Hey, mod this up! +10 insightful! Never seen a more witty or erudite reply in all my years on Slashdot!
Re:Jealous vs. Envious
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 1
The President himself has said it, on several occasions. He seems to have backed off this stance (witness his denial that he ever said it in one of the debates), but it's on record as having been part of his standard speech for most of 2002-2004.
Re:Gemany is 11?
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 2, Funny
It is not illegal to criticize the Chancellor's hair. "Illegal" means contrary to a statute; an offence which is prosecutable by the State itself. In the "case of the Chancellor's Hair", a lawsuit was brought by Schroder himself for libel. There is nothing on Germany's statutes which makes it illegal to criticize anyone's hair; however the hair in question has the right to fight back...
Space elevator doesn't need fuel? How do you think things get lifted? Magic?
Counterweights. There's as much coming down as going up. It will require energy input to overcome friction and imbalances, but not nearly as much as a rocket solution.
I do not want to pay for hundreds of features that I will never use. All I want is an address book and a way to make calls.
To be honest, to me this smacks of Luddism; the additional features you bemoan clearly don't add to the cost of the phones, as the 'baseline' phone price hasn't increased in the past 3-5 years - in fact, it's decreased. I don't know of any phones on the market which do not have "an addressbook and a way to make calls", so the argument is basically pointless.
On the flip side of the argument, I've been using a Sony Ericsson P900 since it came out (and the P800 before that) - it's at the other end of the spectrum to the type of phone you describe, having a full-function PDA, Web browser and camera included - and it's been a total revelation. Having instant Web access wherever you are is astoundingly useful, and applications which make specific use of this feature are starting to appear - for example, I use a nifty little program which downloads the weather forecasts and exchange rates every day (or on demand), so that these data are always available to me. Until you try it, you won't think it's any great shakes, but once you have, you won't go back...
In short: the additional features aren't useless. If you don't want to use them, don't use them, but most people will get utility from them. And they're not adding to the cost of the phones; the increased sales of new models lead to economies of scale which bring down the cost of all phones. Win-win.
Making the entire phone disposable seems to me to be rather wasteful and, well, environmentally-unfriendly. The requirement which this phone purports to address seems to me to be already catered-for by the "pay as you go" model.
Here (Ireland), for example, you can get a decent phone (with no account) for about 100 euro, and then buy call-cards for 10, 20, 50 euro etc. worth of credit. These have a PIN which you use to top-up your account. As an alternative to the "pay monthly" type of account with invoices, it works very well; they're used particularly by teenagers etc. There's no account, nor are one's personal details given to the phone operators.
A lot of the comments here indicate that people think that this is a universally bad thing - in fact, the draft directive was so heavily amended by MEPs in support of the proposals of the FFII and related organisations, that the resulting document is actually quite supportive of realistic limits on software patents.
The article as posted contains some pretty snide commentary, apparently designed to intimate that all current search engines deliberately weight their results in favour of their advertisers. This is demonstrably not the case; in fact, with Google providing a strong, well-publicised counterexample, to do so would be suicide for any search engine with pretentions to market leadership.
The principal difficulty with an open-source search engine algorithm is that it would definitively be open to abuse. Once the ranking algorithm was known, it would be fairly trivial to develop ways to subvert it. One of the reasons why this hasn't happened to Google is because the details of the ranking algorithm are closed. There is a largish industry devoted to figuring out how to influence Google (which is why Google keep tweaking their algorithm). A search engine using an open algorithm would very quickly become unusable as this industry figured out how to play the system.
The funding from Overture is very suspicious, to be honest. Overture, assuming the Yahoo! takeover is given the all-clear, will soon be part of one of the largest commercial search engines, and with a history of business practices which are, shall we say, perhaps less than totally congruent with the open-source ideals.
Running a large, successful search engine requires vast, dedicated resources. I don't know the exact scale of the Yahoo!, Google or MSN search operations, but I'll warrant that they're surprising to anyone who's expecting to run a search engine from a couple of thousand distributed nodes.
An open search engine application is a nice idea, but unfortunately it's one of those applications which are essentially useless without an enormous ASP architecture behind it. An earlier poster indicated that it might be useful for searching and indexing intranets and the like, analogously to the Google Search Appliance. This is indeed a valid potential application, but then, HT://Dig exists already. Is this dramatically better?
An alternative explanation for the duplicate code, of course, is that both the System V and Linux implementations have a common ancestor. I think that this is vastly more likely than IBM (or anyone) having done a straight copy of the System V implementation for Linux. Being "matter of fact" doesn't make you right...
That is one analysis, certainly, and it has the backing of certain factions of the U.S. body politic. It's an extremely right-wing political agenda, though, as it's not progressive - progressive taxation means that the higher your income, the higher the proportion of tax paid. Progressive taxation has been the bedrock of almost all taxation systems for the past half-century or so; to roll it back in favour of a flat tax would have very serious economic consequences; not least of which would be an instant shifting of the tax burden from the wealthy onto the less wealthy. Possibly not the best of ideas.
It is precisely for this reason that the modern states in Western Europe (mostly in the European Union) are so resolutely pacifist; World War II cast a long dark shadow over the continent. The European Union was born of the desire that this should never happen again in Europe - when countries are tied together by strong trading links, and when hundreds of thousands of one country's citizens are living and working in the other, war becomes unthinkable.
It's surprising that the U.S.A. is so belligerent these days, as they committed almost as much to the anti-fascist war as any other country, and worked harder than any to rebuild the shattered economies of Europe and South-East Asia in the aftermath. Europe has learned its lessons, we wonder whether the U.S.A. has.
I would, of course, rather that power be vested in the government, which is appointed by the people and answerable to them, that that it be vested in international corporations, which are driven by greed and are answerable to no-one. Your mileage may vary.
No, the order does matter under the current system; whereby surplus votes are distributed according only to the most recently counted ballots, not based on the distribution throughout the candidate's entire vote set. There is a variation on STV called "Senatorial STV" which recounts the entire vote set of the candidate and distributes the surplus proportionally; however this has proven impractical with a large paper ballot. The superior fairness of SSTV is a definite advantage of an electronic system, but obviously the concerns over transparency and rigour are more important still...
He's my local member of Parliament. A scarily smart and clued-up politician. They do exist. In Ireland, they're mostly in the opposition, but we live in hope...
Following up to myself... I meant to add - the fact that the RFID can be used to track the movements of a note in a central database is no real advance over the use of a note's serial number; it would just make such tracking marginally easier and possibly less error-prone. The amount of data generated by such an exercise would be colossal, however, and of dubious utility.
As a point of information, the laws of the European Union and its constituent states are in general vastly more protective of individual privacy than those of the United States and its constituent states.
The EU's privacy laws were considered so restrictive to trade by the United States that they actually came up at the World Trade Organisation talks. The outcome was the "Safe Haven" registration system for US companies wishing to store data on EU citizens.
There are some exceptions (notably the United Kingdom), but in general one's privacy is more protected considerably more by EU law than by US law.
Neither protection excuses you from the necessity to provide your own privacy, should you desire it, of course.
There's a lot of heat in this thread... let's see if we can inject a little light:
The RFID system isn't of much use to muggers, salesmen, etc. as discussed, because the range of the tag's reply is tiny - a centimetre or two at most. These are designed to be passed through a scanning device.
The "record transactions" thing is a total red herring. Those conducting the transactions would have to use special equipment to write the transaction to the note; it couldn't happen by magic. Even if banks did it as a matter of course, one could presumably erase the record just as easily.
In short, it's just an advanced anti-counterfeiting device; it'll make the notes harder to counterfeit, although still not impossible. Now, if the tags performed some form of cryptographic manipulation on the incoming signal, and replied accordingly, that would make things interesting...
That's an amusing troll; it's a little too reactionary to be convincing, however.
For what it's worth, China Miéville, who was nominated, is considerably further to the "left" than Ian McLeod; in fact Mr Miéville has stood for Parliament on behalf of a political party you would no doubt dub "sophomoric Marxist".
Not everyone subscribes to the last-man-standing-wins model of American capitalism.
The parent article makes some good points about the relative suitability of GSM and CDMA in a large and sparsely-populated area such as North America, however one point needs addressing:
Nope. Having a diverse set of technologies is good for consumers. Being locked into a fast-aging standard is bad. What's good for consumers is having both standards available and letting the free market choose the best option.
Diversity in available technologies is only beneficial to consumers if those consumers are free to easily switch between technologies, and if the technologies are interoperable from the consumers' point of view. This is an often-forgotten tenet of competition; if there are barriers to switching between competing providers, you don't have competition, you have overlapping monopolies.
Consider the application of the above statement to Internet standards:
Having a diverse set of transport protocols is good for consumers. Being locked into fast-aging TCP/IP and HTTP is bad.
... and imagine that Internet devices could only speak either TCP/IP and HTTP or the other (proprietary) standard, not both. The result would be market fragmentation, consumer bewilderment, and the maintenance of proprietary monopolies.
I'm not arguing that GSM is superior to CDMA, or the reverse - they both have good and bad points. But don't be fooled into believing that it was the "free market" which put CDMA in place and keeps it there in North America; it's quite the reverse.
I had a brief play with the Nokia 3650 this week; I was particularly interested to see how it compared with my shiny new P800. I had been a bit nervous about getting the P800 because (a) it was pretty expensive (b) my previous Ericssony (the T68i) had been a big disappointment and (c) I'd always been a Nokia fan, ever since the 6110.
I needn't have worried. Beside the P800, the 3650 is clunky, circumscribed, and weird. The screen is poky and not as clear as the Sony's, and the keyboard's striking aesthetics aren't backed up by anything so mundane as actually being easy to use. The camera on the 3650 is better than the P800s in low light, but this is more than made up for by the P800's superb user interface and PDA functions. The jog dial on the P800 is the closest return to the old Nokia "do what I want" button I've seen in years, and the clever choices of "open" and "closed" UI styles make the P800 the best phone/PDA compromise I've ever encountered - in fact, the only one yet which is both a usable phone and a great PDA.
I used to be a staunch Nokia partisan, but it seems that their only innovations these days are in weird keypad layouts. Check out the P800 instead of the 3650. Sell your dog if you have to - you won't regret this phone.
The Teraserver article on linux.ie doesn't actually refer to the linux.ie server itself; that's got a modest 45GB...
It's interesting how much we've moved on since the Teraserver article was written; I put together a 1TB box for backups a couple of weeks ago using six 320GB drives and a 3Ware controller, and it wasn't that special at all...
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, mod this up! +10 insightful! Never seen a more witty or erudite reply in all my years on Slashdot!
The President himself has said it, on several occasions. He seems to have backed off this stance (witness his denial that he ever said it in one of the debates), but it's on record as having been part of his standard speech for most of 2002-2004.
It is not illegal to criticize the Chancellor's hair. "Illegal" means contrary to a statute; an offence which is prosecutable by the State itself. In the "case of the Chancellor's Hair", a lawsuit was brought by Schroder himself for libel. There is nothing on Germany's statutes which makes it illegal to criticize anyone's hair; however the hair in question has the right to fight back...
... or on GMail.
Counterweights. There's as much coming down as going up. It will require energy input to overcome friction and imbalances, but not nearly as much as a rocket solution.
In the future?
The events of the Star Wars stories take place "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
To be honest, to me this smacks of Luddism; the additional features you bemoan clearly don't add to the cost of the phones, as the 'baseline' phone price hasn't increased in the past 3-5 years - in fact, it's decreased. I don't know of any phones on the market which do not have "an addressbook and a way to make calls", so the argument is basically pointless.
On the flip side of the argument, I've been using a Sony Ericsson P900 since it came out (and the P800 before that) - it's at the other end of the spectrum to the type of phone you describe, having a full-function PDA, Web browser and camera included - and it's been a total revelation. Having instant Web access wherever you are is astoundingly useful, and applications which make specific use of this feature are starting to appear - for example, I use a nifty little program which downloads the weather forecasts and exchange rates every day (or on demand), so that these data are always available to me. Until you try it, you won't think it's any great shakes, but once you have, you won't go back...
In short: the additional features aren't useless. If you don't want to use them, don't use them, but most people will get utility from them. And they're not adding to the cost of the phones; the increased sales of new models lead to economies of scale which bring down the cost of all phones. Win-win.
The Sony Ericsson P800 and P900 both come with sampled "old-style" bell ringtones, which are both very distinctive, and very pleasant.
Making the entire phone disposable seems to me to be rather wasteful and, well, environmentally-unfriendly. The requirement which this phone purports to address seems to me to be already catered-for by the "pay as you go" model.
Here (Ireland), for example, you can get a decent phone (with no account) for about 100 euro, and then buy call-cards for 10, 20, 50 euro etc. worth of credit. These have a PIN which you use to top-up your account. As an alternative to the "pay monthly" type of account with invoices, it works very well; they're used particularly by teenagers etc. There's no account, nor are one's personal details given to the phone operators.
Larry Page.
A lot of the comments here indicate that people think that this is a universally bad thing - in fact, the draft directive was so heavily amended by MEPs in support of the proposals of the FFII and related organisations, that the resulting document is actually quite supportive of realistic limits on software patents.
Full details here . Check it out!
I have a few comments on this development:
An open search engine application is a nice idea, but unfortunately it's one of those applications which are essentially useless without an enormous ASP architecture behind it. An earlier poster indicated that it might be useful for searching and indexing intranets and the like, analogously to the Google Search Appliance. This is indeed a valid potential application, but then, HT://Dig exists already. Is this dramatically better?
An alternative explanation for the duplicate code, of course, is that both the System V and Linux implementations have a common ancestor. I think that this is vastly more likely than IBM (or anyone) having done a straight copy of the System V implementation for Linux. Being "matter of fact" doesn't make you right...
That is one analysis, certainly, and it has the backing of certain factions of the U.S. body politic. It's an extremely right-wing political agenda, though, as it's not progressive - progressive taxation means that the higher your income, the higher the proportion of tax paid. Progressive taxation has been the bedrock of almost all taxation systems for the past half-century or so; to roll it back in favour of a flat tax would have very serious economic consequences; not least of which would be an instant shifting of the tax burden from the wealthy onto the less wealthy. Possibly not the best of ideas.
It is precisely for this reason that the modern states in Western Europe (mostly in the European Union) are so resolutely pacifist; World War II cast a long dark shadow over the continent. The European Union was born of the desire that this should never happen again in Europe - when countries are tied together by strong trading links, and when hundreds of thousands of one country's citizens are living and working in the other, war becomes unthinkable.
It's surprising that the U.S.A. is so belligerent these days, as they committed almost as much to the anti-fascist war as any other country, and worked harder than any to rebuild the shattered economies of Europe and South-East Asia in the aftermath. Europe has learned its lessons, we wonder whether the U.S.A. has.
I would, of course, rather that power be vested in the government, which is appointed by the people and answerable to them, that that it be vested in international corporations, which are driven by greed and are answerable to no-one. Your mileage may vary.
No, the order does matter under the current system; whereby surplus votes are distributed according only to the most recently counted ballots, not based on the distribution throughout the candidate's entire vote set. There is a variation on STV called "Senatorial STV" which recounts the entire vote set of the candidate and distributes the surplus proportionally; however this has proven impractical with a large paper ballot. The superior fairness of SSTV is a definite advantage of an electronic system, but obviously the concerns over transparency and rigour are more important still...
He's my local member of Parliament. A scarily smart and clued-up politician. They do exist. In Ireland, they're mostly in the opposition, but we live in hope...
Following up to myself... I meant to add - the fact that the RFID can be used to track the movements of a note in a central database is no real advance over the use of a note's serial number; it would just make such tracking marginally easier and possibly less error-prone. The amount of data generated by such an exercise would be colossal, however, and of dubious utility.
As a point of information, the laws of the European Union and its constituent states are in general vastly more protective of individual privacy than those of the United States and its constituent states.
The EU's privacy laws were considered so restrictive to trade by the United States that they actually came up at the World Trade Organisation talks. The outcome was the "Safe Haven" registration system for US companies wishing to store data on EU citizens.
There are some exceptions (notably the United Kingdom), but in general one's privacy is more protected considerably more by EU law than by US law.
Neither protection excuses you from the necessity to provide your own privacy, should you desire it, of course.
There's a lot of heat in this thread... let's see if we can inject a little light:
In short, it's just an advanced anti-counterfeiting device; it'll make the notes harder to counterfeit, although still not impossible. Now, if the tags performed some form of cryptographic manipulation on the incoming signal, and replied accordingly, that would make things interesting...
That's an amusing troll; it's a little too reactionary to be convincing, however.
For what it's worth, China Miéville, who was nominated, is considerably further to the "left" than Ian McLeod; in fact Mr Miéville has stood for Parliament on behalf of a political party you would no doubt dub "sophomoric Marxist".
Not everyone subscribes to the last-man-standing-wins model of American capitalism.
The parent article makes some good points about the relative suitability of GSM and CDMA in a large and sparsely-populated area such as North America, however one point needs addressing:
Diversity in available technologies is only beneficial to consumers if those consumers are free to easily switch between technologies, and if the technologies are interoperable from the consumers' point of view. This is an often-forgotten tenet of competition; if there are barriers to switching between competing providers, you don't have competition, you have overlapping monopolies.
Consider the application of the above statement to Internet standards:
... and imagine that Internet devices could only speak either TCP/IP and HTTP or the other (proprietary) standard, not both. The result would be market fragmentation, consumer bewilderment, and the maintenance of proprietary monopolies.
I'm not arguing that GSM is superior to CDMA, or the reverse - they both have good and bad points. But don't be fooled into believing that it was the "free market" which put CDMA in place and keeps it there in North America; it's quite the reverse.
I had a brief play with the Nokia 3650 this week; I was particularly interested to see how it compared with my shiny new P800. I had been a bit nervous about getting the P800 because (a) it was pretty expensive (b) my previous Ericssony (the T68i) had been a big disappointment and (c) I'd always been a Nokia fan, ever since the 6110.
I needn't have worried. Beside the P800, the 3650 is clunky, circumscribed, and weird. The screen is poky and not as clear as the Sony's, and the keyboard's striking aesthetics aren't backed up by anything so mundane as actually being easy to use. The camera on the 3650 is better than the P800s in low light, but this is more than made up for by the P800's superb user interface and PDA functions. The jog dial on the P800 is the closest return to the old Nokia "do what I want" button I've seen in years, and the clever choices of "open" and "closed" UI styles make the P800 the best phone/PDA compromise I've ever encountered - in fact, the only one yet which is both a usable phone and a great PDA.
I used to be a staunch Nokia partisan, but it seems that their only innovations these days are in weird keypad layouts. Check out the P800 instead of the 3650. Sell your dog if you have to - you won't regret this phone.
The Teraserver article on linux.ie doesn't actually refer to the linux.ie server itself; that's got a modest 45GB...
It's interesting how much we've moved on since the Teraserver article was written; I put together a 1TB box for backups a couple of weeks ago using six 320GB drives and a 3Ware controller, and it wasn't that special at all...