Sure, but after over 100 years of designing plastics with a wide variety of properties and applications, I don't see why we couldn't make plastics that can be (part of) road surfaces, too. If I understand correctly, the performance in wet conditions still has to be tested, but the temperature tolerance is already wider than that of asphalt. Combating the slippery when wet problem has been done before, too (e.g. the anti-slip coating on bath tubs or fiberglass yachts), although I am not aware of any efforts specifically to support cars and tires.
I've read the assertion that plastic roads sound like a crazy idea elsewhere, too. I don't think this ideas is crazy at all. Why would it be? We currently pave roads with asphalt which we get from crude oil. It makes sense to me that if we process the crude (or some other oil or source of hydrocarbons; say, recycled plastic) we can make something that works similarly well or even better.
Well yes. But this is a protection against government snooping. It's my understanding that the EU right extend to protection against private entities spying. Like what Google/Facebook may or may not collect.
Right. In general, people in the EU worry a lot more than Americans about what corporations do with their data, and a lot less about what the government does with their data.
The article, though, is about government surveillance of its citizens, and suggests that there is no protection against this written in the US constitution, which it seems to me there actually is. Of course, as you and others have pointed out, that doesn't mean the data isn't being collected and retained anyway, but I do think there is actually a privacy law on the books, right there in the US constitution.
a right of privacy is only inferred by U.S. high courts and is not written into constitutions
You mean other than:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
As a European who moved to the USA a few years ago, I don't think that's quite right. Europe varies from people who have a seemingly unshakable faith in the government to people who will not trust any government, anywhere, ever. On one side, people won't stand up to the government, because why oppose them? On the other side, people won't stand up to the government, at least not openly, until they are fairly confident they can topple it.
By comparison, in the USA, I think a lot of people believe that, anything the government does, they will mess up. Still, depending on the issue, people still look to the government to take care of things. In general, I find there is a lot more debate Statesside about what the government should and shouldn't do, and I really like that.
Where I think the differences are is in that many European governments tend to stand up for the people more, whereas governments in the USA tend to facilitate things for businesses more. For example, people in Europe care a lot about limiting companies' access to their information, politicians listen, and the laws governing what companies can do with peoples' information are fairly strict. In the USA, many companies are somewhat reluctant to do business in Europe because of the legal hurdles. For an example of the differences, see the EU directive that requires websites to notify people of cookie usage.
As for broadband Internet, I think the folks on this discussion who said it is about competition have the right of it. Competition in infrastructure is difficult. So many European countries regulate the infrastructure, and the competition happens at the service level. When done well, the companies selling the services don't also own the infrastructure, and so the service providers compete on an even playing field.
Where I live in the States, Comcast owns the television cable and sells cable Internet service, whereas AT&T owns the telephone lines and sells ADSL. There are a couple of independent ISPs struggling to roll out their own infrastructure. If you are in one of the few areas serviced by the independent ISPs, you can reportedly get great service at good prices. If not, you will have to deal with Comcast (expensive, decent speeds, customer service varies) or AT&T (no experience with them, but they are said to be expensive, slow, and horrible). Elsewhere, there may be other providers, but the story is much the same: infra is owned by the same companies selling the service, so you only get one choice per technology. And the infrastructure is expensive to build, so don't hold your breath for multiple cable providers or even just one fiber provider. This is in a wealthy, high-tech, densely populated area. In rural areas, things are likely worse.
Every time we discuss some tech company on Slashdot, I'm surprised no-one from that company chimes in. In this thread, I have seen a lot of comments from various people, even including some who work for telcos, just not in the USA. Given that there are quite a few cool technologies to play with at telcos, surely some of the folks who work there must be on Slashdot. Am I wrong? Or are they forbidden from joining these discussions, and afraid of the consequences if they do?
At first, I thought the story here is that the U.S. government spends 70% of its budget on writing checks. To which my response would have been that moving to something more efficient than the ridiculous banking system we have in the U.S. would then make the federal government much more efficient.
It appears to be that, rather, 70% of the budget is being paid out to individuals - much of it in the form of health benefits, social security, and income security. Is that cause for concern? Direct payments to individuals have increased relative to other things the federal government spends money on. Ok, the percentages move, that's expected. They're now at 70% of the total budget. Ok, that's somewhat interesting. But what's the actual story here? Is some program growing faster than tax revenue to the point that we have to be concerned that we won't be able to afford it anymore? Did total budget decrease, thus making the percentage larger? Do you feel that the government is spending money on things they shouldn't be spending (as much) money on?
The article provides some more detail: it claims the percentage spent on income security will drop from 25% in 2009 to 17% in 2019, as more is spent on "middle-class entitlement programs such as ObamaCare". So I guess the problem isn't with the 70% being paid to individuals, but with the individuals it gets paid to. Fair enough, we all have our own ideas about which groups the government should be sending money to (if anyone), but perhaps it would have been more productive to get straight to that part, instead of suggesting that 70% is rather high, when the thing you would like money to be spent on is actually part of that 70%.
aptitude so dependencies automatically get installed and uninstalled. Edit the configuration to not install recommended packages by default. Keep it lean!
Then:
openntpd (or some other ntpd) so the computer will know what time it is.
sudo so that I can log in as a regular user and still do system maintenance.
openssh-server (or some other SSH server) so I can log in remotely. I usually change the port number. Make sure root logins are disabled.
tmux so that I can have multiple shells in a single ssh session. screen works for this, too, but I recently switched to tmux.
rsync so that I can copy files around efficiently.
After that, it depends on what I want to do with the system. Usually, there will be at least some software development, so build-essential (libc-dev, gcc, make), irb, git. Usually ssh and some network debugging tools like ping and traceroute6.
I like zsh, so if I'm going to be using the system extensively, I'll install that. If this is my primary system, irssi and mutt. If the system has enough memory to run it, emacs24-nox.
If I want a GUI, xserver-xorg, xterm, whatever window manager I happen to like at the moment (wmii), some web browser (iceweasel).
It's been a while since I've last done this, so I may have missed some things, but this seems to be about it. The package names are for Debian-like systems and will likely be a bit different for other systems, but I don't generally maintain those.
Having been somewhat involved in the migration of a lot of C++ code from older versions of gcc to gcc 4.8.1, I can tell you that 4.8.1 definitely has bugs, in particular with -ftree-slp-vectorize. This doesn't appear to be a huge problem in that almost all the (correct) C++ code we threw at the compiler produced good compiler output, meaning that the quality of the compiler is very good overall. If you do find a bug, and you have some code that reproduces the problem, file a bug report, and the gcc devs will fix the problem. At any rate, gcc 4.8.2 has been out for a number of months now, so if you're still on 4.8.1, you may want to upgrade.
To answer your question, you would basically ask TAO for all objects which are connected to the object that represents you by the "friend" association.
TAO would then do whatever database queries are necessary to get what it doesn't already have in cache, cache the results, and return them to you.
In 1994, Berkeley graduate students Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen replaced the Ingres-based QUEL query language interpreter with one for the SQL query language
Not to detract from anything else in your post, but my understanding of the Fukushima nuclear incident is that the problem wasn't so much that the reactors didn't shut down or that there were runaway nuclear reactions, but rather that there wasn't enough cooling. As I remember it, the reactors shut down just fine as soon as the earthquake hit, but the aftermath of that earthquake caused such a great disaster that it was difficult to get power to the cooling systems and emergency cooling equipment to the site. Do I misremember?
I wonder how well this will run. Although Firefox has slimmed down somewhat after the 2.x era, it has never been particularly lightweight in my experience. About every other smartphone OS maker who has gone the "thou shalt build thy apps using HTML5, not native code" has been burned by bad performance, even when they launched with high-end phones.
According to this CNET review, the ZTE Open is at least faster than the Alcatel Fire, which they describe as slow and laggy.
I guess all this means that they are aiming Firefox OS at the low end of the market, where performance matters less than being able to afford a smartphone. However, I've always found it strange that companies do that - if you are going to make a low-end device, wouldn't you want to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources you have by running native code even more than if you had plenty of CPU cycles and RAM to burn?
I feel for people who work for Microsoft these days. People I know who have worked there say it is a great company to work for (especially Microsoft Research), but it can't be good for morale that several of their recent major releases have met with so much backlash.
In an attempt to grab the niche market, they seem to be eviscerating their core one.. Which I really just don't understand..
Maybe they are betting that the PC will decline and the other devices they make software for (phones, tablets, touch screen laptops, Xbox) will take over. By unifying the UI, they will then offer a consistent interface that people are likely to already be familiar with.
The making of the font is a political statement against government machinery and software spying on us and taking our humanity away. As such, I'd say it's quite clever and attention-getting.
Oh, I thought the point was figuring out how many unsuspecting netizens could be fooled into seriously discussing what is obviously a joke.
I mean, first we get a whole uproar about the NSA wiretapping, as if this is news. This was going on when Bush the second was president, and was widely discussed at the time. Really, this isn't news.
Then we get people seriously believing things like the NSA using more storage capacity than has actually been manufactured worldwide, or an operation like what the NSA was purportedly carrying out costing only 20 million dollars.
And now people are seriously talking about a *font* that is supposed to somehow stymie these efforts.
Clearly, someone is playing some netwide joke on us. The thing is, I'm not really amused, because there are real issues here and real people are being negatively affected by all this nonsense.
I often hear this argument about NIMBYs, but I wonder how much of a problem that actually is. I'm sure you are right that there will be protests no matter what kind of power plant you want to build, but, in the meantime, around the world (and I believe in the USA, too), fossil fuel burning power plants are still being built. Looks to me like you can get stuff done despite the NIMBYs.
Games. As far as I am concerned, Microsoft Windows is the best platform for computer games, and has been for years. For other things I do with computers, I prefer other platforms, though.
"for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud"
If they can do that, why don't they just make the actual console more powerful? I don't see how having 3/4 of your processing power located remotely is better than having it locally. And instead of the 500GB local storage that is frankly not that much by today's standards, they could have 2TB of local storage.
There is a difference between "we need this" and "this is a useful feature". As a species, we don't _need_ to buy furniture that someone else has built, but I'm sure most of us prefer it over growing our own trees, mining our own iron ore, extracting our own iron, making our own tools, and building our own furniture. For one thing, we'll have more time to devote to doing other things. This is progress, man. Why all the hate?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but after over 100 years of designing plastics with a wide variety of properties and applications, I don't see why we couldn't make plastics that can be (part of) road surfaces, too. If I understand correctly, the performance in wet conditions still has to be tested, but the temperature tolerance is already wider than that of asphalt. Combating the slippery when wet problem has been done before, too (e.g. the anti-slip coating on bath tubs or fiberglass yachts), although I am not aware of any efforts specifically to support cars and tires.
I've read the assertion that plastic roads sound like a crazy idea elsewhere, too. I don't think this ideas is crazy at all. Why would it be? We currently pave roads with asphalt which we get from crude oil. It makes sense to me that if we process the crude (or some other oil or source of hydrocarbons; say, recycled plastic) we can make something that works similarly well or even better.
Well yes. But this is a protection against government snooping. It's my understanding that the EU right extend to protection against private entities spying. Like what Google/Facebook may or may not collect.
Right. In general, people in the EU worry a lot more than Americans about what corporations do with their data, and a lot less about what the government does with their data.
The article, though, is about government surveillance of its citizens, and suggests that there is no protection against this written in the US constitution, which it seems to me there actually is. Of course, as you and others have pointed out, that doesn't mean the data isn't being collected and retained anyway, but I do think there is actually a privacy law on the books, right there in the US constitution.
a right of privacy is only inferred by U.S. high courts and is not written into constitutions
You mean other than:
?
Not even kidding. I really am.
I'm already imaginig a Beowulf cluster of these.
As a European who moved to the USA a few years ago, I don't think that's quite right. Europe varies from people who have a seemingly unshakable faith in the government to people who will not trust any government, anywhere, ever. On one side, people won't stand up to the government, because why oppose them? On the other side, people won't stand up to the government, at least not openly, until they are fairly confident they can topple it.
By comparison, in the USA, I think a lot of people believe that, anything the government does, they will mess up. Still, depending on the issue, people still look to the government to take care of things. In general, I find there is a lot more debate Statesside about what the government should and shouldn't do, and I really like that.
Where I think the differences are is in that many European governments tend to stand up for the people more, whereas governments in the USA tend to facilitate things for businesses more. For example, people in Europe care a lot about limiting companies' access to their information, politicians listen, and the laws governing what companies can do with peoples' information are fairly strict. In the USA, many companies are somewhat reluctant to do business in Europe because of the legal hurdles. For an example of the differences, see the EU directive that requires websites to notify people of cookie usage.
As for broadband Internet, I think the folks on this discussion who said it is about competition have the right of it. Competition in infrastructure is difficult. So many European countries regulate the infrastructure, and the competition happens at the service level. When done well, the companies selling the services don't also own the infrastructure, and so the service providers compete on an even playing field.
Where I live in the States, Comcast owns the television cable and sells cable Internet service, whereas AT&T owns the telephone lines and sells ADSL. There are a couple of independent ISPs struggling to roll out their own infrastructure. If you are in one of the few areas serviced by the independent ISPs, you can reportedly get great service at good prices. If not, you will have to deal with Comcast (expensive, decent speeds, customer service varies) or AT&T (no experience with them, but they are said to be expensive, slow, and horrible). Elsewhere, there may be other providers, but the story is much the same: infra is owned by the same companies selling the service, so you only get one choice per technology. And the infrastructure is expensive to build, so don't hold your breath for multiple cable providers or even just one fiber provider. This is in a wealthy, high-tech, densely populated area. In rural areas, things are likely worse.
Every time we discuss some tech company on Slashdot, I'm surprised no-one from that company chimes in. In this thread, I have seen a lot of comments from various people, even including some who work for telcos, just not in the USA. Given that there are quite a few cool technologies to play with at telcos, surely some of the folks who work there must be on Slashdot. Am I wrong? Or are they forbidden from joining these discussions, and afraid of the consequences if they do?
No wonder the dinosaurs went extinct! Running the A/C all the time, they caused so much climate change that they wiped themselves out!
Personally, I like the message that says "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." I wonder who came up with that one.
At first, I thought the story here is that the U.S. government spends 70% of its budget on writing checks. To which my response would have been that moving to something more efficient than the ridiculous banking system we have in the U.S. would then make the federal government much more efficient.
It appears to be that, rather, 70% of the budget is being paid out to individuals - much of it in the form of health benefits, social security, and income security. Is that cause for concern? Direct payments to individuals have increased relative to other things the federal government spends money on. Ok, the percentages move, that's expected. They're now at 70% of the total budget. Ok, that's somewhat interesting. But what's the actual story here? Is some program growing faster than tax revenue to the point that we have to be concerned that we won't be able to afford it anymore? Did total budget decrease, thus making the percentage larger? Do you feel that the government is spending money on things they shouldn't be spending (as much) money on?
The article provides some more detail: it claims the percentage spent on income security will drop from 25% in 2009 to 17% in 2019, as more is spent on "middle-class entitlement programs such as ObamaCare". So I guess the problem isn't with the 70% being paid to individuals, but with the individuals it gets paid to. Fair enough, we all have our own ideas about which groups the government should be sending money to (if anyone), but perhaps it would have been more productive to get straight to that part, instead of suggesting that 70% is rather high, when the thing you would like money to be spent on is actually part of that 70%.
First things first:
aptitude so dependencies automatically get installed and uninstalled. Edit the configuration to not install recommended packages by default. Keep it lean!
Then:
openntpd (or some other ntpd) so the computer will know what time it is.
sudo so that I can log in as a regular user and still do system maintenance.
openssh-server (or some other SSH server) so I can log in remotely. I usually change the port number. Make sure root logins are disabled.
tmux so that I can have multiple shells in a single ssh session. screen works for this, too, but I recently switched to tmux.
rsync so that I can copy files around efficiently.
After that, it depends on what I want to do with the system. Usually, there will be at least some software development, so build-essential (libc-dev, gcc, make), irb, git. Usually ssh and some network debugging tools like ping and traceroute6.
I like zsh, so if I'm going to be using the system extensively, I'll install that. If this is my primary system, irssi and mutt. If the system has enough memory to run it, emacs24-nox.
If I want a GUI, xserver-xorg, xterm, whatever window manager I happen to like at the moment (wmii), some web browser (iceweasel).
It's been a while since I've last done this, so I may have missed some things, but this seems to be about it. The package names are for Debian-like systems and will likely be a bit different for other systems, but I don't generally maintain those.
Having been somewhat involved in the migration of a lot of C++ code from older versions of gcc to gcc 4.8.1, I can tell you that 4.8.1 definitely has bugs, in particular with -ftree-slp-vectorize. This doesn't appear to be a huge problem in that almost all the (correct) C++ code we threw at the compiler produced good compiler output, meaning that the quality of the compiler is very good overall. If you do find a bug, and you have some code that reproduces the problem, file a bug report, and the gcc devs will fix the problem. At any rate, gcc 4.8.2 has been out for a number of months now, so if you're still on 4.8.1, you may want to upgrade.
Check out https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/tao-the-power-of-the-graph/10151525983993920
To answer your question, you would basically ask TAO for all objects which are connected to the object that represents you by the "friend" association.
TAO would then do whatever database queries are necessary to get what it doesn't already have in cache, cache the results, and return them to you.
Go back further to when MySQL got momentum and Postgres did not do SQL *AT ALL*.
[citation needed]
Actually, let me get some citations for you, although they contradict your statement:
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postgresql
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysql
So it would appear that Postgres supported SQL before MySQL even existed.
Not to detract from anything else in your post, but my understanding of the Fukushima nuclear incident is that the problem wasn't so much that the reactors didn't shut down or that there were runaway nuclear reactions, but rather that there wasn't enough cooling. As I remember it, the reactors shut down just fine as soon as the earthquake hit, but the aftermath of that earthquake caused such a great disaster that it was difficult to get power to the cooling systems and emergency cooling equipment to the site. Do I misremember?
I wonder how well this will run. Although Firefox has slimmed down somewhat after the 2.x era, it has never been particularly lightweight in my experience. About every other smartphone OS maker who has gone the "thou shalt build thy apps using HTML5, not native code" has been burned by bad performance, even when they launched with high-end phones.
According to this CNET review, the ZTE Open is at least faster than the Alcatel Fire, which they describe as slow and laggy.
I guess all this means that they are aiming Firefox OS at the low end of the market, where performance matters less than being able to afford a smartphone. However, I've always found it strange that companies do that - if you are going to make a low-end device, wouldn't you want to make the most efficient use of the hardware resources you have by running native code even more than if you had plenty of CPU cycles and RAM to burn?
I feel for people who work for Microsoft these days. People I know who have worked there say it is a great company to work for (especially Microsoft Research), but it can't be good for morale that several of their recent major releases have met with so much backlash.
In an attempt to grab the niche market, they seem to be eviscerating their core one.. Which I really just don't understand..
Maybe they are betting that the PC will decline and the other devices they make software for (phones, tablets, touch screen laptops, Xbox) will take over. By unifying the UI, they will then offer a consistent interface that people are likely to already be familiar with.
The making of the font is a political statement against government machinery and software spying on us and taking our humanity away. As such, I'd say it's quite clever and attention-getting.
Oh, I thought the point was figuring out how many unsuspecting netizens could be fooled into seriously discussing what is obviously a joke.
I mean, first we get a whole uproar about the NSA wiretapping, as if this is news. This was going on when Bush the second was president, and was widely discussed at the time. Really, this isn't news.
Then we get people seriously believing things like the NSA using more storage capacity than has actually been manufactured worldwide, or an operation like what the NSA was purportedly carrying out costing only 20 million dollars.
And now people are seriously talking about a *font* that is supposed to somehow stymie these efforts.
Clearly, someone is playing some netwide joke on us. The thing is, I'm not really amused, because there are real issues here and real people are being negatively affected by all this nonsense.
There are more geeks helping the NSA builds a Stasi apperatus than there are geeks working on building a truely anonymous and untappable internet.
[citation needed]
I often hear this argument about NIMBYs, but I wonder how much of a problem that actually is. I'm sure you are right that there will be protests no matter what kind of power plant you want to build, but, in the meantime, around the world (and I believe in the USA, too), fossil fuel burning power plants are still being built. Looks to me like you can get stuff done despite the NIMBYs.
Games. As far as I am concerned, Microsoft Windows is the best platform for computer games, and has been for years. For other things I do with computers, I prefer other platforms, though.
"for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud"
If they can do that, why don't they just make the actual console more powerful? I don't see how having 3/4 of your processing power located remotely is better than having it locally. And instead of the 500GB local storage that is frankly not that much by today's standards, they could have 2TB of local storage.
I think there's something they're not telling us.
There is a difference between "we need this" and "this is a useful feature". As a species, we don't _need_ to buy furniture that someone else has built, but I'm sure most of us prefer it over growing our own trees, mining our own iron ore, extracting our own iron, making our own tools, and building our own furniture. For one thing, we'll have more time to devote to doing other things. This is progress, man. Why all the hate?