For something to be win-win, it requires two parties to simultaneously "win". In this case, the only "winner" would be AT&T. And it rather gives lie to what they claimed to be the entire point of data caps in the first place - to help prevent over-saturation and congestion of their wireless networks. If there isn't enough bandwidth, then there isn't enough bandwidth - it doesn't matter whether or not both ends of a TCP connection pay, or only one.
Rejiggering the launch site for an unmanned craft, with several seconds round trip phase lag for course corrections from the ground control, is an even worse problem.
Chiang'e 3 had a ~30 second "hovering" stage during its decent, during which it scanned the area it was over (using radar and laser IIRC), and itself made the decision where exactly to land based on that information. AFAIK ground control could have interrupted and overridden the process at any stage, but did not.
If everyone worked together on a single tool for each job, we'd likely have a bunch of tools which are bloated, complicated, try to be everything to everyone, and end up being useful to nobody. Some projects might be wildly more successful than others, but that doesn't mean that one is a fundamentally better solution than the other, or that the less-successful one is pointless or useless. It just means that more people prefer one over the other.
Why is it seen as good that we have choice and competition in mobile operating systems and devices, for example, but so often not that there exists a choice in desktop software?
I suspect many have, but I've been thinking about a similar kind of project. As a theoretical and architectural exercise, I've been considering that the only direct interface to the universe would be over XMPP. So at the very simplest level, you could use an existing chat client to interact with ships and stations by sending simple messages to them like "report status", "report location", "buy firearms", "set course for Kerbin", etc.
OTOH I don't see where that change could possibly come from.
Engineers. The Snowden leaks have been a wakeup call to the security and networking communities. Sure, we always "knew" that stuff wasn't really secure, but when something is shown to be actively being exploited, people tend to sit up and take notice. Nascent and floundering security and privacy projects have been galvanised by the realisation, and work seems now underway apace, to rebuild erstwhile accepted habits on solid cryptographic ground.
The privacy and security you seek on the Internet, will not come from the laws of politicians, decisions of courts, or blood of protesters. It will come from the mathematics of cryptography, and the collaboration of engineers worldwide, working in the background for the liberty of us all.
free software needs to start leading rather than following, just about every noteworthy foss product is a generally crappier knockoff of a proprietary one (notable exceptions include the linux kernel and blender) or just a me-too product. open source is supposed to be about innovation
Firstly, Free software !== Open Source. Secondly, no. neither Free software nor Open Source have been about innovation. Free software it is a philosophy concerned with Freedom. Open Source is a development methodology which has to do with openness and collaboration.
Thirdly, there is innovation from the Free/Open Source community, it just tends to be at a lower-level than most end-users give a crap about. Then there is also the "problem" of openness - innovations tend to be suggested and discussed openly before they are implemented, so are no longer considered so "innovative" by the the time they get released.
The COO said he thought the cost of a single desktop PC was around GBP6,000 per year - for which he could go and buy 10 Apple iPads.
This is, I admit, rather ambiguous, but since the very next paragraph begins:
Far be it for V3 to quibble in affairs of the state, but I feel that either Kelly is misinformed over real-world IT costs or has got his sums mixed up. Firstly there's the minor point that for GBP6,000 you could actually get hold of as many as 22 iPads
Here disputing the claim, so clearly demonstrating that the "10 Apple iPads" comment was made by the COO in question, and not by the author of the article.
That's not to say that the article was of a particularly high quality. It seemed to be all downhill into opinion and insult, from the second above-quoted paragraph.
IANAA, but there's "creative accounting", and then there's fraud. One is perfectly legal, the other not. It's like the difference between "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion".
The thing with creative accounting is not that it hides or creates money from nothing (which would be fraud), but that it moves it around from other places/times. If you see a really good quarter now, it's possibly because some income has been moved from elsewhen. So it might be expected for the next few fiscal quarters to be more disappointing.
The old guy gets to leave on a high, and the new guy gets to "improve" the company's financials after an initial few bad quarters. It's an accountancy win-win.
You say that like it's not feasible, from a religious perspective, that the concepts behind the Star Wars universe were divine inspiration bestowed upon mankind by some supernatural Force. That is, after all, no different to the root source of religious "knowledge" quoted by most (if not all) religions. The only difference is that other religions generally started with oral traditions and writing books, rather than going straight to cinema.
Think about the ways social engineering occurs. If you have, say, a call centre operator who gives out sensitive information to someone who is not who they say they are, there may be two failings: 1. They have deviated from the security procedure, or 2. The security procedures were insufficient.
In the case of (1), retraining. In the case of (2) redesign. Expecting the call centre operator to think back to some "social engineering" training is a ridiculous control notion, you instead tell them not to ever deviate from the security procedure.
But surely, if it is even possible for (1) to occur, it is a failure of the system storing the data; that sensitive information was disclosed without the security procedures being enforced.
The only thing I find strange is that GPL have been fairly efficient when it comes to being a sort of DRM.
The GPL isn't about Digital Rights(/Restriction) Management, it's about Legal Rights Management. That is; it doesn't actively try to prevent you from breaking the license, it just describes consequences for doing so.
I am surprised that no-one have released GPL-software on TPB with the license stripped away yet.
Piracy isn't generally an intellectual philosophy for the abolition of copyright; it's a practical philosophy for getting stuff cheaply and conveniently - which the GPL already allows.
Not only that, but the article linked provides no actual background to how it is "known" that Google "snitched" - just an unsourced quote. A little digging indicates that the quote comes from a Financial Times article (registration required). Here are the relevant paragraphs:
Brussels punished Microsoft for failing to give at least 15m consumers a choice of web browser - a violation of a voluntary antitrust pact that was spotted and raised by Google and Opera, according to several people familiar with the case.
The US software group was left to police its own compliance and Mr Almunia said the lapse was brought to his attention by a Microsoft rival. According to people involved, Google and Opera informally provided the tip-off and helped investigators.
I've seen several people comment that they have their home directory config files under version control. If you're using git for that, it's a fairly simple next step to then "backup" the repo to github. "It's only config files; nobody would be interested in those."
I use the graph to see whose fork of a codebase is most up-to-date, or has potentially useful revisions not merged into the master. I've come across a few projects whose "master" repo is all but dead, and a dozen other people have continued development independently - sometimes having created duplicate bugfixes, etc.
Developers come and go (often without warning), so what I'd *really* like to see is an interface where the codebase is the focus, and no one user or team "owns" any kind of one-true-fork. All forks should be considered fundamentally equal, and judged on their individual merits (recent activity, most activity, most contributors, etc.). And having issues, pull requests, etc. tied to one single fork is just wrong. If something affects the "main" fork, then it quite likely affects all the others, too, and those forks' maintainers should be allowed to accept or reject those items as it relates to their own fork.
They don't have to serve their constituents, they only have to do it *very slightly better* than the other party.
Not even that; they just have to say they will. How many campaign "promises" are actually implemented, by any politician, in any country? Generally very few, from what I can tell.
Personally, I think that, at the end of an elected representative's term, they should be held to account in a court of law for every campaign "promise" they didn't fulfil; each such incident bringing a charge of fraud and/or treason.
Why is it that people who have evaded authorities find it irresistible to gloat about how "clever" they are to have outwitted cops.
I'd imagine that they generally don't. The cops sure as hell aren't going to make an international song and dance about all the suspects who've slipped through their grasp, so the only such people you'll hear from are the self-aggrandising gloaters.
You're not likely to hear from anyone who's keeping a low profile, by definition.
Okay, so what US laws did Wikileaks break? How are the legal proceedings against the organisation going? Anyone been extradited to the US to stand trial? No? So on what legal grounds did Visa, Mastercard, et al, block payments to Wikileaks? I'm pretty sure they haven't blocked donations to Bradley Manning's defence fund; he being the only person actually charged with a crime directly relating to Wikileaks' activities.
If they expected something like that to be enforced, they should have made sure a clause to that effect was part of the license under which the software was released.
As they did, by choosing a copy-left licence.
From a practical point of view, though - attempting to track something as ephemeral as all previous developers' intentions would be a royal pain in the keister.
Not at all. The intentions of the previous developers are, for all practical purposes, described by the license under which they chose to distribute their contributions.
Er, is this supposed to be implying that Valve is going to drop any games where the developer does not come back and write a Linux version? Because I have no idea what you are saying here.
I believe he's saying that Valve are seeing an increased likelihood that Microsoft might flip a switch in Windows, which will make Steam, or Steam-powered games, stop working. Linux, for Valve, is (partly) a hedge against that. There is no one company (other than Valve itself) that can come along and "turn off" Steam for Linux. If Steam continues to function on Windows, then that's great for Valve. If it doesn't, however, then Valve are wise to have a fall-back plan. It's a lot better to have 90% of your income wiped out (all those Steam games that don't run on Linux), than to have 100% of it wiped out, and be scrambling for a fix while the coffers run dry.
Facebook is alreadly living proof of the fact that people don't care about their privacy.
Most people don't care about anything, unless and until it affects them personally. This is (in theory) why governments enact "nanny state" legislation; to prepare for, and protect its population from, bad things that those who will be affected haven't even considered yet.
Few people consider about the cost of hospitalisation after a car accident, until they're in one. Hence national health services. Few people consider the cost of leaving embarrassing photos on Facebook, until it comes up in a job interview. Hence this legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
For something to be win-win, it requires two parties to simultaneously "win". In this case, the only "winner" would be AT&T.
And it rather gives lie to what they claimed to be the entire point of data caps in the first place - to help prevent over-saturation and congestion of their wireless networks. If there isn't enough bandwidth, then there isn't enough bandwidth - it doesn't matter whether or not both ends of a TCP connection pay, or only one.
Chiang'e 3 had a ~30 second "hovering" stage during its decent, during which it scanned the area it was over (using radar and laser IIRC), and itself made the decision where exactly to land based on that information.
AFAIK ground control could have interrupted and overridden the process at any stage, but did not.
If everyone worked together on a single tool for each job, we'd likely have a bunch of tools which are bloated, complicated, try to be everything to everyone, and end up being useful to nobody.
Some projects might be wildly more successful than others, but that doesn't mean that one is a fundamentally better solution than the other, or that the less-successful one is pointless or useless. It just means that more people prefer one over the other.
Why is it seen as good that we have choice and competition in mobile operating systems and devices, for example, but so often not that there exists a choice in desktop software?
I suspect many have, but I've been thinking about a similar kind of project.
As a theoretical and architectural exercise, I've been considering that the only direct interface to the universe would be over XMPP. So at the very simplest level, you could use an existing chat client to interact with ships and stations by sending simple messages to them like "report status", "report location", "buy firearms", "set course for Kerbin", etc.
Engineers. The Snowden leaks have been a wakeup call to the security and networking communities. Sure, we always "knew" that stuff wasn't really secure, but when something is shown to be actively being exploited, people tend to sit up and take notice.
Nascent and floundering security and privacy projects have been galvanised by the realisation, and work seems now underway apace, to rebuild erstwhile accepted habits on solid cryptographic ground.
The privacy and security you seek on the Internet, will not come from the laws of politicians, decisions of courts, or blood of protesters. It will come from the mathematics of cryptography, and the collaboration of engineers worldwide, working in the background for the liberty of us all.
That controller appears to be made of corrugated cardboard.
Firstly, Free software !== Open Source.
Secondly, no. neither Free software nor Open Source have been about innovation. Free software it is a philosophy concerned with Freedom. Open Source is a development methodology which has to do with openness and collaboration.
Thirdly, there is innovation from the Free/Open Source community, it just tends to be at a lower-level than most end-users give a crap about. Then there is also the "problem" of openness - innovations tend to be suggested and discussed openly before they are implemented, so are no longer considered so "innovative" by the the time they get released.
You're mis-attributing statements in the article:
This is, I admit, rather ambiguous, but since the very next paragraph begins:
Here disputing the claim, so clearly demonstrating that the "10 Apple iPads" comment was made by the COO in question, and not by the author of the article.
That's not to say that the article was of a particularly high quality. It seemed to be all downhill into opinion and insult, from the second above-quoted paragraph.
IANAA, but there's "creative accounting", and then there's fraud. One is perfectly legal, the other not. It's like the difference between "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion".
The thing with creative accounting is not that it hides or creates money from nothing (which would be fraud), but that it moves it around from other places/times. If you see a really good quarter now, it's possibly because some income has been moved from elsewhen. So it might be expected for the next few fiscal quarters to be more disappointing.
The old guy gets to leave on a high, and the new guy gets to "improve" the company's financials after an initial few bad quarters. It's an accountancy win-win.
You say that like it's not feasible, from a religious perspective, that the concepts behind the Star Wars universe were divine inspiration bestowed upon mankind by some supernatural Force.
That is, after all, no different to the root source of religious "knowledge" quoted by most (if not all) religions. The only difference is that other religions generally started with oral traditions and writing books, rather than going straight to cinema.
But surely, if it is even possible for (1) to occur, it is a failure of the system storing the data; that sensitive information was disclosed without the security procedures being enforced.
The GPL isn't about Digital Rights(/Restriction) Management, it's about Legal Rights Management. That is; it doesn't actively try to prevent you from breaking the license, it just describes consequences for doing so.
Piracy isn't generally an intellectual philosophy for the abolition of copyright; it's a practical philosophy for getting stuff cheaply and conveniently - which the GPL already allows.
Not only that, but the article linked provides no actual background to how it is "known" that Google "snitched" - just an unsourced quote.
A little digging indicates that the quote comes from a Financial Times article (registration required). Here are the relevant paragraphs:
A lot of intelligent, enlightened people pursue peace, relaxation, and fun, through their work.
The Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license is currently the closest thing you're going to find to an official, globally effective, public domain grant.
I've seen several people comment that they have their home directory config files under version control. If you're using git for that, it's a fairly simple next step to then "backup" the repo to github.
"It's only config files; nobody would be interested in those."
No.
Tax is levied on alcohol and tobacco, yet there are still licences and regulations behind selling either one.
I use the graph to see whose fork of a codebase is most up-to-date, or has potentially useful revisions not merged into the master. I've come across a few projects whose "master" repo is all but dead, and a dozen other people have continued development independently - sometimes having created duplicate bugfixes, etc.
Developers come and go (often without warning), so what I'd *really* like to see is an interface where the codebase is the focus, and no one user or team "owns" any kind of one-true-fork. All forks should be considered fundamentally equal, and judged on their individual merits (recent activity, most activity, most contributors, etc.).
And having issues, pull requests, etc. tied to one single fork is just wrong. If something affects the "main" fork, then it quite likely affects all the others, too, and those forks' maintainers should be allowed to accept or reject those items as it relates to their own fork.
Not even that; they just have to say they will.
How many campaign "promises" are actually implemented, by any politician, in any country? Generally very few, from what I can tell.
Personally, I think that, at the end of an elected representative's term, they should be held to account in a court of law for every campaign "promise" they didn't fulfil; each such incident bringing a charge of fraud and/or treason.
I'd imagine that they generally don't.
The cops sure as hell aren't going to make an international song and dance about all the suspects who've slipped through their grasp, so the only such people you'll hear from are the self-aggrandising gloaters.
You're not likely to hear from anyone who's keeping a low profile, by definition.
Okay, so what US laws did Wikileaks break? How are the legal proceedings against the organisation going? Anyone been extradited to the US to stand trial?
No?
So on what legal grounds did Visa, Mastercard, et al, block payments to Wikileaks? I'm pretty sure they haven't blocked donations to Bradley Manning's defence fund; he being the only person actually charged with a crime directly relating to Wikileaks' activities.
As they did, by choosing a copy-left licence.
Not at all. The intentions of the previous developers are, for all practical purposes, described by the license under which they chose to distribute their contributions.
Two words: Debian Stable
Or, if they stick to Ubuntu, three words: Long Term Support
I believe he's saying that Valve are seeing an increased likelihood that Microsoft might flip a switch in Windows, which will make Steam, or Steam-powered games, stop working. Linux, for Valve, is (partly) a hedge against that. There is no one company (other than Valve itself) that can come along and "turn off" Steam for Linux.
If Steam continues to function on Windows, then that's great for Valve. If it doesn't, however, then Valve are wise to have a fall-back plan. It's a lot better to have 90% of your income wiped out (all those Steam games that don't run on Linux), than to have 100% of it wiped out, and be scrambling for a fix while the coffers run dry.
Most people don't care about anything, unless and until it affects them personally.
This is (in theory) why governments enact "nanny state" legislation; to prepare for, and protect its population from, bad things that those who will be affected haven't even considered yet.
Few people consider about the cost of hospitalisation after a car accident, until they're in one. Hence national health services.
Few people consider the cost of leaving embarrassing photos on Facebook, until it comes up in a job interview. Hence this legislation.