Iridium needs to cover the entire earth, ground-level, at any given time, with a sensitive enough antenna that you can get signal in a handheld device, much similar to a regular cell phone.
That is significantly harder, thus more expensive, than providing a datalink to an airplane in 30.000 ft with a tracking directional antenna. More to the point, you need fewer satellites with less sophisticated equipment to do it.
Every single example you gave there are final products of researches that are dated from the sixties, some even older than that
So just because you can draw a line from then to now, everything that has happened since 1970 is not innovation? That is like claiming that because cars still have internal combustion engines and four wheel with rubber tires, there have been no real innovation in the car industry for 100 years.
Da Vinci made a drawing of a helicopter, but Sikorsky was the first to build it. No innovation since 1400-whenever? Eigenvectors has been known for a long time, so Google is just a rip-off?
I agree that my car/drivers analogy was flawed, but my point which wasn't conveyed very effectively was that the tradesmen in the business has dominated the scene from the real scientists that are still there because of their sheer number, which is a symptom of success. We can't all be develeoping the next OOP or relational database.
With both the lack of interest and the distortion of the original goal, Computer Science as we know may be dying with the elders. Computer Science originally had nothing to do with computers (as in personal computer) per se, but with the science of computation, optimal algorithms for pure math problems, etc. Actually, it was nothing but a branch of Math. The way computer science is being dealt with nowadays, with disdain, lack of interest and with people thinking about it as a tool to put another "screw tighter" professional in the market, soon we may run out of real breakthroughs like the ones those genius created to pave the yellow brick road we run over nowadays.
Naa. I'm sure back when car became widely available and used, some of the "elders" complained that now everybody is a "driver", and they don't even know the intrigate details of internal combustion.
Computer science is alive and well, there are merely two things happening that disorts the view: - "Original" CS has been rolled back into math. You don't do computational heavy math without computers anymore, so why keep CS as a seperate field? Heavy computation is also interesting in lots of other fields, especially medicine and biology. - "New" CS is a trade. Programmers, developers, project managers etc.
There's plenty of novel ideas and innovation out there. Look at SUNs Sparc T1, IBMs Power Cell (hardwarewise) and stuff lige virtualization (both machines (xen, vmware) and programs (java,.NET)). Web Services, the semantic web? Search engines? New language features, like LINQ?
But if you believe that C++ was the height of evolution, well, then, yes, CS is dead.
Who would be a paid shill for the "global warming is a serious threat to us all" side? And who is paying them?
Well, I don't know. The UN? They've proved themselves perfectly useless over the past decade, and now they've just published a report concluding that the UN should be the ones fighting global warming (and no, they won't do it for free, or even remotely cheap).
How is that not every bit as biased and self-serving as Exxon saying "global warming is BS, keep driving your SUV"?
Microsoft's Encrypting File System doesn't encrypt anything that can't be broken in seconds with the password
Isn't that.. kindalike.. you know, the point?
On another note, if the cops suspected you enough to go through the hassle of taking your computer, and yet, here you are, something tells me that, even though cops have no humor, you still made it out.. no?
This just got off on the wrong foot. While I can't say why that British site got the results it got, most of the discussion here seems to accept the premise that free, open source software is somehow related to socialism, communism, leftism, liberalism or whatever you want to call it: It's not.
It's that fucking simple. Socialism (I'll use that general identifier for all of the above mentioned) is about sharing a scarce good.
Back in the day, it was about ownership of the production-apparatus, today it's more about general, monetary wealth. Also here fits issues like affirmative action, to the degree that life opportunities can be considered scarce (which AA advocates obviously are convinced off).
Open source software is to an extreme degree not scarce. That's the whole point. FOSS is about working together for a common goal. It's that simple. It's not more or less socialist that closed source software.
NAT is not the answer to everything. VPN is starting to be everywhere. With still more clients, suppliers, employees and partner companies VPN'ing with each other, even defining namespaces internally in 192.168.0.0/16 is starting to be an issue. I've so far been lucky with a strategy of every party selecting a pseudo-ramdom number for the third block in 192.168.0.0/16, but sooner or later, conflicts will happen.
Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.
Well, in that case it should be a no-brainer to make it into a business concept, don't you agree? Efficient and cheap tend to play well with executives.
Why do you need legislation to enforce what is obviously the best idea?
#3. You cannot own any companies or be a shareholder of any.
That's just cry-baby anti-capitalism. As another poster points out, their shares are in a blind trust. Next you want them not to have any CEO-friends. And I'll counter that and demand that no politician has any labor union friends. And you'll say they can't have any interests in faith communities. And so it goes. The only guy left to actually be electable has never voiced an opinion in his life - and that's hardly a good candidate for office.
Hey: These people are elected with the wast majority of these affiliations out in the public. Base your vote on that.
#1. If you start a war, you send your kids to the frontlines of whatever country you are attacking. #2. Your kid stays there till your term is over.
Uh-uh. And if a politician raises any tax on anything, his own family has to pay UMPTY times that, no matter if they are eligible or not.
Being Danish, I'd love to hear more about this case.
I have law-student friends who claim that there are no provisions in the law that can make someone responsible for what other people does with their (legal) stuff, no matter how it's done.
Compare a bypasser grabbing a shovel from my driveway, smashing a kids face in with it. Am I responsible? Hardly.
The key is to not think of it as "evil government regulation," but instead as "accounting for externalized costs so that the free market has accurate information."
Or, as a more general statement: To think of government regulation as the last measure, not the first.
- Told to get an actual job at the police to be able to do it legally.
It's equally illegal for the police and private citizens to trespass. The only difference is that the police can get a court order to do it legally. And such a court order can't usually include randomly spying on people, hoping something will turn up.
(Read: whoever controls the Internet connection and licensing servers, so maybe a corporation)
Uh-uh. Corporations - evil themselves. And when it comes to unprivilegeded, poor africa children, these entities of evil will be in line to throw the kill switch on the laptops. Beware of the corporations!
Newsflash: In the part of the world where things are actually bad, the problem is not with CEOs. They are with who ever happend to throw a revolution that week, and tell the army to start killing people from whatever tribe they don't like. In other words: governments.
Meanwhile you sit in your house that evil coporations mortgaged so you could buy it, sip caffe latte made from beans that evil coporations imported for you, while you visit blogs on an internet connection that evil coporations made available for you and discuss how everything coporate sucks and the government should do as the UN says, because they did so fucking well in Rwanda, Balkans and Darfur.
Or do you really believe the definition of capitalism intends for people to degrade themselves below the acceptable standards of living when someone wants to buy a book?
The definition of capitalism doesn't intend anything. It's a description of some mechanisms.
Wealth is relative and will always be. These poor people (whom may or may not be stupid and may or may not be victims of the system) have it better than poor people in e.g. russia who have it better than poor people somewhere else, but they are still poor.
Raise the minimum wage a few dollars, and these poor people will have a little more money - and now the $2 TV dinners and $45 worth of gasoline (for a slightly bigger car or a slightly longer commute) is going to take their money, and they'll still be poor. And someone will complain if capitalism meant for these people to degrade themselves to buy a DVD.
I've making serveral times the poverty limit, and there are plenty of things that I want to do and buy that I can't (or don't) - it's all about defining what an acceptable standard of living is. Someone made up the poverty limit, someone else made up the minimum wage. They will always be low (hence "poverty" and "minimum"), but there is a fine line between making sure people are alive, and living their lives on behalf of them (I live in a "high-welfare, high-tax society". Unemployment is ridiculous, but not in official numbers, since they are not counting welfare-receipients.)
..and is already distributing the open source database
Oracle distributing MySQL? Now, there's a sound business decision if I ever saw one. 80%(*) of Oracle's customers are there for buzzwords compliance - now they can get the database they actually need, and Oracle stays synonymous with databases in the enterprise.
The rest of us can push MySQL saying "this is what Oracle recommends, just free".
Vista seemingly wrestles control of the "user experience" from the user
Since when is a user in control of his user experience? Isn't the whole point of a user oriented system (operating or other) to provide a user experience?
Anyway, no matter how much it sucks, Vista doesn't steal your computer, and as such you don't need lawmakers or law enforcement to protect you. Download and burn an Ubuntu CD, and off you go.
If humanity got it's act together we would have our Jetson's world by now, but instead we're too busy focusing on money and pointlessly shit to do it. Which is really a shame.
Oh come-fucking-on. Yes, if humanity got its act together and did everything your way, we'd have your perfect world by now. Only, I probably wouldn't like it, and I'd post comments saying "If only people would do things MY way, then...".
Newsflash, buddy: There can be no universal consensus on how the world should look - people are too different, and thank God for that. As a result of that there can be no one operating system that fits everbody perfectly.
The cool thing about Linux and FOSS is that you can, if you want it enough (Hello, Mark Shuttleworth), roll your own version that fits your view of the world. In Microsofts world you can change your desktop wallpaper and screensaver, and you better like it.
When politicians can be fired from day to day, not every two or four years, they will be even less likely to embark into the long, rough stretch, doing the Right Thing, even though it doesn't seem very popular.
You assume that people care much about day-to-day policy. They don't, and quite frankly, even though I'd like to, I don't think that we can change that very significantly. In other words, Oprah, Howard Stern and Tom Cruise would replace 3/4 of congress (or whatever replacement would be in its place).
You're right! I've invented a perfect device for this purpose: The KitchenTable(tm) (patent pending)
You install this device in a commons area of your home, and then one day you sit your kid down at the table and ass him or her, "OK, (name), I would never spy on you, but I keep hearing so much about MySpace and predators. Would you please walk me through the site and show me what it's all about? That would really make me more comfortable." (conversation NOT included). This will in most cases cause the child to agree, and show the parent around the site (Warning: child/parent bonding may occur). If the tactic fails, the KitchenTable (tm) may be returned for a full refund, reddemable towards the purchase of The Dungeon (tm).
Maybe. But if private property and rule of law was established instead of just dumping money, then people would be able to own their houses (and be relatively safe in the knowledge that a random warlord won't show up and take it), which again allows them to take out mortgages. When people can lend money to build houses, they can choose other materials than banana peels and dirt.
2)Nobody really reads the damn things anyway- people love writing due to the sheer egotism of it, but nobody really reads the damn things except the small circle of friends they'd talk to anyway.
Just because it's the internet, it's not a criteria for success that you have millions of visitors. The phone only allows you to disperse your thought to one (or very few) persons at a time, but there are billions connected to the phone network. Yet, phones are still here. Point: This is talking to a small circle of friends, just not in the way you'd do it.
It would have to stateful and sandboxed. Run on any platform with a GUI. It probably wouldn't be the results of a standards committe as the committe would make a mess of it.
They are claiming that this is secure when malware is installed as a browser helper object - I'm not even talking about grabbing the network traffic, this is even simpler, just access the DOM and go.
The image is a map, when you click it, coordinates are POSTed to the server, that replies with a new image. Grab the coordinates and the image, and you can stich together the password with close to no effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Iridium needs to cover the entire earth, ground-level, at any given time, with a sensitive enough antenna that you can get signal in a handheld device, much similar to a regular cell phone.
That is significantly harder, thus more expensive, than providing a datalink to an airplane in 30.000 ft with a tracking directional antenna. More to the point, you need fewer satellites with less sophisticated equipment to do it.
So just because you can draw a line from then to now, everything that has happened since 1970 is not innovation? That is like claiming that because cars still have internal combustion engines and four wheel with rubber tires, there have been no real innovation in the car industry for 100 years.
Da Vinci made a drawing of a helicopter, but Sikorsky was the first to build it. No innovation since 1400-whenever? Eigenvectors has been known for a long time, so Google is just a rip-off?
I agree that my car/drivers analogy was flawed, but my point which wasn't conveyed very effectively was that the tradesmen in the business has dominated the scene from the real scientists that are still there because of their sheer number, which is a symptom of success. We can't all be develeoping the next OOP or relational database.
Naa. I'm sure back when car became widely available and used, some of the "elders" complained that now everybody is a "driver", and they don't even know the intrigate details of internal combustion.
Computer science is alive and well, there are merely two things happening that disorts the view:
- "Original" CS has been rolled back into math. You don't do computational heavy math without computers anymore, so why keep CS as a seperate field? Heavy computation is also interesting in lots of other fields, especially medicine and biology.
- "New" CS is a trade. Programmers, developers, project managers etc.
There's plenty of novel ideas and innovation out there. Look at SUNs Sparc T1, IBMs Power Cell (hardwarewise) and stuff lige virtualization (both machines (xen, vmware) and programs (java,
But if you believe that C++ was the height of evolution, well, then, yes, CS is dead.
Well, I don't know. The UN? They've proved themselves perfectly useless over the past decade, and now they've just published a report concluding that the UN should be the ones fighting global warming (and no, they won't do it for free, or even remotely cheap).
How is that not every bit as biased and self-serving as Exxon saying "global warming is BS, keep driving your SUV"?
Isn't that.. kindalike.. you know, the point?
On another note, if the cops suspected you enough to go through the hassle of taking your computer, and yet, here you are, something tells me that, even though cops have no humor, you still made it out.. no?
This just got off on the wrong foot. While I can't say why that British site got the results it got, most of the discussion here seems to accept the premise that free, open source software is somehow related to socialism, communism, leftism, liberalism or whatever you want to call it: It's not.
It's that fucking simple. Socialism (I'll use that general identifier for all of the above mentioned) is about sharing a scarce good.
Back in the day, it was about ownership of the production-apparatus, today it's more about general, monetary wealth. Also here fits issues like affirmative action, to the degree that life opportunities can be considered scarce (which AA advocates obviously are convinced off).
Open source software is to an extreme degree not scarce. That's the whole point. FOSS is about working together for a common goal. It's that simple. It's not more or less socialist that closed source software.
NAT is not the answer to everything. VPN is starting to be everywhere. With still more clients, suppliers, employees and partner companies VPN'ing with each other, even defining namespaces internally in 192.168.0.0/16 is starting to be an issue. I've so far been lucky with a strategy of every party selecting a pseudo-ramdom number for the third block in 192.168.0.0/16, but sooner or later, conflicts will happen.
Well, in that case it should be a no-brainer to make it into a business concept, don't you agree? Efficient and cheap tend to play well with executives.
Why do you need legislation to enforce what is obviously the best idea?
That's just cry-baby anti-capitalism. As another poster points out, their shares are in a blind trust.
Next you want them not to have any CEO-friends. And I'll counter that and demand that no politician has any labor union friends. And you'll say they can't have any interests in faith communities. And so it goes. The only guy left to actually be electable has never voiced an opinion in his life - and that's hardly a good candidate for office.
Hey: These people are elected with the wast majority of these affiliations out in the public. Base your vote on that.
Uh-uh. And if a politician raises any tax on anything, his own family has to pay UMPTY times that, no matter if they are eligible or not.
Being Danish, I'd love to hear more about this case.
I have law-student friends who claim that there are no provisions in the law that can make someone responsible for what other people does with their (legal) stuff, no matter how it's done.
Compare a bypasser grabbing a shovel from my driveway, smashing a kids face in with it. Am I responsible? Hardly.
Or, as a more general statement: To think of government regulation as the last measure, not the first.
It's equally illegal for the police and private citizens to trespass. The only difference is that the police can get a court order to do it legally.
And such a court order can't usually include randomly spying on people, hoping something will turn up.
Uh-uh. Corporations - evil themselves. And when it comes to unprivilegeded, poor africa children, these entities of evil will be in line to throw the kill switch on the laptops. Beware of the corporations!
Newsflash: In the part of the world where things are actually bad, the problem is not with CEOs. They are with who ever happend to throw a revolution that week, and tell the army to start killing people from whatever tribe they don't like. In other words: governments.
Meanwhile you sit in your house that evil coporations mortgaged so you could buy it, sip caffe latte made from beans that evil coporations imported for you, while you visit blogs on an internet connection that evil coporations made available for you and discuss how everything coporate sucks and the government should do as the UN says, because they did so fucking well in Rwanda, Balkans and Darfur.
The definition of capitalism doesn't intend anything. It's a description of some mechanisms.
Wealth is relative and will always be. These poor people (whom may or may not be stupid and may or may not be victims of the system) have it better than poor people in e.g. russia who have it better than poor people somewhere else, but they are still poor.
Raise the minimum wage a few dollars, and these poor people will have a little more money - and now the $2 TV dinners and $45 worth of gasoline (for a slightly bigger car or a slightly longer commute) is going to take their money, and they'll still be poor. And someone will complain if capitalism meant for these people to degrade themselves to buy a DVD.
I've making serveral times the poverty limit, and there are plenty of things that I want to do and buy that I can't (or don't) - it's all about defining what an acceptable standard of living is. Someone made up the poverty limit, someone else made up the minimum wage. They will always be low (hence "poverty" and "minimum"), but there is a fine line between making sure people are alive, and living their lives on behalf of them (I live in a "high-welfare, high-tax society". Unemployment is ridiculous, but not in official numbers, since they are not counting welfare-receipients.)
The rest of us can push MySQL saying "this is what Oracle recommends, just free".
(*) I just pulled that number from clear air.
Anyway, no matter how much it sucks, Vista doesn't steal your computer, and as such you don't need lawmakers or law enforcement to protect you. Download and burn an Ubuntu CD, and off you go.
Oh come-fucking-on. Yes, if humanity got its act together and did everything your way, we'd have your perfect world by now. Only, I probably wouldn't like it, and I'd post comments saying "If only people would do things MY way, then...".
Newsflash, buddy: There can be no universal consensus on how the world should look - people are too different, and thank God for that. As a result of that there can be no one operating system that fits everbody perfectly.
The cool thing about Linux and FOSS is that you can, if you want it enough (Hello, Mark Shuttleworth), roll your own version that fits your view of the world. In Microsofts world you can change your desktop wallpaper and screensaver, and you better like it.
This is a bad idea because it fosters populism.
When politicians can be fired from day to day, not every two or four years, they will be even less likely to embark into the long, rough stretch, doing the Right Thing, even though it doesn't seem very popular.
You assume that people care much about day-to-day policy. They don't, and quite frankly, even though I'd like to, I don't think that we can change that very significantly. In other words, Oprah, Howard Stern and Tom Cruise would replace 3/4 of congress (or whatever replacement would be in its place).
You're right!
I've invented a perfect device for this purpose:
The KitchenTable(tm) (patent pending)
You install this device in a commons area of your home, and then one day you sit your kid down at the table and ass him or her, "OK, (name), I would never spy on you, but I keep hearing so much about MySpace and predators. Would you please walk me through the site and show me what it's all about? That would really make me more comfortable." (conversation NOT included).
This will in most cases cause the child to agree, and show the parent around the site (Warning: child/parent bonding may occur). If the tactic fails, the KitchenTable (tm) may be returned for a full refund, reddemable towards the purchase of The Dungeon (tm).
Maybe. But if private property and rule of law was established instead of just dumping money, then people would be able to own their houses (and be relatively safe in the knowledge that a random warlord won't show up and take it), which again allows them to take out mortgages.
When people can lend money to build houses, they can choose other materials than banana peels and dirt.
Just because it's the internet, it's not a criteria for success that you have millions of visitors.
The phone only allows you to disperse your thought to one (or very few) persons at a time, but there are billions connected to the phone network. Yet, phones are still here.
Point: This is talking to a small circle of friends, just not in the way you'd do it.
It would have to stateful and sandboxed. Run on any platform with a GUI. It probably wouldn't be the results of a standards committe as the committe would make a mess of it.
It would be Java?
They are claiming that this is secure when malware is installed as a browser helper object - I'm not even talking about grabbing the network traffic, this is even simpler, just access the DOM and go.
The image is a map, when you click it, coordinates are POSTed to the server, that replies with a new image.
Grab the coordinates and the image, and you can stich together the password with close to no effort.
I predict that you will be doing a lot of high-priority Java/.NET porting over the next few months.