Not looking that much, while this bill has been buried it does appear that where the USSR wanted the state to control everything the US wants large companies to control everything. The end result is similar with the average Joe or Joeski having zero power and rights.
Keep vigalent for your freedoms, or slowly they will disappear.
$400 or less gets you a PC that can do everything you want on the internet, and has the advantage of a hard-disk. All of this internet appliance stuff seemed to miss that point. The idea that you had a $200 box that required a $40,000 box at the other end to act as its brain seemed to be... well brain dead.
The internet is just one reason that people buy a PC, playing games, editing documents, scanning in your photos are all common reasons that people get a PC. Internet appliances couldn't do these things as well as a PC and so deserved their fate. Bad business idea, bad tech idea. Remember X Servers ? They made sense when a Unix box was $20,000 and you could see the reduction in cost, but with internet appliances you would have to sell a huge number of boxes to cover the costs of the backend servers.
Then there are the really stupid ideas... an internet appliance which is basically just a browser, a standalone browser and email client. Something that is cheap and doesn't require a backend server, but does bugger all, and does it worse than a PC. BushTV in the UK is an example of that, and several of these other elements are good examples of abject failure of brains (I know I worked for a company that had such a stupid idea, I worked on abstract software for STBs, they decided to spend $3m on building a box... went bust).
Internet appliances will succeed... when they are appliances. A cooker which connects to food.com or whatever to get receipes, a fridge which connects to the supermarket to order replacement Red Bull, a phone which reads out your emails.
But not when it is a crap PC.
Setting standards... I think not..
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
MS is worried that it won't be setting computing standards ? But it _never_ _ever_ has. Its forte has been ignoring standards and setting out on its own. Its problem now with the concept of the pervasive web and pervasive computing is that its #1 reason for this succeeding, its OS is not longer going to be ubiquidous.
IBM failed because they didn't see the PC revolution, MS have seen the pervasive web, and are trying to get onto it, but their problem is that by its very nature its a non-MS world. Where IBM missed the bandwagon the issue here is that MS want to get onto the one that it has previously tried to blow off the rails. Will Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, IBM, HP, Sun allow MS to join their tea party.
Hopefully not. But there is no accounting for CEO stupidity. MS have to undergo a culture change, their adoption of XML and SOAP looked good, until they haven't implemented the SOAP stuff to the SOAP standard yet (and they are on the bloody standards body!). That underlying aim of embrace, extend, extinguish was fine while they controlled the OS, but with internet aware consumer devices the bar of quality, reliability and interoperability has been raised.
To quote my wife "So people accept that Microsoft write crap code, and even blame themselves for problems, thats the reason I gave up using the PC"
Its true my wife uses the PC very rarely for a bit of browsing and email... but there is no way she would put up with a mobile phone that hangs.
First get elected in dodgy election where you win after some strange goings on in the State run by your brother and your electoral agent gets to deny the opposition a recount.
* Is fixing this bug vital to web content developers, Mozilla distributors, Gecko embedders, or others who will depend on 1.0 for stable code and a minimal set of frozen APIs?
* Is there no alternative to fixing the bug that frees people to work on other 1.0 bugs?
* What goes wrong if we don't fix the bug, and just live with it for 1.0?
* What do we give up from 1.0 in exchange for fixing the bug?
* Can you stare down slashdot and C|net together and at the same time, and argue credibly that the bug is a 1.0 stop-ship problem? While we are not yet at the "about to ship, why should we take any more risk" stage, this question can help us prioritize and avoid unpleasant surprises later, when 1.0 is within our grasp.
Now that is proper requirements management, unusual in most open source projects. These are the 4 basic rules on requirements management.
Full on for them in doing this. They are running it like a proper project and trying to control requirements creep.
Hardly interference. The point here is that while now there are large numbers of record stores which make a good living selling CDs, Records et al from a large number of labels this would produce a few sites totally tied to a specific label. Most record shops have a few albums from indie or small labels and it is that range of selection that is in danger. The aim here is quite clear... dominate the digital market place, don't allow others to sell your albums digitally and so the equivalent of the high street store that has the breadth of records is never allowed to exist as they can't exist selling _only_ indie records.
Fairplay to the EU for this one I say. It isn't interfering its making sure that the big boys don't create a digital monopoly that squeezes the minor players out.
Hopefully this will be the start of a number of such actions including Hailstorm, Passport et al from the boys in Redmond. This is pro-consumer and anti-big-business.
These steps are nothing to do with _now_ yes we needed to have machines that went from 1Hz to 400Mhz or so, otherwise it was a pain in the arse, but the last 3 years has seen insanely powerful machines, and not seen the sort of increases in quality that could be expected.
And no-one EVER needed C++, its a HORRIBLE language:)
a) Yup... the soundcard does large parts of this, the disk is fast
b) see a) lots of this after snowboarding holidays. Mostly done directly from the video camera over the firewire connection
c) Yup... now that is slow, but I've got lots of memory so not that bad... in fact given that I've got 3/4Gb of RAM its probably as fast as memory limited machines with a fast CPU...
d) Yup... hell done that on _much_ slower machines.
e) Yup...
The basic one here is that I don't work 100% of the time on a single task. Waiting for renders is fine (I've always tended to do them as overnight jobs anyway).
All of the above are very very possible on a PII400Mhz, just ensure its got a good soundcard, a good graphics card, fast disk, and lots of memory.
Most of those things suck up memory rather than CPU and its the huge amounts of swapping that cause them to slow down.
Things like SOAP are a classic example. CORBA is a perfect way to get computers communicating, it uses IDL to describe the services, it works on any platform and works using a binary protocol which can be tunneled via HTTP if required.
SOAP is an ASCII based RPC mechanism, when was that a good idea ? So you can _read_ computer to computer transactions ? This is possible because we have cycles to burn and so doing two sets (or more) of textual conversion isn't seen as a bad thing(tm).
Outlook, Netscape 6,.Net all manage to turn computers that previously did useful work into slow chugging behemoths. As another example consider this....
XEmacs used to be considered the worlds largest piece of bloatware... its 4.2meg, its got email, news, web-browser, editor, mayan calendar and the kitchen sink in there....
Mozilla appears to be 16Meg at least (IE was 100Meg when I installed everything!) Is it 4 times as functional, 4 times as reliable... nope.
I'm running at home on a PII 400Mhz and it runs everything I possibly need. My Mother and Father in Law are on a P166 and wondered if they should upgrade. I said no as it really doesn't need it, they just do basic database, spreadsheet and word.
All too often developers use the increased memory and processor speed to write worse implementations, or to create pointless bloatware. I know this will continue no matter what I say but at the end of the day who really needs this much power, QuakeIV players ? QuakeV ? QuakeIII runs fine with my upgraded graphics card, and top of the line sound card, the processor does bugger all.
Moore's law is great, it means computers can do more and more, but for the home market its just silly, 90% of people would be fine not changing their machine for 4 years, but they are forced to upgrade by market perception.
Faster this, faster that.... but never ever actually "better", "more reliable" or "stable".
Hardware is the excuse for bloatware, its not H/W engineers fault but it isn't an excuse to use....
(and yes this is partly a dig at the huge swap requirements on the 2.4 kernel)
When I used to work on Radar display I had the ultimate dev setup (few years ago this was), my own quad processor Alpha box, one 30" 2048x2048 display, and two 21" displays either side, all running off a 50k dedicated graphics generator.
One monitor is never enough, you need at least two, one the boss sees with work on it, the other playing xconq.
You'd almost think that a half-decent GUI and a huge set of tools were the most important things rather than inter-process communication.
Amazing. Stunningly the IBM OS/390 wipes the floor with all of these entries. Great desktop machine. Linux is a good OS, its not the best, it doesn't beat Solaris for reliability, it doesn't beat Windows for usability, and it doesn't come near the Mainframe architectures for speed. But it does have its place, but petty things like this are surely pointless. If a HCI group found that Linux was _easier_ to use, then that would be something to applaud but in the days of Gigabit networks and massive processor speeds and huge RAM these sorts of performance things are less important than ever.
The key to success is ease of use, ease of deployment, Linux is getting there, but having fast pipes won't progress it.
The most secure system is a Unix box run by a 40+ year old bloke who has seen the virtual deaths of more script kiddies than I've had hot dinners.
Actually Mainframe admins run pretty tight ships as well. Its a sad reflection on the new generation of admins that most of these are things the old school had never even thought of doing wrong. The current raft of virii are an example. The people hit had new school systems, the old school companies survived untouched.
Old blokes in a distant room of the organisation, possibly called "Gary" or "Dave" never seem to be doing much, but their network never fails.
Ummm So there are around 280million or so in North America... a similar number for Europe, add in Africa, the Middle East, Asia which are all predominantly GSM and soon the argument falls into tatters. There is no reason not to use GSM, if its the network of choice in the rest of the planet, and it works over large parts of Russia (hint you don't need many towers in Nebraska or Sibera because animals don't use mobiles). And look at Finland. You'd be hard pushed to find a more sparesely populated country, and yet mobiles rule.
The infrastructure in the US sucks, its disjointed, fractured and a pain. A classic example of where a lack of goverment direction restricts choice. Having such a disjointed network has put a heavy dampner on the development of wireless in the US.
Roll on standards, even if they are goverment decreed.
All I can say is "Thank Standards" its about time that you can use the same phone in the rest of the world and still have it work in the States without having to buy a bulky tri-band number. Now if the billing issues could be sorted out then it would be great.
Why is the US always at least 2 years behind the rest of the planet for Wireless ?
Given the current anti-tech rage being promoted in the US media this is a brave decision which should be applauded. While it is quite clear that this is a ridiculous case these are rapidly becomming ridiculous times.
"Ex-Commie tries to undermine US companies" is an all to easy headline to imagine. Its excellent that he has this defence lawyer, that should drive him into freedom, but the fact remains that the Don't Mind Capitulating Act is liable to get stronger rather than weaker... will Bush make this the one case where there isn't a back door to cryptography... probably.
This sort of thing is part of the reason why the US is now in recession, the driving of large corporations at the expense on innovation.
Are the answer, they love pushing buttons and while there are incidents of failure they seamlessly upgrade with the hardware. And they can open fridges and bring beer. They come with switchable covers, have a basic voice and language recognition system, and work off an inexhustable supply of energy. They are even turning things on before you get up, and after you've gone to bed.
The FRENCH goverment informed the old FBI that it had a bunch of terrorists running about and the FBI did... nothing, nadda, zip. In fact they had to ask the French for the information again. Maybe if the FBI and the CIA got off their fat arses and got dirty and tried to infiltrate these organisations they might actually get somewhere.
These sorts of projects are a kick in the teeth to the wireless companies who will soon be trying to sell 3G tech. Or is it that these will become redundant with the advent of 3G.
Personally I can't wait till the day when my laptop has a wireless 3G card that can connect at high speed whenever and where ever I want.
Don't forget WHY the US dropped Encryption export
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
It was because somewhat unsuprisingly the mathematical brains in Japan and Europe had managed to come up with their own encryption systems which COULD be sold in the US, thus meaning that US companies couldn't compete abroad and could get slammed at home.
Or was it that the NSA actually does have a working quantum computer ?
With this many licenses around its getting a bit silly. A friend of mine runs the Scope HMVC project Scope over at Sourceforge and had to change the license slightly so as to enable work to pay him to do it. As more and more licenses come on board it just means more work for the lawyers. Isn't it time that there was a dynamic Open Source license which had a series of checkboxes that dumped out the license appropriate to your project at the end of it.
This is meant to be high tech, but our foundations are still paper.
Interesting ideas but at the end of the day pointless. As people in the UK have known for years having a bunch of nutters in a terrorist organisation being funded by sympathisers abroad (in this case mainly based in the US) doesn't mean that you capitulate and turn into a police state. Intelligence is key, both miltary and political, the art of negotiation and the attempt to remove the problem by political means will be far more successful in the long run. In the short term it hasn't helped having had the political wing of the IRA being allowed to raise funds in the US to support the supporters of terrorism.
Part of the solution, probably the biggest part is working with those people who _peacefully_ oppose these regimes and seek to create a democratic world. The policy of the west (especially the US) during the 70s and 80s was to fund anyone who opposed the Soviets, the the middle east these were Islamic fundamentalists such as the Taliban, not democratic organisations seeking a better system.
Cracking down on privacy, bombing countries are neither real short term or long term solutions. Having 3 billion people living on $2 a day, and 1 billion on $1 a day is. And the continual funding of dictatorial and vicious regimes by the west for their own ends has to stop. When the Iran v Iraq conflict was on the west backed, and supplied arms to, Iraq. When the Soviets invaded Afganistan we armed the Taliban.
There are serious questions to be answered, mainly by the politicians whose actions have led us into the world we find ourselves, it wasn't politicians who died on Sept 11th it was innocent people who died, people who had never supplied arms to Iraq, funded dictatorial regimes and if asked would have said "Hell no" to such suggestions. But thanks to the defense and other big businesses our world is not governed by the poor people classed as "colateral damage" by politicans and soldiers but by greed and monopolistic desire.
Ghandi once said that any act however good, which was achieved by violence had sown the seeds of its own destruction.
It is time to talk, to support those who DEMOCRATICALLY oppose regimes, not to support another bunch of fanatical nutters who just happen to be slightly less worse, at the moment, than the nutters we armed last week.
Politicians are scum, the George Bushes have created this world, but it will never be they who have to pay for their actions.
if she'd been Italian he would have given her another bottle.
As a tourist its the same all over, I've had dodgy problems in stores in the US (esp smaller ones) and the basic attitude is "I know you can't do jack because your leaving in two days time".
Same the world over. European laws do protect the consumer in a similar manner to the US laws. The warrenty on Software products however protects the company and basically says "you gave us $200, we will allow you to use the product for a little while but we still own it and can take it back, disable it or whatever, oh and any bugs in it then tough shit and fork out for the upgrade"
Slashdot Mirror
Not looking that much, while this bill has been buried it does appear that where the USSR wanted the state to control everything the US wants large companies to control everything. The end result is similar with the average Joe or Joeski having zero power and rights.
Keep vigalent for your freedoms, or slowly they will disappear.
Upcoming titles
"Bomb the Chinese Embassy by mistake"
"Ooops we hit another residential area"
"Oh no we hit a tourist boat"
Most games at the moment penalise when you fuck up, I guess these ones will reward you with promotion.
$400 or less gets you a PC that can do everything you want on the internet, and has the advantage of a hard-disk. All of this internet appliance stuff seemed to miss that point. The idea that you had a $200 box that required a $40,000 box at the other end to act as its brain seemed to be... well brain dead.
The internet is just one reason that people buy a PC, playing games, editing documents, scanning in your photos are all common reasons that people get a PC. Internet appliances couldn't do these things as well as a PC and so deserved their fate. Bad business idea, bad tech idea. Remember X Servers ? They made sense when a Unix box was $20,000 and you could see the reduction in cost, but with internet appliances you would have to sell a huge number of boxes to cover the costs of the backend servers.
Then there are the really stupid ideas... an internet appliance which is basically just a browser, a standalone browser and email client. Something that is cheap and doesn't require a backend server, but does bugger all, and does it worse than a PC. BushTV in the UK is an example of that, and several of these other elements are good examples of abject failure of brains (I know I worked for a company that had such a stupid idea, I worked on abstract software for STBs, they decided to spend $3m on building a box... went bust).
Internet appliances will succeed... when they are appliances. A cooker which connects to food.com or whatever to get receipes, a fridge which connects to the supermarket to order replacement Red Bull, a phone which reads out your emails.
But not when it is a crap PC.
MS is worried that it won't be setting computing standards ? But it _never_ _ever_ has. Its forte has been ignoring standards and setting out on its own. Its problem now with the concept of the pervasive web and pervasive computing is that its #1 reason for this succeeding, its OS is not longer going to be ubiquidous.
IBM failed because they didn't see the PC revolution, MS have seen the pervasive web, and are trying to get onto it, but their problem is that by its very nature its a non-MS world. Where IBM missed the bandwagon the issue here is that MS want to get onto the one that it has previously tried to blow off the rails. Will Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, IBM, HP, Sun allow MS to join their tea party.
Hopefully not. But there is no accounting for CEO stupidity. MS have to undergo a culture change, their adoption of XML and SOAP looked good, until they haven't implemented the SOAP stuff to the SOAP standard yet (and they are on the bloody standards body!). That underlying aim of embrace, extend, extinguish was fine while they controlled the OS, but with internet aware consumer devices the bar of quality, reliability and interoperability has been raised.
To quote my wife "So people accept that Microsoft write crap code, and even blame themselves for problems, thats the reason I gave up using the PC"
Its true my wife uses the PC very rarely for a bit of browsing and email... but there is no way she would put up with a mobile phone that hangs.
First get elected in dodgy election where you win after some strange goings on in the State run by your brother and your electoral agent gets to deny the opposition a recount.
Next up closed courts.....
Next thing you know he'll bomb the Red Cross....
* Is fixing this bug vital to web content developers, Mozilla distributors, Gecko embedders, or others who will depend on 1.0 for stable code and a minimal set of frozen APIs?
* Is there no alternative to fixing the bug that frees people to work on other 1.0 bugs?
* What goes wrong if we don't fix the bug, and just live with it for 1.0?
* What do we give up from 1.0 in exchange for fixing the bug?
* Can you stare down slashdot and C|net together and at the same time, and argue credibly that the bug is a 1.0 stop-ship problem? While we are not yet at the "about to ship, why should we take any more risk" stage, this question can help us prioritize and avoid unpleasant surprises later, when 1.0 is within our grasp.
Now that is proper requirements management, unusual in most open source projects. These are the 4 basic rules on requirements management.
Full on for them in doing this. They are running it like a proper project and trying to control requirements creep.
Open Source goes back into the Cathederal ?
Hardly interference. The point here is that while now there are large numbers of record stores which make a good living selling CDs, Records et al from a large number of labels this would produce a few sites totally tied to a specific label. Most record shops have a few albums from indie or small labels and it is that range of selection that is in danger. The aim here is quite clear... dominate the digital market place, don't allow others to sell your albums digitally and so the equivalent of the high street store that has the breadth of records is never allowed to exist as they can't exist selling _only_ indie records.
Fairplay to the EU for this one I say. It isn't interfering its making sure that the big boys don't create a digital monopoly that squeezes the minor players out.
Hopefully this will be the start of a number of such actions including Hailstorm, Passport et al from the boys in Redmond. This is pro-consumer and anti-big-business.
Fairplay I say.
These steps are nothing to do with _now_ yes we needed to have machines that went from 1Hz to 400Mhz or so, otherwise it was a pain in the arse, but the last 3 years has seen insanely powerful machines, and not seen the sort of increases in quality that could be expected.
And no-one EVER needed C++, its a HORRIBLE language
LISP, Smalltalk now you're talking
a) Yup... the soundcard does large parts of this, the disk is fast
b) see a) lots of this after snowboarding holidays. Mostly done directly from the video camera over the firewire connection
c) Yup... now that is slow, but I've got lots of memory so not that bad... in fact given that I've got 3/4Gb of RAM its probably as fast as memory limited machines with a fast CPU...
d) Yup... hell done that on _much_ slower machines.
e) Yup...
The basic one here is that I don't work 100% of the time on a single task. Waiting for renders is fine (I've always tended to do them as overnight jobs anyway).
All of the above are very very possible on a PII400Mhz, just ensure its got a good soundcard, a good graphics card, fast disk, and lots of memory.
Most of those things suck up memory rather than CPU and its the huge amounts of swapping that cause them to slow down.
Things like SOAP are a classic example. CORBA is a perfect way to get computers communicating, it uses IDL to describe the services, it works on any platform and works using a binary protocol which can be tunneled via HTTP if required.
SOAP is an ASCII based RPC mechanism, when was that a good idea ? So you can _read_ computer to computer transactions ? This is possible because we have cycles to burn and so doing two sets (or more) of textual conversion isn't seen as a bad thing(tm).
Outlook, Netscape 6,
XEmacs used to be considered the worlds largest piece of bloatware... its 4.2meg, its got email, news, web-browser, editor, mayan calendar and the kitchen sink in there....
Mozilla appears to be 16Meg at least (IE was 100Meg when I installed everything!) Is it 4 times as functional, 4 times as reliable... nope.
I'm running at home on a PII 400Mhz and it runs everything I possibly need. My Mother and Father in Law are on a P166 and wondered if they should upgrade. I said no as it really doesn't need it, they just do basic database, spreadsheet and word.
All too often developers use the increased memory and processor speed to write worse implementations, or to create pointless bloatware. I know this will continue no matter what I say but at the end of the day who really needs this much power, QuakeIV players ? QuakeV ? QuakeIII runs fine with my upgraded graphics card, and top of the line sound card, the processor does bugger all.
Moore's law is great, it means computers can do more and more, but for the home market its just silly, 90% of people would be fine not changing their machine for 4 years, but they are forced to upgrade by market perception.
Faster this, faster that.... but never ever actually "better", "more reliable" or "stable".
Hardware is the excuse for bloatware, its not H/W engineers fault but it isn't an excuse to use....
(and yes this is partly a dig at the huge swap requirements on the 2.4 kernel)
When I used to work on Radar display I had the ultimate dev setup (few years ago this was), my own quad processor Alpha box, one 30" 2048x2048 display, and two 21" displays either side, all running off a 50k dedicated graphics generator.
One monitor is never enough, you need at least two, one the boss sees with work on it, the other playing xconq.
You'd almost think that a half-decent GUI and a huge set of tools were the most important things rather than inter-process communication.
Amazing. Stunningly the IBM OS/390 wipes the floor with all of these entries. Great desktop machine. Linux is a good OS, its not the best, it doesn't beat Solaris for reliability, it doesn't beat Windows for usability, and it doesn't come near the Mainframe architectures for speed. But it does have its place, but petty things like this are surely pointless. If a HCI group found that Linux was _easier_ to use, then that would be something to applaud but in the days of Gigabit networks and massive processor speeds and huge RAM these sorts of performance things are less important than ever.
The key to success is ease of use, ease of deployment, Linux is getting there, but having fast pipes won't progress it.
The most secure system is a Unix box run by a 40+ year old bloke who has seen the virtual deaths of more script kiddies than I've had hot dinners.
Actually Mainframe admins run pretty tight ships as well. Its a sad reflection on the new generation of admins that most of these are things the old school had never even thought of doing wrong. The current raft of virii are an example. The people hit had new school systems, the old school companies survived untouched.
Old blokes in a distant room of the organisation, possibly called "Gary" or "Dave" never seem to be doing much, but their network never fails.
Transmeta realises its done nothing in notebook market and makes desperate dive for embedded market. ARM and TI described as "not worried".
Every little piece of Transmeta news gets broadcast as bible.
Ummm So there are around 280million or so in North America... a similar number for Europe, add in Africa, the Middle East, Asia which are all predominantly GSM and soon the argument falls into tatters. There is no reason not to use GSM, if its the network of choice in the rest of the planet, and it works over large parts of Russia (hint you don't need many towers in Nebraska or Sibera because animals don't use mobiles). And look at Finland. You'd be hard pushed to find a more sparesely populated country, and yet mobiles rule.
The infrastructure in the US sucks, its disjointed, fractured and a pain. A classic example of where a lack of goverment direction restricts choice. Having such a disjointed network has put a heavy dampner on the development of wireless in the US.
Roll on standards, even if they are goverment decreed.
All I can say is "Thank Standards" its about time that you can use the same phone in the rest of the world and still have it work in the States without having to buy a bulky tri-band number. Now if the billing issues could be sorted out then it would be great.
Why is the US always at least 2 years behind the rest of the planet for Wireless ?
Given the current anti-tech rage being promoted in the US media this is a brave decision which should be applauded. While it is quite clear that this is a ridiculous case these are rapidly becomming ridiculous times.
"Ex-Commie tries to undermine US companies" is an all to easy headline to imagine. Its excellent that he has this defence lawyer, that should drive him into freedom, but the fact remains that the Don't Mind Capitulating Act is liable to get stronger rather than weaker... will Bush make this the one case where there isn't a back door to cryptography... probably.
This sort of thing is part of the reason why the US is now in recession, the driving of large corporations at the expense on innovation.
Are the answer, they love pushing buttons and while there are incidents of failure they seamlessly upgrade with the hardware. And they can open fridges and bring beer. They come with switchable covers, have a basic voice and language recognition system, and work off an inexhustable supply of energy. They are even turning things on before you get up, and after you've gone to bed.
The FRENCH goverment informed the old FBI that it had a bunch of terrorists running about and the FBI did... nothing, nadda, zip. In fact they had to ask the French for the information again. Maybe if the FBI and the CIA got off their fat arses and got dirty and tried to infiltrate these organisations they might actually get somewhere.
They had information, they did nothing.
These sorts of projects are a kick in the teeth to the wireless companies who will soon be trying to sell 3G tech. Or is it that these will become redundant with the advent of 3G.
Personally I can't wait till the day when my laptop has a wireless 3G card that can connect at high speed whenever and where ever I want.
It was because somewhat unsuprisingly the mathematical brains in Japan and Europe had managed to come up with their own encryption systems which COULD be sold in the US, thus meaning that US companies couldn't compete abroad and could get slammed at home.
Or was it that the NSA actually does have a working quantum computer ?
With this many licenses around its getting a bit silly. A friend of mine runs the Scope HMVC project Scope over at Sourceforge and had to change the license slightly so as to enable work to pay him to do it. As more and more licenses come on board it just means more work for the lawyers. Isn't it time that there was a dynamic Open Source license which had a series of checkboxes that dumped out the license appropriate to your project at the end of it.
This is meant to be high tech, but our foundations are still paper.
Interesting ideas but at the end of the day pointless. As people in the UK have known for years having a bunch of nutters in a terrorist organisation being funded by sympathisers abroad (in this case mainly based in the US) doesn't mean that you capitulate and turn into a police state. Intelligence is key, both miltary and political, the art of negotiation and the attempt to remove the problem by political means will be far more successful in the long run. In the short term it hasn't helped having had the political wing of the IRA being allowed to raise funds in the US to support the supporters of terrorism.
Part of the solution, probably the biggest part is working with those people who _peacefully_ oppose these regimes and seek to create a democratic world. The policy of the west (especially the US) during the 70s and 80s was to fund anyone who opposed the Soviets, the the middle east these were Islamic fundamentalists such as the Taliban, not democratic organisations seeking a better system.
Cracking down on privacy, bombing countries are neither real short term or long term solutions. Having 3 billion people living on $2 a day, and 1 billion on $1 a day is. And the continual funding of dictatorial and vicious regimes by the west for their own ends has to stop. When the Iran v Iraq conflict was on the west backed, and supplied arms to, Iraq. When the Soviets invaded Afganistan we armed the Taliban.
There are serious questions to be answered, mainly by the politicians whose actions have led us into the world we find ourselves, it wasn't politicians who died on Sept 11th it was innocent people who died, people who had never supplied arms to Iraq, funded dictatorial regimes and if asked would have said "Hell no" to such suggestions. But thanks to the defense and other big businesses our world is not governed by the poor people classed as "colateral damage" by politicans and soldiers but by greed and monopolistic desire.
Ghandi once said that any act however good, which was achieved by violence had sown the seeds of its own destruction.
It is time to talk, to support those who DEMOCRATICALLY oppose regimes, not to support another bunch of fanatical nutters who just happen to be slightly less worse, at the moment, than the nutters we armed last week.
Politicians are scum, the George Bushes have created this world, but it will never be they who have to pay for their actions.
if she'd been Italian he would have given her another bottle.
As a tourist its the same all over, I've had dodgy problems in stores in the US (esp smaller ones) and the basic attitude is "I know you can't do jack because your leaving in two days time".
Same the world over. European laws do protect the consumer in a similar manner to the US laws. The warrenty on Software products however protects the company and basically says "you gave us $200, we will allow you to use the product for a little while but we still own it and can take it back, disable it or whatever, oh and any bugs in it then tough shit and fork out for the upgrade"