Sending humans up into space is colossally expensive, and of little scientific interest in itself. (It has been proven that you can send humans up into space.) Actual experiments in space, be they to do with zero gravity, telescopes, or what have you can generally be conducted much more economically by mechanised probes.
For the past few decades, manned spaceflight was more a PR exercise than anything else. Someone would go up with a few schoolchildren's experiments, make a few transmissions and get some heroic news coverage. This would be great for national prestige, and to be one of those kids whose plant seedlings got taken up on the space shuttle would have been pretty awesome, though the scientific value of such missions hit the point of diminishing returns a while ago. Now the PR value seems to be declining as well (it has been almost half a century since the first astronauts went up), and the question must be asked: is it really the best use of such sums of money?
The corporate world is 90%+ wedded to IE, and much of it still stuck on IE6. (And it gets worse; one project I worked on last year had to work with an enterprise-wide "secure" deployment of an ancient, extra-buggy version of IE6 not seen outside of that company; we ended up losing much of the AJAX bells and whistles.) I'm told that this is because one thing Microsoft do better is remote administration of large enterprise-wide setups.
Which means that, unless there is a paradigm shift in the corporate culture, HTML5 will remain irrelevant on the corporate desktop; MS don't want to support HTML5 for the reasons described in the article, so IE support for these standards will remain either nonexistent or patched on with layers of hacks (like Google's JavaScript SVG library for IE8). Google's best bet is to ensure that such a shift happens.
Didn't the Church of Scientology own (a big stake in) earthlink.net some years ago? Is this still the case? If so, does this mean that this ISP's users will be banned from editing Wikipedia?
Track listings of unreleased albums, along with accurate track length information (which the Audioscrobbler protocol provides), could be used as probable cause for a search warrant.
The difference between the USA and North Korea is that North Korea is as close to a perfect example of a totalitarian state as has probably ever existed. The state is everywhere, in every aspect of its citizens' lives, to the point where they have internalised it. (Witness, for example, reports from the train explosion in the north of North Korea a few years ago, which stated that many citizens perished going back into their burning houses to rescue their portraits of Kim Jong Il, and imagine, for a moment, what sort of psychological conditioning could make people behave in this fashion.)
If/when the regime collapses, a lot of North Koreans are going to have an extremely hard time adjusting. There will be chaos and hardship, and a lot of North Koreans will pine for the "good old days" of the regime, in the way that East Germans and Russians do, only more so. In short, things are going to get quite fucked up.
So if you're living in the US on a work visa, you're still not allowed any e-book goodness? How do they verify that you're actually a citizen, and not some foreign ne'er-do-well with a US bank account/social security number/other credentials?
I suspect the opposite will happen. The IFPI and/or US Government will appeal the disproportionate leniency of the sentences (i.e., an act of international economic warfare* is being treated as equivalent to a mere burglary), and the sentences will be increased to 5+ years. Either that or the convicts will be extradited to face trial in the United States, where more severe sentences would be almost certainly handed down.
* Currency counterfeiting is an act of war in international law. Under some doctrines of intellectual property (i.e., the ones that have been upheld in US courts when levying $200,000 fines for sharing songs), this could be argued to be equivalent.
If they had walked free, within the next half hour, the US would have announced a trade embargo against Sweden and the blocking of Swedish internet traffic.
They should be glad they're going to a soft Swedish prison and not a US federal prison, given that most of the intellectual property in question belongs to US corporations.
In any case, it's open source (under the name Chromium), so if you don't like Google's EULA, or any other part of their plans for Chrome, you will be able to download and run one of the third-party, de-Googlised builds of Chromium, or even build your own. It seems unlikely that Google would impose particularly unpalatable terms on Chrome, given that it comes with its own competition built in.
Will "killergames" be allowed if they change them so that you're not killing simulated human beings? I.e., if a German version of Grand Theft Auto comes out with the city set to one full of zombies or robots, will that be OK?
This is not without precedent; apparently the German version of Wolfenstein was changed to involve evil space aliens, because depictions of Nazis are illegal in Germany.
If you're one of the people who's contented to have one browser window and one tab open at once, Firefox is fine. If you, however, open a few dozen windows, open tabs in windows, and run JavaScript-intensive pages, it will gradually slow down and start using up a lot of CPU whilst idling, eventually crashing.
Of course, you could say that once you've got that many windows open, you're abusing the browser and doing so at your own risk. Which is fine if it's still 1997 and browsers are just HTML document viewers, but at odds with the new reality of DHTML, AJAX and the browser as an application platform. Which is why Google developed a browser that's designed as an application platform rather than a document viewer with functionality hacked into it.
Of course, Mozilla may fix bugs in Firefox and make it faster and more stable, but as long as its architecture is that of a traditional web browser, it's a potentially less stable proposition than Chrome, and bugs and vulnerabilities in it are more of a problem than they would be in Chrome.
Does Chromium need a recent or GenuineIntel CPU? I tried installing it on my AMD-based Ubuntu box (which is a few years old) and got an illegal instruction error when I tried to run it. It runs fine on another machine (which is about four years old, but Intel-based).
You're confusing two different things. Hygiene and social skills are indeed essential, however, belonging to non-mainstream subcultures is a different phenomenon. There are enough people who get into subcultures such as emo and goth primarily for social reasons (i.e., finding sexual partners). And roleplaying/card gaming probably also count, as long as gender ratios are appropriate; it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of sexual liaisons hatched in the spaces between AD&D/Vampire campaigns (or perhaps even WoW, these days). And then there's the "nervert" phenomenon, where those who identify themselves as outside the mainstream are less bound by considerations of mainstream acceptability have more and more kinky sex than the jocks/cheerleaders they are supposed to envy. Which is why you get polyamory, BDSM and other such phenomena happening much more often among "geek" subcultures.
Your argument seems to be a bit like "Why would any guy be gay? You'll never find a girlfriend that way."
Here in Britain, all the open WiFi access points seem to have disappeared over the past year or so (other than the odd residential "NETGEAR"). Even the cafes and bars that had it are putting passwords on it. It wouldn't surprise me if the surveillance-happy New Labour government had passed a law banning open WiFi, or making the owners liable for any paedoterrorist activity on it.
If there is a significant market niche who believe that WiFi generates negative energy and that one can convert this into positive energy by means of an "orgone generator", someone could make some money by selling WiFi base stations with built-in orgone generators. Just buy a bunch of generic Netgear boxes, case-mod them to look vaguely mystical, using a lot of crystal and gold leaf and such in the process, and sell them at a steep markup. Presto; hippies have good, life-affirming orgone-enhanced WiFi, and you have their money. Everyone's a winner.
Except that the congestion caused by individual drivers on roads (even with each car fully loaded) is far greater than that caused by mass transit vehicles such as buses, trams or trains. And as congestion increases, the cars spend a lot more time waiting in gridlock, and a lot more fuel is burnt than in the theoretical optimum.
Also, I doubt that the Cato Institute would be particularly impartial here.
Not quite; 574km/h was the maximum speed obtained on a special test run, using a train consisting solely of power cars (i.e., no passenger cars), with modified electrical systems and a special raised voltage, just to demonstrate the theoretical possibilities. The maximum speed day to day is 320km/h.
Not that that invalidates the rest of the article; passenger rail in the US is lagging behind the state of the art and, in many cases, behind the state of the practice (witness the state of Amtrak, which makes Britain's post-privatisation railways look like a model of efficiency).
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are, if there is an appeal, she'll get the death penalty. Three times.
Sending humans up into space is colossally expensive, and of little scientific interest in itself. (It has been proven that you can send humans up into space.) Actual experiments in space, be they to do with zero gravity, telescopes, or what have you can generally be conducted much more economically by mechanised probes.
For the past few decades, manned spaceflight was more a PR exercise than anything else. Someone would go up with a few schoolchildren's experiments, make a few transmissions and get some heroic news coverage. This would be great for national prestige, and to be one of those kids whose plant seedlings got taken up on the space shuttle would have been pretty awesome, though the scientific value of such missions hit the point of diminishing returns a while ago. Now the PR value seems to be declining as well (it has been almost half a century since the first astronauts went up), and the question must be asked: is it really the best use of such sums of money?
The corporate world is 90%+ wedded to IE, and much of it still stuck on IE6. (And it gets worse; one project I worked on last year had to work with an enterprise-wide "secure" deployment of an ancient, extra-buggy version of IE6 not seen outside of that company; we ended up losing much of the AJAX bells and whistles.) I'm told that this is because one thing Microsoft do better is remote administration of large enterprise-wide setups.
Which means that, unless there is a paradigm shift in the corporate culture, HTML5 will remain irrelevant on the corporate desktop; MS don't want to support HTML5 for the reasons described in the article, so IE support for these standards will remain either nonexistent or patched on with layers of hacks (like Google's JavaScript SVG library for IE8). Google's best bet is to ensure that such a shift happens.
How does this differ from the Chromium daily builds? Is it identical only officially a Google product, or are there technical differences?
whether there'll be a last.fm client for it.
Didn't the Church of Scientology own (a big stake in) earthlink.net some years ago? Is this still the case? If so, does this mean that this ISP's users will be banned from editing Wikipedia?
Track listings of unreleased albums, along with accurate track length information (which the Audioscrobbler protocol provides), could be used as probable cause for a search warrant.
The difference between the USA and North Korea is that North Korea is as close to a perfect example of a totalitarian state as has probably ever existed. The state is everywhere, in every aspect of its citizens' lives, to the point where they have internalised it. (Witness, for example, reports from the train explosion in the north of North Korea a few years ago, which stated that many citizens perished going back into their burning houses to rescue their portraits of Kim Jong Il, and imagine, for a moment, what sort of psychological conditioning could make people behave in this fashion.)
If/when the regime collapses, a lot of North Koreans are going to have an extremely hard time adjusting. There will be chaos and hardship, and a lot of North Koreans will pine for the "good old days" of the regime, in the way that East Germans and Russians do, only more so. In short, things are going to get quite fucked up.
So if you're living in the US on a work visa, you're still not allowed any e-book goodness? How do they verify that you're actually a citizen, and not some foreign ne'er-do-well with a US bank account/social security number/other credentials?
I suspect the opposite will happen. The IFPI and/or US Government will appeal the disproportionate leniency of the sentences (i.e., an act of international economic warfare* is being treated as equivalent to a mere burglary), and the sentences will be increased to 5+ years. Either that or the convicts will be extradited to face trial in the United States, where more severe sentences would be almost certainly handed down.
* Currency counterfeiting is an act of war in international law. Under some doctrines of intellectual property (i.e., the ones that have been upheld in US courts when levying $200,000 fines for sharing songs), this could be argued to be equivalent.
If they had walked free, within the next half hour, the US would have announced a trade embargo against Sweden and the blocking of Swedish internet traffic.
They should be glad they're going to a soft Swedish prison and not a US federal prison, given that most of the intellectual property in question belongs to US corporations.
So soon it will be possible to watch blocky, smeary versions of all the Spider-Man films in a web browser. Awesome!
In any case, it's open source (under the name Chromium), so if you don't like Google's EULA, or any other part of their plans for Chrome, you will be able to download and run one of the third-party, de-Googlised builds of Chromium, or even build your own. It seems unlikely that Google would impose particularly unpalatable terms on Chrome, given that it comes with its own competition built in.
I wonder where their satellite constellations are.
Will "killergames" be allowed if they change them so that you're not killing simulated human beings? I.e., if a German version of Grand Theft Auto comes out with the city set to one full of zombies or robots, will that be OK?
This is not without precedent; apparently the German version of Wolfenstein was changed to involve evil space aliens, because depictions of Nazis are illegal in Germany.
If you're one of the people who's contented to have one browser window and one tab open at once, Firefox is fine. If you, however, open a few dozen windows, open tabs in windows, and run JavaScript-intensive pages, it will gradually slow down and start using up a lot of CPU whilst idling, eventually crashing.
Of course, you could say that once you've got that many windows open, you're abusing the browser and doing so at your own risk. Which is fine if it's still 1997 and browsers are just HTML document viewers, but at odds with the new reality of DHTML, AJAX and the browser as an application platform. Which is why Google developed a browser that's designed as an application platform rather than a document viewer with functionality hacked into it.
Of course, Mozilla may fix bugs in Firefox and make it faster and more stable, but as long as its architecture is that of a traditional web browser, it's a potentially less stable proposition than Chrome, and bugs and vulnerabilities in it are more of a problem than they would be in Chrome.
Does Chromium need a recent or GenuineIntel CPU? I tried installing it on my AMD-based Ubuntu box (which is a few years old) and got an illegal instruction error when I tried to run it. It runs fine on another machine (which is about four years old, but Intel-based).
You're confusing two different things. Hygiene and social skills are indeed essential, however, belonging to non-mainstream subcultures is a different phenomenon. There are enough people who get into subcultures such as emo and goth primarily for social reasons (i.e., finding sexual partners). And roleplaying/card gaming probably also count, as long as gender ratios are appropriate; it wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of sexual liaisons hatched in the spaces between AD&D/Vampire campaigns (or perhaps even WoW, these days). And then there's the "nervert" phenomenon, where those who identify themselves as outside the mainstream are less bound by considerations of mainstream acceptability have more and more kinky sex than the jocks/cheerleaders they are supposed to envy. Which is why you get polyamory, BDSM and other such phenomena happening much more often among "geek" subcultures.
Your argument seems to be a bit like "Why would any guy be gay? You'll never find a girlfriend that way."
One could probably consider the various seduction schools (as in Neil Strauss' "The Game") to be a social engineering course.
Make your own joke about "penetration testing".
Here in Britain, all the open WiFi access points seem to have disappeared over the past year or so (other than the odd residential "NETGEAR"). Even the cafes and bars that had it are putting passwords on it. It wouldn't surprise me if the surveillance-happy New Labour government had passed a law banning open WiFi, or making the owners liable for any paedoterrorist activity on it.
If there is a significant market niche who believe that WiFi generates negative energy and that one can convert this into positive energy by means of an "orgone generator", someone could make some money by selling WiFi base stations with built-in orgone generators. Just buy a bunch of generic Netgear boxes, case-mod them to look vaguely mystical, using a lot of crystal and gold leaf and such in the process, and sell them at a steep markup. Presto; hippies have good, life-affirming orgone-enhanced WiFi, and you have their money. Everyone's a winner.
Except that the congestion caused by individual drivers on roads (even with each car fully loaded) is far greater than that caused by mass transit vehicles such as buses, trams or trains. And as congestion increases, the cars spend a lot more time waiting in gridlock, and a lot more fuel is burnt than in the theoretical optimum.
Also, I doubt that the Cato Institute would be particularly impartial here.
Actually, GM have a division which builds diesel locomotives.
France's TGV is moving people at 574km/h.
Not quite; 574km/h was the maximum speed obtained on a special test run, using a train consisting solely of power cars (i.e., no passenger cars), with modified electrical systems and a special raised voltage, just to demonstrate the theoretical possibilities. The maximum speed day to day is 320km/h.
Not that that invalidates the rest of the article; passenger rail in the US is lagging behind the state of the art and, in many cases, behind the state of the practice (witness the state of Amtrak, which makes Britain's post-privatisation railways look like a model of efficiency).
Wonder how many of these will end up on eBay.