I think it is hard to safeguard the user against typing things like "rm -rf,*"(*). IMHO, the only thing easily doable here is a question that has to be answered like "Yes, I am absolutely sure that this may destroy all my data.".
But that gets annoying very quickly if the computer asks it for each and every directory. And then, the answer would become a *mechanical* "yes" (without the user thinking about it)...
IMHO, other things like disk crashes can be avoided by RAID1 and frequent backups. I have such a RAID (with the nice sideeffect of increased HDD speed) and all my important things are stored in CVS on another computer (in the same house, though). Just yesterday I had a "kernel:... disk read error" for one of my hard disks and a complete lockup. I was very happy then to have the RAID. It turned out that this was only a bug somewhere in the driver, though (no HDD read problems), my HDD is still fine and Linux' md driver has resynced my disks without any problems. But still, by this I'm feeling that the additional money spent on HDDs is justified:)
-------- (*) - Note that the comma is there that if you accidentally copy and paste this into your shell, it won't cause harm:-)
Stone - lasts about a million years. Clay - 100 years - (10,000 years if burned!!) Parchment/Vellum - 1000 years unless eaten by bugs. Papyrus/Paper - 500 years, MUCH longer if kept dry. Acidic Paper - 100 years or less. Notice the trend - it is NOT toward longer-lived media. Emmm... isn't that da potential fallacy? I mean... the people in stone age may just as well have written things onto papyrus or maybe even simple leaves for quick notes. How do you know? But these media decayed over time and what is left are stones. There isn't neccessarily a trend not towards longer-lived media. Though I also don't believe that the digital media are longer-lived...
Maybe people in the future will catch our space probes and decipher the information in them - maybe because they didn't suffer from earth's microbes... who knows?
The ITU normally regulates such things as telecommunication standards and radio frequencies (the detailed frequency plans are made by individual governments, though).
It is certainly true that the electromagnetic spectrum needs a bit of regulation (else, the strongest source will survive) and interoperability standards in the telephone world (for example between nations) were once neccessary(*).
Now, from the ITU's POV, the internet is like the telephone network and therefore naturally falls under their sphere of influence. And, because extending their influence is probably also one of their goals (is there any organization that wants to shrink...?!), they argue for more UN control of the net.
I would say that no one in power should ask them about the internet because it works and it has grown without regulation. Hopefully, this will be the opinion of most of the politicians in the particular governments the UN consists of. Just because the ITU president says this doesn't mean that it gets implemented.
---- (*)- With proper RFCs for VoIP, one can argue about that.
Simple engines? Do you mean as in cheap and just run or as in weak, because a weak engine wouldnt really be able to deal with the Atlantic Ocean's currents. Read the TFA, there is a nice part about the propulsion system used. I cite from the second article:
Today's underwater gliders (Davis et al., 2002) are autonomous underwater vehicles that use battery powered hydraulic pumps to vary their volume by a few hundred cubic centimeters in order to generate the buoyancy changes that power their forward gliding.
I think it is very sad that the poster tries to describe this somewhat as a positive event!
That there is really a sequence of 'compatible copyright laws' for major/economically important parts of the world (first the DMCA, then the EU version (which applies for me), now Canada's 'reform') shows very well WHO is in control.
This comes together with a brainwashing campaign in cinemas etc. to mold the citizens back into consumer sheep.
Why can't one hear better news regarding IP laws? The only 'good news' in this area are some of the court decisions where a few enlightened judges with common sense try to bring these laws back on track.
Yes, but you're reading Slashdot. Very true. Although many are complaining about/. and advertises own alternatives, for example kuro5hin, advogato or technocrat.net, and everyone is complaining about unfair moderation, duplicate posts, slanted editors etc.,/. is still the source for technology news and discussion. And not only for kids.
I'm not saying that the efforts are worthless (competition is good:) - but with nearly 1e6 registered users, slashdot has a lot of inertia. (Or gravity;)
Simply because of that, many will probably stay here.
This is not really an opinion about any of the sites, just my observation.
That is all true, but if you look at routing protocols, e.g. even the simple RIP protocol, you'll see that it crosses several network layers. The same for other network services such as ICMP and so on. Of course, there have to be instances in the routing process which know a lot of information about several things to make good decisions.
There was once an article on/. which was about leaky abstractions. This is IMHO a case of a leaky abstraction. But only because an abstraction is leaky doesn't mean that one should throw it out of the window! The most powerful thing we have that makes us able to deal with complexity is to build hierarchies:)
Interesting. Still people here who are not brainwashed by the RIAA! Thanks for saying the things clear which would be obvious and non-debated a few years ago!
I really feel somewhat bad that I went to cinema today (although for a much reduced price...). It's like feeding the wlves. And these damn anti-piracy "ads" (here in europe). Five years in prison for copying a CD. Something went REALLY wrong.
The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding. I have said that in another post in this thread: There is a difference between "controversial science" and political intent masked as science. I think it especially hurts science if one describes it as being controversial because some opinion hides behind it. There is always something that has to be added to science to make it's ''implications'' disgusting for some people.
Not that you didn't say that with your quotes or that I'm all against biotech. But I wanted to point that out.
Yes, I think this is one of the things many people misunderstand about science. IMHO, many think that
1. Scientific theories are the truth 2. Science holds an opinion
But: 1. Scientific theories are *always* only an approximation of 'the truth' (if it even exists - the whole philosophical thing about reality, logic etc.pp.).
2. and more important: The most of an opinion a scientist holds is about what to research next. Ideally(!), the findings of a scientist should be just data, models and theories. Nothing which says: Do this or that because this gives a good outcome and bad one else.
Of course, many scientists have opinions because they feel (or are) better informed (For example, a physicist could be pro-nuclear-power). But too many scientists mix their opinions with their science. Nearly every scientist does this (everyone's a human being), but it does not help in any way. (IMHO, medicine, economy and psychology are worse in this regard, but that is a common opinion of physicists;)
And I think this overall leads to the perception that there are theories which are just 'bad'.
See for example what evolution theory, mixed with personal *opinion* and amplified through mass media has done in the past. (Please, spare godwin's law!) (*)
In other words, people are afraid of frankenstein 'science' but they do not differentiate between science and opinion.
-------- (*)- Nowaydays, people are rather indifferent about such issues as prenatal diagnostics and positive eugenics. Some people care about whether they are descendants of apes, but such things don't matter. But these are, IMHO, much more important things mankind has to decide about!
I am also a ham activist (a rather inactive activist at the moment -but that's another issue:) and I must say your idea sounds great and similar to the amateur SETI project (not seti@home, the other one).
I'll now go googling and look if I find some information about such a project on the net. This would be something really interesting, reading data from and maybe even controlling a spacecraft. The crypto issue should really be no problem, if they plan to abandon the probe, they should be able to open up the protocol(??)
BUT, I think there are still many issues to be solved - For example, who controls what the spacecraft gets if commands are neccessary? Democratic elections on commands? This is not meant provocative. But I think many esp. social issues have to be solved for such an effort to succeed!
There are already many research projects ongoing which try to find good routing algorithms and network topologies for IP based mesh networks.
Most of these projects try to build their mesh networks on the IP level, i.e. hardware and, IMHO even more important, medium independent.
This standard seems to work below the IP level, i.e. invisible for normal routing hardware and only usable with those "s" devices.
I wonder if this is really a good idea. Making such a standard prevents altering and improving the routing algorithms (because in the best case, they reside on some FPGA) or using mesh network topologies with, lets say, a mixed WiFi, free space optical (think house to house laser pointers:) and ethernet network. You'd need upgrades for a new routing algorithm and progress in this area will be much slower. OTOH, maybe the network will be more stable, but one has to prove that.
Most of your post is right, but I think some corrections are needed: When a nuclear particle such as radium or iridium decays it gives of particles. Iridium also has stable isotopes, i.e. only special forms of iridium give off particles.
Today we know that nuclear decays give off helium nuclei (alpha), electrons (beta), photons (gamma), and neutron (no Greek name). That's correct, but there are also other forms of decay (much more seldom, admitted).
However, alpha particles are so heavy that even your clothes (and even air) can block their transmission. And that makes alphas very dangerous, too. Not when you look at some alpha emitter as a solid, but if you inhale or ingest it. The so called quality factor (that describes how much biological damage a certain type of particle does) is much higher for alpha particles.
And, to add to your photon discussion, the point is that each individual microwave photon carries a lot less energy than, say, a gamma photon. The energy of gamma photons is above 10^3 eV (electron volt, appropiate unit of energy measurement here) whereas optical photons are in the eV range. Microwave photons are mostly in the micro-eV-range. But the power of an active cellular phone (1-2W) emitted as gamma photons would severely hurt, if not kill you in a short time if you'd wear a brick of radioactive material in your pocket instead of your phone.
Now, energic photons can, of course, cause chemical reactions (for example in your old-style camera). A gamma photon can even cause a lot of chemical reactions (and therefore damage).
But a single microwave or far-infrared photon can AFAIK, only cause shifts in the configuration of molecules. For example, microwaves can change the rotational level of a molecule (i.e. in classical terms how fast it rotates around a certain axis (chemical bond) - quantum physics only knows 'rotational levels' but that's another issue...). They can't break chemical bonds, or only very weak ones which can also be broken by thermal excitement (i.e. thermal movement of the molecules, for example imagine them as clashing together).
Now, the argument is whether changing the configuration of various molecules can cause further (chain) reactions which lead to dangerous effects in the tissue. I don't know a lot about that, but IMHO if such effects exist and are worth mentioning, they only occur for very specific microwave photon energy levels (i.e. microwave frequencies) where important molecules absorb microwave photons in resonance. Doing research into adverse effects is good, but I doubt a ban on the whole microwave spectrum is neccessary.
Now, the only well-known, proven, dangerous effect of microwave photons, only occuring at VERY HIGH doses is the thermal effect. Microwaves, like every kind of EM radiation, heat things up (think microwave oven...!). Some cases are known where RADAR workers died because their blood stopped to flow after being heaten up too much. I heard that there are studies that certain parts of the head, esp. the eyes, are unable to sink the extra heat of a cellular phone into other parts of the head (by blood flow). But this effect should be measurable and the precautions mentioned in other posts (headset) should be sufficient to avoid such conditions.
So the politicians in the Commission think they are doing the best for Europe. They think they're the good guys because the lobbyists tell them they are!
Yes, that's the nice way of saying it:-) Sometimes I think that it is so, too. But that is very seldom now...
IMHO, this is the effect the general political disinterest the population has here in the EU. It may be stronger than in the US, but it' still declining.
And it is now SO LOW that corruption rises steeply. This is corruption, isn't it? Not calling it corruption would euphemise it.
Maybe, people still care a bit about what the media say. The media don't say anything about 'smaller political issues', only the important ones.
But the media also decide what "important issues" are. For example they redefine that corruption is about privately using frequent-flyer-miles (not ok, of course, but corruption?), about contacts of politicians into red-light districts (wtf?!) They let politicians talk about "high-tech", "information economy" etc.pp. But if important laws are proposed in this area, they do not notice or they do not want to notice.
If the Minister for Economic Affairs overrides decisions of the cartel office for apparently no good reason (as it happened here in germany), it's pictured as "saving the economy". Arrrrrrgh!
If they push this through, "we" should not stop trying to prevent software patents. We should lobby for the abolition of software patents then. But this will be hard.
Sometimes, I have the vision for 2020-2030 of some grey-haired FLOSS developers drinking tea together and being nostalgic about the wild times where software development wasn't illegal and fundamental rights were still respected.
But I can not, in any way, accept such a development.
[Discl.: I'm from the EU and not the US, but similar tactics are used by ISPs here.]
The logical next step would be for trojan writers to say that blocking ports that their trojans use is *also* censorship.
You compare trojans with VOIP. Because trojans are intrusive and illegal bits of code. At the same time, you are ok with the ISP interfering with your IP packets by blocking them depending on their content. Yes, the port number can be considered as content. The same way as you I could argue that we'd soon end at OSI level 7 (application) filtering. Couldn't I?
As it is often the case for infrastructure (in a wider sense), the free market won't work here. There is lack of information on the consumer side.
Joe Sixpack is uniformed about these issues. That doesn't mean that he's stupid. Just uninformed. And if the issue is solved politically by setting standards for this product "IP connectivity" (transparent and visible for Joe!), no one really loses.
Personally, I would compare this to food safety standards.
I do know alot about the IP protocol, routing in the internet, bits&bytes etc.pp.
But I don't know a lot about the ingredients of my frozen pizza.
Surely, if there'd be a free unregulated market for food, I could go and buy food but only if I sign a contract with the supplier that there is no machine oil in the pizza, that the tomatoes used were fresh anough, that the number of bacteria don't exceed a certain value and so on. This would end in studying datasheets for food! Maybe even MSDS ones and I don't want to do that!:)
And this would only be possible if the pizza company gives me this information. If it does not, I have to search for another producer of pizzas which does.
Of course you can argue that one can built up trust, e.g. "food safety labels" which set a certain standard. Essentially proxies who decide which food you can buy. But what would you gain by doing that? Less bureaucracy, more efficiency? Surely not. You'd have competing food safety labels ("This ISP supports raw IP labels") and an intransparency because of of different kinds of labels.
Don't get me wrong, labels can be a good thing and a first step in the right direction (for example for ISPs). But I don't think regulating IP connectivity by simply requiring that an ISP just passes data through it's network - without controlling which connections can be made, what data has to flow - has any economic impacts except for the ISPs shareholders.
Sorry for this long post, I really got carried away in the usual/. how-much-free-market-is-good:-)
As an example, there's one form of Maglev devices which is far better than what we have running, that has never seen production, because the owners of the patent charge too much for it.
Hmm, could you provide a link that describes that? I'm fairly curious.
No, I'm not trying to be an ass by demanding references for each and everything (read my other posts in this thread).
Additionally, Social Security is something like a Ponzi scheme, [...] And so is the whole longing for "steady economic growth of 2%". Steady economic growth of two percent is exponential growth and therefore physically impossible to sustain for long times. And it seems to fit your twisted definition of "Ponzi scheme".
This is not to say that more economic growth is bad.
Ehhh, no! With p2pcast/peercast/whatever, the data travels many redundant pathes in the providers network, thus clogging up much more bandwidth than a multicast stream.
With multicast, you'd have (*) a single stream entering the provider. Only the very last router which connects to the dial-in/DSL pool would multply the packets and send them to all clients. A MUCH better solution. But inertia keeps IPv4 (instead of IPv6) and missing 'business opportunities' (they are there, but those who decide seem to be often stupid and short sighted...) prevents widespread multicast networking.
(*) - With today's internet topologies the consumers ends look like the leaf of a tree - Even ISPs often only are a subtree and 'peer' to only one super ISP, a "carrier". BTW: Sadly this is not fault tolerant, not a good way to lay out a network, but it is cheap...
[...] How is that compared to cow emissions? [...] Sigh. At least this is literally BS. Look up the percentage of the worldwide cow population whose whole purpose is to produce milk and meat for us humans! You'll be impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is hard to safeguard the user against typing things like "rm -rf,*"(*). IMHO, the only thing easily doable here is a question that has to be answered like "Yes, I am absolutely sure that this may destroy all my data.".
... disk read error" for one of my hard disks and a complete lockup. I was very happy then to have the RAID. :)
:-)
But that gets annoying very quickly if the computer asks it for each and every directory. And then, the answer would become a *mechanical* "yes" (without the user thinking about it)...
IMHO, other things like disk crashes can be avoided by RAID1 and frequent backups. I have such a RAID (with the nice sideeffect of increased HDD speed) and all my important things are stored in CVS on another computer (in the same house, though).
Just yesterday I had a "kernel:
It turned out that this was only a bug somewhere in the driver, though (no HDD read problems), my HDD is still fine and Linux' md driver has resynced my disks without any problems.
But still, by this I'm feeling that the additional money spent on HDDs is justified
--------
(*) - Note that the comma is there that if you accidentally copy and paste this into your shell, it won't cause harm
Stone - lasts about a million years. Clay - 100 years - (10,000 years if burned!!) Parchment/Vellum - 1000 years unless eaten by bugs. Papyrus/Paper - 500 years, MUCH longer if kept dry. Acidic Paper - 100 years or less. Notice the trend - it is NOT toward longer-lived media.
Emmm... isn't that da potential fallacy?
I mean... the people in stone age may just as well have written things onto papyrus or maybe even simple leaves for quick notes. How do you know? But these media decayed over time and what is left are stones.
There isn't neccessarily a trend not towards longer-lived media. Though I also don't believe that the digital media are longer-lived...
Maybe people in the future will catch our space probes and decipher the information in them - maybe because they didn't suffer from earth's microbes... who knows?
The ITU normally regulates such things as telecommunication standards and radio frequencies (the detailed frequency plans are made by individual governments, though).
It is certainly true that the electromagnetic spectrum needs a bit of regulation (else, the strongest source will survive) and interoperability standards in the telephone world (for example between nations) were once neccessary(*).
Now, from the ITU's POV, the internet is like the telephone network and therefore naturally falls under their sphere of influence. And, because extending their influence is probably also one of their goals (is there any organization that wants to shrink...?!), they argue for more UN control of the net.
I would say that no one in power should ask them about the internet because it works and it has grown without regulation.
Hopefully, this will be the opinion of most of the politicians in the particular governments the UN consists of. Just because the ITU president says this doesn't mean that it gets implemented.
----
(*)- With proper RFCs for VoIP, one can argue about that.
The vehicle has an amazing fuel efficiency!
The batteries have a capacity of 13 MJ. That is the energy content of about 300g of gasoline (for 45MJ/kg).
But the vehicle has a range of 4700km!
Read the TFA, there is a nice part about the propulsion system used. I cite from the second article:I don't know if it can get any simpler.
I think it is very sad that the poster tries to describe this somewhat as a positive event!
That there is really a sequence of 'compatible copyright laws' for major/economically important parts of the world (first the DMCA, then the EU version (which applies for me), now Canada's 'reform') shows very well WHO is in control.
This comes together with a brainwashing campaign in cinemas etc. to mold the citizens back into consumer sheep.
Why can't one hear better news regarding IP laws? The only 'good news' in this area are some of the court decisions where a few enlightened judges with common sense try to bring these laws back on track.
Yes, but you're reading Slashdot. /. and advertises own alternatives, for example kuro5hin, advogato or technocrat.net, and everyone is complaining about unfair moderation, duplicate posts, slanted editors etc., /. is still the source for technology news and discussion. And not only for kids.
:) - but with nearly 1e6 registered users, slashdot has a lot of inertia. (Or gravity ;)
Very true. Although many are complaining about
I'm not saying that the efforts are worthless (competition is good
Simply because of that, many will probably stay here.
This is not really an opinion about any of the sites, just my observation.
That is all true, but if you look at routing protocols, e.g. even the simple RIP protocol, you'll see that it crosses several network layers.
/. which was about leaky abstractions. This is IMHO a case of a leaky abstraction. But only because an abstraction is leaky doesn't mean that one should throw it out of the window! The most powerful thing we have that makes us able to deal with complexity is to build hierarchies :)
The same for other network services such as ICMP and so on.
Of course, there have to be instances in the routing process which know a lot of information about several things to make good decisions.
There was once an article on
Interesting. Still people here who are not brainwashed by the RIAA!
Thanks for saying the things clear which would be obvious and non-debated a few years ago!
I really feel somewhat bad that I went to cinema today (although for a much reduced price...). It's like feeding the wlves. And these damn anti-piracy "ads" (here in europe). Five years in prison for copying a CD. Something went REALLY wrong.
The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding.
I have said that in another post in this thread:
There is a difference between "controversial science" and political intent masked as science. I think it especially hurts science if one describes it as being controversial because some opinion hides behind it. There is always something that has to be added to science to make it's ''implications'' disgusting for some people.
Not that you didn't say that with your quotes or that I'm all against biotech. But I wanted to point that out.
Yes, I think this is one of the things many people misunderstand about science.
;)
IMHO, many think that
1. Scientific theories are the truth
2. Science holds an opinion
But:
1. Scientific theories are *always* only an approximation of 'the truth' (if it even exists - the whole philosophical thing about reality, logic etc.pp.).
2. and more important:
The most of an opinion a scientist holds is about what to research next. Ideally(!), the findings of a scientist should be just data, models and theories. Nothing which says: Do this or that because this gives a good outcome and bad one else.
Of course, many scientists have opinions because they feel (or are) better informed (For example, a physicist could be pro-nuclear-power). But too many scientists mix their opinions with their science. Nearly every scientist does this (everyone's a human being), but it does not help in any way. (IMHO, medicine, economy and psychology are worse in this regard, but that is a common opinion of physicists
And I think this overall leads to the perception that there are theories which are just 'bad'.
See for example what evolution theory, mixed with personal *opinion* and amplified through mass media has done in the past. (Please, spare godwin's law!) (*)
In other words, people are afraid of frankenstein 'science' but they do not differentiate between science and opinion.
--------
(*)- Nowaydays, people are rather indifferent about such issues as prenatal diagnostics and positive eugenics. Some people care about whether they are descendants of apes, but such things don't matter. But these are, IMHO, much more important things mankind has to decide about!
Hi, thanks for one of the better posts on /. :-)
:) and I must say your idea sounds great and similar to the amateur SETI project (not seti@home, the other one).
I am also a ham activist (a rather inactive activist at the moment -but that's another issue
I'll now go googling and look if I find some information about such a project on the net.
This would be something really interesting, reading data from and maybe even controlling a spacecraft. The crypto issue should really be no problem, if they plan to abandon the probe, they should be able to open up the protocol(??)
BUT, I think there are still many issues to be solved - For example, who controls what the spacecraft gets if commands are neccessary? Democratic elections on commands?
This is not meant provocative. But I think many esp. social issues have to be solved for such an effort to succeed!
There are already many research projects ongoing which try to find good routing algorithms and network topologies for IP based mesh networks.
:) and ethernet network. You'd need upgrades for a new routing algorithm and progress in this area will be much slower.
Most of these projects try to build their mesh networks on the IP level, i.e. hardware and, IMHO even more important, medium independent.
This standard seems to work below the IP level, i.e. invisible for normal routing hardware and only usable with those "s" devices.
I wonder if this is really a good idea. Making such a standard prevents altering and improving the routing algorithms (because in the best case, they reside on some FPGA) or using mesh network topologies with, lets say, a mixed WiFi, free space optical (think house to house laser pointers
OTOH, maybe the network will be more stable, but one has to prove that.
Most of your post is right, but I think some corrections are needed:
When a nuclear particle such as radium or iridium decays it gives of particles.
Iridium also has stable isotopes, i.e. only special forms of iridium give off particles.
Today we know that nuclear decays give off helium nuclei (alpha), electrons (beta), photons (gamma), and neutron (no Greek name).
That's correct, but there are also other forms of decay (much more seldom, admitted).
However, alpha particles are so heavy that even your clothes (and even air) can block their transmission.
And that makes alphas very dangerous, too. Not when you look at some alpha emitter as a solid, but if you inhale or ingest it. The so called quality factor (that describes how much biological damage a certain type of particle does) is much higher for alpha particles.
And, to add to your photon discussion, the point is that each individual microwave photon carries a lot less energy than, say, a gamma photon. The energy of gamma photons is above 10^3 eV (electron volt, appropiate unit of energy measurement here) whereas optical photons are in the eV range. Microwave photons are mostly in the micro-eV-range.
But the power of an active cellular phone (1-2W) emitted as gamma photons would severely hurt, if not kill you in a short time if you'd wear a brick of radioactive material in your pocket instead of your phone.
Now, energic photons can, of course, cause chemical reactions (for example in your old-style camera). A gamma photon can even cause a lot of chemical reactions (and therefore damage).
But a single microwave or far-infrared photon can AFAIK, only cause shifts in the configuration of molecules. For example, microwaves can change the rotational level of a molecule (i.e. in classical terms how fast it rotates around a certain axis (chemical bond) - quantum physics only knows 'rotational levels' but that's another issue...). They can't break chemical bonds, or only very weak ones which can also be broken by thermal excitement (i.e. thermal movement of the molecules, for example imagine them as clashing together).
Now, the argument is whether changing the configuration of various molecules can cause further (chain) reactions which lead to dangerous effects in the tissue. I don't know a lot about that, but IMHO if such effects exist and are worth mentioning, they only occur for very specific microwave photon energy levels (i.e. microwave frequencies) where important molecules absorb microwave photons in resonance. Doing research into adverse effects is good, but I doubt a ban on the whole microwave spectrum is neccessary.
Now, the only well-known, proven, dangerous effect of microwave photons, only occuring at VERY HIGH doses is the thermal effect. Microwaves, like every kind of EM radiation, heat things up (think microwave oven...!).
Some cases are known where RADAR workers died because their blood stopped to flow after being heaten up too much.
I heard that there are studies that certain parts of the head, esp. the eyes, are unable to sink the extra heat of a cellular phone into other parts of the head (by blood flow). But this effect should be measurable and the precautions mentioned in other posts (headset) should be sufficient to avoid such conditions.
So the politicians in the Commission think they are doing the best for Europe. They think they're the good guys because the lobbyists tell them they are!
:-)
Yes, that's the nice way of saying it
Sometimes I think that it is so, too. But that is very seldom now...
IMHO, this is the effect the general political disinterest the population has here in the EU. It may be stronger than in the US, but it' still declining.
And it is now SO LOW that corruption rises steeply. This is corruption, isn't it? Not calling it corruption would euphemise it.
Maybe, people still care a bit about what the media say. The media don't say anything about 'smaller political issues', only the important ones.
But the media also decide what "important issues" are. For example they redefine that corruption is about privately using frequent-flyer-miles (not ok, of course, but corruption?), about contacts of politicians into red-light districts (wtf?!)
They let politicians talk about "high-tech", "information economy" etc.pp. But if important laws are proposed in this area, they do not notice or they do not want to notice.
If the Minister for Economic Affairs overrides decisions of the cartel office for apparently no good reason (as it happened here in germany), it's pictured as "saving the economy". Arrrrrrgh!
If they push this through, "we" should not stop trying to prevent software patents. We should lobby for the abolition of software patents then. But this will be hard.
Sometimes, I have the vision for 2020-2030 of some grey-haired FLOSS developers drinking tea together and being nostalgic about the wild times where software development wasn't illegal and fundamental rights were still respected.
But I can not, in any way, accept such a development.
[Discl.: I'm from the EU and not the US, but similar tactics are used by ISPs here.]
:)
/. how-much-free-market-is-good :-)
The logical next step would be for trojan writers to say that blocking ports that their trojans use is *also* censorship.
You compare trojans with VOIP. Because trojans are intrusive and illegal bits of code. At the same time, you are ok with the ISP interfering with your IP packets by blocking them depending on their content. Yes, the port number can be considered as content. The same way as you I could argue that we'd soon end at OSI level 7 (application) filtering. Couldn't I?
As it is often the case for infrastructure (in a wider sense), the free market won't work here. There is lack of information on the consumer side.
Joe Sixpack is uniformed about these issues. That doesn't mean that he's stupid. Just uninformed. And if the issue is solved politically by setting standards for this product "IP connectivity" (transparent and visible for Joe!), no one really loses.
Personally, I would compare this to food safety standards.
I do know alot about the IP protocol, routing in the internet, bits&bytes etc.pp.
But I don't know a lot about the ingredients of my frozen pizza.
Surely, if there'd be a free unregulated market for food, I could go and buy food but only if I sign a contract with the supplier that there is no machine oil in the pizza, that the tomatoes used were fresh anough, that the number of bacteria don't exceed a certain value and so on. This would end in studying datasheets for food! Maybe even MSDS ones and I don't want to do that!
And this would only be possible if the pizza company gives me this information. If it does not, I have to search for another producer of pizzas which does.
Of course you can argue that one can built up trust, e.g. "food safety labels" which set a certain standard. Essentially proxies who decide which food you can buy. But what would you gain by doing that?
Less bureaucracy, more efficiency? Surely not. You'd have competing food safety labels ("This ISP supports raw IP labels") and an intransparency because of of different kinds of labels.
Don't get me wrong, labels can be a good thing and a first step in the right direction (for example for ISPs). But I don't think regulating IP connectivity by simply requiring that an ISP just passes data through it's network - without controlling which connections can be made, what data has to flow - has any economic impacts except for the ISPs shareholders.
Sorry for this long post, I really got carried away in the usual
As an example, there's one form of Maglev devices which is far better than what we have running, that has never seen production, because the owners of the patent charge too much for it.
Hmm, could you provide a link that describes that? I'm fairly curious.
No, I'm not trying to be an ass by demanding references for each and everything (read my other posts in this thread).
Yes, I would like that, too.
And then, I would put up a project on sf.net which interprets this pseudocode. Preferably under GPL.
So that I can do aI hope you see now how ridiculous this whole idea of software patents is!
Additionally, Social Security is something like a Ponzi scheme, [...]
And so is the whole longing for "steady economic growth of 2%".
Steady economic growth of two percent is exponential growth and therefore physically impossible to sustain for long times. And it seems to fit your twisted definition of "Ponzi scheme".
This is not to say that more economic growth is bad.
MUCH better fullscreen versions can be found here:
i ty _n345.html
http://marsrovers.nasa.gov/gallery/all/opportun
Ehhh, no! With p2pcast/peercast/whatever, the data travels many redundant pathes in the providers network, thus clogging up much more bandwidth than a multicast stream.
With multicast, you'd have (*) a single stream entering the provider. Only the very last router which connects to the dial-in/DSL pool would multply the packets and send them to all clients.
A MUCH better solution.
But inertia keeps IPv4 (instead of IPv6) and missing 'business opportunities' (they are there, but those who decide seem to be often stupid and short sighted...) prevents widespread multicast networking.
(*) - With today's internet topologies the consumers ends look like the leaf of a tree - Even ISPs often only are a subtree and 'peer' to only one super ISP, a "carrier".
BTW: Sadly this is not fault tolerant, not a good way to lay out a network, but it is cheap...
What if all new movies implement some kind of watermark that says "I must not be copied" and all new cameras obey this rule?
[...] How is that compared to cow emissions? [...]
Sigh. At least this is literally BS. Look up the percentage of the worldwide cow population whose whole purpose is to produce milk and meat for us humans!
You'll be impressed.
Yes, but I would change the last sentence:
I believe that I want the world to be a better place, and I try to live each day according to that.
Because: 1. knowing what is good is hard. 2. I'm evil sometimes. 3. Accidents happen.