Do you want compiled or interpreted applications on your phone that call 911, spy on you via built-in microphone and camera or run up your bill by constantly transferring the data on background. If you have an Anderoid phone I guess you will have treat it more like a computer, invest in an anti-malware package and keep it up to date. Some users are Ok with that, but probably most are not.
Fortunately P2P is self-filtered these days. If a connection becomes conjested, remaining BitTorrent pears shift bandwidth away from it until the problem passes. It at all possible, faster connections between users within the same ISP are used instead of multiple transfers of the same data from the upstream provider.
No sane ISP would want a 1000 downloads of the same 7GB ISO from an outside server.
In today's world, there is no such thing as ethnic or religious right to self-determination. There is no right to a "Jewish state", "Christian state" or a "Muslim state". There is a right to live where you choose to live, as long as you agree to follow local laws and the host country has a reasonable annual migration quota to avoid chaos from too many unsettled people at once. There is a right to freely practice your religion and morality and enjoy other internationally recognized basic human rights no matter where you are living. If Israel makes a case to preserve freedom of jews to practice their religion and population's support for democracy and multi-party system while otherwise allowing as many refugees as possible to return to their homeland, I will totally support that and wouldn't mind paying taxes for US role in UN peacekeeping force to protect peace in the region. Until then, all I see is a bunch of racists and religious bigots fighting another bunch of racist and religious bigots.
Four million Palestinians arriving in Israel (pop 7million) form a majority You must work for Clinton campaign. But in any case, not all refugees will choose to return, and I am sure limiting the number of returnees to, say, 200K per year in order to facilitate their assimilation in the society can be negotiated. Returned refugees will in fact become Israeli citizens and be able to vote. However, in the meantime they will be subject to Israeli laws and end up with long prison sentences if they show any violent tendencies which are unavoidable for Hamas supporters. By the time, return is complete, immigrants will have profitable jobs and their children will have assimilated into the host culture. It's highly unlikely that they will still vote for a militant political party.
True, "Israel's Jewish character" may become a thing on the past and Jews will have to learn to live side-by-side with muslims and see their children enter mixed marriages. Let them adjust like the rest of the world did. Prejudice is no excuse for taking land away from people who lived their for a hundred generations.
And a lot of them have a explicit models of the body. E.g., eating fat makes you fat.
That's exactly what I am talking about. Most new diets restrict carbs rather than fat and it seems that USDA food pyramid is a recipe for obesity and diabetes. There is very little understanding on weather foods have effect on body weight beyond their calorie content and what diets are most effecting at curbing appetite. Read a few different diet books and you will find more agreement among astrologists.
Mobile carriers are going to provide the same 100Mbps performance as 802.11n, at 50 times the range, with many more expected users on one cell, reasonable send speed and good battery life? I find this new technology fascinating. Perhaps I should subscribe to their newsletter.
Astrology is not a more-flawed model; it's not a model at all.
Temperature and amount of sunlight during pregnancy and early infant months of a baby have no effect at all at his/her personality? Observing positions of various constellations is not one way to keep track of seasons? I see some biology and astronomy education in your stars.
Forget about symmetrical dual/quad core CPUs. A computer of 5 years from now might have:
1 low-power, slower CPU core for 24 hour battery life when used exclusively 4 high-speed CPU cores that rely on a compiler to do instruction reordering and parallelization 4 vector processing units for each high speed core 2 GPU cores with general-purpose processing capability for direct access to video RAM
1GB of low speed, low power RAM for maximizing battery life 512MB of private RAM for high speed access by each fast CPU core 32GB of shared RAM Pattern matching logic built into memory chips for high-speed queries
2 programmable logic chips for implementation of application-specific algorithms
You are writing a movie production application that is to support real-time video transformation as well as inserting of virtual reality objects into recorded footage. Do you think Vista+VB.Net will be the best platform for the task?
Oh, I am sure fragmenting of OS and application market will be good for many closed source companies. It's just that Microsoft will not be one of them, because they can not meaningfully market 10 radically different operating systems. Open source will be still the only way to go for specialized usage scenarios that are too rare for commercial companies to address, have requirements understood only by potential customers or require large teams of C.Sci PHDs to develop successfully.
Once CPU speeds cease to double every few years, competition becomes too complex to sustain a monopoly. Further increases in software performance and features will be done in many different ways - robust multithreading for multi-core CPUs, instruction sets more efficient than x86, use of GPU and CPU's vector unit for general computations, programable hardware with each application supplying Verilog-like code, distributed computing and of course plain old good code. It's impossible for one operating system or one application of a given category to be optimum in all these areas. Programming languages very different from C++, Java or.Net will be needed for good auto-parallelization, auto-vectorization and use of programable hardware. A market for a bare-bone, hand coded in C and assembler OS may once again develop if it allows a movie frame rendering app to run 30% faster when hardware performance is not anticipated to rise wildly in a couple of years.
Microsoft can not possibly maintain 10 operating systems with radically different code bases and programming interfaces. In fact it's likely that some use scenarios will be too specialized for a commercial company and will instead be realized by open-source coding by the prospective users. Eee-PC and OLPC are already more about failure of Moore's law that it's continuation. People want to have a cheap, light and silent notebook with extraordinary battery life, but the technology to run Vista+Aero on such a machine is not anywhere on the horizon. So it suddenly makes more sense to run Linux in order to have the hardware that the user wants.
I'd be pissed if the science teacher was forced to even mention the Creationist moonbats, though. There is no such possibility in Florida bill. In fact, Christian/Muslim/Native American teachers will be forced to teach evolution even if it contradicts their personal beliefs. All the "Academic Freedom Act" says is that teachers will also be able to discuss their own views on Biology and Chemistry and students will not be penalized from expressing their views during class. What is missing is giving students and their parents a choice of schools so that they can select teachers that they think will benefit their education.
I think you are confusing freedom and truth. No matter how obvious is some fact to you, you have to let other people explore different opinions or even be misled. The upside is that once in a while it will be you who is proven wrong. If not for evolution, then perhaps for breast feeding vs formula, string theory, existence of economic systems superior to capitalism or sentient being(s) in this universe that are vastly superior to humans.
Requiring teachers to vary the lesson plan based on the parents' religion is an establishment of religion.
What do you think of requiring teachers to vary the lesson plans based on official government positions?
parents have far more influence over their kids than the school. Spend time with your kids and it won't matter.
How would you feel if your kids were sent to a madrasah for half a day and made to do homework for many hours afterwards? Are you able to spend THIS much time with your children daily?
There was a post on this web site yesterday about a bill in florida to allow teachers to teach whatever they want in class
As opposed to teaching official government positions on each subject? Sounds like the definition of academic freedom. Finally teachers can talk about benefits of medical marijuana, American history from the point of view of Indians, safe sex, drawbacks of copyright laws, civil disobedience...
Accepting that requires teachers to pander to whatever religion the parents have, which is an establishment of religion.
It doesn't require anything of teachers. It just give teachers a chance to be intellectually honest and parents a choice in their childrens' education.
Abstinence is the only sure way to avoid pregnancy (shouldn't we be teaching kids oral sex and same-sex experimentation if that's the only goal of sex ad)? That's a religious argument - it's only being pushed by religious lobbies, and is actually less effective than condoms and the pill.
Then you agree that I should have a choice of school that portrays sexuality (and pregnancy, parenthood, breastfeeding...) in a more positive light? Note how portraying parenthood/breastfeeding in a positive light requires moving away from "once you have a baby your life/carrier is over" hysteria and toward mothers taking a couple of years of work with government pay like in Europe.
Democracy is the best form of government for every society Then why don't we have one? Someone needs to go back to civics class.
The same someone who is trying to install democracy in two radical islamic countries?
They are the same before the law, and you'd have trouble finding legitimate racial diffs in jobs, although some physical work is done better by men. Doesn't mean you get to tell a woman no for that construction job - you have to have a reason other than her breasts.
Nobody is talking about denying any job to a qualified candidate. On the other hand, there are natural differences in people's talent and their own carrier choices - there are more talanted black dancers/singers/basketball players, female counselors/nannies, male soldiers and so on. We shouldn't have to hire inferior candidates just to change natural statistics that offends someone's sense of political correctness.
Says the person apparently defending the challenge to evolution going on in our schools. You preach about not indoctrinating the young while pushing an agenda of indoctrination. Nice.
So you bought into the idea that government choosing ideology and theories that will be imposed on all children in the country is "free thought" and individual parents choosing schools "indoctrination"? Nice!
By the way, I have nothing against evolution. However I can not defend my own right to choose my child's education and deny the same to everyone else.
Linux kernel is denied GPL status because it just re-exports GPLONLY symbols to thousands of non-GPL applications such as Steam games, VMware, Opera, Apache*, Perl...
It's an unwinnable proposition. Teaching and grading students on theories that contradict their (or their parents') religious believes is itself a form of religious education. Imagine being forced to learn Qur'an to get into college, even among assurances that your own (lack of) faith will not be discriminated against.
Forgetting religion for a moment, there are quite a number of assumptions that American school present as facts, or have presented in recent past:
Baby formula is as good as breast milk
Abstinence is the only sure way to avoid pregnancy (shouldn't we be teaching kids oral sex and same-sex experimentation if that's the only goal of sex ad)?
Capitalism is good, communism/socialism is evil
Democracy is the best form of government for every society (even the one where 51% of population will gladly vote to slaughter 49%)
All races and both genders are EXACTLY the same in all aspects and will be equally good at EVERY job in EXACTLY equal percentage of the corresponding population.
Taking baby formula as an example, it was for long time considered as certain of a fact as evolution that there is no reason at all for mothers to breast feed. Would you forbid teachers of the time to challenge this theory because alternatives are not supported by scientific method and are against the "occam razor" principle? Why assume there are some mysterious substances in breast milk when there is no scientific evidence to support that?
We don't need all our children brainwashed by the government into one single way of thinking, be it religious, political or scientific. Give us a wide choice of schools with different philosophies and let government simply provide a scholarship for any legitimate education facility, including homeschooling with outside testing.
why do standard dialogs generally lack an "OK" or "Close" button
Which standard dialogs are you talking about? Open, Save and Quit dialogs definitely have non-titlebar buttons for each possible action. Would be kind of hard to use them otherwise since they are actually sheets and share the titlebar with document windows.
Offhand, I can only confirm that applications' about Dialogs are lacking buttons. Do you really bring them up often enough to have trouble using the titlebar to dismiss them?
Why, you want your Linux browser to sport Windows XP title bar, ignore -display directive, omit support for.tar.gz files, require Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V for copy and paste and ignore middle mouse click...?
The blog was not sponsored! I met this poor Heidi girl and she was really heartbroken about that counterfeit handbag, so we swapped our sob stories. I got real cool Dell as a birthday present, but then it turned out it had a counterfeit copy of Vista installed. Not only the wallpaper had a slightly different color, but the fonts on the screen were not as crisp and defined as on REAL Vista. Worst of all, I couldn't enjoy any of the Windows Genuine Advantage downloads.
Then I started reading up on that and discovered that software counterfeiting is invariably linked to crime and even terrorism. Wouldn't somebody think of the children! Be a broken link in the chain and stop software piracy! Most importantly, don't undermine american capitalism by using free software that is anyway full of stolen code and patent infringements!
Apple is deficient here - no doubt about it. If you want Mom & Pop to click "pay now", you don't expect 'em to be able to parse "http://www.barclays.validation.co.uk". You don't have to be an "idiot" to fall for this - just outside your area of expertise. And if the phishing filter doesn't alert them, do you want to encourage Mom & Pop to go ahead and enter their credit card info on an unknown URL opened from an e-mail message? I, for one, welcome our new botnets with phishing web pages running on infected desktops overlords.
I have replaced Safari with FireFox on every friend and family mac I get my hands on. Re-theme it, copy and paste the icon resource, and they don't notice the change! Maybe they want, but people here will certainly notice that their blogs no longer benefit from Apple's built-in spellchecker for text fields. You shouldn't muck with people's machines unless there is a compelling reason. Someday they will want to educate themselves using system help or a introductory book. How easy would it be with all your customizations?
Given that rabies already produces a real-life zombie plague without specifically targeting temporal lobes, I wouldn't rule out the risk of any virus that penetrates blood-brain barrier. You may take a risk of being a zombie in exchange for certainty of death, but what about all the people whom you might infect by biting, sneezing and so on?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want compiled or interpreted applications on your phone that call 911, spy on you via built-in microphone and camera or run up your bill by constantly transferring the data on background. If you have an Anderoid phone I guess you will have treat it more like a computer, invest in an anti-malware package and keep it up to date. Some users are Ok with that, but probably most are not.
and no sane ISP would allow unfiltered P2P
Fortunately P2P is self-filtered these days. If a connection becomes conjested, remaining BitTorrent pears shift bandwidth away from it until the problem passes. It at all possible, faster connections between users within the same ISP are used instead of multiple transfers of the same data from the upstream provider.
No sane ISP would want a 1000 downloads of the same 7GB ISO from an outside server.
In today's world, there is no such thing as ethnic or religious right to self-determination. There is no right to a "Jewish state", "Christian state" or a "Muslim state". There is a right to live where you choose to live, as long as you agree to follow local laws and the host country has a reasonable annual migration quota to avoid chaos from too many unsettled people at once. There is a right to freely practice your religion and morality and enjoy other internationally recognized basic human rights no matter where you are living. If Israel makes a case to preserve freedom of jews to practice their religion and population's support for democracy and multi-party system while otherwise allowing as many refugees as possible to return to their homeland, I will totally support that and wouldn't mind paying taxes for US role in UN peacekeeping force to protect peace in the region. Until then, all I see is a bunch of racists and religious bigots fighting another bunch of racist and religious bigots.
True, "Israel's Jewish character" may become a thing on the past and Jews will have to learn to live side-by-side with muslims and see their children enter mixed marriages. Let them adjust like the rest of the world did. Prejudice is no excuse for taking land away from people who lived their for a hundred generations.
And a lot of them have a explicit models of the body. E.g., eating fat makes you fat.
That's exactly what I am talking about. Most new diets restrict carbs rather than fat and it seems that USDA food pyramid is a recipe for obesity and diabetes. There is very little understanding on weather foods have effect on body weight beyond their calorie content and what diets are most effecting at curbing appetite. Read a few different diet books and you will find more agreement among astrologists.
Well, much the same thing can be said about diets, vitamins, string theory...
Mobile carriers are going to provide the same 100Mbps performance as 802.11n, at 50 times the range, with many more expected users on one cell, reasonable send speed and good battery life? I find this new technology fascinating. Perhaps I should subscribe to their newsletter.
Astrology is not a more-flawed model; it's not a model at all.
Temperature and amount of sunlight during pregnancy and early infant months of a baby have no effect at all at his/her personality? Observing positions of various constellations is not one way to keep track of seasons? I see some biology and astronomy education in your stars.
Forget about symmetrical dual/quad core CPUs. A computer of 5 years from now might have:
1 low-power, slower CPU core for 24 hour battery life when used exclusively
4 high-speed CPU cores that rely on a compiler to do instruction reordering and parallelization
4 vector processing units for each high speed core
2 GPU cores with general-purpose processing capability for direct access to video RAM
1GB of low speed, low power RAM for maximizing battery life
512MB of private RAM for high speed access by each fast CPU core
32GB of shared RAM
Pattern matching logic built into memory chips for high-speed queries
2 programmable logic chips for implementation of application-specific algorithms
You are writing a movie production application that is to support real-time video transformation as well as inserting of virtual reality objects into recorded footage. Do you think Vista+VB.Net will be the best platform for the task?
Oh, I am sure fragmenting of OS and application market will be good for many closed source companies. It's just that Microsoft will not be one of them, because they can not meaningfully market 10 radically different operating systems. Open source will be still the only way to go for specialized usage scenarios that are too rare for commercial companies to address, have requirements understood only by potential customers or require large teams of C.Sci PHDs to develop successfully.
Once CPU speeds cease to double every few years, competition becomes too complex to sustain a monopoly. Further increases in software performance and features will be done in many different ways - robust multithreading for multi-core CPUs, instruction sets more efficient than x86, use of GPU and CPU's vector unit for general computations, programable hardware with each application supplying Verilog-like code, distributed computing and of course plain old good code. It's impossible for one operating system or one application of a given category to be optimum in all these areas. Programming languages very different from C++, Java or .Net will be needed for good auto-parallelization, auto-vectorization and use of programable hardware. A market for a bare-bone, hand coded in C and assembler OS may once again develop if it allows a movie frame rendering app to run 30% faster when hardware performance is not anticipated to rise wildly in a couple of years.
Microsoft can not possibly maintain 10 operating systems with radically different code bases and programming interfaces. In fact it's likely that some use scenarios will be too specialized for a commercial company and will instead be realized by open-source coding by the prospective users. Eee-PC and OLPC are already more about failure of Moore's law that it's continuation. People want to have a cheap, light and silent notebook with extraordinary battery life, but the technology to run Vista+Aero on such a machine is not anywhere on the horizon. So it suddenly makes more sense to run Linux in order to have the hardware that the user wants.
I think you are confusing freedom and truth. No matter how obvious is some fact to you, you have to let other people explore different opinions or even be misled. The upside is that once in a while it will be you who is proven wrong. If not for evolution, then perhaps for breast feeding vs formula, string theory, existence of economic systems superior to capitalism or sentient being(s) in this universe that are vastly superior to humans.
Requiring teachers to vary the lesson plan based on the parents' religion is an establishment of religion.
What do you think of requiring teachers to vary the lesson plans based on official government positions?
parents have far more influence over their kids than the school. Spend time with your kids and it won't matter.
How would you feel if your kids were sent to a madrasah for half a day and made to do homework for many hours afterwards? Are you able to spend THIS much time with your children daily?
There was a post on this web site yesterday about a bill in florida to allow teachers to teach whatever they want in class
As opposed to teaching official government positions on each subject? Sounds like the definition of academic freedom. Finally teachers can talk about benefits of medical marijuana, American history from the point of view of Indians, safe sex, drawbacks of copyright laws, civil disobedience...
So the license of the software should be determined by it's ties to hardware or use of a particular virtual memory model?
Accepting that requires teachers to pander to whatever religion the parents have, which is an establishment of religion.
It doesn't require anything of teachers. It just give teachers a chance to be intellectually honest and parents a choice in their childrens' education.
Abstinence is the only sure way to avoid pregnancy (shouldn't we be teaching kids oral sex and same-sex experimentation if that's the only goal of sex ad)?
That's a religious argument - it's only being pushed by religious lobbies, and is actually less effective than condoms and the pill.
Then you agree that I should have a choice of school that portrays sexuality (and pregnancy, parenthood, breastfeeding...) in a more positive light? Note how portraying parenthood/breastfeeding in a positive light requires moving away from "once you have a baby your life/carrier is over" hysteria and toward mothers taking a couple of years of work with government pay like in Europe.
Democracy is the best form of government for every society
Then why don't we have one? Someone needs to go back to civics class.
The same someone who is trying to install democracy in two radical islamic countries?
They are the same before the law, and you'd have trouble finding legitimate racial diffs in jobs, although some physical work is done better by men. Doesn't mean you get to tell a woman no for that construction job - you have to have a reason other than her breasts.
Nobody is talking about denying any job to a qualified candidate. On the other hand, there are natural differences in people's talent and their own carrier choices - there are more talanted black dancers/singers/basketball players, female counselors/nannies, male soldiers and so on. We shouldn't have to hire inferior candidates just to change natural statistics that offends someone's sense of political correctness.
Says the person apparently defending the challenge to evolution going on in our schools. You preach about not indoctrinating the young while pushing an agenda of indoctrination. Nice.
So you bought into the idea that government choosing ideology and theories that will be imposed on all children in the country is "free thought" and individual parents choosing schools "indoctrination"? Nice!
By the way, I have nothing against evolution. However I can not defend my own right to choose my child's education and deny the same to everyone else.
Linux kernel is denied GPL status because it just re-exports GPLONLY symbols to thousands of non-GPL applications such as Steam games, VMware, Opera, Apache*, Perl...
* Open Source != GPL
Forgetting religion for a moment, there are quite a number of assumptions that American school present as facts, or have presented in recent past:
Taking baby formula as an example, it was for long time considered as certain of a fact as evolution that there is no reason at all for mothers to breast feed. Would you forbid teachers of the time to challenge this theory because alternatives are not supported by scientific method and are against the "occam razor" principle? Why assume there are some mysterious substances in breast milk when there is no scientific evidence to support that?
We don't need all our children brainwashed by the government into one single way of thinking, be it religious, political or scientific. Give us a wide choice of schools with different philosophies and let government simply provide a scholarship for any legitimate education facility, including homeschooling with outside testing.
why do standard dialogs generally lack an "OK" or "Close" button
Which standard dialogs are you talking about? Open, Save and Quit dialogs definitely have non-titlebar buttons for each possible action. Would be kind of hard to use them otherwise since they are actually sheets and share the titlebar with document windows.
Offhand, I can only confirm that applications' about Dialogs are lacking buttons. Do you really bring them up often enough to have trouble using the titlebar to dismiss them?
Why, you want your Linux browser to sport Windows XP title bar, ignore -display directive, omit support for .tar.gz files, require Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V for copy and paste and ignore middle mouse click...?
The blog was not sponsored! I met this poor Heidi girl and she was really heartbroken about that counterfeit handbag, so we swapped our sob stories. I got real cool Dell as a birthday present, but then it turned out it had a counterfeit copy of Vista installed. Not only the wallpaper had a slightly different color, but the fonts on the screen were not as crisp and defined as on REAL Vista. Worst of all, I couldn't enjoy any of the Windows Genuine Advantage downloads.
Then I started reading up on that and discovered that software counterfeiting is invariably linked to crime and even terrorism. Wouldn't somebody think of the children! Be a broken link in the chain and stop software piracy! Most importantly, don't undermine american capitalism by using free software that is anyway full of stolen code and patent infringements!
You use about the same procedures for someone who has a severely infectious disease as one who has a suppressed immune system.
You mean soldiers in full-body hazard suits, martial law, nuking of hopelessly infected cities...?
Given that rabies already produces a real-life zombie plague without specifically targeting temporal lobes, I wouldn't rule out the risk of any virus that penetrates blood-brain barrier. You may take a risk of being a zombie in exchange for certainty of death, but what about all the people whom you might infect by biting, sneezing and so on?
Improving efficiency of 65nm semiconductors is not the same as adding a heat generator where the smallest part is at least 1mm.