As it seems, the quite bureaucratic Germany has learned from its history (three police states in a century: the Second Empire with the Prussian secret police, Nazi Germany with the GESTAPO/SD/SS and socialist Eastern Germany with the STASI), however privacy is eroding there nearly as quickly as anywhere else.
Where will this (cultural?) trend in the western world lead to and where will it end? I think the older Germans know and perhaps some already prepare for the next autocracy/surveillance society.
Of course that single-digit project founding is just a droplet in the ocean as it would need an apollo program to make profound progress. On the other hand, society has rarely focused its resources on the important and promising technologies and preferred to waste it at other places.
It could also mean http://www.answers.com/topic/reinforcement-learnin g?method=22 (Wikipedia itself is currently down). Reinforcement Learning (RL) is about learning from reward - and about finding optimal sequences of action. Especially for learning sequences over time - like the rats - it is THE method of choice. And yes, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are often used for representing the "optimal policy" in RL. The weights in those networks are then altered by the RL process.
You could describe the process in the rats brain as doing a "virtual policy search RL".
Pure Backpropagation for long sequences over time, on the other hand, is quite an intractable problem, because you have to feed so many time-states into the network.
An interesting observation I made when studying for bigger exams:
a) There are "key days", where I panic about not being able to learn stuff in time and those are the days when I remember/understand stuff far better than on self-confident days. On "panic days", I learn 3x-5x more effiently than on self-confident days.
b) I might study a whole day long and dont understand or at least not being able to explain the formulas/problems/algorithms/whatever in my own words. And then I panic. When I have gone to sleep and wake up the next morning, however, all is there, unfolds in my mind in its crystal clear glory.
Sometimes I remember the dreams of those nights being about formulas and exams.
=> combining this evidence with your post and the article, leads to two points:
- Stress prepares certain areas for reorganising newly acquired memories. - These areas then replay and reorganise the newly acquired memories during the night. The dreams are about some of those informations/processes popping up into the (dream-)conscious realm and the consciousness processing elements try to make sense from the basic subconscious information that is currently learn/trained.
If you have dealt with Experience-Based Artificial Neural Networks (EBANN) - they also learn in that way. They have some formal background knowledge about a problem, acquired/given externally (with humans its e.g. prior knowledge about the domain or just basic logic) and then optimise a Neural Network for working on a generalised class of examples for that problem. The optimisation is lead/constraint by the background knowledge.
be born with outstanding talent and in an environment that fosters that talent during your childhood.
Reality is as easy and unjust as that: everything/everyone else gets drowned in the dull bulk of the bell curve! People like Graham, who have been born with the necessary "essence" often dont want to see the fact that they just had chance and there is no universal concept to solve the problem for everyone.
You will have to do this by some form of genetic engineering. Probably it's about the way crucial parts of the brain are organized and how they organise the information for storage. Just changinge the chemistry around the neurons wont be enough for this task.
My father (a now emeritus physics professor) had the chance to meet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann back in the 50s. My father (having met many of the smartest people of the 20th century), told me von Neumann was by far the smartest person he has ever met. It is said that John von Neumann had the closest of an eidetic memory imaginable. He could have studied for standard college exams in a matter of hours - not to talk about the days you mentioned.
So it IS possible. Some day we will engineer most of mankind to that level and beyond, however if we really use pills, those will probably reorganise the connections brain in a determined way. This is quite different from the methods mentioned in the article.
In Germany there was already an era with exactly that attitude and a whole culture forming from that (long before Hitler was even born) 1815-1848: Biedermeier.
The Biedermeier era is famous for its dullness - in fact the name "Biedermeier" exactly means that: Dull-Boring!
A Quote:
"The second trend is the growing political oppression following the end of the Napoleonic Wars prompting people to concentrate on the domestic and (at least in public) the non-political. Due to the strict publication rules and the censorship had the consequence, that the main topics written about were unpolitical, eg Historical Fiction or Books about the quiet life in the countryside. This does not mean, that there was not a lot of political discussion going on, but it happened at home and in the presence of close friends. This situation finally lead to the revolutions in Europe in the year 1848."
Will we fall back into such dark times? This time not only restricting the private political life, but any suspicious private life, be it personal, economical or political?
This http://med.umich.edu/umim/clinical/pyramid/index.h tm food pyramid ist NOT stupid. It's a "blue & green based" pyramid - contrary to those old "grain based" pyramids. Even as an athlete you need only little meat - preferable "lean meat". You can get B12 from dairy products and proteins and iron from both dairy products and legumes. If you eat quite a lot of sea food you dont need any other meat at all.
Physical exercise and a well balanced food pyramid usually play hand in hand. To neglect one factor or the other is always not a good idea! Specific food IS an issue in these days of abundance and nearly unlimited food choice.
A big advantage of LEDs over standard lightbulbs is, that they are quickly switchable without reducing lifetime that much. For lightbulbs you need expensive flashlights, but for LEDs a standard 5mm High Power LED - or if you want more power, a flux - can be used for fast switching applications. Additionally you can use many LEDs together without much effort to create nice structures and designes in different colors - as mentioned in the article.
Since I discovered not so long ago, that the blue and white LEDs of today with e.g. 8000 and 20000mcd are another dimension compared to the LEDs I used in my electonic experimenting set as a child, I hacked together an XMMS-Plugin serial lightshow with a uC-backend and use some blue and red high-power LEDs to illuminate some parts of the room. With standard lights that fast-switching beat-detection would not be possible in such a cheap way.
Of course if you really want to illuminate the room in a standard, really bright manner, you need even more powerful and expensive LEDs, however it is a good start and I expect my main, ordinary illumination to be "lightshow compatible" in 10 years,-).
I was not talking about the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften or the FSM specifically but I was talking about StGB Paragraph 130 Volksverhetzung which does usually indeed cover Nazi speech!
I agree completely with you that the trend to "declare unwanted information illegal" is a bad thing. I didnt judge that topic. I tried to explain why Germany's legistlative apparatus is so sensitive to hate-speech/sedition.
The Weimar Republic died because of a complex set of reason, but a major point was that the Nazis were allowed to shout around their hate-speech, to incite the masses, to channel the masses prejudices and fears with plain-out lies.
Thats what Paragraph 130 is all about.
A feeling for the complex reasons is given in Sebastian Haffners book - he experienced it in his own life.
Why you can still argue if the German law is a good or a bad thing in that case, most ranting slashdotters should think about the reason why the founding fathers&mothers of the Federal Republic of Germany installed this law in 1948/49.
It was because they were still under the impression of the horrifing death the Weimar Republic experienced in the late 1920 and early 1930, leading to the birth of the 3. Reich.
Nazis came to power because of their demagogic methods, what is called "Volksverhetzung" (special form of sedition) today and the Communists paroles of that time werent much better only on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Critical, sensitive, rational thinking didnt reach the masses (voters) at that time. And the founding fathers feared that the masses could be blinded again.
So like USA citizens see it as an important right to own weapons because of their history and people of other nations might think it is strange, Germans might see it as important to censor Volksverhetzung in any kind because of their own history. Keep that in mind.
For all who want to know more about the background of the dying Weimar Republic this book is perhaps the best:
It's a lot to read but it works this way! There might be many things a lot of people don't know yet.
Transforming your body isn't easy at all at the beginning but success will make it a pleasure at the end. And you will ENJOY all types of sports after some time. Even your initial goal of looking good and being healthy will be less important than the fun of exercising (cardio or strength, doesn't matter which kind) later when you become really trained.
I'm doing running, cycling, swimming, resistance training, aerobics and soccer, each one to three times a week (altogether 12-20 hours a week). Over some years I decreased my body fat from ~30% (when I was 15) to currently 11% while also increasing muscle mass. It took some time and a lot of patience, but it was worth the effort. Now it's just fun.
Something to add: I prefer bio-electric impedance measuring of the body fat over calipers. It's more precise.
Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian. The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.
And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here. I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world: EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services": You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.
We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!
I'm using both FreeBSD and NetBSD on my machines. But as you guessed, FreeBSD needs more ressources than NetBSD. While NetBSD 1.5 runs fine on my 486SX33/w 8MB RAM (7.8 MB are usable), FreeBSD needs 12MB or more at least for installation. NetBSD even installs with 4MB RAM. I even tried to install it with 3.8 MB RAM usable but that was not possible (fdisk ran out of memory).
As a matter of fact I'm using FreeBSD on my FASTEST machine - mainly because building the ports needs a lot CPU power - and NetBSD on my slowest (it's a good "SpartaniX"). All the other machines (4) in between are Linux, mostly Debian. A 486/DX66, now with 16MB RAM, is running Slackware 8 with X on top. But it's not true - as stated in the article - that the lastest Slackware needs 12MB RAM. It installed fine with 8 MB RAM.
However, for the slowest of the slow I would suggest NetBSD - it's the least demanding, while I don't think FreeBSD is really great for minimal installs. Compare the defaults. NetBSD has less than half of the programs in [/usr/s]bin compared to FreeBSD. And even less than OpenBSD:
In Germany you can calculate 5 EUR / MByte (that's nearly 5 US-$ for anyone who cares) concerning GPRS and most of the 4 carriers available. So with 95 kb you will stay below 50 cent which is not so much more than the price of an SMS. When I think about the popularity of SMS in Europe and the popularity of this new Nokia SymbianOS-Camphone among my friends, I'm sure that MMS will be used frequently in the future. On the other hand GPRS is (and UMTS will) be far too expensive for other video-on-demand or video-phone applications than short (and bad quality) clips. The licences for UMTS had its price: In Germany alone 50 Billion EUR. So I'm using GPRS only for ICQ and IRC (low traffic) because it is really great to chat with your friends whereever you are for hours and paying not much money. But surfing the web is much too expensive.
In this context
fli4l
should be mentioned. It's an amzing single-floppy
distribution and while primarily targeting on
router/firewall tasks it is very
extensible. The reason it is not so very well known is probably the fact that most of it's
documentation is in German. But it's definitely
worth a look.
Also check this.
It's always funny to see how the points of view towards dollar or euro are linked with the
country the people live in.
Here in Europe most people would laugh about the dollar being a better "symbol of freedom and privacy".
Many would disagree with your last paragraph, although I don't want to judge which opinion is closer to reality. Many Europeans have a slightly different idea of democracy and freedom than US citizens. Money e.g. is far less powerful here in bending law, elections or being a sign of personal fame and success. On the other hand many things are much more restricted or controlled (Germany's famous bureaucracy).
The point is: the US has a more libertarian face, while most European societies tend to be more social-democratic. Transferred to the currency it means: what you think is "dangerous control" we don't care at all.
If you cry: stay at your dollar, we believe our way of "managing" the currency is free!
If you are talking about the central regions of the ice-shield - they look very different. The calabatic winds streaming down from the heights
of the shield do not form real valleys (I've pictures and an article about that here in front of me, but it is hardcopy, so no link). These valleys are mainly formed by "solid flowing water" (aka ice, glaciers) and
are occuring only near the edge of the shield
towards the sea.
Wind erosion looks indeed different and that
has been discussed for a long time.
I can see the automatic pirate mirrors of big sites
becoming commonly used.
Is pay-per-page really transparent?
Perhaps if you could see how much a link will cost
before following it? This would be like
a pricetag. But certainly all this stuff will lower
the "experience" of surfing the web.
Or x2vnc.
Then you can use a Windows/Mac box and an X11 box with the same Keyboard&Mouse at the same time.
I'm using this one when the battery of my wireless mouse on one machine has to be recharged.
Yes, you could be right.
But while we move on towards
the merge of PDAs, PocketPCs and mobile devices in 3G (UMTS), power consumption becomes more and more important. No ordinary user wants to recharge the battery of his "super-device" every 6 hours. But the ordinary user would like to watch small movies and listen to mp3 (or the successors techs) on his phone-device.
So the "advances in CPU power" must also be
advances in power consumption.
A Palm of today needs much less power than a
PocketPC like the iPaq (running Linux).
A Palm of today is useable as a device you
carry around and is "always on" like a moblie phone. PocketPCs aren't as far as that currently.
So let's hope that CPU (ARM, mobile MIPS, mobile PPC) and display technologies improve so much that these "super-devices" of the next years are indeed running Linux/KDE? otherwise it's
time for other OS/solutions.
The administration of the state
Schleswig Holstein already switched to Linux some time ago.
Other administrations (or parts of them) are switching currently.
The main reason is not the money but Germans fear that there are hidden backdors in US commercial software. After Echelon they don't trust
US closed source software anymore.
There are rumors (and proofed facts) that the US is doing economic espionage on German firms.
The administration could be the next target...
So they try to become independant.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy ...
"Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."
It has always been like this, will always be like this
The "privacy rating" list of the 36 countries mentionted in the article can be found here: http://www.privacyinternational.org/survey/phr2005 /phrtable.pdf
As it seems, the quite bureaucratic Germany has learned from its history (three police states in a century: the Second Empire with the Prussian secret police, Nazi Germany with the GESTAPO/SD/SS and socialist Eastern Germany with the STASI), however privacy is eroding there nearly as quickly as anywhere else.
Where will this (cultural?) trend in the western world lead to and where will it end? I think the older Germans know and perhaps some already prepare for the next autocracy/surveillance society.
There are several quite new (all founded around 2004) collaborative advanced robotics projects sponsored by the EU:
http://www.cogniron.org/ and http://www.neurobotics.info/ are probably the most interesting and better organized than the mentioned http://www.i-swarm.org/.
Of course that single-digit project founding is just a droplet in the ocean as it would need an apollo program to make profound progress. On the other hand, society has rarely focused its resources on the important and promising technologies and preferred to waste it at other places.
It could also mean http://www.answers.com/topic/reinforcement-learnin g?method=22 (Wikipedia itself is currently down). Reinforcement Learning (RL) is about learning from reward - and about finding optimal sequences of action. Especially for learning sequences over time - like the rats - it is THE method of choice. And yes, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are often used for representing the "optimal policy" in RL. The weights in those networks are then altered by the RL process.
You could describe the process in the rats brain as doing a "virtual policy search RL".
Pure Backpropagation for long sequences over time, on the other hand, is quite an intractable problem, because you have to feed so many time-states into the network.
An interesting observation I made when studying for bigger exams:
a) There are "key days", where I panic about not being able to learn stuff in time and those are the days when I remember/understand stuff far better than on self-confident days. On "panic days", I learn 3x-5x more effiently than on self-confident days.
b) I might study a whole day long and dont understand or at least not being able to explain the formulas/problems/algorithms/whatever in my own words. And then I panic. When I have gone to sleep and wake up the next morning, however, all is there, unfolds in my mind in its crystal clear glory.
Sometimes I remember the dreams of those nights being about formulas and exams.
=> combining this evidence with your post and the article, leads to two points:
- Stress prepares certain areas for reorganising newly acquired memories.
- These areas then replay and reorganise the newly acquired memories during the night. The dreams are about some of those informations/processes popping up into the (dream-)conscious realm and the consciousness processing elements try to make sense from the basic subconscious information that is currently learn/trained.
If you have dealt with Experience-Based Artificial Neural Networks (EBANN) - they also learn in that way. They have some formal background knowledge about a problem, acquired/given externally (with humans its e.g. prior knowledge about the domain or just basic logic) and then optimise a Neural Network for working on a generalised class of examples for that problem. The optimisation is lead/constraint by the background knowledge.
be born with outstanding talent and in an environment that fosters that talent during your childhood.
Reality is as easy and unjust as that: everything/everyone else gets drowned in the dull bulk of the bell curve!
People like Graham, who have been born with the necessary "essence" often dont want to see the fact that they just had chance and there is no universal concept to solve the problem for everyone.
You will have to do this by some form of genetic engineering. Probably it's about the way crucial parts of the brain are organized and how they organise the information for storage. Just changinge the chemistry around the neurons wont be enough for this task.
My father (a now emeritus physics professor) had the chance to meet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann back in the 50s. My father (having met many of the smartest people of the 20th century), told me von Neumann was by far the smartest person he has ever met. It is said that John von Neumann had the closest of an eidetic memory imaginable. He could have studied for standard college exams in a matter of hours - not to talk about the days you mentioned.
So it IS possible. Some day we will engineer most of mankind to that level and beyond, however if we really use pills, those will probably reorganise the connections brain in a determined way. This is quite different from the methods mentioned in the article.
In Germany there was already an era with exactly that attitude and a whole culture forming from that (long before Hitler was even born) 1815-1848:
Biedermeier.
The Biedermeier era is famous for its dullness - in fact the name "Biedermeier" exactly means that: Dull-Boring!
A Quote:
"The second trend is the growing political oppression following the end of the Napoleonic Wars prompting people to concentrate on the domestic and (at least in public) the non-political. Due to the strict publication rules and the censorship had the consequence, that the main topics written about were unpolitical, eg Historical Fiction or Books about the quiet life in the countryside. This does not mean, that there was not a lot of political discussion going on, but it happened at home and in the presence of close friends. This situation finally lead to the revolutions in Europe in the year 1848."
Will we fall back into such dark times? This time not only restricting the private political life, but any suspicious private life, be it personal, economical or political?
We are the Internet.
We will add your technological distinctiveness to our own.
Resistance is futile.
You will be assimilated.
Not only the 4th largest in the last 15 years, but also the 5th largest in the last 30 years, which is from the beginning of measurements in 1976:
. html
http://www.spaceweather.com/solarflares/topflares
There have also been reports, that the 10cm radio flux with 27000 sfu has been even greater, than that of the 04/11/03 event.
This http://med.umich.edu/umim/clinical/pyramid/index.h tm food pyramid ist NOT stupid.
It's a "blue & green based" pyramid - contrary to those old "grain based" pyramids.
Even as an athlete you need only little meat - preferable "lean meat".
You can get B12 from dairy products and proteins and iron from both dairy products and legumes.
If you eat quite a lot of sea food you dont need any other meat at all.
Physical exercise and a well balanced food pyramid usually play hand in hand. To neglect one factor or the other is always not a good idea! Specific food IS an issue in these days of abundance and nearly unlimited food choice.
A big advantage of LEDs over standard lightbulbs is, that they are quickly switchable without reducing lifetime that much. For lightbulbs you need expensive flashlights, but for LEDs a standard 5mm High Power LED - or if you want more power, a flux - can be used for fast switching applications.
,-).
Additionally you can use many LEDs together without much effort to create nice structures and designes in different colors - as mentioned in the article.
Since I discovered not so long ago, that the blue and white LEDs of today with e.g. 8000 and 20000mcd are another dimension compared to the LEDs I used in my electonic experimenting set as a child, I hacked together an XMMS-Plugin serial lightshow with a uC-backend and use some blue and red high-power LEDs to illuminate some parts of the room. With standard lights that fast-switching beat-detection would not be possible in such a cheap way.
Of course if you really want to illuminate the room in a standard, really bright manner, you need even more powerful and expensive LEDs, however it is a good start and I expect my main, ordinary illumination to be "lightshow compatible" in 10 years
I was not talking about the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Schriften or the FSM specifically but I was talking about StGB Paragraph 130 Volksverhetzung which does usually indeed cover Nazi speech!
I agree completely with you that the trend to "declare unwanted information illegal" is a bad thing. I didnt judge that topic. I tried to explain why Germany's legistlative apparatus is so sensitive to hate-speech/sedition.
The Weimar Republic died because of a complex set of reason, but a major point was that the Nazis were allowed to shout around their hate-speech, to incite the masses, to channel the masses prejudices and fears with plain-out lies.
Thats what Paragraph 130 is all about.
A feeling for the complex reasons is given in Sebastian Haffners book - he experienced it in his own life.
Why you can still argue if the German law is a good or a bad thing in that case, most ranting slashdotters should think about the reason why the founding fathers&mothers of the Federal Republic of Germany installed this law in 1948/49.
It was because they were still under the impression of the horrifing death the Weimar Republic experienced in the late 1920 and early 1930, leading to the birth of the 3. Reich.
Nazis came to power because of their demagogic methods, what is called "Volksverhetzung" (special form of sedition) today and the Communists paroles of that time werent much better only on the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Critical, sensitive, rational thinking didnt reach the masses (voters) at that time. And the founding fathers feared that the masses could be blinded again.
So like USA citizens see it as an important right to own weapons because of their history and people of other nations might think it is strange, Germans might see it as important to censor Volksverhetzung in any kind because of their own history.
Keep that in mind.
For all who want to know more about the background of the dying Weimar Republic this book is perhaps the best:
Sebastian Haffner -- Defying Hitler: A Memoir
about how to become lean and fit:
Transform your physique.
It's a lot to read but it works this way!
There might be many things a lot of people don't know yet.
Transforming your body isn't easy at all at the beginning but success will make it a pleasure at the end. And you will ENJOY all types of sports after some time. Even your initial goal of looking good and being healthy will be less important than the fun of exercising (cardio or strength, doesn't matter which kind) later when you become really trained.
I'm doing running, cycling, swimming, resistance training, aerobics and soccer, each one to three times a week (altogether 12-20 hours a week). Over some years I decreased my body fat from ~30% (when I was 15) to currently 11% while also increasing muscle mass. It took some time and a lot of patience, but it was worth the effort. Now it's just fun.
Something to add: I prefer bio-electric impedance measuring of the body fat over calipers. It's more precise.
Nokia, Siemens, Ericsson, Sagem, Alcatel, Symbian.
The list could go on. Many, many of the big players in the mobile phone market (phones, network technology, software) are located in. Europe. Europe is a huge market. Not only Italy or Finnland, but also the other big and small countries (DE, FR, GB, ES) have a penetration beyond 60%. There are approximately twice as many mobile phones in Europe as in the US.
And the younger generation wants to do more than just phone someone. SMS, Games, even the number of ringtones or display colors is a very important factor for many customers here.
I believe that while EMS (enhanced message service) was useless like WAP, MMS (multimedia message service) will be used widely. Many people (especially nerds) laugh about these uses but you shouldn't underestimate how much they are accepted by other people. Mobile Multimedia Instant Messaging willl later (with the help of GPRS and UMTS) bring the Internet into the mobile world:
EVERNET. It's not just a marketing hype! If the price is ok (and even if it isn't -> SMS), the (European) customers will use it, because it changes their life so much. For all these features you need software, capable delivering these "services":
You should take a closer look on the Symbian OS v7. It's a well engineered OS with a bright future. One day, at some places in Europe, it might be used more frequently than MS Windows.
We will see who will win this war. One could even call it a war between continents... but this would perhaps be too flamebait. My guess: At the end everyone will find their niche!
I'm using both FreeBSD and NetBSD on my machines. But as you guessed, FreeBSD needs more ressources than NetBSD. While NetBSD 1.5 runs fine on my 486SX33 /w 8MB RAM (7.8 MB are usable), FreeBSD needs 12MB or more at least for installation. NetBSD even installs with 4MB RAM. I even tried to install it with 3.8 MB RAM usable but that was not possible (fdisk ran out of memory).
As a matter of fact I'm using FreeBSD on my FASTEST machine - mainly because building the ports needs a lot CPU power - and NetBSD on my slowest (it's a good "SpartaniX").
All the other machines (4) in between are Linux, mostly Debian. A 486/DX66, now with 16MB RAM, is running Slackware 8 with X on top.
But it's not true - as stated in the article - that the lastest Slackware needs 12MB RAM. It installed fine with 8 MB RAM.
However, for the slowest of the slow I would suggest NetBSD - it's the least demanding, while I don't think FreeBSD is really great for minimal installs. Compare the defaults. NetBSD has less than half of the programs in [/usr/s]bin compared to FreeBSD. And even less than OpenBSD:
In Germany you can calculate 5 EUR / MByte (that's nearly 5 US-$ for anyone who cares)
concerning GPRS and most of the 4 carriers available. So with 95 kb you will stay below 50 cent which is not so much more than the price of an SMS. When I think about the popularity of SMS in Europe and the popularity of this new Nokia SymbianOS-Camphone among my friends, I'm sure that MMS will be used frequently in the future.
On the other hand GPRS is (and UMTS will) be far too expensive for other video-on-demand or video-phone applications than short (and bad quality) clips. The licences for UMTS had its price:
In Germany alone 50 Billion EUR.
So I'm using GPRS only for ICQ and IRC (low traffic) because it is really great to chat with your friends whereever you are for hours and paying not much money. But surfing the web is much too expensive.
In this context fli4l should be mentioned. It's an amzing single-floppy distribution and while primarily targeting on router/firewall tasks it is very extensible. The reason it is not so very well known is probably the fact that most of it's documentation is in German. But it's definitely worth a look. Also check this.
It's always funny to see how the points of view towards dollar or euro are linked with the
country the people live in.
Here in Europe most people would laugh about the dollar being a better "symbol of freedom and privacy".
Many would disagree with your last paragraph, although I don't want to judge which opinion is closer to reality. Many Europeans have a slightly different idea of democracy and freedom than US citizens. Money e.g. is far less powerful here in bending law, elections or being a sign of personal fame and success. On the other hand many things are much more restricted or controlled (Germany's famous bureaucracy).
The point is: the US has a more libertarian face, while most European societies tend to be more social-democratic. Transferred to the currency it means: what you think is "dangerous control" we don't care at all.
If you cry: stay at your dollar, we believe our way of "managing" the currency is free!
If you are talking about the central regions of the ice-shield - they look very different. The calabatic winds streaming down from the heights
of the shield do not form real valleys (I've pictures and an article about that here in front of me, but it is hardcopy, so no link). These valleys are mainly formed by "solid flowing water" (aka ice, glaciers) and
are occuring only near the edge of the shield
towards the sea.
Wind erosion looks indeed different and that
has been discussed for a long time.
I can see the automatic pirate mirrors of big sites
becoming commonly used.
Is pay-per-page really transparent?
Perhaps if you could see how much a link will cost
before following it? This would be like
a pricetag. But certainly all this stuff will lower
the "experience" of surfing the web.
Or x2vnc.
Then you can use a Windows/Mac box and an X11 box with the same Keyboard&Mouse at the same time.
I'm using this one when the battery of my wireless mouse on one machine has to be recharged.
apt-get install x2vnc
Yes, you could be right.
But while we move on towards
the merge of PDAs, PocketPCs and mobile devices in 3G (UMTS), power consumption becomes more and more important. No ordinary user wants to recharge the battery of his "super-device" every 6 hours. But the ordinary user would like to watch small movies and listen to mp3 (or the successors techs) on his phone-device.
So the "advances in CPU power" must also be
advances in power consumption.
A Palm of today needs much less power than a
PocketPC like the iPaq (running Linux).
A Palm of today is useable as a device you
carry around and is "always on" like a moblie phone. PocketPCs aren't as far as that currently.
So let's hope that CPU (ARM, mobile MIPS, mobile PPC) and display technologies improve so much that these "super-devices" of the next years are indeed running Linux/KDE? otherwise it's
time for other OS/solutions.
The administration of the state
Schleswig Holstein already switched to Linux some time ago.
Other administrations (or parts of them) are switching currently.
The main reason is not the money but Germans fear that there are hidden backdors in US commercial software. After Echelon they don't trust
US closed source software anymore.
There are rumors (and proofed facts) that the US is doing economic espionage on German firms.
The administration could be the next target...
So they try to become independant.