for clarification (as so many people misunderstand this): yes there are linux kernel drivers: these are "shims" which provide userspace access to the memory area of the 3D graphics engine. yes there are X11 drivers: these use the standard/usr/lib/libGLES.so.2 libraries... which are proprietary.
it is these OpenGL libraries (libGLES.so.2) for which the source code is NOT available. it is these OpenGL libraries that have all the coding to understand the actual 3D hardware. and, it is the 3D hardware itself which these SoC embedded vendors are NOT providing any information about.
now, in the case of x86 hardware, you have a choice: it's possible to just plug in a different video card. but with these embedded SoC systems, it's not like you can get a laser to cut the silicon out of the chip and replace it with something else. it's an all-or-nothing deal, and that's what's pissing people off in the Free Software Community.
and as you can see from the nouveau and gallium3d projects, it's taken absolutely years to do the required reverse-engineering of NVidia's GPU engines and so on. AMD (ATI) are finally getting with the picture and releasing information. even intel are beginning to understand that maintaining a proprietary 3D Graphics Library is to bring yourself absolute hell on earth.
it would be infinitely better for all parties involved in the production of 3D Graphics Hardware - embedded and otherwise - to make the specifications of their hardware publicly available, such that the Free Software Community could help with the incredibly complex job of writing OpenGL (and other standard) Libraries once and only once (gallium3d).
actually, a case could be made that they are literally "pricing" themselves out of their own market.
as the source code is freely available, there is absolutely nothing stopping any company from taking that free software and modifying it. for example, getting it to, by default, point to a different marketplace. getting it by default to point to a different web search engine. there is actually precedent for this. some companies have in fact set up their own android market places.
google is using money that they receive for providing a valuable proprietary service based in part around free software to then fund free software development.
microsoft use the money they receive for providing technologically multi-man-century-backed proprietary products and services to further fund the development of technologically multi-man-century-backed proprietary products and services.
whilst i don't like much of what google is doing (including releasing software under the Apache2 Software License, and including restricting access to free software it develops and then dumping it on people, in bazaar-like "like it or lump it" fashion and in many cases overwhelming unfunded free software communities to pick up the dog's dinner mess that google's developers made in "secret, bazaar-like fashion") it is nothing compared to what microsoft is doing.
why is anyone concerned about *only* the KGB "infiltrating" lulzsec? and as other people have pointed out - it's anonymous - even to each other! so you could actually end up with the hilarious situation that the only significant contributors to anonymous and lulzsec could actually be 95% foreign intelligence agents from different countries across the world, and nobody but those people who can reliably trace 100% of the world's internet traffic would know...
"Last time that I checked it was and still is a privately owned corporation."... and this is supposed to make me feel better?? what the hell is the a privately owned corporation doing with an unregulated unrestricted uncontrolled license to print money, when the consequences and amounts are both so insanely high? i could understand... if there was actually anything IN THE RESERVE... like... y'know.... gold? or something? y'know? i think you REALLY need to read Senator Ron Paul's book, "End the Fed".
no, the economy didn't "survive": basic economic rules were completely ignored (repeatedly, dating back some 80+ years), and a policy of hyperinflation put in its place. you need to read senator ron paul's book, "end the fed" to fully grasp what's going on, here.
but, to give you an idea, and a good comparison: the policy of taking the brakes off of the U.S. Federal Reserve - allowing them, beginning in 2006, a license quite literally to print money - is very similar to what the hitler government did in between the 1st and 2nd world war. the reichmark was *massively* hyper-inflated (ironically allowing them to completely pay off the 1st world war "reparations") so much so that they had in the end to abandon that currency and come out with the "deutchsmark" instead.
unfortunately in this case, the currency being hyperinflated is the one that is used world-wide as a "Reserve Currency" for international trade. thus, it becomes necessary not just for the U.S.A. to hyerinflate their currency, but also for all currencies pegged to the USD to do the same. this is why there have been 19 "favoured countries" who have received sickeningly-large amounts of money in order to bail them out.
as the major currencies hyper inflate (all at the same rate) everything all looks peachy, but the reality is that if this hyperinflation policy were to be stopped, the concept of money - in every major country - would collapse. this is the only thing that ron paul has, in my opinion, wrong. ron paul advocates returning to the "Gold Standard", to bite the bullet and to allow market forces to take their course in the buying up of remaining valued assets as numerous corrupt, big-bonus-paying banks collapse. unfortunately, i believe that the whole system is so far gone in its level of corruption and hyperinflation that it's far too late for that, and it just has to be sustained through further continued hyperinflation until even that is just blindingly obviously not working.
in the meantime: buy gold. not "gold certificates": those are a scam, as the ratio required to be held by the bond issuer of actual gold to the quantity of bonds issued is: 100 to 1. buy actual real gold.
i worked for NC3A for a while so became very familiar with this situation, which applies just as well to the local Reservoir Water Supply (which has to be secure!) as it does to Police, Fire and Military. the problems that secure locations have is that both the supplier and the software itself require "vetting". the actual cost of this vetting is itself both significant and time-consuming. i heard of one organisation that was still using python 2.1 in 2007, a full 5 years after it had been retired - it was virtually impossible to find any source code that actually still worked, so everything had to be developed from scratch. and the reason why they were using python 2.1 was very simple: the decision-making process took 1 year; the security-approval process took 6 months; the deployment process took 6 months; the development process took 18 months: after that, there's a 2-3 year maintenance cycle.
also of significance is sheer inertia. in russia, there is an urban myth that their tanks are still using valve-based (vacuum tube) electronics "because they're immune to an EM pulse from a nuclear strike". the truth is far more mundane, ironic and somewhat cynical and funny: supply chains. the cost of developing alternative electronics is not inconsiderable, but the sheer logistics of maintaining two sets of supply chains, the risks associated with down-time on the tanks whilst they're being converted, the cost of training people to carry out the conversion, the time taken to convert an entire army of tanks to the new electronics - it's just sheer madness to even contemplete it. so, russia still makes electronics for these tanks that use technology that was retired by pretty much everyone else in the world over 40 years ago.
so yes - there is a serious, serious problem, but it's very very hard to see exactly what a potential solution is. ultimately it boils down to trust: you *can't* trust just any suppliers nor just any software, and that automatically limits the pace of development (or if you're lucky it merely puts the cost at sky high).
... means that the laptop falls over backwards when you open the screen! the reason is that the screen weighs 0.5kg and the rest of the laptop is now only about 300 grammes - including only a 100 gramme battery. so it's necessary to put a counterweight at the front, or to redesign the laptop and have the screen moved forward. no, you can't reduce the weight of the screen, because it's thin glass (which is heavy itself) but it's not self-supporting and so needs to be surrounded by a metal frame.
so, yes, lots of speculation, but the writing is clearly on the wall.
Aluminium is 8% of the planet's crust. it's not a rare earth metal: it's available in unbelievably large quantities. Europositron, a company that has also developed a 100% rechargeable high-capacity cell (5x that of NiMH) - that doesn't degrade or require chemical or mechanical re-processing - has recognised the capacity of aluminium for years. unfortunately, despite working demos, nobody's believed them.
the problem with aluminium as a high-capacity rechargeable battery is that the energy storage capacity is so high (80kWh in a 100kg cell is not unreasonable) that it can easily be classified as a weapon (in the same way that a molotov cocktail can be classified as a weapon).
being open means that if this can be made to work on a SoC (for example, if enough information is obtained to get it to work on an iMX535, which has an AMD / ATI embedded GPU) then that SoC will be literally the world's first truly free software compliant and importantly *modern* embedded processor that is free from proprietary and total dependence on some random, implicitly untrustworthy and usually incompetent software supplier.
in the event that you're not asking a rhetorical question: there isn't a dilemma, and there is no obstacle to overcome.
developers release source code (along with an MD5 or SHA-1 checksum) off of an implicitly-trusted (i.e. non-hijacked) web site. that is the limit and scope of their responsibility - period.
distribution managers have a responsibility to then check that checksum, and to ensure that the downloaded source code is not compromised. they are also responsible for compiling that software into a package, which is then digitally signed and uploaded to a distribution server. that is the end of _their_ responsibility.
the distribution server (or, the managers behind the distribution server) have a responsibility to install software which double-checks the digital signature on the uploaded software (and to reject anything that isn't signed). the double-checked package is then placed onto the downloads list. that is the end of _their_ responsibility.
the user installs the operating system: it contains digital-signature checking software. a download happens. the digital signature is checked.
at no point is the developer of the *original* software involved in or in the slightest bit responsible for any of the above, with the sole exception of placing their software onto a web site and making it available.
there is one team who have decided to break this rule: the freeswitch team. they have taken it upon themselves to "take responsibility" for things which they should never have taken responsibility for, and they have ended up quite literally creating an entire software build and software distribution system, and have accidentally created forks of dozens of software packages and are getting themselves into a fucking awful mess as those multiple packages are getting severely out-of-date and could contain quite serious security flaws which the developers of freeswitch simply do not have time to even identify let alone fix.
the freeswitch team's stupidity in crossing the boundary is therefore an exceptionally good case study demonstrating why it is essential that free software developers NOT go outside of the scope of their responsibility, and leave it up to distributions to perform the packaging of (and signing of) the software.
this is entirely and precisely why distros such as debian go to such lengths to place GPG digital signatures on the downloads; why they go to such lengths to enact extensive GPG key-signing web-of-trust exchanges etc. etc. no software is allowed into the archive that is not GPG digitally-signed by someone who is part of the GPG web-of-trust network (thus whose physical identity has been identified MULTIPLE times by their peers including showing proof of identity in the form of passports or other physical but trusted identification document).
the lengths to which for example the debian developers go are sufficiently extreme that it would be an incredibly foolish exercise for any debian developer to even attempt to place spyware or any kind of malware into packages, because they could be identified (via their GPG Digital Signature) and thus banned for life from the debian project.
the lengths to which it would be necessary to go, to circumvent such a system, involve cracking of GPG Digital Signatures or of compromising the Debian Packaging system itself, and switching off the signature-checking system. whilst the average person would not know how to check that this had occurred, it is an extremely remote and unlikely possibility in and of itself; the experienced debian user could boot up off of a live boot or rescue CD and use rkhunter or chkrootkit to verify that the system had not been compromised.
all in all it has to be said, in simpler terms (as many people on comments here have already said) - don't download stuff you can't trust! but if you can't be bothered to check, but are using a stupid operating system into which a package verification system is not built-in from the ground up, then don't use that stupid operating system! if you ignore this kind of advice, then you deserve everything that you get.
slighly off-topic: two major cities - tel aviv and bangalore - cut down large numbers of trees in order to make room for more people. the immediate result was a rise of 10 Centigrade in bangalore (from 45C to 55C). in tel aviv's case, not only did the temperatures rise but also migrating birds no longer have a stop-over point half way along their route between the two hemispheres.
not that planting some saplings in a public place is going to help in the immediate short-term, i appreciate...
or, more specifically, statistical analysis repeatedly shows a correlation between the size of groups of people doing regular meditation and the reduction of crime in a particular area. and, ironically in some cases, a dramatic and statistically significant increase in reports of crime! [yes that's right, increased *reporting* of criminal activity, rather than "increases in actual criminal activity"...]
a comment from the torrentfreak article is worth repeating here.
"Nothing to see here, move along. This patent describes the YMODEM/XMODEM protocol nicely, which was developed back in the '70s, and could be very easily refuted by this example of prior art."
has anyone forgotten this, already? nokia getting a $EUR 500 million loan for "restructuring purposes"? and ST Thompson - the business cards of all employees at the ST Chip Foundry has the local university on one side and ST on the other: in this way, ST is able to bypass restrictions on EU Grants to "businesses only". so, yes, it's complete horse-shit for the U.S. Govt to be "complaining" about any funding or investment, when it happens the world over. oh - and have we forgotten the world-wide bank bailouts, already? effectively, *any* business loans prior to the outrageous and non-capitalistic bank bailouts could be classified as "Government Loans". several banks in the UK are now Goverment-owned for goodness sake!
that's right. it's not done "sarcastically" - it's done with enthusiasm. i remember this scene from school. we were asked to cheer at the first mention of "honourable men", and as the number of mentions increased, we reverted to complete silence at the end of the speech....
the presentation of artwork, hiring of actors for 3D modelling and the massive development means that the average 3D game costs around $8 million. if users expect games to be of this standard, anyone expecting an independent team to develop something that's "competitive" is pissing in the wind. about the only possible hope is a free software massively collaborative effort, based around existing work and engines, such as WorldForge for MMORGs or the Quake or Doom 3D engines for 3D games.
"and they were all, _all_ honourable men..." just like shakespeare's famously-quoted speech from julius caesar: most people only know the first line, but our protagonist was barred in his speech from saying a single word against caesar. so the phrase "and they were all, all honourable men" is used repeatedly. in the same way, i can't help but think this will have the opposite effect...
If you have a square where along one axis you have Chaotic and non-Chaotic Mathematics, and you have Newtownian Physic and Quantum Physics along the other axis, there is one quadrant missing where, until my friend Dr Alex Hankey began work on it several years ago, there has been absolutely no Research or Mathematical Theories developed, and it's the Quantum-Chaotic quadrant.
Dr Alex Hankey's hypothesis is that Consciousness operates in this Quantum-Chaotic quadrant, where there are self-referring "loops" in our neural structures which keep a Quantum System on the absolute edge between two critical states. It's complicated - and I can only grasp much of his work intuitively.
"I'm hoping the newly announced TermKit http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit [acko.net] will be discussed during the open days. TermKit is new concept to replace the decades old Unix pipes with a modern implementation based on JSON."
that's like saying "we're going to replace the millenia-old medium of air as a means of communicating voice with a modern communications system based on the written word".
unix pipes are just an inter-process communications system that has nothing to do with the data that is transferred over it. JSON is a *data* format.
so i have to ask: what the bloody hell drugs are you on??
what happened to enlightenment, xfce, fvwm, python-plwm and all the others? i hate to mention EvilWM (1000 lines of c), or XMonad (1200 lines of haskell i believe) as it's hard to have any kind of meaningful discussion around 1200 lines of haskell, but, seriously, why weren't all the other window managers more seriously represented? oh wait - there's _one_ talk (an overview) on the EFL classes: https://www.desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/quick-overview-enlightenment-foundation-libraries-and-e17
Slashdot Mirror
for clarification (as so many people misunderstand this): yes there are linux kernel drivers: these are "shims" which provide userspace access to the memory area of the 3D graphics engine. yes there are X11 drivers: these use the standard /usr/lib/libGLES.so.2 libraries... which are proprietary.
it is these OpenGL libraries (libGLES.so.2) for which the source code is NOT available. it is these OpenGL libraries that have all the coding to understand the actual 3D hardware. and, it is the 3D hardware itself which these SoC embedded vendors are NOT providing any information about.
now, in the case of x86 hardware, you have a choice: it's possible to just plug in a different video card. but with these embedded SoC systems, it's not like you can get a laser to cut the silicon out of the chip and replace it with something else. it's an all-or-nothing deal, and that's what's pissing people off in the Free Software Community.
and as you can see from the nouveau and gallium3d projects, it's taken absolutely years to do the required reverse-engineering of NVidia's GPU engines and so on. AMD (ATI) are finally getting with the picture and releasing information. even intel are beginning to understand that maintaining a proprietary 3D Graphics Library is to bring yourself absolute hell on earth.
it would be infinitely better for all parties involved in the production of 3D Graphics Hardware - embedded and otherwise - to make the specifications of their hardware publicly available, such that the Free Software Community could help with the incredibly complex job of writing OpenGL (and other standard) Libraries once and only once (gallium3d).
actually, a case could be made that they are literally "pricing" themselves out of their own market.
as the source code is freely available, there is absolutely nothing stopping any company from taking that free software and modifying it. for example, getting it to, by default, point to a different marketplace. getting it by default to point to a different web search engine. there is actually precedent for this. some companies have in fact set up their own android market places.
google is using money that they receive for providing a valuable proprietary service based in part around free software to then fund free software development.
microsoft use the money they receive for providing technologically multi-man-century-backed proprietary products and services to further fund the development of technologically multi-man-century-backed proprietary products and services.
whilst i don't like much of what google is doing (including releasing software under the Apache2 Software License, and including restricting access to free software it develops and then dumping it on people, in bazaar-like "like it or lump it" fashion and in many cases overwhelming unfunded free software communities to pick up the dog's dinner mess that google's developers made in "secret, bazaar-like fashion") it is nothing compared to what microsoft is doing.
you literally cannot compare the two.
"Amid 9 percent unemployment, Congress was bickering over two check-processing patents."
why is anyone concerned about *only* the KGB "infiltrating" lulzsec? and as other people have pointed out - it's anonymous - even to each other! so you could actually end up with the hilarious situation that the only significant contributors to anonymous and lulzsec could actually be 95% foreign intelligence agents from different countries across the world, and nobody but those people who can reliably trace 100% of the world's internet traffic would know...
"Last time that I checked it was and still is a privately owned corporation." ... and this is supposed to make me feel better?? what the hell is the a privately owned corporation doing with an unregulated unrestricted uncontrolled license to print money, when the consequences and amounts are both so insanely high? i could understand... if there was actually anything IN THE RESERVE ... like... y'know.... gold? or something? y'know? i think you REALLY need to read Senator Ron Paul's book, "End the Fed".
no, the economy didn't "survive": basic economic rules were completely ignored (repeatedly, dating back some 80+ years), and a policy of hyperinflation put in its place. you need to read senator ron paul's book, "end the fed" to fully grasp what's going on, here.
but, to give you an idea, and a good comparison: the policy of taking the brakes off of the U.S. Federal Reserve - allowing them, beginning in 2006, a license quite literally to print money - is very similar to what the hitler government did in between the 1st and 2nd world war. the reichmark was *massively* hyper-inflated (ironically allowing them to completely pay off the 1st world war "reparations") so much so that they had in the end to abandon that currency and come out with the "deutchsmark" instead.
unfortunately in this case, the currency being hyperinflated is the one that is used world-wide as a "Reserve Currency" for international trade. thus, it becomes necessary not just for the U.S.A. to hyerinflate their currency, but also for all currencies pegged to the USD to do the same. this is why there have been 19 "favoured countries" who have received sickeningly-large amounts of money in order to bail them out.
as the major currencies hyper inflate (all at the same rate) everything all looks peachy, but the reality is that if this hyperinflation policy were to be stopped, the concept of money - in every major country - would collapse. this is the only thing that ron paul has, in my opinion, wrong. ron paul advocates returning to the "Gold Standard", to bite the bullet and to allow market forces to take their course in the buying up of remaining valued assets as numerous corrupt, big-bonus-paying banks collapse. unfortunately, i believe that the whole system is so far gone in its level of corruption and hyperinflation that it's far too late for that, and it just has to be sustained through further continued hyperinflation until even that is just blindingly obviously not working.
in the meantime: buy gold. not "gold certificates": those are a scam, as the ratio required to be held by the bond issuer of actual gold to the quantity of bonds issued is: 100 to 1. buy actual real gold.
i worked for NC3A for a while so became very familiar with this situation, which applies just as well to the local Reservoir Water Supply (which has to be secure!) as it does to Police, Fire and Military. the problems that secure locations have is that both the supplier and the software itself require "vetting". the actual cost of this vetting is itself both significant and time-consuming. i heard of one organisation that was still using python 2.1 in 2007, a full 5 years after it had been retired - it was virtually impossible to find any source code that actually still worked, so everything had to be developed from scratch. and the reason why they were using python 2.1 was very simple: the decision-making process took 1 year; the security-approval process took 6 months; the deployment process took 6 months; the development process took 18 months: after that, there's a 2-3 year maintenance cycle.
also of significance is sheer inertia. in russia, there is an urban myth that their tanks are still using valve-based (vacuum tube) electronics "because they're immune to an EM pulse from a nuclear strike". the truth is far more mundane, ironic and somewhat cynical and funny: supply chains. the cost of developing alternative electronics is not inconsiderable, but the sheer logistics of maintaining two sets of supply chains, the risks associated with down-time on the tanks whilst they're being converted, the cost of training people to carry out the conversion, the time taken to convert an entire army of tanks to the new electronics - it's just sheer madness to even contemplete it. so, russia still makes electronics for these tanks that use technology that was retired by pretty much everyone else in the world over 40 years ago.
so yes - there is a serious, serious problem, but it's very very hard to see exactly what a potential solution is. ultimately it boils down to trust: you *can't* trust just any suppliers nor just any software, and that automatically limits the pace of development (or if you're lucky it merely puts the cost at sky high).
... means that the laptop falls over backwards when you open the screen! the reason is that the screen weighs 0.5kg and the rest of the laptop is now only about 300 grammes - including only a 100 gramme battery. so it's necessary to put a counterweight at the front, or to redesign the laptop and have the screen moved forward. no, you can't reduce the weight of the screen, because it's thin glass (which is heavy itself) but it's not self-supporting and so needs to be surrounded by a metal frame.
so, yes, lots of speculation, but the writing is clearly on the wall.
Aluminium is 8% of the planet's crust. it's not a rare earth metal: it's available in unbelievably large quantities. Europositron, a company that has also developed a 100% rechargeable high-capacity cell (5x that of NiMH) - that doesn't degrade or require chemical or mechanical re-processing - has recognised the capacity of aluminium for years. unfortunately, despite working demos, nobody's believed them.
the problem with aluminium as a high-capacity rechargeable battery is that the energy storage capacity is so high (80kWh in a 100kg cell is not unreasonable) that it can easily be classified as a weapon (in the same way that a molotov cocktail can be classified as a weapon).
being open means that if this can be made to work on a SoC (for example, if enough information is obtained to get it to work on an iMX535, which has an AMD / ATI embedded GPU) then that SoC will be literally the world's first truly free software compliant and importantly *modern* embedded processor that is free from proprietary and total dependence on some random, implicitly untrustworthy and usually incompetent software supplier.
in the event that you're not asking a rhetorical question: there isn't a dilemma, and there is no obstacle to overcome.
developers release source code (along with an MD5 or SHA-1 checksum) off of an implicitly-trusted (i.e. non-hijacked) web site. that is the limit and scope of their responsibility - period.
distribution managers have a responsibility to then check that checksum, and to ensure that the downloaded source code is not compromised. they are also responsible for compiling that software into a package, which is then digitally signed and uploaded to a distribution server. that is the end of _their_ responsibility.
the distribution server (or, the managers behind the distribution server) have a responsibility to install software which double-checks the digital signature on the uploaded software (and to reject anything that isn't signed). the double-checked package is then placed onto the downloads list. that is the end of _their_ responsibility.
the user installs the operating system: it contains digital-signature checking software. a download happens. the digital signature is checked.
at no point is the developer of the *original* software involved in or in the slightest bit responsible for any of the above, with the sole exception of placing their software onto a web site and making it available.
there is one team who have decided to break this rule: the freeswitch team. they have taken it upon themselves to "take responsibility" for things which they should never have taken responsibility for, and they have ended up quite literally creating an entire software build and software distribution system, and have accidentally created forks of dozens of software packages and are getting themselves into a fucking awful mess as those multiple packages are getting severely out-of-date and could contain quite serious security flaws which the developers of freeswitch simply do not have time to even identify let alone fix.
the freeswitch team's stupidity in crossing the boundary is therefore an exceptionally good case study demonstrating why it is essential that free software developers NOT go outside of the scope of their responsibility, and leave it up to distributions to perform the packaging of (and signing of) the software.
this is entirely and precisely why distros such as debian go to such lengths to place GPG digital signatures on the downloads; why they go to such lengths to enact extensive GPG key-signing web-of-trust exchanges etc. etc. no software is allowed into the archive that is not GPG digitally-signed by someone who is part of the GPG web-of-trust network (thus whose physical identity has been identified MULTIPLE times by their peers including showing proof of identity in the form of passports or other physical but trusted identification document).
the lengths to which for example the debian developers go are sufficiently extreme that it would be an incredibly foolish exercise for any debian developer to even attempt to place spyware or any kind of malware into packages, because they could be identified (via their GPG Digital Signature) and thus banned for life from the debian project.
the lengths to which it would be necessary to go, to circumvent such a system, involve cracking of GPG Digital Signatures or of compromising the Debian Packaging system itself, and switching off the signature-checking system. whilst the average person would not know how to check that this had occurred, it is an extremely remote and unlikely possibility in and of itself; the experienced debian user could boot up off of a live boot or rescue CD and use rkhunter or chkrootkit to verify that the system had not been compromised.
all in all it has to be said, in simpler terms (as many people on comments here have already said) - don't download stuff you can't trust! but if you can't be bothered to check, but are using a stupid operating system into which a package verification system is not built-in from the ground up, then don't use that stupid operating system! if you ignore this kind of advice, then you deserve everything that you get.
slighly off-topic: two major cities - tel aviv and bangalore - cut down large numbers of trees in order to make room for more people. the immediate result was a rise of 10 Centigrade in bangalore (from 45C to 55C). in tel aviv's case, not only did the temperatures rise but also migrating birds no longer have a stop-over point half way along their route between the two hemispheres.
not that planting some saplings in a public place is going to help in the immediate short-term, i appreciate...
or, more specifically, statistical analysis repeatedly shows a correlation between the size of groups of people doing regular meditation and the reduction of crime in a particular area. and, ironically in some cases, a dramatic and statistically significant increase in reports of crime! [yes that's right, increased *reporting* of criminal activity, rather than "increases in actual criminal activity"...]
ahh... AHHH.... atchOOO!
a comment from the torrentfreak article is worth repeating here.
"Nothing to see here, move along. This patent describes the YMODEM/XMODEM protocol nicely, which was developed back in the '70s, and could be very easily refuted by this example of prior art."
has anyone forgotten this, already? nokia getting a $EUR 500 million loan for "restructuring purposes"? and ST Thompson - the business cards of all employees at the ST Chip Foundry has the local university on one side and ST on the other: in this way, ST is able to bypass restrictions on EU Grants to "businesses only". so, yes, it's complete horse-shit for the U.S. Govt to be "complaining" about any funding or investment, when it happens the world over. oh - and have we forgotten the world-wide bank bailouts, already? effectively, *any* business loans prior to the outrageous and non-capitalistic bank bailouts could be classified as "Government Loans". several banks in the UK are now Goverment-owned for goodness sake!
that's right. it's not done "sarcastically" - it's done with enthusiasm. i remember this scene from school. we were asked to cheer at the first mention of "honourable men", and as the number of mentions increased, we reverted to complete silence at the end of the speech....
it has actually happened. look up the games "cyphesis", "wesnoth" and, to a lesser extent, "bzflag".
the presentation of artwork, hiring of actors for 3D modelling and the massive development means that the average 3D game costs around $8 million. if users expect games to be of this standard, anyone expecting an independent team to develop something that's "competitive" is pissing in the wind. about the only possible hope is a free software massively collaborative effort, based around existing work and engines, such as WorldForge for MMORGs or the Quake or Doom 3D engines for 3D games.
"and they were all, _all_ honourable men..." just like shakespeare's famously-quoted speech from julius caesar: most people only know the first line, but our protagonist was barred in his speech from saying a single word against caesar. so the phrase "and they were all, all honourable men" is used repeatedly. in the same way, i can't help but think this will have the opposite effect...
If you have a square where along one axis you have Chaotic and non-Chaotic Mathematics, and you have Newtownian Physic and Quantum Physics along the other axis, there is one quadrant missing where, until my friend Dr Alex Hankey began work on it several years ago, there has been absolutely no Research or Mathematical Theories developed, and it's the Quantum-Chaotic quadrant.
Dr Alex Hankey's hypothesis is that Consciousness operates in this Quantum-Chaotic quadrant, where there are self-referring "loops" in our neural structures which keep a Quantum System on the absolute edge between two critical states. It's complicated - and I can only grasp much of his work intuitively.
"I'm hoping the newly announced TermKit http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit [acko.net] will be discussed during the open days. TermKit is new concept to replace the decades old Unix pipes with a modern implementation based on JSON."
that's like saying "we're going to replace the millenia-old medium of air as a means of communicating voice with a modern communications system based on the written word".
unix pipes are just an inter-process communications system that has nothing to do with the data that is transferred over it. JSON is a *data* format.
so i have to ask: what the bloody hell drugs are you on??
what happened to enlightenment, xfce, fvwm, python-plwm and all the others? i hate to mention EvilWM (1000 lines of c), or XMonad (1200 lines of haskell i believe) as it's hard to have any kind of meaningful discussion around 1200 lines of haskell, but, seriously, why weren't all the other window managers more seriously represented? oh wait - there's _one_ talk (an overview) on the EFL classes: https://www.desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/quick-overview-enlightenment-foundation-libraries-and-e17