That was certainly a long and well thought out response, thanks! Always fun to get discussions going.:-)
You're right that I've missed the boat a bit on the capacity of the different networks. Particularly wrt 3G in the US. I really never grasped that EVDO was a 3G technology, it seemed more like GPRS or EDGE seen here in Europe. Probably my mistake is that I only hear about it from techies who only use it for data transfer for their computers.
Now when you talk about IS-136 and AMPS at the same time as "Lapland" (which is only a part of Sweden - it's just that's it's really big and no-one really lives there;-) I get the feeling that AMPS is the same, or similar technologies as what in Sweden was called "NMT". Or in short the analog system which was in use all over Sweden before GSM replaced it. (Looking at wikipeadiea is suggests that IS-136 is a continuation of AMPS into 2G systems and that AMPS was similar to NMT.)
As such I do agree that AMPS was for its time most certainly the right choice to use. OTOH I disagree that it was a poor techincal descision to replace it (or in Eu's case NMT and similar techs) with GSM.
As I commented before GSM specifies an entire stack of phone functionality. I'd say it's a pretty good demonstration of how solid that technology was is that it has certainly spawned the biggest unified market as well as being used in next gen networks UMTS). Naturally part of that last bit is mostly because backwards compatability makes the transition easier.
I'd also say that the European decision to go with a clean slate and a unifying standard was the right way. Europe did have a similar situation as the US at the time with everyone and their dog using different systems. Naturally these were all mostly incompatible.
However I do agree that it makes my comment before of referring to IS-136 as "incompatible with GSM" rather backwards. I would however say that I believe that the fierce market driven economy in the states caused the old tech in AMPS to be patched and expanded longer than was suitable. My point is that the reason Cingular (which used that tech as I've understood it) didn't switch to another system is because it was not economically viable. If the competition didn't switch they'd be destroyed.
OTOH in Europe all carriers were forced to switch if they wanted to get into the 2G game. So everyone there was on an equal(ish) footing.
I may be putting words in your mouth though and I'm not sure if you disagree with me on all these points. To reiterate: I feel that the decision to go with GSM was correct both technologically and economically. It created an ultimately freer market which gives users better phones as well as give them the freedom to select which ever phone they want. Naturally many of the decisions in which technologies were selected to incorporate into GSM were made on a patriotic (in the very strange sense that the Eu acts patritically) foundations. I doubt that American companies had a lot of hope of getting their technologies into the standard (with attached royalty naturally).
So I say that the reason your dad is now in a bad spot is that the US market is still fragmented wrt to technologies. If a winning technology had been available there he could have used such a system instead. However the American carriers were hampered with short-sighted goals (update old technology, no sims in phones, incompatible phones hence too small market to get a many makers of phones going) that they lost in the end. My main gripe with that is that I fail to see how GSM or the Eu can be blamed for that?
But I realise that this discussion may have been turned around a bit as it's easy to get caught up in the details when you're having fun arguing. I know I do.
Is the stylesheet changer the same as that found in View->Page Style? If so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to put it back in like you remember it with an extention. If it hasn't been done already.
I still think FF is the Browser with the most geeky features. It's just that they put them as extentions instead so it doesn't flood the browser with features.
Well I'd say 3 years is a very short period of time. 3 years ago the rest of the world (well the parts using GSM as well as Japan) bagan moving to 3G systems. (Still using parts of the GSM system but over new and faster carrier systems.)
Now it was some time since I was studying mobile phone systems at a basic level. What I feel was the greatest benefit of GSM was that it specified not only the radio layer but all of the funtions needed on the phone. It's kind of comparing only the physical carrier (CDMA, TDMA) of the OSI model with an entire network stack. It may well be that the network layer of CDMA is quite a bit better than TDMA (ignoring the later versions of WCDMA and CDMA2000). Since GSM specifies the entire stack this means that phones are compatible to a higher degree. Which means that handset producers can compete instead. And as long as you have a good carrier network (which USA is apparently getting the last few years) handsets are much more interesting to the consumer.
You claim that CDMA operators don't want this competition, I guess that may be true. I can't really see how it would benefit the consumers to have less choice or to be tied heavily into that operators phones.
Now I'm sure your dad may blame his new GSM phone. It would make more sense blaming the company pouring money in an incompatible network (IS-136) instead of following the rest of the world. (Where rest of the world is pretty much Euroupe-Asia.)
Fortunately software engineering is less of a form of craft than software development used to be. (I'd claim that craftmanship in many ways is an art.) When I'm developing and when I'm being artistic (photography mainly) I use pretty opposite criteria for my work.
When I develop I try to make things work. When I'm artistic I try to make things pretty.
That doesn't stop me from inserting intellectual stuff in my development though (but not so much in my professional work).
In my opinion people who consider computer programming an art hold "art" in much too high esteem.
GPGPU are perfectly workable on an AGP based card. It's not as optimal as the drivers are usually not at all optimized for reading back to the main memory, but it can be done. Sadly the same is true for PCIx where read back performance is typically only a fraction of to gfx card performance.
The GPGPU forum has some performance stuff on this for the interested. I just want to point out that you *can* use an AGP card for GPGPU stuff. But the read back performance will hinder your benefits more than on PCIx.
If it doesn't work on an AGP card I imagine it is becuase it just doesn't support the needed shaders. You really need shaders 2.0 or better to be of much use.
I'm sure that there are possibilities to configure the chips from the drivers.
However I kind of doubt that it was much more than fine tuning the chips. My point is that you couldn't take a chip with 2 vertex shaders and 2 fragment shaders and use drivers to turn it into no vertex shaders and 4 fragment shaders.
Perhaps it was around before shaders were all that hot, but then again those were the dark old days when GPU were called graphics chips for a reason. (They weren't really processors.)
But if you have some specific examples it'd be fun to see. Always interesting to watch how the extra ounces of performance is squeesed out.:-)
I wasn't making a statement about cell coverage in the US. I have actually never attempted to use a GSM phone in the states so I have no clue about it. (Friends who have been there have not had a problem though.)
I think the interesting statement that started this was that in the US it was believed that the invisible hand of the free market would fix everything wrt different cell phone technologies. Turns out it didn't work very well. While it's nice that GSM (and other techs) coverage is good now in the US that's what it's been here for the last 10 years.
The key point was that a centrally mandated technology worked better (for the consumers and the market) than a good old free for all.
Appropriate would be not selling or advertising products which a person is not allowed to purchase. Eg alcohol or tobacco to minors.
The rules for this shouldn't be specific for mobile content, it should be that the same rules applying for TV, radio or print should be used for mobile content.
Eg in Sweden it's not allowed to have commersials directed towards children. The reasoning being that children are impressionable and not as capable as an adult to understand that it's propaganda. (I'm sure *you* are much smarter than all adults.) Consider it like how movies are rated PG-13 and such. If you make an online video rental then it would make sense that it has some kind of attempt to enforce those restrictions. If nothing else than for good measure.
Naturally this is only enforceable inside Sweden. So several channels have moved their offices to London and broadcast via satellite.
I guess you're right though about the road to hell. But I doubt that the road to heaven is lined with people selling tobacco to children.
I got the figure from Wikipaedia actually. When it gets online again (I had to use a Google cache) I guess it's time to revise it a bit.;-) Now that I look at the cache again I see that the US measures was naturally square miles. Perhaps it's time for Wiki to go metric/SI.
Other than that, you don't roll out in the entire country. Only in the parts where there actually are people. Here in Sweden we have quite a few different operators with their own nets. (I believe most semi crowded areas have coverage from 3 operators at last.) Besides I'd say that your number of base stations is extremely low. There is no way that there are only 117 GSM base stations in Sweden. The important part is the proportions of them though.
Well, I can't really say I see how you claim that those points are facts or how what you are doing is following them to their logical conclusions. I guess I can adress the three statements you make though.
1) What is "this" referring to? Are you a Swede or are you insinuating that it's a statement I made?
Lets now include number 3) as it's essentially the same statement, though phrased slightly differently. I guess it's better rethoric if you have three statements instead of two.
Perhaps it should, again, be pointed out that shutting down that site was deemed incorrect and caused the ultimatily responsible minister to resign her post. I would say that's a pretty clear indication that it was not considered all right.
Now is freedom of speech more important than possible vandalism and attacks? Yes, I would say that it is. OTOH it's quite clear that what the neo-nazis were doing was only puring gasoline on the fire. They had no ulterior motive of doing this as a demonstration for freedom of speech. They did it because they hoped a lot of muslems would be pissed off.
Sadly you can't exclude idiots from being included in freedom of speech though. I'd say it's a pretty hard question. While I would protect the neo-nazis right to free speech normally I'm not sure I'd do it if I myself or people I know faced bodily harm in the process.
And there was a clear danger to people in those countries. Several embassies had been burned down (among them some completely unrelated to Denmark) and the people working there had been evacuated.
Now on to 2). Yes I agree with you. It is incredibly sad that some people are so misled and ignorant that they are willing to hurt others only for their religious beliefs. Even when the person they are hurting has nothing to do with the issue. It's hardly constrained to the problem of the Mohammed cartoons though, whenever dogma and religion rules you can run into that problem.
As such I think it's important that we try to educate these poor miserable people so they understand WHY we feel freedom of speech is important. Quite a few of them have a pretty severe lack of understanding of how the rest of the world works. All of this are only symptoms of growning pains of globalisation.
So to reiterate:
1) Do I think that it was incorrect that a ministry recommended that the site was shut down? (To be specific, it wasn't shut down by the Swedish government. Someone at that ministry called the ISP and recommended that they shut it down due to the current political climate.) - Yes. 2) Do I think that it was adviceable to put those cartoons online to cause violent reactions in other countries? - No. 3) Do I think the ISP should have shut the page down of their own accord. - Yes. (Not as a government group. Simply as a concerned citizen.) 4) Do I think some religious fundamentalist should get a reality check? - Yes. (And not only those related to cartoon problems.)
Surely the reason you can't call Californian sparkling wines is because Champagne is a trademark?
Let's face it...do we really need laws protecting children against new media when they start up? No. Wait until these things get established and there is a demonstrated need. It doesn't hurt to wait.
I'd say we definately need laws which protect children from new media. The companies sure as hell aren't going to "think of the children" unless they are forced to. A company has one purpose, to make money. And they are responsible to the shareholders to do that as well as they can.
Regarding this debacle I say I'm all for putting constraints on content that eg Vodafone creates and streams to their subscribers. If nothing else they know who the owner of the account is and thus can limit to somthing appropriate.
OTOH it seems like the suggestion is not that Vodafone are responsible if a subscriber goes to Google Videos and downloads rauchy movies. Well, the lawmakers are politicians and thus probably clueless about the details. But such a suggestion is inane and should be openly ridiculed.
I don't think this is because there wasn't a government mandate to use GSM or another standardized technology. One thing a lot of people forget when trying to compare Europe to the US is population density and size. Europe is much more centered around it's cities (which is part of the reason why they have much better public transit). Whereas in the US, we tend to spread out (the majority still being in cities, but there is a lot of the population who live very far away from cities).
Funny that.
Countries in northern Europe has a very low population density, even compared to US. Eg Sweden is at about 20 people per km^2 while the US is at 80.
Strangely enough my GSM phone work in most parts of Sweden. Surely that must be some kind of technical glitch? I couldn't be that it's just an excuse from American telephone companies because their coverage sucks?
Sure, Sweden is a smaller country (about the size of California I believe), but the total population is about that of Los Angeles (according to Wikipaedia). Coverage in all of US is probably unfeasable but you could get coverage in all parts where people actually are.
Perhaps you should look up some facts before spouting off.
It is true that a website was shut down as they posted the Mohammed cartoons. It should probably be noted in this that the site that posted the cartoons has known Neo-Nazi affiliation. The reason it was shut down was not so much that in can anger Muslems (I really don't give a flying fuck what they think.) but because there was a obvious danger to Swedish citizens in those countries should the cartoons be present. Naturally the Neo-Nazi affiliations of the site didn't help their case.
It should also be mentioned that the Swedish minister of foreign affairs (who were responsible for throwing their weight around and shutting the site down) RESIGNED due to to renewed controversy regarding her job. (There were previous issues but the shutdown was the last straw.)
I would hardly say that Sweden (or northern Europe) are anti-semetic. Most people don't really care if you're Jewish, Christian or whatever (most poeple here don't care about religion). And the bias we have considering Jews are typically those portraid in American media. (Insinuating that Jews are good with money and such.)
So please, take your fair and balanced views of other countries somewhere else.
What do you mean "massive FPGAs"? From my own experience with FPGAs and GPUs the two are not at all similar. And FPGA is just that, a "programmable gate array" where you can alter pretty much everything programmatically.
A GPU is an ASIC for obvious reasons. (Cost and performance being the major contendors I suppose.) While you may be able to do some minor adjustments as well as turning on or off different shader pipelines it has nowhere near the flexibility of a FPGA.
General Purpose GPUs has nothing to do with it. Those use the fact that a modern GPU has a shitload of processing power as each fragment (pixel) shader typically has 4 floating point ALUs which can be operated as vector processor. That is done by uploading shaders to the GPU which are then executed there.
Or do you mean that shaders are like a limited programmable array?
This is with my experience as someone who has worked with FPGAs and GPU shaders. (But nothing relating to GPU drivers.)
What is ment in this article with "OS" vary quite a bit from person to person. Point is that there is a very large difference between the "while (1) { run all apps once }" and a complete OS environment like Linux.
If you have a small embedded system it's quite probable that the while loop approach will do just fine. It may even do better than a Linux solution.
Furthermore standard Linux requires a MMU in order to run; there are many processors out there without MMU. (You can get ARM7 CPUs without it eg.) In that case you'll have to get uCLinux instead or a standard Real-Time OS.
And while there now are some RT Linux versions (which AFAIK are proper RT OSes, could be wrong though) a more light-weight RT OS will probably be cheaper on the CPU requirements. And naturally you get real proper RT support that way too.
Now this isn't really in conflict with what you said. I'm just pointing out that while a while loop can be considered an OS that's not what anyone would actually call an OS. It doesn't really have anything to do with what you get on top of the kernel. It's really just a question of what features your OS kernel has. And there Linux is pretty darned complex, hence the lack of support for really small embedded apps.
It won't install unless you have the XNA thing on your computer. In fact even if you select to install the source on a non-C drive it will install 2GB of data on C anyways. I had to move a lot of data around in order to get it to even begin to install.
Then I get a cryptic error that it fails to create a DLL file. (MechCommander2Viewer.dll or something like that.) Turns out that if you don't have all the tools you're not welcome to install the program.
I found that you could begin the install, wait until it throws an error and then copy the source files in the background.
It is made with VS2005 and you can't open the files with anything less. I may be possible to use the Visual C++ Express 2005 (free) compiler to build it though. I may bring the source to work where I actually have VS2005 to take a look at it.
Hopefully someone will tire of this crap and put a de-stupified version of the source out there.
The statement you quote is not the statement I was quibling with. Which was: "[Shared Source] is not open source according to the Open Source Definition, because none of the license programs allows for commercial use of modified code". To be authoritative and NPOV, that sentence needs an "according to...".
You mean like the part above? Like exactly what you quoted?
I don't think it needs a second "according to" in the same sentence if that is what you are implying. The "because" is not something that the writing is argumenting but according to the OSD. Besides, it's a fact that SS doesn't allow commercial use, if you read the license (as I have) you'll find that.
What's kind of funny is that now that Gnome began using Mono there are actually applications running on Mono which are not ported to Win32. The problem seems to be that project may well have dependencies outside of Mono.
Most of the difficult questions about anynomity and uniqueness have already been solved.
Browsing through an introduction to cryptography will show you a large number of different different voting systems with different properties.
Of coruse, then the new question becomes how to manage PKI in a system which is understandable and easy for the entire population. (I'm sure a system can be made though.)
In Sweden different parties have differently coloured papers. (The ballot paper is about half the size of a postcard.) There are a number of smaller parties who have white ballots. The colouring naturally makes it easy to quickly sort and count. The party also list a number of the top poloticians for that party and you can circle one if you want to vote for that person.
You then put your ballots (we vote for 3 different levels of government at the same time) in an envelope and drop it into the voting box.
There is no information about the party agenda on the ballot, you are supposed to know that before you vote. Of course, there are typically a few representatives for each party there whom you can ask directly.
The good news for you is that there are extentions which allow you to open IE in a Firefox tab. Good for those pesky intarweb pages that just refuses to work.
In fact, I'm quite sure that there are extentions which makes it possible to use ActiveX in FF as well. Personally I just use FF for my "real stuff" and keep IE around for other pages.
The problem is that Office is WYSIWYG, but I want Do What I Want You To Do.
Trying to edit a technical Word document (even in Office2003) is an exercise in frustration. You have to fight the system inserting stupid new sections (2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.22 things), fucking up the formatting on every other line. And then randomly inserting page breaks whenever I though I was done.
And if you try to copy-n-paste a diagram made in PowerPoint into your Word document? That's when Clippy points and laughs derisevely at you and proceeds to completely mess up your previous work by inserting 15 new random pagebreaks and making the diagram float over your previous text (so you can't see it).
Now try to do the work with multiple people with their own section/subsection notation and their own diagrams. Try to put these together into one Word file and watch hell break out.
Seriously, Word is the only editing tool which I have seen which has no problems inserting automatically generated figure numbers IN INCORRECT ORDER. (Ie figure 2 before figure 1.) Naturally all references in the text are messed up at the same time, how convinient.
And compare that to LaTeX. LaTeX may be a bitch to get running. But once you have a working it can be quite nice for handling technical documents.
Well, people in Eu and US may not *like* that their phone crashes; but they do tend to accept it. The more technically inclined may bring it in to their dealer and have the phone re-flashed with newer firmware.
In Japan people tend to return the phone if it crashes. No matter how obscure the crash.
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That was certainly a long and well thought out response, thanks! Always fun to get discussions going. :-)
;-) I get the feeling that AMPS is the same, or similar technologies as what in Sweden was called "NMT". Or in short the analog system which was in use all over Sweden before GSM replaced it. (Looking at wikipeadiea is suggests that IS-136 is a continuation of AMPS into 2G systems and that AMPS was similar to NMT.)
You're right that I've missed the boat a bit on the capacity of the different networks. Particularly wrt 3G in the US. I really never grasped that EVDO was a 3G technology, it seemed more like GPRS or EDGE seen here in Europe. Probably my mistake is that I only hear about it from techies who only use it for data transfer for their computers.
Now when you talk about IS-136 and AMPS at the same time as "Lapland" (which is only a part of Sweden - it's just that's it's really big and no-one really lives there
As such I do agree that AMPS was for its time most certainly the right choice to use. OTOH I disagree that it was a poor techincal descision to replace it (or in Eu's case NMT and similar techs) with GSM.
As I commented before GSM specifies an entire stack of phone functionality. I'd say it's a pretty good demonstration of how solid that technology was is that it has certainly spawned the biggest unified market as well as being used in next gen networks UMTS). Naturally part of that last bit is mostly because backwards compatability makes the transition easier.
I'd also say that the European decision to go with a clean slate and a unifying standard was the right way. Europe did have a similar situation as the US at the time with everyone and their dog using different systems. Naturally these were all mostly incompatible.
However I do agree that it makes my comment before of referring to IS-136 as "incompatible with GSM" rather backwards. I would however say that I believe that the fierce market driven economy in the states caused the old tech in AMPS to be patched and expanded longer than was suitable. My point is that the reason Cingular (which used that tech as I've understood it) didn't switch to another system is because it was not economically viable. If the competition didn't switch they'd be destroyed.
OTOH in Europe all carriers were forced to switch if they wanted to get into the 2G game. So everyone there was on an equal(ish) footing.
I may be putting words in your mouth though and I'm not sure if you disagree with me on all these points. To reiterate: I feel that the decision to go with GSM was correct both technologically and economically. It created an ultimately freer market which gives users better phones as well as give them the freedom to select which ever phone they want. Naturally many of the decisions in which technologies were selected to incorporate into GSM were made on a patriotic (in the very strange sense that the Eu acts patritically) foundations. I doubt that American companies had a lot of hope of getting their technologies into the standard (with attached royalty naturally).
So I say that the reason your dad is now in a bad spot is that the US market is still fragmented wrt to technologies. If a winning technology had been available there he could have used such a system instead. However the American carriers were hampered with short-sighted goals (update old technology, no sims in phones, incompatible phones hence too small market to get a many makers of phones going) that they lost in the end. My main gripe with that is that I fail to see how GSM or the Eu can be blamed for that?
But I realise that this discussion may have been turned around a bit as it's easy to get caught up in the details when you're having fun arguing. I know I do.
Is the stylesheet changer the same as that found in View->Page Style? If so I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to put it back in like you remember it with an extention. If it hasn't been done already.
I still think FF is the Browser with the most geeky features. It's just that they put them as extentions instead so it doesn't flood the browser with features.
Erm, yeah.
;-)
I guess if you're too stupid to figure that one out you'll probably not do a very good job at embellishing the truth on the other questions.
Q: How many people have you killed?
A: 1) None (of course!). 2) One. 3) Not many. 4) Lost count.
Thinking deeply... I think I'll go with 2), that way I seem more honest.
Well I'd say 3 years is a very short period of time. 3 years ago the rest of the world (well the parts using GSM as well as Japan) bagan moving to 3G systems. (Still using parts of the GSM system but over new and faster carrier systems.)
Now it was some time since I was studying mobile phone systems at a basic level. What I feel was the greatest benefit of GSM was that it specified not only the radio layer but all of the funtions needed on the phone. It's kind of comparing only the physical carrier (CDMA, TDMA) of the OSI model with an entire network stack. It may well be that the network layer of CDMA is quite a bit better than TDMA (ignoring the later versions of WCDMA and CDMA2000). Since GSM specifies the entire stack this means that phones are compatible to a higher degree. Which means that handset producers can compete instead. And as long as you have a good carrier network (which USA is apparently getting the last few years) handsets are much more interesting to the consumer.
You claim that CDMA operators don't want this competition, I guess that may be true. I can't really see how it would benefit the consumers to have less choice or to be tied heavily into that operators phones.
Now I'm sure your dad may blame his new GSM phone. It would make more sense blaming the company pouring money in an incompatible network (IS-136) instead of following the rest of the world. (Where rest of the world is pretty much Euroupe-Asia.)
Fortunately software engineering is less of a form of craft than software development used to be. (I'd claim that craftmanship in many ways is an art.) When I'm developing and when I'm being artistic (photography mainly) I use pretty opposite criteria for my work.
When I develop I try to make things work. When I'm artistic I try to make things pretty.
That doesn't stop me from inserting intellectual stuff in my development though (but not so much in my professional work).
In my opinion people who consider computer programming an art hold "art" in much too high esteem.
Err, not quite.
GPGPU are perfectly workable on an AGP based card. It's not as optimal as the drivers are usually not at all optimized for reading back to the main memory, but it can be done. Sadly the same is true for PCIx where read back performance is typically only a fraction of to gfx card performance.
The GPGPU forum has some performance stuff on this for the interested. I just want to point out that you *can* use an AGP card for GPGPU stuff. But the read back performance will hinder your benefits more than on PCIx.
If it doesn't work on an AGP card I imagine it is becuase it just doesn't support the needed shaders. You really need shaders 2.0 or better to be of much use.
I'm sure that there are possibilities to configure the chips from the drivers.
:-)
However I kind of doubt that it was much more than fine tuning the chips. My point is that you couldn't take a chip with 2 vertex shaders and 2 fragment shaders and use drivers to turn it into no vertex shaders and 4 fragment shaders.
Perhaps it was around before shaders were all that hot, but then again those were the dark old days when GPU were called graphics chips for a reason. (They weren't really processors.)
But if you have some specific examples it'd be fun to see. Always interesting to watch how the extra ounces of performance is squeesed out.
I wasn't making a statement about cell coverage in the US. I have actually never attempted to use a GSM phone in the states so I have no clue about it. (Friends who have been there have not had a problem though.)
I think the interesting statement that started this was that in the US it was believed that the invisible hand of the free market would fix everything wrt different cell phone technologies. Turns out it didn't work very well. While it's nice that GSM (and other techs) coverage is good now in the US that's what it's been here for the last 10 years.
The key point was that a centrally mandated technology worked better (for the consumers and the market) than a good old free for all.
Appropriate would be not selling or advertising products which a person is not allowed to purchase. Eg alcohol or tobacco to minors.
The rules for this shouldn't be specific for mobile content, it should be that the same rules applying for TV, radio or print should be used for mobile content.
Eg in Sweden it's not allowed to have commersials directed towards children. The reasoning being that children are impressionable and not as capable as an adult to understand that it's propaganda. (I'm sure *you* are much smarter than all adults.) Consider it like how movies are rated PG-13 and such. If you make an online video rental then it would make sense that it has some kind of attempt to enforce those restrictions. If nothing else than for good measure.
Naturally this is only enforceable inside Sweden. So several channels have moved their offices to London and broadcast via satellite.
I guess you're right though about the road to hell. But I doubt that the road to heaven is lined with people selling tobacco to children.
I got the figure from Wikipaedia actually. When it gets online again (I had to use a Google cache) I guess it's time to revise it a bit. ;-) Now that I look at the cache again I see that the US measures was naturally square miles. Perhaps it's time for Wiki to go metric/SI.
Other than that, you don't roll out in the entire country. Only in the parts where there actually are people. Here in Sweden we have quite a few different operators with their own nets. (I believe most semi crowded areas have coverage from 3 operators at last.) Besides I'd say that your number of base stations is extremely low. There is no way that there are only 117 GSM base stations in Sweden. The important part is the proportions of them though.
Well, I can't really say I see how you claim that those points are facts or how what you are doing is following them to their logical conclusions. I guess I can adress the three statements you make though.
1) What is "this" referring to? Are you a Swede or are you insinuating that it's a statement I made?
Lets now include number 3) as it's essentially the same statement, though phrased slightly differently. I guess it's better rethoric if you have three statements instead of two.
Perhaps it should, again, be pointed out that shutting down that site was deemed incorrect and caused the ultimatily responsible minister to resign her post. I would say that's a pretty clear indication that it was not considered all right.
Now is freedom of speech more important than possible vandalism and attacks? Yes, I would say that it is. OTOH it's quite clear that what the neo-nazis were doing was only puring gasoline on the fire. They had no ulterior motive of doing this as a demonstration for freedom of speech. They did it because they hoped a lot of muslems would be pissed off.
Sadly you can't exclude idiots from being included in freedom of speech though. I'd say it's a pretty hard question. While I would protect the neo-nazis right to free speech normally I'm not sure I'd do it if I myself or people I know faced bodily harm in the process.
And there was a clear danger to people in those countries. Several embassies had been burned down (among them some completely unrelated to Denmark) and the people working there had been evacuated.
Now on to 2). Yes I agree with you. It is incredibly sad that some people are so misled and ignorant that they are willing to hurt others only for their religious beliefs. Even when the person they are hurting has nothing to do with the issue. It's hardly constrained to the problem of the Mohammed cartoons though, whenever dogma and religion rules you can run into that problem.
As such I think it's important that we try to educate these poor miserable people so they understand WHY we feel freedom of speech is important. Quite a few of them have a pretty severe lack of understanding of how the rest of the world works. All of this are only symptoms of growning pains of globalisation.
So to reiterate:
1) Do I think that it was incorrect that a ministry recommended that the site was shut down? (To be specific, it wasn't shut down by the Swedish government. Someone at that ministry called the ISP and recommended that they shut it down due to the current political climate.)
- Yes.
2) Do I think that it was adviceable to put those cartoons online to cause violent reactions in other countries?
- No.
3) Do I think the ISP should have shut the page down of their own accord.
- Yes. (Not as a government group. Simply as a concerned citizen.)
4) Do I think some religious fundamentalist should get a reality check?
- Yes. (And not only those related to cartoon problems.)
I'd say we definately need laws which protect children from new media. The companies sure as hell aren't going to "think of the children" unless they are forced to. A company has one purpose, to make money. And they are responsible to the shareholders to do that as well as they can.
Regarding this debacle I say I'm all for putting constraints on content that eg Vodafone creates and streams to their subscribers. If nothing else they know who the owner of the account is and thus can limit to somthing appropriate.
OTOH it seems like the suggestion is not that Vodafone are responsible if a subscriber goes to Google Videos and downloads rauchy movies. Well, the lawmakers are politicians and thus probably clueless about the details. But such a suggestion is inane and should be openly ridiculed.
Funny that.
Countries in northern Europe has a very low population density, even compared to US. Eg Sweden is at about 20 people per km^2 while the US is at 80.
Strangely enough my GSM phone work in most parts of Sweden. Surely that must be some kind of technical glitch? I couldn't be that it's just an excuse from American telephone companies because their coverage sucks?
Sure, Sweden is a smaller country (about the size of California I believe), but the total population is about that of Los Angeles (according to Wikipaedia). Coverage in all of US is probably unfeasable but you could get coverage in all parts where people actually are.
Perhaps you should look up some facts before spouting off.
It is true that a website was shut down as they posted the Mohammed cartoons. It should probably be noted in this that the site that posted the cartoons has known Neo-Nazi affiliation. The reason it was shut down was not so much that in can anger Muslems (I really don't give a flying fuck what they think.) but because there was a obvious danger to Swedish citizens in those countries should the cartoons be present. Naturally the Neo-Nazi affiliations of the site didn't help their case.
It should also be mentioned that the Swedish minister of foreign affairs (who were responsible for throwing their weight around and shutting the site down) RESIGNED due to to renewed controversy regarding her job. (There were previous issues but the shutdown was the last straw.)
I would hardly say that Sweden (or northern Europe) are anti-semetic. Most people don't really care if you're Jewish, Christian or whatever (most poeple here don't care about religion). And the bias we have considering Jews are typically those portraid in American media. (Insinuating that Jews are good with money and such.)
So please, take your fair and balanced views of other countries somewhere else.
What do you mean "massive FPGAs"? From my own experience with FPGAs and GPUs the two are not at all similar. And FPGA is just that, a "programmable gate array" where you can alter pretty much everything programmatically.
A GPU is an ASIC for obvious reasons. (Cost and performance being the major contendors I suppose.) While you may be able to do some minor adjustments as well as turning on or off different shader pipelines it has nowhere near the flexibility of a FPGA.
General Purpose GPUs has nothing to do with it. Those use the fact that a modern GPU has a shitload of processing power as each fragment (pixel) shader typically has 4 floating point ALUs which can be operated as vector processor. That is done by uploading shaders to the GPU which are then executed there.
Or do you mean that shaders are like a limited programmable array?
This is with my experience as someone who has worked with FPGAs and GPU shaders. (But nothing relating to GPU drivers.)
Because Larry Ellison needs a new sub-woofer?
All OSes are not created equal.
What is ment in this article with "OS" vary quite a bit from person to person. Point is that there is a very large difference between the "while (1) { run all apps once }" and a complete OS environment like Linux.
If you have a small embedded system it's quite probable that the while loop approach will do just fine. It may even do better than a Linux solution.
Furthermore standard Linux requires a MMU in order to run; there are many processors out there without MMU. (You can get ARM7 CPUs without it eg.) In that case you'll have to get uCLinux instead or a standard Real-Time OS.
And while there now are some RT Linux versions (which AFAIK are proper RT OSes, could be wrong though) a more light-weight RT OS will probably be cheaper on the CPU requirements. And naturally you get real proper RT support that way too.
Now this isn't really in conflict with what you said. I'm just pointing out that while a while loop can be considered an OS that's not what anyone would actually call an OS. It doesn't really have anything to do with what you get on top of the kernel. It's really just a question of what features your OS kernel has. And there Linux is pretty darned complex, hence the lack of support for really small embedded apps.
I just tried downloading it and installing.
It won't install unless you have the XNA thing on your computer. In fact even if you select to install the source on a non-C drive it will install 2GB of data on C anyways. I had to move a lot of data around in order to get it to even begin to install.
Then I get a cryptic error that it fails to create a DLL file. (MechCommander2Viewer.dll or something like that.) Turns out that if you don't have all the tools you're not welcome to install the program.
More info on how to resolve that on MSDN.
I found that you could begin the install, wait until it throws an error and then copy the source files in the background.
It is made with VS2005 and you can't open the files with anything less. I may be possible to use the Visual C++ Express 2005 (free) compiler to build it though. I may bring the source to work where I actually have VS2005 to take a look at it.
Hopefully someone will tire of this crap and put a de-stupified version of the source out there.
You mean like the part above? Like exactly what you quoted?
I don't think it needs a second "according to" in the same sentence if that is what you are implying. The "because" is not something that the writing is argumenting but according to the OSD. Besides, it's a fact that SS doesn't allow commercial use, if you read the license (as I have) you'll find that.
What's kind of funny is that now that Gnome began using Mono there are actually applications running on Mono which are not ported to Win32. The problem seems to be that project may well have dependencies outside of Mono.
Most of the difficult questions about anynomity and uniqueness have already been solved.
Browsing through an introduction to cryptography will show you a large number of different different voting systems with different properties.
Of coruse, then the new question becomes how to manage PKI in a system which is understandable and easy for the entire population. (I'm sure a system can be made though.)
In Sweden different parties have differently coloured papers. (The ballot paper is about half the size of a postcard.) There are a number of smaller parties who have white ballots. The colouring naturally makes it easy to quickly sort and count. The party also list a number of the top poloticians for that party and you can circle one if you want to vote for that person.
You then put your ballots (we vote for 3 different levels of government at the same time) in an envelope and drop it into the voting box.
There is no information about the party agenda on the ballot, you are supposed to know that before you vote. Of course, there are typically a few representatives for each party there whom you can ask directly.
The good news for you is that there are extentions which allow you to open IE in a Firefox tab. Good for those pesky intarweb pages that just refuses to work.
In fact, I'm quite sure that there are extentions which makes it possible to use ActiveX in FF as well. Personally I just use FF for my "real stuff" and keep IE around for other pages.
The problem is that Office is WYSIWYG, but I want Do What I Want You To Do.
Trying to edit a technical Word document (even in Office2003) is an exercise in frustration. You have to fight the system inserting stupid new sections (2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.2.22 things), fucking up the formatting on every other line. And then randomly inserting page breaks whenever I though I was done.
And if you try to copy-n-paste a diagram made in PowerPoint into your Word document? That's when Clippy points and laughs derisevely at you and proceeds to completely mess up your previous work by inserting 15 new random pagebreaks and making the diagram float over your previous text (so you can't see it).
Now try to do the work with multiple people with their own section/subsection notation and their own diagrams. Try to put these together into one Word file and watch hell break out.
Seriously, Word is the only editing tool which I have seen which has no problems inserting automatically generated figure numbers IN INCORRECT ORDER. (Ie figure 2 before figure 1.) Naturally all references in the text are messed up at the same time, how convinient.
And compare that to LaTeX. LaTeX may be a bitch to get running. But once you have a working it can be quite nice for handling technical documents.
Well, people in Eu and US may not *like* that their phone crashes; but they do tend to accept it. The more technically inclined may bring it in to their dealer and have the phone re-flashed with newer firmware.
In Japan people tend to return the phone if it crashes. No matter how obscure the crash.