trade, and have no technical basis?
When a group of companies that effectively control a market maintain consistently high prices, this is illegal. It should have been broken up over 10 years ago.
Why do high roaming data and voice costs still exist? What actually stops the regulators from fixing this? You've not provided an explanation.
Yes, it's pretty clear from (failed) anti-trust proceedings in the EU against the telecoms operators that patents are the underlying long term reason for high costs that even regulators cannot correct. Patent licensing makes legal a cartel that would be criminal in any other case. There are no technical reasons for high mobile voice/data costs. Landline costs are low. Internet costs are low. GSM infrastructure is now 10+ years old in Europe.
The cost of spectrum might be responsible for short term high costs but those licenses are long paid off.
ITSUG controls who can and cannot do business with GSM in Europe and USA. Competition is excluded, prices are defined between members, and anti-trust authorities are powerless to intervene because it's all legal, thanks to patent licensing.
It does not even matter what the patents actually say. They simply enable the cartel, that's their key role here.
Do you know what a patent is?
It is a legal tool designed to reduce competition in some area of business, in exchange for documenting that specific knowledge so that future generations can reuse it.
So two questions. One, do we need such documentation for software, in the form of patents? One might argue that patents do document, for example, steam engines from the 19th century. Are patents conceivably a proper form of documentation for software knowledge?
Second question, is the stopping of competition worth this documentation? For example, patents on the GSM stack are why we pay so much for mobile data and calls. Patents allow a cartel (ITSUG) that controls prices, legally. The only justification for ITSUG's existence is that future generations will receive a neat stack of over 500 patent families documenting how to build GSM networks and phones. Is this better than, for example, the unpatented RFC stack which allows the Internet to function, without cartels, and at a cost that is as much as 1M times less?
If you can answer YES to both these questions, go ahead with ways to improve software patent quality. If either answer is NO, abolish all legal monopolies on trade in software knowledge.
There is no grey area here.
The reason software patents are described as funny kinds of machines is to get around the disgust with which most people feel when maths and logic are turned into private possessions by force of lobbying.
However, no matter how bizarre the patent language, and no matter whether or not the patent is granted or not, the final decision lies with a judge who determines whether or not the patent applies to a product being imported or sold. At this stage it is extremely simple to distinguish what is "software" from what is not. If you can download it and run it, it's software. So take for example a media player accused of infringing MP3 patents. If I can download and run a new codec, that is software.
Now, who decides whether or not software is patentable? Clearly this clique of US firms trying to control the NZ market are cheating by referring to "Europe", since the same clique hacked the EPC over so many years, fighting EU civil society for years as it then tried to make that hack into EU-wide law.
What they are now doing in Europe is to try to create a separate non-EU patent court that will decide on what is patentable, and what is not. Where judges are chosen by the patent industry. Which works for its clients, i.e. patent holders. I.e. Big pharma, big software, and big telco will be, indirectly but still in a controlled fashion, choosing the judges, and deciding on the outcome of patent arguments.
It seems relatively cheap to buy lawmakers.
The real issue here is simply democracy, and who makes the laws, and how.
The EU data retention directive was pushed principally by the UK government.
Most likely Microsoft is paying friendly companies, as it paid Novell. The goal is to establish credibility for its "Linux patents" so that it can then attack its real enemies and convince a judge that since many other firms licensed these patents, they are valid. It's a fairly standard way of working.
The targets of these patents are most likely (a) Google, (b) Red Hat, and (c) large firms who are migrating their data centers to Linux. "Nice data center you have here, guv. Shame if something nasty, like errr... patents... were to 'appen to it. Can I interest you in this 'ere patent license? Only a thousand quid a day, guv!"
That "international civil liberties alliance" site you link to is a sewer of racism and worse. I *live* in Molenbeek, according to you a hotbed of intifada. Across the street a mosque, my neighbours North African like many here. And? I like it here. It's a bit dirty like much of Belgium but you would have to be insane, and I mean that literally, to claim that there is a muslim underground preparing to take over here.
The idea is... astounding. Brussels, like many European cities, is hugely diverse, with 70% immigration from all across the globe. People come here to get away from extremism and oppression.
The attacks on open wifi and anonymous internet access in EU came from the UK government, run by a bunch of Scottish labour thugs. They pushed this through in 2006 as the EU Data Retention Directive, after the UK parliament had rejected it by an 80% majority vote.
Now how you link that to muslims in Molenbeek really escapes me.
It's fine to use PHP and MySQL for Internet-facing applications but it's not fine to try that without caching. Hint: cache the page. If you really get heavy load, create a static HTML cache of it. The language and database have nothing to do with it, design has everything to do with it.
Wow. I've lived in Belgium since 1985, and bought perhaps 100 mobiles phones here, for myself and my company. Locked mobile phones (tied sales) were illegal in Belgium until recently, due to consumer protection laws. And even today the majority of phones are sold unlocked. Saying "everything in the Benelux is locked" is utter rubbish, sorry.
For what it's worth my last two phones were a Chinese phone ($50 touchscreen dual sim, great but dropped and broke) and a Samsung dual sim, bought in Poland. Poland BTW has a fair split 50-50 between locked and unlocked.
It is quite easy to upgrade the secondary (and primary) drives in the Eee 901 or Eee 1000 with fast SSDs. I've done this on two machines including my main travel machine, the Eee 1000.
Without that upgrade, running anything at all from the secondary (larger) SSD is horrible. E.g. FireFox, which continually writes to disk, just blocks for seconds at a time, over and over.
With the upgrade, it all works beautifully.
OpenOffice is, by the way, more than fast enough for working on large 200-page documents. The main known problem with OOo is in editing large spreadsheets. But for documents, and presentations, it's been fast on Linux boxes since 1999.
The main advantage of Google Docs is easy collaboration between different people, and automatic backup. Losing data on random portable devices is a serious problem that hurts more people than performance or feature changes.
So Google Docs is probably a good choice for beginners, and since most buyers of netbooks in my recent experience (after the geeks all bought theirs) are women with little previous experience... it makes perfect sense.
Anyhow, it's Ubuntu! One click and you install OpenOffice.org.
If you've ever tried a KIRF $50 Chinese smartphone you'll see that all that has been missing is Android. The Shanzai ability to innovate in hardware is so powerful that I predict this is the future model for building phones, computers, and such.
All that's been missing is a decent free OS.
While the Shanzai firms take over most of the world's production of smartphones, and sell their designs and models to Nokia, Samsung, Apple, and Microsoft, they will also be taking over PMPs, netbooks, and god knows what else.
And finally we'll all be using $20 smartphones and $75 computers. I cannot wait.
I actually predicted this almost three years ago and made a website for it.
http://gpla.wikidot.com/
"This site is the home for the new Global Patent Litigation Agreement.
Our mission:
Patent anything in the world
Sue anyone in the world
Our slogan:
One Court to Rule them All
What is the GPLA?
The setting up of a Global Patent Judiciary by international treaty
The construction of a Global Patent Court with full jurisdiction over all patent matters
GPLA is cheap, easy, effective litigation for any WIPO patent. GPLA turns WIPO patents from worthless paper into money machines.
Note: GPLA is would be run by the WIPO Administrative Council."
PDF indeed has the advantage of being a fairly reliable way to deliver formal documents to end users. I get e-tickets as PDFs, and I send out invoices as PDFs.
There has always been a burden of turning information into knowledge, and Word used to be one of the better ways of doing this, as an individual author.
But more and more we prepare such formal documents mechanically, and we use other ways to create the really interesting works, which today are collaborative, not individual.
For me, the advent of cheap wiki platforms like Wikidot.com show the future. No paper, no heavy editors, but very rich collaborative tools that let us build knowledge bases through massive collaboration. In other words Wiki is killing Word.
Now, I am hoping for a simple wiki-based replacement for spreadsheets and presentations. Not emulation, but replacement.
Is there any scenario in which losing this case incompetently and ending up with an outlandish fine actually works against the RIAA? They do in the end need to win over public support and judgements like this one tell people, "piracy is dangerous but the recording industry are massively evil."
It swings the argument away from "piracy is theft and you'll be punished" to "piracy is an act of resistance against a fascist state and you'll be crucified".
The point being that there is no shortage of young guys willing to take the risk of getting figuratively killed if it potentially brings them the great glory of attacking an evil regime.
IMO the motivation of the PirateBay Three was fame and glory more than anything else.
Such judgements thus make it inevitable that the sharing of copyrighted music, movies, and TV will intensify.
The amazing thing is that we consider individual brains to be "intelligent" when it seems pretty clear we're only intelligent as part of a social network. None of us are able to live alone, work alone, think alone. The concept of "self" is largely a deceit designed to make us more competitive, but it does not reflect reality.
So how on earth can a computer be "intelligent" until it can take part in human society, with the same motivations and incentives: collect power, knowledge, information, friends, armies, territories, children...
Artificial intelligence already exists and it's called the Internet: it's a technology that amplifies our existing collective intelligence, by letting us connect to more people, faster, cheaper, than ever before.
The idea that computers can become intelligent independently and in parallel with this real global AI is insane, and it has always been. Computers are already part of our AI.
Actually, the telegraph was already a global AI tool.
But, whatever, boys with toys...
The most likely consequence of this sentence is that clips of Jesus having sex with an angel will soar in popularity and previously uncool notions of what to put where, and with whom, dressed how, will become cool and fashionable.
Having one's product banned for being immoral is usually very good for business.
They'll probably earn more by being in jail for a year and a day than if they were found innocent.
...do not piss off the judge! It really is batshit stupid to do things like destroy evidence and make witnesses vanish (even temporarily). Why not go to court naked except for a t-shirt that says "Guilty as Hell" on the front and "Kiss my hairy butt" on the back?
The only way to handle such things is to find a way to be the victim of the situation, to prove that you did what you could to help, and that the case is unfair, aggressive, and misplaced.
And, if you don't like the law, work to change it, don't sell ways to get around it. Bad laws exist because people pretend they are helpless to change them.
Both Iran and China show dramatically how the Internet has become a tool of political change. This was already happening much earlier but not reported by main stream media.
For instance, web-based activists have been hitting politically in Europe since 1999, to prevent software patents. I've argued that Obama was the first "Internet president" since his campaign was heavily driven by Internet communities.
The fight by political elites to retain power, and the use of ever more sophisticated communications to break their grip, is a worldwide pattern.
So far, the Net has proven it will win such fights.
This will become a truism in future times: software is the expression of a social intelligence and the more people are involved, the better that works. FOSS is simply better at solving complex problems (like "how to build an operating system") than closed source development.
Ironically, while Google depends on FOSS for its most innovative attacks on Microsoft (Android, for example, which has leapt over WinCE and Symbian with what appears little effort), Google keeps its most valuable technology (searching) completely closed.
Thus, one can conclude that this is also Google's long term weakness. Microsoft: if you want to beat Google, find a way to develop a completely open search ranking system.
Belgian politics are not always polite. There is endless infighting. There is no monopoly of power, every government is a coalition and always fragile.
This makes election fraud very hard to organise and probably impossible to keep a secret. One would need to buy too many people, for too long.
So not because I trust the Belgian political establishment, but because I trust their incompetence and greed, I'm pretty satisfied that every vote is counted, and accurately.
Why is a voting system doing any kind of math at all? I voted yesterday in Belgium on a computer that puts my vote onto a card, which is then tallied separately. This same system has been working since at least 1995 with zero reports of fraud or failure (except normal "computer is broken" style failures).
How can a computer "add phantom ballots"? Software does not just "glitch", it breaks in ways that depend entirely on how it was built.
I've been using Chromium for some time on my Eee 1000, since FireFox hangs intermittently (slow SSD, which does not like apps that write a lot of stuff).
Chromium is a pleasant experience, fast and snappy. It used to crash all the time (e.g. when doing a copy/paste) but has been improved daily, and is now stable and usable. I don't know what the Google branded version would add on top. "DON'T DOWNLOAD" sounds like reverse psychology. Definitely, download, and use if you have a machine that is a little slower than the average desktop.