It is about the ability to correct bugs, the ability to improve and maintain the software, even when the company decides linux is not a target anymore (Like Nvidia did for its Optimus technology). Also, authorizing a binary blob to be executed on your machine whith no ability to check what happens in it is a security problem. There could be backdoors in these drivers.
Actually what calmed down my climate-scepticism was to actually read the IPCC report : they are not predicting a doomsday and integrate all the reasonable criticism available. They admit doubt on some things (the influence of clouds and cosmic rays notably) but do not hide facts and continue to work on their model of this complex system.
The best model we have so far is one that attributes a warming effect to CO2. We are not 100% sure it is correct but it is not acceptable to be sceptic of this hypothesis without proposing a better model.
My only qualm is that the politics of this subject do not give scientists enough room for mistakes. In many fields of science, huge discoveries led to complete perspective changes. Global ecology and climate change is a relatively new field that could undergo major changes. I fear the consequences of it if it turns out that their model is plain wrong , which still has a small probability of happening, contrary to the theory of evolution or heliocentrism.
The device is a bit more complex than that : it inputs electricity and produces steam. The disagreement with the scientist called to make measurement was in the level of output. He argued that the steam was not "dry steam" and therefore output less energy than the claim of Rossi. He could not give a precise measure but said that Rossi's calculations were erroneous. In a regular scientific process that is normal : you accept criticism and act accordingly. Rossi should have presented a way to check the quality of the steam but he prefered to start personal attacks on the scientist.
Like usual, this summary is misleading and try to link 2 different things. First thing first. Rossi is a fraud. The problem is not that he doesn't explain the mechanism of his reactors, it is that he refuses to even prove that it works. He called a scientist to certify that his black box was outputing more energy than it was inputing and the scientist disareed and asked for more information. Rossi dismissed him saying there would be no more tests of his claims. Consider Rossi out.
Now about cold fusion. It has been an active subject of research a few decades back. It continues to generate a low but continued amount of interest. The problem is that for a few years, there have been several crackpots like Rossi claiming to have a functional reactor. There has been several frauds. Cold-fusion quickly became associated with crackpottery and scientists relabelled it "low energy nuclear reaction" to be left alone by sensationalist journalists.
After the debacle, however, both NASA and the Army examined the results of these crazy years and concluded it was still worth allocating a small budget to continue experiments "just in case".
There's nothing wrong with being supportive of anti-piracy efforts.
I agree, attacking ships is pretty bad. If you talk about copyright infrigement, it is about DAMN TIME that we, as a society open a debate about how we use internet to share culture, retribute artists and how we change a model that was designed when copying a work could not be done freely and reliably at large scale.
There is imbalance, there is a system that is not working. Artists deserve money for creation, but who will pretend that Mickael Jackson being a billionaire was preferable than one thousand musicians (including him) being "simple" millionaires ? Who will pretend that it is more important to protect Britney Spears' interests rather than free speech ?
The ease of copying music and videos and transmitting them is a fact that is still denyied today by **AA groups. The very people that are paid by artists to defend their interests and help them make money. They are the people who should be proposing a system. They have the data, they know how the industry work, they understand trends, they have knowledge about how one runs a studio. It is their work, not ours. If it becomes our job to find a business system that works, it seems obvious that the first step is to remove these parasites that feed on artists money and are actually counter productive.
Several models have been proposed, but we (IT specialists, music lovers, even amateur artists) lack the insights that **AA denies us. Some models won't work, but we don't have enough data to know which ones. We are fed provably fraudulous data by these groups, it makes it harder to know if an artist can earn enough with touring, merchandising, mecenat, sponsoring, "ransom" financing, schemes likes flattr, websites' advertisements or even (but it won't happen in America) a global tax redistributed by a public organism (why not the very same **AA that refuse to change their system).
Models exist, are numerous, and did not receive objective criticism. Saying "We are the only model and internet should just stop sharing files" is simply denial, that is lasting for so long that it really is pathological.
In France here, a new mobile operator appeared, giving a lot more of technical informations than its competitor. It explained it could not accept more than ~100 open TCP connection per user, because it only has 8000 IPv4 addresses for its mobile network and expects 3 millions users. If users use more than 100 ports, he will have an exhaustion of IP/port combinations. We finally reach the point where IPv4, even using NAT techniques, is becoming impractical. The switch should happen soon.
So rather, make it known that you will boycott products from SOPA supporters, who can tell congressmen what to vote for. Someone developped a nifty app for that:
You know, your argumented and reasonable stance on this problem is what led many "open source zealots" like me into their present situation. In a functional legal environment you could use proprietary software and assume that such a breach of confidence would have so serious consequences for the companies involved that no one would dare to take the risk to put a backdoor in their software or to even make it possible.
This is not however the case, this affair is one of many (CarrierIQ, Echelon, illegal-later-legalized wiretapping, Bluecoat, Amesys, etc...) and the only cure seems to use open source everywhere a backdoor could exist. And that means, mostly, everywhere.
Anyway, I like how you present it : "I'm not an open source zealot, I'm merely an opponent to secret backdoors"
I don't want to undermine the German's PP success that they totally deserve. They are dedicated, organized and coherent. I wish we had the same level of coherency in France. I am just pointing out that even with the same level of dedication, it would be harder to succeed here.
1% is pretty hard, but 5% on a first election is downright impossible.
More and more, I wonder what is the value of an average teacher and of a classroom in this day of cheap communication and monstrous information databases. There is one year's worth of lessons that teaches about critical thinking, learning to learn, learning to find good information. The rest can be done autonomously by kids.
In France the pirate party underwent a ridiculous war between two "factions" for several years. It has been reunited since several years but has been unable so far to present candidates in any major elections.
European countries have different "details" in their election laws that make it easy or hard for small parties to be heard. For instance, in Germany, you receive public funds for your campaign when you reach 0.7% of votes. In France it is 5%.
I think the most important vote for the French PP will be the European elections : this one has a proportional part. There are already , thanks to Sweden, several pirate European MPs and this election has the same rules everywhere. I hope we focus on it.
Because SOPA is already branded as an excuse for politician in several EU country to make a similar legislation. Many EU countries are US-followers when it comes to technological laws, especially those that pretend to deal with copyright infringement.
Please do it worldwide. Then I won't see Sarkozy saying things like "The US did SOPA and everything went alright"
Their primary naval weapon is a missile that can get into ballistic mode before a ship's countermeasure can intercept it. From what I read, the strategy behing "suicide boats" is not the kamikaze strategy of crashing a boat inside an aircraft carrier but rather to be used as the launchpoint of a single anti-ship missile. The launching boat will be easy to sink, but very cheap to replace. If two or three of these boats can sink one large US ship, that is a net win for Iran.
You can't escape a missile with a ship, and no 100% efficient counter-measure exist yet. If Iran strikes first, no big US ship should expect to survive the first wave.
Can you list 10 policies that are identical between the Obama and Bush administrations?
As a non American, I think I won't reach 10, but there are a few obvious important ones from across the Ocean :
- Guantanamo is still there.
- PATRIOT act has been said to be a good thing and even "essential" by the White House
- Gay marriage is still illegal
- Drug on war is still going on and is still silly
- Copyright lobbies can still pass whatever silly legislation they want
- No plans for a Palestinian state
The whole NDAA thing is just unbelievable. In my (not so) humble opinion, signing this bill would make it just impossible to vote for Obama. Removing the right to a fair trial is not an action that one can do unharmed in a democracy. There are few worse things that I can imagine a president doing.
What are you talking about ? Experts agree that in the presidential election of 2012, internet will have more influence than TV. And OWS gets a lot of online coverage.
Check the news, Twitter and facebook have literally caused revolutions in Arab states where traditional media are a tad more controlled than in US.
You live in a country where this happened. If you believe that twitter only gets 1000 votes, please read the link. In a single district, an unknown candidate got 3000 donations through internet.
I think OWS does not recognize itself in the dem or rep party but has no inherent aversion to either. They hate corruption and collusion, the link you post illustrate the kind of things they dislike very concisely and efficiently.
Disconnecting the ties between big corporate interests and politics is a worthwhile goal and some people are calling for that exactly in both parties. I think that if OWS wants to go into politics, it will find allies in both camps.
Dems vs Reps is not the only axis of opinions, right now this is more a Corrupted vs Honest axis that draws the attention.
Slashdot Mirror
It is about the ability to correct bugs, the ability to improve and maintain the software, even when the company decides linux is not a target anymore (Like Nvidia did for its Optimus technology). Also, authorizing a binary blob to be executed on your machine whith no ability to check what happens in it is a security problem. There could be backdoors in these drivers.
Today, millions of people understood why technical staff always had reservation about "cloud-based" solutions.
Actually what calmed down my climate-scepticism was to actually read the IPCC report : they are not predicting a doomsday and integrate all the reasonable criticism available. They admit doubt on some things (the influence of clouds and cosmic rays notably) but do not hide facts and continue to work on their model of this complex system.
The best model we have so far is one that attributes a warming effect to CO2. We are not 100% sure it is correct but it is not acceptable to be sceptic of this hypothesis without proposing a better model.
My only qualm is that the politics of this subject do not give scientists enough room for mistakes. In many fields of science, huge discoveries led to complete perspective changes. Global ecology and climate change is a relatively new field that could undergo major changes. I fear the consequences of it if it turns out that their model is plain wrong , which still has a small probability of happening, contrary to the theory of evolution or heliocentrism.
Every time such law is successfully fought, it comes back under another name.
We should go further : ask for a law that protects DNSs and internet freedom. Even a constitutional amendment, why not ?
The device is a bit more complex than that : it inputs electricity and produces steam. The disagreement with the scientist called to make measurement was in the level of output. He argued that the steam was not "dry steam" and therefore output less energy than the claim of Rossi. He could not give a precise measure but said that Rossi's calculations were erroneous. In a regular scientific process that is normal : you accept criticism and act accordingly. Rossi should have presented a way to check the quality of the steam but he prefered to start personal attacks on the scientist.
For me it is clearly a fraud.
Like usual, this summary is misleading and try to link 2 different things. First thing first. Rossi is a fraud. The problem is not that he doesn't explain the mechanism of his reactors, it is that he refuses to even prove that it works. He called a scientist to certify that his black box was outputing more energy than it was inputing and the scientist disareed and asked for more information. Rossi dismissed him saying there would be no more tests of his claims. Consider Rossi out.
Now about cold fusion. It has been an active subject of research a few decades back. It continues to generate a low but continued amount of interest. The problem is that for a few years, there have been several crackpots like Rossi claiming to have a functional reactor. There has been several frauds. Cold-fusion quickly became associated with crackpottery and scientists relabelled it "low energy nuclear reaction" to be left alone by sensationalist journalists.
After the debacle, however, both NASA and the Army examined the results of these crazy years and concluded it was still worth allocating a small budget to continue experiments "just in case".
Well, I wouldn't bet on the destination being different. I am not sure I want someone else to receive the answer to my request on google.com, port 80.
I guess it is because they also use Orange's network until they have a good enough cover to roll 100% on their own.
There's nothing wrong with being supportive of anti-piracy efforts.
I agree, attacking ships is pretty bad. If you talk about copyright infrigement, it is about DAMN TIME that we, as a society open a debate about how we use internet to share culture, retribute artists and how we change a model that was designed when copying a work could not be done freely and reliably at large scale.
There is imbalance, there is a system that is not working. Artists deserve money for creation, but who will pretend that Mickael Jackson being a billionaire was preferable than one thousand musicians (including him) being "simple" millionaires ? Who will pretend that it is more important to protect Britney Spears' interests rather than free speech ?
The ease of copying music and videos and transmitting them is a fact that is still denyied today by **AA groups. The very people that are paid by artists to defend their interests and help them make money. They are the people who should be proposing a system. They have the data, they know how the industry work, they understand trends, they have knowledge about how one runs a studio. It is their work, not ours. If it becomes our job to find a business system that works, it seems obvious that the first step is to remove these parasites that feed on artists money and are actually counter productive.
Several models have been proposed, but we (IT specialists, music lovers, even amateur artists) lack the insights that **AA denies us. Some models won't work, but we don't have enough data to know which ones. We are fed provably fraudulous data by these groups, it makes it harder to know if an artist can earn enough with touring, merchandising, mecenat, sponsoring, "ransom" financing, schemes likes flattr, websites' advertisements or even (but it won't happen in America) a global tax redistributed by a public organism (why not the very same **AA that refuse to change their system).
Models exist, are numerous, and did not receive objective criticism. Saying "We are the only model and internet should just stop sharing files" is simply denial, that is lasting for so long that it really is pathological.
In France here, a new mobile operator appeared, giving a lot more of technical informations than its competitor. It explained it could not accept more than ~100 open TCP connection per user, because it only has 8000 IPv4 addresses for its mobile network and expects 3 millions users. If users use more than 100 ports, he will have an exhaustion of IP/port combinations. We finally reach the point where IPv4, even using NAT techniques, is becoming impractical. The switch should happen soon.
So rather, make it known that you will boycott products from SOPA supporters, who can tell congressmen what to vote for. Someone developped a nifty app for that :
http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/o78co/my_friend_and_i_wrote_an_application_to_boycott/
You know, your argumented and reasonable stance on this problem is what led many "open source zealots" like me into their present situation. In a functional legal environment you could use proprietary software and assume that such a breach of confidence would have so serious consequences for the companies involved that no one would dare to take the risk to put a backdoor in their software or to even make it possible. This is not however the case, this affair is one of many (CarrierIQ, Echelon, illegal-later-legalized wiretapping, Bluecoat, Amesys, etc...) and the only cure seems to use open source everywhere a backdoor could exist. And that means, mostly, everywhere.
Anyway, I like how you present it : "I'm not an open source zealot, I'm merely an opponent to secret backdoors"
I don't want to undermine the German's PP success that they totally deserve. They are dedicated, organized and coherent. I wish we had the same level of coherency in France. I am just pointing out that even with the same level of dedication, it would be harder to succeed here.
1% is pretty hard, but 5% on a first election is downright impossible.
Who cares it becomes common ? The goal is to use the legal shortcuts created for terrorism in as many cases as possible.
More and more, I wonder what is the value of an average teacher and of a classroom in this day of cheap communication and monstrous information databases. There is one year's worth of lessons that teaches about critical thinking, learning to learn, learning to find good information. The rest can be done autonomously by kids.
In France the pirate party underwent a ridiculous war between two "factions" for several years. It has been reunited since several years but has been unable so far to present candidates in any major elections.
European countries have different "details" in their election laws that make it easy or hard for small parties to be heard. For instance, in Germany, you receive public funds for your campaign when you reach 0.7% of votes. In France it is 5%.
I think the most important vote for the French PP will be the European elections : this one has a proportional part. There are already , thanks to Sweden, several pirate European MPs and this election has the same rules everywhere. I hope we focus on it.
They have to pay back the same amount to the studios regardless how how many tickets they sell, so why would they implement variable pricing?
This may be the core of the problem.
Because SOPA is already branded as an excuse for politician in several EU country to make a similar legislation. Many EU countries are US-followers when it comes to technological laws, especially those that pretend to deal with copyright infringement.
Please do it worldwide. Then I won't see Sarkozy saying things like "The US did SOPA and everything went alright"
Their primary naval weapon is a missile that can get into ballistic mode before a ship's countermeasure can intercept it. From what I read, the strategy behing "suicide boats" is not the kamikaze strategy of crashing a boat inside an aircraft carrier but rather to be used as the launchpoint of a single anti-ship missile. The launching boat will be easy to sink, but very cheap to replace. If two or three of these boats can sink one large US ship, that is a net win for Iran.
You can't escape a missile with a ship, and no 100% efficient counter-measure exist yet. If Iran strikes first, no big US ship should expect to survive the first wave.
Property and sovereignty are not laws of physics.
Meh, "war on drugs"...
Can you list 10 policies that are identical between the Obama and Bush administrations?
As a non American, I think I won't reach 10, but there are a few obvious important ones from across the Ocean :
- Guantanamo is still there.
- PATRIOT act has been said to be a good thing and even "essential" by the White House
- Gay marriage is still illegal
- Drug on war is still going on and is still silly
- Copyright lobbies can still pass whatever silly legislation they want
- No plans for a Palestinian state
The whole NDAA thing is just unbelievable. In my (not so) humble opinion, signing this bill would make it just impossible to vote for Obama. Removing the right to a fair trial is not an action that one can do unharmed in a democracy. There are few worse things that I can imagine a president doing.
All of that because one democrat Senator died at the wrong time...
Damn.
What are you talking about ? Experts agree that in the presidential election of 2012, internet will have more influence than TV. And OWS gets a lot of online coverage.
Check the news, Twitter and facebook have literally caused revolutions in Arab states where traditional media are a tad more controlled than in US.
You live in a country where this happened. If you believe that twitter only gets 1000 votes, please read the link. In a single district, an unknown candidate got 3000 donations through internet.
I think OWS does not recognize itself in the dem or rep party but has no inherent aversion to either. They hate corruption and collusion, the link you post illustrate the kind of things they dislike very concisely and efficiently.
Disconnecting the ties between big corporate interests and politics is a worthwhile goal and some people are calling for that exactly in both parties. I think that if OWS wants to go into politics, it will find allies in both camps.
Dems vs Reps is not the only axis of opinions, right now this is more a Corrupted vs Honest axis that draws the attention.