I don't think it's a majority. In the european elections, voting for UKIP (who vote against any bill in the European Parliament, no matter how sensible it is) is a pretty clear vote against the EU. They currently have 15% of the seats, and received about 15% of the vote in the last election, including the bump that they got from disillusionment with the more mainstream parties over the expenses scandal.
As the other poster said, it depends on the nationalist party. The Welsh and Scottish nationalists are fairly pro-Europe because neither country is really viable as a totally independent entity, but both are larger than some other EU member states and could work as members of the EU, rather than members of the UK.
The current situation in the EU is a bit of a mess. I'm broadly in favour of the institution, but far too much power is concentrated in the totally unaccountable parts of the political system. Unfortunately, any proposal for reform gets shot down by the anti-EU faction who would rather see the EU collapse than see it transformed into something good.
The Euro was also largely a mistake, because they created a centralised currency but without central control on spending. This, effectively, let countries like Greece borrow against economies like Germany, which encouraged unconstrained borrowing and spending. I don't really know how this could be fixed. Centralising control over national budget is politically unfeasible, and keeping a currency stable without that kind of control is not easy.
Most of Microsoft's evil was directed at their competition. They were rarely evil to their customers, lock-in aside, just incompetent. With things like lawsuits over FAT patents and demanding $15 for every Android phone sold, they're still just as evil to their competitors, but they seem to be a lot less incompetent to their customers (I've not used it, but I've heard good things about Windows 7).
Facebook will send you an email saying 'someone wants to friend you on Facebook, click here to create an account and accept the request'. This has a 'never email me again you' link on it. I clicked on that about five years ago and haven't heard anything from them since. Well, except a job interview request (which surprised me - maybe their recruiters agree with their CEO that anyone with a Facebook account is a moron and use that as a first line filter...)
Copyright is irrelevant. The EU Data Protection Directive (implemented by things like the Data Protection Act in the UK) explicitly cover storing personal information, independently of copyright. You may not legally share personal information that you have collected about a person, unless you have their explicit permission. If you give your telephone number to a company and they then sell it on to telemarketers, for example, then they have broken the law.
Why not just add something to the data protection act about receiving information about third parties. It is already illegal to pass on personal information to a third party. The problem is that you'd have to be a complete dick to sue your friends (or even report them to the information commissioner) for tagging you on a Facebook photo or for allowing Google to harvest your email address from their address book. It would be simple to fix it my making receiving and storing personal information from third parties without explicit consent illegal. So, if a person signs up to Facebook and agrees to the T&Cs that say that they give permission for everyone to stalk them, that's fine, but if they don't then it is illegal for Facebook to retain any information about that person.
Another AOL-style post from me. The only reason I'd downgrade to Android would be if WebOS became completely unsupported, contained known security holes, and there was no better alternative than Android.
The Q episode says the opposite. There, he wanted to keep the human eyes but didn't because of the deal Picard had made with Q. In Insurrection, however, his human eyes grew and he didn't tell the doctor to remove them and return to his prosthetics (even though they had things like an advanced zoom feature), he kept the more primitive human ones.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm reinforcing your point: given the choice between the human and cyborg eyes, and having had more experience with the cyborg ones, he still chose the human ones.
It's the details like in 3001 where being circumsized is regarded as mutilation which help make things somewhat mysterious and help one consider the future.
Clarke did a lot of things like that. For example, in Imperial Earth, the main character expresses shock at the idea that someone might eat meat and refuses to sleep with someone because it's a bit weird that they're only attracted to one gender.
I've not read any of his books, but if the movie of Eragon was anything like the book, then I don't want to. Every character and every event had a one to one mapping to something from the original Star Wars movie. I could predict exactly what was going to happen just by thinking what happened in Star Wars. I'm astonished that it survived publication without being buried in a copyright lawsuit. Oh, and (D+1)ragon is the last dragon rider? Who'd have guessed?!?!
What look and feel did they take from Xerox? Menu bar? Nope, Apple created that - Xerox had some free-floating things that looked a little bit like menus. Overlapping windows? Nope, they weren't present at Xerox. The desktop metaphor with the trash can? Nope, that was Jef Raskin (working at Apple).
The case was dismissed because, other than having white rectangular windows with black borders, the Apple look and feel was nothing like the Xerox one.
So you're saying that Microsoft has selling versions of Windows for smartphones since 2002, and you're hoping that maybe by next year they'll finally make a version that is good enough for you to buy?
They've been selling desktop operating systems since the early '80s, but Windows 2000 was the first one that I didn't hate. Then they had a small step backwards with XP, apparently a larger one backwards with Vista, and then 7 is good again (I've not used Vista or 7, I'm just going by my father's opinion there).
So why would a printer (in the sense of "a device with a toner cartridge, a paper path, and a laser that writes to a selenium-coated roller") need to write to an SMB share?
Because it can read PDFs from the SMB share and print them and can scan documents and save them as PDFs on SMB (and FTP) shares.
I've used nVidia's shutter glasses mode, and it's not an experience I'd like to repeat. First you need to carefully calibrate it for the distance that you sit from the screen, otherwise you get a 3D image but the depth just looks weird and wrong. Then you need to make sure you don't move your head very much, or you get weird distortions. And then you're left feeling motion sick after about 5 minutes, because you're getting some of the depth cues that your brain expects, but not others.
As for FreeBSD, I think they missed a nice opportunity to ship llvm + clang with libobjc2 and libdispatch. They recently pulled objective c from base
I discussed including libobjc2 in base some people in the FreeBSD team, but there isn't much point of it by itself - it really needs a Foundation implementation to be useful. GCC libobjc was pulled because it is GPL'd. The 4.2.1 version is GPLv2 and the exemption only applies to code compiled with GCC. More recent versions are GPLv3, but the exemption applies to any compiler. Since 4.2.1 can't be used with clang and newer ones can't go in the base system, it got kicked out. If you want to use Objective-C with FreeBSD, then you need some stuff from ports anyway, but now you don't need to install a compiler because the clang in FreeBSD 9 can handle pretty much anything that OS X 10.7 / iOS 5 can in terms of the language. I know someone who's working on a permissively licensed Foundation implementation, using FreeBSD-specific features at the expense of portability, so it may end up in the base system at some point...
Having libdispatch in the base system would be nice, but it's the kind of thing that will probably stay in ports unless it's added as a base system as a dependency.
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I don't think it's a majority. In the european elections, voting for UKIP (who vote against any bill in the European Parliament, no matter how sensible it is) is a pretty clear vote against the EU. They currently have 15% of the seats, and received about 15% of the vote in the last election, including the bump that they got from disillusionment with the more mainstream parties over the expenses scandal.
As the other poster said, it depends on the nationalist party. The Welsh and Scottish nationalists are fairly pro-Europe because neither country is really viable as a totally independent entity, but both are larger than some other EU member states and could work as members of the EU, rather than members of the UK.
The current situation in the EU is a bit of a mess. I'm broadly in favour of the institution, but far too much power is concentrated in the totally unaccountable parts of the political system. Unfortunately, any proposal for reform gets shot down by the anti-EU faction who would rather see the EU collapse than see it transformed into something good.
The Euro was also largely a mistake, because they created a centralised currency but without central control on spending. This, effectively, let countries like Greece borrow against economies like Germany, which encouraged unconstrained borrowing and spending. I don't really know how this could be fixed. Centralising control over national budget is politically unfeasible, and keeping a currency stable without that kind of control is not easy.
Most of Microsoft's evil was directed at their competition. They were rarely evil to their customers, lock-in aside, just incompetent. With things like lawsuits over FAT patents and demanding $15 for every Android phone sold, they're still just as evil to their competitors, but they seem to be a lot less incompetent to their customers (I've not used it, but I've heard good things about Windows 7).
In contrast, Facebook is evil to its users.
Except that the CIA also uses Facebook to find you, so it doesn't really need the Soviet Russian component...
Facebook will send you an email saying 'someone wants to friend you on Facebook, click here to create an account and accept the request'. This has a 'never email me again you' link on it. I clicked on that about five years ago and haven't heard anything from them since. Well, except a job interview request (which surprised me - maybe their recruiters agree with their CEO that anyone with a Facebook account is a moron and use that as a first line filter...)
No, if it's written then it's libellous.
Copyright is irrelevant. The EU Data Protection Directive (implemented by things like the Data Protection Act in the UK) explicitly cover storing personal information, independently of copyright. You may not legally share personal information that you have collected about a person, unless you have their explicit permission. If you give your telephone number to a company and they then sell it on to telemarketers, for example, then they have broken the law.
Why not just add something to the data protection act about receiving information about third parties. It is already illegal to pass on personal information to a third party. The problem is that you'd have to be a complete dick to sue your friends (or even report them to the information commissioner) for tagging you on a Facebook photo or for allowing Google to harvest your email address from their address book. It would be simple to fix it my making receiving and storing personal information from third parties without explicit consent illegal. So, if a person signs up to Facebook and agrees to the T&Cs that say that they give permission for everyone to stalk them, that's fine, but if they don't then it is illegal for Facebook to retain any information about that person.
Generally, classified data is not allowed on laptop computers, except under some quite strict conditions.
Another AOL-style post from me. The only reason I'd downgrade to Android would be if WebOS became completely unsupported, contained known security holes, and there was no better alternative than Android.
The Q episode says the opposite. There, he wanted to keep the human eyes but didn't because of the deal Picard had made with Q. In Insurrection, however, his human eyes grew and he didn't tell the doctor to remove them and return to his prosthetics (even though they had things like an advanced zoom feature), he kept the more primitive human ones.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm reinforcing your point: given the choice between the human and cyborg eyes, and having had more experience with the cyborg ones, he still chose the human ones.
That's the Star, from 1981. Steve Jobs got his tour of PARC in 1979, when he was shown the Alto, not the Star.
It's the details like in 3001 where being circumsized is regarded as mutilation which help make things somewhat mysterious and help one consider the future.
Clarke did a lot of things like that. For example, in Imperial Earth, the main character expresses shock at the idea that someone might eat meat and refuses to sleep with someone because it's a bit weird that they're only attracted to one gender.
I've not read any of his books, but if the movie of Eragon was anything like the book, then I don't want to. Every character and every event had a one to one mapping to something from the original Star Wars movie. I could predict exactly what was going to happen just by thinking what happened in Star Wars. I'm astonished that it survived publication without being buried in a copyright lawsuit. Oh, and (D+1)ragon is the last dragon rider? Who'd have guessed?!?!
And when he got the option of having human eyes, he chose them in spite of the reduction in capabilities.
Working knowledge of English? Nowhere near universal, even in first-world economies
Well, if you include the USA you're going to skew the statistics slightly, but they do tend to have an approximate idea of how English works...
My mobile phone is pretty old and crap. But it's still smaller than the ones that they carried in the original series of Star Trek...
stealing the look and feel from Xerox
What look and feel did they take from Xerox? Menu bar? Nope, Apple created that - Xerox had some free-floating things that looked a little bit like menus. Overlapping windows? Nope, they weren't present at Xerox. The desktop metaphor with the trash can? Nope, that was Jef Raskin (working at Apple).
The case was dismissed because, other than having white rectangular windows with black borders, the Apple look and feel was nothing like the Xerox one.
So you're saying that Microsoft has selling versions of Windows for smartphones since 2002, and you're hoping that maybe by next year they'll finally make a version that is good enough for you to buy?
They've been selling desktop operating systems since the early '80s, but Windows 2000 was the first one that I didn't hate. Then they had a small step backwards with XP, apparently a larger one backwards with Vista, and then 7 is good again (I've not used Vista or 7, I'm just going by my father's opinion there).
So why would a printer (in the sense of "a device with a toner cartridge, a paper path, and a laser that writes to a selenium-coated roller") need to write to an SMB share?
Because it can read PDFs from the SMB share and print them and can scan documents and save them as PDFs on SMB (and FTP) shares.
Is there a new thing where you capitalise your spelling mistakes as some kind of ironic statement? I've seen this ALOT (but not that alot) recently.
I've used nVidia's shutter glasses mode, and it's not an experience I'd like to repeat. First you need to carefully calibrate it for the distance that you sit from the screen, otherwise you get a 3D image but the depth just looks weird and wrong. Then you need to make sure you don't move your head very much, or you get weird distortions. And then you're left feeling motion sick after about 5 minutes, because you're getting some of the depth cues that your brain expects, but not others.
Drop me a mail - I think it's public but I don't have the address on hand. I'll put you in touch with the guy who's working on it.
As for FreeBSD, I think they missed a nice opportunity to ship llvm + clang with libobjc2 and libdispatch. They recently pulled objective c from base
I discussed including libobjc2 in base some people in the FreeBSD team, but there isn't much point of it by itself - it really needs a Foundation implementation to be useful. GCC libobjc was pulled because it is GPL'd. The 4.2.1 version is GPLv2 and the exemption only applies to code compiled with GCC. More recent versions are GPLv3, but the exemption applies to any compiler. Since 4.2.1 can't be used with clang and newer ones can't go in the base system, it got kicked out. If you want to use Objective-C with FreeBSD, then you need some stuff from ports anyway, but now you don't need to install a compiler because the clang in FreeBSD 9 can handle pretty much anything that OS X 10.7 / iOS 5 can in terms of the language. I know someone who's working on a permissively licensed Foundation implementation, using FreeBSD-specific features at the expense of portability, so it may end up in the base system at some point...
Having libdispatch in the base system would be nice, but it's the kind of thing that will probably stay in ports unless it's added as a base system as a dependency.
It's almost like you have a point, but somehow you'd rather make snide remarks than actually let anyone know what it is...