Here is what I simply don't understand about all this. I block ads because they are annoying as hell and I NEVER click on any of them anyway, so whether I am looking at ads or not, the companies doing the advertising will NEVER make any money off me through those ads. The people who bother to block ads are mostly the same as me, so who are the advertisers going to blame when everyone turns off their ad blockers and they STILL don't sell enough products per billion ad impressions?
Isn't the main problem here that the whole Internet advertising scheme is faulty? Ad prices have been plummeting each year for the entire history of the Internet because they are orders of magnitude less effective than advertisers imagined they would be. The people who are going to click on ads AND BUY THE PRODUCTS through those ad links are exactly the same people who don't bother to block ads in the first place. So I don't see what difference it will make if the people who WON'T click on your ads and WON'T buy your products consent to view the ads. All the websites will be doing is almost fraudulently inflating the impact/distribution of ads on their site while failing to provide any additional value to the people advertising their products.
No, even if everyone suddenly turned off their ad blockers the Internet would continue to descend into a place where sites that can't pay for themselves any other way will have to show exponentially more ads (since the ad prices will continue to decrease) until it will be impossible to find any actual content betwixt all the ads. Since this has basically already happened on a ton of useless sites I'd say it's pretty well proven that the Internet advertising model is a failure, and ad blocking couldn't account for more than a small percentage of this failure. It's basically a type of pyramid scheme that is continually collapsing in on itself, and in the long term it will fail completely.
A functional micro-payment system is the only thing that will keep sites alive in the future. Until that gets figured out, websites that don't directly charge users for some kind of valued product or service will continue to fail. The idea of running free websites solely on the advertising model with no other source of income is pure bunk from the get-go.
I got curious again just the other day and tried to install OS/2 in a virtual machine just to experience it. However I was completely stymied by the fact that the floppy disk images are in some odd-sized proprietary "DSK" format that neither VirtualBox nor Parallels seem to be able to read, and the CD images are apparently not bootable. I googled for half a day unsuccessfully looking for some way to convert the the floppy images into a compatible format. There was no way that I could see to bypass the floppies and run the installation directly from the CD image either, as far as I could tell.
I'd really love to know how the hell people manage to get OS/2 running in any VM. In almost two decades of playing around with nearly every obscure x86-compatible operating system under the sun (anyone else heard of Native Oberon?) I've never been so stumped just trying to get an OS installed.
It's very odd to me that they seem to have left out Lexar completely from this little test. Back when I was really into digital photography I spent a lot of time on DPReview and Amazon and B&H Photo looking for the best deals on the fastest CompactFlash and SD cards. The top competitors seemed to always be the SanDisk Ultra/Extreme lines and Lexar's Professional cards. Kingston has usually done well also, but the most prominent/popular over the years have always have seemed to be SanDisk and Lexar.
Even 2-3 years ago I remember Lexar having "300x" cards competing with the SanDisk Extreme lineup. Just now doing a quick search on Amazon shows Lexar "600x" SD cards available, so it's not like they've dropped out of the market.
Maybe somebody at Lexar pissed off the editor of PC Pro? I can't imagine why else you'd leave one of the fastest cards on the market out of a speed test. Hmm...
Oh, yeah. PC Pro. Why the f**k am I even reading Slashdot anymore?
This smart phone is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late smart phone! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to your business unit would be pushing up the daisies! Its market processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an EX-SMARTPHONE!
I don't understand what's happening with Linux these days. Buggy installers, crappy UIs in an attempt to change the "GUI paradigm" for whatever reason, unstable software (particularly compared to that in, say, Windows 7), kernel/power regressions, etc. I was interested in Linux because it was (at some point in time) more robust and stable than Windows, that it was technically superior. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
NB. I'm talking about desktop use; I'm sure Linux is superior in many ways for servers and embedded devices - the desktop experience as a whole still seems rather immature still unfortunately.
I'm afraid I have to agree. I used to use Linux as my main desktop OS, years ago. Various flavors from Gentoo and straight up Debian to more user-friendly things like Mandrake. Enjoyed most of them, but got quite fed up with all the little things that always had to be fixed and tweaked in order to make each distro run right. Over a decade later each distro is still continually changing miscellaneous stuff, introducing as many regressions as fixes, and reinventing the wheel for simple stuff (like the installer) that should have been standardized years ago. It's ridiculous. I've tried to test drive a few distros every couple of years and I've had a hell of a time even getting some of the installer discs to boot up in a VM! I almost never ran into such problems years ago.
At this point I'm terrified that when Apple finally collapses in a few years the only choices I'll have for a desktop OS will be between some bizarre and unrecognizable future nightmare version of Windows and half a dozen supposedly user-friendly Linux distros that will be full of so many bugs and quirks that I'll want to give up using computers entirely. The promise of computing nirvana that Linux/Open Source seemed to offer years ago has never been realized. Linux changes constantly, but never in any particular direction. That is both its strength and its shortcoming.
I consider myself very scientific, fairly worldly, and pretty open minded.
But to me this is unethical.
Ask yourself just some simple preliminary questions such as: If the resulting semi-human is self aware, what rights will it/he/she have? Will it/he/she be a cage animal? Will it be sterilized or allowed to reproduce? And if so, with which other species or semi-species? Is this fair to it/he/she? Will it/he/she be allowed to vote? To own property? Be allowed or required to work? To choose a field of education? To be free of staring, poking prodding?
You declare that it is unethical, but then all you have are questions, not reasons why it is unethical. The only way humanity will ever find answers to these questions is to be confronted with the reality of the existence of things such as non-human sentient species. Society in general and especially the legal system requires something to occur in reality in order to even begin coming to terms whether it is good or bad. If we leave it as a thought experiment we'll still be arguing about it ten thousand years from now, and the neanderthal species will still be extinct.
More importantly, someone somewhere is eventually going to perform this experiment, and succeed. Do you want it to be us, or some isolated totalitarian dictatorship country *COUGH*northkorea*COUGH* which may be far more inclined to breeding a population of hybrid-human slaves who are given no rights under the law? There needs to be established international precedent for treating non-human sentient beings as equals, otherwise the opposite might easily happen. The only way to resolve these issues is to confront them in reality, and short of having some sentient aliens immigrate here from Tau Ceti Alpha, I don't know how else we're going to tackle these ethical choices.
Bottom line is that denying the advancement of technology because "I have some questions" is pointless. If we were resurrecting the dodo would you declare it perfectly ethical just because the dodo is clueless about what's happening? Of course you would. It would be lauded as an important project. On the other hand, neanderthals would be sentient so you want to deny them a chance at continued existence in this universe just because their lives might be complicated and difficult? Guess what would probably happen with a resurrected dodo species, after we have enough of them. Yeah, we'll start carving them up for Thanksgiving dinner (and enjoying it). Hard to believe we could really do anything worse to the neanderthals. Outside of certain segments of the population I think most people will treat them just about as well as they treat fellow humans. Of course by that I mean they will be treated badly, just like we treat each other. But at the same time it will highlight the fact that we do treat each other badly, and how we should stop doing that.
Some individuals resulting from these experiments may get mistreated horribly, but I can see nothing but a positive effect for humanity as a whole in the long term to be forced to confront the reality that we are not the only sentient species in the universe. And if we get things resolved sufficiently maybe we won't be so bad off when we meet some other non-human sentient species, and maybe they won't decide to exterminate us for being absolutely horrid, hateful little creatures.
Because they make any real, useful, gun control much less likely to happen. Their grandstanding is counter productive.
For example you try and say "Hey, we really should register firearms. After all you register your car, why not guns too? It would allow for some tracking and accountability, and in the event someone becomes a prohibited person easier allow courts to determine if they have any guns that need to be surrendered." Well the gun lobby shoots back with "No, unacceptable, if you have a registry it can be used to target gun owners." You respond "That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Then, this happens, in a place that has a gun registry. Now the gun lobby doesn't have to talk in hypotheticals, or other nations, they can point to something that happened right in America that is precisely the kind of shit they are talking about. Now more moderate gun owners, who might have been amenable, or at least accepting, of the idea hate it because they believe what the gun lobby is saying.
Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned, period, end of story, unless the second amendment is repealed. All kinds of arguments have been tried and all have failed, the supreme court has ruled that the 2nd does in fact mean that gun ownership is a protected, individual, right.
As such trying stupid shit to do things that are bans but not in name, or to harass or make things difficult for gun owners are counter productive. All they do is polarize things, convince gun owners that any and all controls are bad because they'll be abused.
Stunts like this are nothing but harmful.
You really don't go far enough with this comment. You've acknowledged that it happened, but you haven't acknowledged what it really means. The plain and simple truth is this: A firearms registry was just abused to target firearms owners, thus proving that firearms registries will be abused to target firearms owners. There is no other side to this argument. It is not "counter productive" that the list was abused, it is simply reality. The idea that such a list would not be abused has always been preposterous and always will be preposterous. Gun registries are not a workable solution in a free society. Period. QED. Thus it is proven.
It's funny how the gun control crowd is constantly "shooting themselves in the foot" with actions and rhetoric like this that simply strengthens the other side and guarantees there will absolutely be millions more firearms ending up being sold and used, especially illegal black market firearms. The more they push, the more the other side pushes back and the results will end up being the exact opposite of what they want.
Wow. Bad at reading comprehension much? The guy you were replying to was basically agreeing with you, and saying exactly what you said. Might want to re-read his post a few times.
Maybe this is just me, but making fun of Mormon underwear seems to me just as dumb as making fun of the hijab, yarmulke, Sikh turban, or pocket protector.
OK, I've never worn a pocket protector, but you get my point I hope.
No, actually I don't see your point at all. Are any of those clothing items supposed to provide the wearer with hidden magical protections against evil? The Mormons' magic underwear is not worn so much as a public symbol of faith or modesty as it is a literal magical talisman. It's like a religious tin foil hat. It deserves all the ridicule it gets.
This seems like a good article on which to talk about something I've recently been reading about: Michael Reynolds and his Earthships.
So this guy, for almost 45 years now, has been building homes out of recycled materials (tires, cans, and bottles mostly). They're designed to as close to "carbon zero" in their energy requirements as possible. They collect their own water from the roof and store it in cisterns rather than needing public water infrastructure or pulling from an aquifer. They are heated and cooled passively by the sun, both in the dead of winter and the height of summer. That of course cuts out the bulk of any energy requirements, since heating and cooling require more electricity than anything else in a typical home. Earthships also treat their own waste water on-site using a greenhouse full of plants. So every piece of public infrastructure that a typical home would require is all taken care of on-site. Water, power and sewer.
Even with drastically lowered power requirements compared to a conventional house, the complete solar power system to run an Earthship costs $25-30,000. That's a few solar panels, a few heavy duty batteries, inverters, charge controller, etc. Now triple or quadruple that setup for a conventional home, unless you just want enough for emergency power, in which case you might as well just have a 7kw-10kw generator installed. What many people are doing is just installing solar panels tied to the power grid to decrease their electric bill. That kind of installation pays for itself within a few years, but of course does absolutely nothing to give you power in emergencies since your local inverter shuts down when the grid shuts down and you have no battery bank to store the power even for overnight usage.
In short, Earthships clearly demonstrate that true grid-independent solar power is still extremely expensive, at least in the initial setup cost. Solar installation should not be talked about in terms of absolute cost but in terms of how much stress it will remove from the public infrastructure and how it will help decrease the country's dependence on centralized energy production. That's not to mention how many millions of people won't have to lose power, water and sewer every time there's an outage. That's really the major benefit to putting in a complete solar power system: partial or complete independence from the grid. Not saving money. If even 10% of homes were Earthship style homes, the impact on the public of major infrastructure outages would be lessened quite a bit. Decentralizing weak points of infrastructure should always be seen as a good thing.
Anyone who's interested in sustainable and/or off-grid housing should visit the Earthship website (earthship.com) or view some of the videos on YouTube. Look for "Garbage Warrior" and "Earthship seminar". Michael Reynolds has been demonstrating for decades now that it is possible to build sustainable homes that don't require any infrastructure for about the same overall price as a conventional home. But you definitely need to think a little bit outside the box.
More and more in the last decade or so I have seen things that lead me to believe that humans have been basically modern humans for approximately 200,000 years. That's how far back our ancestors have been traced through our mitochondrial DNA. I have no doubt that in coming decades there will be new discoveries that will keep pushing the dates of "modern" human behavior further and further back.
This is a fascinating concept to me because it means the human race and basic forms of human civilization have been around for an incredibly long time. Basic concepts like languages, writing systems, trading, counting, money, philosophy, astronomy, martial arts and many other things have probably been invented, forgotten and reinvented hundreds of times by individual geniuses over the course of those 200,000 years. All the sci-fi stories I've ever read where it's seen as some amazing thing that an alien race has been around for more than a hundred thousand years... Well, the human race proves that's really not that amazing. Or, conversely, that the human race is equally as amazing as those "ancient" alien races. In fact, we could be considered one of those "ancient" alien races, from the perspective of an alien race.
When I was younger, the concept was that just a few thousand years ago we were retarded cave men, and then suddenly civilization happened. Nowadays what I picture is more like endless millennia of fairly intelligent people living like Native Americans in many different ways, with pockets of even more modern cultures that rose and fell through the ages, until finally a few thousand years ago a few things like writing and math were (re)discovered and remembered and propagated to enough other humans that modern civilization exploded into being and had enough momentum and population to finally stick around, where it hadn't been able to "stick" before. I think it was basically luck that things didn't develop either ten thousand years earlier or ten thousand years later. All the basic elements seem to have been there for a looooooong time.
Just my pet theory. I am not an anthropologist, obviously, just fascinated by the things that may have happened during early modern human history, which seems to extend much further back than what I was taught in grade school.
Read the ancient but still highly useful Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is a textbook example of a situation that can be attacked using the advice in that excellent book. If you sidestep Bob when trying to bring this new system in there is about a 98% chance of significant strife and animosity resulting from such action. If you are able to get on Bob's good side and work with him to introduce a new system, things will go infinitely better. Especially if everyone including Bob thinks it's mostly his idea.
Here's the catch though: You can't fake it. You must approach people with a real, genuine interest in getting to know them. If they are difficult to deal with you have to find some chink in their armor that will make them more approachable. If you fake it you will go down in flames and the Dale Carnegie approach will never work for you.
Any other angle of attack in this situation usually will turn out very negatively for one or both parties.
You folks never been to Asia / Chinatown before? I'm sure a lot of them are officially licensed versions also. Been around for many years.
After the horrors Lucas inflicted on us with the new trilogy I'm surprised anyone is complaining. New ones can't possibly be worse or even as bad, as long as he's not in charge of production/writing/design/etc. anymore.
A lot of folks here seem to be confused about the difference between someone finding and disclosing a vulnerability that you found on YOUR OWN COPY of a piece of software, and finding and disclosing a vulnerability that you found while you were on SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER SYSTEM.
To the legal system, and most judges, prosecutors and juries, computers are still "magic". It doesn't matter how childishly, stupidly simple it was to find the problem, or how dangerous it is to others, what matters to the law is that you "accessed" a part of someone else's computer system that you were not authorized to access.
To put this in analogy form, it is illegal to break into and enter someone else's home without permission. If you live in a duplex with a crummy lock on the front door and you find out that YOUR locked front door can be opened with a toothpick, that's one thing. Complain to the landlord or replace it with a better lock if you happen to be the owner. If you then proceed to open your NEIGHBOR'S locked front door with a toothpick, you are committing the crime of breaking and entering, and if your neighbor is at home and sees you doing this he would be well within his legal rights to call the police and have you arrested for B&E. If you're LUCKY and your neighbor is a reasonable person you can explain that you were just testing the security of his front door for him. But you are not legally protected in any way because it ISN'T YOUR HOUSE.
It's stupid, and people have regularly been "burned at the stake" (i.e. "sent to prison") in recent decades for the criminal equivalent of say, checking to see if a stray black cat has a collar and tag. But that's the way it is and to pretend otherwise is very naive.
So do as most people are advising. Find another service and forget any of this ever happened. If it really burns a hole in your heart not to warn them of the problem again, find a good email anonymizer service and send them just enough detail for them to identify and fix the problem, without identifying yourself.
When I was in high school (early 2000's) I used to wonder how they were going to teach lawmakers and enforcers so they could cope with all the new crap that was being made. Were they going to send them all to schools to teach them how networked computers worked or maybe hire a bunch of IT advisors? I was being way too optimistic, its been a decade of incompetent, ignorant, old people making and enforcing laws without an understanding of what they are making laws about. Why is there now law requiring knowledge and education in the field for which you make and enforce laws?
Bwahahaha! Son, I was in high school in the early 90s, and let me tell you, the decades of incompetent, ignorant old people making and enforcing laws without any understanding of what they are making laws about did not just start 20 years ago. It's been with us for at least 20 *centuries*.
The only thing that can possibly change things is geek types managing to get themselves elected, like what's happening with the Pirate Party in various localities. Politicians and enforcers who don't already understand technology are completely uninterested in being educated. Things will unfortunately have to get far more draconian before the general public will really start voting in any new blood in significant enough numbers to make any real changes to the system. By the time enough new blood gets elected there will be new issues that they won't understand because they'll be the old fogies. It's an endless cycle.
The next step appears to be to move from algebraics to broad descriptions of the type of data you want to download. This is waiting on computers with a great deal more processing power and perhaps emergent AI, but there will come a time where instead of feeding a bunch of packets over a noisy channel the Internet will simply say to your computer "short film with 20-something actor wondering whether to marry now or enjoy life for a while longer" and your system will fill in the rest, completing the transfer mathematically. This is down the road a ways, but newer technology such as lossy compression for data is already available and potentially lucrative for those who are willing to think outside of the conventional box and try something with a few more holes in it.
Later that day your surgically implanted computing device warns you that you're about to run out of space on your 300 petabyte holographic storage crystal. Surprised, you do some investigating and find that the crystal has been filled with 17,381 full-length short films with a 20-something actor wondering whether to marry now or enjoy life for a while longer. At the end of the month you get billed for 2.3 billion dollars for exceeding your monthly data transfer quota.
The saddest part of this kind of crap is just how silly it all is. If instead of just paying her for private sex the "johns" were paying her to make a private "adult film" (with them as director and co-star), then she would simply be an "adult film star" and they would be making "pornography" which is perfectly legal. Take away the camera and suddenly it's "prostitution" which is illegal. Even though the participants and the sex acts will be exactly the same.
What... the... FUCK?
How many more decades or centuries will it be before society at large finally acknowledges that it is complete bizarro-world insanity for "consensual sex for money" to continue to be highly illegal while "consensual sex for money IN FRONT OF A CAMERA" is perfectly legal? It's the same goddamn thing for Christ's sake! Make up your fucking mind!
Prostitution should be exactly as legal as pornography. Legalize it, regulate it, tax it, and test sex workers for STDs/HIV at least once a month just exactly the same as they do with "adult film stars". Any other course is utter nonsense. A few of the actual civilized countries of the world seem to have figured this out, but I give the US another century before it happens here. At least.
I know I'll get flamed for this since it goes against the Linux philosophy, but how about getting rid of competing Gnome and KDE (and now Unity) desktops and agree on one standard desktop with a single API for everyone to write to. And maintain backwards compatibility for the API so an application written for GnoKDE 2.0 still still run unaltered on GnoKDE 3.0.
I know that having multiple desktops gives users choice, but there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products. Oh, and stop pushing out alpha releases (I'm talking about you, Ubuntu/Unity) as the default desktop and telling users that it's for their own good.
But hey, don't trust me, I use Xfce since it does everything I need in a desktop.
This is really the core of why Linux is a total failure with mainstream computer users. Because there is no such thing as the "Linux desktop". There never has been and never will be. There is only a frankenstein's patchwork of hundreds of slightly different Linux desktop distributions (and their variations) which are _based_ on Linux. The only Linux desktop that will ever succeed in the market is one that is unified and standardized and packaged as a well-supported product. What's that new distro that's become almost a household name? Oh yeah: Android.
Yeah, it's Linux, but they don't talk about it being Linux, they talk about it as the Android Platform, and that's exactly what it is, a stable platform on which to develop applications. App developers don't develop their apps for "Linux", they develop their apps for "Android". And the public knows it only as Android.
I fully expect to come back in another decade and see the same situation in the Linux world that exists now, with infinite combinations of a half dozen different popular window managers, distros, GUI frameworks and so on. It's a fiddler's paradise that works well for approximately 1% of the population. But for normal humans there will be no penetration of the market until you can say to someone, "THIS is the Linux desktop. There is no other." And that is never, ever, ever, EVER going to happen because it is completely contrary to the whole spirit of the open source community which spawns Linux and it's variations. Individual independence and unilateral dictatorial leadership decisions do not mix well, but it is precisely the unilateral dictatorial decisions that lead to consistency. But consistency can't make everyone happy, which is why open source development was started in the first place! What the geeks want and what the general public wants are diametric opposites!
What the Linux community really needs to get over is the idea that the "Linux desktop" should in any way be competing with unified commercial desktop platforms. Because it just fucking CAN'T. It is NOT the same animal, and it is NOT made for the same reasons. The "Linux desktop" will NEVER become mainstream. The only possible way that Linux will penetrate the mainstream is as a stablized, commercially supported, branded product like Android. Even then, it will need to be combined with hardware. Notice how Android and Mac OS X are not marketed to the public independently of the related hardware. Android is marketed with smartphones and Mac OS X is marketed with Mac hardware. Linux on the other hand is marketed as a software product independent of hardware. It's an aftermarket modification with extremely limited appeal.
It's kind of like marketing a replacement engine that does all the same things as the engine that's already in your car, is pretty reliable and very fuel efficient, but you probably won't be able to find a mechanic in town to fix it if it breaks down. Why would any non-mechanically-inclined car owner want that? The answer is pretty obvious: They don't. They're perfectly happy with the engine that's already in their car, and they will only be changing thei
Only stay at places with shower facilities. RV'ing can be fun, but without some comforts like the ability to take long/hot showers, it will always feel like a small step above camping.
Not something you will want to do for several years. And find places with electrical outlets. Air conditioning is something to die for during the summer, and you wont have it if you are running a generator only.
Just FYI there are quite a few 5th wheels on the market with very roomy nice bathrooms and there is at least one company (Girard?) that is now making an "on demand" water heater that lets you have hot water for as long as you have fresh water and propane. I'd recommend that anyone wanting to fulltime in an RV get something like that installed so that all you need to look for is a site with at least a city water hookup, sewer and power. Most larger 5th wheels are also equipped for either a single or a stacked washer/dryer setup. If you have that you also won't need to limit yourself to locations with laundry facilities.
I'd go so far as to say that the two most important things to look for in your RV are 1) a good insulation package including thermal/double paned windows, and 2) a nice roomy bathroom. Everything else is just gravy. Proper insulation will save you gobs of money paying for excessive propane and/or electrical usage, and lets you stay wherever you feel like staying, rather than needing to follow the seasons like many RVers do. A roomy bathroom will make it feel like you are at least staying in a decent hotel room as opposed to feeling like you're "camping". These two things will make a world of difference.
Sources: Me, from researching the RV market for the last several months after my wife and I rented a class C RV for three weeks last fall and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I've been working in IT depts for roughly 20 years and can't remember ever having issues related to "data breach from lack of encryption". Not saying it doesn't happen, but I reckon for most people (outside of finance/defence/govt etc) it's overkill. It raises a question, how much security is too much? Do you have a lock on your front door? 3 locks? 45 locks? If you had 100 locks on your door and only locked 99 of them, would this be considered vulnerable? This is how I think of the security industry. One lock is fine. If that doesn't work, then no amount of extra locks will help. The bad guys will simply break a window.
Holy cow that was the most retarded post about encryption that I think I've ever read here, yet somehow it got modded +5, insightful. WTF, Slashdot?
The password you use to login to your computer is like a door lock. Too easily bypassed.
Full Disk Encryption is like building your entire house out of 6 inch thick plate steel, with plate steel shields that descend to protect the doors and windows when you lock the house. And the bad guys only have their hands, feet and a nail file to use to break in with. Overkill in the physical world? Yes. But in the digital world it now costs about the same as not doing encryption, and makes it thousands of times more difficult for the bad guys to get your data.
Your understanding of the relative benefits of digital security vs physical security is really terrible.
I also was a big fan of BeOS. Loved it. Used it exclusively for a couple of years. Over a decade ago. Before it died.
But why exactly do we keep having articles about a BeOS clone operating system that is still basically in a nearly useless pre-alpha state after a decade of work? How is this useful to anyone besides the people working on Haiku? Where are all the articles every other week about how well GNU HURD is progressing? Because they are both just about equally useless at this point, until some sort of significant progress is made. There are dozens of other obscure in-progress experimental operating systems out there in various states of development, and there are places to go to read about them. I know, because I used to go to those places to read about all the obscure alternative operating systems.
I'm sure Haiku OS is great fun for the people who spend time working on it, and I wish them joy of it. But I'll bet that pretty much all the people who would ever want to hear about it are already on their mailing list.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is what I simply don't understand about all this. I block ads because they are annoying as hell and I NEVER click on any of them anyway, so whether I am looking at ads or not, the companies doing the advertising will NEVER make any money off me through those ads. The people who bother to block ads are mostly the same as me, so who are the advertisers going to blame when everyone turns off their ad blockers and they STILL don't sell enough products per billion ad impressions?
Isn't the main problem here that the whole Internet advertising scheme is faulty? Ad prices have been plummeting each year for the entire history of the Internet because they are orders of magnitude less effective than advertisers imagined they would be. The people who are going to click on ads AND BUY THE PRODUCTS through those ad links are exactly the same people who don't bother to block ads in the first place. So I don't see what difference it will make if the people who WON'T click on your ads and WON'T buy your products consent to view the ads. All the websites will be doing is almost fraudulently inflating the impact/distribution of ads on their site while failing to provide any additional value to the people advertising their products.
No, even if everyone suddenly turned off their ad blockers the Internet would continue to descend into a place where sites that can't pay for themselves any other way will have to show exponentially more ads (since the ad prices will continue to decrease) until it will be impossible to find any actual content betwixt all the ads. Since this has basically already happened on a ton of useless sites I'd say it's pretty well proven that the Internet advertising model is a failure, and ad blocking couldn't account for more than a small percentage of this failure. It's basically a type of pyramid scheme that is continually collapsing in on itself, and in the long term it will fail completely.
A functional micro-payment system is the only thing that will keep sites alive in the future. Until that gets figured out, websites that don't directly charge users for some kind of valued product or service will continue to fail. The idea of running free websites solely on the advertising model with no other source of income is pure bunk from the get-go.
Not entirely off-topic:
I got curious again just the other day and tried to install OS/2 in a virtual machine just to experience it. However I was completely stymied by the fact that the floppy disk images are in some odd-sized proprietary "DSK" format that neither VirtualBox nor Parallels seem to be able to read, and the CD images are apparently not bootable. I googled for half a day unsuccessfully looking for some way to convert the the floppy images into a compatible format. There was no way that I could see to bypass the floppies and run the installation directly from the CD image either, as far as I could tell.
I'd really love to know how the hell people manage to get OS/2 running in any VM. In almost two decades of playing around with nearly every obscure x86-compatible operating system under the sun (anyone else heard of Native Oberon?) I've never been so stumped just trying to get an OS installed.
Any pointers would be appreciated.
It's very odd to me that they seem to have left out Lexar completely from this little test. Back when I was really into digital photography I spent a lot of time on DPReview and Amazon and B&H Photo looking for the best deals on the fastest CompactFlash and SD cards. The top competitors seemed to always be the SanDisk Ultra/Extreme lines and Lexar's Professional cards. Kingston has usually done well also, but the most prominent/popular over the years have always have seemed to be SanDisk and Lexar.
Even 2-3 years ago I remember Lexar having "300x" cards competing with the SanDisk Extreme lineup. Just now doing a quick search on Amazon shows Lexar "600x" SD cards available, so it's not like they've dropped out of the market.
Maybe somebody at Lexar pissed off the editor of PC Pro? I can't imagine why else you'd leave one of the fastest cards on the market out of a speed test. Hmm...
Oh, yeah. PC Pro. Why the f**k am I even reading Slashdot anymore?
This smart phone is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late smart phone! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to your business unit would be pushing up the daisies! Its market processes are of interest only to historians! It's hopped the twig! It's shuffled off this mortal coil! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible! This.... is an EX-SMARTPHONE!
Beau'iful plumage!
I don't understand what's happening with Linux these days. Buggy installers, crappy UIs in an attempt to change the "GUI paradigm" for whatever reason, unstable software (particularly compared to that in, say, Windows 7), kernel/power regressions, etc. I was interested in Linux because it was (at some point in time) more robust and stable than Windows, that it was technically superior. Now I'm not so sure anymore.
NB. I'm talking about desktop use; I'm sure Linux is superior in many ways for servers and embedded devices - the desktop experience as a whole still seems rather immature still unfortunately.
I'm afraid I have to agree. I used to use Linux as my main desktop OS, years ago. Various flavors from Gentoo and straight up Debian to more user-friendly things like Mandrake. Enjoyed most of them, but got quite fed up with all the little things that always had to be fixed and tweaked in order to make each distro run right. Over a decade later each distro is still continually changing miscellaneous stuff, introducing as many regressions as fixes, and reinventing the wheel for simple stuff (like the installer) that should have been standardized years ago. It's ridiculous. I've tried to test drive a few distros every couple of years and I've had a hell of a time even getting some of the installer discs to boot up in a VM! I almost never ran into such problems years ago.
At this point I'm terrified that when Apple finally collapses in a few years the only choices I'll have for a desktop OS will be between some bizarre and unrecognizable future nightmare version of Windows and half a dozen supposedly user-friendly Linux distros that will be full of so many bugs and quirks that I'll want to give up using computers entirely. The promise of computing nirvana that Linux/Open Source seemed to offer years ago has never been realized. Linux changes constantly, but never in any particular direction. That is both its strength and its shortcoming.
I consider myself very scientific, fairly worldly, and pretty open minded.
But to me this is unethical.
Ask yourself just some simple preliminary questions such as: If the resulting semi-human is self aware, what rights will it/he/she have? Will it/he/she be a cage animal? Will it be sterilized or allowed to reproduce? And if so, with which other species or semi-species? Is this fair to it/he/she? Will it/he/she be allowed to vote? To own property? Be allowed or required to work? To choose a field of education? To be free of staring, poking prodding?
You declare that it is unethical, but then all you have are questions, not reasons why it is unethical. The only way humanity will ever find answers to these questions is to be confronted with the reality of the existence of things such as non-human sentient species. Society in general and especially the legal system requires something to occur in reality in order to even begin coming to terms whether it is good or bad. If we leave it as a thought experiment we'll still be arguing about it ten thousand years from now, and the neanderthal species will still be extinct.
More importantly, someone somewhere is eventually going to perform this experiment, and succeed. Do you want it to be us, or some isolated totalitarian dictatorship country *COUGH*northkorea*COUGH* which may be far more inclined to breeding a population of hybrid-human slaves who are given no rights under the law? There needs to be established international precedent for treating non-human sentient beings as equals, otherwise the opposite might easily happen. The only way to resolve these issues is to confront them in reality, and short of having some sentient aliens immigrate here from Tau Ceti Alpha, I don't know how else we're going to tackle these ethical choices.
Bottom line is that denying the advancement of technology because "I have some questions" is pointless. If we were resurrecting the dodo would you declare it perfectly ethical just because the dodo is clueless about what's happening? Of course you would. It would be lauded as an important project. On the other hand, neanderthals would be sentient so you want to deny them a chance at continued existence in this universe just because their lives might be complicated and difficult? Guess what would probably happen with a resurrected dodo species, after we have enough of them. Yeah, we'll start carving them up for Thanksgiving dinner (and enjoying it). Hard to believe we could really do anything worse to the neanderthals. Outside of certain segments of the population I think most people will treat them just about as well as they treat fellow humans. Of course by that I mean they will be treated badly, just like we treat each other. But at the same time it will highlight the fact that we do treat each other badly, and how we should stop doing that.
Some individuals resulting from these experiments may get mistreated horribly, but I can see nothing but a positive effect for humanity as a whole in the long term to be forced to confront the reality that we are not the only sentient species in the universe. And if we get things resolved sufficiently maybe we won't be so bad off when we meet some other non-human sentient species, and maybe they won't decide to exterminate us for being absolutely horrid, hateful little creatures.
Because they make any real, useful, gun control much less likely to happen. Their grandstanding is counter productive.
For example you try and say "Hey, we really should register firearms. After all you register your car, why not guns too? It would allow for some tracking and accountability, and in the event someone becomes a prohibited person easier allow courts to determine if they have any guns that need to be surrendered." Well the gun lobby shoots back with "No, unacceptable, if you have a registry it can be used to target gun owners." You respond "That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Then, this happens, in a place that has a gun registry. Now the gun lobby doesn't have to talk in hypotheticals, or other nations, they can point to something that happened right in America that is precisely the kind of shit they are talking about. Now more moderate gun owners, who might have been amenable, or at least accepting, of the idea hate it because they believe what the gun lobby is saying.
Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned, period, end of story, unless the second amendment is repealed. All kinds of arguments have been tried and all have failed, the supreme court has ruled that the 2nd does in fact mean that gun ownership is a protected, individual, right.
As such trying stupid shit to do things that are bans but not in name, or to harass or make things difficult for gun owners are counter productive. All they do is polarize things, convince gun owners that any and all controls are bad because they'll be abused.
Stunts like this are nothing but harmful.
You really don't go far enough with this comment. You've acknowledged that it happened, but you haven't acknowledged what it really means. The plain and simple truth is this: A firearms registry was just abused to target firearms owners, thus proving that firearms registries will be abused to target firearms owners. There is no other side to this argument. It is not "counter productive" that the list was abused, it is simply reality. The idea that such a list would not be abused has always been preposterous and always will be preposterous. Gun registries are not a workable solution in a free society. Period. QED. Thus it is proven.
It's funny how the gun control crowd is constantly "shooting themselves in the foot" with actions and rhetoric like this that simply strengthens the other side and guarantees there will absolutely be millions more firearms ending up being sold and used, especially illegal black market firearms. The more they push, the more the other side pushes back and the results will end up being the exact opposite of what they want.
Wow. Bad at reading comprehension much? The guy you were replying to was basically agreeing with you, and saying exactly what you said. Might want to re-read his post a few times.
Maybe this is just me, but making fun of Mormon underwear seems to me just as dumb as making fun of the hijab, yarmulke, Sikh turban, or pocket protector.
OK, I've never worn a pocket protector, but you get my point I hope.
No, actually I don't see your point at all. Are any of those clothing items supposed to provide the wearer with hidden magical protections against evil? The Mormons' magic underwear is not worn so much as a public symbol of faith or modesty as it is a literal magical talisman. It's like a religious tin foil hat. It deserves all the ridicule it gets.
This seems like a good article on which to talk about something I've recently been reading about: Michael Reynolds and his Earthships.
So this guy, for almost 45 years now, has been building homes out of recycled materials (tires, cans, and bottles mostly). They're designed to as close to "carbon zero" in their energy requirements as possible. They collect their own water from the roof and store it in cisterns rather than needing public water infrastructure or pulling from an aquifer. They are heated and cooled passively by the sun, both in the dead of winter and the height of summer. That of course cuts out the bulk of any energy requirements, since heating and cooling require more electricity than anything else in a typical home. Earthships also treat their own waste water on-site using a greenhouse full of plants. So every piece of public infrastructure that a typical home would require is all taken care of on-site. Water, power and sewer.
Even with drastically lowered power requirements compared to a conventional house, the complete solar power system to run an Earthship costs $25-30,000. That's a few solar panels, a few heavy duty batteries, inverters, charge controller, etc. Now triple or quadruple that setup for a conventional home, unless you just want enough for emergency power, in which case you might as well just have a 7kw-10kw generator installed. What many people are doing is just installing solar panels tied to the power grid to decrease their electric bill. That kind of installation pays for itself within a few years, but of course does absolutely nothing to give you power in emergencies since your local inverter shuts down when the grid shuts down and you have no battery bank to store the power even for overnight usage.
In short, Earthships clearly demonstrate that true grid-independent solar power is still extremely expensive, at least in the initial setup cost. Solar installation should not be talked about in terms of absolute cost but in terms of how much stress it will remove from the public infrastructure and how it will help decrease the country's dependence on centralized energy production. That's not to mention how many millions of people won't have to lose power, water and sewer every time there's an outage. That's really the major benefit to putting in a complete solar power system: partial or complete independence from the grid. Not saving money. If even 10% of homes were Earthship style homes, the impact on the public of major infrastructure outages would be lessened quite a bit. Decentralizing weak points of infrastructure should always be seen as a good thing.
Anyone who's interested in sustainable and/or off-grid housing should visit the Earthship website (earthship.com) or view some of the videos on YouTube. Look for "Garbage Warrior" and "Earthship seminar". Michael Reynolds has been demonstrating for decades now that it is possible to build sustainable homes that don't require any infrastructure for about the same overall price as a conventional home. But you definitely need to think a little bit outside the box.
More and more in the last decade or so I have seen things that lead me to believe that humans have been basically modern humans for approximately 200,000 years. That's how far back our ancestors have been traced through our mitochondrial DNA. I have no doubt that in coming decades there will be new discoveries that will keep pushing the dates of "modern" human behavior further and further back.
This is a fascinating concept to me because it means the human race and basic forms of human civilization have been around for an incredibly long time. Basic concepts like languages, writing systems, trading, counting, money, philosophy, astronomy, martial arts and many other things have probably been invented, forgotten and reinvented hundreds of times by individual geniuses over the course of those 200,000 years. All the sci-fi stories I've ever read where it's seen as some amazing thing that an alien race has been around for more than a hundred thousand years... Well, the human race proves that's really not that amazing. Or, conversely, that the human race is equally as amazing as those "ancient" alien races. In fact, we could be considered one of those "ancient" alien races, from the perspective of an alien race.
When I was younger, the concept was that just a few thousand years ago we were retarded cave men, and then suddenly civilization happened. Nowadays what I picture is more like endless millennia of fairly intelligent people living like Native Americans in many different ways, with pockets of even more modern cultures that rose and fell through the ages, until finally a few thousand years ago a few things like writing and math were (re)discovered and remembered and propagated to enough other humans that modern civilization exploded into being and had enough momentum and population to finally stick around, where it hadn't been able to "stick" before. I think it was basically luck that things didn't develop either ten thousand years earlier or ten thousand years later. All the basic elements seem to have been there for a looooooong time.
Just my pet theory. I am not an anthropologist, obviously, just fascinated by the things that may have happened during early modern human history, which seems to extend much further back than what I was taught in grade school.
This.
Read the ancient but still highly useful Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. This is a textbook example of a situation that can be attacked using the advice in that excellent book. If you sidestep Bob when trying to bring this new system in there is about a 98% chance of significant strife and animosity resulting from such action. If you are able to get on Bob's good side and work with him to introduce a new system, things will go infinitely better. Especially if everyone including Bob thinks it's mostly his idea.
Here's the catch though: You can't fake it. You must approach people with a real, genuine interest in getting to know them. If they are difficult to deal with you have to find some chink in their armor that will make them more approachable. If you fake it you will go down in flames and the Dale Carnegie approach will never work for you.
Any other angle of attack in this situation usually will turn out very negatively for one or both parties.
Darth Mickey?
How long before we see a T-shirt with Mickey holding a light saber and the text below it:
Minnie, I am your father.....
Uhh...
http://www.google.com/search?q=darth+mickey+t-shirt&hl=en&client=opera&hs=wkI&rls=en&channel=suggest&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=N2CRUNalJ6_xigLalYH4Cw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1863&bih=1073
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=darth+mickey&qpvt=darth+mickey&FORM=IGRE
You folks never been to Asia / Chinatown before? I'm sure a lot of them are officially licensed versions also. Been around for many years.
After the horrors Lucas inflicted on us with the new trilogy I'm surprised anyone is complaining. New ones can't possibly be worse or even as bad, as long as he's not in charge of production/writing/design/etc. anymore.
CalOPPA Gangnam Style!
Seconding the parent.
A lot of folks here seem to be confused about the difference between someone finding and disclosing a vulnerability that you found on YOUR OWN COPY of a piece of software, and finding and disclosing a vulnerability that you found while you were on SOMEONE ELSE'S COMPUTER SYSTEM.
To the legal system, and most judges, prosecutors and juries, computers are still "magic". It doesn't matter how childishly, stupidly simple it was to find the problem, or how dangerous it is to others, what matters to the law is that you "accessed" a part of someone else's computer system that you were not authorized to access.
To put this in analogy form, it is illegal to break into and enter someone else's home without permission. If you live in a duplex with a crummy lock on the front door and you find out that YOUR locked front door can be opened with a toothpick, that's one thing. Complain to the landlord or replace it with a better lock if you happen to be the owner. If you then proceed to open your NEIGHBOR'S locked front door with a toothpick, you are committing the crime of breaking and entering, and if your neighbor is at home and sees you doing this he would be well within his legal rights to call the police and have you arrested for B&E. If you're LUCKY and your neighbor is a reasonable person you can explain that you were just testing the security of his front door for him. But you are not legally protected in any way because it ISN'T YOUR HOUSE.
It's stupid, and people have regularly been "burned at the stake" (i.e. "sent to prison") in recent decades for the criminal equivalent of say, checking to see if a stray black cat has a collar and tag. But that's the way it is and to pretend otherwise is very naive.
So do as most people are advising. Find another service and forget any of this ever happened. If it really burns a hole in your heart not to warn them of the problem again, find a good email anonymizer service and send them just enough detail for them to identify and fix the problem, without identifying yourself.
When I was in high school (early 2000's) I used to wonder how they were going to teach lawmakers and enforcers so they could cope with all the new crap that was being made. Were they going to send them all to schools to teach them how networked computers worked or maybe hire a bunch of IT advisors? I was being way too optimistic, its been a decade of incompetent, ignorant, old people making and enforcing laws without an understanding of what they are making laws about. Why is there now law requiring knowledge and education in the field for which you make and enforce laws?
Bwahahaha! Son, I was in high school in the early 90s, and let me tell you, the decades of incompetent, ignorant old people making and enforcing laws without any understanding of what they are making laws about did not just start 20 years ago. It's been with us for at least 20 *centuries*.
The only thing that can possibly change things is geek types managing to get themselves elected, like what's happening with the Pirate Party in various localities. Politicians and enforcers who don't already understand technology are completely uninterested in being educated. Things will unfortunately have to get far more draconian before the general public will really start voting in any new blood in significant enough numbers to make any real changes to the system. By the time enough new blood gets elected there will be new issues that they won't understand because they'll be the old fogies. It's an endless cycle.
How about the Romney/Ryan economic recovery "plan". It's gotta qualify as mathematical fiction.
The next step appears to be to move from algebraics to broad descriptions of the type of data you want to download. This is waiting on computers with a great deal more processing power and perhaps emergent AI, but there will come a time where instead of feeding a bunch of packets over a noisy channel the Internet will simply say to your computer "short film with 20-something actor wondering whether to marry now or enjoy life for a while longer" and your system will fill in the rest, completing the transfer mathematically. This is down the road a ways, but newer technology such as lossy compression for data is already available and potentially lucrative for those who are willing to think outside of the conventional box and try something with a few more holes in it.
Later that day your surgically implanted computing device warns you that you're about to run out of space on your 300 petabyte holographic storage crystal. Surprised, you do some investigating and find that the crystal has been filled with 17,381 full-length short films with a 20-something actor wondering whether to marry now or enjoy life for a while longer. At the end of the month you get billed for 2.3 billion dollars for exceeding your monthly data transfer quota.
This happens every month.
A truly glorious future awaits us!
How the hell did the parent post get modded funny?
Yeah, GP is an idiot. Channel 2 is obviously 100% better than channel 1, not 50% better. Duh.
The saddest part of this kind of crap is just how silly it all is. If instead of just paying her for private sex the "johns" were paying her to make a private "adult film" (with them as director and co-star), then she would simply be an "adult film star" and they would be making "pornography" which is perfectly legal. Take away the camera and suddenly it's "prostitution" which is illegal. Even though the participants and the sex acts will be exactly the same.
What... the... FUCK?
How many more decades or centuries will it be before society at large finally acknowledges that it is complete bizarro-world insanity for "consensual sex for money" to continue to be highly illegal while "consensual sex for money IN FRONT OF A CAMERA" is perfectly legal? It's the same goddamn thing for Christ's sake! Make up your fucking mind!
Prostitution should be exactly as legal as pornography. Legalize it, regulate it, tax it, and test sex workers for STDs/HIV at least once a month just exactly the same as they do with "adult film stars". Any other course is utter nonsense. A few of the actual civilized countries of the world seem to have figured this out, but I give the US another century before it happens here. At least.
"Apple is risking upsetting 65% of the world's population"
Are you fucking kidding me?
Not only that, but this is obviously the first steps...
Into a THOUSAND YEARS OF DARKNESS. Wooooo!
Chuck Norris says stick with Google Maps, or the world is doomed. Doooomed!
I know I'll get flamed for this since it goes against the Linux philosophy, but how about getting rid of competing Gnome and KDE (and now Unity) desktops and agree on one standard desktop with a single API for everyone to write to. And maintain backwards compatibility for the API so an application written for GnoKDE 2.0 still still run unaltered on GnoKDE 3.0.
I know that having multiple desktops gives users choice, but there are many talented developers on the KDE, Gnome and Unity teams, and it seems like they could make a much more polished and usable product if they worked together instead of coming out with separate products. Oh, and stop pushing out alpha releases (I'm talking about you, Ubuntu/Unity) as the default desktop and telling users that it's for their own good.
But hey, don't trust me, I use Xfce since it does everything I need in a desktop.
This is really the core of why Linux is a total failure with mainstream computer users. Because there is no such thing as the "Linux desktop". There never has been and never will be. There is only a frankenstein's patchwork of hundreds of slightly different Linux desktop distributions (and their variations) which are _based_ on Linux. The only Linux desktop that will ever succeed in the market is one that is unified and standardized and packaged as a well-supported product. What's that new distro that's become almost a household name? Oh yeah: Android.
Yeah, it's Linux, but they don't talk about it being Linux, they talk about it as the Android Platform, and that's exactly what it is, a stable platform on which to develop applications. App developers don't develop their apps for "Linux", they develop their apps for "Android". And the public knows it only as Android.
I fully expect to come back in another decade and see the same situation in the Linux world that exists now, with infinite combinations of a half dozen different popular window managers, distros, GUI frameworks and so on. It's a fiddler's paradise that works well for approximately 1% of the population. But for normal humans there will be no penetration of the market until you can say to someone, "THIS is the Linux desktop. There is no other." And that is never, ever, ever, EVER going to happen because it is completely contrary to the whole spirit of the open source community which spawns Linux and it's variations. Individual independence and unilateral dictatorial leadership decisions do not mix well, but it is precisely the unilateral dictatorial decisions that lead to consistency. But consistency can't make everyone happy, which is why open source development was started in the first place! What the geeks want and what the general public wants are diametric opposites!
What the Linux community really needs to get over is the idea that the "Linux desktop" should in any way be competing with unified commercial desktop platforms. Because it just fucking CAN'T. It is NOT the same animal, and it is NOT made for the same reasons. The "Linux desktop" will NEVER become mainstream. The only possible way that Linux will penetrate the mainstream is as a stablized, commercially supported, branded product like Android. Even then, it will need to be combined with hardware. Notice how Android and Mac OS X are not marketed to the public independently of the related hardware. Android is marketed with smartphones and Mac OS X is marketed with Mac hardware. Linux on the other hand is marketed as a software product independent of hardware. It's an aftermarket modification with extremely limited appeal.
It's kind of like marketing a replacement engine that does all the same things as the engine that's already in your car, is pretty reliable and very fuel efficient, but you probably won't be able to find a mechanic in town to fix it if it breaks down. Why would any non-mechanically-inclined car owner want that? The answer is pretty obvious: They don't. They're perfectly happy with the engine that's already in their car, and they will only be changing thei
Only stay at places with shower facilities. RV'ing can be fun, but without some comforts like the ability to take long/hot showers, it will always feel like a small step above camping.
Not something you will want to do for several years. And find places with electrical outlets. Air conditioning is something to die for during the summer, and you wont have it if you are running a generator only.
Just FYI there are quite a few 5th wheels on the market with very roomy nice bathrooms and there is at least one company (Girard?) that is now making an "on demand" water heater that lets you have hot water for as long as you have fresh water and propane. I'd recommend that anyone wanting to fulltime in an RV get something like that installed so that all you need to look for is a site with at least a city water hookup, sewer and power. Most larger 5th wheels are also equipped for either a single or a stacked washer/dryer setup. If you have that you also won't need to limit yourself to locations with laundry facilities.
I'd go so far as to say that the two most important things to look for in your RV are 1) a good insulation package including thermal/double paned windows, and 2) a nice roomy bathroom. Everything else is just gravy. Proper insulation will save you gobs of money paying for excessive propane and/or electrical usage, and lets you stay wherever you feel like staying, rather than needing to follow the seasons like many RVers do. A roomy bathroom will make it feel like you are at least staying in a decent hotel room as opposed to feeling like you're "camping". These two things will make a world of difference.
Sources: Me, from researching the RV market for the last several months after my wife and I rented a class C RV for three weeks last fall and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I've been working in IT depts for roughly 20 years and can't remember ever having issues related to "data breach from lack of encryption". Not saying it doesn't happen, but I reckon for most people (outside of finance/defence/govt etc) it's overkill.
It raises a question, how much security is too much? Do you have a lock on your front door? 3 locks? 45 locks? If you had 100 locks on your door and only locked 99 of them, would this be considered vulnerable? This is how I think of the security industry. One lock is fine. If that doesn't work, then no amount of extra locks will help. The bad guys will simply break a window.
Holy cow that was the most retarded post about encryption that I think I've ever read here, yet somehow it got modded +5, insightful. WTF, Slashdot?
The password you use to login to your computer is like a door lock. Too easily bypassed.
Full Disk Encryption is like building your entire house out of 6 inch thick plate steel, with plate steel shields that descend to protect the doors and windows when you lock the house. And the bad guys only have their hands, feet and a nail file to use to break in with. Overkill in the physical world? Yes. But in the digital world it now costs about the same as not doing encryption, and makes it thousands of times more difficult for the bad guys to get your data.
Your understanding of the relative benefits of digital security vs physical security is really terrible.
I also was a big fan of BeOS. Loved it. Used it exclusively for a couple of years. Over a decade ago. Before it died.
But why exactly do we keep having articles about a BeOS clone operating system that is still basically in a nearly useless pre-alpha state after a decade of work? How is this useful to anyone besides the people working on Haiku? Where are all the articles every other week about how well GNU HURD is progressing? Because they are both just about equally useless at this point, until some sort of significant progress is made. There are dozens of other obscure in-progress experimental operating systems out there in various states of development, and there are places to go to read about them. I know, because I used to go to those places to read about all the obscure alternative operating systems.
I'm sure Haiku OS is great fun for the people who spend time working on it, and I wish them joy of it. But I'll bet that pretty much all the people who would ever want to hear about it are already on their mailing list.