Also I'm kinda curious: Why would spend twice as much to buy an Intel Mac PC if they're just running linux? I'd buy a regular PC for 1/2 to 2/3rd the cost.
I looked for a silent small footprint linux pc. I was unable to find one. That's why I bought a Mac Mini. It runs Linux flawlessly... and silently thanks to the fanless design and SSD.
People wanting an HD screen on a laptop might also have to buy Apple hardware even though they plan to use only Linux.
Some bugs are so deep the open source process can't fix them.
Some bugs are so deep that they are very difficult to fix. FTFY
Search Google for "prune_one_dentry oops". [...] nobody wants to take that on.
FUD. The fix is in the work for a long time. Christoph Lameter recently (01/29/2010) submitted the 15th iteration of the patch set. Hopefuly this time no unforeseen consequences will prevent it to be merged into the official kernel. You can read about it here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/29/332
Who modded parent insightful?
Most countries that do not have punitive damage allowances in their laws are usually run by tyrants anyways. The concept of punitive damages does not even exist in Civil Law countries.
Here is a nice map where you will see that Civil Law is by far the predominant system of law in the world (including for instance all European countries barring the British Islands, Japan, Mexico etc. all known to be "run by tyrants").
For your information, the institution of punitive damages only appeared in England at the end of the eighteenth century (the first case dates to 1763). To put it into perspective Civil Law was first codified 529AD. Punitive damages then crossed the Atlantic Ocean and became an established part of the law of the United States, and at the same time, from England, it spread through all the countries of the Commonwealth. Despite the fact that they are criticized, limited, and controlled, their existence remains in most Common Law countries. On the contrary, punitive damages play an important role in the United States, where they can be exceptionally high.
Most countries in the world are quite happy to do without punitive damage allowances. In those countries, Exxon would be effectively prosecuted under criminal law. Of course, such an ideal system does not work very well when prosecutors are given orders by politicians elected thanks to Exxon money. Maybe that's why the US needs punitive damages and most other countries don't.
They just have some stupid browser sniffing in place to serve you the 'right' license agreement depending on your OS (or more precisely depending on the OS advertised by your User Agent).
As a linux user, i just get a blank page (not even an error message).
A diff between the Windows and OSX licenses doesn't show any difference though (only the name of the product in the title differs).
The OECD's methodology is seriously flawed...
[skipping a long rant with many dubious unsourced figures] ...the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second "fast lane."
Enough said...
In most developped countries, 1.5 to 3.0 mb/s is only considered to be the "fast lane"... on cellphones.
I consider my quadruple-play 20mb/s DSL to be a bit slow (one phone call and two HDTV channels - both over IP - are enough to eat almost half my bandwith) so I will switch before the end of the year to 100mb/s FTTH (for 30 euros/month including free unlimited calls to 45 countries).
Maybe the fact that I can choose among 20 broadband ISPs in my area has more to do with it than all your pseudo-reasons about density, geographic size, household size and whatnot.
And the fact that we provide much greater than 24% of the UNs military deployments is irrellevant, right?
It's not irrelevant but false: the U.S. provides 0.005% of the blue helmets (yes, you read that right).
Of the 191 UN member states, 94 contribute 39,329 troops to 13 different missions.
The five permanent members of the security council, who effectively ordered all those blue helmets dispatched, provide 1,030 troops in total.
The US has deployed a quarter of a million troops in Iraq and several thousand in Afghanistan. To serve the UN in 2003, it sent two soldiers. The UK does slightly better: 415 British troops currently wear blue helmets.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India and Ghana are the five main contributors, providing 18,745 troops.
Note: those figures dates back to february 2004.
One more point : since 1990, in missions in Sierra Leone and Liberia alone, more than 1,200 peacekeepers died. One of them was Canadian, the others were all Nigerians.
Why exactly should we be carrying 25% of the total cost of the UN?
It is not 25% anymore, it is 24%: the U.S. asked for a rebate a few years ago.
We are one of 185 countries.
This is a stupid metric: do you really think that East Timor (2004 GDP: $370,000,000) should pay the same amount as the U.S. (2004 GDP: $11,750,000,000,000)?
The US I doubt has 25% of world economic output
The US GDP was 21.17% of the world GDP in 2004.
Every other rich country pays a little bit more than its fair share to compensate for countries in civil war or deep economic crisis. Japan for instance is paying 19% of the budget for less than 10% of the global GDP, Gernany 8% of the budget for less than 5% of the global GDP and so on.
So with 24% of the budget for 21.17% of the global GDP, the U.S. contribution seen as a share of its GDP is already the lowest of all developped countries: in raw dollars, the U.S. assessments of $440,000,000 is 0.0037% of its GDP when Japan for instance pays $346,000,000 i.e. 0.0092% of its GDP. So you personally are contributing almost 3 time less of your annual incomes to the U.N. than a japanese or me in Europe.
so I can't determine any other reason other than "the US should pay".
What about "everyone except the US has already paid its (proportionaly larger) share"?
If the U.S. was at least paying 21.17% of the budget instead of 24%, the complaints would not be so loud.
The problem is that the U.S. has not even paid half its commitments for 2004, and not even 15% of its due for 2005 (that is less than 4% of the U.N. budget). In contrast, every other major contributor has already fully paid 2004 and 2005.
If you aggregate the effective payements made on the last 12 months, the U.S. is only the 6th contributor to the U.N. budget, behind Italy (2.89% of the world GDP)!
Here are the hard and daunting data (remember you asked for it): http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/tables/reg-bud get/large05.htm
Why do you think U.S. officials always speak of the assessments (never the payments)?
I said: "DRM systems don't work."
You replied: "I disagree."
So let's see your argumnents to disagree :
There will always be people who break DRMs. Look at DeCCS, by your logic, every signle DVD released should have been immediately pirated and made as available as public domain. But they weren't. Why? because it's too much of a hassle. Why deal with multiple clients, crappy searchs, fake files, and days worth of waiting to get a movie that you could drive down to the video store and picked up for $2?
If I may rephrase: people who could get things for free illegaly on the net still go buy it in shops because it is easier.
I would add "and because most people given a choice prefer the legal way".
And why do you say it is easier? no "multiple clients, crappy searchs, fake files, and days worth of waiting"
I agree 100% with those reasons but they have everything to do with a better distribution and nothing to do with copy protection (aka DRM). You proved nothing here about the need or effectiveness of DRM.
Look at iTunes. Personally, I think their specific DRM sucks donkey balls. BUT, all they did was provide a way for consumers to easily and legally aquire content online. And now it is a multi-million dollar revenue source for Apple. This should be a screaming fireball of a wake up call for veture capitalist to invest in DRMs and content delivery.
If I may rephrase: people offered a mean of buying content online legaly are happy to do it.
I agree with that too. And I agree that "This should be a screaming fireball of a wake up call for veture capitalist to invest in [...] content delivery." But why do you write "DRMs and content delivery"? Apples DRM is so ineffective (just burn, it's gone) that they are in fact selling DRM free content. Once more you proved nothing about the need or effectiveness of DRM.
Imagine an international open standard DRM.
I can imagine it as easily as I can imagine a magic carpet.
What I wouldn't do is to build a business model on such a dream.
You could even advance the DRM technology and maintain the standard API. So if someone ever cracks the DRM, you can patch it with out having to re-write all of the readers and delivery system.
I see: single vendor control, centralized user database, single point of failure... Great!
And one last thing: never say "if someone ever cracks the DRM", say "when". And remember the answer to that question is probably "yesterday" (except if your product is still vaporware... as it seems)
A seemless open standard DRM could open up huge markets
Yes, and so could a magic carpet...
Please stop dreaming about "seemless open standard DRM": DRM systems don't work.
For a non-technical explanation, you should probably read Bruce Schneier or Microsofts Darknet paper.
IIRC they really hadn't identified any substantive problems with it in terms of side effects
It depends on what you mean by "substantive": the most commons side effects are headache, nervousness, and anxiety. A less common side effect is insomnia (often due to combination with alcohol).
although I think it's probably new and there's always the chance of long-term brain rot.
Modafinil is hardly new:
in France, it was approved by the french equivalent of the FDA back in 1992.
in the USA it was approved by the FDA for the treatment of narcolepsy in 1998.
Oddly the doctor didn't give me modafinil, but did give me Xanax.
Stupid... but common reaction. Xanax is higly addictive when Modafinil (or Adrafinil) is not... but Xanax, like most benzodiazepines, is socially well accepted, when Modafinil is mostly known as an item on the list of prohibited substances in anti-doping tests.
Thank you for the corrections. I have always found country names tricky. Just look at Holland, it's:
Netherlands in english
Nederland in dutch
Niederlande in german
Neerland in spanish
Nederländ in swedish
and so on.
Please remember that this 8.71 percent comes from a study of mostly north-american websites (NetApplication clients).
A similar study is done each month in Europe and the figures are quite different:
Finland 28.96% Czech Rep. 24.72% Germany 24.18% Hungary 20.37% Poland 20.13% Sweden 15.91% Switzerland 15.83% France 15.12% Austria 14.59% Estonia 14.24% Greece 14.00% Romania 12.73% Belgium 12.61% U.K. 12.29% Ireland 11.64% Portugal 11.39% Norway 11.20% Spain 10.82% Italy 10.38% Netherland 10.20% Monaco 09.08% Luxemburg 08.95% Danemark 08.48% Lituania 03.68%
This is a quite old story (06/21) and he took time to write a follow-up on his blog:
My Last word on DRM... today Here's my last word on drm. I repeat, I'm not against the concept and most consumers aren't either unless they bump into it while trying to use content they purchased in a legitimate way. I am against the way msft has supported folks using their Reader software and being locked out of my content. Some of you also suggest I may have violated the dmca when I posted my solution. I don't know. Honestly. It seems to me the program does nothing to the files, they are quite protected and must be run on an activated computer that reads them. The DRM is not stripped out at all. That's more akin to ouputting my iTunes files to a CD or a cassette tape. But maybe not. So for now, I'm deleting the files and the program and will inquire of folks who know more about the legal aspects.
I am a heavy user of ssh over gprs (or gsm where gprs is not available):
I usually don't need/want a laptop when I am traveling so I initially went the PDA+cellphone way.
I have used my old Zaurus SL-5000D with a bluetooth CF-card and a triband SonyEricsson cellphone (T68i, then T630) to ssh into my european servers from Europe (UK, Italy, NL), the US (NYC, LA), Asia (HK, Cambodia, Thailand) and even from Japan, using a rented blutooth-enabled cellphone. It has always worked flawlessly. I never had any problem with blocked 22 port or anything like that in any of these countries.
I considered the Treo 600 very seriously, but I will stick to my current PDA+cellphone solution. In Japan the Treo would be as useless as my Sony-Ericsson. But it is a lot easier to rent a simple bluetooth-enabled cellphone and use my usual PDA than it would be to rent an integrated local smartphone with an ssh client.
For the networks questions, there are more problems : if the cost is not important (company paid for instance), just use the roaming partners of your cellphone company : the big european players (Vodafone, Orange, T-mobile) usually try to have at least one partner allowing data in every country (be it over gprs or gsm). But it is expensive, and the costs are very difficult to predict. So if you want to optimize, you have to buy pay-as-you-go plans in every country, being careful to choose plans allowing data. You usually have to pay a premium for data but it is a lot cheaper than simply roaming.
The biggest problem then becomes to choose the right simcard from you (huge) collection depending on the place where you are. It can sometimes be tricky like : So I am in Cambodia near the Thailand border and I don't have any Cambodian pay-as-you-go plan. Choices are using my 12Call simcard because i am not far from Thailand and I can see their network from here, or using my SmarTone simcard, roaming through a local network to HongKong, or simply use the local roaming partner of my european network. Which one would be the cheapest??? The answer, found by trying, was using my HongKong pay-as-you-go plan (SmarTone). Please don't ask me why.:-)
The other ones may be new (i don't know) but Modafinil is a very old story :
in France, it was approved by the french equivalent of the FDA back in 1992.
in the USA it was approved by the FDA for the treatment of narcolepsy in 1998.
I posted some informations about it on/. some years ago. If I may quote myself for your convenience:
[swb(14022) wrote:]
I forget what it's called
You're probably refering to Modafinil (2-[(diphenylmethyl)sulfinyl]acetamide) or Adrafinil (2-[(diphenylmethyl)sulfinyl]acetohydroxamic acid). The brand names are Provigil, Olmifon or Modiolal.
Beside narcolepsy, it is recommended for elderly patients who have difficulty staying alert. It has also been tested in various armed forces... and by some athletes (it's on the list of prohibited substances in anti-doping tests).
It's not an amphetimine or a stimulant, but when you take apparently you just don't get tired.
I'm not so sure that it's not a stimulant: The precise mechanism(s) through which it promotes wakefulness is unknown. What is certain is that it does not work like amphetamines (no dopaminergic activity.)
From what I've read the side effects of the drug are virtually non-existant
From what I've tried there are side effects (not always but sometimes). The most commons are headache, nervousness, and anxiety. A less common side effect is insomnia (often due to combination with alcohol). Insomnia is an adverse side effect because modafinil does not normaly prevent sleep: if you want to stay awake you're not tired, but if you want to sleep you fall asleep without problem.
Anwyay, I think it'd be an interesting drug to have since it would effectively increase your free time.
Never tried it that way.
I only use it to meet schedule when a project is so late that coffee isn't enough.
I wonder what the side effect of effectively experiencing 25% more free time would be over a few years
Probably debts.
Don't forget that these drugs are expensive (no generic yet). Count $30 per sleepless night if you've got a medical prescription and $100 per night if you buy it through the grey market.
They found out that you can either hire a domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire an imported techie for 25-35k/yr.
As other have rightly pointed, you can't pay an H1B significantly less than the going rate for a given job.
So the alternative is probably more like :
They found out that you can either hire an average domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire a top-notch imported techie for 50-80k/yr.
And although this may not be a popular idea on US-centric slashdot, a top-notch imported techie can be worth 3 or 4 average domestic ones...
I mean, we've used computers to prove much of boolean and linear algebra. The most famed result in the field is that of the Robbins Conjecture, proven entirely by computer. The computer produced a very "inhuman" proof...
I disagree. Trust was not involved for the Robbins Conjecture: the proof was only "inhuman" in the sense that it would have been very difficult for someone to find it. But it was dead simple to verify that proof once the computer had found it.
The problem we have now is that some proofs generated by computers are too big or too complex to be verified by humans. Here lies the problem of trust.
If they don't, what is the preferred technique for diagramming an OOP program?
Most of us probably use UML State (or Activity) Diagrams.
UML State Diagrams come from David Harel's work on Statecharts. Statecharts constitute a broad and popular extension of finite state diagrams
While there are some differences between original statecharts and UML state diagram, the best introduction remains imho David Harel's paper : Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems (Science of Computer Programming 8-3, 1987). It is available onlline here on David's home page.
You can also rely on any good book about the UML (i recommend Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series).
Just to set the record straight, the original author of this post is Jack Harvey, and it
was originally published under the title "The Immortal Murderer" on January
18th, 1989 on DECUServe, the DECUS member bulletin board.
This bulletin board is still active under the name Encompasserve.org after
mergers of Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq with Hewlett Packard.
The original publication can still be found on that bulletin board in the
archived Soapbox conference, note number 168.
It was Monday, 19-Oct-1987.
For those of you who were not born, Monday 19-Oct-1987 was the day the stock market crashed.
The main advantages of the Cadarache site are the climate and life conditions (most scientists would prefer the sun of the French Riviera to the snow of northern Japan) and the surrounding existing scientific institutions (Cadarache is already home to some France's fusion programs including the record-breaking 'Tore Supra' tokamak).
The main advantage of the Rokkasho-mura site is the proximity to the sea (very handy for collecting the parts manufactured by each member).
As stated in the BBC article EU, Russia and China support the Cadarache site (52%) when Japan and the US support Rokkasho-mura (38%). South-Korea initially supported the japanese site, but according to some news agencies, they are now open to change their views to avoid a deadlock.
Those were the facts.
Now for the rumors: the BBC states "The US has been against the French option because of France's opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq." (my emphasis)
Such a feeling dates back to the choice of the EU site in may 2003 : the two bidders to be the european proposed site were Cadarache and Vandellos in Spain. As stated in this article in _Nature_, Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, publicly gave his support to Spain against France eventhough the choice was a matter for the EU. Cadarache was eventualy chosen unanimously by the european union member states. The US now supporting Japan (again against the technical merits of the two sites) is widely seen in Europe as a politically-grounded "anywhere but in France" stance.
What could France have done, say, if 9/11 had happened there? Nothing. What could Germany have done? Nothing. And that's why France and Germany kow-tow to terrorists and extremists, because they no ability to do anything if anyone attacks them, so they must roll over like dogs and pray that terrorists bother someone else.
You should choose your examples better :
France is the only other country to have an operational nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It's called the _Charles de Gaulle_. It's smaller than the Nimitz class (262m vs 335m) but comparable in it's potential uses.
a similar to 9/11 event happened in France back in the 90s. The only difference was France had a long experience of islamic terrorism, so the hijackers were properly "dealt with" *before* crashing the plane on Paris. This is what the Seattle Times (thanks Google) printed about that event :
Four men, wearing the blue uniform of Algeria's national airline, had charged onto an Air France jet on the tarmac in Algiers, killing two passengers. They wired dynamite inside the plane and were overheard discussing how to blow it up over Paris.
The Algiers control tower refused to release the plane for takeoff and a tense standoff lasted two days. But after the hijackers executed a French passenger, threw him out onto the tarmac and threatened to kill another passenger every half hour, the Airbus jet was given clearance for takeoff to France.
The plane touched down in Marseille, where the hijackers ordered it filled with 27 tons of jet fuel -- far more than needed to make it the 400 miles to Paris.
As the plane was being fueled, French commandos hid in mobile loading ramps rolled near the jet. In a flash, they stormed the jet, throwing in stun grenades. Through the smoke and noise, they shot and killed the four hijackers.
None of the remaining 177 passengers was seriously hurt. Massive tragedy had been averted.
Slashdot Mirror
Also I'm kinda curious: Why would spend twice as much to buy an Intel Mac PC if they're just running linux? I'd buy a regular PC for 1/2 to 2/3rd the cost.
I looked for a silent small footprint linux pc. I was unable to find one. That's why I bought a Mac Mini. It runs Linux flawlessly... and silently thanks to the fanless design and SSD.
People wanting an HD screen on a laptop might also have to buy Apple hardware even though they plan to use only Linux.
Some bugs are so deep that they are very difficult to fix. FTFY
FUD. The fix is in the work for a long time. Christoph Lameter recently (01/29/2010) submitted the 15th iteration of the patch set. Hopefuly this time no unforeseen consequences will prevent it to be merged into the official kernel. You can read about it here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/1/29/332
Here is a nice map where you will see that Civil Law is by far the predominant system of law in the world (including for instance all European countries barring the British Islands, Japan, Mexico etc. all known to be "run by tyrants").
For your information, the institution of punitive damages only appeared in England at the end of the eighteenth century (the first case dates to 1763). To put it into perspective Civil Law was first codified 529AD. Punitive damages then crossed the Atlantic Ocean and became an established part of the law of the United States, and at the same time, from England, it spread through all the countries of the Commonwealth. Despite the fact that they are criticized, limited, and controlled, their existence remains in most Common Law countries. On the contrary, punitive damages play an important role in the United States, where they can be exceptionally high.
Most countries in the world are quite happy to do without punitive damage allowances. In those countries, Exxon would be effectively prosecuted under criminal law. Of course, such an ideal system does not work very well when prosecutors are given orders by politicians elected thanks to Exxon money. Maybe that's why the US needs punitive damages and most other countries don't.
They just have some stupid browser sniffing in place to serve you the 'right' license agreement depending on your OS (or more precisely depending on the OS advertised by your User Agent).
As a linux user, i just get a blank page (not even an error message).
A diff between the Windows and OSX licenses doesn't show any difference though (only the name of the product in the title differs).
In most developped countries, 1.5 to 3.0 mb/s is only considered to be the "fast lane"... on cellphones.
I consider my quadruple-play 20mb/s DSL to be a bit slow (one phone call and two HDTV channels - both over IP - are enough to eat almost half my bandwith) so I will switch before the end of the year to 100mb/s FTTH (for 30 euros/month including free unlimited calls to 45 countries).
Maybe the fact that I can choose among 20 broadband ISPs in my area has more to do with it than all your pseudo-reasons about density, geographic size, household size and whatnot.
Of the 191 UN member states, 94 contribute 39,329 troops to 13 different missions.
The five permanent members of the security council, who effectively ordered all those blue helmets dispatched, provide 1,030 troops in total.
The US has deployed a quarter of a million troops in Iraq and several thousand in Afghanistan. To serve the UN in 2003, it sent two soldiers. The UK does slightly better: 415 British troops currently wear blue helmets.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, India and Ghana are the five main contributors, providing 18,745 troops.
Note: those figures dates back to february 2004.
One more point : since 1990, in missions in Sierra Leone and Liberia alone, more than 1,200 peacekeepers died. One of them was Canadian, the others were all Nigerians.
Every other rich country pays a little bit more than its fair share to compensate for countries in civil war or deep economic crisis. Japan for instance is paying 19% of the budget for less than 10% of the global GDP, Gernany 8% of the budget for less than 5% of the global GDP and so on. So with 24% of the budget for 21.17% of the global GDP, the U.S. contribution seen as a share of its GDP is already the lowest of all developped countries: in raw dollars, the U.S. assessments of $440,000,000 is 0.0037% of its GDP when Japan for instance pays $346,000,000 i.e. 0.0092% of its GDP. So you personally are contributing almost 3 time less of your annual incomes to the U.N. than a japanese or me in Europe. What about "everyone except the US has already paid its (proportionaly larger) share"?
If the U.S. was at least paying 21.17% of the budget instead of 24%, the complaints would not be so loud. The problem is that the U.S. has not even paid half its commitments for 2004, and not even 15% of its due for 2005 (that is less than 4% of the U.N. budget). In contrast, every other major contributor has already fully paid 2004 and 2005.
If you aggregate the effective payements made on the last 12 months, the U.S. is only the 6th contributor to the U.N. budget, behind Italy (2.89% of the world GDP)!
Here are the hard and daunting data (remember you asked for it):
http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/tables/reg-bu
Why do you think U.S. officials always speak of the assessments (never the payments)?
You replied: "I disagree."
So let's see your argumnents to disagree : If I may rephrase: people who could get things for free illegaly on the net still go buy it in shops because it is easier. I would add "and because most people given a choice prefer the legal way". And why do you say it is easier? no "multiple clients, crappy searchs, fake files, and days worth of waiting" I agree 100% with those reasons but they have everything to do with a better distribution and nothing to do with copy protection (aka DRM). You proved nothing here about the need or effectiveness of DRM. If I may rephrase: people offered a mean of buying content online legaly are happy to do it. I agree with that too. And I agree that "This should be a screaming fireball of a wake up call for veture capitalist to invest in [...] content delivery." But why do you write "DRMs and content delivery"? Apples DRM is so ineffective (just burn, it's gone) that they are in fact selling DRM free content. Once more you proved nothing about the need or effectiveness of DRM. I can imagine it as easily as I can imagine a magic carpet.
What I wouldn't do is to build a business model on such a dream.
I see: single vendor control, centralized user database, single point of failure... Great!
And one last thing: never say "if someone ever cracks the DRM", say "when". And remember the answer to that question is probably "yesterday" (except if your product is still vaporware... as it seems)
Yes, and so could a magic carpet...
Please stop dreaming about "seemless open standard DRM": DRM systems don't work.
For a non-technical explanation, you should probably read Bruce Schneier or Microsofts Darknet paper.
- in France, it was approved by the french equivalent of the FDA back in 1992.
- in the USA it was approved by the FDA for the treatment of narcolepsy in 1998.
Stupid... but common reaction. Xanax is higly addictive when Modafinil (or Adrafinil) is not... but Xanax, like most benzodiazepines, is socially well accepted, when Modafinil is mostly known as an item on the list of prohibited substances in anti-doping tests.Thank you for the corrections. I have always found country names tricky. Just look at Holland, it's:
Netherlands in english
Nederland in dutch
Niederlande in german
Neerland in spanish
Nederländ in swedish
and so on.
How can one remember all those small differences?
Please remember that this 8.71 percent comes from a study of mostly north-american websites (NetApplication clients).
A similar study is done each month in Europe and the figures are quite different:
src: XiTi
This is a quite old story (06/21) and he took time to write a follow-up on his blog :
My Last word on DRM... today
Here's my last word on drm. I repeat, I'm not against the concept and most consumers aren't either unless they bump into it while trying to use content they purchased in a legitimate way. I am against the way msft has supported folks using their Reader software and being locked out of my content. Some of you also suggest I may have violated the dmca when I posted my solution. I don't know. Honestly. It seems to me the program does nothing to the files, they are quite protected and must be run on an activated computer that reads them. The DRM is not stripped out at all. That's more akin to ouputting my iTunes files to a CD or a cassette tape. But maybe not. So for now, I'm deleting the files and the program and will inquire of folks who know more about the legal aspects.
No comment...
I am a heavy user of ssh over gprs (or gsm where gprs is not available):
:-)
I usually don't need/want a laptop when I am traveling so I initially went the PDA+cellphone way.
I have used my old Zaurus SL-5000D with a bluetooth CF-card and a triband SonyEricsson cellphone (T68i, then T630) to ssh into my european servers from Europe (UK, Italy, NL), the US (NYC, LA), Asia (HK, Cambodia, Thailand) and even from Japan, using a rented blutooth-enabled cellphone.
It has always worked flawlessly. I never had any problem with blocked 22 port or anything like that in any of these countries.
I considered the Treo 600 very seriously, but I will stick to my current PDA+cellphone solution. In Japan the Treo would be as useless as my Sony-Ericsson. But it is a lot easier to rent a simple bluetooth-enabled cellphone and use my usual PDA than it would be to rent an integrated local smartphone with an ssh client.
For the networks questions, there are more problems : if the cost is not important (company paid for instance), just use the roaming partners of your cellphone company : the big european players (Vodafone, Orange, T-mobile) usually try to have at least one partner allowing data in every country (be it over gprs or gsm). But it is expensive, and the costs are very difficult to predict. So if you want to optimize, you have to buy pay-as-you-go plans in every country, being careful to choose plans allowing data. You usually have to pay a premium for data but it is a lot cheaper than simply roaming.
The biggest problem then becomes to choose the right simcard from you (huge) collection depending on the place where you are. It can sometimes be tricky like : So I am in Cambodia near the Thailand border and I don't have any Cambodian pay-as-you-go plan. Choices are using my 12Call simcard because i am not far from Thailand and I can see their network from here, or using my SmarTone simcard, roaming through a local network to HongKong, or simply use the local roaming partner of my european network. Which one would be the cheapest??? The answer, found by trying, was using my HongKong pay-as-you-go plan (SmarTone). Please don't ask me why.
Just my two euro-cents.
For Modafinil, we are almost there!
The other ones may be new (i don't know) but Modafinil is a very old story :
- in France, it was approved by the french equivalent of the FDA back in 1992.
- in the USA it was approved by the FDA for the treatment of narcolepsy in 1998.
I posted some informations about it onThank you very much for the informative clarification.
There is obviously a need for products like Integrity.
Being able to run Linux apps is just the topping on the cake.
What about
On a side note, you also have the very useful option:in order to list only addresses you've typed in the address bar autocomplete.
Most of these advanced options can't be changed through the GUI, but they are still there in Firefox.
HTH
They found out that you can either hire a domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire an imported techie for 25-35k/yr.
As other have rightly pointed, you can't pay an H1B significantly less than the going rate for a given job.
So the alternative is probably more like :
They found out that you can either hire an average domestic techie for 50-80k/yr or hire a top-notch imported techie for 50-80k/yr.
And although this may not be a popular idea on US-centric slashdot, a top-notch imported techie can be worth 3 or 4 average domestic ones...
The problem we have now is that some proofs generated by computers are too big or too complex to be verified by humans. Here lies the problem of trust.
UML State Diagrams come from David Harel's work on Statecharts. Statecharts constitute a broad and popular extension of finite state diagrams
While there are some differences between original statecharts and UML state diagram, the best introduction remains imho David Harel's paper : Statecharts: A Visual Formalism for Complex Systems (Science of Computer Programming 8-3, 1987). It is available onlline here on David's home page.
You can also rely on any good book about the UML (i recommend Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series).
Here is today error message for my hotmail account: It was worst on Friday though: there was not even an error message as loginnet.passport.com was either dead or unreachable.
Even 15 years later it's still damn funny.
Just to set the record straight, the original author of this post is Jack Harvey, and it was originally published under the title "The Immortal Murderer" on January 18th, 1989 on DECUServe, the DECUS member bulletin board.
This bulletin board is still active under the name Encompasserve.org after mergers of Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq with Hewlett Packard.
The original publication can still be found on that bulletin board in the archived Soapbox conference, note number 168.
For those of you who were not born, Monday 19-Oct-1987 was the day the stock market crashed.
On a side note, the oldest usenet post mentioning MP3 seems to be this one : 1995/07/24. Does any archaeologist have older references ?
Some facts
The actual members are
- EU (28%)
- Japan (28%)
- Russia (14%)
- USA (10%)
- China (10%)
- South-Korea (10%)
The two proposed sites are Cadarache (EU) and Rokkasho-mura (Japan).The main advantages of the Cadarache site are the climate and life conditions (most scientists would prefer the sun of the French Riviera to the snow of northern Japan) and the surrounding existing scientific institutions (Cadarache is already home to some France's fusion programs including the record-breaking 'Tore Supra' tokamak).
The main advantage of the Rokkasho-mura site is the proximity to the sea (very handy for collecting the parts manufactured by each member).
As stated in the BBC article EU, Russia and China support the Cadarache site (52%) when Japan and the US support Rokkasho-mura (38%). South-Korea initially supported the japanese site, but according to some news agencies, they are now open to change their views to avoid a deadlock.
Those were the facts.
Now for the rumors: the BBC states "The US has been against the French option because of France's opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq." (my emphasis)
Such a feeling dates back to the choice of the EU site in may 2003 : the two bidders to be the european proposed site were Cadarache and Vandellos in Spain. As stated in this article in _Nature_, Spencer Abraham, the US energy secretary, publicly gave his support to Spain against France eventhough the choice was a matter for the EU. Cadarache was eventualy chosen unanimously by the european union member states. The US now supporting Japan (again against the technical merits of the two sites) is widely seen in Europe as a politically-grounded "anywhere but in France" stance.
You should choose your examples better :