Yeah, the US ditched King George and got President George, son of George. Big improvement.
Actually, the President George they ditched King George to install was fairly decent for a treasonous rebel blackguard. It's the Presidents George they ended up with a couple of centuries later who aren't worthy of the name.
Even the assertion that censorship is a form of oppression is based on a cultural norm of freedom of speech. Until someone says something that you think is beyond the pale, like "it is desirable to rape young boys" - yikes. Or maybe "Slashdot is a pile of sh*t and technophiles are morons". Or how about "black people are genetically predisposed to intellectual inferiority". (All of which I disagree with strongly, I hasten to add.)
Censorship is still a form of oppression, even then. Freedom of speech is only of any use if someone, somewhere, wants to silence you. And it's most truly needed when most people want to silence you. Nobody was ever locked up for remarking on how lovely the weather was today.
This Thai royal family must have a pretty thin skin, to not be able to take any criticism from anybody.
As I understand it, the king of Thailand is fairly relaxed about this stuff and often pardons people convicted of lese-majeste offences. It's his fans among the general public who insist that the king should be above criticism. He's apparently very popular.
So how did the whites manage to colonise them in the first place? Perhaps they cheated by attacking while the locals were having a tea-break?
I love that reasoning. Africa needed to be invaded and taught European religion and ways of life, because their existing culture was inferior. This inferiority was proved by the fact that the Europeans were able to invade in the first place.
As I recall, Juan de Sepulveda had some thoughts along those lines. His recommendations for how the Spanish ought to deal with the native civilisations of America might be considered barbaric, but of course they were all for the spiritual good of those poor heathens and not at all for the aggrandisement of the empire.
'For might makes right, and till they've seen the light, they've got to be protected, and all their rights respected, till somebody we like can be elected...'
-- Tom Lehrer, Send the Marines!
No, see.. actually I'm just keeping a back up for the RIAA in case they lose their copy.
Oh, come on. It's not as if giant media corporations are ever going to just lose important stuff like that and have to beg for anyone who happened to have pirated it to send them a copy. That's just ridiculous.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go and watch Power of the Daleks on DVD.
Smart screens and keyboards. When I first thought of the pocket computer as an all-purpose machine, I imagined it would fit into a cradle/docking station so that users could hook up a real keyboard and monitor. But there's no reason this cannot be done wirelessly. Imagine walking into your office and plopping down your little computer/phone. It automatically connects to a "smart monitor" and "smart keyboard" and drives both.
Paired Bluetooth devices, perhaps. You wouldn't be able to just plonk down next to any old set of monitor and keyboard, of course, you'd need to authenticate them at least once, otherwise anybody carrying around such devices could trivially compromise your system. But if you're going to be tied to a specific set of keyboards and mice and monitors which your computer will allow to connect to it, you might as well use a docking station and save the battery.
Voice command and speech recognition. This, of course, is the holy grail of pocket computing. You won't find yourself complaining about virtual keyboards if speech I/O ever works well. Clear voice technology. While on the subject of voice, it would be even better if the device could talk back to you in a clear, understandable, and pleasant voice.
I don't want to talk to my portable computer. That's utterly obnoxious: people talking loudly on their mobiles on the bus are bad enough, people chattering away to a robot in their pocket would be a nightmare. I'd quite like voice control of a home automation computer, though.
Situational awareness. The smartphone should know when to turn itself off by knowing where it is. The idea is that when your phone is in an airplane, for instance, it turns itself off. It goes to vibrate mode automatically in other situations, such as in the theater. There are a lot of different methodologies for making this work.
For it to know it's in such a place, there'd have to be a standard signal that says 'This is a place you should be switched off'. Trivial denial of service attack. I suppose you might be able to do something with GPS - detect a plane by the speed, detect cinemas by a database of known locations - but who maintains the database? Google, maybe?
Ownership awareness. The device simply will not work for anyone other than the owner.
Solve that problem and you'll be the richest man in the industry. How does the owner authenticate reliably? Whole-disk encryption with a strong passphrase, maybe. But you just know most people will set it to 'password', or the name of their cat.
Broadcast TV reception. I have never been sure why there are so many weird TV technologies for portable devices when the broadcasting grid could be used just as easily. Let the device act as a portable TV receiver.
On TV frequencies you'd need a big antenna. Wavelength is something like 50cm. There's a reason we use microwaves for Wi-Fi and mobile phones.
Extensible. There is no reason why various mechanisms cannot be put into the device to turn it into any number of laboratory instruments and useful gizmos. It could serve as a pH meter, a blood sugar checker, a blood pressure tester, and a postage meter scale. It could also be the basis for a car tune-up aid and all sorts of other things.
I'm sure that with the right USB peripherals and software it would make the tea too.
Yes, Mars they are doing. But do you remember when the last lunar soft landing happened ? 1976, Luna-24, a successful sample return probe sent by USSR.
To be fair here, Luna 24 returned 170.1g of regolith. NASA on the other hand landed six 14.7 tonne probes on the Moon in the late sixties to early seventies. They deployed a total of twelve autonomous intelligent versatile exploration units, traversing a total of 97km of lunar surface, and gathered some 381.7kg of samples and returned them to Earth.
To follow that spectacular accomplishment with a few petty robot landers seems... pointless.
But Capitalism and Communism are each the final endpoint of the axis in their respective directions.
Strictly wouldn't that be Anarchy and Communism? It's possible to have a capitalist state with a government regulating the market and ensuring social safeguards; the economy is still primarily driven by the profit motive, which is the defining characteristic of a capitalist society. The limiting case as you move away from Communism would be zero resources put into the common pool, a complete state of every man for himself. No government at all.
I'd suggest that Capitalism and Socialism are two economic models, with Anarchy (or perhaps more like Feudalism, since the corporations would probably form a power base) at one extreme and Communism at the other.
Someone calling the police and saying "Hey I found kiddie porn on this computer." seems to be reasonable cause to me.
I don't get why anyone would ever do this. They trust the police so much? They're so certain they'll not become suspects themselves? Personally I'd break out DBAN on the spot and never breathe a word of it to anybody.
Can you find a file in your harddrive with the same MD5 hash as the current Google logo?
As they said, that's comparing one to one. As you start comparing many to many, the number of pairings rises fast and the chances of a hash collision become significant. It's similar to the way that there's a 1 in 365 chance that any given random stranger shares my birthday, but it only takes 23 random strangers to gather together before the chance passes evens that some pair of them shares a birthday - and 57 random strangers before the chance passes 99%.
If you want a football analogy for this, there's a beautiful video on youtube, it's a college football game where the greatest play ever made was made. One team runs the ball clear back up the field for a touchdown. What made it so great was the lateral passing involved. I've never watched much football but from what I've seen of it, the only guy throwing the ball is the QB. At most I've seen other people fumble it and the other team gain possession, that's it. In this play, there's like five or six lateral passes as runners are boxed in by the opposing team, they would pass the ball to someone who's open and the march down the field would continue. The defenders couldn't figure out where the ball was because it was moving so quickly, everyone scrambling for position and just being out of place.
Nightlies shouldn't be used by those that want to use extensions or avoid crashes
I dunno. I use the nightlies at work... I don't use any extensions though.
+1 Missed the point but still sounded vaguely insightful?
You missed out the 'or' operator. The original statement was that IF (you want to use extensions OR you want to avoid crashes) THEN you shouldn't use nightlies. The followup said that he used the nightlies and avoided crashes just as well as with the stable release, although he didn't use extensions. So: wants to use extensions FALSE, wants to avoid crashes TRUE, and as it turns out nightlies work just fine. Hence OP's theorem is disproved by counterexample.
Really, this is basic Boolean logic. Anyone reading/. ought to understand this stuff...
Wow. Lot o' parentheses there. You're not a Lisp programmer by any chance?
At any rate this was the part I never liked about Christianity. God demands blood for sin, but doesn't mind whose - the sinner himself is fine, a sacrificial animal is fine too, his own son is best of all? I mean, that's downright stone age. It's about as far removed from justice as you can get, and it makes God a bloodthirsty monster.
The typical PHB will read the first two lines on his blackberry, and you're golden. Worst case he or she will scroll down - but the managerial brain is set to shut down at the word "perl". The word "cron" is a failsafe - in case the PHB also has ADD. Later when s/he comes back and says "why didn't you warn me", you can point to the text "beneath the fold" of your email.
I say we make 'em use it. Sure, they could nuke my house. But I don't think they want to, and I don't think they have the stones for it.
This is basically how rebellion is done in the modern era. You are a small extremist faction with little popular support; the masses have little problem with the evil empire, but you and your comrades are up for rebellion. So you go and cause mayhem in the town centre - perhaps you occupy some government buildings, run up a flag, proclaim a new republic in the name of your favourite ideology, put in your application form for your place in history. You behave provocatively.
The idea is to get the evil empire to react with overwhelming and excessive force. You want them to roll in with tanks and the air force. You want them to shoot civilians in the streets, the more the better. You want half the city to burn. You want a long list of atrocities. And you want a whole lot of your own people to be captured and then shot at dawn.
Because by next week, you'll have people queueing up around the block to join the rebels.
Although we need more than just a fence. We need a fence, and behind that another fence, and behind that a minefield, and then another fence, and probably an access road, and another fence, and another fence, and then a 40 foot high sheer concrete wall, complete with guard towers that provide complete fire coverage. Oh, we'll also need ways to detect attempts at tunneling so we can blow the tunnels down on their heads and kill them that way.
You should contract that job out to the Germans. I believe they have experience with border fortifications of that kind, although they decommissioned theirs in 1989.
You totally missed the point. What if the US govt. were the bad guys.
The bad guys are whoever the propaganda says they are. As the earlier post says, who do you think Fox News is going to portray as the villain of the piece?
Imagine if you will an America that goes completely socialist, as it likely will with the Democrats in complete control.
They're going to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service?
Or are they just going to raise taxes quite a bit?
Actually, I was talking about your decision to indirectly put bullets on OTHER bodies. Just because you can't see where your money is being applied, it doesn't mean that you're not part of it.
Shit, you're right. I should stop buying oil right now.
No, really. OO shouldn't have a "save as.doc" that doesn't work -- you can't blame this on the User. If it says "save as.doc", it should open in Word fine. That's a reasonable expectation.
Not with Word, it isn't. Even Microsoft can't get it to work reliably across different versions.
Leave it to turkey to ban an entire site becuase of soccer.
You're American, right? Or Aussie or Indian or something. Somewhere where they don't understand this.
There's political ideology, over which people can get a little touchy. There's religion, over which people can get quite irate. And then there's football.
I was all ready to criticise Turkey if this had been an act of political or religious censorship. But it has to do with football... well, suddenly the response seems perfectly reasonable. Football is serious business. A matter of life and death, as some say; Shankly knew better.
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Actually, the President George they ditched King George to install was fairly decent for a treasonous rebel blackguard. It's the Presidents George they ended up with a couple of centuries later who aren't worthy of the name.
Censorship is still a form of oppression, even then. Freedom of speech is only of any use if someone, somewhere, wants to silence you. And it's most truly needed when most people want to silence you. Nobody was ever locked up for remarking on how lovely the weather was today.
Run by the Music And Film Industry Associations, I expect.
As I understand it, the king of Thailand is fairly relaxed about this stuff and often pardons people convicted of lese-majeste offences. It's his fans among the general public who insist that the king should be above criticism. He's apparently very popular.
I love that reasoning. Africa needed to be invaded and taught European religion and ways of life, because their existing culture was inferior. This inferiority was proved by the fact that the Europeans were able to invade in the first place.
As I recall, Juan de Sepulveda had some thoughts along those lines. His recommendations for how the Spanish ought to deal with the native civilisations of America might be considered barbaric, but of course they were all for the spiritual good of those poor heathens and not at all for the aggrandisement of the empire.
'For might makes right, and till they've seen the light, they've got to be protected, and all their rights respected, till somebody we like can be elected...'
-- Tom Lehrer, Send the Marines!
Oh, come on. It's not as if giant media corporations are ever going to just lose important stuff like that and have to beg for anyone who happened to have pirated it to send them a copy. That's just ridiculous.
Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go and watch Power of the Daleks on DVD.
Paired Bluetooth devices, perhaps. You wouldn't be able to just plonk down next to any old set of monitor and keyboard, of course, you'd need to authenticate them at least once, otherwise anybody carrying around such devices could trivially compromise your system. But if you're going to be tied to a specific set of keyboards and mice and monitors which your computer will allow to connect to it, you might as well use a docking station and save the battery.
Voice command and speech recognition. This, of course, is the holy grail of pocket computing. You won't find yourself complaining about virtual keyboards if speech I/O ever works well. Clear voice technology. While on the subject of voice, it would be even better if the device could talk back to you in a clear, understandable, and pleasant voice.
I don't want to talk to my portable computer. That's utterly obnoxious: people talking loudly on their mobiles on the bus are bad enough, people chattering away to a robot in their pocket would be a nightmare. I'd quite like voice control of a home automation computer, though.
Situational awareness. The smartphone should know when to turn itself off by knowing where it is. The idea is that when your phone is in an airplane, for instance, it turns itself off. It goes to vibrate mode automatically in other situations, such as in the theater. There are a lot of different methodologies for making this work.
For it to know it's in such a place, there'd have to be a standard signal that says 'This is a place you should be switched off'. Trivial denial of service attack. I suppose you might be able to do something with GPS - detect a plane by the speed, detect cinemas by a database of known locations - but who maintains the database? Google, maybe?
Ownership awareness. The device simply will not work for anyone other than the owner.
Solve that problem and you'll be the richest man in the industry. How does the owner authenticate reliably? Whole-disk encryption with a strong passphrase, maybe. But you just know most people will set it to 'password', or the name of their cat.
Broadcast TV reception. I have never been sure why there are so many weird TV technologies for portable devices when the broadcasting grid could be used just as easily. Let the device act as a portable TV receiver.
On TV frequencies you'd need a big antenna. Wavelength is something like 50cm. There's a reason we use microwaves for Wi-Fi and mobile phones.
Extensible. There is no reason why various mechanisms cannot be put into the device to turn it into any number of laboratory instruments and useful gizmos. It could serve as a pH meter, a blood sugar checker, a blood pressure tester, and a postage meter scale. It could also be the basis for a car tune-up aid and all sorts of other things.
I'm sure that with the right USB peripherals and software it would make the tea too.
To be fair here, Luna 24 returned 170.1g of regolith. NASA on the other hand landed six 14.7 tonne probes on the Moon in the late sixties to early seventies. They deployed a total of twelve autonomous intelligent versatile exploration units, traversing a total of 97km of lunar surface, and gathered some 381.7kg of samples and returned them to Earth.
To follow that spectacular accomplishment with a few petty robot landers seems... pointless.
I think it's called 'Sweden'.
Strictly wouldn't that be Anarchy and Communism? It's possible to have a capitalist state with a government regulating the market and ensuring social safeguards; the economy is still primarily driven by the profit motive, which is the defining characteristic of a capitalist society. The limiting case as you move away from Communism would be zero resources put into the common pool, a complete state of every man for himself. No government at all.
I'd suggest that Capitalism and Socialism are two economic models, with Anarchy (or perhaps more like Feudalism, since the corporations would probably form a power base) at one extreme and Communism at the other.
I don't get why anyone would ever do this. They trust the police so much? They're so certain they'll not become suspects themselves? Personally I'd break out DBAN on the spot and never breathe a word of it to anybody.
As they said, that's comparing one to one. As you start comparing many to many, the number of pairings rises fast and the chances of a hash collision become significant. It's similar to the way that there's a 1 in 365 chance that any given random stranger shares my birthday, but it only takes 23 random strangers to gather together before the chance passes evens that some pair of them shares a birthday - and 57 random strangers before the chance passes 99%.
Try rugby, you might enjoy it.
You missed out the 'or' operator. The original statement was that IF (you want to use extensions OR you want to avoid crashes) THEN you shouldn't use nightlies. The followup said that he used the nightlies and avoided crashes just as well as with the stable release, although he didn't use extensions. So: wants to use extensions FALSE, wants to avoid crashes TRUE, and as it turns out nightlies work just fine. Hence OP's theorem is disproved by counterexample.
Really, this is basic Boolean logic. Anyone reading /. ought to understand this stuff...
At any rate this was the part I never liked about Christianity. God demands blood for sin, but doesn't mind whose - the sinner himself is fine, a sacrificial animal is fine too, his own son is best of all? I mean, that's downright stone age. It's about as far removed from justice as you can get, and it makes God a bloodthirsty monster.
Sir Humphrey Appleby? Is that you?
So somewhere around the lower end of the scale for a festival-goer?
This is basically how rebellion is done in the modern era. You are a small extremist faction with little popular support; the masses have little problem with the evil empire, but you and your comrades are up for rebellion. So you go and cause mayhem in the town centre - perhaps you occupy some government buildings, run up a flag, proclaim a new republic in the name of your favourite ideology, put in your application form for your place in history. You behave provocatively.
The idea is to get the evil empire to react with overwhelming and excessive force. You want them to roll in with tanks and the air force. You want them to shoot civilians in the streets, the more the better. You want half the city to burn. You want a long list of atrocities. And you want a whole lot of your own people to be captured and then shot at dawn.
Because by next week, you'll have people queueing up around the block to join the rebels.
You should contract that job out to the Germans. I believe they have experience with border fortifications of that kind, although they decommissioned theirs in 1989.
The bad guys are whoever the propaganda says they are. As the earlier post says, who do you think Fox News is going to portray as the villain of the piece?
They're going to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service?
Or are they just going to raise taxes quite a bit?
Shit, you're right. I should stop buying oil right now.
Not with Word, it isn't. Even Microsoft can't get it to work reliably across different versions.
You're American, right? Or Aussie or Indian or something. Somewhere where they don't understand this.
There's political ideology, over which people can get a little touchy. There's religion, over which people can get quite irate. And then there's football.
I was all ready to criticise Turkey if this had been an act of political or religious censorship. But it has to do with football... well, suddenly the response seems perfectly reasonable. Football is serious business. A matter of life and death, as some say; Shankly knew better.
Fortunately, they can't drive.