I read it had a CO2 atmosphere. Thats not particularly nice for animal life and may also mean that the ocean oxygen sinks have not been filled, which is not good for marine life. Maybe there is some algea there, thats about it. The earth had an oxygen atmosphere for some 3 billion years or so and little happened during that time. It does not seem at all favourable for complex life to exist.
I would be surprised if bitcoin will become popular at least until it is made easier to use for most people. Reading some of the descriptions of this, it sounds like something only a geek could love, it is too overly complex for most people and the user interfaces are probably things only geeks would love. Average people will probably not bother it and it will only be used by a very small geek community. Geeks are smart but they lack understanding of the behaviour of common people and of developing user interfaces that are useable to common people. I call this the Linux effect.
This is overstated and inaccurate headline. A large area of harm can come from a software application accessing memory space which is a hardware adapter mapped into address space of the app, and manipulation of pointers and so on. This is a issue with C level programming where you have direct access to memory addresses and pointers. A javascript implementation of WebGL does not offer access to OpenGL functions by addresses or pointers to the functions at all. Instead it should use a dispatch table below the javascript environment. JS is thus isolated from direct access to hardware and IS NOT using hardware addresses in any way to access functions.The WebGL program can only therefore access the functions via that dispatch table. There are still possible issued with problems with the OpenGL API itself that may need to be addressed for safety. However, direct access to video hardware by a Javascript app is out of the question, it should not be done, and should not be allowed in a Javascript environment. the Javascript is a sandbox and does not provide direct access to memory address space, system calls or other such things. if security is a concern, due to Hardware faults that could be triggered by sending a series of OpenGL commands, the web browser can be configured to use software renderer instead of the hardware rendering, or selectively block that series of OpenGL commands in some way. If there are significant problems with hardware rendering, that may be sometjhing that may have to be considered as a default option. this is something that can affect all applications that are used over a network including gaming applications, since, even a gaming app that sends abstracted updates such as "soldier moves forward 200px" can trigger OpenGL calls in a predictable way. However, these nor WebGL should not expose the graphics hardware directly to Javascript or the network protocol, nor the address space, only OpenGL functions can be called by some sort of token or symbol which is contained within the sandbox environment and does not directly referfence a memory location. Those OpenGL functions are used by a wide range of different network applications, so this is not a problem particular to WebGL.
I am a web rendering engine developer so I have an interest in making sure these things are safe. If necessary we will software render by default until we can be sure about safety with direct rendering. Furthermore this is not a WebGL problem,s, these are bugs in OpenGL itself. There are software rendering workarounds. So this will not affect the availability of WebGL.
I do support WebGL since it will help the web environment compete against Flash.
Cable TV is dead? Only because of the networks incompetance. From a technical perspective cable tv is quite sound. For this reason, it is impossible to stream millions of individual streams of HD video over TCP/IP to millions of users. Cable TV does provide a selection of HD video feeds in a relatively efficient way by having many, many users tune into the same feed. . Also, because of the fact there is not enough bandwidth to carry millions of HD streams to users in a city, the quality of streaming video can be quite bad, and network congestion problems become acute.
Cable TV programming is crap but this does not mean the technical concept is. Its really the only way to bring many, many HD feeds to a large number of people without maxing out bandwidth. I would say, as far as the management and content of the network, why not let users democratically decide what is shown rather than leave it in the hands of corrupt network executives that try to force their preferences for wrestling and cooking shows, celebrity gossip and so on on everyone.
it is likely even more wasteful to have the workers in these paperless offices drive 30 miles to work in a gas guzzling SUV because they want to live out in some gated community far out in the outskirts,
The solution was long ago to move into parcels to compete with UPS. That market is much more stable. USPS failed to realise this simple solution and seize it.
Agreeed. The chinese will get the space stations done. It is quite symbolic that the US due to budget cuts may bring down the ISS, just as China is putting up theres. China in all ways is really the industrial superpower today and they certainly have the resources now. Its not the USA, and they dont have Republican asswipes to deal with. The US is a has been superpower. The writing is on the wall, the US has become a deindustrialised corpse which is becoming somethin g that exports little else than endless wars and bombs. The US has very little that the rest of the world really wants or needs anymore. This is due to the Republican conservative ideology which continues to attack the US middle class and give more tax breaks to the wealthy who offshore their jobs. Much of the good things about the US were done with altruistic systems often involving government science research funding. With Corporations reckless greed the US is mainly becoming a hollowed out consumer. Americans are kept in a state of idiotic reality distortion by constant right wing propoganda. Corporations are basically traitors who continue to sell out the US, they elect Republicans who bankrupt the country with wars, and they offshore jobs and rake in billions of profits, and keep tax rates on these rich scum low, the same wealthy elites who are basically offshoring the US economy and destroying our middle class. If the US wanted to be successful again it would raise taxes on t he rich and protect education, social security and implement universal health care, all pro middle class things. The US middle class are the those who keep things running and develop new technologies, not some wealthy elite sitting on a yacht.
I am pretty sure they will. Its China, not the US. There is one thing to say about their authoritarian government, when they want it done, they get it done. The US projects were derailed by all of the political haggling in the US. At times the divided nature of US politics just kills any progress at all. And extreme budget cutting to appease an ignorant, joe sixpack population who does not understand complex dynamics of a country adn buys into Republican/corporatist/christian reality distortion. They are leaving in ther own deluded reality. Everything is upside down for them. They asre the most antipatriotic people but they think they are patriotic. They are anti-patriotic in opposing taxes and the countries health care and public infrastructure efforts, letting the country fall into the hands of corporations ready to offshore the US to foreign control. They at the same time support the very things that are bankrupting the country, the endless wars and are basically destroying us in all ways by draining our resources to these useless wild goose hunts. Its ironic that Republicans worship the troops and think they are hereos when they are enablers bankrupting this country and causing the country to collapse as resoruces are diverted away from our science and infrastructure development into these black hole wars.
I doubt there would be iphones if this had happened. Sun seems to suffer from the lack of marketing skill and understanding of how average users operates and developing an environment that is suitable for them.
One of the reasons Sun has been doing so poorly as well, and why their business model is wrong and failing, is that the market for supercomputers and mainframes is shrinking. Businesses realise now that you can completely replace millions of dollars computer complexes of 30 years ago with a few $500 consumer PCs, that you dont need that high end expensive, premium hardware anymore. While computing power has increased, business activities have often stayed the same, the payroll, accounting, inventory control, mailing lists, accounts and transaction code takes the same amount of resources it did 30 years ago, but computers today are massively more powerful. With cloud computing, since the computers are far more poweful,fewer computers are needed, as well, in those data centers, to service the same load. All of this means a shrinking market for mainframes, fewer of them needed to do the same things and consumer computers having replaced a large part of that market.
Sun had made themselves dependant on a shrinking business computer market as businesses began to realise they no longer needed this very expernsive, premium top of the line hardware, so it had a shrinking market. They were totally ignorant of how to market or develop products for consumers. In many ways, Sun is similar to Linux, it is completely inept to understand why Microsoft is dominate and what needs to be done to make consumer friendly devices (hint: It is not really GUI design that is the primary reason, it is hardware support: it is engaging hardware vendors and making it so the OS has a stable binary interface for hardware drivers and excellent documentation and SDKs that makes it easy for hardware vendors to support the OS). That Linux does not understand this is one reason it is not widely adopted, in addition to many of its developers being downright arrogant, assuming that people should rearrange their lives around the OS, rather than the OS suit their needs, learn cryptic commands, or write their won device driver to use a piece of hardware. Obviously had Apple had made its main user front end anything like how linux hackers think it should be and requried users to write device drivers it would have been a miserable failure. With Sun it was likely the same problems that Linux has that would have precluded any sort of development of a consumer device.
Interestingly, one of the areas where the demand for computing power at the application level has been increasing is desktop consumer computers! This is due to 3D gaming and other entertainment activity that is still today stressing current CPUs and is gauranteed to consume all of the computing power of the top of the line cutting edge CPUs for some time to come. There is still a massive amount of room for growth in virtual reality gaming resource usage that it is gauranteed to be able to utilise all of the resources of the fastest CPUs yet to come. While daily business operation computing remains more static in resource use, gaming, 3D, virtual reality in consumer computers is where real growth in computer power consumption has been occuring for some time.
Im not sure if of models might be an issue but Nokia also has marketing problems as well, Nokia needs to create a single premium phone model and give it some sort of name, rather than a model number, and then only sell a single premium phone with that brand. A strategy is to sell the lesser, lower end phones under a different brand/company name from the premium high end model.
Part of what Nokia misses is creating the hype of creating the cutting edge visionary device. The idea of running a company selling low end, plain, boring cell phone products and creating an image of that does not work. Nokia has come to represent stale, bland, aging technology. There is a market for simpler older technology but the brand definitely should not be defined by this cheaper, older technology. That Nokia seems to have the idea it can sell cheaper older technology and neglect creating a premium cutting end brand, and this will result in more people buying the phones is a massive error.
In many ways, Nokia has similar problems as GM, which produced for years poor quality or low quality vehicles and damaged many of its brands as a result, assuming that people would always buy their stuff, and losing a differentiated high end. Again creating seperate brand names for the lower end stuff and having using a brand for only the high end top of the line visionary cutting edge phone may be a good plan.
Nokias problems are due to management arrogance, that is the company thinks it can sell phones as some cheap run of the mill commodity and that the cheaper phones could make the company, that stale technology would go over well with people, and that the cutting edge visionary work of apple or google is not important. It is obvious that is a major error.
It is clear that Apple and Google etc are providing a better product and if Nokia can even keep up it is survival of the fittest,.
Patents today are massively abused. Originally developed for the purpose of encourage innovation. tnhey actually squelch it. Many innovations improve on a previous idea. Patents make it difficult for independant developers to improve on and rrefine an idea. Patents have been turned in to a way to squelch independant innovation and create monopoliies, and stagnant technologies which are difficult to improve on or use independantly. Patent holders often charge licence fees so high they preclude independant use or refinement, make the technology too costly to deploy and limit its use, or they do not licence the technlogy at all, gaining a monopoly on ideas.
Both copyright law and patent law badly need reform. Software patents need to be prohibited altogether. Other patents need to be required to be licenced to other persons, for a reasonable percentage of profits (if there is no revenue there would be no fee). Copyrighted works no longer under production or distribution will also be made public domain immediately and must comply with the same reasonable licencing requirements.
The cost of DSL in rural areas probably will not be that great. I suspect they could fund it with much less than $20, since as much of the existing copper twin wire cable can be used, with loop extender equipment being used to regenerate the signal.
Hopefully this will mean a rollout of DSL in remote locations. DSL actually is the best way to bring internet to rural areas, as most of the cable is already laid, all that needs to be done is to install some signal regeneration/loop extender equipment. Fiber optics can also be brought to a node part of the way, but the amount of cable that needs to be replaced is still less. It is amazing the bandwidh that can be seen with newer DSL modems, its enough to even carry video. Its amazing what can be squeezed out of a twisted pair.
the desktop is not going anywhere. Do i want to work on a spreadsheet on a 4x4 inch screen? hell no. Do i want my documents becoming the property of a big corporation and if i lose internet connection i cant get them? Hell no.
It is a good point. Perhaps a multiparty proportional system would be better, would end the dual party system and lead to less us vs. them, such as the party lists in europe, which by its nature. leads to a much greater diversity of parties. All a party needs is 5% of the popular vote. Secondly, it assures that everyones vote counts. A party list can be combined with a transferable prefeerance list vote for people whose party fell below the 5% threshold.
Good question. Its not that ideological since I beleive that people should have a right to do what they wish as long as it does not take away others rights to do the same. So in the case of nudism people should have a right to not wear clothes in an outdoor location such a beach or park, or not to, its their own choice, but they should not have a right to force on others at such places to not where clothes, or to wear them. So, this is letting people make up their own minds about their own preference rather than forcing our preferences on others. I advocate that nudity be made illegal in beaches and parks, this does not mean that private properties could not make their own rules on private property.
Secondly, the only ideology here to speak of is one based on individual rights and self determination, which by its nature abstains from forcing some rule on other people that takes away their own right to make their own self determination choices. This works on the concept people should have a right to live as they wish as long as they are not taking way others rights to do the same. It also connects to nonviolence since violence is a deprivation of a persons right to self determination.
The rules against harmless things such as nude beaches are in fact, based on violence and threats, on something that itself that is harmless. it is the ones who make and enforce such rules that are forcing themselves, often violently, on others.
Nudists are non violent, and live and let live, not ready to force their ways on and control everyone else, like people who who enforce rules against nudism do.
Nudism is about peace, nature, and freedom. It isa peaceful, non violent act that is beneficial spiritually, psychologically and physically. It is healthy on all levels.
I use that as an example. There are many other cases where religious and authoritarian idealogues go wrong, again, forcing their preferences on others, unlike self determination idealogy by which its intrinsic nature seeks to avoid forcing ones preferences on another (this includes, avoidance of violence, that is, non violence, is a self determination based idea).
A deprivation of sex can be harmful to the mind, there is little doubt about that. The toad stuff is obviously not true and wont help matters to promulgate something that is not true.
As far as Suadi Arabia, the state itself commits massive amounts of violence onto its people. As well, the society has little crime due to fear of the oppressive regime, not because its people are necessarily peaceful or rational, most likely many of them are not.
one of the reasons laws against victimless and harmless things damages a society is it sets up a paradox, that the state can illegalise anything it wishes for arbitrary reasons and that people who have done nothing to truly take away anyones rights can be attacked, and that is acceptable. So it creates a sort of mental paradigm which leads to an acceptance of the idea that as long as one is powerful and has control over others one can make any rules one wishes, it sort of leads to authoritarian thinking and societies.
I am suggesting that nudity should be made legal in parks and beaches, and in general, even in most outdoor locations. Private property locations could implement their own rules, that would not change.
*Ding dong the witch is dead*. And good riddance. Censorship has no place in a freedom loving society and its really appalling that Republicans who blather on about freedom are the first to support authoritarian censorship. Censorship and other social conservative ideas generally makes a society by condoning violent behaviour and sanctioning supression and violence against others who have views, expression or opinions some do not like.
Skin never hurt anyone, the idea that nudity or sex is bad (or psychedelics for that matter) is completely concocted by society, these things are victimless, as a society we should let individuals make up their own minds and decisions, rather than have a authoritarian government and the right wing religious organisations, the private quasi or defacto governmental form of that, watching over our every move.
I prefer more of a western European model, with a socially liberal atmosphere and little or no censorship, nude beaches etc, and governments that concern themselves with making sure people have food, housing, good jobs, and health care, and education, rather than obsesssing over imposing arbitrary ideologies on people. As a social libertatian, that is what we believe in and leads to a truly safe society.
The idea that nudity is wrong is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie promulgated by oppressive religious ideologies that are designed to control, enslave and indoctrinate peoples minds. It is opposed to individual liberty and rationality, that people should have individual self determination rights and things which do not deprive others of their own freedom should not be enacted. Nudity is victimless, it takes away no ones right to not or to wear clothes as they prefer. In fact, laws against nudity take away our right to make these choices for themselves. Nudity is truly harmless, and there is much more of it in Europe. Yet Europe is far safer than the US and has much less violent crime, an overall safer society.
The most socially conservative places in the world, such as Iraq, or Afghanistan are also the most dangerous and violent.
Ironically the country that Republicans seem to want is one where public school has been replaced by bible school, harmless. natural and innocent things like nude swimming have been banned, and with children dying on the street from starvation and treatable medical conditions, massive military and industrial prison complexs and so on.
We will all be better off when we evolve past medieval religious ideologies and systems of oppressive social control designed to take away individuals freedom, not preserve them.
The open source drivers supposedly developed in tandem with the kernel ARE crap and do often crash. The idea of the highly reliable open source drivers is a myth. the fact is they are full of bugs because kernel developers cannot possibly test them with all hardware, only a hardware vendor can really do that. With hardware vendor drivers, the hardware vendor will test the hell out of the driver with their hardware. Linux just has to make sure the ABI/API stays stable (or compatability is provided for older iterations of them) so the driver developers have a stable target. If you keep the ABI/API compatability a driver being matched with a kernel is a non issue.
Does Linux want to be something for elite geeks or for common users too? Your attitude is the problem with Linux and why it remains the domain mainly of some elite geeks and unuseable for real people. To make something that is clearly not preferable to Windows and which people do not want to use shows real flaws in software development, it is not successful software.
Perhaps the X/Linux developers should take hardware manufacturers more seriously. Linux still refuses to make a stable driver ABI that hardware vendors can count on. Ive heard the arguments before against that they are they dont make sense. It would allow the user to decide which driver to use, it does not preclude open source drivers, in fact, it would increase deployment of Linux since there would be more users as the Linux hardware support improved. Putting up with a system that has binary drivers that are 4% of the OS, but would help Linux become useable for average people and thus increase rollout of open source is a good trade off. Its also about making the system work how users want, not kernel developers making it so users have a hard time using binary drivers and manufacturers having a hard time supporting it.
Many drivers manufacturers have include proprietary code licenced from other sources. The Linux developers think they are more important than they really are if hardware vendors will completely rewrite code, or open source code they have had no intention of open sourcing, just to satisfy a group of people that is about 1% of desktop users. If Linux would allow a stable ABI to be included with the kernel, Linux might gain user share and better hardware vendor support, and once Linux has much larger user share then it will be in a better position to ask for more open source drivers.
The stable ABI would also not require any big change the kernel, in fact, it could be implemented on a compatability layer module that could be loaded when needed. The ABI support could be included in that layer, rather than deep in the kernel itself, so the idea that a stable ABI would clutter up the kernel code is wrong, the compatability code could be implemented in a seperate layer module.
Another big problems with X.org and Linux is the lack of good documentation of the internals and it being very hard to find good documentation of the internals and interfaces for making drivers. I've looked and there is very little, and what exists is shoddy and extremely poor. We cannot expect hardware makers to spend months trying to figure it all out. At least Windows has fairly complete APi documentation in MSDN and is far better than X or Linux. Linux and X developers, DOCUMENT your code and interfaces. A key part of good code is documentation adn these people document little or nothing. The problems with the pathetic internals documentation, to the point that few people knows how it works and it is very difficult for even expert programmers to be able to understand the system due to the fact little is documented, is a serious problem.
X itself should not be blamed, when in fact, its issues with the X.org/linux driver systems. X itself is a solid standard, and one which has been a benefit due to the backwards compatabiity. It is so important for X and Linux to provide backward compatability at the API and ABI level for both software and drivers, and to document it all well, and then encourage hardware vendors to make drivers, preferably open source, but if they insist on binary only we should make sure that can be done, and that the driver will work across different kernel generations.
One big reason that Linux has low uptake is due to lack of hardware support. Its more than a chicken egg problem. It in many ways is aided by the attitude problems of linux developers themselves. The only way to get decent hardware support is to demand hardware vendors release drivers. Its the only way to get well tested drivers for the hardware, there is too much hardware for Linux developers to buy it all and test to see if the drivers work. However, many hardware drivers will not or cannot release drivers open source. It wont happen in many cases. Either the driver contains third party licenced code or what have you. Yet Linux refuses to allow binary drivers to work and to maintain compatability with binary drivers for past kernels. Hardware makers wont mess with trying to support linux if they have to make 30 different drivers for each kenel and distro combo. Another problem with Linux developers is the simply dismal and pathetic documentation for writing drivers. Ive studied this, I know, the documentation is crap to non existant and many driver makers throw up their hands. Linux developers think they are more important than they really are. Linux has 3% market share yet is far more difficult to work with than Windows. Windows has far better documentation and software kits for driver writing. Linux is 1% or less desktop market share, hardware makers are not going to waste their time with a kernel written by people who dont know how to document things and have an arrogant attitude. I beleive Linux kernel developers have always wanted Linux to be something that was difficult to use and impossible for regular users, this makes them feel special, like they are elites, for actually being able to get the damn thing to actually work.
Binary drivers being made possible and better documentation would actually increase OSS use and would also lead to more OSS drivers in the long run. With more binary drivers user share would increase, once Linux has user share, then it can start to bargain more to get more OSS drivers from companies. Binary are things that OSS purists could opt out of, as well, OSS alternatives could be developed, and the binary drivers could serve to provide something to use until an OSS driver is available. its not like the binary drivers will be forced on anyone. And for about 3% of the kernel being binary we can get a useable, open source system that can take on windows, and once there is a larger user share for Linux, then it can be in a better position to demand more OSS drivers.
This is all a bit arrogant. The fact is the resources do not exist to extend your American quality of life to over 6 billion people. It would take 8 more planets to do that, and probably so many every few centuries as the resources of each is completely exhausted.
No one, who is a true proponent of sustainability, wants to kill people. You need to get over this false, wrong, and completely bone headed idea that people who are concerned about overpopulation are for cullings. Its slanderous, absurd, misleading and does absolutely no good. We advocate educational programs to stabilise population coupled with a charity and end poverty program, utilising contraceptives and countering false cultural myths that often prevent people from using contraceptives or understanding the implications of their behaviours.
We want to save life, that is the whole point of not so depleting the earth and overrunning its resources, adn destroying every last wild creature, that our quality of life has declined. Overpopulation reduces quality of life, such as clean air. beautiful vistas, wide open spaces, forests, wilderness, adn so on. It reduces the per capita resources.
Overpopulation deprives us of our freedom as well, by making resources scarce it creates contention over them so much that it creates conflict and the loss of people to be able to independantly sustain themselves. By overcrowding as well peoples ability to get away from society and live indepenantly if they wish far away from others, is also reduced. Overpopulation drives poverty and ignorance, and violence, leading to a loss of freedom. The cost of resources is increased, land becomes harder to obtain, this makes people more dependant on moentary systems through which people lose their freedom. It is pretty clear that if we care about human freedom and quality of life, that those who want to have endless population growth, driving massive environmental destruction, are opposed to life, quality of life and human freedom. Notice its often authoritarian religions that brainwash people and see people as things to be controlled, that promoted overpopulation.
Population growth is a ponzi scheme on a planet with limited resources. It cannot continue and eventually one way or another will stop. Whether we completely destroy our planets wildlife and environment before that happens is a good question. Continueing population growth is highly detrimental and will only worsen long term issues and problems. Continueing it must stop eventually better to stop population growth now and work to create a sustainable civilisation before we destroy more of our planets environments and increase the stress on living systems further.
I was about to say the same thing. It is so frustrating to see these things posted and a mistake such as that made, it makes it look like the writer doesnt have a clue. The new congress will have its first sessions after the new year.
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I read it had a CO2 atmosphere. Thats not particularly nice for animal life and may also mean that the ocean oxygen sinks have not been filled, which is not good for marine life. Maybe there is some algea there, thats about it. The earth had an oxygen atmosphere for some 3 billion years or so and little happened during that time. It does not seem at all favourable for complex life to exist.
I would be surprised if bitcoin will become popular at least until it is made easier to use for most people. Reading some of the descriptions of this, it sounds like something only a geek could love, it is too overly complex for most people and the user interfaces are probably things only geeks would love. Average people will probably not bother it and it will only be used by a very small geek community. Geeks are smart but they lack understanding of the behaviour of common people and of developing user interfaces that are useable to common people. I call this the Linux effect.
This is overstated and inaccurate headline. A large area of harm can come from a software application accessing memory space which is a hardware adapter mapped into address space of the app, and manipulation of pointers and so on. This is a issue with C level programming where you have direct access to memory addresses and pointers. A javascript implementation of WebGL does not offer access to OpenGL functions by addresses or pointers to the functions at all. Instead it should use a dispatch table below the javascript environment. JS is thus isolated from direct access to hardware and IS NOT using hardware addresses in any way to access functions.The WebGL program can only therefore access the functions via that dispatch table. There are still possible issued with problems with the OpenGL API itself that may need to be addressed for safety. However, direct access to video hardware by a Javascript app is out of the question, it should not be done, and should not be allowed in a Javascript environment. the Javascript is a sandbox and does not provide direct access to memory address space, system calls or other such things. if security is a concern, due to Hardware faults that could be triggered by sending a series of OpenGL commands, the web browser can be configured to use software renderer instead of the hardware rendering, or selectively block that series of OpenGL commands in some way. If there are significant problems with hardware rendering, that may be sometjhing that may have to be considered as a default option. this is something that can affect all applications that are used over a network including gaming applications, since, even a gaming app that sends abstracted updates such as "soldier moves forward 200px" can trigger OpenGL calls in a predictable way. However, these nor WebGL should not expose the graphics hardware directly to Javascript or the network protocol, nor the address space, only OpenGL functions can be called by some sort of token or symbol which is contained within the sandbox environment and does not directly referfence a memory location. Those OpenGL functions are used by a wide range of different network applications, so this is not a problem particular to WebGL.
I am a web rendering engine developer so I have an interest in making sure these things are safe. If necessary we will software render by default until we can be sure about safety with direct rendering. Furthermore this is not a WebGL problem,s, these are bugs in OpenGL itself. There are software rendering workarounds. So this will not affect the availability of WebGL.
I do support WebGL since it will help the web environment compete against Flash.
Cable TV is dead? Only because of the networks incompetance. From a technical perspective cable tv is quite sound. For this reason, it is impossible to stream millions of individual streams of HD video over TCP/IP to millions of users. Cable TV does provide a selection of HD video feeds in a relatively efficient way by having many, many users tune into the same feed. . Also, because of the fact there is not enough bandwidth to carry millions of HD streams to users in a city, the quality of streaming video can be quite bad, and network congestion problems become acute.
Cable TV programming is crap but this does not mean the technical concept is. Its really the only way to bring many, many HD feeds to a large number of people without maxing out bandwidth. I would say, as far as the management and content of the network, why not let users democratically decide what is shown rather than leave it in the hands of corrupt network executives that try to force their preferences for wrestling and cooking shows, celebrity gossip and so on on everyone.
Whats he chance of having life here or on Europa?
it is likely even more wasteful to have the workers in these paperless offices drive 30 miles to work in a gas guzzling SUV because they want to live out in some gated community far out in the outskirts,
The solution was long ago to move into parcels to compete with UPS. That market is much more stable. USPS failed to realise this simple solution and seize it.
Agreeed. The chinese will get the space stations done. It is quite symbolic that the US due to budget cuts may bring down the ISS, just as China is putting up theres. China in all ways is really the industrial superpower today and they certainly have the resources now. Its not the USA, and they dont have Republican asswipes to deal with. The US is a has been superpower. The writing is on the wall, the US has become a deindustrialised corpse which is becoming somethin g that exports little else than endless wars and bombs. The US has very little that the rest of the world really wants or needs anymore. This is due to the Republican conservative ideology which continues to attack the US middle class and give more tax breaks to the wealthy who offshore their jobs. Much of the good things about the US were done with altruistic systems often involving government science research funding. With Corporations reckless greed the US is mainly becoming a hollowed out consumer. Americans are kept in a state of idiotic reality distortion by constant right wing propoganda. Corporations are basically traitors who continue to sell out the US, they elect Republicans who bankrupt the country with wars, and they offshore jobs and rake in billions of profits, and keep tax rates on these rich scum low, the same wealthy elites who are basically offshoring the US economy and destroying our middle class. If the US wanted to be successful again it would raise taxes on t he rich and protect education, social security and implement universal health care, all pro middle class things. The US middle class are the those who keep things running and develop new technologies, not some wealthy elite sitting on a yacht.
I am pretty sure they will. Its China, not the US. There is one thing to say about their authoritarian government, when they want it done, they get it done. The US projects were derailed by all of the political haggling in the US. At times the divided nature of US politics just kills any progress at all. And extreme budget cutting to appease an ignorant, joe sixpack population who does not understand complex dynamics of a country adn buys into Republican/corporatist/christian reality distortion. They are leaving in ther own deluded reality. Everything is upside down for them. They asre the most antipatriotic people but they think they are patriotic. They are anti-patriotic in opposing taxes and the countries health care and public infrastructure efforts, letting the country fall into the hands of corporations ready to offshore the US to foreign control. They at the same time support the very things that are bankrupting the country, the endless wars and are basically destroying us in all ways by draining our resources to these useless wild goose hunts. Its ironic that Republicans worship the troops and think they are hereos when they are enablers bankrupting this country and causing the country to collapse as resoruces are diverted away from our science and infrastructure development into these black hole wars.
I doubt there would be iphones if this had happened. Sun seems to suffer from the lack of marketing skill and understanding of how average users operates and developing an environment that is suitable for them.
One of the reasons Sun has been doing so poorly as well, and why their business model is wrong and failing, is that the market for supercomputers and mainframes is shrinking. Businesses realise now that you can completely replace millions of dollars computer complexes of 30 years ago with a few $500 consumer PCs, that you dont need that high end expensive, premium hardware anymore. While computing power has increased, business activities have often stayed the same, the payroll, accounting, inventory control, mailing lists, accounts and transaction code takes the same amount of resources it did 30 years ago, but computers today are massively more powerful. With cloud computing, since the computers are far more poweful,fewer computers are needed, as well, in those data centers, to service the same load. All of this means a shrinking market for mainframes, fewer of them needed to do the same things and consumer computers having replaced a large part of that market.
Sun had made themselves dependant on a shrinking business computer market as businesses began to realise they no longer needed this very expernsive, premium top of the line hardware, so it had a shrinking market. They were totally ignorant of how to market or develop products for consumers. In many ways, Sun is similar to Linux, it is completely inept to understand why Microsoft is dominate and what needs to be done to make consumer friendly devices (hint: It is not really GUI design that is the primary reason, it is hardware support: it is engaging hardware vendors and making it so the OS has a stable binary interface for hardware drivers and excellent documentation and SDKs that makes it easy for hardware vendors to support the OS). That Linux does not understand this is one reason it is not widely adopted, in addition to many of its developers being downright arrogant, assuming that people should rearrange their lives around the OS, rather than the OS suit their needs, learn cryptic commands, or write their won device driver to use a piece of hardware. Obviously had Apple had made its main user front end anything like how linux hackers think it should be and requried users to write device drivers it would have been a miserable failure. With Sun it was likely the same problems that Linux has that would have precluded any sort of development of a consumer device.
Interestingly, one of the areas where the demand for computing power at the application level has been increasing is desktop consumer computers! This is due to 3D gaming and other entertainment activity that is still today stressing current CPUs and is gauranteed to consume all of the computing power of the top of the line cutting edge CPUs for some time to come. There is still a massive amount of room for growth in virtual reality gaming resource usage that it is gauranteed to be able to utilise all of the resources of the fastest CPUs yet to come. While daily business operation computing remains more static in resource use, gaming, 3D, virtual reality in consumer computers is where real growth in computer power consumption has been occuring for some time.
Im not sure if of models might be an issue but Nokia also has marketing problems as well, Nokia needs to create a single premium phone model and give it some sort of name, rather than a model number, and then only sell a single premium phone with that brand. A strategy is to sell the lesser, lower end phones under a different brand/company name from the premium high end model.
Part of what Nokia misses is creating the hype of creating the cutting edge visionary device. The idea of running a company selling low end, plain, boring cell phone products and creating an image of that does not work. Nokia has come to represent stale, bland, aging technology. There is a market for simpler older technology but the brand definitely should not be defined by this cheaper, older technology. That Nokia seems to have the idea it can sell cheaper older technology and neglect creating a premium cutting end brand, and this will result in more people buying the phones is a massive error.
In many ways, Nokia has similar problems as GM, which produced for years poor quality or low quality vehicles and damaged many of its brands as a result, assuming that people would always buy their stuff, and losing a differentiated high end. Again creating seperate brand names for the lower end stuff and having using a brand for only the high end top of the line visionary cutting edge phone may be a good plan.
Nokias problems are due to management arrogance, that is the company thinks it can sell phones as some cheap run of the mill commodity and that the cheaper phones could make the company, that stale technology would go over well with people, and that the cutting edge visionary work of apple or google is not important. It is obvious that is a major error.
It is clear that Apple and Google etc are providing a better product and if Nokia can even keep up it is survival of the fittest,.
Patents today are massively abused. Originally developed for the purpose of encourage innovation. tnhey actually squelch it. Many innovations improve on a previous idea. Patents make it difficult for independant developers to improve on and rrefine an idea. Patents have been turned in to a way to squelch independant innovation and create monopoliies, and stagnant technologies which are difficult to improve on or use independantly. Patent holders often charge licence fees so high they preclude independant use or refinement, make the technology too costly to deploy and limit its use, or they do not licence the technlogy at all, gaining a monopoly on ideas.
Both copyright law and patent law badly need reform. Software patents need to be prohibited altogether. Other patents need to be required to be licenced to other persons, for a reasonable percentage of profits (if there is no revenue there would be no fee). Copyrighted works no longer under production or distribution will also be made public domain immediately and must comply with the same reasonable licencing requirements.
The cost of DSL in rural areas probably will not be that great. I suspect they could fund it with much less than $20, since as much of the existing copper twin wire cable can be used, with loop extender equipment being used to regenerate the signal.
Hopefully this will mean a rollout of DSL in remote locations. DSL actually is the best way to bring internet to rural areas, as most of the cable is already laid, all that needs to be done is to install some signal regeneration/loop extender equipment. Fiber optics can also be brought to a node part of the way, but the amount of cable that needs to be replaced is still less. It is amazing the bandwidh that can be seen with newer DSL modems, its enough to even carry video. Its amazing what can be squeezed out of a twisted pair.
the desktop is not going anywhere. Do i want to work on a spreadsheet on a 4x4 inch screen? hell no. Do i want my documents becoming the property of a big corporation and if i lose internet connection i cant get them? Hell no.
It is a good point. Perhaps a multiparty proportional system would be better, would end the dual party system and lead to less us vs. them, such as the party lists in europe, which by its nature. leads to a much greater diversity of parties. All a party needs is 5% of the popular vote. Secondly, it assures that everyones vote counts. A party list can be combined with a transferable prefeerance list vote for people whose party fell below the 5% threshold.
Good question. Its not that ideological since I beleive that people should have a right to do what they wish as long as it does not take away others rights to do the same. So in the case of nudism people should have a right to not wear clothes in an outdoor location such a beach or park, or not to, its their own choice, but they should not have a right to force on others at such places to not where clothes, or to wear them. So, this is letting people make up their own minds about their own preference rather than forcing our preferences on others. I advocate that nudity be made illegal in beaches and parks, this does not mean that private properties could not make their own rules on private property.
Secondly, the only ideology here to speak of is one based on individual rights and self determination, which by its nature abstains from forcing some rule on other people that takes away their own right to make their own self determination choices. This works on the concept people should have a right to live as they wish as long as they are not taking way others rights to do the same. It also connects to nonviolence since violence is a deprivation of a persons right to self determination.
The rules against harmless things such as nude beaches are in fact, based on violence and threats, on something that itself that is harmless. it is the ones who make and enforce such rules that are forcing themselves, often violently, on others.
Nudists are non violent, and live and let live, not ready to force their ways on and control everyone else, like people who who enforce rules against nudism do.
Nudism is about peace, nature, and freedom. It isa peaceful, non violent act that is beneficial spiritually, psychologically and physically. It is healthy on all levels.
I use that as an example. There are many other cases where religious and authoritarian idealogues go wrong, again, forcing their preferences on others, unlike self determination idealogy by which its intrinsic nature seeks to avoid forcing ones preferences on another (this includes, avoidance of violence, that is, non violence, is a self determination based idea).
A deprivation of sex can be harmful to the mind, there is little doubt about that. The toad stuff is obviously not true and wont help matters to promulgate something that is not true.
As far as Suadi Arabia, the state itself commits massive amounts of violence onto its people. As well, the society has little crime due to fear of the oppressive regime, not because its people are necessarily peaceful or rational, most likely many of them are not.
one of the reasons laws against victimless and harmless things damages a society is it sets up a paradox, that the state can illegalise anything it wishes for arbitrary reasons and that people who have done nothing to truly take away anyones rights can be attacked, and that is acceptable. So it creates a sort of mental paradigm which leads to an acceptance of the idea that as long as one is powerful and has control over others one can make any rules one wishes, it sort of leads to authoritarian thinking and societies.
I am suggesting that nudity should be made legal in parks and beaches, and in general, even in most outdoor locations. Private property locations could implement their own rules, that would not change.
*Ding dong the witch is dead*. And good riddance. Censorship has no place in a freedom loving society and its really appalling that Republicans who blather on about freedom are the first to support authoritarian censorship. Censorship and other social conservative ideas generally makes a society by condoning violent behaviour and sanctioning supression and violence against others who have views, expression or opinions some do not like.
Skin never hurt anyone, the idea that nudity or sex is bad (or psychedelics for that matter) is completely concocted by society, these things are victimless, as a society we should let individuals make up their own minds and decisions, rather than have a authoritarian government and the right wing religious organisations, the private quasi or defacto governmental form of that, watching over our every move.
I prefer more of a western European model, with a socially liberal atmosphere and little or no censorship, nude beaches etc, and governments that concern themselves with making sure people have food, housing, good jobs, and health care, and education, rather than obsesssing over imposing arbitrary ideologies on people. As a social libertatian, that is what we believe in and leads to a truly safe society.
The idea that nudity is wrong is, in fact, a lie. It is a lie promulgated by oppressive religious ideologies that are designed to control, enslave and indoctrinate peoples minds. It is opposed to individual liberty and rationality, that people should have individual self determination rights and things which do not deprive others of their own freedom should not be enacted. Nudity is victimless, it takes away no ones right to not or to wear clothes as they prefer. In fact, laws against nudity take away our right to make these choices for themselves. Nudity is truly harmless, and there is much more of it in Europe. Yet Europe is far safer than the US and has much less violent crime, an overall safer society.
The most socially conservative places in the world, such as Iraq, or Afghanistan are also the most dangerous and violent.
Ironically the country that Republicans seem to want is one where public school has been replaced by bible school, harmless. natural and innocent things like nude swimming have been banned, and with children dying on the street from starvation and treatable medical conditions, massive military and industrial prison complexs and so on.
We will all be better off when we evolve past medieval religious ideologies and systems of oppressive social control designed to take away individuals freedom, not preserve them.
The open source drivers supposedly developed in tandem with the kernel ARE crap and do often crash. The idea of the highly reliable open source drivers is a myth. the fact is they are full of bugs because kernel developers cannot possibly test them with all hardware, only a hardware vendor can really do that. With hardware vendor drivers, the hardware vendor will test the hell out of the driver with their hardware. Linux just has to make sure the ABI/API stays stable (or compatability is provided for older iterations of them) so the driver developers have a stable target. If you keep the ABI/API compatability a driver being matched with a kernel is a non issue.
Does Linux want to be something for elite geeks or for common users too? Your attitude is the problem with Linux and why it remains the domain mainly of some elite geeks and unuseable for real people. To make something that is clearly not preferable to Windows and which people do not want to use shows real flaws in software development, it is not successful software.
Perhaps the X/Linux developers should take hardware manufacturers more seriously. Linux still refuses to make a stable driver ABI that hardware vendors can count on. Ive heard the arguments before against that they are they dont make sense. It would allow the user to decide which driver to use, it does not preclude open source drivers, in fact, it would increase deployment of Linux since there would be more users as the Linux hardware support improved. Putting up with a system that has binary drivers that are 4% of the OS, but would help Linux become useable for average people and thus increase rollout of open source is a good trade off. Its also about making the system work how users want, not kernel developers making it so users have a hard time using binary drivers and manufacturers having a hard time supporting it.
Many drivers manufacturers have include proprietary code licenced from other sources. The Linux developers think they are more important than they really are if hardware vendors will completely rewrite code, or open source code they have had no intention of open sourcing, just to satisfy a group of people that is about 1% of desktop users. If Linux would allow a stable ABI to be included with the kernel, Linux might gain user share and better hardware vendor support, and once Linux has much larger user share then it will be in a better position to ask for more open source drivers.
The stable ABI would also not require any big change the kernel, in fact, it could be implemented on a compatability layer module that could be loaded when needed. The ABI support could be included in that layer, rather than deep in the kernel itself, so the idea that a stable ABI would clutter up the kernel code is wrong, the compatability code could be implemented in a seperate layer module.
Another big problems with X.org and Linux is the lack of good documentation of the internals and it being very hard to find good documentation of the internals and interfaces for making drivers. I've looked and there is very little, and what exists is shoddy and extremely poor. We cannot expect hardware makers to spend months trying to figure it all out. At least Windows has fairly complete APi documentation in MSDN and is far better than X or Linux. Linux and X developers, DOCUMENT your code and interfaces. A key part of good code is documentation adn these people document little or nothing. The problems with the pathetic internals documentation, to the point that few people knows how it works and it is very difficult for even expert programmers to be able to understand the system due to the fact little is documented, is a serious problem.
X itself should not be blamed, when in fact, its issues with the X.org/linux driver systems. X itself is a solid standard, and one which has been a benefit due to the backwards compatabiity. It is so important for X and Linux to provide backward compatability at the API and ABI level for both software and drivers, and to document it all well, and then encourage hardware vendors to make drivers, preferably open source, but if they insist on binary only we should make sure that can be done, and that the driver will work across different kernel generations.
One big reason that Linux has low uptake is due to lack of hardware support. Its more than a chicken egg problem. It in many ways is aided by the attitude problems of linux developers themselves. The only way to get decent hardware support is to demand hardware vendors release drivers. Its the only way to get well tested drivers for the hardware, there is too much hardware for Linux developers to buy it all and test to see if the drivers work. However, many hardware drivers will not or cannot release drivers open source. It wont happen in many cases. Either the driver contains third party licenced code or what have you. Yet Linux refuses to allow binary drivers to work and to maintain compatability with binary drivers for past kernels. Hardware makers wont mess with trying to support linux if they have to make 30 different drivers for each kenel and distro combo. Another problem with Linux developers is the simply dismal and pathetic documentation for writing drivers. Ive studied this, I know, the documentation is crap to non existant and many driver makers throw up their hands. Linux developers think they are more important than they really are. Linux has 3% market share yet is far more difficult to work with than Windows. Windows has far better documentation and software kits for driver writing. Linux is 1% or less desktop market share, hardware makers are not going to waste their time with a kernel written by people who dont know how to document things and have an arrogant attitude. I beleive Linux kernel developers have always wanted Linux to be something that was difficult to use and impossible for regular users, this makes them feel special, like they are elites, for actually being able to get the damn thing to actually work.
Binary drivers being made possible and better documentation would actually increase OSS use and would also lead to more OSS drivers in the long run. With more binary drivers user share would increase, once Linux has user share, then it can start to bargain more to get more OSS drivers from companies. Binary are things that OSS purists could opt out of, as well, OSS alternatives could be developed, and the binary drivers could serve to provide something to use until an OSS driver is available. its not like the binary drivers will be forced on anyone. And for about 3% of the kernel being binary we can get a useable, open source system that can take on windows, and once there is a larger user share for Linux, then it can be in a better position to demand more OSS drivers.
This is all a bit arrogant. The fact is the resources do not exist to extend your American quality of life to over 6 billion people. It would take 8 more planets to do that, and probably so many every few centuries as the resources of each is completely exhausted.
No one, who is a true proponent of sustainability, wants to kill people. You need to get over this false, wrong, and completely bone headed idea that people who are concerned about overpopulation are for cullings. Its slanderous, absurd, misleading and does absolutely no good. We advocate educational programs to stabilise population coupled with a charity and end poverty program, utilising contraceptives and countering false cultural myths that often prevent people from using contraceptives or understanding the implications of their behaviours.
We want to save life, that is the whole point of not so depleting the earth and overrunning its resources, adn destroying every last wild creature, that our quality of life has declined. Overpopulation reduces quality of life, such as clean air. beautiful vistas, wide open spaces, forests, wilderness, adn so on. It reduces the per capita resources.
Overpopulation deprives us of our freedom as well, by making resources scarce it creates contention over them so much that it creates conflict and the loss of people to be able to independantly sustain themselves. By overcrowding as well peoples ability to get away from society and live indepenantly if they wish far away from others, is also reduced. Overpopulation drives poverty and ignorance, and violence, leading to a loss of freedom. The cost of resources is increased, land becomes harder to obtain, this makes people more dependant on moentary systems through which people lose their freedom. It is pretty clear that if we care about human freedom and quality of life, that those who want to have endless population growth, driving massive environmental destruction, are opposed to life, quality of life and human freedom. Notice its often authoritarian religions that brainwash people and see people as things to be controlled, that promoted overpopulation.
Population growth is a ponzi scheme on a planet with limited resources. It cannot continue and eventually one way or another will stop. Whether we completely destroy our planets wildlife and environment before that happens is a good question. Continueing population growth is highly detrimental and will only worsen long term issues and problems. Continueing it must stop eventually better to stop population growth now and work to create a sustainable civilisation before we destroy more of our planets environments and increase the stress on living systems further.
I was about to say the same thing. It is so frustrating to see these things posted and a mistake such as that made, it makes it look like the writer doesnt have a clue. The new congress will have its first sessions after the new year.
Dont be so sure. Isreal provides a perfect cover story to invade oil rich lands nearby.