Nuclear isn't the only option to replace fossil fuels. Geothermal power is baseload and has been successfully used in a number of countries for a while now. Bio-fuel plants are baseload and if fueled by the right fuel (e.g. there are bio-fuel plants fueled by waste products from other processes) can be a viable option too.
Oh and Solar Thermal (heating up a massive store of heat using the sun and mirrors and such) is also baseload if its used in areas where the sun shines enough of the time that there will be enough heat in the thermal mass to provide electric power when the sun isn't shining.
And there are various forms of water power, not just bad-for-the-environment hydroelectric power (where you block off a river and kill the ecosystem) but wave and tidal power that extract the vast amounts of energy in the movements of the waves and tides.
Anyone who says "there is no option for baseload other than fossil fuels and nuclear" clearly knows nothing about energy generation.
They should stop subsidizing things like coal, oil and gas and "let the market decide the most cost-effective options for electricity generation". Oh and that counts for any other energy sources subsidized by the government including Corn Ethanol. Stop subsidizing energy production in any form, remove any blocks, red tap or other things that result in anything other than a level playing field and let the chips fall where they may. If that results in higher electricity prices, introduce a direct subsidy on electricity that is totally unrelated to the method of generation.
I use WinAmp because its a great media player and I dont listen to music on a portable device.
But for anyone with a portable device, they will likely be using the play-and-sync tools that come with the device/support the device, i.e. iTunes or Nokia PC Suite or whatever the various Android vendors are pushing with their phones. Also if you are using a cloud music service like Google Music, Spotify, iCloud etc, WinAmp is irrelevant because you will be using the browser interface or native client for that service (whatever it might be). And then for those not using a portable device OR a cloud music service, lots of them are probably using Windows Media Player because its the default and its there and they dont see a need for anything else. More of them are using something free (or open source) rather than WinAmp.
Then of course you have all the people who only ever downloaded the free version of WinAmp and never paid a cent for it.
Why are countries like Australia, Canada and others supporting this kind of crap? These kinds of trade agreements give greater powers to big US IP holders (Hollywood, big pharma etc etc etc), they dont give any of the reductions in agricultural protectionism that countries like Australia want and they probably have very little benefit in terms of actually reducing trade barriers.
So why don't countries like Australia say "no, we wont sign up to a treaty that gives a whole pile of benefits to big US corporations and almost zero benefits to us"? Its not like the US is holding a gun to their backs forcing them to sign.
The difference I suspect is that what runs on the WiFi chip (or the Bluetooth chip if its got its own firmware) is not an operating system under the definition of the term, it doesn't have separate distinct processes like a OS.
Whereas what runs on the baseband does have separate processes and other OS-like characteristics. Or at least it does on the baseband CPUs I saw when I did a 6 month student internship at Motorola:)
You can gaurantee that the cable companies are already trying to figure out who they need to write big fat cheques to in order to kill this bill dead. The #1 threat for the cable companies is that people will replace cable (or premium expensive channel tiers) with video from online sources (either free or non-free, legal or non-legal)
I have ridden on buses many times where the readers are not working (in fact I rode one the other day) and the driver just tells everyone to get on anyway (the readers in my city have a back-to-base link as far as I know). Often the alternative to "run the service with broken readers and let people on for free" is "don't run the service at all and piss people off because their bus didn't show up", "get a replacement bus with working readers and piss people off because the bus is late" or "get another driver to do the run and piss people off because the bus is late".
Ok so you add a unique hardware ID (burned into the card when its manufactured and unchangeable) and the data stored on the card is tied to it. If the card data is cloned, the card its cloned to wont have the correct ID and will fail to work.
Its not like the people cloning these cards to get free bus travel are going to be spending dollars on equipment that can somehow create cards with the correct unique ID for the cards they are copying. Plus, a cloned card wont have the correct transit company logos on it (unless you can replicate that too which also costs dollars to do properly) meaning inspectors or drivers looking to see your card (which happens on the transit network in my city which also has a card system) will see that its a fake.
The American propaganda machine (lead by the 24-hour news channels like Fox, MSNBC and CNN and backed up by other news outlets) dwarfs anything seen in Germany under Hitler or Russia under Stalin.
And, as others have said, its all about the bread (or rather Big Macs, Original Recipe and Coca-Cola) and the circuses (or rather Big Brother, Iron Man and Lady Gaga).
Someone needs to find a way to make politics as exciting as reality TV, that might get people to care more about how their country is run...
Thats why the terminals have all the intelligence. If the system is designed right, forged cards, replay attacks (e.g. add $50 to the card, read its contents, spend the $50, write the old contents to get a free top-up) and other such things can be prevented.
What you can do is to add a simple hardware increment-only counter to the card. Each time the card is written to, the counter is incremented by the circuit logic. When the card is read, if the value of the counter doesn't match whats stored in the encrypted-and-signed blob, it will reject the card.
Why is it that transit smart cards always seem to take longer to roll out than promised, cost more than promised, end up being more complex than promised and end up being less secure than they should be?
You dont even need to make the cards themselves "smart", you can make the cads just data storage devices that can store an encrypted data blob and do all the cryptography and stuff in the readers. And you can use good strong well-tested cryptography instead of inventing your own crypto.
Cards would be cheaper because they wouldn't contain much logic, just a memory chip, RFID/NFC/whatever antenna and some logic to read from and write to the memory chip. Anyone who builds a reader and reads their card out will simply get an encrypted/signed blob that they cant mess with.
If its anything like some of the other spyware installers I have seen, its simply a wrapper around the user-provided installer. So you run their installer which does all the spyware stuff and then runs the real installer exe.
If the coconut or palm oils come from plantations in places like Indonesia or Brazil where the rainforest is being destroyed to plant the trees then its not that good.
I dont use the box in question enough for the power savings to matter. (my last power bill was only $1.78 per day and that covers a lot more than my Gentoo box) Mostly I only turn it on to do the semi-regular emerge runs or (more usually) to do development/compiling for my Nokia N900 phone. If I had any spare cash I would replace my Core 2 Duo main box with a Core i7 and then turn the Core 2 Duo into a Gentoo box but I am unemployed right now and cant afford an upgrade.
It should be ILLEGAL for any company to make statements like "xyz is violating our patents" unless that statement contains details of which patents are being violated and which products/features/etc are doing the violating.
If Microsoft is forced to reveal in public which patents are being violated and how, it would allow the Linux community to evaluate that information and find prior art where it exists or find ways to make linux not violate the patent (e.g. kernel option to disable the relavent code or rewrite the code to not violate) and generally make it harder for MS)
Remember the TomTom case, evidence came out about a specific FAT patent related to long file names and TomTom just disabled that feature (since they didn't actually need it)
The reason the Koreans (and some of the other Asian countries) created these banking standards is that at the time, getting any kind of secure mass-market crypto from US vendors was nearly impossible thanks to export controls (remember the old "Export" versions of things like Netscape and IE?)
So because they couldn't get high-strength crypto from the US, they had to roll their own, hence things like SEED.
I have a N900 and am very interested in the Neo900 (and in fact will be contributing to the software stuff where I can). I LOVE the N900 touch screen, its far better than the one on the iPhones and Android devices the rest of my family use, I love using the stylus and even with fingers its still good enough for me. And I love the keyboard too, its usable without being too annoying. I think the Neo900 is the perfect device for me (and will be interested in one when my N900 eventually fails)
The world is undergoing the biggest shift in the way we get entertainment since the first TV signals were broadcast all those years ago. More and more people are downloading and streaming content (legal and otherwise) from the Internet and shifting away from the traditional "broadcast" model of content delivery. And the companies who make the big bucks making and selling that broadcast content will think nothing of spending big bucks to make sure that doesn't happen.
Whatever happened to SED, that technology that was similar to a CRT except that each pixel gets its own electron gun? Seems like the tech combines the good things about CRTs with the good things about flat screen displays.
There will be 2 ways to use this. You can either download the source code and use it in your code (in which case you have to pay the h.264 patent royalties yourself) OR you can have your program download the binary blob from Cisco directly in which case any download your end users make is covered by Cisco's license for the H.264 patents.
Cisco have also said they will accept (and host) binaries for OSs and architectures where ports are done by the community, meaning that if someone happens to want a binary for, say, a SPARC port or a port to OS/2, Cisco will host those binaries and give you the same patent coverage.
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Nuclear isn't the only option to replace fossil fuels. Geothermal power is baseload and has been successfully used in a number of countries for a while now. Bio-fuel plants are baseload and if fueled by the right fuel (e.g. there are bio-fuel plants fueled by waste products from other processes) can be a viable option too.
Oh and Solar Thermal (heating up a massive store of heat using the sun and mirrors and such) is also baseload if its used in areas where the sun shines enough of the time that there will be enough heat in the thermal mass to provide electric power when the sun isn't shining.
And there are various forms of water power, not just bad-for-the-environment hydroelectric power (where you block off a river and kill the ecosystem) but wave and tidal power that extract the vast amounts of energy in the movements of the waves and tides.
Anyone who says "there is no option for baseload other than fossil fuels and nuclear" clearly knows nothing about energy generation.
They should stop subsidizing things like coal, oil and gas and "let the market decide the most cost-effective options for electricity generation". Oh and that counts for any other energy sources subsidized by the government including Corn Ethanol.
Stop subsidizing energy production in any form, remove any blocks, red tap or other things that result in anything other than a level playing field and let the chips fall where they may.
If that results in higher electricity prices, introduce a direct subsidy on electricity that is totally unrelated to the method of generation.
I use WinAmp because its a great media player and I dont listen to music on a portable device.
But for anyone with a portable device, they will likely be using the play-and-sync tools that come with the device/support the device, i.e. iTunes or Nokia PC Suite or whatever the various Android vendors are pushing with their phones.
Also if you are using a cloud music service like Google Music, Spotify, iCloud etc, WinAmp is irrelevant because you will be using the browser interface or native client for that service (whatever it might be).
And then for those not using a portable device OR a cloud music service, lots of them are probably using Windows Media Player because its the default and its there and they dont see a need for anything else. More of them are using something free (or open source) rather than WinAmp.
Then of course you have all the people who only ever downloaded the free version of WinAmp and never paid a cent for it.
Why are countries like Australia, Canada and others supporting this kind of crap?
These kinds of trade agreements give greater powers to big US IP holders (Hollywood, big pharma etc etc etc), they dont give any of the reductions in agricultural protectionism that countries like Australia want and they probably have very little benefit in terms of actually reducing trade barriers.
So why don't countries like Australia say "no, we wont sign up to a treaty that gives a whole pile of benefits to big US corporations and almost zero benefits to us"?
Its not like the US is holding a gun to their backs forcing them to sign.
The difference I suspect is that what runs on the WiFi chip (or the Bluetooth chip if its got its own firmware) is not an operating system under the definition of the term, it doesn't have separate distinct processes like a OS.
Whereas what runs on the baseband does have separate processes and other OS-like characteristics. Or at least it does on the baseband CPUs I saw when I did a 6 month student internship at Motorola :)
You can gaurantee that the cable companies are already trying to figure out who they need to write big fat cheques to in order to kill this bill dead. The #1 threat for the cable companies is that people will replace cable (or premium expensive channel tiers) with video from online sources (either free or non-free, legal or non-legal)
BZZT WRONG. I have seen the Nexus 4 hardware and I know for a fact that it does contain a separate CPU for the baseband.
I have ridden on buses many times where the readers are not working (in fact I rode one the other day) and the driver just tells everyone to get on anyway (the readers in my city have a back-to-base link as far as I know). Often the alternative to "run the service with broken readers and let people on for free" is "don't run the service at all and piss people off because their bus didn't show up", "get a replacement bus with working readers and piss people off because the bus is late" or "get another driver to do the run and piss people off because the bus is late".
Ok so you add a unique hardware ID (burned into the card when its manufactured and unchangeable) and the data stored on the card is tied to it. If the card data is cloned, the card its cloned to wont have the correct ID and will fail to work.
Its not like the people cloning these cards to get free bus travel are going to be spending dollars on equipment that can somehow create cards with the correct unique ID for the cards they are copying. Plus, a cloned card wont have the correct transit company logos on it (unless you can replicate that too which also costs dollars to do properly) meaning inspectors or drivers looking to see your card (which happens on the transit network in my city which also has a card system) will see that its a fake.
The American propaganda machine (lead by the 24-hour news channels like Fox, MSNBC and CNN and backed up by other news outlets) dwarfs anything seen in Germany under Hitler or Russia under Stalin.
And, as others have said, its all about the bread (or rather Big Macs, Original Recipe and Coca-Cola) and the circuses (or rather Big Brother, Iron Man and Lady Gaga).
Someone needs to find a way to make politics as exciting as reality TV, that might get people to care more about how their country is run...
Thats why the terminals have all the intelligence.
If the system is designed right, forged cards, replay attacks (e.g. add $50 to the card, read its contents, spend the $50, write the old contents to get a free top-up) and other such things can be prevented.
What you can do is to add a simple hardware increment-only counter to the card. Each time the card is written to, the counter is incremented by the circuit logic. When the card is read, if the value of the counter doesn't match whats stored in the encrypted-and-signed blob, it will reject the card.
Why is it that transit smart cards always seem to take longer to roll out than promised, cost more than promised, end up being more complex than promised and end up being less secure than they should be?
You dont even need to make the cards themselves "smart", you can make the cads just data storage devices that can store an encrypted data blob and do all the cryptography and stuff in the readers. And you can use good strong well-tested cryptography instead of inventing your own crypto.
Cards would be cheaper because they wouldn't contain much logic, just a memory chip, RFID/NFC/whatever antenna and some logic to read from and write to the memory chip. Anyone who builds a reader and reads their card out will simply get an encrypted/signed blob that they cant mess with.
If its anything like some of the other spyware installers I have seen, its simply a wrapper around the user-provided installer.
So you run their installer which does all the spyware stuff and then runs the real installer exe.
If the coconut or palm oils come from plantations in places like Indonesia or Brazil where the rainforest is being destroyed to plant the trees then its not that good.
I dont use the box in question enough for the power savings to matter. (my last power bill was only $1.78 per day and that covers a lot more than my Gentoo box)
Mostly I only turn it on to do the semi-regular emerge runs or (more usually) to do development/compiling for my Nokia N900 phone.
If I had any spare cash I would replace my Core 2 Duo main box with a Core i7 and then turn the Core 2 Duo into a Gentoo box but I am unemployed right now and cant afford an upgrade.
It should be ILLEGAL for any company to make statements like "xyz is violating our patents" unless that statement contains details of which patents are being violated and which products/features/etc are doing the violating.
If Microsoft is forced to reveal in public which patents are being violated and how, it would allow the Linux community to evaluate that information and find prior art where it exists or find ways to make linux not violate the patent (e.g. kernel option to disable the relavent code or rewrite the code to not violate) and generally make it harder for MS)
Remember the TomTom case, evidence came out about a specific FAT patent related to long file names and TomTom just disabled that feature (since they didn't actually need it)
Just as long as they dont drop x32 support for my Pentium 4 Gentoo box...
The reason the Koreans (and some of the other Asian countries) created these banking standards is that at the time, getting any kind of secure mass-market crypto from US vendors was nearly impossible thanks to export controls (remember the old "Export" versions of things like Netscape and IE?)
So because they couldn't get high-strength crypto from the US, they had to roll their own, hence things like SEED.
+1 to this.
I have a N900 and am very interested in the Neo900 (and in fact will be contributing to the software stuff where I can). I LOVE the N900 touch screen, its far better than the one on the iPhones and Android devices the rest of my family use, I love using the stylus and even with fingers its still good enough for me.
And I love the keyboard too, its usable without being too annoying.
I think the Neo900 is the perfect device for me (and will be interested in one when my N900 eventually fails)
The world is undergoing the biggest shift in the way we get entertainment since the first TV signals were broadcast all those years ago. More and more people are downloading and streaming content (legal and otherwise) from the Internet and shifting away from the traditional "broadcast" model of content delivery. And the companies who make the big bucks making and selling that broadcast content will think nothing of spending big bucks to make sure that doesn't happen.
Why would a machine that is designed to be air-gapped and kept so secure need a microphone or other audio inputs?
Whatever happened to SED, that technology that was similar to a CRT except that each pixel gets its own electron gun? Seems like the tech combines the good things about CRTs with the good things about flat screen displays.
Actually, I think its not activation, its a day-one patch that is required to enable the functionality.
There will be 2 ways to use this. You can either download the source code and use it in your code (in which case you have to pay the h.264 patent royalties yourself) OR you can have your program download the binary blob from Cisco directly in which case any download your end users make is covered by Cisco's license for the H.264 patents.
Cisco have also said they will accept (and host) binaries for OSs and architectures where ports are done by the community, meaning that if someone happens to want a binary for, say, a SPARC port or a port to OS/2, Cisco will host those binaries and give you the same patent coverage.