How long until an average user will chose the nouveau driver over the closed source driver, if said user doesn't care about licensing or building from source, but is looking for out of the box performance?
When it is stable? The damn thing kept crashing on me one or two times a day which is why I switched to the proprietary driver. Now I'm back to using the Nouveau driver with a new Nvidia card and it only crashes one or two times a month which is just about stable enough to not make me bother with the proprietary one.
Where does that put them in comparison with the Nvidia driver on Windows?
The Windows driver is somewhat more stable, I regard stability as an aspect of performance.
"Living History". Japan invaders were thrown out of China some *75 years ago*. Not too many people left who have personal memories of it, any more.
I'm neither Japanese nor Chinese so the closest I can get to relating to the way the Chinese might feel about the Japanese and WWII (and at the same time unfortunately Godwining this thread) is that my great uncle spent years in a Nazi KZ camp, and my grandfather was arrested and worked over by the Gestapo for treason. No living memory there but I was raised by people who experienced the Third Reich first hand and it still makes my skin crawl whenever I hear one of the latest crop of European right-wing populists talk about the Moslems like the Nazis used to talk about the Jews before they gained power and still had to worry about freaking out the electorate. You don't need living memory to be become alarmed when the past looks like it might be about to begin to repeat itself and having read the Wikipedia article on the Nanking Massacres I can easily understand why the Chinese might be freaked out at the slightest hint of a nuclear armed Japan.
The Chinese government still uses Japan and the atrocities committed in the 1930s and 1940s as a bogeyman to distract from the atrocities committed by the Chinese government against it's own people in the 1940s and 1950s.
Let's not forget the Cultural Revolution (1960s). I don't think I have ever seen figures over the deathtoll that were lower than a million.
iphone is a keyboard and a tv-set away from being a full-fledged computer for 99% of the population.
Actually.... it isn't, not anymore You can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to an iPhone and there is a HDMI connector available. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... The phone desktop gets projected to the TV without changing the aspect ratio which is rather rudimentary and you can only interact with it through the keyboard and the touch screen on the device. I'd say what's missing is mainly a decent TV/Monitor mode for the iOS desktop and a touch screen display device capable of sending touch and gesture feedback to the iPhone, either that or a mouse. There is actually a Cydia app that provides mouse support but that requires a jailbreak. Personally I'd prefer a touch screen TV but the point is the same, all the iPhone need to make this workable is software development work. That being said I'd still buy a laptop to do serious work.
Actually, the Chinese will build to any spec. If they can build it on the same quality requirements for cheaper, you tell them you want it to your quality spec and you pay less.
This is unlike Germany, where the only quality level is "high", and you pay for German manufacture. German manufacturers won't provide you with a lower cost-tier and a lesser-duty-cycle product.
Everybody has their own strategy and "it may be expensive but you'll get your money's worth" is an engineering principle that has woked for the Germans for going on 150 years so why fix something that ain't broke? I would, for example, much prefer getting hit by a Jihadist packing an RPG while sitting in a German tank than in a Chinese one because "Made in Germany" is pretty much synoymous with quality and when it comes to tanks while "Made in China" basically means "N-th iteration of some 1960s Soviet design". Now if I was in the market for a cheap company car at throw-away prices I might consider Chinese some chinese rehash of a 1980s european car but I'd probably end up buying something Japanese beacuase with the Japanese you at least get innovation, new designs and a constant level of quality even if it isn't always the best.
You'd also have to ask the member states to give up their sovereignty. This wasn't easy even in the case of the US as there were a ton of issues that needed resolving (i.e. balancing power between small and large states.)
This would be incredibly more difficult in the case of Europe since the individual member states have had their own identity often going back two or even three millennia, not only that but what cultural identity would they take? I.e. little things like what common language will they speak? (Granted the US has no official language, but 80% of the population speaks the same one...such is by far not the case in the EU.) Also, I'm having a hard time seeing how e.g. England would agree to it, seeing as they even refuse to adopt the Euro (which it turns out was actually a good idea and worked quite well in their favor) and they don't even drive on the same side of the road as everybody else.
There is a large group of nations within the EU that have little problem with increased integration, Britain is in something of a small minority in its anti-EU stance. Until now keeping Britain in the EU has been seen as important and nobody really thought they should leave. Recently, however, the idea has been voiced in other EU countries that the British should just should just bloody leave if they have that stink in their nose rather continue this constant dithering. People are just getting sick of hearing Britain threaten to leave and then never doing anything about it, especially since it usually seems to be a smokescreen to extort special treatment. There is a whole bunch of things that can be done in terms of restructuring the EU if the UK is no longer there fucking things up to get special deals for it's financial industry. If the UK decides to go it will certainly be watched with great interest as they leave the common market, refuses to join the EEZ which is not an option for most of the UK Euro-skeptics/isolationists since it would involve enacting all those hated EU laws without any say in how they are made (a say which the UK currently has as an EU member). Ukip in Britain, the Freedom party in the Netherlands and Front National in France all believe that Europe is better off as a bag of squabbling nation states that Europe was before the EU was set up. The kind of squabbling, feuding bag full of angry weasels that would not have been able to agree on whether or not the Soviet Union was a threat for long enough to even conceive of forming an alliance against the Soviets to prevent them from gobbling Europe up one squabbling state at a time. NATO was only formed as a counterweight against the Soviets after several swift ass-kicks from the Americans and they cannot be counted on to the play the role of the big bad parent forever. So who is right? Is it Ukip and Co. who think they can take Europe back to being a bag of small squabbling nations and still be taken seriously by great powers like China, India, Russia and the USA? Or is it the so called 'federalists' who see increases in political and economic union as the only way to stand up to the big boys? You tell me? Which is more likely to succeed in helping Europe to deal with the Great powers of the 21st century? One big European cat or a group of cute little house-cats? If this reminds you Americans of a debate that took place in the US before the civil war about the pros and cons of increasing Federalism that is no coincidence. The one difference is that I am not nearly as alarmed at the prospect of a European civil war as some of the more delusional Euro skeptic wing nuts who seem to consider a pan European civil war to be just around the corner.
In their defense, Bush Jr. didn't run on the platform of increasing surveillance and decreasing government transparency. For the second term he run on a solid platform of FUD and even many non-GOP voters bought into it.
Further in their defense, TP is a delayed reaction to Bush actions. Sure, it is largely counter-productive, ineffective, lacking concrete goals and so on, but if you are objective you can't claim they are not trying to do something about this.
Well if nothign else, and judging from the mods the post has been getting, this seems to be a sore topic with some GOP voters.
You average GOP voter strongly values privacy and will not look kindly at this kind of targeted approach.
Are these the same GOP voters who voted GW Bush Jr. into office, the self same GW Bush Jr. who got the ball rolling on the now famous NSA warrantless surveillance behemoth?
Even that isn't entirely remote, if he plays his cards right. We had something similar happen in Alaska back in 2010 when the incumbent Lisa Murkowski lost the primary to the Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. She went on to win as a write-in candidate with something like a 40% margin, because it didn't take long for the more crazy extreme side of Joe Miller to show up and public opinion of him quickly flipped.
I'm not an American so just out of curiosity: What is a write-in candidate?....and: Why is somebody who looses a primary election held by a political party banned by law from running as an independent? What ever ones opinion of sore losers may be, passing laws against them running as independents seems a bit anti-democratic to me. In my country we occasionally get a splinter candidate running as an independent. Usually this is after a disagreement in one of the mainstream parties where somebody is dissatisfied about being bumped down to the bottom of the elction list in local elections or because they were sidelined for a parliamentary seat (i.e. because of party internal backstabbing). Recently, for example, this has been common in right wing parties whose leaders are EU skeptic and have been keen to prevent any EU friendly party members from gaining parliementary seats. Some of these independents have even been known to get elected because they were simply put more competent than the nimrod that the party bosses helped to win the primary. So far nobody has even considered passing laws against such independents.
I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.
Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.
Plenty of options? Like going to congress where the hard liners were calling for his execution? The truth is that it was hard line bullshitters like that which drove Snowden to Russia. The US political class shot it self in the foot with its come-down-on-him-like-a-ton-of-bricks attitude and now Russia is benefitting. It's basically a reverse of the situation faced during the Cold War by people who had legitimate reason to criticises the Soviet system had no way of doing so except by defecting to the west to avoid being locked away. Perhaps you should ask yourself why the only place from which the NSA and the US govt. can be safely criticisesd these days on certain issues without having to fear being disappeared into some CIA run solitary confinement unit, is a shark tank like Putin's Russia?
To argue that cache files in a web browser is infringement is as silly as claiming that your eye transmitting an image to your brain is infringement...
I can see stiffer sentences if the hacking leads to loss of life DIRECTLY. For example, hacking into a hospital system and bringing down critical life saving systems.
But to me, and I don't know how the UK manslaughter laws are rigged, it would be more helpful to update those laws instead of this one.
Having said that, national security combined with unauthorized computer access can and will be used against whistleblowers of government abuse. Watch for that to happen.
I'm generally in favour of people not getting any discounts on sentences for 'cyber attacks'. This is partly because I remember a time long ago when certain egotistical morons saw creating malware and letting it loose on the public as a good career move, a short cut to a well paying job. However, even those people don't deserve a life sentence and whoever thought of that idea should look up the word 'draconian' in a dictionary. If a cyber attack kills somebody use the manslaughter laws, if they cause massive amounts of damage sentence them appropriately just don't try to crack down on hactivists like Anonymous by trying to lock them up for life (and let's face it that's who these laws are aimed at). That's something that you'd expect to be the knee-jerk reaction in Putin's Russia not in the United Kingdom.
Ha-ha-ha. Yes, the old 'you can have any phone so long as it's black Bakelite, and we've got a slot to install it next year' Post Office Telephones was just so, so much better than the BT of today.
The darkest day in the history of the telecoms business was the day when the old monopolies were broken up and 'users' became 'customers' who could go elsewhere for better service. It's a god thing that we now have big monolithic privatized telcos that compete by not invading each other's turf and beat down any annoying competitors that pop up with a big fat club. Watch this if you haven't already it's a must see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I'm sure everyone was thinking, we don't have enough languages that are basically a badly implemented subset of C++. We need to make another one. Let's see if Android will respond by creating an even less compatible C++ clone than Java.
Eh? Subset of C++? C++ is a (almost) a superset of C as long as you respect a few rules such as the fact that you can define variables like:
int class = 0;
in C but not in C++. The above snippet will (obviously) give you a compiler error in C++ since class is a reserved word in C++ but GCC for example has no trouble with that declaration (so C++ is not a strict superset of C++). There are quite a few other things that exist in both languages but work differently in C++ which make C++ programs unacceptable to C compilers even if you only use stuff in your code that is common to both languages. Objective C is claimed to be a strict a superset of C. I've never tested that claim but I imagine you'd get a compiler error if you did this in Objective C (I don't have a compiler handy):
void id() {}
you can, however, do this in C without any complaint.
I have always found it strange how you Anglo Saxons see so much sanctity in feces. To us Germans it is a revolting substance but for you it is the focus of much religious reverence.
That's OK, we've never understood why your toilets have shelves so you can inspect your own feces.
So, whose the one obsessed with poo?
Well, we may examine the turd before despatching it onwards on its journey to the sewage treatment facility, but we have not yet accorded fecal matter the status of a venerated holy relic. Your religious veneration trumps our slightly unusual scientific curiosity.
"Ja, Ve investigated but der Amerikans undt Birtish vouldn't answer zee question and zee others vent all Sgt Schulz on uns"
...Holy crap...
I have always found it strange how you Anglo Saxons see so much sanctity in feces. To us Germans it is a revolting substance but for you it is the focus of much religious reverence.
Wrong. The body was made from waste cotton fibre bonded with phenol resin. It's a great material - light, strong, reasonably eco-friendly, non-corrosive. It's not a million miles from carbon fibre or even what this article is talking about. The rest of the Trabant was a conventional spot-welded steel monocoque.
It's lazy stereotyping to mock the Trabant without actually looking at how it was made. Sure, the design was dated and yes, the engines were terrible, but they were reliable and cheap, and actually a much more efficient car than most of the gas-guzzlers made in the west.
My main gripe about the Trabant's build quality was the poor panel fit, but that's not an inherent drawback of the materials it was made from, just a side-effect of somewhat old-fashioned tooling.
The problem with the Trabant's resin body was cold. I saw a Trabant collide with a Volvo once, it was about -10 degrees C and the Trabant's front end just shattered like glass. The Trabi was also very light, I remember walking past a Range Rover stuck in a big pile of snow many years ago. Somehow the driver had gotten himself stuck and was busy with a shovel trying to get himself out of. All of a sudden this Trabant with chained up wheels comes buzzing along, crawls over the snow drift like a snowmobile and disappears up the street. The look on the Range Rover driver's face was utterly priceless. I've always been a Trabant fan. Jeremy Clarkson hated it, but then he hates anything that doesn't have at least 500hp under the hood and an interior made from the skins of endangered animals. I'd like to buy one of the hatchbacks and turn it into an electric car. Imagine that, a sensible, electric and communist car with less that 500hp under the hood. One car that pisses Jeremy Clarkson off it four different ways at the same time.
Does Google require that they're the default search engine on Android devices? I thought at one point Verizon was selling android devices with Bing as the default search engine. Google Play access has some strings attached, but I think an OEM can still change the launcher, etc. How about the defaults? I think Amazon and Nokia don't get Google Play because they don't want their devices to be able to run Google services - not because they simply refuse to make them the default.
I don't know does it require that? I don't really give a crap whether one can dig through a forest of configuration menus to change the default search engine on Android. I'm also pretty sure OEMs that choose to piss google off by making the Bing or Yahoo search engines default thus enabling the enemy to siphon off your personal data (and which rightfully belongs to Google) are few and far between. The EU competition authority didn't give a rats ass that you could install alternate browsers on Windows and force Microsoft to implement that choice screen. Does Google provide a choice screen when you set up Android asking the user to choose his favorite search engine like Microsoft was forced to do with it's browsers? I don't remember seeing one the last few times I set up Samsung Galaxy tablets and smartphones for my family. If Google does not offer that choice they are open to attack just like Microsoft was with the browser issue and will be if it requires Bing to be default. It's basically the same conflict of interest.
Sounds like their fishing for another round of EU antitrust proceedings.
Would that be before or after Google and it's legion of allies get roasted by the EU antitrust authority for making Google the default search engine on Android devices?
OK, so "there has been no significant correlation between successful strikes and a reduction in al-Qaeda attacks".
Am I the only one thinking things might have been much worse if no terrorist leaders had been taken out at all?
The problem is that US has gone overboard with these 'decapitation strikes' (read: assassinations) and they are causing blowback. A further problem is that Al-Qaeda is highly resistant to this kind of strategy because it is just as much an idea as it is an organization and you cannot kill an idea with a drone strike or an M4 carbine. Because it is primarily an idea or a philosophy, Al-Quaeda operates more like a franchising company (or maybe like an MLM outfit) than a traditional guerrilla organization. In addition to a religious philosophy, Al-Quaeda provides information on bomb making, how to train, how to operate weapons and how to obtain them, how to communicate securely and how to evade security forces etc... People motivated by Al-Quaeda's message often form cells first and then contact the organization for support, not the other way around. Al-Quaeda will bankroll promising groups and operations but their control over these groups can be pretty limited. I've heard accounts of motivated 'Mujahideen' showing up in the Pakistani tribal country, seeking out al-Quaeda and 'pitching' operations to them like a Hollywood director would 'pitch' a movie script or a TV show to a studio. Decapitating al-Quaeda cells with drone strikes or special forces ops is like a never ending game of whack-a-mole because there is an endless supply of martyrs that are often recruited from the human 'collateral damage' of drone strikes. Even if the director of the CIA could snap with his fingers and every al-Quaeda fighter on earth would drop dead today the idea of al-Quaeda would live on and new cells would form and the 'war on terror' would continue tomorrow because, as I said before, you can't kill an idea.
$1,000 in road enforcement fees per driverless car.
This model's already being proposed for electric vehicles, on the grounds that they aren't paying fuel taxes. It's idiotic for EV's, since they serve an important purpose. But it's ideal for driverless cars.
Just put a big red "pull over at the nearest suitable location" button somewhere within easy reach. If these things are smart enough to ferry people around without wrecking themselves, driving into walls at full speed, driving off cliffs and without running over pedestrians and cyclists they can pull over automatically when the peelers want to have a word with the passengers.
There were a few "Megacorps", even then. Like the East India company.
People that complain that corporations are worse than ever are very ignorant of history. For centuries, the East India Company had their own army, waged war in their own name, and occasionally executed people that failed to pay their bills. No modern corporation even comes close.
Today corporations either get their governments to wage their wars for them like the Americans did in Iraq or more commonly, they hire mercenary companies to fight wars. And I'm not talking about 'company' in the military sense, there are many commercial companies in the UK and now in the USA who offer this as a service. There is a myriad of modern examples of this such companies at work, especially from Africa.
It's mostly glacier/ice sheets. There are lots of theories that small rises in temp will greatly affect average ice depth. What evidence do you have that all of those predictions are wrong?
Shhhhh.... you are messing up his Neocon fantasy about drilling for oil and digging for minerals once all the ice melts.
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How long until an average user will chose the nouveau driver over the closed source driver, if said user doesn't care about licensing or building from source, but is looking for out of the box performance?
When it is stable? The damn thing kept crashing on me one or two times a day which is why I switched to the proprietary driver. Now I'm back to using the Nouveau driver with a new Nvidia card and it only crashes one or two times a month which is just about stable enough to not make me bother with the proprietary one.
Where does that put them in comparison with the Nvidia driver on Windows?
The Windows driver is somewhat more stable, I regard stability as an aspect of performance.
"Living History". Japan invaders were thrown out of China some *75 years ago*. Not too many people left who have personal memories of it, any more.
I'm neither Japanese nor Chinese so the closest I can get to relating to the way the Chinese might feel about the Japanese and WWII (and at the same time unfortunately Godwining this thread) is that my great uncle spent years in a Nazi KZ camp, and my grandfather was arrested and worked over by the Gestapo for treason. No living memory there but I was raised by people who experienced the Third Reich first hand and it still makes my skin crawl whenever I hear one of the latest crop of European right-wing populists talk about the Moslems like the Nazis used to talk about the Jews before they gained power and still had to worry about freaking out the electorate. You don't need living memory to be become alarmed when the past looks like it might be about to begin to repeat itself and having read the Wikipedia article on the Nanking Massacres I can easily understand why the Chinese might be freaked out at the slightest hint of a nuclear armed Japan.
The Chinese government still uses Japan and the atrocities committed in the 1930s and 1940s as a bogeyman to distract from the atrocities committed by the Chinese government against it's own people in the 1940s and 1950s.
Let's not forget the Cultural Revolution (1960s). I don't think I have ever seen figures over the deathtoll that were lower than a million.
iphone is a keyboard and a tv-set away from being a full-fledged computer for 99% of the population.
Actually.... it isn't, not anymore You can connect a Bluetooth keyboard to an iPhone and there is a HDMI connector available.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
The phone desktop gets projected to the TV without changing the aspect ratio which is rather rudimentary and you can only interact with it through the keyboard and the touch screen on the device. I'd say what's missing is mainly a decent TV/Monitor mode for the iOS desktop and a touch screen display device capable of sending touch and gesture feedback to the iPhone, either that or a mouse. There is actually a Cydia app that provides mouse support but that requires a jailbreak. Personally I'd prefer a touch screen TV but the point is the same, all the iPhone need to make this workable is software development work. That being said I'd still buy a laptop to do serious work.
Actually, the Chinese will build to any spec. If they can build it on the same quality requirements for cheaper, you tell them you want it to your quality spec and you pay less.
This is unlike Germany, where the only quality level is "high", and you pay for German manufacture. German manufacturers won't provide you with a lower cost-tier and a lesser-duty-cycle product.
Everybody has their own strategy and "it may be expensive but you'll get your money's worth" is an engineering principle that has woked for the Germans for going on 150 years so why fix something that ain't broke? I would, for example, much prefer getting hit by a Jihadist packing an RPG while sitting in a German tank than in a Chinese one because "Made in Germany" is pretty much synoymous with quality and when it comes to tanks while "Made in China" basically means "N-th iteration of some 1960s Soviet design". Now if I was in the market for a cheap company car at throw-away prices I might consider Chinese some chinese rehash of a 1980s european car but I'd probably end up buying something Japanese beacuase with the Japanese you at least get innovation, new designs and a constant level of quality even if it isn't always the best.
You'd also have to ask the member states to give up their sovereignty. This wasn't easy even in the case of the US as there were a ton of issues that needed resolving (i.e. balancing power between small and large states.)
This would be incredibly more difficult in the case of Europe since the individual member states have had their own identity often going back two or even three millennia, not only that but what cultural identity would they take? I.e. little things like what common language will they speak? (Granted the US has no official language, but 80% of the population speaks the same one...such is by far not the case in the EU.) Also, I'm having a hard time seeing how e.g. England would agree to it, seeing as they even refuse to adopt the Euro (which it turns out was actually a good idea and worked quite well in their favor) and they don't even drive on the same side of the road as everybody else.
There is a large group of nations within the EU that have little problem with increased integration, Britain is in something of a small minority in its anti-EU stance. Until now keeping Britain in the EU has been seen as important and nobody really thought they should leave. Recently, however, the idea has been voiced in other EU countries that the British should just should just bloody leave if they have that stink in their nose rather continue this constant dithering. People are just getting sick of hearing Britain threaten to leave and then never doing anything about it, especially since it usually seems to be a smokescreen to extort special treatment. There is a whole bunch of things that can be done in terms of restructuring the EU if the UK is no longer there fucking things up to get special deals for it's financial industry. If the UK decides to go it will certainly be watched with great interest as they leave the common market, refuses to join the EEZ which is not an option for most of the UK Euro-skeptics/isolationists since it would involve enacting all those hated EU laws without any say in how they are made (a say which the UK currently has as an EU member). Ukip in Britain, the Freedom party in the Netherlands and Front National in France all believe that Europe is better off as a bag of squabbling nation states that Europe was before the EU was set up. The kind of squabbling, feuding bag full of angry weasels that would not have been able to agree on whether or not the Soviet Union was a threat for long enough to even conceive of forming an alliance against the Soviets to prevent them from gobbling Europe up one squabbling state at a time. NATO was only formed as a counterweight against the Soviets after several swift ass-kicks from the Americans and they cannot be counted on to the play the role of the big bad parent forever. So who is right? Is it Ukip and Co. who think they can take Europe back to being a bag of small squabbling nations and still be taken seriously by great powers like China, India, Russia and the USA? Or is it the so called 'federalists' who see increases in political and economic union as the only way to stand up to the big boys? You tell me? Which is more likely to succeed in helping Europe to deal with the Great powers of the 21st century? One big European cat or a group of cute little house-cats? If this reminds you Americans of a debate that took place in the US before the civil war about the pros and cons of increasing Federalism that is no coincidence. The one difference is that I am not nearly as alarmed at the prospect of a European civil war as some of the more delusional Euro skeptic wing nuts who seem to consider a pan European civil war to be just around the corner.
Yes, the are mostly the same voters.
In their defense, Bush Jr. didn't run on the platform of increasing surveillance and decreasing government transparency. For the second term he run on a solid platform of FUD and even many non-GOP voters bought into it.
Further in their defense, TP is a delayed reaction to Bush actions. Sure, it is largely counter-productive, ineffective, lacking concrete goals and so on, but if you are objective you can't claim they are not trying to do something about this.
Well if nothign else, and judging from the mods the post has been getting, this seems to be a sore topic with some GOP voters.
You average GOP voter strongly values privacy and will not look kindly at this kind of targeted approach.
Are these the same GOP voters who voted GW Bush Jr. into office, the self same GW Bush Jr. who got the ball rolling on the now famous NSA warrantless surveillance behemoth?
Even that isn't entirely remote, if he plays his cards right. We had something similar happen in Alaska back in 2010 when the incumbent Lisa Murkowski lost the primary to the Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. She went on to win as a write-in candidate with something like a 40% margin, because it didn't take long for the more crazy extreme side of Joe Miller to show up and public opinion of him quickly flipped.
I'm not an American so just out of curiosity: What is a write-in candidate? ....and: Why is somebody who looses a primary election held by a political party banned by law from running as an independent? What ever ones opinion of sore losers may be, passing laws against them running as independents seems a bit anti-democratic to me. In my country we occasionally get a splinter candidate running as an independent. Usually this is after a disagreement in one of the mainstream parties where somebody is dissatisfied about being bumped down to the bottom of the elction list in local elections or because they were sidelined for a parliamentary seat (i.e. because of party internal backstabbing). Recently, for example, this has been common in right wing parties whose leaders are EU skeptic and have been keen to prevent any EU friendly party members from gaining parliementary seats. Some of these independents have even been known to get elected because they were simply put more competent than the nimrod that the party bosses helped to win the primary. So far nobody has even considered passing laws against such independents.
I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.
Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.
Plenty of options? Like going to congress where the hard liners were calling for his execution? The truth is that it was hard line bullshitters like that which drove Snowden to Russia. The US political class shot it self in the foot with its come-down-on-him-like-a-ton-of-bricks attitude and now Russia is benefitting. It's basically a reverse of the situation faced during the Cold War by people who had legitimate reason to criticises the Soviet system had no way of doing so except by defecting to the west to avoid being locked away. Perhaps you should ask yourself why the only place from which the NSA and the US govt. can be safely criticisesd these days on certain issues without having to fear being disappeared into some CIA run solitary confinement unit, is a shark tank like Putin's Russia?
To argue that cache files in a web browser is infringement is as silly as claiming that your eye transmitting an image to your brain is infringement...
Let's not give them any ideas now shall we...
I can see stiffer sentences if the hacking leads to loss of life DIRECTLY. For example, hacking into a hospital system and bringing down critical life saving systems.
But to me, and I don't know how the UK manslaughter laws are rigged, it would be more helpful to update those laws instead of this one.
Having said that, national security combined with unauthorized computer access can and will be used against whistleblowers of government abuse. Watch for that to happen.
I'm generally in favour of people not getting any discounts on sentences for 'cyber attacks'. This is partly because I remember a time long ago when certain egotistical morons saw creating malware and letting it loose on the public as a good career move, a short cut to a well paying job. However, even those people don't deserve a life sentence and whoever thought of that idea should look up the word 'draconian' in a dictionary. If a cyber attack kills somebody use the manslaughter laws, if they cause massive amounts of damage sentence them appropriately just don't try to crack down on hactivists like Anonymous by trying to lock them up for life (and let's face it that's who these laws are aimed at). That's something that you'd expect to be the knee-jerk reaction in Putin's Russia not in the United Kingdom.
Ha-ha-ha. Yes, the old 'you can have any phone so long as it's black Bakelite, and we've got a slot to install it next year' Post Office Telephones was just so, so much better than the BT of today.
The darkest day in the history of the telecoms business was the day when the old monopolies were broken up and 'users' became 'customers' who could go elsewhere for better service. It's a god thing that we now have big monolithic privatized telcos that compete by not invading each other's turf and beat down any annoying competitors that pop up with a big fat club. Watch this if you haven't already it's a must see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I'm sure everyone was thinking, we don't have enough languages that are basically a badly implemented subset of C++. We need to make another one.
Let's see if Android will respond by creating an even less compatible C++ clone than Java.
Eh? Subset of C++? C++ is a (almost) a superset of C as long as you respect a few rules such as the fact that you can define variables like:
int class = 0;
in C but not in C++. The above snippet will (obviously) give you a compiler error in C++ since class is a reserved word in C++ but GCC for example has no trouble with that declaration (so C++ is not a strict superset of C++). There are quite a few other things that exist in both languages but work differently in C++ which make C++ programs unacceptable to C compilers even if you only use stuff in your code that is common to both languages. Objective C is claimed to be a strict a superset of C. I've never tested that claim but I imagine you'd get a compiler error if you did this in Objective C (I don't have a compiler handy):
void id() {}
you can, however, do this in C without any complaint.
That's OK, we've never understood why your toilets have shelves so you can inspect your own feces.
So, whose the one obsessed with poo?
Well, we may examine the turd before despatching it onwards on its journey to the sewage treatment facility, but we have not yet accorded fecal matter the status of a venerated holy relic. Your religious veneration trumps our slightly unusual scientific curiosity.
"Ja, Ve investigated but der Amerikans undt Birtish vouldn't answer zee question and zee others vent all Sgt Schulz on uns"
...Holy crap...
I have always found it strange how you Anglo Saxons see so much sanctity in feces. To us Germans it is a revolting substance but for you it is the focus of much religious reverence.
Wrong. The body was made from waste cotton fibre bonded with phenol resin. It's a great material - light, strong, reasonably eco-friendly, non-corrosive. It's not a million miles from carbon fibre or even what this article is talking about. The rest of the Trabant was a conventional spot-welded steel monocoque.
It's lazy stereotyping to mock the Trabant without actually looking at how it was made. Sure, the design was dated and yes, the engines were terrible, but they were reliable and cheap, and actually a much more efficient car than most of the gas-guzzlers made in the west.
My main gripe about the Trabant's build quality was the poor panel fit, but that's not an inherent drawback of the materials it was made from, just a side-effect of somewhat old-fashioned tooling.
The problem with the Trabant's resin body was cold. I saw a Trabant collide with a Volvo once, it was about -10 degrees C and the Trabant's front end just shattered like glass. The Trabi was also very light, I remember walking past a Range Rover stuck in a big pile of snow many years ago. Somehow the driver had gotten himself stuck and was busy with a shovel trying to get himself out of. All of a sudden this Trabant with chained up wheels comes buzzing along, crawls over the snow drift like a snowmobile and disappears up the street. The look on the Range Rover driver's face was utterly priceless. I've always been a Trabant fan. Jeremy Clarkson hated it, but then he hates anything that doesn't have at least 500hp under the hood and an interior made from the skins of endangered animals. I'd like to buy one of the hatchbacks and turn it into an electric car. Imagine that, a sensible, electric and communist car with less that 500hp under the hood. One car that pisses Jeremy Clarkson off it four different ways at the same time.
My God, someone's after the BOOZE?!
Well, scam or not, we can't have that sort of behaviour. It was bad enough when we ran out of vermouth, without this sort of nonsense....
There is a Scandinavian, Irish, or Scottish proverb? ... not sure which, but it goes like this: Eliminate Alcohol! drink it all!
Does Google require that they're the default search engine on Android devices? I thought at one point Verizon was selling android devices with Bing as the default search engine. Google Play access has some strings attached, but I think an OEM can still change the launcher, etc. How about the defaults? I think Amazon and Nokia don't get Google Play because they don't want their devices to be able to run Google services - not because they simply refuse to make them the default.
I don't know does it require that? I don't really give a crap whether one can dig through a forest of configuration menus to change the default search engine on Android. I'm also pretty sure OEMs that choose to piss google off by making the Bing or Yahoo search engines default thus enabling the enemy to siphon off your personal data (and which rightfully belongs to Google) are few and far between. The EU competition authority didn't give a rats ass that you could install alternate browsers on Windows and force Microsoft to implement that choice screen. Does Google provide a choice screen when you set up Android asking the user to choose his favorite search engine like Microsoft was forced to do with it's browsers? I don't remember seeing one the last few times I set up Samsung Galaxy tablets and smartphones for my family. If Google does not offer that choice they are open to attack just like Microsoft was with the browser issue and will be if it requires Bing to be default. It's basically the same conflict of interest.
Sounds like their fishing for another round of EU antitrust proceedings.
Would that be before or after Google and it's legion of allies get roasted by the EU antitrust authority for making Google the default search engine on Android devices?
OK, so "there has been no significant correlation between successful strikes and a reduction in al-Qaeda attacks".
Am I the only one thinking things might have been much worse if no terrorist leaders had been taken out at all?
The problem is that US has gone overboard with these 'decapitation strikes' (read: assassinations) and they are causing blowback. A further problem is that Al-Qaeda is highly resistant to this kind of strategy because it is just as much an idea as it is an organization and you cannot kill an idea with a drone strike or an M4 carbine. Because it is primarily an idea or a philosophy, Al-Quaeda operates more like a franchising company (or maybe like an MLM outfit) than a traditional guerrilla organization. In addition to a religious philosophy, Al-Quaeda provides information on bomb making, how to train, how to operate weapons and how to obtain them, how to communicate securely and how to evade security forces etc... People motivated by Al-Quaeda's message often form cells first and then contact the organization for support, not the other way around. Al-Quaeda will bankroll promising groups and operations but their control over these groups can be pretty limited. I've heard accounts of motivated 'Mujahideen' showing up in the Pakistani tribal country, seeking out al-Quaeda and 'pitching' operations to them like a Hollywood director would 'pitch' a movie script or a TV show to a studio. Decapitating al-Quaeda cells with drone strikes or special forces ops is like a never ending game of whack-a-mole because there is an endless supply of martyrs that are often recruited from the human 'collateral damage' of drone strikes. Even if the director of the CIA could snap with his fingers and every al-Quaeda fighter on earth would drop dead today the idea of al-Quaeda would live on and new cells would form and the 'war on terror' would continue tomorrow because, as I said before, you can't kill an idea.
Perhaps this is a sign that the rumoured Shale bubble is beginning to burst.
$1,000 in road enforcement fees per driverless car.
This model's already being proposed for electric vehicles, on the grounds that they aren't paying fuel taxes. It's idiotic for EV's, since they serve an important purpose. But it's ideal for driverless cars.
Just put a big red "pull over at the nearest suitable location" button somewhere within easy reach. If these things are smart enough to ferry people around without wrecking themselves, driving into walls at full speed, driving off cliffs and without running over pedestrians and cyclists they can pull over automatically when the peelers want to have a word with the passengers.
There were a few "Megacorps", even then. Like the East India company.
People that complain that corporations are worse than ever are very ignorant of history. For centuries, the East India Company had their own army, waged war in their own name, and occasionally executed people that failed to pay their bills. No modern corporation even comes close.
Today corporations either get their governments to wage their wars for them like the Americans did in Iraq or more commonly, they hire mercenary companies to fight wars. And I'm not talking about 'company' in the military sense, there are many commercial companies in the UK and now in the USA who offer this as a service. There is a myriad of modern examples of this such companies at work, especially from Africa.
It's mostly glacier/ice sheets. There are lots of theories that small rises in temp will greatly affect average ice depth. What evidence do you have that all of those predictions are wrong?
Shhhhh.... you are messing up his Neocon fantasy about drilling for oil and digging for minerals once all the ice melts.