I'm not sure of the tone of your post (whether you actually support what you say or whether you're presenting it as a potential view from those in power), but the GP very clearly referenced that line of thinking in saying "This kind of thing...is indicative of a government that feels itself to be above the people, or, at best, the feel that they 'know what`s good for us'."
If they think things need to be done but know that "they do not necessarily play well with voters" and proceed to do them anyway, particularly in secret, then they are quite simply ceasing to represent the people. Even if they really did/do know best, it's certainly not their place to make that call.
I never quite understand the comments along the lines of "The only thing this little machine has going for it is size" - isn't that exactly what it needs to have going for it? I'm waiting for the 8.9 screen myself, but as long as the price is not too much more than $600 it's a fair deal in my opinion. The fact that the first iteration was unbelievably cheap (I seem to recall hearing that it was designed for kids, although I may be mistaken) might've done them a disservice; I'm just happy that there now exists an ultraportable that doesn't cost thousands - the fact that it has the small size and is the same price as other laptops (rather than floating around in the clouds with the Vaios and Lifebooks) is perfect for me. I'm glad that there is finally an option to trade off some speed and get an tiny, lightweight machine for "standard basic notebook" money.
The energy gained from the hydrogen combustion will be less than the energy expended in the electrolysis. It's as simple as that. No system is 100% efficient, so you must lose some energy in the process of extracting the hydrogen from the water. If the hydrogen generator were plugged into the wall you could argue that the gains coming from the electricity used were greater than spending the equivalent money on petrol rather than electricity, even factoring in the inherent losses from the process, but inside the car's system all the energy ultimately comes from the petrol anyway.
I no very little about the chemistry involved in adding hydrogen to the combustion of petrol, so I can't say what (if any) impact it could have on emissions, but the physics of the situation mean that you must be expending more fuel overall than you would without the system.
There's also this BBC article that touches on the issue. The problem there was that in falsifying the origins of the bodies, he also circumvented the measures in place to ensure that the parts taken from them were safe, thus endangering anyone who received them.
I'm not really sure what you mean about 'gaming the system' with regard to healthcare - what can you gain from a national health system other than medicine or the service of doctors and nurses? What would you do with your ill-gotten medical supplies, exactly? If you're talking of insider deals and corruption, why is that any more likely to be a problem in a government system than a private one? Hell, what makes you think that it's impossible to engineer a system that can be both secure and transparent?
The problem with asking them to "discriminate between something that is rightful and something that is completely wrong" is that right and wrong are matters of opinion and absolutely not universal. I would hypothesise that those running Wikileaks may well be willing to publish things that they themselves consider 'wrong' on the basis that they do not consider it their own right to make that judgement.
This diagram is not really a secret to foreign intelligence services; nobody is going to be surprised by this design, just by the fact that it's appeared in public. Open sources have speculated on these matters for a long time (see nuclear weapons design article in Wikipedia), and this just confirms that they were right. (The structure of the neutron initiator is elegant, and interesting, however.)
This is a crude, but effective, plutonium based design. Devices that are orders of magnitude more efficient are possible. A disclosure of, for example, the plans of the W-88 or a Russian equivalent, would be far more threatening, as there are actually real secrets involved there not known to all the NWS (the Big-5 + India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea) or Virtual NWS (Germany, Japan, Sweden, South Korea, Canada, Ukraine, Taiwan, Italy, Spain...to name a few) intelligence agencies. After 1949 or so, disclosure of this would not have been a real threat to U.S. national security.
The real problem about building one of these designs is the rarity (at least outside of NWS nuclear facilities) of plutonium and polonium, as well as the ability to fabricate sophisticated high explosives to exacting specifications. We're not talking about IEDs here. To build a nuclear weapon requires a state.
I do still think (as they say) that it is interesting that the documents have surfaced at all. I am very impressed with the even handedness that Wikileaks shows in providing possibilities for a hoax but also potential evidence to the contrary - it's somewhat of a breath of fresh air compared to much of the sensationalism that we are often subjected to on subjects much more trivial than this.
What, in your opinion, separates astrology from religion? Non-theist religions, in particular, could be described in a very similar manner to your post.
To me, at least, the physical interface and the software are really the only two reasons to pay the premium for Apple. If you want a functional MP3 player then there are hundreds of very cheap Chinese imports that didn't have to bother copying the look of the iPod. If there were copies that replicated the most important features of the Apple products I'd be much more interested, but as it is I'd just consider them another cheap but functional player that happens to be in an Apple-style casing rather than a true 'clone' of Apple's version.
It actually really surprises me that we haven't seen more public anger about the financial cost of the Iraq war. The relative drawbacks of the previous regime in Iraq against the situation that exists now, and from that the moral justification for invading, are debatable issues and it's somewhat understandable that there are people all along the spectrum from for to against.
I would have thought, however, that if you asked most Americans whether they would've preferred to invade Iraq or to have free petrol for a year with enough left over for a modestly sized fleet of building-crushing robots to placate any who still held fears about security I think I could guess what most people would choose.
The price per gigabyte doesn't even compare between DVDs and flash memory, that is true, but (assuming you're shooting JPEG rather than RAW) you'll still be able to get a very significant number of pictures on a 4, 8 or 16GB card. Sending home a $15-50 card every month or two shouldn't break the bank, although make sure you stock up either at home or somewhere like Singapore or Hong Kong because you'll be paying prices from five years ago for 128MB cards in a lot of places.
In answer to the original post, I took a Toughbook CF-W2 (which I bought fairly cheaply second hand) with me on a trip that sounds like it was fairly similar to what's being described and it performed faultlessly, although there was the odd time I wished it was a little lighter. If and when I end up faced with the same question again I'll be taking an Asus eee just like the parent suggested. USB 2.5" hard drives or flash drives are cheap (so much so that if you need reliability it's probably worth just buying two) and very small and light so storage shouldn't be an issue and the lack of moving parts in the machine itself should work to your advantage for durability.
I suspect that you're right, but that doesn't mean that we're out of the woods on this one yet. Firstly, and most simply, is the fact that I can think of far better ways of spending billions of pounds than this. Secondly is that (as we have seen with no-fly lists) just because a database is inaccurate, it doesn't mean it'll be enough to put those in charge off using it for important and even life-changing work. Thirdly, as we have so recently seen, government agencies seem largely incapable of securing the data the they do hold.
I don't see the ID card project being the pervasive tool that the government seem to be hoping for, but I'm sure it's going to cause a lot of problems along the way.
I will admit that I haven't seen every variation of Apple's slot loading drives, but I can assure you that a fair cross section of them don't have a manual eject mechanism.
I personally don't agree with you, but I've realised something when debating points like this: both sides can argue about rights until they're blue in the face, but normally there's are two simple question to settle it - Will it really achieve anything useful? If so, will that achievement be worth more than the extra resources expended?
I quite like to debate about these kind of things (hell, that's why I'm reading stories like this on Slashdot) but realistically I know that none of us are likely to drastically change our opinions about the issue. I'd be interested to hear from those who are on the same side as the parent though (i.e. believe it is within the rights of border controls to search data), and whether they they think that this scheme is really going to get anyone anywhere by doing so.
Would there be any problems in making individual, 20 year copyright non-transferable from the creator? None spring to mind immediately, and it would mean anyone who purchases the copyright would then be classed as 'corporate' for those purposes and have the term dropped to five years. If the creator wants the full 20 then they hold on to it themselves and license it to others.
I'd be surprised to hear that we were getting anything cheaper in the UK than you do in the US, and we can get converter boxes for £10 ($20) from a major supermarket; before that the 'standard' price for many of them was £20 ($40). Considering that we tend to pay higher pre-tax prices and have to pay much more VAT than you guys, I'd suggest that something rather odd is going on to keep the prices artificially high. Unless, I suppose, the US digital broadcast tech has some alteration that makes production significantly more expensive, but I find that hard to believe.
I think it comes down to pragmatism vs. idealism here. A Windows only client blocks a significant minority of users (Mac, Linux, BSD as well as various embedded devices such as phones or dedicated web terminals). A flash client is not ideal - it is still non-free and non-open as well as blocking a very small number of users - but is still probably the simplest and most widely usable streaming system using currently established technology.
A question I've been wondering about: what's the official logic behind Guantanamo, and the UK's recently extended provisions for holding terror suspects without charge?. I find myself thinking "holy crap this is a bad thing, surely if they think there is enough evidence that these people deserve to be imprisoned then they must have enough evidence to charge them with a crime and take it to trial", but obviously some very powerful people believe otherwise, and I've never really seen anything examining their reasoning against that held by myself and apparently many others.
To offer another, similar example: police in England tasered a man in a diabetic coma because they thought he was a security threat and he wasn't responding to them. They shocked him because he wasn't responding - he was unconscious - how could that possibly be use of the taser in order protect the officers?
In the UK I've seen a callback from the 999 operator after a call was made and they didn't hear anything (just something along the lines of "We just got a call from this phone, is everything OK?", "Yes, it must've accidentally dialed, sorry to waste your time."). Don't know what they would've done if the callback wasn't answered though.
Even stranger is the fact that an 18 rating from the BBFC in the UK means that the game can only be purchased by those aged 18 or over. They're given out to mainstream games (GTA for instance) that the console makers are perfectly happy to see on their machines - why do the same companies think differently about the issue in the US?
Risk aversion is an interesting thing. I don't claim to know anything about what's behind it (correlation != cause and all that), but from what I have seen it links strongly to how developed (for want of a better word) a country is. In the US, western Europe and Australia everyone has to deal with health and safety regulations, most people wear seatbelts, there are pedestrian crossings on roads, workplaces have fire standards, etc. Some of this is (IMO) a good thing, some of it is not (the article being a perfect example of where we've gone wrong). In many South Asian countries I've been to most people are quite happy to accept a much greater level of danger in their lives, there aren't many (if any) regulations (good or bad), and people seem (from my 'outsider' point of view) to get injured more often - losing fingers, eyes and so on. Essentially there is no 'what if?' - people don't worry about getting out of a burning building because the building probably won't burn. I also get the impression that this is how it was in the west many years ago - the images of people working on NY skyscrapers with no safety harnesses for example.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, to be honest, other than to say that there's a happy medium but when the momentum builds its too easy to go sailing past that point on the way from one extreme to the other.
But the story is that MS is not doing this for security, they're doing it to prevent 'defectors' taking others with them. I really can't even begin to get inside the thought process of whoever had this idea - who seriously thinks "Hmm, good employees are leaving because they think another company is a more pleasant place to work, we'd better make sure the secret doesn't get out" rather than "Hmm, good employees are leaving because they think another company is a more pleasant place to work, we'd better see if we can find out what we're doing wrong and perhaps work on fixing it".
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I'm not sure of the tone of your post (whether you actually support what you say or whether you're presenting it as a potential view from those in power), but the GP very clearly referenced that line of thinking in saying "This kind of thing...is indicative of a government that feels itself to be above the people, or, at best, the feel that they 'know what`s good for us'."
If they think things need to be done but know that "they do not necessarily play well with voters" and proceed to do them anyway, particularly in secret, then they are quite simply ceasing to represent the people. Even if they really did/do know best, it's certainly not their place to make that call.
I never quite understand the comments along the lines of "The only thing this little machine has going for it is size" - isn't that exactly what it needs to have going for it? I'm waiting for the 8.9 screen myself, but as long as the price is not too much more than $600 it's a fair deal in my opinion. The fact that the first iteration was unbelievably cheap (I seem to recall hearing that it was designed for kids, although I may be mistaken) might've done them a disservice; I'm just happy that there now exists an ultraportable that doesn't cost thousands - the fact that it has the small size and is the same price as other laptops (rather than floating around in the clouds with the Vaios and Lifebooks) is perfect for me. I'm glad that there is finally an option to trade off some speed and get an tiny, lightweight machine for "standard basic notebook" money.
The energy gained from the hydrogen combustion will be less than the energy expended in the electrolysis. It's as simple as that. No system is 100% efficient, so you must lose some energy in the process of extracting the hydrogen from the water. If the hydrogen generator were plugged into the wall you could argue that the gains coming from the electricity used were greater than spending the equivalent money on petrol rather than electricity, even factoring in the inherent losses from the process, but inside the car's system all the energy ultimately comes from the petrol anyway.
I no very little about the chemistry involved in adding hydrogen to the combustion of petrol, so I can't say what (if any) impact it could have on emissions, but the physics of the situation mean that you must be expending more fuel overall than you would without the system.
There's also this BBC article that touches on the issue. The problem there was that in falsifying the origins of the bodies, he also circumvented the measures in place to ensure that the parts taken from them were safe, thus endangering anyone who received them.
I'm not really sure what you mean about 'gaming the system' with regard to healthcare - what can you gain from a national health system other than medicine or the service of doctors and nurses? What would you do with your ill-gotten medical supplies, exactly? If you're talking of insider deals and corruption, why is that any more likely to be a problem in a government system than a private one? Hell, what makes you think that it's impossible to engineer a system that can be both secure and transparent?
The problem with asking them to "discriminate between something that is rightful and something that is completely wrong" is that right and wrong are matters of opinion and absolutely not universal. I would hypothesise that those running Wikileaks may well be willing to publish things that they themselves consider 'wrong' on the basis that they do not consider it their own right to make that judgement.
Send as in transmit, not as in email - you can't log in at all if the application doesn't pass on the username/password.
What, in your opinion, separates astrology from religion? Non-theist religions, in particular, could be described in a very similar manner to your post.
To me, at least, the physical interface and the software are really the only two reasons to pay the premium for Apple. If you want a functional MP3 player then there are hundreds of very cheap Chinese imports that didn't have to bother copying the look of the iPod. If there were copies that replicated the most important features of the Apple products I'd be much more interested, but as it is I'd just consider them another cheap but functional player that happens to be in an Apple-style casing rather than a true 'clone' of Apple's version.
It actually really surprises me that we haven't seen more public anger about the financial cost of the Iraq war. The relative drawbacks of the previous regime in Iraq against the situation that exists now, and from that the moral justification for invading, are debatable issues and it's somewhat understandable that there are people all along the spectrum from for to against.
I would have thought, however, that if you asked most Americans whether they would've preferred to invade Iraq or to have free petrol for a year with enough left over for a modestly sized fleet of building-crushing robots to placate any who still held fears about security I think I could guess what most people would choose.
The price per gigabyte doesn't even compare between DVDs and flash memory, that is true, but (assuming you're shooting JPEG rather than RAW) you'll still be able to get a very significant number of pictures on a 4, 8 or 16GB card. Sending home a $15-50 card every month or two shouldn't break the bank, although make sure you stock up either at home or somewhere like Singapore or Hong Kong because you'll be paying prices from five years ago for 128MB cards in a lot of places.
In answer to the original post, I took a Toughbook CF-W2 (which I bought fairly cheaply second hand) with me on a trip that sounds like it was fairly similar to what's being described and it performed faultlessly, although there was the odd time I wished it was a little lighter. If and when I end up faced with the same question again I'll be taking an Asus eee just like the parent suggested. USB 2.5" hard drives or flash drives are cheap (so much so that if you need reliability it's probably worth just buying two) and very small and light so storage shouldn't be an issue and the lack of moving parts in the machine itself should work to your advantage for durability.
I suspect that you're right, but that doesn't mean that we're out of the woods on this one yet. Firstly, and most simply, is the fact that I can think of far better ways of spending billions of pounds than this. Secondly is that (as we have seen with no-fly lists) just because a database is inaccurate, it doesn't mean it'll be enough to put those in charge off using it for important and even life-changing work. Thirdly, as we have so recently seen, government agencies seem largely incapable of securing the data the they do hold.
I don't see the ID card project being the pervasive tool that the government seem to be hoping for, but I'm sure it's going to cause a lot of problems along the way.
I will admit that I haven't seen every variation of Apple's slot loading drives, but I can assure you that a fair cross section of them don't have a manual eject mechanism.
I personally don't agree with you, but I've realised something when debating points like this: both sides can argue about rights until they're blue in the face, but normally there's are two simple question to settle it - Will it really achieve anything useful? If so, will that achievement be worth more than the extra resources expended?
I quite like to debate about these kind of things (hell, that's why I'm reading stories like this on Slashdot) but realistically I know that none of us are likely to drastically change our opinions about the issue. I'd be interested to hear from those who are on the same side as the parent though (i.e. believe it is within the rights of border controls to search data), and whether they they think that this scheme is really going to get anyone anywhere by doing so.
Would there be any problems in making individual, 20 year copyright non-transferable from the creator? None spring to mind immediately, and it would mean anyone who purchases the copyright would then be classed as 'corporate' for those purposes and have the term dropped to five years. If the creator wants the full 20 then they hold on to it themselves and license it to others.
I'd be surprised to hear that we were getting anything cheaper in the UK than you do in the US, and we can get converter boxes for £10 ($20) from a major supermarket; before that the 'standard' price for many of them was £20 ($40). Considering that we tend to pay higher pre-tax prices and have to pay much more VAT than you guys, I'd suggest that something rather odd is going on to keep the prices artificially high. Unless, I suppose, the US digital broadcast tech has some alteration that makes production significantly more expensive, but I find that hard to believe.
I think it comes down to pragmatism vs. idealism here. A Windows only client blocks a significant minority of users (Mac, Linux, BSD as well as various embedded devices such as phones or dedicated web terminals). A flash client is not ideal - it is still non-free and non-open as well as blocking a very small number of users - but is still probably the simplest and most widely usable streaming system using currently established technology.
I really can't tell if you're joking or not. I hope you are.
A question I've been wondering about: what's the official logic behind Guantanamo, and the UK's recently extended provisions for holding terror suspects without charge?. I find myself thinking "holy crap this is a bad thing, surely if they think there is enough evidence that these people deserve to be imprisoned then they must have enough evidence to charge them with a crime and take it to trial", but obviously some very powerful people believe otherwise, and I've never really seen anything examining their reasoning against that held by myself and apparently many others.
To offer another, similar example: police in England tasered a man in a diabetic coma because they thought he was a security threat and he wasn't responding to them. They shocked him because he wasn't responding - he was unconscious - how could that possibly be use of the taser in order protect the officers?
In the UK I've seen a callback from the 999 operator after a call was made and they didn't hear anything (just something along the lines of "We just got a call from this phone, is everything OK?", "Yes, it must've accidentally dialed, sorry to waste your time."). Don't know what they would've done if the callback wasn't answered though.
Even stranger is the fact that an 18 rating from the BBFC in the UK means that the game can only be purchased by those aged 18 or over. They're given out to mainstream games (GTA for instance) that the console makers are perfectly happy to see on their machines - why do the same companies think differently about the issue in the US?
Risk aversion is an interesting thing. I don't claim to know anything about what's behind it (correlation != cause and all that), but from what I have seen it links strongly to how developed (for want of a better word) a country is. In the US, western Europe and Australia everyone has to deal with health and safety regulations, most people wear seatbelts, there are pedestrian crossings on roads, workplaces have fire standards, etc. Some of this is (IMO) a good thing, some of it is not (the article being a perfect example of where we've gone wrong). In many South Asian countries I've been to most people are quite happy to accept a much greater level of danger in their lives, there aren't many (if any) regulations (good or bad), and people seem (from my 'outsider' point of view) to get injured more often - losing fingers, eyes and so on. Essentially there is no 'what if?' - people don't worry about getting out of a burning building because the building probably won't burn. I also get the impression that this is how it was in the west many years ago - the images of people working on NY skyscrapers with no safety harnesses for example.
I don't really know where I'm going with this, to be honest, other than to say that there's a happy medium but when the momentum builds its too easy to go sailing past that point on the way from one extreme to the other.
But the story is that MS is not doing this for security, they're doing it to prevent 'defectors' taking others with them. I really can't even begin to get inside the thought process of whoever had this idea - who seriously thinks "Hmm, good employees are leaving because they think another company is a more pleasant place to work, we'd better make sure the secret doesn't get out" rather than "Hmm, good employees are leaving because they think another company is a more pleasant place to work, we'd better see if we can find out what we're doing wrong and perhaps work on fixing it".