"Well. I was getting mildly interested in OSM, until you mentioned these things. Searching and route-finding is 90% of what I use maps for... Too bad. "
You should try http://www.openrouteservice.org/ for route-finding. It uses OSM and I've found it works very well here in the UK.
If this and DuckDuckGo start gaining momentum google may find itself in Altavista's shoes.
I agree. Have already switched to DuckDuckGo and it's a breath of fresh air to miss out on the ads and not worry about being tracked. I have contributed to OpenStreetMap and have seen the content on it it grow over the last couple of years at a terrific rate. It has the potential to be an absolute goldmine of information as more people contribute gps tracks and local points of interest.
Where I live we still have (mildly) radioactive sheep from Chernobyl which farmers can't sell. I would suspect that our masters wish to extend the life of nuclear plants for two reasons - lack of people willing to invest in new ones and the cost of decommissioning. I remember reading last week in the paper (one editorially in favour of nuclear power) the soothing news that that the land around Dounreay plant in Scotland which has now closed should be relatively safe in 330 years. Also the decommissioning cost at today's estimates will only set the UK taxpayer, or perhaps soon the Scottish taxpayer, back by around £3 billion. That's for one plant. You can see how the costs will rack up as lots come to the end of their useful life.
There are a lot of new techniques being developed to allow experimentation without the use of mice or other animals such as http://www.drhadwentrust.org/current-portfolio/skin-cancer. DHT are funding quite a few different research projects as are a number of other organisations which they hope will overcome the limitations of and errors resulting from studies on non-humans.
And what, pray, is wrong with "maths"? It is a contraction of mathematics, plural. I agree with the use of "codes" however as while it is syntactically well formed, a better and more correct term to convey the meaning is "orders". For your information, you spelled "furcating" incorrectly, by the way.
Unfortunately, Thatcher and her City backers didn't believe there was any future in making things and pursued policies to run down industry in the UK. They believed, as has every government since and indeed most governments around the world, that the only thing that matters is the comfort of the spivs who make their fortunes by gambling in the casinos that are the financial centres of the world. The reason for this is clear - the spivs fund the political parties. Thus, off-shoring to the cheapest labour market, lack of domestic investment in technology and the taking of obscene profits by a few have guaranteed that the west is descending into third world status.
Personal computing has been the realm of keyboard+mouse for almost 30 years, but the multiplicity of cheap sensors that is arriving will allow for complex tasks taking advantage of a variety of peripherals, each one good for a particular interaction modality: 3D input, direct selection by touch instead than by a remote cursor, wide gestures for navigation between tasks... they can be done now with more than mouse selection and key combos. That's true either for collaboration (that is not going to disappear even if works are no longer in the office) or for isolated thoughtful work. A single worker will want to take advantage of multimodal interaction and separate information surfaces to keep track of different subtasks and for multitasking, which are difficult to do on the traditional desktop metaphor.
This is the kind of thinking that gave us Gnome 3 Shell and Unity. Quite frankly I and almost everyone else I know is quite happy with a 2D interface, keyboard and mouse for most tasks. I certainly find almost anything else including the new whizz-bang phone-on-a-desktop interfaces rather less productive and after a while, irritating. I don't want to wave my arms around, swipe or pinch things, or indeed have my handwriting translated or talk to a machine. These sort of things are entertaining for adolescents who don't need to make a living and are fine for tiny amounts of interaction on a phone but don't scale up too well. They are gimmicks like 3D TV - solutions to problems that don't exist. There is a reason that the 2D, menu based interface has been around so long and it isn't that there was a lack of technological capability to make something better. The reason is that it works well and people like it.
I see that they plan it to have a range of 40Km. That's less than 25 miles on a charge so not much use for those living in rural areas or in the commuter belt of a lot of cities.The car would only be really useful to those living within a small distance of their commute or main travel distance. Does this not just take them away from existing efficient public transport and increase congestion? Assuming they want personal transport for further distances they would also need a more conventional car.
Animals releasing methane don't have anything to do with global warming, since that's already part of the carbon cycle.
Fossil fuels are the issue.
They surely do. They would only be a natural part of the carbon cycle if they existed in sustainable numbers. Unfortunately there is an increasing amount of livestock being bred to satiate the market for animal products, both in the west and the rapidly expanding markets in the east. In the east, it is increasingly seen as being desirable to copy western patterns of consumption and this includes adopting a western style diet high in animal products. The by-product is both increased methane production and the expansion of factory style farming which also entails high energy input.
As I understand it, the only way this could be imposed in Scotland is via a ruling by the new supreme court but the way libel is defined and treated are different in the two countries. I may be wrong about that but that's how I understand it.
If such legislation is passed in England it will be interesting to see if the UK government uses the Supreme Court to force it upon Scotland also. Otherwise would sites have to differentiate the geographical location of the poster to determine whether Scottish or English law applied?
Exactly. Regardless of how the vulnerability was exposed, the researcher did the right thing and handed the information to the owner of the system. The result was the right one and the intent was honest even if the method of discovery may not have been strictly legal. Any good and fair legal system should judge someone on intent and outcome. Computer security relies on the willingness of well intentioned individuals who sometimes use illegal methods to reveal vulnerabilities. I can't see how it is productive to scare people from revealing what they find by prosecuting them when their intentions are not malevolent, in fact, precisely the opposite. The resources of law enforcement should be directed at those who have malign intent instead.
You can change the icons quite easily and there are a number of sets available online. To change the icon set go to Tools>Options>View and you will see an option for Icon Size and Style. Select a style from the drop down menu. BTW I find the LibreOffice interface infinitely preferable to the mess that MS Office now uses. I used to be a fan of MS Office and thought it was their best product but switched OpenOffice long ago after having suffered more and more bugs and the interface becoming more convoluted and less productive. Having switched again to LibreOffice I have found the improvements over OOo very well executed and had no bug problems. The project seems to be moving along nicely and MS Office file support is excellent.
You won't regret the move to Kyocera. I think their lasers are pretty much unbeatable. Nice print quality, reasonably cheap to run and well made and to top it all - no image drum to replace. I haven't regretted moving to them at all. I used to like HPs but find them fairly expensive to run but reliable as long as you avoid the lower cost models. The Kyoceras have panned out better overall though.
This is a good solution but until there are significant inroads made into getting corporate IT specifiers to adopt ODF compliant software, users won't be able to use it on most corporate machines. The solution must be to actively market the standard to the corporates who currently can't see past proprietary formats and counter MS's dominance. This is easier said than done as MS aggressively pushes their product and spreads disinformation. Corporate buyers also tend to distrust anything which is free to install as they can't imagine it will be any good. I know this from experience of a trial in my workplace where I and a colleague have for the past 4 years, used only Openoffice for all our word processor and spreadsheet work while all our other colleagues have used MS Office. Despite only having problems opening two.doc formatted spreadsheets in that time, most of our colleagues including the MD have decided to stick with MS office - the main objection being that MS Office must be better because it is expensive! Another argument I have heard is that there is a high cost to retrain staff due to minor differences in the interface even though MS Office now sports the "ribbon" interface which to be frank couldn't look more different to the previous menu based interface. The real problem is that there a lot of people with a vested monetary interest in keeping MS Office dominant and support staff don't want to learn to support something different.
Now that Nokia is aligned with the Microsoft axis, could this possibly be a subtle marketing ploy on the behalf of Windows? Picture it - Linux positioned as the low rent OS running on poor hardware with limited features - Windows positioned as the high spec. alternative running on the higher end hardware with all the toys. They have already made the N9, a phone running on Linux with a high specification, unavailable in most of the western world despite the good reviews. It can only help Microsoft, and not just with phone OS sales. Think negative image.
It's not that it's not tested. It's just that what the Firefox designers want is now completely divorced from what the users want. This has been clear for me since the 'awesomebar'*.
I'm trying out Opera. I used to be a Firefox promoter, moving people off IE6 and onto FF every chance I got; but now... all the browsers seem like necessary evils.
*Not that adding the awesomebar was bad... but forcing the awesomebar, and eliminating the option to turn it off, was. That's the behavior that indicates a company is putting marketing ahead of engineering.
I think Mozilla really have shot themselves in the foot. I've used Opera for years - since it was a paid-for application - with Firefox as a fall-back for the odd site with non-standard design. It's easy to knock Opera for being closed source but I've found it has consistently had the best interface and changes have mostly been incremental and fully tested prior to release. Opera have also made a lot of innovations in ease of usage making it a very aesthetically pleasant and ergonomically refined browser. Firefox in comparison has a clunky (in my opinion) interface and occasionally breaks. Good luck with your trial. I hope you find Opera as satisfactory as I have.
BMO is right to an extent but the reality is that all medium / large companies suck the lifeblood out of you. It just depends on how fast they do it as to whether you notice before you are a shell of the person you once were. My advice is work for yourself (or join a co-operative). At least you get to suck your own soul out then.
The patent business is completely mad. Eventually (not so far in the future methinks), the world will grind to a halt as everyone will be in court fighting patent cases rather than doing anything productive.
I use Opera 99% of the time and while I'm not an extension junkie, only using ad and script blocking and a translator, find with Opera these all work well. The interface design and customisability is worth the change from Firefox alone. I couldn't bring myself to use Chrome - a bit flaky and you never know what Google is doing with the data.
Surely concerns with larger projects which could not be split could be nationalised instead?
What the FREAKING heck gives you the idea that things can simply be nationalized in the US?! That wouldn't be constitutional in any way as an over-riding policy. WTF?!
And why not? Surely if it is an improvement for the benefit of the economy and of the majority of the citizens of the US, it cannot be unconstitutional?
Surely this misses the whole point of education - to learn to think critically for oneself? Tweaking essays to meet some sort of formula isn't learning and any institution which regards formulaic submissions as desirable demeans the notion of critical thought.
Profit is the excess money after research, manufacture, cost of sales and other overheads are paid for. Not-for-profit means precisely that - any surplus is put back into the enterprise, reinvested and not taken as profit. Much of the failure of western economies lies in profit-taking at the expense of investing in future stability and innovation.
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"Well. I was getting mildly interested in OSM, until you mentioned these things. Searching and route-finding is 90% of what I use maps for... Too bad. " You should try http://www.openrouteservice.org/ for route-finding. It uses OSM and I've found it works very well here in the UK.
If this and DuckDuckGo start gaining momentum google may find itself in Altavista's shoes.
I agree. Have already switched to DuckDuckGo and it's a breath of fresh air to miss out on the ads and not worry about being tracked. I have contributed to OpenStreetMap and have seen the content on it it grow over the last couple of years at a terrific rate. It has the potential to be an absolute goldmine of information as more people contribute gps tracks and local points of interest.
Where I live we still have (mildly) radioactive sheep from Chernobyl which farmers can't sell. I would suspect that our masters wish to extend the life of nuclear plants for two reasons - lack of people willing to invest in new ones and the cost of decommissioning. I remember reading last week in the paper (one editorially in favour of nuclear power) the soothing news that that the land around Dounreay plant in Scotland which has now closed should be relatively safe in 330 years. Also the decommissioning cost at today's estimates will only set the UK taxpayer, or perhaps soon the Scottish taxpayer, back by around £3 billion. That's for one plant. You can see how the costs will rack up as lots come to the end of their useful life.
There are a lot of new techniques being developed to allow experimentation without the use of mice or other animals such as http://www.drhadwentrust.org/current-portfolio/skin-cancer. DHT are funding quite a few different research projects as are a number of other organisations which they hope will overcome the limitations of and errors resulting from studies on non-humans.
And what, pray, is wrong with "maths"? It is a contraction of mathematics, plural. I agree with the use of "codes" however as while it is syntactically well formed, a better and more correct term to convey the meaning is "orders". For your information, you spelled "furcating" incorrectly, by the way.
Unfortunately, Thatcher and her City backers didn't believe there was any future in making things and pursued policies to run down industry in the UK. They believed, as has every government since and indeed most governments around the world, that the only thing that matters is the comfort of the spivs who make their fortunes by gambling in the casinos that are the financial centres of the world. The reason for this is clear - the spivs fund the political parties. Thus, off-shoring to the cheapest labour market, lack of domestic investment in technology and the taking of obscene profits by a few have guaranteed that the west is descending into third world status.
Personal computing has been the realm of keyboard+mouse for almost 30 years, but the multiplicity of cheap sensors that is arriving will allow for complex tasks taking advantage of a variety of peripherals, each one good for a particular interaction modality: 3D input, direct selection by touch instead than by a remote cursor, wide gestures for navigation between tasks... they can be done now with more than mouse selection and key combos. That's true either for collaboration (that is not going to disappear even if works are no longer in the office) or for isolated thoughtful work. A single worker will want to take advantage of multimodal interaction and separate information surfaces to keep track of different subtasks and for multitasking, which are difficult to do on the traditional desktop metaphor.
This is the kind of thinking that gave us Gnome 3 Shell and Unity. Quite frankly I and almost everyone else I know is quite happy with a 2D interface, keyboard and mouse for most tasks. I certainly find almost anything else including the new whizz-bang phone-on-a-desktop interfaces rather less productive and after a while, irritating. I don't want to wave my arms around, swipe or pinch things, or indeed have my handwriting translated or talk to a machine. These sort of things are entertaining for adolescents who don't need to make a living and are fine for tiny amounts of interaction on a phone but don't scale up too well. They are gimmicks like 3D TV - solutions to problems that don't exist. There is a reason that the 2D, menu based interface has been around so long and it isn't that there was a lack of technological capability to make something better. The reason is that it works well and people like it.
I see that they plan it to have a range of 40Km. That's less than 25 miles on a charge so not much use for those living in rural areas or in the commuter belt of a lot of cities.The car would only be really useful to those living within a small distance of their commute or main travel distance. Does this not just take them away from existing efficient public transport and increase congestion? Assuming they want personal transport for further distances they would also need a more conventional car.
Animals releasing methane don't have anything to do with global warming, since that's already part of the carbon cycle. Fossil fuels are the issue.
They surely do. They would only be a natural part of the carbon cycle if they existed in sustainable numbers. Unfortunately there is an increasing amount of livestock being bred to satiate the market for animal products, both in the west and the rapidly expanding markets in the east. In the east, it is increasingly seen as being desirable to copy western patterns of consumption and this includes adopting a western style diet high in animal products. The by-product is both increased methane production and the expansion of factory style farming which also entails high energy input.
As I understand it, the only way this could be imposed in Scotland is via a ruling by the new supreme court but the way libel is defined and treated are different in the two countries. I may be wrong about that but that's how I understand it.
Please be safe if viewing the meteor shower. Wear dark glasses and lock up your plants.
That's the first thing I thought. Here in Scotland Doo means either a pigeon or excrement.
If such legislation is passed in England it will be interesting to see if the UK government uses the Supreme Court to force it upon Scotland also. Otherwise would sites have to differentiate the geographical location of the poster to determine whether Scottish or English law applied?
Exactly. Regardless of how the vulnerability was exposed, the researcher did the right thing and handed the information to the owner of the system. The result was the right one and the intent was honest even if the method of discovery may not have been strictly legal. Any good and fair legal system should judge someone on intent and outcome. Computer security relies on the willingness of well intentioned individuals who sometimes use illegal methods to reveal vulnerabilities. I can't see how it is productive to scare people from revealing what they find by prosecuting them when their intentions are not malevolent, in fact, precisely the opposite. The resources of law enforcement should be directed at those who have malign intent instead.
You can change the icons quite easily and there are a number of sets available online. To change the icon set go to Tools>Options>View and you will see an option for Icon Size and Style. Select a style from the drop down menu. BTW I find the LibreOffice interface infinitely preferable to the mess that MS Office now uses. I used to be a fan of MS Office and thought it was their best product but switched OpenOffice long ago after having suffered more and more bugs and the interface becoming more convoluted and less productive. Having switched again to LibreOffice I have found the improvements over OOo very well executed and had no bug problems. The project seems to be moving along nicely and MS Office file support is excellent.
You won't regret the move to Kyocera. I think their lasers are pretty much unbeatable. Nice print quality, reasonably cheap to run and well made and to top it all - no image drum to replace. I haven't regretted moving to them at all. I used to like HPs but find them fairly expensive to run but reliable as long as you avoid the lower cost models. The Kyoceras have panned out better overall though.
This is a good solution but until there are significant inroads made into getting corporate IT specifiers to adopt ODF compliant software, users won't be able to use it on most corporate machines. The solution must be to actively market the standard to the corporates who currently can't see past proprietary formats and counter MS's dominance. This is easier said than done as MS aggressively pushes their product and spreads disinformation. Corporate buyers also tend to distrust anything which is free to install as they can't imagine it will be any good. I know this from experience of a trial in my workplace where I and a colleague have for the past 4 years, used only Openoffice for all our word processor and spreadsheet work while all our other colleagues have used MS Office. Despite only having problems opening two .doc formatted spreadsheets in that time, most of our colleagues including the MD have decided to stick with MS office - the main objection being that MS Office must be better because it is expensive! Another argument I have heard is that there is a high cost to retrain staff due to minor differences in the interface even though MS Office now sports the "ribbon" interface which to be frank couldn't look more different to the previous menu based interface. The real problem is that there a lot of people with a vested monetary interest in keeping MS Office dominant and support staff don't want to learn to support something different.
Now that Nokia is aligned with the Microsoft axis, could this possibly be a subtle marketing ploy on the behalf of Windows? Picture it - Linux positioned as the low rent OS running on poor hardware with limited features - Windows positioned as the high spec. alternative running on the higher end hardware with all the toys. They have already made the N9, a phone running on Linux with a high specification, unavailable in most of the western world despite the good reviews. It can only help Microsoft, and not just with phone OS sales. Think negative image.
It's not that it's not tested. It's just that what the Firefox designers want is now completely divorced from what the users want. This has been clear for me since the 'awesomebar'*. I'm trying out Opera. I used to be a Firefox promoter, moving people off IE6 and onto FF every chance I got; but now... all the browsers seem like necessary evils. *Not that adding the awesomebar was bad... but forcing the awesomebar, and eliminating the option to turn it off, was. That's the behavior that indicates a company is putting marketing ahead of engineering.
I think Mozilla really have shot themselves in the foot. I've used Opera for years - since it was a paid-for application - with Firefox as a fall-back for the odd site with non-standard design. It's easy to knock Opera for being closed source but I've found it has consistently had the best interface and changes have mostly been incremental and fully tested prior to release. Opera have also made a lot of innovations in ease of usage making it a very aesthetically pleasant and ergonomically refined browser. Firefox in comparison has a clunky (in my opinion) interface and occasionally breaks. Good luck with your trial. I hope you find Opera as satisfactory as I have.
BMO is right to an extent but the reality is that all medium / large companies suck the lifeblood out of you. It just depends on how fast they do it as to whether you notice before you are a shell of the person you once were. My advice is work for yourself (or join a co-operative). At least you get to suck your own soul out then.
The patent business is completely mad. Eventually (not so far in the future methinks), the world will grind to a halt as everyone will be in court fighting patent cases rather than doing anything productive.
I use Opera 99% of the time and while I'm not an extension junkie, only using ad and script blocking and a translator, find with Opera these all work well. The interface design and customisability is worth the change from Firefox alone. I couldn't bring myself to use Chrome - a bit flaky and you never know what Google is doing with the data.
Surely concerns with larger projects which could not be split could be nationalised instead?
What the FREAKING heck gives you the idea that things can simply be nationalized in the US?! That wouldn't be constitutional in any way as an over-riding policy. WTF?!
And why not? Surely if it is an improvement for the benefit of the economy and of the majority of the citizens of the US, it cannot be unconstitutional?
Surely this misses the whole point of education - to learn to think critically for oneself? Tweaking essays to meet some sort of formula isn't learning and any institution which regards formulaic submissions as desirable demeans the notion of critical thought.
Profit is the excess money after research, manufacture, cost of sales and other overheads are paid for. Not-for-profit means precisely that - any surplus is put back into the enterprise, reinvested and not taken as profit. Much of the failure of western economies lies in profit-taking at the expense of investing in future stability and innovation.