Functionally, FireWire and USB2 are probably as good or better than this. But the fact that Serial ATA is backwards compatible in many ways really matters much of the chip and controller design can probably be carried over, and it may turn out that even older BIOSes and operating system can use the new standard transparently if you plug in a new interface card.
For FireWire and USB, in contrast, there is just a lot more to configure and a lot more driver support needed, and it's still hard to boot from them.
He is using restore CDs for Windows. It gets even worse if you install from Microsoft's distribution. Often, Windows will misrecognize hardware or fail to recognize it altogether. Then you have to go hunting for drivers over the web from various manufacturers' sites.
Linux became easier to install than Windows quite a number of years ago. The main advantage that Windows still has these days is that it comes preinstalled. The other problem with Linux installs is that on laptops, the precompiled Linux kernels often just don't have the right options set; this should be fixed by finally making the Linux kernel completely modular, but I won't hold my breath.
Mac OSX, incidentally, is perhaps even a little easier to install than Linux, but it asks more annoying personal questions.
Changing an interface to increase usability by even a subset of the population is entirely reasonable so long as it doesn't substantially impact usability by the populace as a whole.
I disagree. Cumulatively, accomodating all the possible excentricities and quirks of everybody results in overwhelming waste, costs, and functional limitations. And that is just what we see in user interfaces designed by HCI experts: bloated, annoying programs with very limited functionality.
Furthermore, those accomodations don't help, they make things worse. If you don't learn to check for paper at home, you likely will forget when you travel as well, and then you are in real trouble. And if you come to rely on all those gadgets and gimmicks in one house, you'll have to buy them all again when you move.
If you are disabled, by all means, go ahead and accomodate. But for laziness or stupidity, there is a very simple answer: you have one of the most powerful brains in the animal kingdom--use it.
In fact, bringing movie-quality, real-time CG to PCs will result in a lot more good movies being made. Right now, people can direct films only if they have the ability to work within the commercial film industry and have some knack for telling commercially successful stories. There are lots of excellent storytellers that would love to tell stories visually but don't want to put up with producers, financing, actors, sets, or any of that other junk and/or who have stories to tell that no company is interested in telling.
That doesn't mean everybody will have the talent to make excellent movies, but it may expand the pool of people able to do it by several orders of magnitude.
Besides, many commercial movies are apparently made by people who don't have a clue how to tell a good story.
This is a fine example of why patents are often a tremendous resource to the technical community. Go download the patent from the USPTO and you'll find the blueprint on how to build one of these yourself.
Big deal. There are plenty of one-handed chorded keyboards around, with minor differences in shape and major differences in layout and chords.
Having a patent on them is self-defeating--why would anybody want to invest their time and effort in learning a patented input method when there are plenty of free ones around?
Remember, a patent doesn't prevent you from building something as long as you don't do it for profit.
There is no "non-profit" exception for patents. If an invention is patented, you are not permitted to build it for any reason without a license from the patent holder: not for research, not as a prototype, not to enhance it, not to try it out, not for education, not for fun.
Why the slasdot community is so hostile towards patents in principle I shall never understand.
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that you don't seem to have a clue about the patent system. As someone who actually holds a number of patents, I can tell you: they are a useless waste of time and money. Most small inventors cannot easily afford them or prosecute them, and large companies just use them to keep innovators out of their markets. The overall result is bad for consumers and bad for inventors; only lawyers and large companies really benefit from the system (and the politicians they give lots of money to).
You honestly go through that step every time? Jeesh.
You mean, look at the roll holder before I sit down? Of course. Doing so is simple self-preservation in the real world.
As such, a good dual-roll design is truly an improvement over the more traditional system you argue in favor of.
I don't argue in favor or against it, I'm merely pointing out that for normal people, this is not a real problem. The fact that HCI researchers think it is a problem tells you a lot about HCI researchers.
(Even if it were a real problem, the dual-roll design doesn't really fix things. If you don't look at it fairly regularly, you will still find yourself with your pants down and no paper. If you wanted to "protect" people from that situation, you'd have to lock the bowl itself when there is no paper, to force people to refill before they are caught with their pants down. This has obvious disadvantages in practice, but it is roughly the equivalent of what many modal dialog boxes do in real-world software.)
The cabinet under the sink can be difficult to get to if you're already sitting on the pot and don't care to get up.
That's why you look before you sit down, another one of those simple lessons of life most people learn in kindergarden. If you haven't figured out to look first, dual rolls won't help you either.
Further, the availability of backup rolls is not readily visible, and may go undiscovered 'till it's too late.
Again, look first if necessary. If you forgot to look and there is nothing there (two failures), it is embarrassing enough for everybody involved not to repeat the mistake, and harmless enough not to lose sleep over.
If you can get by with the laser, chances are that your filling is pretty simple anyway. You probably wouldn't feel anything with a modern high-speed drill on such a filling even if you didn't get Novocain. Or you can use one of those new sandblast-like drills.
The big stuff--crowns, root canals, removal of old fillings, and all that, still requires a drill, often of the slow variety, to get the right shape and surface. The mechanical feedback is important to dentists to know when to stop drilling and to create subtle surface features that make the fillings actually stay in.
And even if you could ablate half a tooth with a high powered laser, frankly, I wouldn't want to have half a tooth, or old amalgam fillings, for that matter, vaporized inside my mouth.
tells you a lot about the state of HCI research
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Toilet Paper Algorithms
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It should be pretty obvious to any halfway intelligent person how to use a dual-roll toilet holder. It does not require a computer scientist, a rocket scientist, or any other kind of scientist.
Furthermore, most homes have something nice and pretty called a "under-sink cabinet" in the bathroom, which is where you keep the extra toilet rolls when you have a one-roll holder. It solves the problem of which roll to take paper from (the one in the holder, not the one out of sight in the cabinet, in case you are part of the few percent of the population that doesn't get this). And that is why most homes don't bother with ugly, bulky, industrial-looking dual-roll toilet holders. People who have a separate room for their toilet and no under-sink cabinets usually install a little cabinet in that room, useful not only for holding toilet paper but also cleaning supplies.
Most normal people understand this. Most normal people know to look in the cabinet when they run out of toilet paper. (Most normal people also know not to keep any incriminating or unusual personal items there because they understand that other people will be looking there.)
I think the fact that one of the foremost HCI experts in the countries thinks it worthwhile to share his profound insights on this matter tells you a lot more about the state of HCI research than anything about toilet paper. Apparently, HCI researchers think that the rest of the country consists of idiots who don't even know what to do in the bathroom. In different words, I think a lot of HCI research is roughly at the same level of worrying about installing dual-roll toilet paper holders in the home.
At Fry's or CompUSA, those are many monitors connected with very long cables to splitters and a single signal source. Of course, you get ghosting and image defects. The plasma monitors are probably connected to composite video. But if you plug one monitor into one VGA card with a good cable of reasonable length, you won't be able to tell the difference.
[Efron] When the numbers are large enough, and the distracting details are removed, the chance of anything is fairly high.
Efron is a venerable statistician, but this is plain wrong. There are many things that are so unlikely that, for practical purposes, they simply do not occur in this universe. For example, all the air molecules in a room don't all get on one half of the room, leaving the other half with a vacuum. Statistically, this arrangement is (approximately) as probable as any other. But there aren't enough rooms in the universe to make this an event that could occur with "fairly high" probability.
Much of physics relies on things that are "astronomically unlikely", and much of engineering consists of changing conditions so that something that is very unlikely becomes common. We have enshrined these "astronomically unlikely" principle as a the laws of thermodynamics, and we don't even bother to say "a perpetual motion machine is possible but very, very unlikely", we just say "you can't build one", because for practical purposes, you can't.
[Tibshirani] ''The chance of getting a royal flush is very low,'' he says, ''and if you were to get a royal flush, you would be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is low. You just don't notice when you get all the others; you notice when you get the royal flush.''
This is true but not relevant. If you randomly think of some particular hand and then have it dealt, you do have reason to be surprised, although, since the prior probability on the existence ESP or telekinesis is so minute, you should probably still attribute it to randomness. On the other hand, you have no reason to be surprised if you get a royal flush once over many games, just like you have no reason to be surprised to get any particular hand once in many games.
Similarly, statistically, having all the air molecules in a room be present only on one side of the room is (approximately) as probable as any other particular arrangement of air molecules, but I guarantee that if you were in that room, you would notice, and you would have reason to be surprised. In fact, you would almost certainly be correct in concluding that that arrangement of air molecules didn't come about by chance but involved something like a vacuum pump and a partition.
Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a researcher in a lab at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents as potential cancer drugs.
Now we are getting to the good stuff. The problem with the conspiracy surrounding these cases has nothing to do with statistics or people's ignorance of it.
The death of half a dozen germ warfare experts under the age of 60 within a span of four months would be an unlikely event, whether or not it follows 9/11. Not astronomically unlikely, but something that would certainly warrant closer investigation. If you assume that there are maybe 100 such world experts, you can look at standard mortality tables to bound the probability of this event occurring.
What's wrong with that analysis is that these people were not "germ warfare specialists"--they were biologists. Journalists constructed the label "germ warfare specialists" after the fact. But there are a lot of biologists in the world. The death of half a dozen biologists over a four month period is a much more probable event--simply because there are a lot more biologists around.
Most "earth shattering discoveries" take years to be understood and applied by others. Just publish and the process is slow enough as it is.
If it is something you think governments or other people might like to suppress but that you think is still worthwhile publishing (maybe cryptography), use steganography, publish it via a public network, then reveal some of the keys later.
If it is something that really is harmful ("how to build a nuclear device in your basement", "how to make a killer virus from cheese", etc.) just don't publish it and don't tell anybody about it. Most of the time, if people know something is possible, they can easily recreate it even if you don't tell them how.
Everytime this comes up, people engage in the same spurious reasoning: they argue that national IDs are the first step towards a privacy-violating database of everything. Folks, whether or not the US government builds a database has little to do with whether we have national ID cards and numbers or not. If we don't, the government is just going to make up another number that you'll never hear about, or they'll just use your social security number. Or do you seriously believe that Ashcroft and the other folks are going to say "oh, they won't let us have national IDs and ID numbers, so we'll just go home"?
Internal or ad-hoc identifiers are much worse than a public, well-designed system of national ID numbers. Among other things, if you don't know your secret government ID number or record locator, it's much harder for you to force the US government to comply with privacy regulations--even with a court ourder--they'll just claim that they "couldn't find the records" or that they "must have overlooked them" and get away with it even if found out. And if the government makes up their own internal system or uses social security numbers, you are much more likely to be the victim of identity theft or mistaken identity.
In order to protect our privacy, we need good privacy legislation that covers both government agencies and companies. And in order to protect our privacy, we need a well-designed system of national ID numbers--preferably numbers that are large and have a non-trivial internal checksum. Both of these would have to be decided at the ballot box.
The reason why this isn't going to happen is because the people in the US that are mainly concerned about privacy are also people with libertarian leanings. They just don't understand that the only way to protect privacy is through strong government regulations.
The quality of plasma displays is low enough that you almost certainly won't be able to tell the difference. Just get one with a standard VGA input. If you need to run the VGA cable a long distance, Blackbox.com offers boxes that let you use standard VGA with long cables. If you really want DVI, get a DVI-to-VGA converter and put it next to the screen. Keep in mind that the signal eventually will be analog anyway.
Even running natively under Windows XP, Quicken is full of bugs and very, very inefficient. Yes, it does lose transactions and it can't add correctly. The only thing it has going for it is that Intuit has agreements with lots of financial institutions for online banking.
One can only hope that with the adoption of open, XML-based financial transaction protocols (OFX), open source programs will finally be able to perform on-line banking as well.
Kapital and GNU Cash, unfortunately, strive hard to emulate Quicken's monolithic and buggy design and share the biggest problem with Quicken: they are written in C/C++, so you just don't know whether they contain stray pointers and mess up your data. A collection of command line programs written in some safe language, together with a simple GUI, would likely be a more extensible and more robust design.
They will be able to, after they change the law so that it mandates that you use the next generation Windows running on the next generation Intel chip.
It would be really nice if Apple, in fact, showed some real, industry-standard benchmark results to support their performance claims, but they don't.
When others have looked at the G4 performance on a standard benchmark suite like SPEC (e.g., here), a 1GHz G4 is not significantly faster than a 1GHz Pentium III.
We may all "know" that, but it seems to be a myth. At least on SPEC benchmarks, a 1GHz G4 PPC doesn't do a whole lot better than a 1GHz Pentium III. The SPEC benchmarks are a pretty good mix of real-world code. What Heise got on them is probably what you and I can expect when we compile our programs. One might also note that, despite Apple's constant claims about how powerful the G4 is, they have never submitted a SPEC benchmark result for the chip themselves.
I think the PPC is a dead end for Apple. Lack of a 64bit migration path is a problem. Intel's Itanium doesn't need to fear comparison architecture-wise with PPC either. But the mainstream will go to 64bit AMD and Pentium. That's perhaps where Apple should go as well.
I never said that nothing bad happens in the US, I'm trying to point out that when something wrong does happen, it rarely goes by without a lot of people complaining loudly until the problem gets solved.
What does that have to do with national ID cards? My point is that the US government, when it wants to, can keep files on people and intern them without national ID cards.
Democracy is a pretty name for mob rule. The more democratic a culture is, the more power is given to the majority to quiet minority opinion.
Is that what they taught you in school? No wonder, then. In Europe, people are quite clear about the fact that democracy means protection of minorities.
As for privacy issues, you seem to ignore the issue of privacy from your own government against unreasonable search and seizure. Every bit of information that the government is legally required to know is one less bit of information that needs to be pulled kicking and screaming from a judge. Compulsory national ID cards are little more than an overbroad blanket search warrant.
A national ID card and number doesn't contain any information the government doesn't already have. But it is a tool I, as a citizen, can use to protect my privacy. With a national ID card and number, a government agency can't hide and say "uh, sorry, we can't get at that information conveniently".
IMO, it is becoming corrupt because it is getting too democratic. Modifications of the federal constitution to allow direct election of senators and nearly-direct election of the president have guaranteed that only those who can afford media exposure become elected.
I agree that direct elections are problematic. I disagree that they equal "more democracy", for the same reason that you name.
Conveniently enough, those are also the same Americans that tend not to vote.
Bush won by almost a majority. Clearly, a lot of voters seem quite happy to throw away their rights and follow a seemingly benign (or, in this case, simply dopey) leader.
If Europeans learned from their mistakes as you claim, Dutch troops probably wouldn't have allowed Srebrenica to happen...
I'm sorry, but I don't follow that. What does a propensity, or lack thereof, of meddling in other countries' affairs have to do with defense of freedom and liberty in one's home country?
As I mentioned before, while enforcement of policy has changed dramatically, the policy itself on immigration and visas and such have not.
Oh? What rock have you been hiding under?
When you get right down to it, what frightens me most about Europe is how totally sterile and uniform the culture is. Too many people agree on too many things to be healthy, establishing an environment that's ripe for absuses against the "others" that just don't fit into the totalitarian majority.
Funny, that is just what frightens Europeans about America. Of course, in the US, the manipulation of the "totalitarian majority" is privatized, as is much of the government, but that doesn't make the effects any less insidious. In fact, it makes it worse because it places such manipulation beyond the reaches of democratic control. And people like you are cheer-leading it on, deluding themselves into the belief that they stand for the defense of liberty and individual freedom.
The German government established an identification system for all Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc. so that they could know where they are, what they're doing there and who they're doing it with
So? The US has had registers of Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc. as well. This was particularly popular in the US between the 1930's and 1960's, complete with government-sponsored blackmail and employment discrimination. The US had no problems putting Japanese-Americans into camps in WWII without a national ID system. And a century earlier, the US had no problem tracking down American Indians.
The simple fact is that having a national ID system has little to do with privacy or lack thereof. Privacy legislation has to do with privacy. And what protects your from government abuse of power is not the ability to hide in some hole somewhere, it is creating a democratic and responsible government. By the time you have to hide in some hole somewhere (probably toting a gun), hiding from your government, it's already too late.
What should really scare you is the US. The US government is becoming increasingly corrupt and undemocratic. And Americans blissfully and ignorantly throw away their civil rights and privacy rights because the US government manipulates them into a hysteria about terrorism (it used to be the cold war; maybe it will be space aliens next year).
That is something we need to do something about. If it comes down to whether Ashcroft's goons can find you to make you disappear in some government holding cell without due process, you have already lost, ID card or not.
You should also worry about privacy violations by US companies, which are largely unregulated. They can wreck your life with various forms of discrimination, and you are nearly powerless to get the data, let alone challenge it.
Europeans understand privacy and totalitarianism much better than Americans--Europeans have lived through it. It's the Americans that are at risk of repeating the European mistakes because Americans are so blissfully ignorant of it all and think that it just can't happen here.
PostgreSQL and MySQL cover the open source market, and the spectrum of functionality that most people need, pretty well. We also get Interbase and a bunch of others. The arrival of yet another relational database is really not a big deal.
Incidentally, SAP-DB is not part of any of the major distributions as far as I can tell. If you want to popularize it, the first thing to do might be to volunteer to support it for Debian.
I use OSX on the desktop and Linux for a compute cluster, so here is my experience.
OSX makes a good desktop system for people who want a no-hassles UNIX system that runs out of the box. It makes it easy for people with modest computer experience to install and maintain their machine. And it runs a bunch of commercial desktop apps.
Once you are talking number crunching with a compute cluster, you are almost certainly better off with Linux-based systems. Linux has extensive cluster administration tools. Cluster installation and maintenance is much easier than OSX installation and maintenance. You can easily run any GUI-based Linux programs remotely using X11, which still beats Apple's remote desktop software in both functionality and performance. You get automatic process migration across a cluster with OpenMOSIX. There is much more numerical and scientific software available for Linux than for OSX, much of it open source; while porting to OSX usually isn't hard, it does require some effort.
Also, you do much better in terms of hardware. While XServe pricing is OK, Pentium and AMD-based servers are still cheaper and offer better performance, and they are offered by many vendors in many different configurations. And, if you like, people already use 64bit Itanium-based machines, or you can still get Alpha-based 64bit compute servers.
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For FireWire and USB, in contrast, there is just a lot more to configure and a lot more driver support needed, and it's still hard to boot from them.
Linux became easier to install than Windows quite a number of years ago. The main advantage that Windows still has these days is that it comes preinstalled. The other problem with Linux installs is that on laptops, the precompiled Linux kernels often just don't have the right options set; this should be fixed by finally making the Linux kernel completely modular, but I won't hold my breath.
Mac OSX, incidentally, is perhaps even a little easier to install than Linux, but it asks more annoying personal questions.
I disagree. Cumulatively, accomodating all the possible excentricities and quirks of everybody results in overwhelming waste, costs, and functional limitations. And that is just what we see in user interfaces designed by HCI experts: bloated, annoying programs with very limited functionality.
Furthermore, those accomodations don't help, they make things worse. If you don't learn to check for paper at home, you likely will forget when you travel as well, and then you are in real trouble. And if you come to rely on all those gadgets and gimmicks in one house, you'll have to buy them all again when you move.
If you are disabled, by all means, go ahead and accomodate. But for laziness or stupidity, there is a very simple answer: you have one of the most powerful brains in the animal kingdom--use it.
That doesn't mean everybody will have the talent to make excellent movies, but it may expand the pool of people able to do it by several orders of magnitude.
Besides, many commercial movies are apparently made by people who don't have a clue how to tell a good story.
Big deal. There are plenty of one-handed chorded keyboards around, with minor differences in shape and major differences in layout and chords.
Having a patent on them is self-defeating--why would anybody want to invest their time and effort in learning a patented input method when there are plenty of free ones around?
Remember, a patent doesn't prevent you from building something as long as you don't do it for profit.
There is no "non-profit" exception for patents. If an invention is patented, you are not permitted to build it for any reason without a license from the patent holder: not for research, not as a prototype, not to enhance it, not to try it out, not for education, not for fun.
Why the slasdot community is so hostile towards patents in principle I shall never understand.
Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that you don't seem to have a clue about the patent system. As someone who actually holds a number of patents, I can tell you: they are a useless waste of time and money. Most small inventors cannot easily afford them or prosecute them, and large companies just use them to keep innovators out of their markets. The overall result is bad for consumers and bad for inventors; only lawyers and large companies really benefit from the system (and the politicians they give lots of money to).
You mean, look at the roll holder before I sit down? Of course. Doing so is simple self-preservation in the real world.
As such, a good dual-roll design is truly an improvement over the more traditional system you argue in favor of.
I don't argue in favor or against it, I'm merely pointing out that for normal people, this is not a real problem. The fact that HCI researchers think it is a problem tells you a lot about HCI researchers.
(Even if it were a real problem, the dual-roll design doesn't really fix things. If you don't look at it fairly regularly, you will still find yourself with your pants down and no paper. If you wanted to "protect" people from that situation, you'd have to lock the bowl itself when there is no paper, to force people to refill before they are caught with their pants down. This has obvious disadvantages in practice, but it is roughly the equivalent of what many modal dialog boxes do in real-world software.)
That's why you look before you sit down, another one of those simple lessons of life most people learn in kindergarden. If you haven't figured out to look first, dual rolls won't help you either.
Further, the availability of backup rolls is not readily visible, and may go undiscovered 'till it's too late.
Again, look first if necessary. If you forgot to look and there is nothing there (two failures), it is embarrassing enough for everybody involved not to repeat the mistake, and harmless enough not to lose sleep over.
The big stuff--crowns, root canals, removal of old fillings, and all that, still requires a drill, often of the slow variety, to get the right shape and surface. The mechanical feedback is important to dentists to know when to stop drilling and to create subtle surface features that make the fillings actually stay in.
And even if you could ablate half a tooth with a high powered laser, frankly, I wouldn't want to have half a tooth, or old amalgam fillings, for that matter, vaporized inside my mouth.
Furthermore, most homes have something nice and pretty called a "under-sink cabinet" in the bathroom, which is where you keep the extra toilet rolls when you have a one-roll holder. It solves the problem of which roll to take paper from (the one in the holder, not the one out of sight in the cabinet, in case you are part of the few percent of the population that doesn't get this). And that is why most homes don't bother with ugly, bulky, industrial-looking dual-roll toilet holders. People who have a separate room for their toilet and no under-sink cabinets usually install a little cabinet in that room, useful not only for holding toilet paper but also cleaning supplies.
Most normal people understand this. Most normal people know to look in the cabinet when they run out of toilet paper. (Most normal people also know not to keep any incriminating or unusual personal items there because they understand that other people will be looking there.)
I think the fact that one of the foremost HCI experts in the countries thinks it worthwhile to share his profound insights on this matter tells you a lot more about the state of HCI research than anything about toilet paper. Apparently, HCI researchers think that the rest of the country consists of idiots who don't even know what to do in the bathroom. In different words, I think a lot of HCI research is roughly at the same level of worrying about installing dual-roll toilet paper holders in the home.
By the way, I didn't say that it was an "issue of resolution". I didn't even mention the word "resolution".
At Fry's or CompUSA, those are many monitors connected with very long cables to splitters and a single signal source. Of course, you get ghosting and image defects. The plasma monitors are probably connected to composite video. But if you plug one monitor into one VGA card with a good cable of reasonable length, you won't be able to tell the difference.
Efron is a venerable statistician, but this is plain wrong. There are many things that are so unlikely that, for practical purposes, they simply do not occur in this universe. For example, all the air molecules in a room don't all get on one half of the room, leaving the other half with a vacuum. Statistically, this arrangement is (approximately) as probable as any other. But there aren't enough rooms in the universe to make this an event that could occur with "fairly high" probability.
Much of physics relies on things that are "astronomically unlikely", and much of engineering consists of changing conditions so that something that is very unlikely becomes common. We have enshrined these "astronomically unlikely" principle as a the laws of thermodynamics, and we don't even bother to say "a perpetual motion machine is possible but very, very unlikely", we just say "you can't build one", because for practical purposes, you can't.
[Tibshirani] ''The chance of getting a royal flush is very low,'' he says, ''and if you were to get a royal flush, you would be surprised. But the chance of any hand in poker is low. You just don't notice when you get all the others; you notice when you get the royal flush.''
This is true but not relevant. If you randomly think of some particular hand and then have it dealt, you do have reason to be surprised, although, since the prior probability on the existence ESP or telekinesis is so minute, you should probably still attribute it to randomness. On the other hand, you have no reason to be surprised if you get a royal flush once over many games, just like you have no reason to be surprised to get any particular hand once in many games.
Similarly, statistically, having all the air molecules in a room be present only on one side of the room is (approximately) as probable as any other particular arrangement of air molecules, but I guarantee that if you were in that room, you would notice, and you would have reason to be surprised. In fact, you would almost certainly be correct in concluding that that arrangement of air molecules didn't come about by chance but involved something like a vacuum pump and a partition.
Which brings us to the death of Benito Que, who was not, despite reports to the contrary, actually a microbiologist. He was a researcher in a lab at the University of Miami Sylvester Cancer Center, where he was testing various agents as potential cancer drugs.
Now we are getting to the good stuff. The problem with the conspiracy surrounding these cases has nothing to do with statistics or people's ignorance of it.
The death of half a dozen germ warfare experts under the age of 60 within a span of four months would be an unlikely event, whether or not it follows 9/11. Not astronomically unlikely, but something that would certainly warrant closer investigation. If you assume that there are maybe 100 such world experts, you can look at standard mortality tables to bound the probability of this event occurring.
What's wrong with that analysis is that these people were not "germ warfare specialists"--they were biologists. Journalists constructed the label "germ warfare specialists" after the fact. But there are a lot of biologists in the world. The death of half a dozen biologists over a four month period is a much more probable event--simply because there are a lot more biologists around.
If it is something you think governments or other people might like to suppress but that you think is still worthwhile publishing (maybe cryptography), use steganography, publish it via a public network, then reveal some of the keys later.
If it is something that really is harmful ("how to build a nuclear device in your basement", "how to make a killer virus from cheese", etc.) just don't publish it and don't tell anybody about it. Most of the time, if people know something is possible, they can easily recreate it even if you don't tell them how.
Internal or ad-hoc identifiers are much worse than a public, well-designed system of national ID numbers. Among other things, if you don't know your secret government ID number or record locator, it's much harder for you to force the US government to comply with privacy regulations--even with a court ourder--they'll just claim that they "couldn't find the records" or that they "must have overlooked them" and get away with it even if found out. And if the government makes up their own internal system or uses social security numbers, you are much more likely to be the victim of identity theft or mistaken identity.
In order to protect our privacy, we need good privacy legislation that covers both government agencies and companies. And in order to protect our privacy, we need a well-designed system of national ID numbers--preferably numbers that are large and have a non-trivial internal checksum. Both of these would have to be decided at the ballot box.
The reason why this isn't going to happen is because the people in the US that are mainly concerned about privacy are also people with libertarian leanings. They just don't understand that the only way to protect privacy is through strong government regulations.
The quality of plasma displays is low enough that you almost certainly won't be able to tell the difference. Just get one with a standard VGA input. If you need to run the VGA cable a long distance, Blackbox.com offers boxes that let you use standard VGA with long cables. If you really want DVI, get a DVI-to-VGA converter and put it next to the screen. Keep in mind that the signal eventually will be analog anyway.
Great. Let's get that down to zero. That would mean that Linux is so easy to install that people won't have to pay money to anybody anymore.
One can only hope that with the adoption of open, XML-based financial transaction protocols (OFX), open source programs will finally be able to perform on-line banking as well.
Kapital and GNU Cash, unfortunately, strive hard to emulate Quicken's monolithic and buggy design and share the biggest problem with Quicken: they are written in C/C++, so you just don't know whether they contain stray pointers and mess up your data. A collection of command line programs written in some safe language, together with a simple GUI, would likely be a more extensible and more robust design.
They will be able to, after they change the law so that it mandates that you use the next generation Windows running on the next generation Intel chip.
When others have looked at the G4 performance on a standard benchmark suite like SPEC (e.g., here), a 1GHz G4 is not significantly faster than a 1GHz Pentium III.
I think the PPC is a dead end for Apple. Lack of a 64bit migration path is a problem. Intel's Itanium doesn't need to fear comparison architecture-wise with PPC either. But the mainstream will go to 64bit AMD and Pentium. That's perhaps where Apple should go as well.
What does that have to do with national ID cards? My point is that the US government, when it wants to, can keep files on people and intern them without national ID cards.
Democracy is a pretty name for mob rule. The more democratic a culture is, the more power is given to the majority to quiet minority opinion.
Is that what they taught you in school? No wonder, then. In Europe, people are quite clear about the fact that democracy means protection of minorities.
As for privacy issues, you seem to ignore the issue of privacy from your own government against unreasonable search and seizure. Every bit of information that the government is legally required to know is one less bit of information that needs to be pulled kicking and screaming from a judge. Compulsory national ID cards are little more than an overbroad blanket search warrant.
A national ID card and number doesn't contain any information the government doesn't already have. But it is a tool I, as a citizen, can use to protect my privacy. With a national ID card and number, a government agency can't hide and say "uh, sorry, we can't get at that information conveniently".
IMO, it is becoming corrupt because it is getting too democratic. Modifications of the federal constitution to allow direct election of senators and nearly-direct election of the president have guaranteed that only those who can afford media exposure become elected.
I agree that direct elections are problematic. I disagree that they equal "more democracy", for the same reason that you name.
Conveniently enough, those are also the same Americans that tend not to vote.
Bush won by almost a majority. Clearly, a lot of voters seem quite happy to throw away their rights and follow a seemingly benign (or, in this case, simply dopey) leader.
If Europeans learned from their mistakes as you claim, Dutch troops probably wouldn't have allowed Srebrenica to happen...
I'm sorry, but I don't follow that. What does a propensity, or lack thereof, of meddling in other countries' affairs have to do with defense of freedom and liberty in one's home country?
As I mentioned before, while enforcement of policy has changed dramatically, the policy itself on immigration and visas and such have not.
Oh? What rock have you been hiding under?
When you get right down to it, what frightens me most about Europe is how totally sterile and uniform the culture is. Too many people agree on too many things to be healthy, establishing an environment that's ripe for absuses against the "others" that just don't fit into the totalitarian majority.
Funny, that is just what frightens Europeans about America. Of course, in the US, the manipulation of the "totalitarian majority" is privatized, as is much of the government, but that doesn't make the effects any less insidious. In fact, it makes it worse because it places such manipulation beyond the reaches of democratic control. And people like you are cheer-leading it on, deluding themselves into the belief that they stand for the defense of liberty and individual freedom.
After they got many billions of dollars in corporate welfare for converting and "leasing" 767's to the military as refueling planes the military doesn't want or need. Your tax dollars at work.
So? The US has had registers of Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, etc. as well. This was particularly popular in the US between the 1930's and 1960's, complete with government-sponsored blackmail and employment discrimination. The US had no problems putting Japanese-Americans into camps in WWII without a national ID system. And a century earlier, the US had no problem tracking down American Indians.
The simple fact is that having a national ID system has little to do with privacy or lack thereof. Privacy legislation has to do with privacy. And what protects your from government abuse of power is not the ability to hide in some hole somewhere, it is creating a democratic and responsible government. By the time you have to hide in some hole somewhere (probably toting a gun), hiding from your government, it's already too late.
What should really scare you is the US. The US government is becoming increasingly corrupt and undemocratic. And Americans blissfully and ignorantly throw away their civil rights and privacy rights because the US government manipulates them into a hysteria about terrorism (it used to be the cold war; maybe it will be space aliens next year).
That is something we need to do something about. If it comes down to whether Ashcroft's goons can find you to make you disappear in some government holding cell without due process, you have already lost, ID card or not.
You should also worry about privacy violations by US companies, which are largely unregulated. They can wreck your life with various forms of discrimination, and you are nearly powerless to get the data, let alone challenge it.
Europeans understand privacy and totalitarianism much better than Americans--Europeans have lived through it. It's the Americans that are at risk of repeating the European mistakes because Americans are so blissfully ignorant of it all and think that it just can't happen here.
Incidentally, SAP-DB is not part of any of the major distributions as far as I can tell. If you want to popularize it, the first thing to do might be to volunteer to support it for Debian.
OSX makes a good desktop system for people who want a no-hassles UNIX system that runs out of the box. It makes it easy for people with modest computer experience to install and maintain their machine. And it runs a bunch of commercial desktop apps.
Once you are talking number crunching with a compute cluster, you are almost certainly better off with Linux-based systems. Linux has extensive cluster administration tools. Cluster installation and maintenance is much easier than OSX installation and maintenance. You can easily run any GUI-based Linux programs remotely using X11, which still beats Apple's remote desktop software in both functionality and performance. You get automatic process migration across a cluster with OpenMOSIX. There is much more numerical and scientific software available for Linux than for OSX, much of it open source; while porting to OSX usually isn't hard, it does require some effort.
Also, you do much better in terms of hardware. While XServe pricing is OK, Pentium and AMD-based servers are still cheaper and offer better performance, and they are offered by many vendors in many different configurations. And, if you like, people already use 64bit Itanium-based machines, or you can still get Alpha-based 64bit compute servers.