What rotten luck! That's just the time periods needed for the investigations. Well, that just goes to show - accidents can happen to anybody, even the president himself is not immune.
It seems to me that the skill they lack most is patience. It is a skill, something that has to be learned, and it is valuable. I can't see that we have to change society to accomodate people that demand instant gratification - on the contrary, impatience lies behing many of the modern ailments. We can't wait for a dinner that takes an hour to cook by hand, so we eat fast food and snacks and get obese. And rather than learning the dreary and boring patience skill, we have renamed impatience - it is now 'ambition'.
But actually, true ambition requires a lot of patience. If you want to make it to anything, learn patience.
Nobody is ever simply good or bad - this is something that we all need to realize. I used to believe that my heroes were only good and my 'enemies' were only good, but all it ever gave me way isolation from reality. If you can't see something of yourself in your worst enemy and something of him/her in you, then you're missing an important part of reality, and you are cutting yourself off from the possibility of solving the problems and moving forward.
Didn't Jesus say something to that effect? That ought to count for something in the US, a nation that calls itself Christian.
Why should 'society' judge it? This is not a question of taxation or something, it is about what the individual wants to pay for. I don't want to pay over the odds for factory produced music, especially not when the money mostly goes into the wrong pockets. If I hear a piece of music I like, I want to reward the artist - I don't care much for stuffing the pockets of wealthy people who have no artistic talent and are simply parasites on the artist. Fortunately it is no longer imperative that a musician has a contract with a big record label - professional standard recording equipment gets cheaper all the time.
I'm still reeling from the impact of these news. This is what we have all been waiting for - the solution to pollution. global warming, disease, hunger, war and faster than light travel!! The Era of Always Smooth Softice is upon us. I am deeply honoured and moved to have been chosen to live in a time where such momentous discoveries are made. I am still struggling for breath. I, for one, welcome our new Smooth Icrecream Overlords. In Soviet... no, wait a minute, I think I got carried away there.
A devastating crossfire of shock waves and star formation ...
smash into the Milky Way's plane These are rather heavy words for the fact that a rather rarified cloud of gas is going to seep in between the stars in our galaxy. Even in the highly unlikely event that there are humans around when this begins to happen, we wouldn't notice on a day to day basis. A star system takes long to form, in human terms, in the order of 100,000 to millions of years. Even the collision between two galaxies is not something that anybody would notice in their daily lives.
Oops, sorry, didn't meant to infringe on Abba's intellectal property. However, isn't it true that people used to say that you become an artist because you've got something inside that must get out, find and expression? Even if it means giving up the prospect of being wealthy? So what is all this about artists not wanting to produce music or whatever if they can't maximize their profits? To me it sounds like they aren't really artists.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for paying artists decently, but I think it is fair to expect that they are actually real artists, not just production line text and song engineers. And I do object to paying over the odds into the pockects of rich, predatory corporations, who aren't in it for the money. Give me a true artist and I'll be willing to pay the normal, full CD price for downloading an album, if I know the money goes to the musician, not some greedy corporation.
As for the Iron Curtain: It may have been a device for oppressing the population in USSR, but it was used in the west to scare the population into submitting to an absurd, extreme capitalism that we would never have accepted if it wasn't for the Iron Curtain. Now that is is gone, those in power need something else: the so-called war on terror. They were never interested in freedom, but I think we knew that - the question is, when do we stop them?
- addressing the actual issue: We are going to have to give up fossil fuels. This means that we will have to adopt a lifestyle that depends a lot less on cheap energy. And that means that we have to travel less, do much more ourselves (fewer electrical gadgets in our home, no ready made meals, etc), waste less, and there will have to be a lot fewer people on the planet.
Using biodiesel and ethanol is only a dummy, something to make people feel less depressed by the reality: it is not possible to maintain our present way of life with the huge number of people in the world. So what do we want: eradicate 90% of all people on the planet or live a much more basic lifestyle? Doing nothing serious will mean the first - through wars, epidemics, natural disasters and starvation.
The situation is not hopeless, but we are not going to get there by dreaming about ethanol, it will require huge changes in our societies. People like the neo-conservatives have known this for years and have been working hard to ensure that they are going to come out on top - you didn't think they cared about what was good for you, did you? The truth is that capitalism, with its demand for constant growth and consumerism, is reaching its limit. The almighty and holy marketplace cannot solve these problems - the marketforces are based on 'directed self-interest', and self-interest will never tell you to give away your own comfort to help others, certainly not if those others are half a world away.
Technology can at best help us break the fall and ensure that we, as a species, can get back on our feet if we are careful. The best thing we ordinary people can do, apart from saving energy and other obvious stuff, is to get politically active, and go out and work to get rid of this current, corrupt, political class that is mismanaging our country, and replace it with somebody who actually work for the good of the people.
It seems to me that all these technical attempts miss a couple of points.
First of all, democracy has to be simple enough that common people can easily understand it in order to avoid the risk of political elitism, where a small group is able to play on a system that most don't understand. And secondly, the system must be seen to be 'clearly fair' by those same, common people.
And based on those criteria, I think the best way would be simple, proportional votes, or whatever the term is. It ought to be easy - you have candidates 1, 2, 3,... and the one who gets most votes wins. Making it more complicated can only play into the hands of special interest groups and will be abused, as the voting machine debacle illustrates.
I know, of course, that things are not as simple as that in the real world, and that there are significant downsides to such a simple method, but isn't it at least better than the current system? Haven't we in the past seen candidates who got the most actual votes and still lost? That can't be right, I think. What ever problems may arise from a simple, direct voting system, I am sure they can be solved in better ways. Perhaps it is as simple as limiting the power of the president a bit more.
Give me a break Sure - where do you want it? But of course, when I boldly claim that you don't need to learn discipline in Java, I am oversimplifying in the hope that the reader is able to fill in the obvious gap. After all, discipline is required for anything you do, to some extent; but in C you need so much more of.
I am not saying that Java is bad or that Java programmers are bad, but there is still some serious value in understanding how a computer works right down there at the metal, and C is a lot closer to the bare metal; and that is why it is important for CS students to learn to use C well, even if they will forever more use Java, C# or whatever. When you study computer science, you study to become a Computer Scientist, which requires a lot more than the ability to program - hence the word 'Scientist'. Computer Scientists are, as far as I know, required to be able to write things like operating systems from scratch and that kind of things, and you won't choose Java for that if you want it to go fast (not quite true, I know - Nixdorff made a series of servers once, whose OS was written almost entirely in interpreted BASIC).
Now, as for the 80% errors caused by pointers - it is perfectly possible to learn a coding discipline that avoids them. This should happen automatically with experience; after a while you learn to always initialize buffers - whether they are pointers, strings, int or other - when you define them.
Don't be silly. Flying an aircraft requires a whole new set of skills, that are outside the normal experience of most people. Driving is not just flying with a number of 'security enhancements', whereas programming in Java is like programming in C, but without the need to learn about pointers or good programming discipline. So if C is like a manual car, Java is an automatic.
It is reasonable to expect that a CS student has both the ability and the interest it takes to learn all the details of programming well in C.
I don't think the question of whether you think computer games are good or bad weighs all that much on people's minds. In fact, I don't think the candidates' stand on any single issue matter too much, really - it all boils down to one single question: who do people feel they can trust the most? I can easily understand why people in America are sick and tired of ultra-conservatives, mindless religion and 'tough' posturing - after GWB I suspect a lot of people simply want somebody who seems not only mentally competent, but also reasonably moderate, open-minded and progressive.
Please note, I don't have anything against conservatives, religion or wanting to fight crime - it's the unthinking, reactionary idiots, who refuse to waste any thought on anything because they already know The Truth About It All, and who, in the US at least, are always found on the far right.
So this guy hates UNIX-like systems because they are not innovative and are "a 1970s intellectual framework"? The sole reason why there are still UNIX-like systems today is because of the technical and intellectual merits of the UNIX philosophy; it sure as hell isn't because of the immense business acumen of the UNIX companies. It is quite possible that there are many systems and ideas that would make for a more user-friendly and altogether cuter operating system, but UNIX was never designed for unskilled users, it has always been a system for those who are highly skilled and mostly interested in the technical side of computing.
Thus we have a system that emphasizes logical consistency, technical flexibility, ease of programming, efficiency, portability etc. By lucky coincidence it turns out that these qualities are also an excellent basis for building more user friendly gadgets and systems, which is why more and more companies choose to run Linux on their appliances: NAS boxes, DVRs, mobile phones and a whole lot of other things.
Nobody is forcing anybody to stick with the UNIX idea, but I challenge anybody to come up with a better system.
Needless to say, Beijing's Municipal Government is not 'The Chinese Government', nor is this 'a bold challenge to the legal authority of the Communist Party to decide what China's 1.3 billion people can say and read on their computers'. And strictly speaking, we don't know whether his posting was actually removed by somebody who was a member of any government or indeed the Communist Party. In fact, the most likely scenario is that some employee at whichever web-hosting company runs the blog saw some reference to Beijing's local government and automatically deleted the post without even reading it further. And bureaucrats all over the world being what they are, they don't want to be bothered with cleaning up after their mistakes, so they tried to ignore it, knowing that this is too trivial for anybody to take serious action.
So how can this become 'a bold challenge' that illustrates that 'some of China's educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system'? Well, only in the hazy minds of people who are willing to believe anything about their perceived enemies, never mind reality. I can't be bothered pointing out that this kind of things happen all the time everywhere - you already know.
I, like many other people in the world love and respect the American nation and the American people - but, by gods, you sometimes make it bloody hard work.
1. A workplace where I stand as well as sit. After nearly 30 years behind a desk in front of computers, my eyes and back are both suffering, and I am overweight. My eyes, that is just age, but my back and overweight would benefit tremendously from being able to change position often - standing up while working uses a lot more energy, and if you could put a treadmill under your feet, that would be even better. Not 'cool' perhaps, but good for you; that's what I want.
2. No air conditioning. I have never been in an airconditioned room that didn't make me unconformtable. They tend to blast you with cold air when they go off, and when they stop you feel too hot - this change between hot and cold makes you physically ill. I would actually prefer simply to feel too hot in the summer; it is more predictable, so you can dress for it or you can come in at night if it is that bad.
The difference is in relevance. Most TV ads are irrelevant to most people - unless you have children in the right age group, you won't care much about a Pampers advert, and on tv you can't search for things, you just see what happens to pass by. On the web you will be looking for things, mostly, and therefore there is a bigger chance that the adverts are relevant - and that you are motivated to take an interest.
Once again we have an article focusing on the wrong problem - and the whole of/. following.
I have no problem with wanting to regulate games and other entertainment. It seems quite likely to me that they influence our behaviour, but that is just my opinion and not scientifically established yet. And it is not the most important problem here - it is the fact that the legislators have next to no knowledge about these things and prefer to ignore the reality and live in a dream world where 'ideals' and 'religions' are more important then facts.
Whether violent games are damaging or not is one thing - what you do (or indeed can do) about it is quite another. And passing laws about age limits is mostly just hand waving and possibly damaging, because not only will those laws be ignored, but it also becomes 'cool' to get the latest banned game. If we want to do something about the attraction violence and violent games holds, we should focus on educating people about things, and influencing the cultural attitudes and social problems that lead to people preferring violence.
It's speed cameras, not surveillance cameras. And while I don't agree with obeying the rules just because they are 'the law', I do agree with obeying the rules that make sense; and the speed limits do make sense in most cases. Driving safely is not only about being able to control your car even when you drive fast, it is also about being able to get out of difficult situations alive, and preferably without accidents.
The low speed limits are certainly important - as they say, at 30 mph 80% survive (being hit by a car), at 40 mph it is 20%. I'm not sure it makes all that much difference whether people drive 70 or 80, though, but the percentage of people who can't drive safely at high speeds gets bigger the higher the speed - so perhaps the 70 mph limit is sensible on motorways. On the other hand there is quite a large number that drive far too slowly, which causes a lot of frustration in other road users and leads to irrational behaviours, like dangerous overtaking and probably dangerous speeding too.
IMO there should be minimum as well as maximum speed limits; if you can't drive safely at 90% of the speed limit, you shouldn't be on a public road driving a motorised vehicle. I'm sure a lot of those who tend to drive too fast would be more willing to accept that they have to respect the limit, if you could be reasonably sure that you didn't always up behind some plonker that insisted on plodding along at half the legal limit.
I'm fairly sure it was planned as a publicity stunt
Or perhaps they actually want to do something about corruption, but hadn't counted on just how many would try access the site. Corruption is widespread in China, and very unpopular. The only people who want is the people - the criminals - who benefit from it. This is the people, nor is it the national government, because it causes unrest, which the national government has to deal with; and I don't think they want that.
The chinese government are like most governments in most modern nations - they by and large want to do what is best for the people, or what they think is best. They are not monsters that enjoy making the population as unhappy as possible, despite the picture that gets painted in the more reactionary media in the west. The big problem they have is that they have an incredibly vast country to control and simply not enough resources; that and the fact that corruption has been part of the Chinese society for well over 5000 years. It will probably take at least a generation of modernisation to change this.
Every time there are news from China, it is interpreted in the worst possible light - if they put a man on the moon, it must be because they starve their poor and want to rain death on America, if they tighten copyright laws, it is 'repression', if they don't, they are 'thieves'. Try to be fair - criticize where there is genuinely something to criticize, praise where that is due. That's what we expect for ourselves, isn't it?
He owned the old disk, right? Did applt buy that disk from him in any way, eg. by exchange of money? No? Then they should of course give the thing back, no doubt about it.
This is news - it has been known for a long time. I think the real news, which you can read between the lines, is that they have actually made some measurements, run some simulations and clarified some details - perhaps the most important part is the simulation, which means they have a good, working, mathematical model.
And instead of putting funny devices in people's cars, a simple and much safer solution to most traffic jams is to ban lorries from overtaking. Lorries seem mostly to drive 60 mph - when one overtakes another, you suddenly have 2 lanes that can only move at 60, where most cars would have been driving at 70 or more (in UK much, much more, but let us just assume that people drive at the legal speed limit) - that is the most common cause for traffic slowdowns. It doesn't help a lot either that it take 10 minutes to overtake in a lorry, because the difference in speed is about 0.1 mph.
This has been tested in several places, with great success. The one I remember best was in Denmark, where one particular road was almost constantly congested. When they banned lorries from overtaking, the problem all but disappeared, just like that.
I don't think so - no elctronic component known to mankind could survive the harsh environment that immediately develops inside a pair of sports shoes used by a teenager.
Hold it, hold it! We're not quite there yet. It was only yesterday, on the historical timescale, that we discovered DNA and now we are beginning to get some vague ideas about how some of the things actually work. We can even theorize about correcting errors in people's genetic code, but creating a living cell from scratch? Not even the best biologists know more than a tiny fraction of what goes into making a living cell function. IOW, we are far, far out in the world of science fiction here nobody is just on the threshold to discovering how to create living cells from scratch, or even mostly from scratch.
If and when that ever happens, I don't think any of the readers of/. will be around. The problem with absurd, sweeping patents will have solved itself by collapsing completely, capitalism is likely to have been left behind as yet another temporary absurdity in human culture, the climate change crisis will have run its course and found its solution, and if humanity is still around, we will have found a role as the guardians and preservers of the planets.
Slashdot Mirror
What rotten luck! That's just the time periods needed for the investigations. Well, that just goes to show - accidents can happen to anybody, even the president himself is not immune.
It seems to me that the skill they lack most is patience. It is a skill, something that has to be learned, and it is valuable. I can't see that we have to change society to accomodate people that demand instant gratification - on the contrary, impatience lies behing many of the modern ailments. We can't wait for a dinner that takes an hour to cook by hand, so we eat fast food and snacks and get obese. And rather than learning the dreary and boring patience skill, we have renamed impatience - it is now 'ambition'.
But actually, true ambition requires a lot of patience. If you want to make it to anything, learn patience.
Nobody is ever simply good or bad - this is something that we all need to realize. I used to believe that my heroes were only good and my 'enemies' were only good, but all it ever gave me way isolation from reality. If you can't see something of yourself in your worst enemy and something of him/her in you, then you're missing an important part of reality, and you are cutting yourself off from the possibility of solving the problems and moving forward.
Didn't Jesus say something to that effect? That ought to count for something in the US, a nation that calls itself Christian.
- a Beowulf cluster...
Why should 'society' judge it? This is not a question of taxation or something, it is about what the individual wants to pay for. I don't want to pay over the odds for factory produced music, especially not when the money mostly goes into the wrong pockets. If I hear a piece of music I like, I want to reward the artist - I don't care much for stuffing the pockets of wealthy people who have no artistic talent and are simply parasites on the artist. Fortunately it is no longer imperative that a musician has a contract with a big record label - professional standard recording equipment gets cheaper all the time.
I'm still reeling from the impact of these news. This is what we have all been waiting for - the solution to pollution. global warming, disease, hunger, war and faster than light travel!! The Era of Always Smooth Softice is upon us. I am deeply honoured and moved to have been chosen to live in a time where such momentous discoveries are made. I am still struggling for breath. I, for one, welcome our new Smooth Icrecream Overlords. In Soviet... no, wait a minute, I think I got carried away there.
Oops, sorry, didn't meant to infringe on Abba's intellectal property. However, isn't it true that people used to say that you become an artist because you've got something inside that must get out, find and expression? Even if it means giving up the prospect of being wealthy? So what is all this about artists not wanting to produce music or whatever if they can't maximize their profits? To me it sounds like they aren't really artists.
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for paying artists decently, but I think it is fair to expect that they are actually real artists, not just production line text and song engineers. And I do object to paying over the odds into the pockects of rich, predatory corporations, who aren't in it for the money. Give me a true artist and I'll be willing to pay the normal, full CD price for downloading an album, if I know the money goes to the musician, not some greedy corporation.
As for the Iron Curtain: It may have been a device for oppressing the population in USSR, but it was used in the west to scare the population into submitting to an absurd, extreme capitalism that we would never have accepted if it wasn't for the Iron Curtain. Now that is is gone, those in power need something else: the so-called war on terror. They were never interested in freedom, but I think we knew that - the question is, when do we stop them?
- addressing the actual issue: We are going to have to give up fossil fuels. This means that we will have to adopt a lifestyle that depends a lot less on cheap energy. And that means that we have to travel less, do much more ourselves (fewer electrical gadgets in our home, no ready made meals, etc), waste less, and there will have to be a lot fewer people on the planet.
Using biodiesel and ethanol is only a dummy, something to make people feel less depressed by the reality: it is not possible to maintain our present way of life with the huge number of people in the world. So what do we want: eradicate 90% of all people on the planet or live a much more basic lifestyle? Doing nothing serious will mean the first - through wars, epidemics, natural disasters and starvation.
The situation is not hopeless, but we are not going to get there by dreaming about ethanol, it will require huge changes in our societies. People like the neo-conservatives have known this for years and have been working hard to ensure that they are going to come out on top - you didn't think they cared about what was good for you, did you? The truth is that capitalism, with its demand for constant growth and consumerism, is reaching its limit. The almighty and holy marketplace cannot solve these problems - the marketforces are based on 'directed self-interest', and self-interest will never tell you to give away your own comfort to help others, certainly not if those others are half a world away.
Technology can at best help us break the fall and ensure that we, as a species, can get back on our feet if we are careful. The best thing we ordinary people can do, apart from saving energy and other obvious stuff, is to get politically active, and go out and work to get rid of this current, corrupt, political class that is mismanaging our country, and replace it with somebody who actually work for the good of the people.
It seems to me that all these technical attempts miss a couple of points.
... and the one who gets most votes wins. Making it more complicated can only play into the hands of special interest groups and will be abused, as the voting machine debacle illustrates.
First of all, democracy has to be simple enough that common people can easily understand it in order to avoid the risk of political elitism, where a small group is able to play on a system that most don't understand. And secondly, the system must be seen to be 'clearly fair' by those same, common people.
And based on those criteria, I think the best way would be simple, proportional votes, or whatever the term is. It ought to be easy - you have candidates 1, 2, 3,
I know, of course, that things are not as simple as that in the real world, and that there are significant downsides to such a simple method, but isn't it at least better than the current system? Haven't we in the past seen candidates who got the most actual votes and still lost? That can't be right, I think. What ever problems may arise from a simple, direct voting system, I am sure they can be solved in better ways. Perhaps it is as simple as limiting the power of the president a bit more.
I am not saying that Java is bad or that Java programmers are bad, but there is still some serious value in understanding how a computer works right down there at the metal, and C is a lot closer to the bare metal; and that is why it is important for CS students to learn to use C well, even if they will forever more use Java, C# or whatever. When you study computer science, you study to become a Computer Scientist, which requires a lot more than the ability to program - hence the word 'Scientist'. Computer Scientists are, as far as I know, required to be able to write things like operating systems from scratch and that kind of things, and you won't choose Java for that if you want it to go fast (not quite true, I know - Nixdorff made a series of servers once, whose OS was written almost entirely in interpreted BASIC).
Now, as for the 80% errors caused by pointers - it is perfectly possible to learn a coding discipline that avoids them. This should happen automatically with experience; after a while you learn to always initialize buffers - whether they are pointers, strings, int or other - when you define them.
Don't be silly. Flying an aircraft requires a whole new set of skills, that are outside the normal experience of most people. Driving is not just flying with a number of 'security enhancements', whereas programming in Java is like programming in C, but without the need to learn about pointers or good programming discipline. So if C is like a manual car, Java is an automatic.
It is reasonable to expect that a CS student has both the ability and the interest it takes to learn all the details of programming well in C.
I don't think the question of whether you think computer games are good or bad weighs all that much on people's minds. In fact, I don't think the candidates' stand on any single issue matter too much, really - it all boils down to one single question: who do people feel they can trust the most? I can easily understand why people in America are sick and tired of ultra-conservatives, mindless religion and 'tough' posturing - after GWB I suspect a lot of people simply want somebody who seems not only mentally competent, but also reasonably moderate, open-minded and progressive.
Please note, I don't have anything against conservatives, religion or wanting to fight crime - it's the unthinking, reactionary idiots, who refuse to waste any thought on anything because they already know The Truth About It All, and who, in the US at least, are always found on the far right.
So this guy hates UNIX-like systems because they are not innovative and are "a 1970s intellectual framework"? The sole reason why there are still UNIX-like systems today is because of the technical and intellectual merits of the UNIX philosophy; it sure as hell isn't because of the immense business acumen of the UNIX companies. It is quite possible that there are many systems and ideas that would make for a more user-friendly and altogether cuter operating system, but UNIX was never designed for unskilled users, it has always been a system for those who are highly skilled and mostly interested in the technical side of computing.
Thus we have a system that emphasizes logical consistency, technical flexibility, ease of programming, efficiency, portability etc. By lucky coincidence it turns out that these qualities are also an excellent basis for building more user friendly gadgets and systems, which is why more and more companies choose to run Linux on their appliances: NAS boxes, DVRs, mobile phones and a whole lot of other things.
Nobody is forcing anybody to stick with the UNIX idea, but I challenge anybody to come up with a better system.
Needless to say, Beijing's Municipal Government is not 'The Chinese Government', nor is this 'a bold challenge to the legal authority of the Communist Party to decide what China's 1.3 billion people can say and read on their computers'. And strictly speaking, we don't know whether his posting was actually removed by somebody who was a member of any government or indeed the Communist Party. In fact, the most likely scenario is that some employee at whichever web-hosting company runs the blog saw some reference to Beijing's local government and automatically deleted the post without even reading it further. And bureaucrats all over the world being what they are, they don't want to be bothered with cleaning up after their mistakes, so they tried to ignore it, knowing that this is too trivial for anybody to take serious action.
So how can this become 'a bold challenge' that illustrates that 'some of China's educated elite may be growing impatient with a one-party authoritarian system'? Well, only in the hazy minds of people who are willing to believe anything about their perceived enemies, never mind reality. I can't be bothered pointing out that this kind of things happen all the time everywhere - you already know.
I, like many other people in the world love and respect the American nation and the American people - but, by gods, you sometimes make it bloody hard work.
It's comptetion - it's good for you. Free markets, remember?
The two things I would like most are:
1. A workplace where I stand as well as sit. After nearly 30 years behind a desk in front of computers, my eyes and back are both suffering, and I am overweight. My eyes, that is just age, but my back and overweight would benefit tremendously from being able to change position often - standing up while working uses a lot more energy, and if you could put a treadmill under your feet, that would be even better. Not 'cool' perhaps, but good for you; that's what I want.
2. No air conditioning. I have never been in an airconditioned room that didn't make me unconformtable. They tend to blast you with cold air when they go off, and when they stop you feel too hot - this change between hot and cold makes you physically ill. I would actually prefer simply to feel too hot in the summer; it is more predictable, so you can dress for it or you can come in at night if it is that bad.
The difference is in relevance. Most TV ads are irrelevant to most people - unless you have children in the right age group, you won't care much about a Pampers advert, and on tv you can't search for things, you just see what happens to pass by. On the web you will be looking for things, mostly, and therefore there is a bigger chance that the adverts are relevant - and that you are motivated to take an interest.
Once again we have an article focusing on the wrong problem - and the whole of /. following.
I have no problem with wanting to regulate games and other entertainment. It seems quite likely to me that they influence our behaviour, but that is just my opinion and not scientifically established yet. And it is not the most important problem here - it is the fact that the legislators have next to no knowledge about these things and prefer to ignore the reality and live in a dream world where 'ideals' and 'religions' are more important then facts.
Whether violent games are damaging or not is one thing - what you do (or indeed can do) about it is quite another. And passing laws about age limits is mostly just hand waving and possibly damaging, because not only will those laws be ignored, but it also becomes 'cool' to get the latest banned game. If we want to do something about the attraction violence and violent games holds, we should focus on educating people about things, and influencing the cultural attitudes and social problems that lead to people preferring violence.
It's speed cameras, not surveillance cameras. And while I don't agree with obeying the rules just because they are 'the law', I do agree with obeying the rules that make sense; and the speed limits do make sense in most cases. Driving safely is not only about being able to control your car even when you drive fast, it is also about being able to get out of difficult situations alive, and preferably without accidents.
The low speed limits are certainly important - as they say, at 30 mph 80% survive (being hit by a car), at 40 mph it is 20%. I'm not sure it makes all that much difference whether people drive 70 or 80, though, but the percentage of people who can't drive safely at high speeds gets bigger the higher the speed - so perhaps the 70 mph limit is sensible on motorways. On the other hand there is quite a large number that drive far too slowly, which causes a lot of frustration in other road users and leads to irrational behaviours, like dangerous overtaking and probably dangerous speeding too.
IMO there should be minimum as well as maximum speed limits; if you can't drive safely at 90% of the speed limit, you shouldn't be on a public road driving a motorised vehicle. I'm sure a lot of those who tend to drive too fast would be more willing to accept that they have to respect the limit, if you could be reasonably sure that you didn't always up behind some plonker that insisted on plodding along at half the legal limit.
I'm fairly sure it was planned as a publicity stunt
Or perhaps they actually want to do something about corruption, but hadn't counted on just how many would try access the site. Corruption is widespread in China, and very unpopular. The only people who want is the people - the criminals - who benefit from it. This is the people, nor is it the national government, because it causes unrest, which the national government has to deal with; and I don't think they want that.
The chinese government are like most governments in most modern nations - they by and large want to do what is best for the people, or what they think is best. They are not monsters that enjoy making the population as unhappy as possible, despite the picture that gets painted in the more reactionary media in the west. The big problem they have is that they have an incredibly vast country to control and simply not enough resources; that and the fact that corruption has been part of the Chinese society for well over 5000 years. It will probably take at least a generation of modernisation to change this.
Every time there are news from China, it is interpreted in the worst possible light - if they put a man on the moon, it must be because they starve their poor and want to rain death on America, if they tighten copyright laws, it is 'repression', if they don't, they are 'thieves'. Try to be fair - criticize where there is genuinely something to criticize, praise where that is due. That's what we expect for ourselves, isn't it?
He owned the old disk, right? Did applt buy that disk from him in any way, eg. by exchange of money? No? Then they should of course give the thing back, no doubt about it.
This is news - it has been known for a long time. I think the real news, which you can read between the lines, is that they have actually made some measurements, run some simulations and clarified some details - perhaps the most important part is the simulation, which means they have a good, working, mathematical model.
And instead of putting funny devices in people's cars, a simple and much safer solution to most traffic jams is to ban lorries from overtaking. Lorries seem mostly to drive 60 mph - when one overtakes another, you suddenly have 2 lanes that can only move at 60, where most cars would have been driving at 70 or more (in UK much, much more, but let us just assume that people drive at the legal speed limit) - that is the most common cause for traffic slowdowns. It doesn't help a lot either that it take 10 minutes to overtake in a lorry, because the difference in speed is about 0.1 mph.
This has been tested in several places, with great success. The one I remember best was in Denmark, where one particular road was almost constantly congested. When they banned lorries from overtaking, the problem all but disappeared, just like that.
I don't think so - no elctronic component known to mankind could survive the harsh environment that immediately develops inside a pair of sports shoes used by a teenager.
Hold it, hold it! We're not quite there yet. It was only yesterday, on the historical timescale, that we discovered DNA and now we are beginning to get some vague ideas about how some of the things actually work. We can even theorize about correcting errors in people's genetic code, but creating a living cell from scratch? Not even the best biologists know more than a tiny fraction of what goes into making a living cell function. IOW, we are far, far out in the world of science fiction here nobody is just on the threshold to discovering how to create living cells from scratch, or even mostly from scratch.
/. will be around. The problem with absurd, sweeping patents will have solved itself by collapsing completely, capitalism is likely to have been left behind as yet another temporary absurdity in human culture, the climate change crisis will have run its course and found its solution, and if humanity is still around, we will have found a role as the guardians and preservers of the planets.
If and when that ever happens, I don't think any of the readers of