More than the absence of the Start button, the Win 8 GUI will suffer from its lack of visual breathing space. Yeah, there's still apparently a nice selection of wallpapers, better than the default you'd get with the OSx, but the Start screen itself suffocates you with its billboard-like tiles.
Win XP had this refreshing image of a rolling green field beneath a blue skiy, the promise of a weekend escape into the country. Now the same office worker looking at the Win 8 start screen will see nothing but the loud artificial colors of the city. Is it that why MS had called it The Metro? Because it resembled those gaudy billboards at a subway station competing for the rush-hour commuter's fleeting attention?
Since Mars life would be greatly more different to Earth life, even if we assume the truth of "panspermia" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia), wouldn't it make more sense for Venter to trial his method first on extinct, preferably macroscopic life forms here? The bigger the better. Extinct germs would be more difficult to get rid of than a rampaging T-rex that any survivalist nutcase can gun down. My prime candidate would be those frozen Siberian mammoths, which he could clone into caveman steak.
"The major parties are Labour (more left wing) and Liberals (who oddly enough are very un-liberal conservatives)."
Left and Right doesn't mean shit anymore in any of the major English-speaking countries. The mainstream parties all seem to favor copy monopolies and increased surveillance of citizens. UK's Labour was a willing partner in Bush Jr's Iraq misadventure. I also remember reading in the BBC how the party was actually disappointed over the Conservatives' decision to block security "hacker" Gary McKinnon's extradition to the US.
"Given the recent declarations from U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and others that the nation is facing a 'digital Pearl Harbor' or 'digital 9/11' from hostile nation states like Iran"
I'm worried by this blurring of distinctions in the historical significance of the two events. Whatever your political persuasion, Pearl Harbor was a de facto declaration of war. It was a strike against a military target carried out by a true nation state. The "9/11" terrorist attack was something else. It was carried out by an independent group that at worst can be described as being in an alliance of convenience with some foreign government.
By confusing our figures of speech for two clearly different types of cyberattacks, the danger is that the same counterattack methods will be used for both. Treating "9/11" as an act of war, and not simply as a well-coordinated distributed terrorist attack, led to a trillion-dollar War on Terror. On hindsight did it make sense to send out a nation's armies to deal with a few hundred suspected terrorists? Wouldn't it have been better if the intelligence agencies dealt with the issue, resorting to large military strikes only when the intelligence and situation warranted?
So now will the hometowns/countries of suspected Anonymous members be the target of the same massive disruption of IT services that US would launch in retaliaton for a supposed cyberattack from Iran or China?
"How often is she going to call you up asking why nothing is working - because she isn't connected to the internet? It's about as perfect for old people as drivers licenses are."
The Internet is the No.1 reason for a grandmom/pop to use a computer.
The writer quotes Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt with regard the income "polarization" at top IT companies: "Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They're contracted out."
So, basically, these "cool" companies are income-wise pretty much like the Greek democracies of ancient times. On one hand you have the citizens, adult males, and then the rest, including the chidlren, women and slaves. Of course, a typical corporation is even worse than such a flawed "democracy", being run like a Communist Party.
You've just made an unwarranted assumption. All the GP said was that Mohammad walked into the bar. This may well be the terroristic equivalent of Jesus walking into the temple filled by hawkers. Jesus himself didn't take part in the shenanigans.
Really, I don't see this as an issue if you're volunteering your personal info to Google anyway. I'm more worried by the tracking that Google does even if you're not logged in, say, via its ad and recaptcha services.
They're far too whimsical to be predictions of OUR present. They're best suited as material for a steampunk movie or anime, what people thought was possible using souped-up versions of the technology of the day. I doubt whether it's possible to predict what the future will look, although it should be possible to describe vaguely what type of technologies people will use. For example, it should be possible to describe a tablet computer in terms that a 19th century geek would understand, a portable magic lantern that can also serve as a camera, telephone, phonograph, etc. In a non-dystopian future, we're sure to have micro-versions of today's supercomputers, but whether it'll look like a smart phone, AR glasses, or something implanted inside our skulls is something for the next Steve Jobs to market to the gadget sheep of the future.
"As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both students were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents."
"Sophisticated" and "Facebook" don't go together, unless you're an information-harvesting bot.
I don't know about RMS, but Torvalds? He's been known to use four-letter words to describe the things he don't like. As far as online reputations go, Torvalds sounds like a nicer person in person, but he tends to use more abrasive language than RMS, who mostly reserves his online rants to describing congressmen as "congress critters", stuff that he posts on his "personal" web site.
Read the stuff though that he's posted on the official FSF sites. They're more well-thought out than anything Torvalds has written, since, well, Torvalds, as a self-confessed pragmatist, tends not to take official positions on anything. Torvalds himself admits, no, he's proud of the fact that he has NO vision as a software godfather. Which isn't necessarily a bad "position" to take. If you believe that like life on Earth, software should evolve, free from ideological design.
Don't forget the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Surely the Iron Curtain was a Soviet invention? If not, how do you explain the speed at which the Iron Curtain fell once Gorbachev made it clear to the East Germans and other Eastern Bloc countries that he wouldn't bail them out when their people start rebelling?
That part about "disclosing" would eliminate a whole lot of patents. What do you need to disclose about an Apple-style design patent?
This also doesn't eliminate the OP's comment about inventions made "5 minutes before the other person". Let's say, I invented Gadget X while Inventor Y has a pending, unprocessed patent application for it. If inventor Y's patent is eventually approved, I now have to license Gadget X from him despite the fact that I didn't benefit from any of his disclosure.
Except for #1, the debate participant rules (http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=candidate-selection-process) do look biased in favor of the ruling parties:
2) Mathematical chance of securing a majority of the Electoral College votes. This doesn't take into account the possibility of say a three-corner fight where nobody gets the desired number of votes.
3) 15% popular support. Why is this set so high when a majority or significant plurality of Americans don't vote?
Assuming they really need the cash, and aren't just trolling for Tweets, a Wikipedia-style "Personal Appeal" would have done more wonders. Assange looks cuter than Wales.
Too tired to read TFA. But from TFS, I had the impression they merely applied the basic rules of algebra to sort-of reverse the equations like when you solve for x given "6 = 3x"?
I was thinking maybe the card was some sort of X-gen flash drive/SIM card combo, part of the ubiquitous computing experience of the future. So even if biometric systems are the norm already, you don't expect your contacts/desktop configuration/etc to be wetwired into your brain?
"...they had the idea 5 minutes before the other person."
And that is what needs to be fixed in the patent system, short of abolishing altogether. Why do patents have to winner-takes-all when the historical record is full of examples of parallel inventions and discoveries, like the wheel, caculus or the theory of evolution? Why can't patents be awarded like the winners of sports competiton or American Idol, where even those who didn't place first gets a diminishing share of the prize money?
You mean the next undergrad to drop out of college thinking he can change the world with one hot idea? Education would be wasted on the next Zuckerberg. Just introduce him to some venture capitlaist with money to burn and let the wheel of fortune spin.
"Suddenly Trooper Basteri saw the laser -- a powerful green beam coming from the shore. It snaked across the water and up towards the helicopter's cockpit. Basteri warned Riley that the blast of light was imminent, and warned him not to look at it."
The impression I got was of the attacker firing some sort of photon missile at them, an "imminent" "blast of light" "coming from the shore". I would rewrite the acount so that instead of being targeted by a single beam, the helicopter was instead targeted by "pulses" of laser light. Some of the pulses would have missed them because they were wrongly targeted. Only in a sci-fi movie can one dodge a laser beam fired in the right direction.
"The PC market, the cloud, and enterprise storage"
You mean the invisible majority? The PC market is "flatlining", to borrow the title of quite a few Slashdot stories. In the short term the problem probably won't be the storage market shrinking but changing focus. Fewer rotary drives will be made for the home enthusiast and more for the Big Data like Google and Facebook. This could mean either more realiable but more expensive hard drives or, this is what I fear, cheaper, more TB's/$ but less reliable drives since Big Data tends to be redundantly stored unlike the files of the average media pirate.
No need to bring advanced physics into the picture. Seeing the danger of relying on a discontented population of underpaid elves to ramp up production, Santa invented a droid army of Santas. These both produce the toys and deliver them on Christmas. The elves you see burning up are the occasional terrorist saboteurs.
Slashdot Mirror
More than the absence of the Start button, the Win 8 GUI will suffer from its lack of visual breathing space. Yeah, there's still apparently a nice selection of wallpapers, better than the default you'd get with the OSx, but the Start screen itself suffocates you with its billboard-like tiles.
Win XP had this refreshing image of a rolling green field beneath a blue skiy, the promise of a weekend escape into the country. Now the same office worker looking at the Win 8 start screen will see nothing but the loud artificial colors of the city. Is it that why MS had called it The Metro? Because it resembled those gaudy billboards at a subway station competing for the rush-hour commuter's fleeting attention?
Since Mars life would be greatly more different to Earth life, even if we assume the truth of "panspermia" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia), wouldn't it make more sense for Venter to trial his method first on extinct, preferably macroscopic life forms here? The bigger the better. Extinct germs would be more difficult to get rid of than a rampaging T-rex that any survivalist nutcase can gun down. My prime candidate would be those frozen Siberian mammoths, which he could clone into caveman steak.
"The major parties are Labour (more left wing) and Liberals (who oddly enough are very un-liberal conservatives)."
Left and Right doesn't mean shit anymore in any of the major English-speaking countries. The mainstream parties all seem to favor copy monopolies and increased surveillance of citizens. UK's Labour was a willing partner in Bush Jr's Iraq misadventure. I also remember reading in the BBC how the party was actually disappointed over the Conservatives' decision to block security "hacker" Gary McKinnon's extradition to the US.
"Given the recent declarations from U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and others that the nation is facing a 'digital Pearl Harbor' or 'digital 9/11' from hostile nation states like Iran"
I'm worried by this blurring of distinctions in the historical significance of the two events. Whatever your political persuasion, Pearl Harbor was a de facto declaration of war. It was a strike against a military target carried out by a true nation state. The "9/11" terrorist attack was something else. It was carried out by an independent group that at worst can be described as being in an alliance of convenience with some foreign government.
By confusing our figures of speech for two clearly different types of cyberattacks, the danger is that the same counterattack methods will be used for both. Treating "9/11" as an act of war, and not simply as a well-coordinated distributed terrorist attack, led to a trillion-dollar War on Terror. On hindsight did it make sense to send out a nation's armies to deal with a few hundred suspected terrorists? Wouldn't it have been better if the intelligence agencies dealt with the issue, resorting to large military strikes only when the intelligence and situation warranted?
So now will the hometowns/countries of suspected Anonymous members be the target of the same massive disruption of IT services that US would launch in retaliaton for a supposed cyberattack from Iran or China?
So what's more evil, forcing 14 year olds to work or getting them addicted to Super Mario?
"How often is she going to call you up asking why nothing is working - because she isn't connected to the internet? It's about as perfect for old people as drivers licenses are."
The Internet is the No.1 reason for a grandmom/pop to use a computer.
If you think the 128K is low, then the amount paid to the other workers must be even more dismal. Read this:
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/10/15/the-billionaires-next-door/
The writer quotes Google ex-CEO Eric Schmidt with regard the income "polarization" at top IT companies: "Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They're contracted out."
So, basically, these "cool" companies are income-wise pretty much like the Greek democracies of ancient times. On one hand you have the citizens, adult males, and then the rest, including the chidlren, women and slaves. Of course, a typical corporation is even worse than such a flawed "democracy", being run like a Communist Party.
You've just made an unwarranted assumption. All the GP said was that Mohammad walked into the bar. This may well be the terroristic equivalent of Jesus walking into the temple filled by hawkers. Jesus himself didn't take part in the shenanigans.
You forgot to add all the people killed during the American Civil War or the "collateral damage" in the Vietnam War. Shall I go on?
Really, I don't see this as an issue if you're volunteering your personal info to Google anyway. I'm more worried by the tracking that Google does even if you're not logged in, say, via its ad and recaptcha services.
They're far too whimsical to be predictions of OUR present. They're best suited as material for a steampunk movie or anime, what people thought was possible using souped-up versions of the technology of the day. I doubt whether it's possible to predict what the future will look, although it should be possible to describe vaguely what type of technologies people will use. For example, it should be possible to describe a tablet computer in terms that a 19th century geek would understand, a portable magic lantern that can also serve as a camera, telephone, phonograph, etc. In a non-dystopian future, we're sure to have micro-versions of today's supercomputers, but whether it'll look like a smart phone, AR glasses, or something implanted inside our skulls is something for the next Steve Jobs to market to the gadget sheep of the future.
"As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both students were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents."
"Sophisticated" and "Facebook" don't go together, unless you're an information-harvesting bot.
I don't know about RMS, but Torvalds? He's been known to use four-letter words to describe the things he don't like. As far as online reputations go, Torvalds sounds like a nicer person in person, but he tends to use more abrasive language than RMS, who mostly reserves his online rants to describing congressmen as "congress critters", stuff that he posts on his "personal" web site.
Read the stuff though that he's posted on the official FSF sites. They're more well-thought out than anything Torvalds has written, since, well, Torvalds, as a self-confessed pragmatist, tends not to take official positions on anything. Torvalds himself admits, no, he's proud of the fact that he has NO vision as a software godfather. Which isn't necessarily a bad "position" to take. If you believe that like life on Earth, software should evolve, free from ideological design.
Don't forget the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Surely the Iron Curtain was a Soviet invention? If not, how do you explain the speed at which the Iron Curtain fell once Gorbachev made it clear to the East Germans and other Eastern Bloc countries that he wouldn't bail them out when their people start rebelling?
That part about "disclosing" would eliminate a whole lot of patents. What do you need to disclose about an Apple-style design patent?
This also doesn't eliminate the OP's comment about inventions made "5 minutes before the other person". Let's say, I invented Gadget X while Inventor Y has a pending, unprocessed patent application for it. If inventor Y's patent is eventually approved, I now have to license Gadget X from him despite the fact that I didn't benefit from any of his disclosure.
Except for #1, the debate participant rules (http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=candidate-selection-process) do look biased in favor of the ruling parties:
2) Mathematical chance of securing a majority of the Electoral College votes. This doesn't take into account the possibility of say a three-corner fight where nobody gets the desired number of votes.
3) 15% popular support. Why is this set so high when a majority or significant plurality of Americans don't vote?
Assuming they really need the cash, and aren't just trolling for Tweets, a Wikipedia-style "Personal Appeal" would have done more wonders. Assange looks cuter than Wales.
It's definitely 42.
Too tired to read TFA. But from TFS, I had the impression they merely applied the basic rules of algebra to sort-of reverse the equations like when you solve for x given "6 = 3x"?
I was thinking maybe the card was some sort of X-gen flash drive/SIM card combo, part of the ubiquitous computing experience of the future. So even if biometric systems are the norm already, you don't expect your contacts/desktop configuration/etc to be wetwired into your brain?
"...they had the idea 5 minutes before the other person."
And that is what needs to be fixed in the patent system, short of abolishing altogether. Why do patents have to winner-takes-all when the historical record is full of examples of parallel inventions and discoveries, like the wheel, caculus or the theory of evolution? Why can't patents be awarded like the winners of sports competiton or American Idol, where even those who didn't place first gets a diminishing share of the prize money?
You mean the next undergrad to drop out of college thinking he can change the world with one hot idea? Education would be wasted on the next Zuckerberg. Just introduce him to some venture capitlaist with money to burn and let the wheel of fortune spin.
The account in TFA sounds a bit confusing:
"Suddenly Trooper Basteri saw the laser -- a powerful green beam coming from the shore. It snaked across the water and up towards the helicopter's cockpit. Basteri warned Riley that the blast of light was imminent, and warned him not to look at it."
The impression I got was of the attacker firing some sort of photon missile at them, an "imminent" "blast of light" "coming from the shore". I would rewrite the acount so that instead of being targeted by a single beam, the helicopter was instead targeted by "pulses" of laser light. Some of the pulses would have missed them because they were wrongly targeted. Only in a sci-fi movie can one dodge a laser beam fired in the right direction.
"The PC market, the cloud, and enterprise storage"
You mean the invisible majority? The PC market is "flatlining", to borrow the title of quite a few Slashdot stories. In the short term the problem probably won't be the storage market shrinking but changing focus. Fewer rotary drives will be made for the home enthusiast and more for the Big Data like Google and Facebook. This could mean either more realiable but more expensive hard drives or, this is what I fear, cheaper, more TB's/$ but less reliable drives since Big Data tends to be redundantly stored unlike the files of the average media pirate.
No need to bring advanced physics into the picture. Seeing the danger of relying on a discontented population of underpaid elves to ramp up production, Santa invented a droid army of Santas. These both produce the toys and deliver them on Christmas. The elves you see burning up are the occasional terrorist saboteurs.