I don't think I have read the same accounts you have. The accounts I have seen don't mention the SAS and the statements issued regarding the detah was not issued by the Special Air Service, was it?
It was reported in the news as the the Metropolitan police force as in this statement. They may recruit from SAS for their fast response teams and their operatives but they are as far as I know not an operative unit under the SAS. SAS is the military special forces in Great Britain.
The Metropolitan police is by far the largest policing force in the Greater London [Map] district and lately incorporated also The Royal Park Constabulary into their forces. But they are not a military branch, they are the civilian police though in certain cases they may definitely make joint operations.
The incident that lead to the unfortunate death of a most likely innocent Brazilian man is now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police Service Directorate of Professional Standards which would correspond to Bureau of Internal Affairs in some other countries.
I can certainly understand why it happened. I can think myself into the policemens situation. Someone is running, he is wearing a coat that may conceal explosives, you yell at him to stop, he runs away, he jumps the gate to the metro station, down the stairs and you are following.
He then makes the fatal mistake of boarding the train just after the terror attacks that have happened. There is pretty much only one thing to do and that is to take him out before he explodes the train.
I can also understand the person running. Imagine that you are walking in London, you grew up in the harsh streets of a larger Brazilian town, you know everything about surviving in the streets. Suddenly three people dressed as ordinary men yell something and starts coming towards you looking very threatening. One pulls a fire arm, big and black in his hand. Instinct and panic takes over and you turn around, the only thing in your mind is to get away from these guys, whoever they are. They are yelling something but you can't make it out clearly. There are no uniforms, just three guys coming at you - one with a gun in his hand.
You runs towards the nearby metro station, jumps the gates, down the escalators and as you try to get on a train which is just about to leave you half stumble, falls you feel the pain and hear the bang when the first bullet is unloaded into your body, it then goes black.
I don't really blame the policemen, they were trying to do their job and I think they were doing it. I find the whole thing to be a tragedy of gigantig proportions and I feel for the poor guys family. I hope things like this will never have to happen to any one again. But I know that people are only people, mistakes will happen and in certain situations there is nothing you could do.
Had I been the guy I would probably been startled but I would not have done what he did. Had I been the police I would have been hesitant to fire, and therefore perhaps it is a good thing I am not a police officer because I don't think I would have the guts to do his job.
A tragic accident.
I don't know, it does not have to be bad just because it is based on a computer game. While a lot of movies are nonsense no matter if they are based on computer games or not, I still enjoy a few of them. One example could perhaps be Tomb Raider which - if not a high-brow movie in any way - still was entertaining and made for some nice action scenes.
Of course that is abvious, the problem is that it means that if you want to use an alternative OS you will have to move on to other (more expensive) hardware eventually. If MS pushes BIOS integration and makes Windows not run on machines that have other types of BIOS we will all have to buy Macs or something. Not that I mind, but it would make things a bit more expensive than today I'm afraid.
A few things you should bear in mind is that upcoming versions of Windows will probably be "integrated" with the BIOS, there have been articles about this earlier on/. This integration will most likely make it impossible to run anything but MS Approved Standard Windows on a certain machine. I see different BIOS for different machines, i.e. a sophisticated hardware lock for people to run only the OS that came with the machine and nothing else.
On such a machine how would you be able ton install Linux, BSD or another OS of your choice? You would become effectively prevented from doing so and since you can not just take any BIOS code and install for your motherboard you are pretty screwed.
Remains to wait for someone to hack it - or do it yourself. From the quality of the BIOS hacks for say DVD-R burners I am kind of worried. There is a lot of crap floating around out there...
No, I think it is a good thing, especially if it is possible to get the motherboard manufacturers to agree to this now - then there is not much turning back even if MS starts rattling their sabres to scare the board manufacturers back into the fold...
On the other hand, if MS says "you gotta use the MSBIOS" or Longhorn/Whatever won't work I guess most will do it.
I am not sure that a GPL2 licencse would be entirely suitable for a motherboard BIOS either, but that's another story...
It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?
If that would be true, would it not be equally naive to believe that ATI knows all the inner workings and quirks of Linux as intimately as those who spend all their (free) time hacking the kernel?
Speaking of which... are there any companies today that have had good success with distributing bandwidth over power-lines?
Over here in Sweden one of the biggest actors did some trials about five years ago but put it all on hold because they ran into all kinds of problems with it.
I myself happened to pull the feed about every ten minutes, and boy that god me on 72 hour ice.
Now it is back - occasionally. I get headlines sometimes, but still sometimes they change into the message telling me I am abusing them still. Now I pull once an hour.
There are many suggestions of a new kind of time standard out there. But metric time has a few drawbacks that I personally don't like. The reson the 60 second, 60 minute 24 hour clock has survived so long is that the numbers can be divided easily. 60 can be factored by 2, 3, 5, that also goes for 30, and 15 can be factored by 2 and 3 - 12 can be factored into both 2 and 3, that's rather convenient when speaking of fractions of hours.
Swatch has devised and Internet time they call beats which has a neat feature for us netizens - no timezones. They divide the day into 1000 beats, but the factors of 1000 is 2 and 5 and that makes it rather inconvenient although 40 beats is close to an hour, 20 half an hour and 10 about a quarter of an hour. I use it sometimes, both my mobile phone and wristwatch can display it. Not to mention my desktop.
I have a feeling that the name at least partly relates to the Nuon box. I don't know if any of you have seen the Nuon box, but Jeff Minter has done a substantial amount of work on it...
Slashdot Mirror
It was reported in the news as the the Metropolitan police force as in this statement. They may recruit from SAS for their fast response teams and their operatives but they are as far as I know not an operative unit under the SAS. SAS is the military special forces in Great Britain.
The Metropolitan police is by far the largest policing force in the Greater London [Map] district and lately incorporated also The Royal Park Constabulary into their forces. But they are not a military branch, they are the civilian police though in certain cases they may definitely make joint operations.
The incident that lead to the unfortunate death of a most likely innocent Brazilian man is now being investigated by the Metropolitan Police Service Directorate of Professional Standards which would correspond to Bureau of Internal Affairs in some other countries.
I can certainly understand why it happened. I can think myself into the policemens situation. Someone is running, he is wearing a coat that may conceal explosives, you yell at him to stop, he runs away, he jumps the gate to the metro station, down the stairs and you are following. He then makes the fatal mistake of boarding the train just after the terror attacks that have happened. There is pretty much only one thing to do and that is to take him out before he explodes the train. I can also understand the person running. Imagine that you are walking in London, you grew up in the harsh streets of a larger Brazilian town, you know everything about surviving in the streets. Suddenly three people dressed as ordinary men yell something and starts coming towards you looking very threatening. One pulls a fire arm, big and black in his hand. Instinct and panic takes over and you turn around, the only thing in your mind is to get away from these guys, whoever they are. They are yelling something but you can't make it out clearly. There are no uniforms, just three guys coming at you - one with a gun in his hand. You runs towards the nearby metro station, jumps the gates, down the escalators and as you try to get on a train which is just about to leave you half stumble, falls you feel the pain and hear the bang when the first bullet is unloaded into your body, it then goes black. I don't really blame the policemen, they were trying to do their job and I think they were doing it. I find the whole thing to be a tragedy of gigantig proportions and I feel for the poor guys family. I hope things like this will never have to happen to any one again. But I know that people are only people, mistakes will happen and in certain situations there is nothing you could do. Had I been the guy I would probably been startled but I would not have done what he did. Had I been the police I would have been hesitant to fire, and therefore perhaps it is a good thing I am not a police officer because I don't think I would have the guts to do his job. A tragic accident.
Not even if you were using the holy MD5 or the glorious GPG?
I don't know, it does not have to be bad just because it is based on a computer game. While a lot of movies are nonsense no matter if they are based on computer games or not, I still enjoy a few of them. One example could perhaps be Tomb Raider which - if not a high-brow movie in any way - still was entertaining and made for some nice action scenes.
Of course that is abvious, the problem is that it means that if you want to use an alternative OS you will have to move on to other (more expensive) hardware eventually. If MS pushes BIOS integration and makes Windows not run on machines that have other types of BIOS we will all have to buy Macs or something. Not that I mind, but it would make things a bit more expensive than today I'm afraid.
On such a machine how would you be able ton install Linux, BSD or another OS of your choice? You would become effectively prevented from doing so and since you can not just take any BIOS code and install for your motherboard you are pretty screwed.
Remains to wait for someone to hack it - or do it yourself. From the quality of the BIOS hacks for say DVD-R burners I am kind of worried. There is a lot of crap floating around out there...
No, I think it is a good thing, especially if it is possible to get the motherboard manufacturers to agree to this now - then there is not much turning back even if MS starts rattling their sabres to scare the board manufacturers back into the fold...
On the other hand, if MS says "you gotta use the MSBIOS" or Longhorn/Whatever won't work I guess most will do it.
I am not sure that a GPL2 licencse would be entirely suitable for a motherboard BIOS either, but that's another story...
It is naive to think that you could even understand, let alone improve, what the engineers - who know the hardware intimately - have written?
If that would be true, would it not be equally naive to believe that ATI knows all the inner workings and quirks of Linux as intimately as those who spend all their (free) time hacking the kernel?
Just a thought...
Speaking of which... are there any companies today that have had good success with distributing bandwidth over power-lines? Over here in Sweden one of the biggest actors did some trials about five years ago but put it all on hold because they ran into all kinds of problems with it.
I myself happened to pull the feed about every ten minutes, and boy that god me on 72 hour ice. Now it is back - occasionally. I get headlines sometimes, but still sometimes they change into the message telling me I am abusing them still. Now I pull once an hour.
Swatch has devised and Internet time they call beats which has a neat feature for us netizens - no timezones. They divide the day into 1000 beats, but the factors of 1000 is 2 and 5 and that makes it rather inconvenient although 40 beats is close to an hour, 20 half an hour and 10 about a quarter of an hour. I use it sometimes, both my mobile phone and wristwatch can display it. Not to mention my desktop.
I have a feeling that the name at least partly relates to the Nuon box. I don't know if any of you have seen the Nuon box, but Jeff Minter has done a substantial amount of work on it...