I would like correct some misunderstandings that several readers seem to have after reading the article title. This does NOT mean that every Finn will be getting a government-financed 1Mbit broadband starting next July (doh..) but rather it's something of an obligation to the government imposed by itself on itself, to provide every single address in Finland (including the extremely rural Northern villages in Lapland) with the readiness to start using a moderate broadband connection by next July. The customers will definitely still have to pay their TelCo of choice a monthly fee for providing the actual service (actually, I personaly just renewed my contract with the Telco for 24 months - I guess they would have said if broadband was going to be a free commodity by next year:).
The assumed logic behind this is, that as more and more of government functions and media are moving from physical media to the Internet, the technical readiness to access the Internet from one's home should be a civil right, just like running water, a telephone line and snail mail delivery. After this, the government can start moving more of its stuff to the Internet (e.g. some tax-money financed television content produced by the national broadcaster is already available only on-line), and they can rest easy that no one will file a complaint that a broadband Internet access is something of a luxury product (like it was in the early 90's), or that the government is giving priority to the South where broadband access was a few years back more abundant.
Of course, in practice 1Mb connections have been available in all urbanized and even less-urbanized areas for several years. I think this law will simply mean that the government will pay the TelCos some subsidies to build the last-mile cable even in the far, rural North, and in the very few Southern villages that are still without 1Mb broadband cables.
This glitch occured in Finnish municipality elections, where it is not uncommon to loose or win a seat with a margin of a few votes. In one of the municipalities, which trialed e-voting, a party could gain a seat with as few as 130 votes. More importantly, in the voting list sytem the people who actually go into the office (from their respective parties), is decided by their relative popularity on the party list. Therefore, even a single vote can easily (and commonly) change *who*, from the party gaining the seat, actually becomes a representative, and a bunch of votes could easily change the power-balance of the parties in a small municipality (and even decide if a minority party gets their single seat). No wonder most of the people who appealed to court were candidates who were a few votes short of gaining an office in the municipalities with problems.
Then if every other filesystem was based on FUSE, you would load the initramfs with the FUSE module, the FUSE setup programs and a config file.
Actually, user space filesystems are nice, but they are way too slow for implementing a high speed server and/or even a decent desktop machine. They are good for experiments and pioneering work though (like GMailFS and SSHFS), but having a good set of fast, basic filesystems in the kernel is just obligatory AFAIK.
Basicly Wikipedia is already what he is looking for - an online collaborative academic wrting software. The format is just encylopedia articles. It supports LaTeX off the shelf, at least the mathematical formulae are formated in LaTeX. Now with the addition of the PDF converter, the only new thing needed to do would be to rewrite the PDF converter to format in the standard scientific paper format. Editing would take place as an online MediaWiki page. It has most of the tools you'd need for a sensible academic writing software already, like adding citations and references.
And there's another reason also. Many people who work in the scientific field are already familiar with MediaWiki notation because many have contributed to Wikipedia, and if not, the learning curve is rather gentle.
Heh, yes. As seen from this side of the Atlantic (Finland, Europe), your land seems to be one damn big contradiction. You claim to be the cradle of freedom in the world. You mobilize your biggest-in the-world destroying forces to go killing for freedom to some country in the Middle East. The most yankees i've seen just don't stop praising the freedom of USA. But in reality it seems more and more like you're becoming the 1984 of our time.
Now as this is a mainly yankee forum, I'd like express what I see is wrong with your country, though I've never been to USA and base my views on literature, internet, newspapers and TV. So why are you loosing your freedom? Lemme explain it from the beginning:
The problem number one and root of every other problem is the American dream: every individual is economically on it's own and everyone has the possibility to become rich one day, if you just work hard enough. That's why you don't allow too much social security ("get some work, you hippie! don't live on other people's money!"), taxing ("once earned money shouldn't be taken away") nor state controlled monopolies (even on fields like media nor health care) and instead give free hands to coroporations.
The problem is that the American dream is 100% BS. You have the system called capitalism. The #1 law of capitalism is that those who already have money make more money on the expnese of those who have fewer money, who become poorer. See it for yourself: play a few rounds of the Monopoly game with your friends. The natural sense of most people should say, that a system which gives more to those who already have and takes from those who don't, is unfair. But no, remember that we have the American dream: everyone is on his/her own and if you're not receiving enough material goods a) you're not just trying enough b) it's the will of Lord c) other BS. So just let the rich make their money and poors starve!
Now why are the people in USA not realizing that the system sucks and throwing those fat pigs away? Because the second law of libertarian capitalism says money=power. In USA even the medias like TV and the newspapers are free to markets. In most European countries there are state-controlled TV stations who don't go for market profit, but more like objective truth (i'm not saying that neither this system is best possible: the state may lie just like corporations, but this doesn't seem to be as frequent). When I open my local TV and they are airing american TV series or I go to cinema to watch an american movie, I see 90% times mind-controlling shit. Your media seems to want make people stupid sheeps who can be easily persuated to buying more stupid things or believeing the lies that your politicans feed you. Now please mind that the the politicans are also chosen by media: those who have enough money to commercials and close contact to media owners to persuade them to write/air good articles/news about them are chosen, because american people are mostly stupid as sheeps and vote the one who is praised in TV and the election is just a formality. Not every individual in USA is stupid, eg. most people in Slashdot seem much more aware than the avarage John Doe.
Because media is controlled by the rich class there is only one truth in USA: the truth of the rich. A good example of this mind-control: it was no long time ago when Michael Moore's movie critizing the Bush regieme was banned in USA. The supercapitalism is to blame: it has sold the truth and "democracy" for money.
We have an almost perfect system: the rich class has everyone else working to give them more money, media feeding the poor more lies and the power of everyone ("democracy") in the richs' hands. There remains one problem, though: the freedom. If people were really free and knew how bad they are treated, they'd kick the richs' asses. We have to rip people off their rights so that they keep on working for us. An example of which you see right in this article.
Finns are quite precise about their privacy issues. Finnish media reacts very aggressievly to any insult of privacy, was it about snail-mail, telecommonucation or e-mail. A firm can ruin its reputation very badly, if someone finds out any interfering of privacy.
For example there is one major legal case underway, where Finland's biggest telecommunication company's head was arrested, including the former president of the company. The case is about tracing mobile phones to reveal people who are leaking sensitive information about the company to media.
So in the first place the article attached to this story trys to settle the concerned citizen by proving that the system is truly anonymous (temporary, non-personal and untraceable keys for following all those faceless mobile phones) and the police authorities have no access to it. I see no reason to doubt their honesty because the Road Administraion (which will use the system) is governmental bureau and lying might lead to yet-another privacy scandal in Finland.
Isn't it more like shouting to a herd of bulls "IF YOU NOTICE ME PLEASE DON'T RUN OVER ME!" so they sure will notice you and sure will get mad to you and sure will run over you? I believe most of the readers wouldn't even have checked out the page if there wasn't request not to slashdot the page..
How can I tell the actual bandwidth I am receiving?
The best way to do this is to download something large from the Internet, either via FTP or your browser. While you're downloading the file or program, your client (your FTP application or browser) should tell you the rate at which that file is downloading. Beware though. Some applications will report your throughput in terms of Kbps (Kilobytes per second), while others will report your throughput in terms of kbps (kilobits per second; note the lower case k).
I'm pretty sure that b stood for bits and B stood for bytes (and to avoid misconception, it's better to use bit (kbit, Mbit..) for bits.) Isn't it quite embarrassing for broadband company to mix things like this, or do they even care?
Slashdot Mirror
When you can't win them by producing a better-quality product, just sue them!
I would like correct some misunderstandings that several readers seem to have after reading the article title. This does NOT mean that every Finn will be getting a government-financed 1Mbit broadband starting next July (doh..) but rather it's something of an obligation to the government imposed by itself on itself, to provide every single address in Finland (including the extremely rural Northern villages in Lapland) with the readiness to start using a moderate broadband connection by next July. The customers will definitely still have to pay their TelCo of choice a monthly fee for providing the actual service (actually, I personaly just renewed my contract with the Telco for 24 months - I guess they would have said if broadband was going to be a free commodity by next year :).
The assumed logic behind this is, that as more and more of government functions and media are moving from physical media to the Internet, the technical readiness to access the Internet from one's home should be a civil right, just like running water, a telephone line and snail mail delivery. After this, the government can start moving more of its stuff to the Internet (e.g. some tax-money financed television content produced by the national broadcaster is already available only on-line), and they can rest easy that no one will file a complaint that a broadband Internet access is something of a luxury product (like it was in the early 90's), or that the government is giving priority to the South where broadband access was a few years back more abundant.
Of course, in practice 1Mb connections have been available in all urbanized and even less-urbanized areas for several years. I think this law will simply mean that the government will pay the TelCos some subsidies to build the last-mile cable even in the far, rural North, and in the very few Southern villages that are still without 1Mb broadband cables.
Yeah, less effective in silencing any differing opinions about negligible stuff like your privacy, civil rights and freedom.
5.1 Few software titles, inability to run familiar Windows software. (Some applications (which don't work in Wine) have zero Linux equivalents).
I wonder, what titles are these exactly? What popular Windows software lack a viable Open Source/Linux counterpart?
This glitch occured in Finnish municipality elections, where it is not uncommon to loose or win a seat with a margin of a few votes. In one of the municipalities, which trialed e-voting, a party could gain a seat with as few as 130 votes. More importantly, in the voting list sytem the people who actually go into the office (from their respective parties), is decided by their relative popularity on the party list. Therefore, even a single vote can easily (and commonly) change *who*, from the party gaining the seat, actually becomes a representative, and a bunch of votes could easily change the power-balance of the parties in a small municipality (and even decide if a minority party gets their single seat). No wonder most of the people who appealed to court were candidates who were a few votes short of gaining an office in the municipalities with problems.
Then if every other filesystem was based on FUSE, you would load the initramfs with the FUSE module, the FUSE setup programs and a config file.
Actually, user space filesystems are nice, but they are way too slow for implementing a high speed server and/or even a decent desktop machine. They are good for experiments and pioneering work though (like GMailFS and SSHFS), but having a good set of fast, basic filesystems in the kernel is just obligatory AFAIK.
Basicly Wikipedia is already what he is looking for - an online collaborative academic wrting software. The format is just encylopedia articles. It supports LaTeX off the shelf, at least the mathematical formulae are formated in LaTeX. Now with the addition of the PDF converter, the only new thing needed to do would be to rewrite the PDF converter to format in the standard scientific paper format. Editing would take place as an online MediaWiki page. It has most of the tools you'd need for a sensible academic writing software already, like adding citations and references.
And there's another reason also. Many people who work in the scientific field are already familiar with MediaWiki notation because many have contributed to Wikipedia, and if not, the learning curve is rather gentle.
Now as this is a mainly yankee forum, I'd like express what I see is wrong with your country, though I've never been to USA and base my views on literature, internet, newspapers and TV. So why are you loosing your freedom? Lemme explain it from the beginning:
The problem number one and root of every other problem is the American dream: every individual is economically on it's own and everyone has the possibility to become rich one day, if you just work hard enough. That's why you don't allow too much social security ("get some work, you hippie! don't live on other people's money!"), taxing ("once earned money shouldn't be taken away") nor state controlled monopolies (even on fields like media nor health care) and instead give free hands to coroporations.
The problem is that the American dream is 100% BS. You have the system called capitalism. The #1 law of capitalism is that those who already have money make more money on the expnese of those who have fewer money, who become poorer. See it for yourself: play a few rounds of the Monopoly game with your friends. The natural sense of most people should say, that a system which gives more to those who already have and takes from those who don't, is unfair. But no, remember that we have the American dream: everyone is on his/her own and if you're not receiving enough material goods a) you're not just trying enough b) it's the will of Lord c) other BS. So just let the rich make their money and poors starve!
Now why are the people in USA not realizing that the system sucks and throwing those fat pigs away? Because the second law of libertarian capitalism says money=power. In USA even the medias like TV and the newspapers are free to markets. In most European countries there are state-controlled TV stations who don't go for market profit, but more like objective truth (i'm not saying that neither this system is best possible: the state may lie just like corporations, but this doesn't seem to be as frequent). When I open my local TV and they are airing american TV series or I go to cinema to watch an american movie, I see 90% times mind-controlling shit. Your media seems to want make people stupid sheeps who can be easily persuated to buying more stupid things or believeing the lies that your politicans feed you. Now please mind that the the politicans are also chosen by media: those who have enough money to commercials and close contact to media owners to persuade them to write/air good articles/news about them are chosen, because american people are mostly stupid as sheeps and vote the one who is praised in TV and the election is just a formality. Not every individual in USA is stupid, eg. most people in Slashdot seem much more aware than the avarage John Doe.
Because media is controlled by the rich class there is only one truth in USA: the truth of the rich. A good example of this mind-control: it was no long time ago when Michael Moore's movie critizing the Bush regieme was banned in USA. The supercapitalism is to blame: it has sold the truth and "democracy" for money.
We have an almost perfect system: the rich class has everyone else working to give them more money, media feeding the poor more lies and the power of everyone ("democracy") in the richs' hands. There remains one problem, though: the freedom. If people were really free and knew how bad they are treated, they'd kick the richs' asses. We have to rip people off their rights so that they keep on working for us. An example of which you see right in this article.
> It's gut wrenching that we're creating a generation that prides itself on its stupidity.
You should read this article featured on /. lately. It gave me some thoughts about why teens are willing to be stupid.
Finns are quite precise about their privacy issues. Finnish media reacts very aggressievly to any insult of privacy, was it about snail-mail, telecommonucation or e-mail. A firm can ruin its reputation very badly, if someone finds out any interfering of privacy.
For example there is one major legal case underway, where Finland's biggest telecommunication company's head was arrested, including the former president of the company. The case is about tracing mobile phones to reveal people who are leaking sensitive information about the company to media.
So in the first place the article attached to this story trys to settle the concerned citizen by proving that the system is truly anonymous (temporary, non-personal and untraceable keys for following all those faceless mobile phones) and the police authorities have no access to it. I see no reason to doubt their honesty because the Road Administraion (which will use the system) is governmental bureau and lying might lead to yet-another privacy scandal in Finland.
Is the poster's comprehension of time a bit twisted?
PICO is Pine's message composition editor and it is integrated to PINE as default. So PICO is in fact just PINE without the mail-thingie.
Isn't it more like shouting to a herd of bulls "IF YOU NOTICE ME PLEASE DON'T RUN OVER ME!" so they sure will notice you and sure will get mad to you and sure will run over you? I believe most of the readers wouldn't even have checked out the page if there wasn't request not to slashdot the page..
From RCN's product info:
I'm pretty sure that b stood for bits and B stood for bytes (and to avoid misconception, it's better to use bit (kbit, Mbit..) for bits.) Isn't it quite embarrassing for broadband company to mix things like this, or do they even care?