Serving people as citizens means something very different than serving thems as consumers. There is already a separation in most countries between religion and governance and, in the long run, a similar separation of governance from corporate interests is needed.
One of many problems with DRM is the large conflict of interest with the same large corporations pushing this twisted legislation being the same ones that own nearly all modes of (dis-)informing the citizenry.
Controlling information is an old political fight going back to way before the Gutenberg press. Control of information is a key to controlling the population.
Broadcasting, mostly in the U.S., has shifted away from being a means of stimulating active citizenship. In particular it has shifted away from adressing citizens, where its purpose was to be useful, to addressing consumers, where its purpose is to turn viewers passive and into customers.
In the short term this has gotten out of hand in the U.S. and requires rapid corrective action. However, some European countries have chump leaders too and the concept needs to arrested at an early stage before it can metastisize through the rest of the world.
In the long term, there needs to be a stronger separation of corporate interests and governance. The former is short term and often is counter to the best interests of citizenry.
Yes, any with the knowledge the should have learned the first year of bio can make resistant bacteria or splice bacteria. It's not anything that any amount of surveilance, ignorance, indoctrination and fear is going to help with. All that does is make an unpleasant place to live full of ignorant dogmatic highstrung types without removing the actual risk. Perhaps it would even increase the risk.
Besides, it's lack of knowledge that causes the worst economic damage. Just look at the damage from fire ants, africanized bees, starlings, zebra mussels, elm beetles and so on. Or if you don't like those examples, then look at the TCO at the national and international level for chlorinated hydrocarbons, dioxins, and PCBs or for BSE-friendly agricultural practices. Someone was sloppy, ignorant or decided that rules are for other people and that plus time is all that was needed. Since you cannot remove the technical possibility to cause damage, you can remove the incentive.
Naively, improving living standards would help. If people are literate, capable of analytical thought, educated, employed, kept healthy, and well fed like an average Finn, then they're less likely to cause trouble and more likely to contribute. I think you can probably find an inverse correlation between quality of life and crime.
It's a good article, but could be more clear about correcting two misconceptions (aka units of FUD) spread by Bill & Co.. First, regarding the nature of modifications to GPL code -- only if you intend to distribute your modifications must you release them under GPL. If the modifications stay in house, then you can do what you want. Second, at the beginning of the article we hear Bill's view on security, but no correction or even a mention that it will be discussed later.
KStars and similar packages are good tools to help orient yourself or plan ahead before you go out and look or guess at optimum viewing time for your location. It's especially useful if the sky is partly cloudy or visibility is obscured by light pollution.
Dark skies are a prerequisite to any optics based astronomy. Why are we using so much money to shine light up into the sky? If half the light is going up instead of down, then we're losing half your lighting money for nothing and lowering the standard of living.
That's the beauty of it. Corporations are largely free from the regulations protecting the populations from the governments.
In a more insidiuous way freedom of information is being removed by outsourcing many governmental functions to private entities. This prevents us from finding out about changes, especially the negative ones. Open access to public records would likely prevent a lot of poor decisions and reduce graft.
Sweden is a prime example. The freedom of information article in their constitution (from 1766) requires that Swedish citizens the same level of access to public records as the creators of those records have. However, by outsourcing the functions of what had been govenrment agencies to private corporations, their records are no longer public and no longer protected by the constitution. Removing the records from public scrutiny makes it easier to sneak stuff through.
Likewise, large infusions of cash here and there allow decisions to circumvent public comment or votes. That's currently "business as usual" but ought to be solvable.
Speaking of legitimate uses.. The long-range buses in Sweden and Finland record speed vs time on a paper disc behind the odometer. Drivers swap these at semi-regular intervals and when they change shifts.
The main reason seems to be to ensure that they take their breaks on time (ie. rest) and don't speed. Since the buses cover the remote areas not always covered by trains, these measures seem good for the health and comfort of the driver and for the saftey of the passengers.
Yes, that is like saying the boats in the ocean are messing with the ocean. So your point about boats is spot on. Just ask any one in the fishing industry what boat wakes do to spawning areas. The effects of engine noise on sea mammals is still being studied.
Even from a non-economic, non-biological aspect, otherwise silent submarines can be tracked by how they disturb the different layers of water. These planes will be cruising for long periods like modern subs do.
However, back to the planes. Yes, even tiny jet contrails in the big sky change the weather as much as 3 degrees C. That can be translated directly into millions of dollars per year increased / decreased revenue from crops, if not from other industries.
Since these are supposed to be up there 24/7, it does look like they'd churn the atmosphere a bit. What these don't do in magnitude they make up for in duration. What kind of effect would this have on weather, especially at that altitude?
Could these platforms be mounted with catalysts to remove chemical pollutants?
Explosions and loud noises are fun, especially when they are far away, but the sea is not empty and water carries sound much beter and further than air.
Though obviously half baked it's hardly overhyped. It's very different from past sonars. Did you look at the decibel level of the output? The frequencies are also the same the ones the whales actively uses. ie. their ears are best tuned to.
Whales and many other large sea
animals depend on having good ears / sonar to go on living. As an urbanized human you technically don't need your ears for survival, but having the sound equivalent of jet engines go off unexpectedly behind your ears would have adverse effect on your fitness.
In a worst case, this will mung the ears of large groups of animals rendering them unfit for survival. In the best case it will drown out or interfere with their communication (mating and food finding) and lower their survival fitness.
OEM sales are poor and still declining and manufacturers seem to be stating that they haven't hit the bottom yet.
This means that Microsoft's primary source of income has been diminishing and will only rebound a quarter or two after equipment sales rebounds. Since before the down turn, MS has been unprofitable enough to have to use creative bookkeeping including such as withholding dividends, avoiding taxes and cost shifting. Further, as their stock values plumment, they'll have to compensate employees with real cash...
Assuming that MS doesn't turn out to be as insolvent as Worldcom or Enron, their current strategy seems to lead them out of software development and into providing services. With software no longer their primary money maker, it'll be pushed to the side probably much the same way that stability and security have been pushed asided for new features.
This may be one of a long chain of public announcements leading to MS support of OSS while they try to figure out how to lock in OSS users.
In many latin american countries it's not just Christmas, but those dry periods right before payday. The amount usually varied dependent one your ethnic background and social status. Once when we got pulled over and in too much of a hurry to argue the price of the bribe down, the driver just reached down into a bag of mixed change and handed a large fist full of coins to the police officer... and drove off while the officer was still disoriented, before he could count it. We got off for less than $3 USD.
I think the case is similar here. For a country as large as Peru, $550 000 USD is chump change even for hardware. When you start talking about the sum in terms of "licensing" and "consulting" it's even less. Besides, Toledo and his entourage probably spent more than that on the trip up to see Bill. Odds are Toledo will take all this into consideration and we'll see *BSD and Linux as a result.
At least when Mr. Tony sucks up to Bill as a play against his political opponents he maintains a facade of dignitiy by doing the meetings on his home turf. Maybe he uses the cuisine as a lure.;)
It's been years since I've seen his film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" even in the second run theaters. It's a good scifi film and relevent to parts of the tech sector.
In contrast to the 30%-50% U.S. taxes, Nordic taxes include free university, free health care, free dental care, a liveable (barely) pension, great public transport, smooth roads, etc. Oh yeah and reasonably safe streets and non-toxic fish. Try *finding* a salmon or trout in the Huron or Grand Rivers, let alone getting one clean enough not to be disposed of as toxic waste. In past centuries, these were great rivers. Stockholm used to be the Calcutta of Europe. The U.S. could profit heavily from learning how they cleaned up.
If you can't be bothered to read the original article;) then at least read the one from The Register. It's as much a question of seeking higer quality software as pricing.
[Arbeids- og administrasjonsminister Victor D.] Norman tror oppsigelsen av avtalen med Microsoft ikke bare vil gi billigere dataløsninger, men også kvalitativt bedre løsninger.
"Gir Microsoft på båten." Norsk Rikskringkasting/NRK. 12 July 2002. http://www.nrk.no/nyheter/okonomi/1987724.html
The labor and administration minister slams both the high price and the unreasonably poor quality of MS products. For a Scandinavian diplomat to say something "could be better quality" is about the same as hearing a German saying "dis iss piece av schit" or hearing an American curse for about 10 minutes.
Now that MS is no longer given a functional monopoly in Norway, they'll have to shape up in regards to quality and pricing. Or else they'll be losing more contracts. Shops / institutions in Norway with smaller budgets have already started to dump MS albeit very, very quietly.
Medical doctors and many other others licensed to practice medicine do not like to be reminded that they are merely technicians.
Making a diagnosis is usually following a decision based on observed symptoms. Expert systems excel at this, but you still need, for the time being, someone with enough skill to correctly find and identify the symptoms. That's where the human skill is needed, but studies in the 1980's showed that when fed symptoms, computers were better at identifying more uncommon problems.
A lot of medical school is learning to act like a doctor: to dog the interns and to be just appropriately arrogant with the patients, secretaries, etc.
The same can probably be said for most other professional degrees - a large amount is socialization. So of course the MDs don't like it. It doesn't invalidate their actual medical knowledge, but does risk pointing out how much is theater.
MS is requiring OEMs to phase out dual boot Win2k/WinXP PCs by next year, but preferably sooner. If wiping the WinXP partition then voids the machine's warranty, then this could be seen as more than just strong arming folks into MS License 6.0. It would seem to be like an attempt to prohibit dual boot machines in general. This and Palladium should be able to keep any non-MS OS's off of the market.
Denmark's coins are easily discernable by color, size, shape, texture, and sound. Not only that, they're stylish.
Sweden's notes are distinguishable by size, aspect ratio, and color.
For nice to look at money, Finland's now defunct Markka was a good example.
Great for blind, color blind or the disoriented, drunk tourist. The EU money clearly suffers from designed by committee syndrome. The committee should look more closely at the good examples when they have to redo the design of the money.
A number of companies have a lot to gain if there are no longer any open standards or, just as good, disincentive to follow them. This would give some a short term infusion of royalty money and would allow others the chance to grab a majority of the world's computer networks.
But we've seen private standards before and they are not good. Many networks with private and closed standards existed for decades prior to the Internet. Only open standards allowed formation the web and the Internet as it is today. Going back to closed standards would make it expensive and difficult for any new developments to reach critical mass in adoption. This would put innovation back on ice, something that would be really bad at this moment in the economic recession / depression. (Eating your seed potatos | penny wise, pound foolish.)
If the corporations are really interested in turning a quick profit, how about capping executive salaries and perks? Each business could save millions if not billions that way, while still enabling future development.
You can do NOTHING on Yahoo's auction site unless you give Yahoo a credit card to "verify your identity".
Don't use Yahoo for this. Ten years ago it was highly illegal in the U.S. to use either a credit card or SSAN for identification purposes. Note that being illegal doesn't necessarily stop them from asking, there are enough chumps that will give out that information to make it profitable to ask. Your state id or drivers' license is for identification.
Palladium, if it goes through, is really bad. Through the recent changes in the EULA for the obligatory Windows Media Player security upgrade removes your choice in the matter of upgrades.
For those that weren't caught by XP with their mouth open, MS is going to try to force WinNt users into the subscription model. From there, it is simple to roll out Palladium enabled software, turned off by default to take advantage of complacency, until it reaches a critical mass. From then on all upgrades and major services require it. Checkmate, the U.S. would be permanently out of the IT sector.
Sadly if this happens, Palladium probably will make security far worse and may depend on flawed algortithms and insecure theory. MSIE, MS-Passport, MS-Outlook, IIS, root holes in XP, do not suggest otherwise.
The big trick may be for MS to get this through before the U.S. administration turns over or MS gets an Enron / WorldCom style audit. MS could be very possibly be one audit away from chapter 11 and additional criminal charges.
Native species have tight balance with food supply, disease and predators do keep from getting out of control. They've had thousand and in some cases millions of years to work out a dynamic equilibrium. The poplation size fluctuates a little, but not much. The introduced ones often lack these checks and then get out of control causing their and related populations to soar and plummet. The introduced species often don't taste as good to predators or have no predators in their new environment.
IANAB (I am not a biologist) but it is probably not a problem of local optima as in AI, but of not having enough generations to adapt to the change / new problem.
For specific, but simple, examples you can look at the problem of rats in the Galopogos Islands and New Zealand.
Or cats any where you have birds that nest on the ground or in burrows. The rats reproduce faster than the birds they prey on, giving the birds no time to change their hard-coded nesting habits. It's not a matter of not evolving, it's a matter of not having time to adapt.
I hope that RedFlag will have good support for traditional characters. The two major reasons for using simplified are now gone: 1) Some consider traditional characters easier to read and, now that we have keyboards, they are just as easy to write. 2) There are no longer any reasons to keep "the masses" from being able to read pre-communist documents encoded in the traditional characters.
One reason for public rejection was hiding price gouging behind the metric units at the gas stations. This was shortly after the oil crunch and folks werre rather sensitive to gas prices since many had cars getting well under 20 mpg. Once a few people did the math they began to associate it with the metric system rather than dishonest merchants. The latter is still a problem. Ever notice that the prices go up towards the end of the week and stay up until Monday or Tuesday?
Slashdot Mirror
One of many problems with DRM is the large conflict of interest with the same large corporations pushing this twisted legislation being the same ones that own nearly all modes of (dis-)informing the citizenry. Controlling information is an old political fight going back to way before the Gutenberg press. Control of information is a key to controlling the population.
Broadcasting, mostly in the U.S., has shifted away from being a means of stimulating active citizenship. In particular it has shifted away from adressing citizens, where its purpose was to be useful, to addressing consumers, where its purpose is to turn viewers passive and into customers.
In the short term this has gotten out of hand in the U.S. and requires rapid corrective action. However, some European countries have chump leaders too and the concept needs to arrested at an early stage before it can metastisize through the rest of the world.
In the long term, there needs to be a stronger separation of corporate interests and governance. The former is short term and often is counter to the best interests of citizenry.
Besides, it's lack of knowledge that causes the worst economic damage. Just look at the damage from fire ants, africanized bees, starlings, zebra mussels, elm beetles and so on. Or if you don't like those examples, then look at the TCO at the national and international level for chlorinated hydrocarbons, dioxins, and PCBs or for BSE-friendly agricultural practices. Someone was sloppy, ignorant or decided that rules are for other people and that plus time is all that was needed. Since you cannot remove the technical possibility to cause damage, you can remove the incentive.
Naively, improving living standards would help. If people are literate, capable of analytical thought, educated, employed, kept healthy, and well fed like an average Finn, then they're less likely to cause trouble and more likely to contribute. I think you can probably find an inverse correlation between quality of life and crime.
Dark skies are a prerequisite to any optics based astronomy. Why are we using so much money to shine light up into the sky? If half the light is going up instead of down, then we're losing half your lighting money for nothing and lowering the standard of living.
In a more insidiuous way freedom of information is being removed by outsourcing many governmental functions to private entities. This prevents us from finding out about changes, especially the negative ones. Open access to public records would likely prevent a lot of poor decisions and reduce graft.
Sweden is a prime example. The freedom of information article in their constitution (from 1766) requires that Swedish citizens the same level of access to public records as the creators of those records have. However, by outsourcing the functions of what had been govenrment agencies to private corporations, their records are no longer public and no longer protected by the constitution. Removing the records from public scrutiny makes it easier to sneak stuff through.
Likewise, large infusions of cash here and there allow decisions to circumvent public comment or votes. That's currently "business as usual" but ought to be solvable.
The main reason seems to be to ensure that they take their breaks on time (ie. rest) and don't speed. Since the buses cover the remote areas not always covered by trains, these measures seem good for the health and comfort of the driver and for the saftey of the passengers.
Even from a non-economic, non-biological aspect, otherwise silent submarines can be tracked by how they disturb the different layers of water. These planes will be cruising for long periods like modern subs do.
However, back to the planes. Yes, even tiny jet contrails in the big sky change the weather as much as 3 degrees C. That can be translated directly into millions of dollars per year increased / decreased revenue from crops, if not from other industries.
Could these platforms be mounted with catalysts to remove chemical pollutants?
Though obviously half baked it's hardly overhyped. It's very different from past sonars. Did you look at the decibel level of the output? The frequencies are also the same the ones the whales actively uses. ie. their ears are best tuned to.
Whales and many other large sea animals depend on having good ears / sonar to go on living. As an urbanized human you technically don't need your ears for survival, but having the sound equivalent of jet engines go off unexpectedly behind your ears would have adverse effect on your fitness. In a worst case, this will mung the ears of large groups of animals rendering them unfit for survival. In the best case it will drown out or interfere with their communication (mating and food finding) and lower their survival fitness.
Assuming that MS doesn't turn out to be as insolvent as Worldcom or Enron, their current strategy seems to lead them out of software development and into providing services. With software no longer their primary money maker, it'll be pushed to the side probably much the same way that stability and security have been pushed asided for new features.
This may be one of a long chain of public announcements leading to MS support of OSS while they try to figure out how to lock in OSS users.
I think the case is similar here. For a country as large as Peru, $550 000 USD is chump change even for hardware. When you start talking about the sum in terms of "licensing" and "consulting" it's even less. Besides, Toledo and his entourage probably spent more than that on the trip up to see Bill. Odds are Toledo will take all this into consideration and we'll see *BSD and Linux as a result.
At least when Mr. Tony sucks up to Bill as a play against his political opponents he maintains a facade of dignitiy by doing the meetings on his home turf. Maybe he uses the cuisine as a lure. ;)
It's been years since I've seen his film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" even in the second run theaters. It's a good scifi film and relevent to parts of the tech sector.
Well, Liberty Alliance will not carry personal data. An uses very different technology from MS-Passport.
In contrast to the 30%-50% U.S. taxes, Nordic taxes include free university, free health care, free dental care, a liveable (barely) pension, great public transport, smooth roads, etc. Oh yeah and reasonably safe streets and non-toxic fish. Try *finding* a salmon or trout in the Huron or Grand Rivers, let alone getting one clean enough not to be disposed of as toxic waste. In past centuries, these were great rivers. Stockholm used to be the Calcutta of Europe. The U.S. could profit heavily from learning how they cleaned up.
Now that MS is no longer given a functional monopoly in Norway, they'll have to shape up in regards to quality and pricing. Or else they'll be losing more contracts. Shops / institutions in Norway with smaller budgets have already started to dump MS albeit very, very quietly.
Making a diagnosis is usually following a decision based on observed symptoms. Expert systems excel at this, but you still need, for the time being, someone with enough skill to correctly find and identify the symptoms. That's where the human skill is needed, but studies in the 1980's showed that when fed symptoms, computers were better at identifying more uncommon problems.
A lot of medical school is learning to act like a doctor: to dog the interns and to be just appropriately arrogant with the patients, secretaries, etc. The same can probably be said for most other professional degrees - a large amount is socialization. So of course the MDs don't like it. It doesn't invalidate their actual medical knowledge, but does risk pointing out how much is theater.
MS is requiring OEMs to phase out dual boot Win2k/WinXP PCs by next year, but preferably sooner. If wiping the WinXP partition then voids the machine's warranty, then this could be seen as more than just strong arming folks into MS License 6.0. It would seem to be like an attempt to prohibit dual boot machines in general. This and Palladium should be able to keep any non-MS OS's off of the market.
Sweden's notes are distinguishable by size, aspect ratio, and color.
For nice to look at money, Finland's now defunct Markka was a good example.
Great for blind, color blind or the disoriented, drunk tourist. The EU money clearly suffers from designed by committee syndrome. The committee should look more closely at the good examples when they have to redo the design of the money.
But we've seen private standards before and they are not good. Many networks with private and closed standards existed for decades prior to the Internet. Only open standards allowed formation the web and the Internet as it is today. Going back to closed standards would make it expensive and difficult for any new developments to reach critical mass in adoption. This would put innovation back on ice, something that would be really bad at this moment in the economic recession / depression. (Eating your seed potatos | penny wise, pound foolish.)
If the corporations are really interested in turning a quick profit, how about capping executive salaries and perks? Each business could save millions if not billions that way, while still enabling future development.
Microsoft-Free Fridays
Sadly if this happens, Palladium probably will make security far worse and may depend on flawed algortithms and insecure theory. MSIE, MS-Passport, MS-Outlook, IIS, root holes in XP, do not suggest otherwise.
The big trick may be for MS to get this through before the U.S. administration turns over or MS gets an Enron / WorldCom style audit. MS could be very possibly be one audit away from chapter 11 and additional criminal charges.
IANAB (I am not a biologist) but it is probably not a problem of local optima as in AI, but of not having enough generations to adapt to the change / new problem.
For specific, but simple, examples you can look at the problem of rats in the Galopogos Islands and New Zealand. Or cats any where you have birds that nest on the ground or in burrows. The rats reproduce faster than the birds they prey on, giving the birds no time to change their hard-coded nesting habits. It's not a matter of not evolving, it's a matter of not having time to adapt.
I hope that RedFlag will have good support for traditional characters. The two major reasons for using simplified are now gone: 1) Some consider traditional characters easier to read and, now that we have keyboards, they are just as easy to write. 2) There are no longer any reasons to keep "the masses" from being able to read pre-communist documents encoded in the traditional characters.
One reason for public rejection was hiding price gouging behind the metric units at the gas stations. This was shortly after the oil crunch and folks werre rather sensitive to gas prices since many had cars getting well under 20 mpg. Once a few people did the math they began to associate it with the metric system rather than dishonest merchants. The latter is still a problem. Ever notice that the prices go up towards the end of the week and stay up until Monday or Tuesday?