Sorry for the self-reply...there's a nice comprehensive history of these types of systems at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex . AT&T's was just one of a whole bunch, of which Minitel was the only one which really got traction.
The article is notably missing any kind of actual source for these supposed 'proposals'. It also doesn't actually quote the question that Schmidt was asked, or make it at all clear whether Schmidt actually raised the topic or whether he was simply blindsided with a question like 'would it be a good idea to transfer control of the internet to the ITU'.
The only actual citation in the original article is to the speech by the FCC commissioner, which similarly didn't provide any actual proof of the claims made, and was vigorously disputed by the ITU itself.
So really - we still don't actually have any clear indication there is any proposal to 'transfer control of the internet to the UN' in the first place. Just the FCC commissioner's assertion, directly rejected by the ITU, that there is such a proposal.
Or, as it was put somewhat more elegantly a couple hundred years ago...http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=58976: "They must work for those goals before the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread."
The bits that involved traffic did not involve 'silly law' situations such as you describe: they looked at actual asshole-ish behaviour (actually cutting off other people at a four-way stop, and failing to stop at a marked pedestrian crossing where a pedestrian is clearly waiting to cross). Other tests included lying in a self-reported competition and taking candies which the participants were told were meant for kids in a neighbouring study. All of these sound like decent experiments to me, and nothing like what you seem to have assumed was the case.
"In one test, subjects were asked to compare themselves with people at the top or the bottom of the social scale (Donald Trump or a homeless person, for example.)"
Americans: mistaking money for class since the 18th century.
People have been working on it for a long time. Notwithstanding a whiz-bang technology demo of a specific codec which does a good PR job of appearing a much bigger deal than it really is, it's a pretty complex problem - but G.722-based 'HD voice' has been deployed in various European countries for a few years, now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_audio .
Hey, that's not fair. The Liberals certainly found a decent, intelligent, thoughtful leader who certainly wasn't a rat......it's just that they promptly ditched him for a Romney-esque jackass because the brainiacs thought he had a more telegenic smile, or something. And we all know how well that worked out!
"In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence."
Universities are not supposed to be businesses, and faculty are not supposed to justify their existence by making money. They are meant to advance learning. Counting 'research outputs' like they were so many plastic beans seems like a spectacularly poor way to assess the quality of your intellectual output.
Er, how are those two things even remotely related? One's a 150 year old international standards body, the other appears to be some sort of American corporately-owned road toll system.
So your argument boils down to: "because one party I can think of in the entire history of human endeavour once made an assertion in bad faith, it follows that the ITU is definitely doing the same thing". Holy rhetorical fail, batman!
(It's also worth remembering that the ITU long pre-dates the UN and has been a fairly dull-but-necessary standards body doing the kind of dull-but-necessary things standards bodies so frequently do for rather more than a century. It's only under the UN umbrella these days because that's where it makes sense for it to be. I don't see any particular reason to assume that it's lying and the commisioner of the FCC, who has an obvious vested interest in scare stories about TEH EVIL FOREIGNERS COMING TO STEAL OUR INTERNETS, is telling the truth; especially when he doesn't appear to have a shred of evidence.)
Basically a 'remix' is a very liberal conception of 'based on Fedora' - it allows the inclusion of third-party packages, the modification of Fedora packages, and so on. Really, you can do whatever you like and call it a 'Fedora Remix'.
So in this case, they can certainly tweak things extensively to target a low-resource system. Note that Fedora has a very active ARM port and community, and we've had Fedora running on many low-resource ARM devices for quite some time. Fedora is not 'just' a resource-heavy desktop distro.
i dunno why everyone's thinking so small in terms of distances.
thousands of kilometres? that's practically touching. halfway to the moon? well, maybe now we're only very good friends.
i mean, remember the douglas adams line. halfway to the moon is *nowhere* in terms of...Space. SPAAAAAACE.
let's face it, we puny humans already have the technology - if, for some reason, we had the desire - to build a ship which could fly to mars, come back, and then blow up the planet. now you're the captain of the ship that has to stop that ship. if your capabilities cover a sphere with a diameter of 'half the distance to the moon', you are comprehensively fucked.
for space combat to even be at all possible, defensive capabilities over truly mind-boggling distances - we're talking AUs here, not piddling thousands of kilometers - are going to need to get developed. somehow.
not so much a failure of imagination as wilful blindness. humans, in general, find stories about humans - or at least things you can sort of think of as people, like almost all aliens ever imagined - interesting. stories about autonomous robots blowing each other up...not interesting.
some authors go to quite intricate lengths to make it semi-plausible that actual human agency would be involved in something, trying to defend against the 'just use a bloody robot' complaint. viz gundam (referenced above) and the culture series. some authors just hope no-one notices. some lampshade it. but most have thought about it.
to expand on my comment: this is all really well-trodden stuff. just look at, well, any sf author ever. all sf I can think of either treats ships as one-hit kills, or hand-waves some kind of Advanced Energy Shielding system to magically bestow resiliency on spacecraft. in other words, everyone who's thought about it at all hard is perfectly well aware that any spacecraft without _serious_ shielding is insanely vulnerable to any kind of hull breach at all.
you're assuming 'combat between people and some other species we simply want to annihilate', which is all well and good, but it's not the only possible type of combat.
it's pretty much a given for anyone who's thought about it for more than thirty seconds that kinetic bombardment is pretty much unanswerable, and hence the only type of combat that it's worth really thinking about is the kind in which kinetic bombardment of a 'stationary' target doesn't really achieve anything - so we're talking about, say, combat between two factions, whether human or non-human, for control of existing resources which have value to both sides. There's no point kinetically bombarding a planet if the whole point of the war is to gain control of something on the planet.
'traced back to someone who appears to be sympathetic to the NDP' is more accurate. and, well, bleeding obvious. you don't need an IP address to figure that someone tweeting embarrassing but entirely factual things about a Conservative politician is quite likely to be an NDP (or, I suppose, Liberal) sympathizer.
well, you can look at it that way. the other way you can look at it is this:
the police can already access all the records in question if they have just cause, by getting a court order. obviously, getting a court order isn't a terribly onerous thing in the context of a really serious crime - terrorism, child abuse, whatever. offences of that nature are rare enough and serious enough that there's no problem getting a court order where one is warranted.
it follows that, whatever the justification publicly offered, it doesn't make any sense that a law which removes the requirement to obtain a court order is truly targeted at very serious crimes. no, it only makes sense in the context of much less serious offences. say you're looking at, oh, to take a COMPLETELY random example, file sharing. you've got hundreds of thousands of potential offences, and probably little in the way of decent investigative evidence in any of them.
now THAT'S a case where it 'makes sense' to remove the requirement for a court order, because it really is going to cost of a lot of resources to go out and get a couple hundred thousand court orders, especially if your evidence is pretty weak.
So, yeah, we can ignore the rhetoric, and instead ask the question 'in what circumstances does it really benefit the police not to have to go and get a court order to look at these records?' And the answer to that question is very different to the rhetoric you hear from the Cons surrounding the bill.
Slashdot Mirror
"physicists have shown that it is possible to use two beams of incoherent radio waves"
Finally! A use for Rush Limbaugh!
Sorry for the self-reply...there's a nice comprehensive history of these types of systems at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotex . AT&T's was just one of a whole bunch, of which Minitel was the only one which really got traction.
It wasn't even new on AT&T. France had Minitel in 1982. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
These systems were neat, sure. Were they the internet? No. Noooo---ooo. No.
"Was there some sort of crime in Maryland (specifically Anne Arundel County) that started this investigation?'
Yes. At least, allegedly. The crime in question is the paying out of gambling winnings to Maryland residents, which is a crime under U.S. law.
The article is notably missing any kind of actual source for these supposed 'proposals'. It also doesn't actually quote the question that Schmidt was asked, or make it at all clear whether Schmidt actually raised the topic or whether he was simply blindsided with a question like 'would it be a good idea to transfer control of the internet to the ITU'.
The only actual citation in the original article is to the speech by the FCC commissioner, which similarly didn't provide any actual proof of the claims made, and was vigorously disputed by the ITU itself.
So really - we still don't actually have any clear indication there is any proposal to 'transfer control of the internet to the UN' in the first place. Just the FCC commissioner's assertion, directly rejected by the ITU, that there is such a proposal.
the problem is clearly that people don't wear hats any more, so you have nowhere convenient and immediately visible to stick your press pass.
presumably the stables of high-end race horses are rather high security when it comes to people who work with the *competing* high-end race horses.
"let's see, a couple of ambien in the nosebag, and...there's one more competitor we don't have to worry about..."
Or, as it was put somewhat more elegantly a couple hundred years ago...http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=58976: "They must work for those goals before the majestic equality of the laws, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread."
Did you try RingTFA?
The bits that involved traffic did not involve 'silly law' situations such as you describe: they looked at actual asshole-ish behaviour (actually cutting off other people at a four-way stop, and failing to stop at a marked pedestrian crossing where a pedestrian is clearly waiting to cross). Other tests included lying in a self-reported competition and taking candies which the participants were told were meant for kids in a neighbouring study. All of these sound like decent experiments to me, and nothing like what you seem to have assumed was the case.
"In one test, subjects were asked to compare themselves with people at the top or the bottom of the social scale (Donald Trump or a homeless person, for example.)"
Americans: mistaking money for class since the 18th century.
People have been working on it for a long time. Notwithstanding a whiz-bang technology demo of a specific codec which does a good PR job of appearing a much bigger deal than it really is, it's a pretty complex problem - but G.722-based 'HD voice' has been deployed in various European countries for a few years, now. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wideband_audio .
Hey, that's not fair. The Liberals certainly found a decent, intelligent, thoughtful leader who certainly wasn't a rat... ...it's just that they promptly ditched him for a Romney-esque jackass because the brainiacs thought he had a more telegenic smile, or something. And we all know how well that worked out!
But most people commenting on this story are Americans, so you know, hang away!
"In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence."
Universities are not supposed to be businesses, and faculty are not supposed to justify their existence by making money. They are meant to advance learning. Counting 'research outputs' like they were so many plastic beans seems like a spectacularly poor way to assess the quality of your intellectual output.
approximately precisely as fucked as it was under Bush, because your politicians have virtually no independent power over anything any more?
Er, how are those two things even remotely related? One's a 150 year old international standards body, the other appears to be some sort of American corporately-owned road toll system.
So your argument boils down to: "because one party I can think of in the entire history of human endeavour once made an assertion in bad faith, it follows that the ITU is definitely doing the same thing". Holy rhetorical fail, batman!
(It's also worth remembering that the ITU long pre-dates the UN and has been a fairly dull-but-necessary standards body doing the kind of dull-but-necessary things standards bodies so frequently do for rather more than a century. It's only under the UN umbrella these days because that's where it makes sense for it to be. I don't see any particular reason to assume that it's lying and the commisioner of the FCC, who has an obvious vested interest in scare stories about TEH EVIL FOREIGNERS COMING TO STEAL OUR INTERNETS, is telling the truth; especially when he doesn't appear to have a shred of evidence.)
Because it's an art project. It's not meant to be a production device.
Fedora has implementations of just about every major desktop / WM, certainly including Xfce and LXDE. It's not GNOME or KDE-only.
Note that this is a Fedora Remix, which is a term with a specific meaning:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Remix
Basically a 'remix' is a very liberal conception of 'based on Fedora' - it allows the inclusion of third-party packages, the modification of Fedora packages, and so on. Really, you can do whatever you like and call it a 'Fedora Remix'.
So in this case, they can certainly tweak things extensively to target a low-resource system. Note that Fedora has a very active ARM port and community, and we've had Fedora running on many low-resource ARM devices for quite some time. Fedora is not 'just' a resource-heavy desktop distro.
i dunno why everyone's thinking so small in terms of distances.
thousands of kilometres? that's practically touching. halfway to the moon? well, maybe now we're only very good friends.
i mean, remember the douglas adams line. halfway to the moon is *nowhere* in terms of...Space. SPAAAAAACE.
let's face it, we puny humans already have the technology - if, for some reason, we had the desire - to build a ship which could fly to mars, come back, and then blow up the planet. now you're the captain of the ship that has to stop that ship. if your capabilities cover a sphere with a diameter of 'half the distance to the moon', you are comprehensively fucked.
for space combat to even be at all possible, defensive capabilities over truly mind-boggling distances - we're talking AUs here, not piddling thousands of kilometers - are going to need to get developed. somehow.
not so much a failure of imagination as wilful blindness. humans, in general, find stories about humans - or at least things you can sort of think of as people, like almost all aliens ever imagined - interesting. stories about autonomous robots blowing each other up...not interesting.
some authors go to quite intricate lengths to make it semi-plausible that actual human agency would be involved in something, trying to defend against the 'just use a bloody robot' complaint. viz gundam (referenced above) and the culture series. some authors just hope no-one notices. some lampshade it. but most have thought about it.
to expand on my comment: this is all really well-trodden stuff. just look at, well, any sf author ever. all sf I can think of either treats ships as one-hit kills, or hand-waves some kind of Advanced Energy Shielding system to magically bestow resiliency on spacecraft. in other words, everyone who's thought about it at all hard is perfectly well aware that any spacecraft without _serious_ shielding is insanely vulnerable to any kind of hull breach at all.
"Space introduces dynamics as unique as underwater. Craft can be insanely delicate and lack any armor and still be a potent force. "
Yes, so unique, they're not _at all_ like fighter planes. Which pretty much crash if you breathe on 'em too hard, but sure are potent forces...
you're assuming 'combat between people and some other species we simply want to annihilate', which is all well and good, but it's not the only possible type of combat.
it's pretty much a given for anyone who's thought about it for more than thirty seconds that kinetic bombardment is pretty much unanswerable, and hence the only type of combat that it's worth really thinking about is the kind in which kinetic bombardment of a 'stationary' target doesn't really achieve anything - so we're talking about, say, combat between two factions, whether human or non-human, for control of existing resources which have value to both sides. There's no point kinetically bombarding a planet if the whole point of the war is to gain control of something on the planet.
'traced back to someone who appears to be sympathetic to the NDP' is more accurate. and, well, bleeding obvious. you don't need an IP address to figure that someone tweeting embarrassing but entirely factual things about a Conservative politician is quite likely to be an NDP (or, I suppose, Liberal) sympathizer.
well, you can look at it that way. the other way you can look at it is this:
the police can already access all the records in question if they have just cause, by getting a court order. obviously, getting a court order isn't a terribly onerous thing in the context of a really serious crime - terrorism, child abuse, whatever. offences of that nature are rare enough and serious enough that there's no problem getting a court order where one is warranted.
it follows that, whatever the justification publicly offered, it doesn't make any sense that a law which removes the requirement to obtain a court order is truly targeted at very serious crimes. no, it only makes sense in the context of much less serious offences. say you're looking at, oh, to take a COMPLETELY random example, file sharing. you've got hundreds of thousands of potential offences, and probably little in the way of decent investigative evidence in any of them.
now THAT'S a case where it 'makes sense' to remove the requirement for a court order, because it really is going to cost of a lot of resources to go out and get a couple hundred thousand court orders, especially if your evidence is pretty weak.
So, yeah, we can ignore the rhetoric, and instead ask the question 'in what circumstances does it really benefit the police not to have to go and get a court order to look at these records?' And the answer to that question is very different to the rhetoric you hear from the Cons surrounding the bill.