Pragmatic environmental policies? The current western political structures don't allow for this. They are all designed for the short term, as such long term policies (of the 10 year plus kind) don't really have a lot of sway. They aren't something that most politicians will be still around to claim credit for and worse they may give the opposition chance to claim credit for something that you carried out. The era of the career politician beholden only to the state is detrimental to real democracy and real long term aims.
The reality is that we don't have a great deal of data, not when you talk in geological terms, and we are then using it to extrapolate into systems that we don't really understand. We have hunches, but nothing definitive. We know some things, we don't know the whole picture. Its a shame but true.
I seem to remember having a Palm Treo that didn't have user replaceable batteries. I remember having Palm PDAs that didn't have user replaceable batteries either. So there is a precedent within the same consumer electronics space.
If the consumer is so swept up in the hype that they don't research such an expensive purchase as an iPhone how is that Apple's fault?
This global warming is happening and its our fault. I know you might have heard that there are people with other views, including a few scientists, but here are a few things to help you out.
First, here's a link to an article to tell you how to interpret the rest of them, not that we are telling you what to think merely placing the information before you so that you can make up your own mind.
Got that? Right. Here's a guide to how to debunk all of the negative points we've seen floating around. Okay, so some of them are a bit spurious, and facile, but they're the best we can come up with.
What? Why did we publish this? Its an important topic that affects everyone on the planet. No, its nothing to do with the increase in circulation we get when we post things about climate change.
Because for the vast majority of users iTunes works. Providing a single method of putting media onto the iPod reduces support costs. All that is needed is to make sure that iTunes can populate the iPod. If there is a problem its either with the iPod not reading the database file from iTunes, in which case reset it and reload, or there is a problem with iTunes.
If you go down the model of allowing drag/drop then the player has to do more work. That require additional software on the player to handle this. That takes up more space and makes the firmware more complex. It also means that some content (iTunes loaded) will be available straight away whereas other won't be until it has been indexed. This dilutes the experience and adds complexity. When dealing with consumer devices complexity is the enemy. The KISS principle is heavily at work here.
I just want it to show up as a thumb drive, drop songs on it from explorer, in any directories I choose, and have it play the music
That's fine for someone that's computer savvy and wants to spend the time doing that. There is a problem with that for the general population though. It requires you, the human, having to be trained to do something that the computer could do for you. If you want to do that fine, the majority of people just want to be able to stick XYZ bands songs onto the player and don't give a stuff how its organised.
I used to be anal about how things were organised. I've now adopted the don't give a stuff attitude. I just want to be able to get to things easily, I don't want to have to spend time organising a filing system.
The Lord of the Rings reads well. The Hobbit reads well. They show that JRR Tolkien had a good ear for a tale. Everything composited from notes by Christopher Tolkien shows that this wasn't a genetic Tolkien family trait.
The Silmarillion and others read like background information, which is what they were. JRR built up a whole mythos to draw from when writing LoTR. This gave him a good base to produce a rich story. I see the continued publication of these tarted up notes as a poor distraction from the original tale.
Over here in the UK we endured years of IRA terrorism, often supported by the good denziens of Boston. During that time we had fairly regular bombing atrocities. We suffered the removal of wastebaskets from public areas, because they might be a good place to place a bomb (the wastebaskets didn't return following the IRA ceasefire, more on that later). That was all though. There was little panic. These incidents were widely, and accurately perceived, as few and far between. There was more chance of being killed crossing the road.
Now in our post 9/11 world we are under a constant threat from religious extremists. These people are in our midst and, though they have killed fewer than the IRA, we need new laws and anti-terrorist measures. We need to be able to imprison people without trial for longer to gather evidence to support a case against them. We need more restrictions on air travel, because that doesn't affect daily life but is visible. We need to have everyone fingerprinted, more CCTV, more ANPR cameras (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) even though it is recognised that their deployment may be illegal.
Of course all of these measure are for our own good. The information gathered by these won't be used to our detriment, they certainly wouldn't be sold (like the register of electors, or the car registration database, or any other database that the government has) and once the threat has gone the measures will be repealed. In the days of the IRA we were told to get on with our lives as normal and not let the terrorists win. We are still waiting for wastebaskets in stations.
The issue isn't whether you can use Gentoo to run a server, rather whether Gentoo is a sensible choice in an enterprise environment with multiple servers. It may work fine for your server but that doesn't mean that you are superior, or that the article writer is an idiot. It may mean that you don't understand the nature of the problem.
If you have a server farm with a 100+ servers on it which is easier to upgrade in a production environment; Gentoo with possible manual intervention or Redhat using custom RPMs and Kickstart?
I would rather that instead of playing fast and loose with our money that they looked at slimming down the bureaucracy that rules our lives first. If they managed to do that then, and only then, would I think about letting them rationalise their data storage.
The cameras aren't watching for anything, yet. The cameras are either passive and simply record to tape for later review should something untoward happen or active, in that they have a human controller.
In the UK we have seen the development of the APNR system (which may or may not be illegal) which was used to track down the killer of a policewoman. This is planned to be extended throughout the country. This will allow people's movements to be reviewed historically.
We aren't too far away from having the necessary power available to be able to perform face recognition and with ID cards and biometric passports the data to compare against will be available. At this point your movements can be tracked and stored for future use.
The UK government doesn't have a very good track record with data that it holds. With the way that the accountants are running things it is seen as a resource that can be monetized. We already have issues with vehicle licencing, and therefore ownership, records being available to pretty much anyone that wants to pay for them. Organisations can pay to carry out criminal records checks on people, another valuable government resource. Movement and habit data would be of use to many people and, if your not doing anything wrong, what would be the harm in selling the data?
Of course this is just public spaces. What if the crime rate stopped falling though? What if crimes were committed in private places? Obviously the argument would go "Look at the reduction we got with the public cameras. We just need to have cameras in these other places to wipe crime out completely". Who could argue with that?
The only people who don't object to the erosion of liberty and those that lack imagination.
Well the class action might get to the bottom of this, if it ever makes it to court. It does look as though Nintendo doesn't have too much of a problem here though. If people decide to throw Wiimote, contrary to the instructions Nintendo print in the manual, then they only have themselves to blame. The number of people coming up with copycat issues looks like people circling to try and get something out of Nintendo for free. The way that the Wii is selling it doesn't look to be too much of a problem to me.
Use some imagination. Passports are delivered by post. It would require the co-operation of a postman but it is possible to intercept the delivery of the passport. Scan the information without opening the envelope then deliver the passport as normal a day late. As the recepient doesn't know when the passport was sent, and delivery delays are sadly common, they have no idea that their passport has been cloned.
Most people didn't refer to his report. Rather they referred to an article on The Register instead. The author of The Register article has a history of anti-iTunes store articles and an anti-DRM agenda. He took what he wanted from the report to back up his viewpoint. The real problem is the way that this was swallowed by the rest without checking the source themselves.
Sadly this seems to be the deal in journalism at the moment. Everything is sacrificed in order to be first to publish or, if not first then, not too far behind. Accuracy appears to be sacrificed in the race to publish.
Why research? Research is hard work. You have to check things and find corroborating evidence. Its much easier to get hold of a bit of data, slap it into a spreadsheet, draw a few graphs, then make statements based on what you see.
Seriously, why would Apple release real data to these people when they see what they do with the data that they can get hold of?
The origin of most of the down and gloom around iTunes sales was an article written on The Register (http://www.theregister.com) by Andrew Orlowski. Whilst looking around trying to find some beef behind the report I found article after article refering to the news and linking back to the article on The Register. I couldn't find any other article that linked elsewhere or that appeared to have read the Forrester report.
This shows two faults. The first is the lack of checking that goes on by web based services when reporting things, they publish first then look into things later if they get time. The second is the gullibility of the general public when reading things. "Its all over the web. It must be true!". The fact that these reports all refered back to the same origin, an article written by a reporter with a track record of bashing iTunes and an anti-DRM agenda, didn't matter. The consequence is a drop in share price as people panic on the news.
For myself, I waited for someone else to back up the story. As that didn't appear I discounted it as rumour.
Errr... I'm 40+ had have had PS/PS2/Dreamcast/GameCube/XBox 360 and my Wii will arrive tomorrow. I remember playing Pong and having an Atari 2600 as a kid. Don't be so amazed when parents play games, remember that they were young once!
It could be more properly written as 'in order to embrace its position in the world the Russian government agreed to institute laws so as to prevent people from earning money from the works of others without their permission'.
The whole holier than thou attitude around this subject on Slashdot sickens me. All of mp3 have been selling the product of artists work without paying any recompense to the artists. This is theft in all but name, its copyright breach but the difference is a technical one. The majority of people supporting this site weren't doing it for political reasons, opposition to the RIAA, but because it was cheaper. It was cheaper because it didn't recompense the artists.
This agreement shows that Russia is growing up, its just a shame that the Slashdot crowd isn't doing so as well.
Where did the rant about trucks come from? Someone has a huge chip on their shoulder I think.
Anyway, back to the point. The point was that there is so much clutter on some roads that its pretty much impossible to take it all in and drive safely. This is especially true on unfamilar roads in some city centres. Its not a case of not being able to navigate its just that in some places there is too much information.
In Kensington they recognised this and decluttered the high street. This decluttering removed a lot of barriers, both at the edge of the round, and around islands used for staggered pedestrian crossings. The end result of this was a reduction in accident figures (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?xm l=/motoring/2006/10/14/mflights114.xml).
I listened to a discussion about this on BBC Radio 4 last week where they had one of the people who had supported this on. The main aim was to place the decision making back in the hands of the driver. If the drivers have to concentrate on what they are doing more, no barriers clearly making out 'their' space, then they devote more attention to the business of driving and hence driver safe. Its not going to work for all drivers, but no scheme does. Anything that a) reduces accidents and b) saves money sounds good to me.
I've been used mouse driven computers for over 20 years. I couldn't understand how anyone could use a mouse that didn't have 3-buttons for a while. That was because the interface I was used was designed so that you needed 3-buttons to work it. The number of buttons doesn't matter if the interface is designed properly.
As a long-time (>10 years) Mac user its perfectly possible to use a Mac with a one-button mouse because that's what the interface is designed for. This thing about the number of buttons is just ignorance and intransigence. Yes, I read that you have a Mac and a non-Apple two button mouse. It sounds like you are still trying to drive it as if its Windows though.
Mod the parent up. Since the introduction of a similar system in the UK, teachers set an assess coursework that counts towards final grades, the product of the education system has deteriorated.
We have a system which rates schools based on their performance. The only measurement of performance is final grades. This has lead over the last 10 years to lessons becoming little more than coaching sessions. Children are taught how to pass exams rather than being taught a subject and then being examined on that knowledge. This currently only applies to high schools but with a push for higher education (first degree) over here and money being given to Universities based on the number of pupils passed it seems inevitable that it will extend to first degree level.
We have a population that, on paper, appears to be gaining more and better qualifications. The fact that some of the these people with A grades cannot spell or construct a grammatically correct sentence is ignored by the examination process.
The programme did speak to someone working in a call centre in the UK. That person pretty much said that the security was so lax that any of the breaches levelled at India could also take place within UK call centres. So the programme wasn't making cheap shots.
The difference between India and the UK was the manner in which this data was marketed. Outside Hyderabad, which had G.Bush visiting and high security at the time of the investigation, the personal information was being dealt as any other commoditiy. That is, openly traded. The makers of the programme weren't able to gain access to data as readily within the UK. The speculation, as it was untested, as to why this was the case was down to jurisdictional issues.
A large number of UK companies have taken advantage of the services supplied by Indian call centres. The security of data is a genuine concern. The numbers being talked about were in the 50,000 - 100,000 new leads per month. This is fraud on a large scale even if its only being carried out by a relatively small number of people. Some of the sample data, which when challenged was said to be made up, was used to track one person down that was prepared to appear on camera and confirm it as true. Interestingly this data was obtained because the person had a credit check done in a UK shop which happened to go through to an Indian call centre.
Incidentally the programme did say that the information was garnered not from banking call centres but mostly from ones used by mobile phone companies. The implication being that the banking call centres had a higher level of security.
Post 9/11 the USA has been in a national panic attack. Witness what the administration has been able to get away with in the name of security. Witness what has happened to air travel. The administration has been making political capital over its response to 9/11 ever since. Is it wrong to provide balance by showing that they ignored the threat?
I'm a non-muslim but believe that George Bush and friends got what they were wanting, a new Pearl Harbour, with the 11th Sept attacks. They wanted a pretext to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan as they refused to play ball with them even after all of the support the US had given them when they fought the Russians. It also gave a pretext for the removal of Saddam. He 'had links' with Osama.
I do not believe that the US instigated the 11th Sept attacks. Not quite. I do think that there is much more to the events than has come out and that elements within the US were aware of the 11th Sept attacks prior to them happening. I would not be surprised if the same was true for the 7/7 attacks either.
Whatever the truth of the above both the US and UK governments have capitalised on the attacks to implement legislation that would not likely to have passed beforehand. The UK government is also doing a good job of keeping the threat in the forefront of everyone's mind and not doing enough to emphasise that it is a very small minority of muslims that are carrying this out. The manipulation of the psyche of the nation is such that two men were thrown off a plane for wearing leather jackets, looking at their watches and not speaking English at the behest of the other passengers. Everyone is so busy looking for the snake in the grass they are failing to look at the net being placed around their freedoms. This is all being done in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping people safe.
This freezing of bank accounts, especially if they are all muslim, is just one more thing that is driving our nation apart. It sickens me that people fall for it and that a government that prides itself on its ability to spin the story that the media present have not harnessed their power to calm people. Unless of course they don't want people calmed?
Slashdot Mirror
The reality is that we don't have a great deal of data, not when you talk in geological terms, and we are then using it to extrapolate into systems that we don't really understand. We have hunches, but nothing definitive. We know some things, we don't know the whole picture. Its a shame but true.
I seem to remember having a Palm Treo that didn't have user replaceable batteries. I remember having Palm PDAs that didn't have user replaceable batteries either. So there is a precedent within the same consumer electronics space.
If the consumer is so swept up in the hype that they don't research such an expensive purchase as an iPhone how is that Apple's fault?
This global warming is happening and its our fault. I know you might have heard that there are people with other views, including a few scientists, but here are a few things to help you out.
First, here's a link to an article to tell you how to interpret the rest of them, not that we are telling you what to think merely placing the information before you so that you can make up your own mind.
Got that? Right. Here's a guide to how to debunk all of the negative points we've seen floating around. Okay, so some of them are a bit spurious, and facile, but they're the best we can come up with.
What? Why did we publish this? Its an important topic that affects everyone on the planet. No, its nothing to do with the increase in circulation we get when we post things about climate change.
If you go down the model of allowing drag/drop then the player has to do more work. That require additional software on the player to handle this. That takes up more space and makes the firmware more complex. It also means that some content (iTunes loaded) will be available straight away whereas other won't be until it has been indexed. This dilutes the experience and adds complexity. When dealing with consumer devices complexity is the enemy. The KISS principle is heavily at work here.
That's fine for someone that's computer savvy and wants to spend the time doing that. There is a problem with that for the general population though. It requires you, the human, having to be trained to do something that the computer could do for you. If you want to do that fine, the majority of people just want to be able to stick XYZ bands songs onto the player and don't give a stuff how its organised.
I used to be anal about how things were organised. I've now adopted the don't give a stuff attitude. I just want to be able to get to things easily, I don't want to have to spend time organising a filing system.
The Lord of the Rings reads well. The Hobbit reads well. They show that JRR Tolkien had a good ear for a tale. Everything composited from notes by Christopher Tolkien shows that this wasn't a genetic Tolkien family trait.
The Silmarillion and others read like background information, which is what they were. JRR built up a whole mythos to draw from when writing LoTR. This gave him a good base to produce a rich story. I see the continued publication of these tarted up notes as a poor distraction from the original tale.
Now in our post 9/11 world we are under a constant threat from religious extremists. These people are in our midst and, though they have killed fewer than the IRA, we need new laws and anti-terrorist measures. We need to be able to imprison people without trial for longer to gather evidence to support a case against them. We need more restrictions on air travel, because that doesn't affect daily life but is visible. We need to have everyone fingerprinted, more CCTV, more ANPR cameras (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) even though it is recognised that their deployment may be illegal.
Of course all of these measure are for our own good. The information gathered by these won't be used to our detriment, they certainly wouldn't be sold (like the register of electors, or the car registration database, or any other database that the government has) and once the threat has gone the measures will be repealed. In the days of the IRA we were told to get on with our lives as normal and not let the terrorists win. We are still waiting for wastebaskets in stations.
Best take the the way out then because, as this shows, you're not free in the good ole US of A anymore.
If you have a server farm with a 100+ servers on it which is easier to upgrade in a production environment; Gentoo with possible manual intervention or Redhat using custom RPMs and Kickstart?
I would rather that instead of playing fast and loose with our money that they looked at slimming down the bureaucracy that rules our lives first. If they managed to do that then, and only then, would I think about letting them rationalise their data storage.
In the UK we have seen the development of the APNR system (which may or may not be illegal) which was used to track down the killer of a policewoman. This is planned to be extended throughout the country. This will allow people's movements to be reviewed historically.
We aren't too far away from having the necessary power available to be able to perform face recognition and with ID cards and biometric passports the data to compare against will be available. At this point your movements can be tracked and stored for future use.
The UK government doesn't have a very good track record with data that it holds. With the way that the accountants are running things it is seen as a resource that can be monetized. We already have issues with vehicle licencing, and therefore ownership, records being available to pretty much anyone that wants to pay for them. Organisations can pay to carry out criminal records checks on people, another valuable government resource. Movement and habit data would be of use to many people and, if your not doing anything wrong, what would be the harm in selling the data?
Of course this is just public spaces. What if the crime rate stopped falling though? What if crimes were committed in private places? Obviously the argument would go "Look at the reduction we got with the public cameras. We just need to have cameras in these other places to wipe crime out completely". Who could argue with that?
The only people who don't object to the erosion of liberty and those that lack imagination.
Well the class action might get to the bottom of this, if it ever makes it to court. It does look as though Nintendo doesn't have too much of a problem here though. If people decide to throw Wiimote, contrary to the instructions Nintendo print in the manual, then they only have themselves to blame. The number of people coming up with copycat issues looks like people circling to try and get something out of Nintendo for free. The way that the Wii is selling it doesn't look to be too much of a problem to me.
Use some imagination. Passports are delivered by post. It would require the co-operation of a postman but it is possible to intercept the delivery of the passport. Scan the information without opening the envelope then deliver the passport as normal a day late. As the recepient doesn't know when the passport was sent, and delivery delays are sadly common, they have no idea that their passport has been cloned.
Sadly this seems to be the deal in journalism at the moment. Everything is sacrificed in order to be first to publish or, if not first then, not too far behind. Accuracy appears to be sacrificed in the race to publish.
Seriously, why would Apple release real data to these people when they see what they do with the data that they can get hold of?
This shows two faults. The first is the lack of checking that goes on by web based services when reporting things, they publish first then look into things later if they get time. The second is the gullibility of the general public when reading things. "Its all over the web. It must be true!". The fact that these reports all refered back to the same origin, an article written by a reporter with a track record of bashing iTunes and an anti-DRM agenda, didn't matter. The consequence is a drop in share price as people panic on the news.
For myself, I waited for someone else to back up the story. As that didn't appear I discounted it as rumour.
Errr ... I'm 40+ had have had PS/PS2/Dreamcast/GameCube/XBox 360 and my Wii will arrive tomorrow. I remember playing Pong and having an Atari 2600 as a kid. Don't be so amazed when parents play games, remember that they were young once!
It could be more properly written as 'in order to embrace its position in the world the Russian government agreed to institute laws so as to prevent people from earning money from the works of others without their permission'.
The whole holier than thou attitude around this subject on Slashdot sickens me. All of mp3 have been selling the product of artists work without paying any recompense to the artists. This is theft in all but name, its copyright breach but the difference is a technical one. The majority of people supporting this site weren't doing it for political reasons, opposition to the RIAA, but because it was cheaper. It was cheaper because it didn't recompense the artists.
This agreement shows that Russia is growing up, its just a shame that the Slashdot crowd isn't doing so as well.
Anyway, back to the point. The point was that there is so much clutter on some roads that its pretty much impossible to take it all in and drive safely. This is especially true on unfamilar roads in some city centres. Its not a case of not being able to navigate its just that in some places there is too much information.
In Kensington they recognised this and decluttered the high street. This decluttering removed a lot of barriers, both at the edge of the round, and around islands used for staggered pedestrian crossings. The end result of this was a reduction in accident figures (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/main.jhtml?xm l=/motoring/2006/10/14/mflights114.xml).
I listened to a discussion about this on BBC Radio 4 last week where they had one of the people who had supported this on. The main aim was to place the decision making back in the hands of the driver. If the drivers have to concentrate on what they are doing more, no barriers clearly making out 'their' space, then they devote more attention to the business of driving and hence driver safe. Its not going to work for all drivers, but no scheme does. Anything that a) reduces accidents and b) saves money sounds good to me.
As a long-time (>10 years) Mac user its perfectly possible to use a Mac with a one-button mouse because that's what the interface is designed for. This thing about the number of buttons is just ignorance and intransigence. Yes, I read that you have a Mac and a non-Apple two button mouse. It sounds like you are still trying to drive it as if its Windows though.
We have a system which rates schools based on their performance. The only measurement of performance is final grades. This has lead over the last 10 years to lessons becoming little more than coaching sessions. Children are taught how to pass exams rather than being taught a subject and then being examined on that knowledge. This currently only applies to high schools but with a push for higher education (first degree) over here and money being given to Universities based on the number of pupils passed it seems inevitable that it will extend to first degree level.
We have a population that, on paper, appears to be gaining more and better qualifications. The fact that some of the these people with A grades cannot spell or construct a grammatically correct sentence is ignored by the examination process.
The parent is the single biggest piece of opinionated tripe I've ever read (except perhaps for this).
PS. Please mod as flamebait .. but it you do mod the parent as such too
The difference between India and the UK was the manner in which this data was marketed. Outside Hyderabad, which had G.Bush visiting and high security at the time of the investigation, the personal information was being dealt as any other commoditiy. That is, openly traded. The makers of the programme weren't able to gain access to data as readily within the UK. The speculation, as it was untested, as to why this was the case was down to jurisdictional issues.
A large number of UK companies have taken advantage of the services supplied by Indian call centres. The security of data is a genuine concern. The numbers being talked about were in the 50,000 - 100,000 new leads per month. This is fraud on a large scale even if its only being carried out by a relatively small number of people. Some of the sample data, which when challenged was said to be made up, was used to track one person down that was prepared to appear on camera and confirm it as true. Interestingly this data was obtained because the person had a credit check done in a UK shop which happened to go through to an Indian call centre.
Incidentally the programme did say that the information was garnered not from banking call centres but mostly from ones used by mobile phone companies. The implication being that the banking call centres had a higher level of security.
Post 9/11 the USA has been in a national panic attack. Witness what the administration has been able to get away with in the name of security. Witness what has happened to air travel. The administration has been making political capital over its response to 9/11 ever since. Is it wrong to provide balance by showing that they ignored the threat?
I'm a non-muslim but believe that George Bush and friends got what they were wanting, a new Pearl Harbour, with the 11th Sept attacks. They wanted a pretext to attack the Taliban in Afghanistan as they refused to play ball with them even after all of the support the US had given them when they fought the Russians. It also gave a pretext for the removal of Saddam. He 'had links' with Osama.
I do not believe that the US instigated the 11th Sept attacks. Not quite. I do think that there is much more to the events than has come out and that elements within the US were aware of the 11th Sept attacks prior to them happening. I would not be surprised if the same was true for the 7/7 attacks either.
Whatever the truth of the above both the US and UK governments have capitalised on the attacks to implement legislation that would not likely to have passed beforehand. The UK government is also doing a good job of keeping the threat in the forefront of everyone's mind and not doing enough to emphasise that it is a very small minority of muslims that are carrying this out. The manipulation of the psyche of the nation is such that two men were thrown off a plane for wearing leather jackets, looking at their watches and not speaking English at the behest of the other passengers. Everyone is so busy looking for the snake in the grass they are failing to look at the net being placed around their freedoms. This is all being done in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping people safe.
This freezing of bank accounts, especially if they are all muslim, is just one more thing that is driving our nation apart. It sickens me that people fall for it and that a government that prides itself on its ability to spin the story that the media present have not harnessed their power to calm people. Unless of course they don't want people calmed?