If you are going to visit Japan, there is a special travel pass you can get, which is only for tourists. It allows you to travel on any train in Japan over one, two, three or four weeks. It is well worth it.
Having spent three weeks travelling around Japan on their trains, I can confirm that they are very impressive. Many of the trains have the kind of luxury fittings that you'd expect to find flying first class. But they are expensive.
Although I believe that Europe is currently developing a Europe-wide high-speed rail system, Japan has had one for years. Why is it only Japan that has such an advanced train system? Travelling by train is great - much more environmentally sound and safer than travelling by car, and of course you get to use the travelling time productively, especially when the trains have plugs for laptops and network connections/WiFi.
Question: Why is it that many people in the UK are get so upset about the idea of national ID cards, when nobody seems to mind (or notice) other even more "big brother" things that go on in the UK, such as the national grid of video cameras on every street corner and road?
The French have always been a big proponent but then again they have this massive penis envy with respect to the US.
It has nothing to do with penis envy. As a European, I want our economy to be strong and united, and our defense force strong and not reliant on a third party. This is not because I envy the USA. It is because I live in Europe, and even if the USA says that it'll propect us in the case of a third world war, I'd much rather the EU had it's own capabilities because the USA has shown itself to be increasingly unilateral in its actions.
Some in the current administration in the USA have even been questioning the "loyalty" of the UK recently, and if the administration is capable of that then it's capable of stabbling its 'lesser' friends in the back.
Sorry, but that's just the way it feels to me at the moment. Hopefully something will change in the near future and we'll be able to feel that the USA is a great and friendly power again.
Last time I used a cybercafe in Italy (Florence), they demanded to see my passport.
That might have been because you were paying with a credit card. In many countries you have to show ID if paying with a card. I don't know of any law in Italy that demands ID at Internet Cafes.
Isn't eliminating online anonimity practically impossible? What about cybercafes, for instance? (Although not big in the USA, cybercafes are one of the main ways to access the internet in many poorer countries)
Secondly, supposing you did manage it by imposing some kind of draconian laws i.e. you have to log on at all cybercafes with some universal ID. Then wouldn't identity theft become an even bigger problem - i.e. hackers would pinch other peoples identities to hack.
Most companies can't randomly delete their competitors' packets because malicious packet drops will be handled the same way as random packet drops: the sender will route around the failure point. It would only be effective if a company controlled a competitor's only uplink.
So, it's a well designed system.
To stuff the PageRank rating, however, a company only needs to change its own pages, not to change those of its competitors. Any large company that could afford to spend time/money could potentially break the system.
You are describing a page ranking system that can be broken, so it's not well designed. I think the key is the fact that you only have control over your own web sites - if you can break the system for your competitors by modifying your own site them the page ranking system you are using is faulty.
Your examples are bespoke systems for very specific purposes. There would be no benefit in open sourcing them because they are only used by the people that write them.
But lets ignore that. Let's say, just for arguments sake, that the Revenue Service did want to open source software that only it uses. There is no reason why it couldn't do it - you see you assume that for instance, the reveunues software would contain hard-coded rules like, "if a bar claims business costs of over 55% of its income, then flag it for investigation". Now, it is very unlikely that the software the revenue uses has this kind of information hardcoded into it. These rules would be in database of some kind. So the reveunue could releases the software it uses as open source - it wouldn't be much help to crooked accountants if they didn't have access to the rule base.
Believe it or not, there are some applications that CANNOT BE EFFECTIVELY OPEN SOURCED.
Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.
Believe it or not, this would depend on HOW YOU DO IT.
I seem no reason why search engine technology couldn't be open sourced if it was approached in a sensible way from a technical viewpoint. After all, the technology of the internet itself is all open source, and yet we don't really get problems with companies trying to fiddle that software in their favour (for instance, randomly deleting packets from their competitors).
1) a future version of MS Outlook will offer all of these features in an easy to use way.
2) The OSS community will scream "They're evil! They're just trying to force a proprietry solution on everyone!"
3) The OSS community will then copy what they MS done, or try to catch up with their own solution.
Don't get me wrong. I'm really pro-OSS. I just despair at the short sightedness of the community sometimes, and its lack of understanding of end-user requirements.
This is very simple, it's called "GnuPG meets Procmail".
Accept to the secure mailbox only e-mail signed with a signature for which the identity chain has been verified.
Find some spam still coming in, in a signed form? Distrust the weak link in the identity chain, and you're done.
Easier said than done, eh?
Ah, yes. The typical OSS fanatics answer. "You can already to that! All you have to do is install snorbort on your flangewatsit, and use the command line to set the niddle flag. It's easy!"
I sometimes wonder if OSS will ever make any significant dent in the desktop market. Unfortunately the OSS community doesn't seem to get what's needed to make it happen.
I've never understood why this isn't something that the OSS community hasn't tried to tackle.
For business purposes, I want an email system that:
1) Is Spam free. 2) Is secure. 3) Is failsafe - i.e. if the recipient doesn't receive the message, I want to know about it.
Surely from a technical perspective, this isn't that difficult?
Why can't the OSS mail clients agree on a standard for doing this. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, for instance, to have two mail boxes (or whatever you want to call them) for a single email address - one for "secure emails", and the other for the rest. The secure email box would only recieve emails that were from an approved address.
This could be a great way for OSS software to creep into organisations - I could tell my clients, for instance, hey, if you use Thunderbird, we can email each other more securely/without spam/in a failsafe manner. The network effects of this kind of promotion for OSS could be fantastic.
This looks like an opportunity that's going to waste for the OSS community. Come on guys, or people will start saying we don't innovate!
One thing I'm not clear about when we're talking about sub-atomic particles - how do we know we've got it right? I mean, the idea that these are particles - discrete physical entities if you like - comes from observations of effect and are, as far as I can tell, purely abstractions of what is actually going on. Sometimes abstractions - which of course helps the human mind get understand complex things - can actually mislead. How do we know we've got our thinking right about how sub-atomic particles work?
but I can see that Microsoft may "cut off it's nose to spite it's face" ie not make the player available at all, to spin the judgement against them as "dooming the EU market to a second-class status".
I really doubt they would do that. It's not like the market for music will disappear just because Microsoft isn't it in.
we'll soon be able to transfer our 911 protection as well.
Can you explain what this means? I know 911 is your emergency telephone number for the police etc., but what do you mean by "transfer our 911 protection"?
I studied biology and one of the lecturers was an expert in viruses. He is convinced that there is a high probability of a global, deadly flu-like virus sometime in the near-term future. (I remember one of his memorable phrases - be thankful that the HIV virus is so difficult to catch, you have to have sex with the carrier. Imagine if they just had to sneeze near you...)
Anyway, what do you do when this deadly virus breaks out? Apparently the thing to do is head for the hills - take a caravan somewhere remote, for instance, and live there for six months or so. With a shotgun, just in case things get really desperate.
Just so you know. Although perhaps I'm going to regret posting this on Slashdot. I'm not sure living in a world in which only the nerds survive would be worth it...
It seems to me that the most important thing to gain widespread acceptance of Linux is for the big PC manufacturers to promote and factory install it.
We used to hear that when companies such as Dell and HP were approached about this, they would be very hesitant about it, probably due to fear of what Microsoft might do in retaliation.
Is this still the case? Do you think we are ever going to see Dell offering Linux as an option on their standard desktops, for example?
Consider - worlds largest post company - Deutsche Post. The airline that carries the most passengers - Lufthansa. The Germans own a good many of the biggest companies in the auto industry. And Deutsche Telecom (which I believe includes T-Online) is one of the world's largest telecomms.
I think people fail to realise how powerful the German business sector is. If Germany was the same size of the USA, I'm sure it would be the top dog at the moment, not the USA. And now that the European European Union is creating the biggest single global market, Germany should be able to increase it's economy even further as it is at the heart of Europe.
Distressed damsel: Help, help! These new door opening robots have gained self-awareness and are trying to take over the world!
Hero: Quick, run upstairs!
[Damsel and hero are at the top of the stairs, watching the robots]
Damsel: What are they doing? They're whispering...
Hero: Plotting some foul deed, no doubt.
Damsel: Oh no! They're opening all the doors, letting in a nasty cold draft!
Hero: Those evil fiends! We have to do something quick!
Damsel: There's only one man who can save us now! Mild-mannered Linus Torvalds, figurehead of the Open Source movement!!
Hero: Great idea! He can send a pack of angry penguins! I'll email him now!
Hero: [tapping on laptop keyboard, mumbling to himself] Dear Linus, we are trapped upstairs by self-aware door opening robot fiends that are intent on taking over the world! Please help!
[Several hours later. Hero and Damsel are slumped against the wall, looking very bored]
Surely it is relatively easy to make a helicopter that can fly itself? Seriously. All the need to be able to do is go up, down, forward and turn. The tricky bit would be landing, but then all they have to do is have a flat surface because they can land just by going down.
An self-flying plane would be much harder, and any vehicle that needs to navigate on land due to all the obstacles.
Not impressed. If the only reason is newsworthy is because it has been stolen, why does should it be considered "news for nerds"?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reason the US as a whole doesn't invest more in trains is the fact that the country is A. Pretty big and B. Pretty Empty.
That actually sounds more like a reason why it would be sensible to have a rail system to me, rather than a reason it hasn't got one.
for those of us who don't use that artificial metric crap.
Yes, for those of us with twelve fingers, imperial measurements are much more natural.
If you are going to visit Japan, there is a special travel pass you can get, which is only for tourists. It allows you to travel on any train in Japan over one, two, three or four weeks. It is well worth it.
Having spent three weeks travelling around Japan on their trains, I can confirm that they are very impressive. Many of the trains have the kind of luxury fittings that you'd expect to find flying first class. But they are expensive.
Although I believe that Europe is currently developing a Europe-wide high-speed rail system, Japan has had one for years. Why is it only Japan that has such an advanced train system? Travelling by train is great - much more environmentally sound and safer than travelling by car, and of course you get to use the travelling time productively, especially when the trains have plugs for laptops and network connections/WiFi.
Why has this been modded down to -1? It's the guy's opinion and it's perfectly reasonable.
Question: Why is it that many people in the UK are get so upset about the idea of national ID cards, when nobody seems to mind (or notice) other even more "big brother" things that go on in the UK, such as the national grid of video cameras on every street corner and road?
The French have always been a big proponent but then again they have this massive penis envy with respect to the US.
It has nothing to do with penis envy. As a European, I want our economy to be strong and united, and our defense force strong and not reliant on a third party. This is not because I envy the USA. It is because I live in Europe, and even if the USA says that it'll propect us in the case of a third world war, I'd much rather the EU had it's own capabilities because the USA has shown itself to be increasingly unilateral in its actions.
Some in the current administration in the USA have even been questioning the "loyalty" of the UK recently, and if the administration is capable of that then it's capable of stabbling its 'lesser' friends in the back.
Sorry, but that's just the way it feels to me at the moment. Hopefully something will change in the near future and we'll be able to feel that the USA is a great and friendly power again.
Last time I used a cybercafe in Italy (Florence), they demanded to see my passport.
That might have been because you were paying with a credit card. In many countries you have to show ID if paying with a card. I don't know of any law in Italy that demands ID at Internet Cafes.
Wow... that's pretty surprising. I'm hard-pressed to come up with any non-personal uses for IM in the workplace.
Don't you have to communicate with other people where you work?
Isn't eliminating online anonimity practically impossible? What about cybercafes, for instance? (Although not big in the USA, cybercafes are one of the main ways to access the internet in many poorer countries)
Secondly, supposing you did manage it by imposing some kind of draconian laws i.e. you have to log on at all cybercafes with some universal ID. Then wouldn't identity theft become an even bigger problem - i.e. hackers would pinch other peoples identities to hack.
Most companies can't randomly delete their competitors' packets because malicious packet drops will be handled the same way as random packet drops: the sender will route around the failure point. It would only be effective if a company controlled a competitor's only uplink.
So, it's a well designed system.
To stuff the PageRank rating, however, a company only needs to change its own pages, not to change those of its competitors. Any large company that could afford to spend time/money could potentially break the system.
You are describing a page ranking system that can be broken, so it's not well designed. I think the key is the fact that you only have control over your own web sites - if you can break the system for your competitors by modifying your own site them the page ranking system you are using is faulty.
These four examples destroy your silly notion.
You seem to be very confused.
Your examples are bespoke systems for very specific purposes. There would be no benefit in open sourcing them because they are only used by the people that write them.
But lets ignore that. Let's say, just for arguments sake, that the Revenue Service did want to open source software that only it uses. There is no reason why it couldn't do it - you see you assume that for instance, the reveunues software would contain hard-coded rules like, "if a bar claims business costs of over 55% of its income, then flag it for investigation". Now, it is very unlikely that the software the revenue uses has this kind of information hardcoded into it. These rules would be in database of some kind. So the reveunue could releases the software it uses as open source - it wouldn't be much help to crooked accountants if they didn't have access to the rule base.
The same is true for your other two examples.
Believe it or not, there are some applications that CANNOT BE EFFECTIVELY OPEN SOURCED.
Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.
Believe it or not, this would depend on HOW YOU DO IT.
I seem no reason why search engine technology couldn't be open sourced if it was approached in a sensible way from a technical viewpoint. After all, the technology of the internet itself is all open source, and yet we don't really get problems with companies trying to fiddle that software in their favour (for instance, randomly deleting packets from their competitors).
For the future, I predict the following thing:
1) a future version of MS Outlook will offer all of these features in an easy to use way.
2) The OSS community will scream "They're evil! They're just trying to force a proprietry solution on everyone!"
3) The OSS community will then copy what they MS done, or try to catch up with their own solution.
Don't get me wrong. I'm really pro-OSS. I just despair at the short sightedness of the community sometimes, and its lack of understanding of end-user requirements.
This is very simple, it's called "GnuPG meets Procmail".
Accept to the secure mailbox only e-mail signed with a signature for which the identity chain has been verified.
Find some spam still coming in, in a signed form? Distrust the weak link in the identity chain, and you're done.
Easier said than done, eh?
Ah, yes. The typical OSS fanatics answer. "You can already to that! All you have to do is install snorbort on your flangewatsit, and use the command line to set the niddle flag. It's easy!"
I sometimes wonder if OSS will ever make any significant dent in the desktop market. Unfortunately the OSS community doesn't seem to get what's needed to make it happen.
I've never understood why this isn't something that the OSS community hasn't tried to tackle.
For business purposes, I want an email system that:
1) Is Spam free.
2) Is secure.
3) Is failsafe - i.e. if the recipient doesn't receive the message, I want to know about it.
Surely from a technical perspective, this isn't that difficult?
Why can't the OSS mail clients agree on a standard for doing this. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, for instance, to have two mail boxes (or whatever you want to call them) for a single email address - one for "secure emails", and the other for the rest. The secure email box would only recieve emails that were from an approved address.
This could be a great way for OSS software to creep into organisations - I could tell my clients, for instance, hey, if you use Thunderbird, we can email each other more securely/without spam/in a failsafe manner. The network effects of this kind of promotion for OSS could be fantastic.
This looks like an opportunity that's going to waste for the OSS community. Come on guys, or people will start saying we don't innovate!
One thing I'm not clear about when we're talking about sub-atomic particles - how do we know we've got it right? I mean, the idea that these are particles - discrete physical entities if you like - comes from observations of effect and are, as far as I can tell, purely abstractions of what is actually going on. Sometimes abstractions - which of course helps the human mind get understand complex things - can actually mislead. How do we know we've got our thinking right about how sub-atomic particles work?
but I can see that Microsoft may "cut off it's nose to spite it's face" ie not make the player available at all, to spin the judgement against them as "dooming the EU market to a second-class status".
I really doubt they would do that. It's not like the market for music will disappear just because Microsoft isn't it in.
we'll soon be able to transfer our 911 protection as well.
Can you explain what this means? I know 911 is your emergency telephone number for the police etc., but what do you mean by "transfer our 911 protection"?
I studied biology and one of the lecturers was an expert in viruses. He is convinced that there is a high probability of a global, deadly flu-like virus sometime in the near-term future. (I remember one of his memorable phrases - be thankful that the HIV virus is so difficult to catch, you have to have sex with the carrier. Imagine if they just had to sneeze near you...)
Anyway, what do you do when this deadly virus breaks out? Apparently the thing to do is head for the hills - take a caravan somewhere remote, for instance, and live there for six months or so. With a shotgun, just in case things get really desperate.
Just so you know. Although perhaps I'm going to regret posting this on Slashdot. I'm not sure living in a world in which only the nerds survive would be worth it...
It seems to me that the most important thing to gain widespread acceptance of Linux is for the big PC manufacturers to promote and factory install it.
We used to hear that when companies such as Dell and HP were approached about this, they would be very hesitant about it, probably due to fear of what Microsoft might do in retaliation.
Is this still the case? Do you think we are ever going to see Dell offering Linux as an option on their standard desktops, for example?
Consider - worlds largest post company - Deutsche Post. The airline that carries the most passengers - Lufthansa. The Germans own a good many of the biggest companies in the auto industry. And Deutsche Telecom (which I believe includes T-Online) is one of the world's largest telecomms.
I think people fail to realise how powerful the German business sector is. If Germany was the same size of the USA, I'm sure it would be the top dog at the moment, not the USA. And now that the European European Union is creating the biggest single global market, Germany should be able to increase it's economy even further as it is at the heart of Europe.
Distressed damsel: Help, help! These new door opening robots have gained self-awareness and are trying to take over the world!
Hero: Quick, run upstairs!
[Damsel and hero are at the top of the stairs, watching the robots]
Damsel: What are they doing? They're whispering...
Hero: Plotting some foul deed, no doubt.
Damsel: Oh no! They're opening all the doors, letting in a nasty cold draft!
Hero: Those evil fiends! We have to do something quick!
Damsel: There's only one man who can save us now! Mild-mannered Linus Torvalds, figurehead of the Open Source movement!!
Hero: Great idea! He can send a pack of angry penguins! I'll email him now!
Hero: [tapping on laptop keyboard, mumbling to himself] Dear Linus, we are trapped upstairs by self-aware door opening robot fiends that are intent on taking over the world! Please help!
[Several hours later. Hero and Damsel are slumped against the wall, looking very bored]
Damsel: Any reply yet?
Hero: [sighs] No, not yet.
Distressed damsel: Help, help! These new door opening robots have gained self-awareness and are trying to take over the world!
Hero: Quick, run upstairs!
Surely it is relatively easy to make a helicopter that can fly itself? Seriously. All the need to be able to do is go up, down, forward and turn. The tricky bit would be landing, but then all they have to do is have a flat surface because they can land just by going down.
An self-flying plane would be much harder, and any vehicle that needs to navigate on land due to all the obstacles.
Not impressed. If the only reason is newsworthy is because it has been stolen, why does should it be considered "news for nerds"?
Interesting to note that Steadicopter claims that their helicopter is unique and there is no other of its kind in the world.
No, that's not really interesting. Companies have a tendency to claim that their products are unique...
Never seen a remote controlled helicopter before? What's that if not a pilotless helicopter?
This is a very boring story. Can't you find anything better than this?