Here in Australia all of the movie theaters I have been to have a list of conditions of entry (which is perfectly OK since its private property and they get to set the rules for entering that property). The rules vary from theater to theater but they all have a rule about not using your phone in the theater. The theater usually also has a reminder/message about it at the start of the film saying "please turn off your phone". And people are generally very good about turning off their phone when the actual movie starts and not distracting people with it.
And since its in the conditions of entry, the theater staff are within their rights to go up to someone using their phone in a way that is distracting and tell that person to switch it off or to eject that person from the theater.
In one case I remember (not sure which film but it was something really big and it was opening day) the staff were actually checking bags and stuff before going in and making people switch their devices off before they went inside (although I have a sneaking suspicion that the checks may have had more to do with looking for people who planned to use unauthorized recording equipment to make illegal copies of the film than about people being distracting with their phones)
With the shim written by Canonical, it will load both signed and unsigned binaries but only signed binaries get access to important UEFI boot-time-only features. And part of the rules for getting such things signed is a requirement that the signed binary must toggle the UEFI disable flag (or whatever it is that disables access to these boot-time-only features) before it hands control over to unsigned code. So by the time your initrd and kexec are running, you no longer have access to these boot-time-only features (which presumably prevents you from loading a virus that in turn loads Windows 8)
The US needs to join the 21st Century and implement a modern banking system. Here in Australia I can log onto my internet banking and transfer money to any other bank account and it wont cost me a cent. All I need is the BSB number (which maps to a specific bank and possibly a specific branch or group of branches depending on the financial institution) and the account number. I can also pay for things at most retail stores (and other businesses) with EFTPOS using my bank card and it also wont cost me a cent most of the time (although some businesses do charge fees for using EFTPOS). These days you can even order a pizza and pay for it with EFTPOS.
I pay all my bills straight from my bank account and dont pay a cent. My private health insurance, home insurance, rent, internet and mobile phone are all debited automatically. My home phone and power bills I still get as paper bills but I can pay those straight away with a direct transfer from my bank account to the companies involved.
I have gone to the cinema many times and in all cases that I can remember they have big signs in the lobby saying "turn off your phone when in the theater" and then they have a message at the start of the movie (during the ads and previews and stuff) also saying "turn off your phone". No reason why movie theaters in the US couldn't simply make it a condition of entry that you turn off your phone or dont use it in ways that distract other people. If you cant be without your phone for a couple of hours, go to the cinema (or session) that doesn't restrict phone use.
I mostly remember AltaVista because for many years (before Google Translate showed up) the AltaVista translator was the best and easiest way to translate foreign language text into English.
Worst mistake I ever made in all my years of buying (and building) computers was when I bought a 300MHz Cyrix part as an upgrade to fit into my PC (at the time the Cyrix part was the only real way to upgrade beyond the Pentium 166 MMX that I had without buying an expensive new motherboard). That Cyrix part was a piece of junk and never worked all that great (although to be fair some of that was because I was stupid and used the heatsink and fan from the Pentium 166 MMX on the Cyrix part instead of getting a heatsink/fan that was suitable for the Cyrix part).
Ever since that mistake I have only bought Intel chips and have always bought the correct Intel-approved heatsink/fan combo to go with them.
The whole idea of "clean coal" and "carbon capture" is stupid. How do you store that much carbon dioxide? How do you make sure that the storage isn't compromised? (which would cause all the stored carbon dioxide to be leaked into the atmosphere) How do you keep the storage from being compromised 20/30/50/100/200 years into the future?
The real solution is to use power generation sources that are less polluting including natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, wind, tidal and wave, biomass/biogas, waste-to-energy conversion and yes nuclear (both modern more efficient safer fission reactors that can burn things like thorium and nuclear waste and fusion reactors once someone makes one that produces more energy than it consumes).
Yes, my "anything but coal" ideas will mean people who are currently being paid to dig that dirty black crap out of the ground may not continue to be paid to do so in the future but that's the price of progress.
What would happen if a tax was introduced in the US is that electricity generators and other polluters would just increase their prices by whatever the carbon tax is. As Bruce Scneier says in his excellent book "Liars and Outliers", imposing a monetary cost on bad things with the aim of discouraging those bad things doesn't make the people who are "defecting" from the expected norms stop doing it.
IMO the best solution to help reduce emissions is a trading system whereby the government gives every polluting company a limited number of permits to pollute. If they produce less emissions than they have permits for, they can sell the excess permits to someone who needs more. The trick to making it work is to make sure the system captures ALL the polluters and that both the total # of permits in the system and the # of permits given to individual polluters is low enough to keep the cost of permits on the open market high (and hence the incentives to reduce pollution stay high too).
Any time someone invents a way of moving value/wealth around, its going to be subject to regulation by governments looking to prevent its use by criminals and bad guys to move their ill-gotten gains and hide where their money came from.
Doesn't matter if its Bitcoin, US dollars, Second Life currency or cute cat pictures, if it can be used to buy stuff in the real world and has a real-world value, the governments of this world are going to want to regulate it.
I suspect the UK also didn't go as far because of the sensitivities surrounding anything derived from or connected to the Bletchley Park Enigma work (which is where many of the early British computing pioneers and work came from)
If (as has been claimed by a number of sources) the people who were allegedly raped by Assange no longer want the prosecution to go ahead), why are the Swedish (cops/state prosecutors etc) still interested in continuing with the prosecution? Maybe the law is different in Sweden but from where I sit, if someone commits an act of rape against someone else, it should be up to the victim to make the decision on whether they want to make a complaint and proceed with prosecution.
Now THIS is an idea I have had for a while but lacked the skills (and time) to implement. Basically an IM client which does not log anything to disk by default (so there is nothing for anyone to recover about what was said or who was talking, great if you are in a country where the secret police like to seize the computers of suspected dissidents).
As difficult as possible to detect and block. Full end-to-end encryption with unique session keys (so even having the secret keys of all participants in the conversation AND a full log of the network traffic wont let you recover the data). High strength RSA for client to client authentication with strong protections against a MITM attack by a rogue actor (such as a police or intelligence organization)
And in my idea, it would be 100% open source and open spec and as widely distributed (both in terms of number of copies of the program and its code and in terms of geographical location of those copies) as possible. This ensures that its hosted in enough countries that if, say, the US government says "you can't distribute that, it doesn't have the backdoors to let the FBI listen in on conversations as required by CALEA", the program will continue to be available.
I used to use Trillian for a while but then I switched to the open-source Miranda IM client. Talks to most of the networks I need (IRC, ICQ, MSN, AIM) and has all the features I need (even more so with extra plugins). 100% open source so I can hack on it if I wanted to.
Only thing it doesn't do is Skype but you can thank Microsoft for that, not Trillian.
If I lived in the USA (and in the right district), I would specifically vote AGAINST any politician who supported forcing NASA to use ATK systems products.
If ATK systems cant come up with a new product to build and a new use for all those workers, they deserve to go out of business. And yes those workers would then not have a job anymore but hey, that's life, people loose their jobs all the time because the company they work for doesn't need em anymore.
1.Make it illegal under libel laws to claim that someone is violating a patent without providing details of the actual patents (i.e. if someone claims you are violating their patents and wont say which ones, you get to sue them for libel). This will stop the kind of thing companies like Microsoft have been doing where they make nebulous patent claims without actually providing details. 2.Ban any and all patents on any part of the human genome regardless of what form the information is in (including banning patenting of any proteins that are produced by any gene found in the human body). 3.Require that any patent holder who holds a patent covering a standard that is mandated by the federal government MUST license their patents under FRAND terms to anyone wishing to implement that mandated standard. So if the government requires that all TV sets support ATSC digital TV or that TV channels must transmit ATSC digital TV signals, then holders of any patents covering ATSC digital TV must license those patents to anyone who wishes to implement ATSC digital TV in order to comply with the government regulations. (whether that be for the purpose of a receiver that can receive ATSC digital TV or for the purpose of a TV network wishing to transmit ATSC digital TV) Or if the government mandates that cars feature airbags, then anyone holding relavent airbag patents must license them to any automaker under FRAND terms and cant use the patents to lock out competitors.
I would be happy to have ANY job in Software Development. But around here everyone wants 3-5 years experience in.NET or Oracle or J2EE or any number of other technologies and no-one is going to give you the experience.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as the American people continue to swallow the propaganda shoved in their face by the mainstream media, nothing is ever going to change.
Here in Australia all of the movie theaters I have been to have a list of conditions of entry (which is perfectly OK since its private property and they get to set the rules for entering that property). The rules vary from theater to theater but they all have a rule about not using your phone in the theater. The theater usually also has a reminder/message about it at the start of the film saying "please turn off your phone". And people are generally very good about turning off their phone when the actual movie starts and not distracting people with it.
And since its in the conditions of entry, the theater staff are within their rights to go up to someone using their phone in a way that is distracting and tell that person to switch it off or to eject that person from the theater.
In one case I remember (not sure which film but it was something really big and it was opening day) the staff were actually checking bags and stuff before going in and making people switch their devices off before they went inside (although I have a sneaking suspicion that the checks may have had more to do with looking for people who planned to use unauthorized recording equipment to make illegal copies of the film than about people being distracting with their phones)
With the shim written by Canonical, it will load both signed and unsigned binaries but only signed binaries get access to important UEFI boot-time-only features. And part of the rules for getting such things signed is a requirement that the signed binary must toggle the UEFI disable flag (or whatever it is that disables access to these boot-time-only features) before it hands control over to unsigned code. So by the time your initrd and kexec are running, you no longer have access to these boot-time-only features (which presumably prevents you from loading a virus that in turn loads Windows 8)
The US needs to join the 21st Century and implement a modern banking system.
Here in Australia I can log onto my internet banking and transfer money to any other bank account and it wont cost me a cent. All I need is the BSB number (which maps to a specific bank and possibly a specific branch or group of branches depending on the financial institution) and the account number.
I can also pay for things at most retail stores (and other businesses) with EFTPOS using my bank card and it also wont cost me a cent most of the time (although some businesses do charge fees for using EFTPOS). These days you can even order a pizza and pay for it with EFTPOS.
I pay all my bills straight from my bank account and dont pay a cent. My private health insurance, home insurance, rent, internet and mobile phone are all debited automatically. My home phone and power bills I still get as paper bills but I can pay those straight away with a direct transfer from my bank account to the companies involved.
I have gone to the cinema many times and in all cases that I can remember they have big signs in the lobby saying "turn off your phone when in the theater" and then they have a message at the start of the movie (during the ads and previews and stuff) also saying "turn off your phone". No reason why movie theaters in the US couldn't simply make it a condition of entry that you turn off your phone or dont use it in ways that distract other people.
If you cant be without your phone for a couple of hours, go to the cinema (or session) that doesn't restrict phone use.
In one of his books there is a special t-shirt that makes the wearer invisible to surveillance cameras.
I mostly remember AltaVista because for many years (before Google Translate showed up) the AltaVista translator was the best and easiest way to translate foreign language text into English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_and_gas_industry_in_New_Zealand says they do have oil.
Were these normal keys that just happened to be marked "Do not duplicate" or where these actual high-security keys for higher-security locks?
Not if you build a system yourself (as many people have done with all kinds of homebrew lock systems)
Fox news is a more effective propaganda machine than anything that dictators like Hitler and Stalin ever had...
Worst mistake I ever made in all my years of buying (and building) computers was when I bought a 300MHz Cyrix part as an upgrade to fit into my PC (at the time the Cyrix part was the only real way to upgrade beyond the Pentium 166 MMX that I had without buying an expensive new motherboard). That Cyrix part was a piece of junk and never worked all that great (although to be fair some of that was because I was stupid and used the heatsink and fan from the Pentium 166 MMX on the Cyrix part instead of getting a heatsink/fan that was suitable for the Cyrix part).
Ever since that mistake I have only bought Intel chips and have always bought the correct Intel-approved heatsink/fan combo to go with them.
The whole idea of "clean coal" and "carbon capture" is stupid. How do you store that much carbon dioxide? How do you make sure that the storage isn't compromised? (which would cause all the stored carbon dioxide to be leaked into the atmosphere) How do you keep the storage from being compromised 20/30/50/100/200 years into the future?
The real solution is to use power generation sources that are less polluting including natural gas, solar thermal, geothermal, wind, tidal and wave, biomass/biogas, waste-to-energy conversion and yes nuclear (both modern more efficient safer fission reactors that can burn things like thorium and nuclear waste and fusion reactors once someone makes one that produces more energy than it consumes).
Yes, my "anything but coal" ideas will mean people who are currently being paid to dig that dirty black crap out of the ground may not continue to be paid to do so in the future but that's the price of progress.
What would happen if a tax was introduced in the US is that electricity generators and other polluters would just increase their prices by whatever the carbon tax is. As Bruce Scneier says in his excellent book "Liars and Outliers", imposing a monetary cost on bad things with the aim of discouraging those bad things doesn't make the people who are "defecting" from the expected norms stop doing it.
IMO the best solution to help reduce emissions is a trading system whereby the government gives every polluting company a limited number of permits to pollute. If they produce less emissions than they have permits for, they can sell the excess permits to someone who needs more. The trick to making it work is to make sure the system captures ALL the polluters and that both the total # of permits in the system and the # of permits given to individual polluters is low enough to keep the cost of permits on the open market high (and hence the incentives to reduce pollution stay high too).
Any time someone invents a way of moving value/wealth around, its going to be subject to regulation by governments looking to prevent its use by criminals and bad guys to move their ill-gotten gains and hide where their money came from.
Doesn't matter if its Bitcoin, US dollars, Second Life currency or cute cat pictures, if it can be used to buy stuff in the real world and has a real-world value, the governments of this world are going to want to regulate it.
Having experienced it first hand, I would say that the Netscape 4.x rendering engine was by far the WORST HTML rendering engine I have ever seen :)
I suspect the UK also didn't go as far because of the sensitivities surrounding anything derived from or connected to the Bletchley Park Enigma work (which is where many of the early British computing pioneers and work came from)
If (as has been claimed by a number of sources) the people who were allegedly raped by Assange no longer want the prosecution to go ahead), why are the Swedish (cops/state prosecutors etc) still interested in continuing with the prosecution?
Maybe the law is different in Sweden but from where I sit, if someone commits an act of rape against someone else, it should be up to the victim to make the decision on whether they want to make a complaint and proceed with prosecution.
If you need a modern "system that just works" in the vein of these old systems, IBM and others will sell it to you.
Comparing a PDP to a modern desktop PC is like comparing a big-rig truck to a Toyota Corolla.
Now THIS is an idea I have had for a while but lacked the skills (and time) to implement. Basically an IM client which does not log anything to disk by default (so there is nothing for anyone to recover about what was said or who was talking, great if you are in a country where the secret police like to seize the computers of suspected dissidents).
As difficult as possible to detect and block. Full end-to-end encryption with unique session keys (so even having the secret keys of all participants in the conversation AND a full log of the network traffic wont let you recover the data). High strength RSA for client to client authentication with strong protections against a MITM attack by a rogue actor (such as a police or intelligence organization)
And in my idea, it would be 100% open source and open spec and as widely distributed (both in terms of number of copies of the program and its code and in terms of geographical location of those copies) as possible. This ensures that its hosted in enough countries that if, say, the US government says "you can't distribute that, it doesn't have the backdoors to let the FBI listen in on conversations as required by CALEA", the program will continue to be available.
I used to use Trillian for a while but then I switched to the open-source Miranda IM client. Talks to most of the networks I need (IRC, ICQ, MSN, AIM) and has all the features I need (even more so with extra plugins). 100% open source so I can hack on it if I wanted to.
Only thing it doesn't do is Skype but you can thank Microsoft for that, not Trillian.
If I lived in the USA (and in the right district), I would specifically vote AGAINST any politician who supported forcing NASA to use ATK systems products.
If ATK systems cant come up with a new product to build and a new use for all those workers, they deserve to go out of business. And yes those workers would then not have a job anymore but hey, that's life, people loose their jobs all the time because the company they work for doesn't need em anymore.
1.Make it illegal under libel laws to claim that someone is violating a patent without providing details of the actual patents (i.e. if someone claims you are violating their patents and wont say which ones, you get to sue them for libel). This will stop the kind of thing companies like Microsoft have been doing where they make nebulous patent claims without actually providing details.
2.Ban any and all patents on any part of the human genome regardless of what form the information is in (including banning patenting of any proteins that are produced by any gene found in the human body).
3.Require that any patent holder who holds a patent covering a standard that is mandated by the federal government MUST license their patents under FRAND terms to anyone wishing to implement that mandated standard. So if the government requires that all TV sets support ATSC digital TV or that TV channels must transmit ATSC digital TV signals, then holders of any patents covering ATSC digital TV must license those patents to anyone who wishes to implement ATSC digital TV in order to comply with the government regulations. (whether that be for the purpose of a receiver that can receive ATSC digital TV or for the purpose of a TV network wishing to transmit ATSC digital TV)
Or if the government mandates that cars feature airbags, then anyone holding relavent airbag patents must license them to any automaker under FRAND terms and cant use the patents to lock out competitors.
Not much in the way of heavy industry in my town and certainly not the sort that is likely to need software development guys.
I would be happy to have ANY job in Software Development. .NET or Oracle or J2EE or any number of other technologies and no-one is going to give you the experience.
But around here everyone wants 3-5 years experience in