That would work if one of their internal lawyers had mentioned it in passing and that's how Google had found out about the problem. However, in this case it's government regulators who brought the subject, which means Google now knows its being watched and knows there's the risk of regulators demanding to see internal documents and auditing their systems.
So no, Google can't, now, go for the runaround option. They have to implement something that means someone at least views the comments that are received by that email address.
Thanks for posting this. The app mentioned in the summary is a completely different one and I was left thinking someone had confused the Google TV app - which has been out for a long time - with the rumors Amazon was about to release a general Amazon instant video app.
Of course, now I've installed the real one, I can't actually get it to play anything (error of "Unknown error" every time I try to play anything) but at least I found the right app.
Given the name, "Prime Video", I'm wondering if the app is only available to those with a Prime subscription - ie you can't use it if you just want to rent/buy movies and have no Prime account.
SQL is ugly, but unfortunately everyone who has attempted to reinvent it hasn't understood it, and has produced something with only a tiny percentage of its critical functionality.
It's the best we've got. NoSQL? A terrible movement made up not of SQL's critics, but of those who have no understanding of the relevent technologies.
No, he's right. The "Not only" thing is a recent thing. Wikipedia said nothing about it in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NoSQL&oldid=335085794), and the NoSQL site itself admits that people "now use" the "Not only" term claiming that the "original" NoSQL was "misleading". Besides which, it'd be NOSQL, not NoSQL, if it had "always" meant that.
I remember NoSQL first coming onto the scene, with its advocates being strong opponents of SQL itself. Regretfully the movement was at its peak when efforts to put a database in the web standards were ongoing, resulting in WebSQL being rejected and IndexedDB being put in its place. Why? Read the W3C discussions at the time. The hostility was to SQL. The reasons revolved around SQL. It was SQL specifically that was rejected.
Having trouble believing it now. Nakamoto took all these steps to protect his identity but made an order for a physical item to be shipped to his real name and address using his pseudonymous email address?
All signs were that it was home grown, right down to the "You need to use Safari to watch this video" message for Firefox and Chrome (Chrome FFS! It's not that big a fork of Webkit yet...) users.
HTML5 video has been working in all major browsers for how long now? And how many CDNs are there that specialize purely in video?
I think the thing people are questioning is the "It's when I open a lot of tabs" comment.
Here's the thing. It may not be. I know this because every now and again I too prune the tabs. And for a while, it looks like that's solved the problem. Only the memory issues suddenly flare up again. And usually they do when I open lots more tabs... but sometimes not.
After a long while I tried using about:memory and looking at the reports it gave. This showed me that many web pages I'd assumed were problematic, for example Twitter, GMail, and the modern AJAX-heavy Google home page, weren't actually that bad. Well, they're bad, they use tens of megabytes for something ridiculously simple (consider the fact the Mozilla binary is smaller than the footprint of many of these pages and you'll see where I'm coming from) but they're not the cause of the "Uh-oh, Firefox is now using 2G of RAM and is about to crash" thing.
On the other hand I found that a hobbyist website I frequent whose design appeared to have not changed in ten years beyond the owners adding the requisite "Share via 600 social media networks!", "Here's which of our articles are trending on Faceplace!", etc, add-on JS libraries, was eating hundreds of megabytes across a small handful of tabs. I, of course, would visit that website, go to the news page, open three or four articles in new tabs, and leave them open without thinking about it because I was monitoring the discussion, and didn't realize the impact.
Is this Firefox's fault? No idea. There's a few things that can be going on: it could be that the pages are using JS in a way that's impossible to sanely garbage collect (ie simple bugs that result in references to giant supposed-to-be-temporary objects remaining linked to), it could be some obscure bug in Firefox resulting in memory leakage (less likely, simply because I know they've been working on it, and I know that Chrome also shows the same websites apparently using more memory, it could be that Firefox's JS implementation is inefficient and uses more memory per object than is strictly necessary, or a whole host of other causes.
Me? I'm thinking Firefox could probably help with solving the issue by isolating tabs but also by punishing webpages that start to go out of control like this. We already have a situation where a CPU heavy script results in an alert to the user (albeit a not very well implemented one - I don't want a modal dialog coming up about a tab I'm not looking at thankyouverymuch, attach it to the tab in question, change the color of the tab, but let me finish what I'm reading in the tab I have in front please.) Perhaps a similar dialog needs to come up when a tab starts to exceed a particular limit on memory, with a "Continue (Doubling memory limit for tab), Stop script, Reload tab" option set.
Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago!
on
PHP 5.6.0 Released
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In fairness Java hasn't really been like that for years. Not that I blame anyone for holding grudges.
Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago!
on
PHP 5.6.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Mainstream? Never heard of either of them.
Using Slashdot's search feature: Wordpress brings up too many hits to count. Umbraco? Zero. Orchard? Less than one page none of which appear to have any relation to the CMS project.
So I can reasonably suggest I'm not in a minority here in never hearing about any of them.
All good points. That said, this proposal is worse than what you're describing: it only works with specially crafted HTML, requires every browser be upgraded to support it (easier than in the past, but still), and ordinary web browsing, zooming in and out, will cause problems.
Perhaps a better solution is for the upgrades to occur server side, with browsers adding to the Accepted family of headers information about the resolution and size they're looking for, and how many bytes of the image they have already, with the server responding - IF that header is provided - with a partial download that satisfies the required resolution. If Apache starts to support this natively, no websites need be modified to support the feature no new HTML is needed, and browsers can support the feature as necessary.
That way the server doesn't have to be configured to turn off countermeasures to download managers and can still use pipelining and reuse existing connections, while the progressive content features of PNG and JPEG can be used to the fullest.
I completely disagree with the notion systemd is "How Windows does things", but still, let's suppose that's true: is it really true Windows requires beefier hardware to "do the same job"?
services.exe has been around since Windows NT 3.x. On my Windows 7 64 machine right now it's occupying four megabytes of memory. init, running on a 12.04LTS box, is using six.
I'm going to say I think both are within the same ballpark, which is what you'd expect, both are simply tracking processes (kinda, in the case of init) and stopping/starting them. You really don't need huge amounts of memory or CPU to do that, and it would take a pretty weird algorithm/feature set for any init/services equivalent to start gobbling serious amounts of memory.
We have four attempts to solve the same problem because we keep doing things badly. Script based services management, in my view, isn't a good thing, and it's also not a good thing to have multiple different clusters of service managers, init, inetd, etc.
Let's look at the status quo that many systemd rioters want to keep: service management scripts generally have to track at least one process, and frequently clusters of them, and usually as the process gets more and more complex, have to be shored up with additional supporting code in the binaries themselves (think Apache's apachectl and BIND's rndc) obliterating any advantage you might have had in having a "user readable" shell script in the first place. Meta data is stored in the most unlikely places - anywhere from/etc configuration files to "comments" in the init script itself (think runlevels.) The kernel itself keeps advancing, with the wonderful cgroups system providing new and better ways to improve security, but we're stuck with chrooting and setuiding daemons because we leave the security decisions to our cross platform binaries.
I'm not suggesting systemd is perfect (XML FFS?), but I think it's a rational response to what is actually a massive kludge and arguably one of the very few serious mistakes in *ix. Are there proprietary alternatives that are better? Maybe. Their proprietary nature means we haven't been exposed to their potential good points, if any, which is a great argument against proprietary software if you want to influence the world for the better.
Were I to design systemd, it'd probably look slightly different. At the same time, I can't argue:
1. With the need for systemd and the feature set it implements.
2. That the status quo is worth keeping. It isn't.
3. Superficial "This isn't the Unix way" arguments. Kludges are not the Unix way either. This is one area we need a change in.
Finally, you didn't mention it, so not addressing your comment but addressing the other major criticism of systemd: Yes, the developers have social interaction problems. So does Linus, and half a dozen other major "personalities" we've always worked with. Hell, one key developer whose work was on the verge of being adopted by the FOSS world (and was adopted by at least one major distro) even killed his wife. I'll slam FOSS developers for their poor social skills if I think it's deserved, and even suggest in extreme cases that a fork might be desirable, but the code they write is there for the using, and if it's a good idea we use it, we should use it.
In the mean time, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Is something that implements the featureset systemd implements necessary? Yes. Are there any non-proprietary alternative projects that implement the same necessary features? No. Does systemd do anything genuinely terrible that makes it impractical to use or worse than the status quo? No. It's good enough, let's adopt it, and let's make it better.
Why should the fact that not everything need be gender balanced mean that you can't argue that a specific thing should be?
To put it another way: is Wikipedia helped or harmed by having only one gender contribute to it, given it's supposed to be a repository of human knowledge?
Also why is it that WP should do more to appeal to females but FB doesn't need to do more to appeal to males?
Because Wikipedia is, for better or worse, intended to be a repository of human knowledge, while Facebook is a repository of cat photos, freemium games, and promotional potato chip coupon pages.
Having half the (intelligent, knowledgable) population under-represented in Wikipedia is a problem as it will impact the information Wikipedia makes available, and the usefulness of that information, and thus the usefulness of Wikipedia as a whole and its ability to be a repository for human knowledge.
Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago!
on
PHP 5.6.0 Released
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· Score: 1
It doesn't have a monopoly as such, but it's very hard to avoid. Many - maybe even most - of the major web apps you're likely to be contracted to change/extend are written in PHP for some reason. There appears to be no mainstream alternative to, say, Wordpress/Drupal/et al that's written in something more solid like Java or C#.
Please be aware that despite virtually every poster thinking otherwise here, the Holographic Universe Theory is not about simulations, the Matrix, or anything like that. Think back to what a Hologram actually is, rather than how the term is often used in science fiction - that is, a 2D object that, when hit by light at different angles, projects entirely different patterns. That's the definition of the word they were using when they came up with the phrase.
Now, if you're going to ask me to describe what HUT is, I'm the wrong person. Nobody understands a word I'm saying half the time, and in any case, I don't understand the concepts enough to be able to understand it, let alone explain it.
I think you've missed the GP's issue with MI's solution which is that inevitably the result of jailing people for photographing rabbits is that people who photograph rabbits end up getting jailed.
That is, this "solution" has a hell of a lot of collateral damage. Entirely blameless people will get their lives turned upside down. Lots of people. Not one person who pissed off a policeman once in a blue-moon, but hundreds, may be thousands. These people will lose their jobs, have difficultly getting employment, may lose their home and worldly possessions, all because of they spend time in prison after violating a stupid law.
Worse still, MI assumes that the law will get repealed, and you assume the law will get repealed quickly. Both are statements without supporting arguments. It is reasonable to assume that if the act of arresting people over something so blatantly stupid causes a public outcry, that is, if it garners widespread media coverage, then the law might get amended. But it's NOT clear that the enforcement will get that outcry, and in some ways, it's more likely to get the outcry if the law is abused than if it isn't.
Outcry or not, the law will not be amended "quickly", because local and State governments do have a process for amending laws, do have an agenda they're trying to implement at the same time, and so are at best likely to take months to repeal an unpopular law. At worst, years, or never. If there's just one stupid law, then yeah, shortly before an election it's likely to be addressed. Dozens? Well, sure, shortly before an election one or two of those dozens, the one or two that the media is focusing on, will get repealed. Everything else? They may get repealed, if there's time, during the outcry itself. If the outcry dies down, then the law will get forgotten and continue to get enforced. It may even be that sympathy evaporates for the victims, as the lack of rationality of the law gets forgotten as the blame shifts to new victims for continuing to violate the law despite the fact everyone knows about it now because of the previous outcry.
It's a very bad idea. Everyone, police, prosecutors, judges, and so on, needs to use their discretion and decide when it's a good idea to enforce something and when it isn't. We've already denied judges that discretion with mandatory sentencing laws, and that's not done us any good at all. How is denying prosecutors and police discretion going to help?
The point of driverless cars is supposed to be a way to get us to that utopian transportation vision where we can go anywhere automatically by telling our transportation device where we want to go. This has been "possible" for decades but for one problem: all proposed systems required new tracks/roads be built that were separated from the current road system. That's prohibitively expensive. So in walks Google, and a few others, and says "We have all this technology, let's create something that interoperates with existing traffic on existing roads."
And they do some demos, and everyone thinks they've solved the problem.
Only they haven't. Google's cars, for example, have to drive on a "virtual track". There are holes in the track. Some of them are holes in the map, others are temporary detours and or obstacles that means the cars are unable to navigate them because it doesn't have enough information. To make driverless cars "work" as well as they appear to do at all across the whole country, Google is going to have to keep a constant, updated by the minute, map of the entire US road system, not just the official roads, but the private roads, the position of every driveway, etc.
So the DMV's comments aren't actually entirely out of order. Forget emergencies, you will have to take over every few hundred miles, assuming Google can update its databases to some decent compromise between up-to-the-second and "good enough", simply because the cars are going to have problems continuing.
Me? I'd prefer we look at our transportation system again and ask if this is really what we want and need. And if we're going to continue legally mandating suburban development and banning urban development, perhaps we need to look into improving PRT technologies and making them work.
If I'm reading the Neowin thread, followed by the Neowin articles, properly, the "two windows" speculation thing appears to be because of this:
- In September, Microsoft will release a preview of Windows 9 called "Threshold" to Enterprise customers. The idea is that Enterprises (large corporations) need some time to prepare for the upgrade.
- Threshold is mostly feature complete, but lacks the more significant UI changes that Windows 9 will bring.
- Windows 9 will be released much later and will have significant UI upgrades as well as everything in Threshold.
Because these two versions of "Next generation Windows" have been floating around, some have thought that there are two different versions of Windows.
The problem is that very often someone who thinks he is (or is) completely innocent will talk to the cops, and as a result the cops decide he's committed a crime, prosecute him, and he goes to jail. Here's an example http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10... of the scientist Thomas Butler
For those who don't want to click on the link, it describes a situation wherea man was prosecuted for lying to the FBI, after he caused a major alert by pretending some vials of plague bacteria had been stolen that, in fact, he'd accidentally destroyed.
I'm kind of wondering if that's the example the parent poster actually planned to use, or if he cut and pasted the wrong link. I'd have thought Bulter would have been aware of the consequences of pretending someone had stolen such a thing, that it would result in a major investigation, with a lot of resources wasted.
Hate to break it to you, but nothing about socialism has anything to do with "occupational licensing". Socialism is simply about people cooperating with one another to work for the public good, which might be via the government, but can equally be in voluntary groups - the cooperative movement, for example, is considered socialist by virtually everyone, be they rabid anti-socialist or red hippie alike, yet has nothing to do with government. And let's not get started on unions... Robert Owen, considered by most the "Father of Socialism", had no government role at all in what he was working on, he'd be admired by many libertarians if it wasn't for that damned dirty S word blinkering them.
Part of the problem with the US right now is the propaganda has gotten so ridiculous that the word "socialism" has been redefined here to the point of meaninglessness. Most Americans seem to use it to mean "Anything the government does (that I don't like)". That's a silly definition, and if we want a meaningful discussion of the way the world should work, we need to eliminate it. "Anything the government does" has a variety of words to describe it already. And nobody in their right mind worships prisons, oil subsidies, or indeed the military-industrial complex, as examples of cases where people come together to work for the public good.
Electric kettles sell poorly here, and when I got here - though this changed around five years later - it was exceptionally difficult to find an automatic kettle (one that shuts off when the water starts boiling.)
And yeah, they do seem to take longer, though it's too early in the morning for me to figure out why, my sleeping head is thinking the halved voltage should mean double the amps through the element for the same wattage, making it hotter. (Or is that the problem, and as a result US heating elements need to have a lower resistance for the same wattage, and thus don't output as much heat?)
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That would work if one of their internal lawyers had mentioned it in passing and that's how Google had found out about the problem. However, in this case it's government regulators who brought the subject, which means Google now knows its being watched and knows there's the risk of regulators demanding to see internal documents and auditing their systems.
So no, Google can't, now, go for the runaround option. They have to implement something that means someone at least views the comments that are received by that email address.
Thanks for posting this. The app mentioned in the summary is a completely different one and I was left thinking someone had confused the Google TV app - which has been out for a long time - with the rumors Amazon was about to release a general Amazon instant video app.
Of course, now I've installed the real one, I can't actually get it to play anything (error of "Unknown error" every time I try to play anything) but at least I found the right app.
Given the name, "Prime Video", I'm wondering if the app is only available to those with a Prime subscription - ie you can't use it if you just want to rent/buy movies and have no Prime account.
SQL is ugly, but unfortunately everyone who has attempted to reinvent it hasn't understood it, and has produced something with only a tiny percentage of its critical functionality.
It's the best we've got. NoSQL? A terrible movement made up not of SQL's critics, but of those who have no understanding of the relevent technologies.
No, he's right. The "Not only" thing is a recent thing. Wikipedia said nothing about it in 2009 (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NoSQL&oldid=335085794), and the NoSQL site itself admits that people "now use" the "Not only" term claiming that the "original" NoSQL was "misleading". Besides which, it'd be NOSQL, not NoSQL, if it had "always" meant that.
I remember NoSQL first coming onto the scene, with its advocates being strong opponents of SQL itself. Regretfully the movement was at its peak when efforts to put a database in the web standards were ongoing, resulting in WebSQL being rejected and IndexedDB being put in its place. Why? Read the W3C discussions at the time. The hostility was to SQL. The reasons revolved around SQL. It was SQL specifically that was rejected.
Having trouble believing it now. Nakamoto took all these steps to protect his identity but made an order for a physical item to be shipped to his real name and address using his pseudonymous email address?
All signs were that it was home grown, right down to the "You need to use Safari to watch this video" message for Firefox and Chrome (Chrome FFS! It's not that big a fork of Webkit yet...) users.
HTML5 video has been working in all major browsers for how long now? And how many CDNs are there that specialize purely in video?
UPDATE3: Pictures of Satoshi in the nude from his private iCloud account have now been posted all over 4chan.
Stay on Slashdot as this story develops...
I think the thing people are questioning is the "It's when I open a lot of tabs" comment.
Here's the thing. It may not be. I know this because every now and again I too prune the tabs. And for a while, it looks like that's solved the problem. Only the memory issues suddenly flare up again. And usually they do when I open lots more tabs... but sometimes not.
After a long while I tried using about:memory and looking at the reports it gave. This showed me that many web pages I'd assumed were problematic, for example Twitter, GMail, and the modern AJAX-heavy Google home page, weren't actually that bad. Well, they're bad, they use tens of megabytes for something ridiculously simple (consider the fact the Mozilla binary is smaller than the footprint of many of these pages and you'll see where I'm coming from) but they're not the cause of the "Uh-oh, Firefox is now using 2G of RAM and is about to crash" thing.
On the other hand I found that a hobbyist website I frequent whose design appeared to have not changed in ten years beyond the owners adding the requisite "Share via 600 social media networks!", "Here's which of our articles are trending on Faceplace!", etc, add-on JS libraries, was eating hundreds of megabytes across a small handful of tabs. I, of course, would visit that website, go to the news page, open three or four articles in new tabs, and leave them open without thinking about it because I was monitoring the discussion, and didn't realize the impact.
Is this Firefox's fault? No idea. There's a few things that can be going on: it could be that the pages are using JS in a way that's impossible to sanely garbage collect (ie simple bugs that result in references to giant supposed-to-be-temporary objects remaining linked to), it could be some obscure bug in Firefox resulting in memory leakage (less likely, simply because I know they've been working on it, and I know that Chrome also shows the same websites apparently using more memory, it could be that Firefox's JS implementation is inefficient and uses more memory per object than is strictly necessary, or a whole host of other causes.
Me? I'm thinking Firefox could probably help with solving the issue by isolating tabs but also by punishing webpages that start to go out of control like this. We already have a situation where a CPU heavy script results in an alert to the user (albeit a not very well implemented one - I don't want a modal dialog coming up about a tab I'm not looking at thankyouverymuch, attach it to the tab in question, change the color of the tab, but let me finish what I'm reading in the tab I have in front please.) Perhaps a similar dialog needs to come up when a tab starts to exceed a particular limit on memory, with a "Continue (Doubling memory limit for tab), Stop script, Reload tab" option set.
In fairness Java hasn't really been like that for years. Not that I blame anyone for holding grudges.
Mainstream? Never heard of either of them.
Using Slashdot's search feature: Wordpress brings up too many hits to count. Umbraco? Zero. Orchard? Less than one page none of which appear to have any relation to the CMS project.
So I can reasonably suggest I'm not in a minority here in never hearing about any of them.
You appear to be correct, I'm not sure where I got it from that systemd uses XML...
All good points. That said, this proposal is worse than what you're describing: it only works with specially crafted HTML, requires every browser be upgraded to support it (easier than in the past, but still), and ordinary web browsing, zooming in and out, will cause problems.
Perhaps a better solution is for the upgrades to occur server side, with browsers adding to the Accepted family of headers information about the resolution and size they're looking for, and how many bytes of the image they have already, with the server responding - IF that header is provided - with a partial download that satisfies the required resolution. If Apache starts to support this natively, no websites need be modified to support the feature no new HTML is needed, and browsers can support the feature as necessary.
That way the server doesn't have to be configured to turn off countermeasures to download managers and can still use pipelining and reuse existing connections, while the progressive content features of PNG and JPEG can be used to the fullest.
I completely disagree with the notion systemd is "How Windows does things", but still, let's suppose that's true: is it really true Windows requires beefier hardware to "do the same job"?
services.exe has been around since Windows NT 3.x. On my Windows 7 64 machine right now it's occupying four megabytes of memory. init, running on a 12.04LTS box, is using six.
I'm going to say I think both are within the same ballpark, which is what you'd expect, both are simply tracking processes (kinda, in the case of init) and stopping/starting them. You really don't need huge amounts of memory or CPU to do that, and it would take a pretty weird algorithm/feature set for any init/services equivalent to start gobbling serious amounts of memory.
We have four attempts to solve the same problem because we keep doing things badly. Script based services management, in my view, isn't a good thing, and it's also not a good thing to have multiple different clusters of service managers, init, inetd, etc.
Let's look at the status quo that many systemd rioters want to keep: service management scripts generally have to track at least one process, and frequently clusters of them, and usually as the process gets more and more complex, have to be shored up with additional supporting code in the binaries themselves (think Apache's apachectl and BIND's rndc) obliterating any advantage you might have had in having a "user readable" shell script in the first place. Meta data is stored in the most unlikely places - anywhere from /etc configuration files to "comments" in the init script itself (think runlevels.) The kernel itself keeps advancing, with the wonderful cgroups system providing new and better ways to improve security, but we're stuck with chrooting and setuiding daemons because we leave the security decisions to our cross platform binaries.
I'm not suggesting systemd is perfect (XML FFS?), but I think it's a rational response to what is actually a massive kludge and arguably one of the very few serious mistakes in *ix. Are there proprietary alternatives that are better? Maybe. Their proprietary nature means we haven't been exposed to their potential good points, if any, which is a great argument against proprietary software if you want to influence the world for the better.
Were I to design systemd, it'd probably look slightly different. At the same time, I can't argue:
1. With the need for systemd and the feature set it implements.
2. That the status quo is worth keeping. It isn't.
3. Superficial "This isn't the Unix way" arguments. Kludges are not the Unix way either. This is one area we need a change in.
Finally, you didn't mention it, so not addressing your comment but addressing the other major criticism of systemd: Yes, the developers have social interaction problems. So does Linus, and half a dozen other major "personalities" we've always worked with. Hell, one key developer whose work was on the verge of being adopted by the FOSS world (and was adopted by at least one major distro) even killed his wife. I'll slam FOSS developers for their poor social skills if I think it's deserved, and even suggest in extreme cases that a fork might be desirable, but the code they write is there for the using, and if it's a good idea we use it, we should use it.
In the mean time, let's not let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough. Is something that implements the featureset systemd implements necessary? Yes. Are there any non-proprietary alternative projects that implement the same necessary features? No. Does systemd do anything genuinely terrible that makes it impractical to use or worse than the status quo? No. It's good enough, let's adopt it, and let's make it better.
Yeah, but why? That's a little like saying the decline in use of GTK is because Intel has a new C compiler out.
Why should the fact that not everything need be gender balanced mean that you can't argue that a specific thing should be?
To put it another way: is Wikipedia helped or harmed by having only one gender contribute to it, given it's supposed to be a repository of human knowledge?
.
Because Wikipedia is, for better or worse, intended to be a repository of human knowledge, while Facebook is a repository of cat photos, freemium games, and promotional potato chip coupon pages.
Having half the (intelligent, knowledgable) population under-represented in Wikipedia is a problem as it will impact the information Wikipedia makes available, and the usefulness of that information, and thus the usefulness of Wikipedia as a whole and its ability to be a repository for human knowledge.
It doesn't have a monopoly as such, but it's very hard to avoid. Many - maybe even most - of the major web apps you're likely to be contracted to change/extend are written in PHP for some reason. There appears to be no mainstream alternative to, say, Wordpress/Drupal/et al that's written in something more solid like Java or C#.
Please be aware that despite virtually every poster thinking otherwise here, the Holographic Universe Theory is not about simulations, the Matrix, or anything like that. Think back to what a Hologram actually is, rather than how the term is often used in science fiction - that is, a 2D object that, when hit by light at different angles, projects entirely different patterns. That's the definition of the word they were using when they came up with the phrase.
Now, if you're going to ask me to describe what HUT is, I'm the wrong person. Nobody understands a word I'm saying half the time, and in any case, I don't understand the concepts enough to be able to understand it, let alone explain it.
I think you've missed the GP's issue with MI's solution which is that inevitably the result of jailing people for photographing rabbits is that people who photograph rabbits end up getting jailed.
That is, this "solution" has a hell of a lot of collateral damage. Entirely blameless people will get their lives turned upside down. Lots of people. Not one person who pissed off a policeman once in a blue-moon, but hundreds, may be thousands. These people will lose their jobs, have difficultly getting employment, may lose their home and worldly possessions, all because of they spend time in prison after violating a stupid law.
Worse still, MI assumes that the law will get repealed, and you assume the law will get repealed quickly. Both are statements without supporting arguments. It is reasonable to assume that if the act of arresting people over something so blatantly stupid causes a public outcry, that is, if it garners widespread media coverage, then the law might get amended. But it's NOT clear that the enforcement will get that outcry, and in some ways, it's more likely to get the outcry if the law is abused than if it isn't.
Outcry or not, the law will not be amended "quickly", because local and State governments do have a process for amending laws, do have an agenda they're trying to implement at the same time, and so are at best likely to take months to repeal an unpopular law. At worst, years, or never. If there's just one stupid law, then yeah, shortly before an election it's likely to be addressed. Dozens? Well, sure, shortly before an election one or two of those dozens, the one or two that the media is focusing on, will get repealed. Everything else? They may get repealed, if there's time, during the outcry itself. If the outcry dies down, then the law will get forgotten and continue to get enforced. It may even be that sympathy evaporates for the victims, as the lack of rationality of the law gets forgotten as the blame shifts to new victims for continuing to violate the law despite the fact everyone knows about it now because of the previous outcry.
It's a very bad idea. Everyone, police, prosecutors, judges, and so on, needs to use their discretion and decide when it's a good idea to enforce something and when it isn't. We've already denied judges that discretion with mandatory sentencing laws, and that's not done us any good at all. How is denying prosecutors and police discretion going to help?
I've been wondering that too.
The point of driverless cars is supposed to be a way to get us to that utopian transportation vision where we can go anywhere automatically by telling our transportation device where we want to go. This has been "possible" for decades but for one problem: all proposed systems required new tracks/roads be built that were separated from the current road system. That's prohibitively expensive. So in walks Google, and a few others, and says "We have all this technology, let's create something that interoperates with existing traffic on existing roads."
And they do some demos, and everyone thinks they've solved the problem.
Only they haven't. Google's cars, for example, have to drive on a "virtual track". There are holes in the track. Some of them are holes in the map, others are temporary detours and or obstacles that means the cars are unable to navigate them because it doesn't have enough information. To make driverless cars "work" as well as they appear to do at all across the whole country, Google is going to have to keep a constant, updated by the minute, map of the entire US road system, not just the official roads, but the private roads, the position of every driveway, etc.
So the DMV's comments aren't actually entirely out of order. Forget emergencies, you will have to take over every few hundred miles, assuming Google can update its databases to some decent compromise between up-to-the-second and "good enough", simply because the cars are going to have problems continuing.
Me? I'd prefer we look at our transportation system again and ask if this is really what we want and need. And if we're going to continue legally mandating suburban development and banning urban development, perhaps we need to look into improving PRT technologies and making them work.
If I'm reading the Neowin thread, followed by the Neowin articles, properly, the "two windows" speculation thing appears to be because of this:
- In September, Microsoft will release a preview of Windows 9 called "Threshold" to Enterprise customers. The idea is that Enterprises (large corporations) need some time to prepare for the upgrade.
- Threshold is mostly feature complete, but lacks the more significant UI changes that Windows 9 will bring.
- Windows 9 will be released much later and will have significant UI upgrades as well as everything in Threshold.
Because these two versions of "Next generation Windows" have been floating around, some have thought that there are two different versions of Windows.
For those who don't want to click on the link, it describes a situation wherea man was prosecuted for lying to the FBI, after he caused a major alert by pretending some vials of plague bacteria had been stolen that, in fact, he'd accidentally destroyed.
I'm kind of wondering if that's the example the parent poster actually planned to use, or if he cut and pasted the wrong link. I'd have thought Bulter would have been aware of the consequences of pretending someone had stolen such a thing, that it would result in a major investigation, with a lot of resources wasted.
Hate to break it to you, but nothing about socialism has anything to do with "occupational licensing". Socialism is simply about people cooperating with one another to work for the public good, which might be via the government, but can equally be in voluntary groups - the cooperative movement, for example, is considered socialist by virtually everyone, be they rabid anti-socialist or red hippie alike, yet has nothing to do with government. And let's not get started on unions... Robert Owen, considered by most the "Father of Socialism", had no government role at all in what he was working on, he'd be admired by many libertarians if it wasn't for that damned dirty S word blinkering them.
Part of the problem with the US right now is the propaganda has gotten so ridiculous that the word "socialism" has been redefined here to the point of meaninglessness. Most Americans seem to use it to mean "Anything the government does (that I don't like)". That's a silly definition, and if we want a meaningful discussion of the way the world should work, we need to eliminate it. "Anything the government does" has a variety of words to describe it already. And nobody in their right mind worships prisons, oil subsidies, or indeed the military-industrial complex, as examples of cases where people come together to work for the public good.
Electric kettles sell poorly here, and when I got here - though this changed around five years later - it was exceptionally difficult to find an automatic kettle (one that shuts off when the water starts boiling.)
And yeah, they do seem to take longer, though it's too early in the morning for me to figure out why, my sleeping head is thinking the halved voltage should mean double the amps through the element for the same wattage, making it hotter. (Or is that the problem, and as a result US heating elements need to have a lower resistance for the same wattage, and thus don't output as much heat?)