I have to say. Nothing gives me the chills quite like an organization called "Morality in Media."
I'm dead serious when I say it's only a hop and skip from denying girls education and stoning people for sex before marriage. Their attitudes are derived from the same imperative - moral superiority, and the belief that they have the right to dictate the personal behavior of others.
It's a good thing the constitution denies our government the privilege of restraint on speech, because this is one group I would like to silence.
he current cable infrastructure in the US simply cannot provide 3-5Mb/sec dedicated bandwidth to every home.
You shouldn't fall for that line. There isn't any truth to it at all; it's just been hammered home by the telcos to garner support for deregulation and compartmentalization of the Internet.
Technology surpassed today's bandwidth needs 10 years ago; it is cheaper and more accessible today than it ever has been.
If a major telco fails to manage its network effectively, that infrastructure should be seized as a public asset and handed to competent management. Our tax dollars paid for (some of) it, and the lines are run on (mostly) public land. The Internet is too important to let stagnate from incompetence (or worse, profit-seeking malevolence).
Consider: if the local hydro monopoly threatened to ration electricity down to 20kWh/day per household (and increase the price to 1,000x the standard rate per kWh over), how long do you think before its assets would be seized?
It's patently obvious to most Canadians that many of our government agencies collude with industry to screw citizens out of their hard earned dollars. From protectionism to anti-competitive regulation, it seems like virtually everyone we employ from city to federal government is cashing two paycheques.
Didn't really see this one coming though. Usually the courts exercise some amount of restraint enforcing bad law after bad law.
You think it's an appropriate act to commit essentially genocide against a group of innocent people, in reprisal for a criminal act committed by a single individual?
Don't let your emotions get the best of you.
"Terrorists" love nothing more than that kind of response./P.
A spokesperson from Amazon will surely allay our fears - they aren't taking any of the books about murder, massacres, or war! You'll still be able to get your fill reading about people being beheaded, stabbed, maimed,.. even burned to death!
I've always relied very heavily on audio cues my whole life, and have exceptionally developed hearing (perfect pitch, good direction finding, instrument/voice separation, etc). I'm pretty seriously red/green colorblind (failed all the bubble wheels at the optometrist), and I've often wondered if this is related.
.. for your vision, contributions, and (and I know I'm not alone in this one).. helping me establish a career.
I make a living building and maintaining *nix hosts, and it probably wouldn't have happened if I didn't spend my childhood and teenage years playing with free software like Slackware, Debian, gcc, screen, bash, and a million other packages. Of course, a complete thank you list would be long enough to overflow my copy/paste buffer, but as this article is about GNU:
Thank you RMS! You've inspired millions of us, and pushed humanity forward yet another step.
Yes, from the point of the view of the planet and every other living thing, we are the disease. There's somewhere around 6+ billion people, happily eating, consuming, polluting, and destroying to our hearts' content. Installing higher efficiency light bulbs or buying Prius' or switching to riding a bike aren't going to avert a collapse in our global ecology/economy. We have to stop destroying our food and ecosystems on which we rely and undo the damage we've done. In short, stop charging to our children's credit cards, start paying them off, then start saving. Switching to riding a bike is like spending just a little less on their credit cards. We have to do so much more.
You know, in the public space you only get someone's attention for two minutes a day.
You just spent yours telling them not to ride bikes.
If you truly are an environmentalist, stop hoping for miracles. Baby steps. And for crying out loud, don't push us backward.
Auditorium A/C designers know that - about one watt per kilogram resting, triple that when aerobic. Many portable electronics devices can run off a few percent of that energy. It would be nice to capture that energy mechanically, thermally, or chemically.
Sir, what exactly do you have in mind?:)
Instruction manual told you to put the anode where?!
If Nokia put together a team of 500 to focus exclusively on Maemo (not this Meego junk they're moving to), they could obsolete all other phone OSes within a year. Frankly, all Maemo needs is a reskin (too dark), better priority and swap management, X enhancements (smoother transitions), a simplified SDK for Windows users, and advertisement. The apps will come, especially since so many are potentially available as a direct port.
The n900 is the best technology thing I've ever owned... it would be a tragic loss if they abandoned it.
When a process runs amok and takes down the host OS, we don't blame the process. We blame the OS. The OS's job is to protect the host (and other processes) from errant processes.
While it's certainly unethical behavior, I don't think we should rush to blame Amazon for this and any of its future actions. It's like putting candy in front of a baby and getting upset when the baby reaches for it.
The patent system should be dismantled. It is obsolete.
Failing that, software patents should be unquestionably and finally ruled invalid.
Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick. There's a neat article about it in this month's National Geographic.
I dunno why, but I suddenly pictured a bunch of embarrassed Swedes whistling as they quietly move the town over a few hundred meters.
I know I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable about Western society's view of sex and nudity as something dangerous, mysterious, and generally negative. It varies from country to country, but it feels like we're continuing to regress into a puritanical and uneducated fear of our reproductive systems, even while other parts of our society leverage that fear - churches, MTV, clothing companies, magazines..
I worry that we're sending the wrong message to youth. That they should be denied sexual education, and told that they will be punished for developing sexually before some arbitrary age - typically several years after the onset of puberty.
Now I'm not going to argue that real commercial kiddy porn is a positive thing. But I also wish humanity would take a step back, a deep breath, and view the issue with some amount of rationality. For crying out loud, we're locking up our children for sending nude images of themselves! Talk about psychosis.
Many men are terrified to approach and help a child in need for fear of being caught up in this institutionalized hunt.
We're justifying censorship, Internet filtering, gestapo-state police invasions, horrific prison terms... for pictures. For all we know (and we don't because research on the subject is utterly impossible), pictures help otherwise decent human beings who happen to be attracted to young people to cope with their sexual orientation. By threatening dozens of years in jail for simple possession, we could be encouraging those inclined to go out and find the real thing.
Why not focus our efforts and energy on things we can (probably) all agree are worse for kids than possession of images like ending child hunger and poverty, war, child soldiers, and such things? Japan can sort her own issues.
Some of us want a phone that 'just works' and looks polished and well thought out. We don't buy it to hack it.
You can say what you will about the iphone, but at least it does what it does well. Do I miss some features? Yes. Would I buy another one? Don't know, I may take a chance on an alternative, but at this point in time, using an iphone vs an android phone is a noticeable user experience difference. Android is less polished, more rough corners, less fluid, less thought out.
It will catch up. But not yet.
I hear this over and over again, but finally having used an iPhone a few weeks ago, I disagree. First, it's unstable. I personally witnessed two unexplained reboots and a hard lockup that required reflashing (over the course of one week of heavy usage). When I asked the owner what the deal was, he said: "Ah, it's been a while since I've reset." Say what?
Not all apps maintain their state (lack of multitasking aside). I left one application (think it was maps, but I forget) to get an address, and when I went back, I lost the buffer I had been typing in. Had to retype the entire thing. What is this, 2003?
The entire thing seems designed around tethering to a computer with iTunes. I spent two weeks in the US recently without my laptop - n900 only. Anything that can be done on the device can be done without a PC... even flashing.
Speaking of..flash... still no flash in the web browser! Feature? I guess. But one of the things it does well, apparently, is web browsing. After using my n900 for the past 4 months, Safari feels like a toy. Especially on that low-res screen.
I don't know; I didn't see any polish that was significantly better than my friend's Nexus running 2.1. And frankly I find the Maemo UI much more usable.
In my opinion, I think both devices have such a lead on the iPhone it's unlikely that it will ever catch up.
I honestly don't mean this as a troll. I just don't understand something here.
If application compatibility is an issue for you, why not ditch apple's proprietary device and buy one of the many Android devices? Or if you're a *nix user, an n900?
I'm truly baffled by the iPhone's continued popularity amongst my fellow engineers.
The "fire in a crowded theatre" example is problematic; you are not being charged with act of expressing "fire;" you are being charged with the act of endangering the public. Whether you yell "fire" or change the screen to display a burning theater is immaterial.
Of course this argument can be applied in bullshit situations like "we weren't charging him with writing down with the government, we were charging him with endangering the public!"
An aroused, vigilant public and court system is the only real defense.
But, in any case, preventing people from yelling "fire" in a movie theatre is not a form of censorship.
I hope this doesn't happen, but if it does, I hope they leave the current ISA/availability/pricing scheme alone and just use ARM resources to improve their own products, but that is unlike Apple.
The problem is, even if it doesn't change its pricing structure, HTC, Palm, Nokia, and anyone else using ARM based processors will need to spend vast resources preparing for an architecture switch anyway. You simply cannot rely on your competitor to remain honest.
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I have to say. Nothing gives me the chills quite like an organization called "Morality in Media."
I'm dead serious when I say it's only a hop and skip from denying girls education and stoning people for sex before marriage. Their attitudes are derived from the same imperative - moral superiority, and the belief that they have the right to dictate the personal behavior of others.
It's a good thing the constitution denies our government the privilege of restraint on speech, because this is one group I would like to silence.
he current cable infrastructure in the US simply cannot provide 3-5Mb/sec dedicated bandwidth to every home.
You shouldn't fall for that line. There isn't any truth to it at all; it's just been hammered home by the telcos to garner support for deregulation and compartmentalization of the Internet.
Technology surpassed today's bandwidth needs 10 years ago; it is cheaper and more accessible today than it ever has been.
If a major telco fails to manage its network effectively, that infrastructure should be seized as a public asset and handed to competent management. Our tax dollars paid for (some of) it, and the lines are run on (mostly) public land. The Internet is too important to let stagnate from incompetence (or worse, profit-seeking malevolence).
Consider: if the local hydro monopoly threatened to ration electricity down to 20kWh/day per household (and increase the price to 1,000x the standard rate per kWh over), how long do you think before its assets would be seized?
It's patently obvious to most Canadians that many of our government agencies collude with industry to screw citizens out of their hard earned dollars. From protectionism to anti-competitive regulation, it seems like virtually everyone we employ from city to federal government is cashing two paycheques.
Didn't really see this one coming though. Usually the courts exercise some amount of restraint enforcing bad law after bad law.
You think it's an appropriate act to commit essentially genocide against a group of innocent people, in reprisal for a criminal act committed by a single individual?
Don't let your emotions get the best of you.
"Terrorists" love nothing more than that kind of response./P.
This is actually good news. Anything that helps further the demise of television is a good thing.
A spokesperson from Amazon will surely allay our fears - they aren't taking any of the books about murder, massacres, or war! You'll still be able to get your fill reading about people being beheaded, stabbed, maimed, .. even burned to death!
Honestly, what's all the fuss?
Happy days and jubilation!
I've always relied very heavily on audio cues my whole life, and have exceptionally developed hearing (perfect pitch, good direction finding, instrument/voice separation, etc). I'm pretty seriously red/green colorblind (failed all the bubble wheels at the optometrist), and I've often wondered if this is related.
.. for your vision, contributions, and (and I know I'm not alone in this one).. helping me establish a career.
I make a living building and maintaining *nix hosts, and it probably wouldn't have happened if I didn't spend my childhood and teenage years playing with free software like Slackware, Debian, gcc, screen, bash, and a million other packages. Of course, a complete thank you list would be long enough to overflow my copy/paste buffer, but as this article is about GNU:
Thank you RMS! You've inspired millions of us, and pushed humanity forward yet another step.
Yes, from the point of the view of the planet and every other living thing, we are the disease. There's somewhere around 6+ billion people, happily eating, consuming, polluting, and destroying to our hearts' content. Installing higher efficiency light bulbs or buying Prius' or switching to riding a bike aren't going to avert a collapse in our global ecology/economy. We have to stop destroying our food and ecosystems on which we rely and undo the damage we've done. In short, stop charging to our children's credit cards, start paying them off, then start saving. Switching to riding a bike is like spending just a little less on their credit cards. We have to do so much more.
You know, in the public space you only get someone's attention for two minutes a day.
You just spent yours telling them not to ride bikes.
If you truly are an environmentalist, stop hoping for miracles. Baby steps. And for crying out loud, don't push us backward.
Came here to post this from my n900. :) Beat me to it.
Auditorium A/C designers know that - about one watt per kilogram resting, triple that when aerobic. Many portable electronics devices can run off a few percent of that energy. It would be nice to capture that energy mechanically, thermally, or chemically.
Sir, what exactly do you have in mind? :)
Instruction manual told you to put the anode where?!
You took the words out of my mouth.
If Nokia put together a team of 500 to focus exclusively on Maemo (not this Meego junk they're moving to), they could obsolete all other phone OSes within a year. Frankly, all Maemo needs is a reskin (too dark), better priority and swap management, X enhancements (smoother transitions), a simplified SDK for Windows users, and advertisement. The apps will come, especially since so many are potentially available as a direct port.
The n900 is the best technology thing I've ever owned... it would be a tragic loss if they abandoned it.
If you're broadcast your data via radio, why on earth would you expect anyone to consider it private?
Encryption. If you need it, use it.
When a process runs amok and takes down the host OS, we don't blame the process. We blame the OS. The OS's job is to protect the host (and other processes) from errant processes.
While it's certainly unethical behavior, I don't think we should rush to blame Amazon for this and any of its future actions. It's like putting candy in front of a baby and getting upset when the baby reaches for it.
The patent system should be dismantled. It is obsolete.
Failing that, software patents should be unquestionably and finally ruled invalid.
Probably not even remotely possible due to its size, but a similar problem seems to have been created in Kiruna, in Sweden. The town sits on top of the world's largest iron ore mine, and the mine has created a large cavity under the town. They are moving everything, in some cases, literally brick by brick. There's a neat article about it in this month's National Geographic.
I dunno why, but I suddenly pictured a bunch of embarrassed Swedes whistling as they quietly move the town over a few hundred meters.
I know I'm not alone in feeling uncomfortable about Western society's view of sex and nudity as something dangerous, mysterious, and generally negative. It varies from country to country, but it feels like we're continuing to regress into a puritanical and uneducated fear of our reproductive systems, even while other parts of our society leverage that fear - churches, MTV, clothing companies, magazines..
I worry that we're sending the wrong message to youth. That they should be denied sexual education, and told that they will be punished for developing sexually before some arbitrary age - typically several years after the onset of puberty.
Now I'm not going to argue that real commercial kiddy porn is a positive thing. But I also wish humanity would take a step back, a deep breath, and view the issue with some amount of rationality. For crying out loud, we're locking up our children for sending nude images of themselves! Talk about psychosis.
Many men are terrified to approach and help a child in need for fear of being caught up in this institutionalized hunt.
We're justifying censorship, Internet filtering, gestapo-state police invasions, horrific prison terms... for pictures. For all we know (and we don't because research on the subject is utterly impossible), pictures help otherwise decent human beings who happen to be attracted to young people to cope with their sexual orientation. By threatening dozens of years in jail for simple possession, we could be encouraging those inclined to go out and find the real thing.
Why not focus our efforts and energy on things we can (probably) all agree are worse for kids than possession of images like ending child hunger and poverty, war, child soldiers, and such things? Japan can sort her own issues.
Some of us want a phone that 'just works' and looks polished and well thought out. We don't buy it to hack it.
You can say what you will about the iphone, but at least it does what it does well. Do I miss some features? Yes. Would I buy another one? Don't know, I may take a chance on an alternative, but at this point in time, using an iphone vs an android phone is a noticeable user experience difference. Android is less polished, more rough corners, less fluid, less thought out.
It will catch up. But not yet.
I hear this over and over again, but finally having used an iPhone a few weeks ago, I disagree. First, it's unstable. I personally witnessed two unexplained reboots and a hard lockup that required reflashing (over the course of one week of heavy usage). When I asked the owner what the deal was, he said: "Ah, it's been a while since I've reset." Say what?
Not all apps maintain their state (lack of multitasking aside). I left one application (think it was maps, but I forget) to get an address, and when I went back, I lost the buffer I had been typing in. Had to retype the entire thing. What is this, 2003?
The entire thing seems designed around tethering to a computer with iTunes. I spent two weeks in the US recently without my laptop - n900 only. Anything that can be done on the device can be done without a PC... even flashing.
Speaking of..flash... still no flash in the web browser! Feature? I guess. But one of the things it does well, apparently, is web browsing. After using my n900 for the past 4 months, Safari feels like a toy. Especially on that low-res screen.
I don't know; I didn't see any polish that was significantly better than my friend's Nexus running 2.1. And frankly I find the Maemo UI much more usable.
In my opinion, I think both devices have such a lead on the iPhone it's unlikely that it will ever catch up.
I honestly don't mean this as a troll. I just don't understand something here.
If application compatibility is an issue for you, why not ditch apple's proprietary device and buy one of the many Android devices? Or if you're a *nix user, an n900?
I'm truly baffled by the iPhone's continued popularity amongst my fellow engineers.
For a sufficiently wrong definition of "bad," I guess they're right.
Even without Meego I'll be happy with my n900 for as long as it survives. It's the coolest tech thing I've ever owned.
There's nothing quite like having a full GCC toolchain in your pocket for those moments when you simply have to compile something. :)
The "fire in a crowded theatre" example is problematic; you are not being charged with act of expressing "fire;" you are being charged with the act of endangering the public. Whether you yell "fire" or change the screen to display a burning theater is immaterial.
Of course this argument can be applied in bullshit situations like "we weren't charging him with writing down with the government, we were charging him with endangering the public!"
An aroused, vigilant public and court system is the only real defense.
But, in any case, preventing people from yelling "fire" in a movie theatre is not a form of censorship.
I hope this doesn't happen, but if it does, I hope they leave the current ISA/availability/pricing scheme alone and just use ARM resources to improve their own products, but that is unlike Apple.
The problem is, even if it doesn't change its pricing structure, HTC, Palm, Nokia, and anyone else using ARM based processors will need to spend vast resources preparing for an architecture switch anyway. You simply cannot rely on your competitor to remain honest.
"Rap isn't music" argument.
Sigh. We get it. You don't like games. Just say so.
I posit that if Rupert Murdoch is pissed, we (Internet generation) must be doing something right.