"Then maybe there wouldn't be as many face-palm electronic security holes like the Chrysler Jeep Cherokee vulnerability."
And of course, Apple's security is second to none in the face-palming industry.
..."and we'd probably see a number of astronauts either splattered across the Martian surface or stranded down their until their life-support systems gave out (landings and lift-offs are hard)."
I say the landing part is one of the easiest problems to fix. How many astronauts have crash-landed on the Moon using 60's era technology?
Lift-off is hard but no harder than the way we ALREADY launch people to low earth orbit. I think the biggest problem is the getting there form LEO. The biggest danger would be getting lost in space, or killed there by some freak impact or solar outburst. Once on Mars, it's just a matter of burrowing sufficient deep in the ground that you can weather any dust storm. Mars not being as geologically active as Earth means the chances of a catastrophic earthquake or volcanic eruption are slimmer. So burrowing under a sufficient layer of Martian earth should against most natural disasters.
"If you want to get the police to do anything in this world, don't contact them yourself, have your lawyer contact them."
Wrong. In places where the rule of law or lawyers is strong, yes. But in most places, contacting Benjamin Franklin is the better option.
Joking aside, most open source can't handle open source. I mean, you can't randomly insert emacs source code into the Linux kernel, can you? There are definitely rules that govern the exchange of source code between projects, even if we disregard the conflicting licenses. For example you often have to port code that runs beautifully on desktop GNU/Linux to run on a broken Linux like Android, and that's even if you're running the same architecture (x86, ARM, etc).
If I read right the OP said or implied that s/he was a software developer of some sort (Github?), so I think in this case an online reputation does matter. So unless the OP is Linus Torvalds, a bad web rep means your chances of getting hired or contracted for a project is significantly impacted.
Pesky algorithms. They should know when to shut up.
Seriously, I thought Google's "customer service" and whatnot was merely (mostly?) sophisticated spam, Turing-contest bots, and that you had to write a really nasty, threatening letter to get past the filters to a human.
" Israel is surrounded by a few hundred million people living in a culture that makes right-wing abortion clinic bombers look downright sane."
You mention the phrase "a culture" in a way that makes it seems that there's only one other major Middle Eastern culture besides the Jewish culture of Israel. Even if we eliminate the presence of the various Christian and quasi-Islamic groups, that still leaves at least two different Muslim groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The 9/11 bombers were all Sunni Muslims, the religion of the pro-American Saudi Arabia, who I presume Israel won't nuke. Iran, a Shiite Muslim majority country, hasn't sponsored any major or consistent acts of terrorism comparable to the one's carried out by Osama and his twisted supporters. See the shitfuck in Syria? That's a war between different Muslim factions more violent than any between Israel and the Arab states.
There's no single, united Muslim culture that wants to wipe Israel off the map. Most of the anti-Israel political and military activity tend to be posturing, a way for the various Islamic groups and countries to maintaing their significance and divert their public or followers from their own failures (economic, social, etc). Sure Iran's mostly Palestinian allies have carried out random acts of terrorism like kidnapping and the shooting of Israeli settlers, but these are incidents that Israel is fully capable of dealing with using conventional arms, tanks and fighter bombers included. You don't nuke a country that sponsors terrorism no more fatal than the Columbine massacre.
An Israeli, as well as Iranian/Saudi, bomb is totally out of place in the Middle East and only complicates matter further.
""Imagine a boot stamping on a human face...forever." Ancient Rome and Greece, 1930s Germany, these are democracies that handed over emergency power and The People never got it back."
Many of the original Roman dictators were appointed, if not for a fixed term, for a specific function like fighting a war (somewhat like how a modern leader could place a country under Martial Law). One notable exception was Julius Caesar, who became dictator for life, his life being terminated by an assassination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator#Replacement_of_the_dictatorate). So yes the Roman people did get their power back, at least as far as their limited democracy was concerned (the Romans had slaves and other "non-citizens").
There'll probably a huge (black?)market for used or surplus old wifi routers. And plenty of people buying low-watt single board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Which make me wonders if the FCC will modify their proposed rules so that only only the transmitter and support chips of a router board are locked down and not the whole device since it would be fairly trivial to make a wifi router out of USB Wifi dongles.
" I know of a possible fix for that: build a one-way pager into the phone. Then you can keep the phone in "airplane mode" (no tracking) nearly all the time, and tell people that they should page you when they have something to say to you. When you are paged, you can decide when it is safe to connect to the phone radio network and reveal your location -- presumably when you are in a place that is not sensitive."
This is actually a workable suggestion. The trick is to use a portable 3G/4G device. This can come either as a stand-alone model with its own battery pack or as a USB dongle that must be connected to your PC. The main purpose of this device is actually to provide mobile internet access for a device without a built-in 3G/4G connection (but only wifi or a USB port). But these can also be used to send and receive text messages. Google for mobile wifi or "mifi" to see examples.
It has peaked for me also. And I think that's a good thing. Now instead of wrestling with all the config etc stuff back in the bad old days when the Year of Linux (on the desktop) was still a popular meme and rallying cry, I just use it. Yes, from time to time, things still break. But that's because I'm on the distro equivalent of the developer channel not on the long-term support release.
Nowadays a browser is the least reason you'll have for not switching. Except for IE pre-7 all of today's major browser present pretty much the same user experience. Graphical browsers fall into three or four major camp, Webkit browsers like Chromium and Safari, Gecko-based browsers like Firefox, and the Microsoft browsers. Recent Microsoft browsers tend to be standards compliant enough for a web developer or web site to ignore. The major problem nowadays is whether to code for the desktop or for mobile, which is dominated by whatever browser engines Apple and Google use.
If so they'll probably learn like Google that the most important of those patents are loose change since most of them are "essential" patents that must be licensed under FRAND terms. So it's not as if they've suddenly acquired a big war chest to bully other smartphone manufacturers. They'll probably still be earning more from the software patents they developed in-house. The Nokia purchase was a reactionary move. I won't be surprised if Google just baited them to it.
I'm ok with smart watches that run for mere days so long as they keep the time even when the smart functions go zombie, sort of like the way an unplugged desktop PC can still keep within tolerable limits of the correct time when you do a cold boot after a couple of days or weeks.
Obviously I don't own a smartch so this is partly a question. Do these things have an auxiliary power pack similar to the BIOS battery of a PC?
If space launches weren't planned months and even years in advance, I actually suspect this is a grand ploy by the Party to divert the masses from the impending collapse of their economy. In a representative democracy they have things called elections.
Partial solution to the charging problemo is wireless charging. Somebody should invent wireless charging desk or desk covers where you just dump all your gizmos, and voila, you wake up and they're ready to go.
Another solution is eInk screens similar to the one used by the Kindle and Kobo, although I suspect the SOC or SIP (system in a package) is the bigger drain on the battery. So the processing unit is probably the one that needs to be made more energy efficient rather than simply adding more juice to the battery.
The Blender Institute has made two other short movies since Bx3. The full chronology of the "major" (being a relative term) Blender open movie projects:
1) Elephants Dream (2006) 2) Big Buck Bunny (2008) 3) Sintel (2010) 4) Tears of Steel (2012)
Tears of Steel is "live action" but has enough frame by frame CGI effects to qualify as animation. The current project is part of its first full-length feature ("full-length" being again a relative term as the movie is projected to last less than an hour).
Slashdot Mirror
"Then maybe there wouldn't be as many face-palm electronic security holes like the Chrysler Jeep Cherokee vulnerability." And of course, Apple's security is second to none in the face-palming industry.
Comparer mentions food in both sentences, plant food vs. bird food. So you can't help but think this is about food.
..."and we'd probably see a number of astronauts either splattered across the Martian surface or stranded down their until their life-support systems gave out (landings and lift-offs are hard)."
I say the landing part is one of the easiest problems to fix. How many astronauts have crash-landed on the Moon using 60's era technology?
Lift-off is hard but no harder than the way we ALREADY launch people to low earth orbit. I think the biggest problem is the getting there form LEO. The biggest danger would be getting lost in space, or killed there by some freak impact or solar outburst. Once on Mars, it's just a matter of burrowing sufficient deep in the ground that you can weather any dust storm. Mars not being as geologically active as Earth means the chances of a catastrophic earthquake or volcanic eruption are slimmer. So burrowing under a sufficient layer of Martian earth should against most natural disasters.
"If you want to get the police to do anything in this world, don't contact them yourself, have your lawyer contact them." Wrong. In places where the rule of law or lawyers is strong, yes. But in most places, contacting Benjamin Franklin is the better option.
Isn't this already being done with Wikispecies.org (https://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)?
Catch phrases: "The free species directory that anyone can edit." "Wikispecies is free, because life is in the public domain!"
Joking aside, most open source can't handle open source. I mean, you can't randomly insert emacs source code into the Linux kernel, can you? There are definitely rules that govern the exchange of source code between projects, even if we disregard the conflicting licenses. For example you often have to port code that runs beautifully on desktop GNU/Linux to run on a broken Linux like Android, and that's even if you're running the same architecture (x86, ARM, etc).
If I read right the OP said or implied that s/he was a software developer of some sort (Github?), so I think in this case an online reputation does matter. So unless the OP is Linus Torvalds, a bad web rep means your chances of getting hired or contracted for a project is significantly impacted.
" yes they kept pestering me for months"
Pesky algorithms. They should know when to shut up.
Seriously, I thought Google's "customer service" and whatnot was merely (mostly?) sophisticated spam, Turing-contest bots, and that you had to write a really nasty, threatening letter to get past the filters to a human.
Unless it's frozen stiff, eating C02 is far less dangerous than eating nightshade. So your comparison is a bit off.
Yes, because if you have nothing to hide ... nevermind
" Israel is surrounded by a few hundred million people living in a culture that makes right-wing abortion clinic bombers look downright sane."
You mention the phrase "a culture" in a way that makes it seems that there's only one other major Middle Eastern culture besides the Jewish culture of Israel. Even if we eliminate the presence of the various Christian and quasi-Islamic groups, that still leaves at least two different Muslim groups, the Sunnis and the Shiites. The 9/11 bombers were all Sunni Muslims, the religion of the pro-American Saudi Arabia, who I presume Israel won't nuke. Iran, a Shiite Muslim majority country, hasn't sponsored any major or consistent acts of terrorism comparable to the one's carried out by Osama and his twisted supporters. See the shitfuck in Syria? That's a war between different Muslim factions more violent than any between Israel and the Arab states.
There's no single, united Muslim culture that wants to wipe Israel off the map. Most of the anti-Israel political and military activity tend to be posturing, a way for the various Islamic groups and countries to maintaing their significance and divert their public or followers from their own failures (economic, social, etc). Sure Iran's mostly Palestinian allies have carried out random acts of terrorism like kidnapping and the shooting of Israeli settlers, but these are incidents that Israel is fully capable of dealing with using conventional arms, tanks and fighter bombers included. You don't nuke a country that sponsors terrorism no more fatal than the Columbine massacre.
An Israeli, as well as Iranian/Saudi, bomb is totally out of place in the Middle East and only complicates matter further.
""Imagine a boot stamping on a human face...forever." Ancient Rome and Greece, 1930s Germany, these are democracies that handed over emergency power and The People never got it back."
Many of the original Roman dictators were appointed, if not for a fixed term, for a specific function like fighting a war (somewhat like how a modern leader could place a country under Martial Law). One notable exception was Julius Caesar, who became dictator for life, his life being terminated by an assassination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator#Replacement_of_the_dictatorate). So yes the Roman people did get their power back, at least as far as their limited democracy was concerned (the Romans had slaves and other "non-citizens").
Turn off your phone when you're not expecting a call.* Reduces at least two problems: power drain and cellphone tracking.
*SMS and FB posts are stored so it's not as if you're going to miss your friend's cat photos or wedding invite.
There'll probably a huge (black?)market for used or surplus old wifi routers. And plenty of people buying low-watt single board computers like the Raspberry Pi. Which make me wonders if the FCC will modify their proposed rules so that only only the transmitter and support chips of a router board are locked down and not the whole device since it would be fairly trivial to make a wifi router out of USB Wifi dongles.
" I know of a possible fix for that: build a one-way pager into the phone. Then you can keep the phone in "airplane mode" (no tracking) nearly all the time, and tell people that they should page you when they have something to say to you. When you are paged, you can decide when it is safe to connect to the phone radio network and reveal your location -- presumably when you are in a place that is not sensitive."
This is actually a workable suggestion. The trick is to use a portable 3G/4G device. This can come either as a stand-alone model with its own battery pack or as a USB dongle that must be connected to your PC. The main purpose of this device is actually to provide mobile internet access for a device without a built-in 3G/4G connection (but only wifi or a USB port). But these can also be used to send and receive text messages. Google for mobile wifi or "mifi" to see examples.
It has peaked for me also. And I think that's a good thing. Now instead of wrestling with all the config etc stuff back in the bad old days when the Year of Linux (on the desktop) was still a popular meme and rallying cry, I just use it. Yes, from time to time, things still break. But that's because I'm on the distro equivalent of the developer channel not on the long-term support release.
Nowadays a browser is the least reason you'll have for not switching. Except for IE pre-7 all of today's major browser present pretty much the same user experience. Graphical browsers fall into three or four major camp, Webkit browsers like Chromium and Safari, Gecko-based browsers like Firefox, and the Microsoft browsers. Recent Microsoft browsers tend to be standards compliant enough for a web developer or web site to ignore. The major problem nowadays is whether to code for the desktop or for mobile, which is dominated by whatever browser engines Apple and Google use.
Download a Windows VM, and use QEMU. Problem(?) solved.
If so they'll probably learn like Google that the most important of those patents are loose change since most of them are "essential" patents that must be licensed under FRAND terms. So it's not as if they've suddenly acquired a big war chest to bully other smartphone manufacturers. They'll probably still be earning more from the software patents they developed in-house. The Nokia purchase was a reactionary move. I won't be surprised if Google just baited them to it.
I'm ok with smart watches that run for mere days so long as they keep the time even when the smart functions go zombie, sort of like the way an unplugged desktop PC can still keep within tolerable limits of the correct time when you do a cold boot after a couple of days or weeks.
Obviously I don't own a smartch so this is partly a question. Do these things have an auxiliary power pack similar to the BIOS battery of a PC?
The answer is obviously no. I can't find any half decent programming show on Java or C, let alone some new fangled language like Go and Swift.
Miss, I have valuable information I need to communicate to you directly. (Yes it's been done to death in spy movies.)
If space launches weren't planned months and even years in advance, I actually suspect this is a grand ploy by the Party to divert the masses from the impending collapse of their economy. In a representative democracy they have things called elections.
Partial solution to the charging problemo is wireless charging. Somebody should invent wireless charging desk or desk covers where you just dump all your gizmos, and voila, you wake up and they're ready to go. Another solution is eInk screens similar to the one used by the Kindle and Kobo, although I suspect the SOC or SIP (system in a package) is the bigger drain on the battery. So the processing unit is probably the one that needs to be made more energy efficient rather than simply adding more juice to the battery.
The Blender Institute has made two other short movies since Bx3. The full chronology of the "major" (being a relative term) Blender open movie projects:
1) Elephants Dream (2006)
2) Big Buck Bunny (2008)
3) Sintel (2010)
4) Tears of Steel (2012)
Tears of Steel is "live action" but has enough frame by frame CGI effects to qualify as animation. The current project is part of its first full-length feature ("full-length" being again a relative term as the movie is projected to last less than an hour).