Nothing wrong. It's just that often people want to have their site for a whole region, not one in each country.
Still, why "asia"? An international company can easily do it all within one domain, eg japan.xyz.com, china.xyz.com, east.xyz.com, etc. each entity can create whatever subdomains seem sensible to it, without having to mess around with registrars, fighting with domain squatters, etc. A new continental TLD is unlikely to be the perfect match for every or even many companies. So it will become a generic domain, and we already have.com for that.
You've gotta be kidding me about the hand-writing recognition. For a machine that will be deployed all over the planet? What for? Won't it have a keyboard and the keymapping/Unicode doodads? Handwriting recognition is tough; even our best AI is still challenged by it, and that's just for *one* language.
Probably mostly for the non-alphabetic CJK languages, (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), which are fairly complex to enter via keyboards, but are relatively easy to OCR, because the stroke patterns are more regular than the sloppy and variable way we write Latin letters. The device is also meant to act like a tablet, allowing notes to be "written" over graphics and text.
And dont even get me started on how my rural area schoolchildren are yet to see a computer until their latter high school years.
The $100 laptop project is meant to provide digital libraries for students at schools that don't have enough books to go around. I'm a little dubious about that idea myself, you can print a decent paperback for less than 50 cents, but shipping could be a killer.
Anyway, even in your own rural school that's not the problem, I'm sure there are more than enough textbooks to go around. Personally, I'd rather my daughter (8) wasn't spending time at school playing with computers, because basically all they do is use MS Paint, and visit some supposedly educational websites. Learning the 3 Rs via chalk and talk would be a better way to spend her time.
Microsoft, of all companies, understands that, and except in really extreme situations will usually work with a company to get them in compliance, for NO fine (even offering a discount to "help them out" in some cases). The BSA, on the other hand... Absolute pure evil.
The BSA is basically controlled by Microsoft.
See this Mother Jones article about the BSA in South America. (Yes, it's a very lefty magazine but I think credible.):
The BSA receives funding from most of the top software companies but appears to be most heavily funded by Microsoft. And, according to Antel's information technology manager, Ricardo Tascenho, the company settled the matter by signing a "special agreement" with Microsoft to replace all of its software with Microsoft products....Antel's situation suggests that when the BSA cracks down on piracy overseas, it's Bill Gates who turns out to be the pirate. Representatives from rival firms complain that Microsoft is abusing its power within the BSA to speed its global dominance...Felipe Yungman, Novell's manager of security for Argentina, says he and another staffer at Novell discovered, while pursuing their own investigation for the company, that the BSA was setting up sweetheart deals for Microsoft. "Companies or government offices had to, as a condition [that the BSA] forgive them of piracy, replace Novell products with Microsoft products," he says.
Aren't you tired of every other result for a Google search of "computer upgrades" pointing to porn? Same goes for images if you search for "white house" or "AMD logo"
Frome the current Wikipedia page: In 1986, Middle Tennessee State University established the "John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies," honoring Seigenthaler's "lifelong commitment to free expression values". He founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University
And this guy is going ballistic because he can't find out who maligned him on Wikipedia, so he wants Wikipedia, and the ISP, to be accountable. He obviously doesn't care at the immense chilling effect this would have should he get his way. It seems freedom of expression is fine for him, but not anyone else. Anonymity is a valuable and important tool allowing free expression for those who may fear repercussions.
And I'm not giving credence to the lies posted about him, that they were online unchallenged for months means that no one looked at the page; until he went public maybe no one at all, so the damage to his reputation was slight. His desired remedies are massively disproportionate.
I know that it's probably taken a bit out of context, but I'm really having a hard time reading any of his articles and discerning a cohesive thought, much less a consistent one.
He's a joke, nothing "he" writes is meant to be taken seriously.
The Register runs this kind of stunt from time to time. The whole point is just to boost readership. They don't care if people come there for something insightful or because it's utterly moronic; the page hits are the same after all.
The Register does run articles like this -- as a joke. And regularly they're picked up by irony-deficient Americans and posted as if they were real. Otto Z Stern is basically a combination of Hunter S Thompson and Jerry Pournelle. Look at the tag to the story:
Otto Z. Stern is a director at The Institute of Technological Values - a think tank dedicated to a more moral digital age. He has closely monitored the IT industry's intersection with America's role as a world leader for thirty years. You can find Stern locked and loaded, corralling wounded iLemmings, nursing an opal-plated prostate, spanking open source fly boys, wearing a smashing suit, dropping a SkyCar on the Googleplex, spitting on Frenchmen, vomiting in fear with a life-sized cutout of Hilary Rosen at his solar-powered compound somewhere in the Great American Southwest.
I hate the fact that hospitals can make hundreds of thousands of dollars over a transplant's life (anti-rejection drugs, therapies, surgery, actual sale of the organ) and the person it was taken from is left with jack for their family.
Problem is the person making the decision to pull the plug (and cut off your face and other organs) would have a financial incentive to do so. Of course, they could already hate you.
the answer is well-settled. Legislatively dealing with porn (and defining it) is nothing new; laws are already in place limiting what newstands can sell, at what age consumers can purchase it, what penalties exist for selling it to people beneath that age, etc.
Except that the "laws in place" are DIFFERENT IN EVERY PLACE. And this guy is from Utah, we can guess what standards he wants applied.
Much simpler solution: cut off Utah from the Internet. This is something he actually has the ability to do if the state is behind him.
Umm... Some articles posted within the 10 hours before this one include this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.
Look at the timestamps on the article, then of the comments.
Eg:
The Mother of all BIOS Guides
Posted by Hemos on Monday November 28, @03:27AM First post: Monday November 28, @12:41PM
(All times in my TZ, of course.) Almost 9 hours from the stated live time to the first comments. So somethng is quite wrong.
The question you should ask is why the hell your company is giving you a "very high spec'd machine with dual-head 1600x1200 screens." if your work only "involves web/e-Mail/SSH access".
My guess is this is just a fantasy question designed to press the buttons for Slashdot, with as much relation to the submitter's real life as a "Letter to Penthouse"; i.e. techno-porn wish fulfilment. "If you had a Lamborghini/a million dollars/a longer dick/..."
I think the poster has grasped the less than clear point that 'bouncing like cannonballs' means not bouncing at all.
Actually, the submitter seems to have mashed up the analogies in TFA to somethng unintellible.
It says "In the lunar daytime, intense ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun knocks electrons out of the powdery grit. Dust grains on the moon's daylit surface thus become positively charged. Eventually, the repulsive charges become so strong that grains are launched off the surface 'like cannonballs,' says Abbas, arcing kilometers above the moon until gravity makes them fall back again to the ground."
Note that the word "bouncing" does not appear anywhere.
Actually, if you read the descriptions for all the electric models, you'll find that several of them have phrases like "modify your water use habits" and "not for a whole family" or "one shower or sink at a time."
Well, I was responding to the guy who said they just didn't work at all. Obviously a continuous flow heater of any kind is going to have limits on how much it can supply at once.
The microwave item mentioned in the post apparently will not have these restrictions.
"Apparently"? There are no specs in TFA, and the company website is "coming soon". You're converting electricity to heat either way so I don't know how it would use significantly less power; resistive heating from an immersed element is pretty efficient, not to mention very simple and cheap (to make, if not run).
there is no tank on this unit. Water is heated as it flows through. Try doing that with resistor based elements and you'll get slightly above room temperature water at best.
Really? So none of the electric "tankless" water heaters on this page actually work then?
We've been using microwaves to heat food for years now. How come no one came up with this idea before? Is there a technical limitation that has been overcome?
Maybe because it's not really a great idea. MW ovens are efficient because they just heat water, not the air etc in the oven. But an immersed electric element is already very efficient at heating water. If I want to boil more than one cup of water I use an electric heater, or a kettle on a stove. If there is a breakthrough, it would be in making high-powered (by comparison with domestic MW ovens)as cheap than an on-demand electric heater. That's assuming it really is as cheap, if it's not then it's just a novelty item for gadget geeks &/or Japanese.
And then what, once the line has been moved once already? What will you say to the "Free the Heroin Campaign"?
Actually, I would say yes. If someone wants to wipe themself out you can't stop them. A lot of people abuse alcohol, a smaller number would abuse heroin if it was legal. Back about 1900 heroin was legal in the US. It was (ab)used pretty much as people use prescription sedatives now. I'm told pharmaceutical heroin has few side-effects, there are junkies in their 90s who'd hardly have survived if they'd been on hard liquor that long. You can't make drug abuse disappear by legislation. Even putting millions of people in jail as in the US hasn't dented the problem. I've had a close friend on heroin and it broke my heart, but if she'd been able to buy it at a pharmacy instead of prostituting herself to buy it from a dealer I think she could have lived a normal life.
As I said above, if you allow tobacco, it's laughable to deny other drugs on the basis of harm.
Seems like this could be a bit of a stretch in places like Central America and Africa
Yes, in TFA a doctor says as a public health measure it would be much easier, cheaper and effective to spray the standing water where they breed rather than trying to suck them up later in this device.
It also raises the question: How will this interact with the Do Not Call bill that was passed a while ago? According to the bill, companies that have a past relationship with you are exempt from the blacklist. If you put your number into one of these boxes...
RTFA. "We won't share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you're connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can't see it. In addition, we'll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time."
The only problem I see is that how do they stop assholes from putting in other people's numbers? I had assumed your phone number would be stored in your Google profile, but they say here that it is only stored temporarily, so that can't be so. (Though keeping for a "short" time would be long enough to track if someone complained.)
Slashdot Mirror
Still, why "asia"? An international company can easily do it all within one domain, eg japan.xyz.com, china.xyz.com, east.xyz.com, etc. each entity can create whatever subdomains seem sensible to it, without having to mess around with registrars, fighting with domain squatters, etc. A new continental TLD is unlikely to be the perfect match for every or even many companies. So it will become a generic domain, and we already have .com for that.
Probably mostly for the non-alphabetic CJK languages, (Chinese/Japanese/Korean), which are fairly complex to enter via keyboards, but are relatively easy to OCR, because the stroke patterns are more regular than the sloppy and variable way we write Latin letters. The device is also meant to act like a tablet, allowing notes to be "written" over graphics and text.
The $100 laptop project is meant to provide digital libraries for students at schools that don't have enough books to go around. I'm a little dubious about that idea myself, you can print a decent paperback for less than 50 cents, but shipping could be a killer.
Anyway, even in your own rural school that's not the problem, I'm sure there are more than enough textbooks to go around. Personally, I'd rather my daughter (8) wasn't spending time at school playing with computers, because basically all they do is use MS Paint, and visit some supposedly educational websites. Learning the 3 Rs via chalk and talk would be a better way to spend her time.
XYZ.us -> US company
XYZ.eu -> UK company
XYZ.asia -> Chinese company
What about the French, German, Dutch; Japanese, Korean, Thai...
And what's wrong with the current:
XYZ.co.uk -> UK company
XYZ.com.cn -> Chinese company?
What would be the point? Is there another China on another continent?
The BSA is basically controlled by Microsoft. See this Mother Jones article about the BSA in South America. (Yes, it's a very lefty magazine but I think credible.):
Ruubbish. Do image searches on these terms:
AMD logo
white house
computer upgrades
On all these just one porn image out of 60 results. If that bothers you, use the "safe search" button.
In 1986, Middle Tennessee State University established the "John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies," honoring Seigenthaler's "lifelong commitment to free expression values". He founded the First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University
And this guy is going ballistic because he can't find out who maligned him on Wikipedia, so he wants Wikipedia, and the ISP, to be accountable. He obviously doesn't care at the immense chilling effect this would have should he get his way. It seems freedom of expression is fine for him, but not anyone else. Anonymity is a valuable and important tool allowing free expression for those who may fear repercussions.
And I'm not giving credence to the lies posted about him, that they were online unchallenged for months means that no one looked at the page; until he went public maybe no one at all, so the damage to his reputation was slight. His desired remedies are massively disproportionate.
He's a joke, nothing "he" writes is meant to be taken seriously.
The Register does run articles like this -- as a joke. And regularly they're picked up by irony-deficient Americans and posted as if they were real. Otto Z Stern is basically a combination of Hunter S Thompson and Jerry Pournelle. Look at the tag to the story:
Problem is the person making the decision to pull the plug (and cut off your face and other organs) would have a financial incentive to do so. Of course, they could already hate you.
What if he wears a mask during the crime!
What about fingerprints, DNA, and "ordinary", Maichael-Jackson-style, plastic surgery?
Unless, like here, the editors don't read the comments (or the articles they greenlight).
Except that the "laws in place" are DIFFERENT IN EVERY PLACE. And this guy is from Utah, we can guess what standards he wants applied.
Much simpler solution: cut off Utah from the Internet. This is something he actually has the ability to do if the state is behind him.
Look at the timestamps on the article, then of the comments.
Eg:
The Mother of all BIOS Guides
Posted by Hemos on Monday November 28, @03:27AM
First post: Monday November 28, @12:41PM
(All times in my TZ, of course.) Almost 9 hours from the stated live time to the first comments. So somethng is quite wrong.
My guess is this is just a fantasy question designed to press the buttons for Slashdot, with as much relation to the submitter's real life as a "Letter to Penthouse"; i.e. techno-porn wish fulfilment. "If you had a Lamborghini/a million dollars/a longer dick/..."
Actually, the submitter seems to have mashed up the analogies in TFA to somethng unintellible.
It says "In the lunar daytime, intense ultraviolet (UV) light from the sun knocks electrons out of the powdery grit. Dust grains on the moon's daylit surface thus become positively charged. Eventually, the repulsive charges become so strong that grains are launched off the surface 'like cannonballs,' says Abbas, arcing kilometers above the moon until gravity makes them fall back again to the ground."
Note that the word "bouncing" does not appear anywhere.
Well, I was responding to the guy who said they just didn't work at all. Obviously a continuous flow heater of any kind is going to have limits on how much it can supply at once.
The microwave item mentioned in the post apparently will not have these restrictions.
"Apparently"? There are no specs in TFA, and the company website is "coming soon". You're converting electricity to heat either way so I don't know how it would use significantly less power; resistive heating from an immersed element is pretty efficient, not to mention very simple and cheap (to make, if not run).
And the rest are electric.
Really? So none of the electric "tankless" water heaters on this page actually work then?
Maybe because it's not really a great idea. MW ovens are efficient because they just heat water, not the air etc in the oven. But an immersed electric element is already very efficient at heating water. If I want to boil more than one cup of water I use an electric heater, or a kettle on a stove. If there is a breakthrough, it would be in making high-powered (by comparison with domestic MW ovens)as cheap than an on-demand electric heater. That's assuming it really is as cheap, if it's not then it's just a novelty item for gadget geeks &/or Japanese.
Actually, I would say yes. If someone wants to wipe themself out you can't stop them. A lot of people abuse alcohol, a smaller number would abuse heroin if it was legal. Back about 1900 heroin was legal in the US. It was (ab)used pretty much as people use prescription sedatives now. I'm told pharmaceutical heroin has few side-effects, there are junkies in their 90s who'd hardly have survived if they'd been on hard liquor that long. You can't make drug abuse disappear by legislation. Even putting millions of people in jail as in the US hasn't dented the problem. I've had a close friend on heroin and it broke my heart, but if she'd been able to buy it at a pharmacy instead of prostituting herself to buy it from a dealer I think she could have lived a normal life.
As I said above, if you allow tobacco, it's laughable to deny other drugs on the basis of harm.
Yes, in TFA a doctor says as a public health measure it would be much easier, cheaper and effective to spray the standing water where they breed rather than trying to suck them up later in this device.
Old indeed, CONTROL was using a more sophisticated version in the 1960s.
RTFA. "We won't share your telephone number with anyone, including the advertiser. When you're connected with the advertiser, your number is blocked so the advertiser can't see it. In addition, we'll delete the number from our servers after a short period of time."
The only problem I see is that how do they stop assholes from putting in other people's numbers? I had assumed your phone number would be stored in your Google profile, but they say here that it is only stored temporarily, so that can't be so. (Though keeping for a "short" time would be long enough to track if someone complained.)