I quote the Live Science article: "More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on" . Well, actually the study (see findings table, last page of the PDF) shows that 79.9 percent of guys correctly identified friendliness and only 12.1pct mistook it for sexual interest. Sadness and rejection were also correctly interpreted most of the times (and almost never mistaken for sexual interest).
And now I quote the/. summary: Men were found commonly to perceive more sexual intent in women's behavior than women were intending to convey. Wrong again: sexual interest is the only intent that just less than half of the male sample correctly interpreted, with almost 40% of them mistaking it for friendliness.
So it seems that we don't do too bad after all. Of course, this doesn't fly too well with the typical "horny males think all girls 'want some' " stereotypes.
Now, I'd be willing to see the results of the same research, applied to girls. My anecdotal evidence indicates that girls fare even worse than guys at interpreting "sexual interest" signals. My "sexual interest" signals consistently get ignored (maybe I'm just too shy) or, even worse, mistaken for an invitation to be friends and tell me their ex-boyfriend stories (when this happens: run!). I also find that a non-trivial number of girls mistakes friendliness for sexual interest (usually the same ones who think of themselves as hot and intersting).
-Tries to tackle industrial piracy through technology - Check -Strong financial incentive to break the scheme exists - Check -Can be broken or crippled in a number of ways - Check -Attempts to address a problem involving dozens of manufacturers, hundreds of factories, producing billions of microchips which get integrated into everything from toasters to cellphones, planes, and oil rigs - Check -Scheme conveniently relies on the Internet for authentication- Check -And, last but not least: features cheesy acronym forming a heroic-sounding name - Check
Okay, I think it is safe to assume this will lead nowhere. Or nowhere good at least.
Seriously, I can't wait to see what happens until someone DDoSes an authentication server and about half a billion different devices, from fridges to routers, all suddenly stop working because they all use the same chip, (say, the one that handles temperature control).
Thanks for the tip. We do have a phone wiring indeed, so I'll start looking into that HPNA thingie, which I'd never heard about. Do you recommend any product / brand in particular?
The ethernet-over-power plugs we tried are the fastest available (85 Mbps) and it's absolutely unusable. It probably has to do with our electrical wiring than the technology itself, as many people seem to use it without problems.
Why do you consider IP over the power line unreliable?
Umm, because we already tried. The image is lagging and the sound is jittery, despite the fact that we got the fastest IP over power line converters available - they're rated at something like 85Mbps and sold as "HD" by our provider (Orange) - and although my dad actually re-organized the wiring to get as direct a route as possible. It still sucks.
That said, what else would it really replace or be used in?
Short-range wireless video transmission, for one. From your IPTV box to your TV(s).
Case in point: at home, we just ditched cable and DSL and switched to an optic fibre triple-play (internet/IP TV/telephone) offer, which is much cheaper. For technical reasons the main receiver box can only be located near our entrance door, while the TV sits at the other side of the house.
Out of three possible solutions, none work well: -laying an ethernet cable in the ceiling is possible, but a headache -IP over the power lines is unreliable -WiFi, regardless of the flavor, doesn't provide enough bandwidth (keep in mind that the box streams several HDTV channels at once, for instance when recording one while watching another)
So in our case, the proposed chip and protocol sounds ideal. 10m doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more than enough to cover most apartments / houses, and I expect it will be possible to get signal at much greater distances, with degraded signal. 2.5Gbps over 20m, wirelessly, would rock.
how many more cables would have to be cut to effectively take the middle east off the net?
Not too many: since FLAG and SEA-ME-WE-4 (the two fastest links, by far, connecting the region to the rest of the world) are already partially or completely down, I think cutting SEA-ME-WE-3 would be enough to bring what remains of the infrastructure to its knees. If any backbone nerd cared to provide any details...:)
I'm pretty sure there are other routes; however, they are much slower lines and are mostly dedicated to telephony. Most countries in the middle east also have at least one satellite link of some sort, which are hard to scramble (or so they say).
However, in case of actual, long-term, bandwidth shortage, it would be quite trivial for most Middle Eastern countries (where telcos and access to international connectivity are typically state-controlled) to block bittorrent, FTP, YouTube, Kazaa, etc, and dedicate all the remaining bandwidth to essential services, such as e-mail, or allocate all the bandwidth to the government and administration.
The problem of many Middle-Eastern and North African countries is that they never really developed neighbour-to-neighbour communication links. For instance a ping from Tunisia to Morocco has good chances of going through Palermo (Italy) or Marseille (France). I'm pretty sure a ping between two countries in the Gulf would give surprising results too.
For once you might want to take a good look at what has happened in France;)
A few years back, local loop unbundling (a EU requirement) created competition among private ISPs and the formerly public operator/monopoly, France Telecom (FT). FT had to give up their stranglehold on DSL (and subsequently on telephony as well), many private ISPs started offering DSL services, and available speeds quickly rose to 20 Mbps (and now even 28 for some operators). The typical offer, which costs you 29.99 euros/month, gets you not just unlimited Internet, but also dozens of TV channels (including some in HD) and free unlimited phone calls to landlines in France, the EU, and dozens of foreign countries. That would have been considered totally impossible just a few years back.
Now, the DSL market is facing saturation, particularly in urban areas. So the telcos have naturally started laying out 100Mbps fiber - my dad just got his installed, and it seems to work extremely well (the only downside is that I'll have to look into 802.11n, because his Airport Extreme is now officially slower than his internet connection:p). It's essentially the same price as his previous DSL suscription.
Note that fibre network operators are not affected by LLU - in order to protect their revenue and provide an incentive to invest in the fibre network. A good move IMHO, as otherwise I'm not sure anyone would have bothered to pay for the initial network investment. Whether or not LLU is required for fibre in the future, competition from DSL (and soon WiMax?) should be enough to keep fibre prices down.
In Paris, I think the municipality is making money from fibre, as telcos pay a fee to lay out their network through the sewer system. Other cities have paid for the initial investment cost, and now rent the infrastructure to ISPs. In both scenarios, public investment has been kept to a minimum.
The interesting thing is that both the fast DSL and fibre markets were initially pushed and led by Free, an independent and extremely aggressive (and geek-friendly!) ISP for whom price-slashing was the only way to become a recognized player.
So, in theory all the US of A needs to fix its telecom infrastructure is: -local loop unbundling on DSL, *asap* -its own version of Free -as far as fibre is concerned, maybe some level of investment by local or federal authorities to Get Things Done quicker (but probably nowhere close to 100bn though - maybe 1/10th of that amount)
Competition and economies of scale should be able to do the rest.
Those dirty, scheming, lying, backstabbing bastards are at it again - covering their ass, just in time before the White House changes hands. Blaming it on 'recycling' too - what a nice "fuck you" to Americans...
This administration will go down in history as the most egregiously shameful, dishonest, dirty in the history of the United States. I still can't get over the fact that he managed to get elected again after he stole an election, started a war on fake motives, and let his rich friends get richer on the back of troops and taxpayers.
No iPod connector. No backseat DVD player. No hybrid engine. Lame.
The "Pimp my Ride" guys do better.
RSS feeds for European channels?
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Miro Turns 1.0
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This application looks cool, but I can't find the content I'm looking for (French TV shows). I checked tvrss.net but it seems to have US programmes only.
Does anybody know a good source of RSS feeds for European/French shows?
OK, I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll still comment. You make interesting and valid points, but here are a few thoughts:
Their first and most important foreign policy objective is to retake Taiwan.
I don't agree. They know damn well that the US won't let that happen anytime soon. In addition, China's economy is extremely dependent on East-Asian investment: keep in mind that Asia-Pacific countries' foreign direct investment (FDI) to China is larger than combined Western FDI to China! A conflict in the Pacific could be fatal to the Chinese economy and, right now (not that it couldn't change), it's all about the economy as far as the Chinese Communist party is concerned.
In my opinion, China's ramping up of its Navy has much more to do with South-Asian seas, and more specifically, control over the Strait of Malacca. IIRC, about 80% of China's energy imports and 50% of its goods exports transit through that strait. China knows damn well that the US (or anybody else for that matter) blocking the strait would result in massive economic losses. Hence the necessity of China to be able to un-block the strait militarily if necessary. If anything, a war with Taiwan would probably be massively unpopular, especially if it means economic recession, and that could stir even more internal trouble than there currently is. (Nationalism / Patriotism are not driving forces among the Chinese populace, at least not if they mean conflict. Don't believe for a second that the "rallies" against Taiwan and Japan a few years back were not entirely staged by the authorities.)
China has also been trying to extend its control in the Philippines Sea and the Indian ocean, and has been island-hopping and flag-planting at the expense of Indonesia for some time now (and maybe Philippines as well?). Reasons for this are: speculations that there may be huge amounts of natural gas waiting to be discovered in the area; fishing rights in territorial waters; installation of military bases, radar stations; etc.
China is also trying to get access to the Gulf of Bengal and Gulf of Thailand, for similar reasons, and also because having a strong Navy presence there would make a lot of sense in the event of a show-down with India, or even the US. China is making great efforts to improve its control of countries in the region, particularly in Burma (confirmed presence of Chinese military bases on the Andaman coast) and Cambodia (China is busy linking the city of Nanning to Laos and Cambodia, by road, and, apparently, train; and there are persistent rumors that the Chinese might build a Navy base in or close to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's largest port city).
So, they're playing a long game on all the important levels, and it's about the scariest thing imaginable and it's right around the corner.
Of course they're playing a long game. Why would they do otherwise? But does that mean that they're preparing to get aggressive? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it. China's "next frontier" is... to the West, and inside its own borders. That means that they have close to 1bn people not benefitting from economic growth, and that could result in unrest, riots, instability. I think China's government is focusing on this more than on anything else and that this is, at least, buying everybody else some time. I'd say no less than 10 years.
And the United States government has its head so far up its own ass about Iraq and Iran and whatever enemy AIPAC thinks we need to fight, that it will be completely surprised when China does make its move.
I think Iraq/Iran and a potential show-down with China would be dealt with on completely different levels. Regarless of the level of American stupidity in dealing with that country, the war in Iraq is a purely tactial/operational affair. Same thing for hypothetical strikes over Iran. A war with China, on the other hand, would have pretty good chances of escalating to the nuclear stage pretty quickly (or at least to strate
I've been using the free Carbon Copy Cloner for a while to do bootable backups of my entire hard drive. Crude, but it works well and I currently don't really need other features. The only downside is that it can take forever to back up everything.
When I'm away from my backup harddrive, I do just as you say and drag and drop my most important files to my iPod.
Of course, once I upgrade to 10.5 I'll probably wonder how I've been living without Time Machine all this time. Plus ça change...
I was wondering what had prompted Apple to suddenly go out and publish the iPhone SDK. Now I get it - they don't want to risk letting developers flee to Android and miss potential killer apps.
Now let's see what comes out of Android. It can't be any worse than most current phone OSs anyways.
The article presents this car as a complement to public transportation (I quote TFA):
"The problem with mass transit is it kind of takes you to where you want to go and at the approximate time you want to get there, but not exactly. Sometimes you have to walk up to a mile from the last train or subway stop," said Franco Vairani, a Ph.D. candidate at MIT's school of architecture. OK, now, I understand the appeal of light-weight, stackable, "community" cars in some cases (such as sprawling suburban environments) but seriously - in most cities there are simpler, more effective means to do that "last mile". Bicycles come to mind as a pretty simple, cheap, and reliable solution. The Paris municipality recently introduced a close-to-free (29 euros per year, first 30 minutes free, then price increases each half-hour so prevent you from keeping the bike all day long) community rent-a-bike service called Vélib, which consists of over 10,000 bikes located in hundreds of stations scattered around the city. It works well now that the first glitches have been ironed out. A mile on a bike takes about 10 minutes, is good for you, consumes no energy, and is manageable in all but the most extreme weather conditions.
Also, any decent public transportation system should have much less than a mile between two metro/bus/tramway stations - leaving the maximum walking distance to half a mile. That is the case of many European cities.
On a related note, the ever-awesome Dutchs invented the Bike Dispenser, which I have yet to see in real life but which looks absolutely wicked. In my opinion this looks much more manageable than 1,200-pounds electric stackable cars.
What? The same old fart again?!
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Ask Rob Malda
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... I mean, forget Cmdr Taco, I want to ask questions to this CowboyNeal guy instead:D
-Please, please, please give us iChat, even if only through WiFi (that way the carriers don't lose too much business). I'm not even considering buying one if it doesn't have iChat. I can live without videoconferencing, but it would be trivial to add, so...
-Ability to install any 3rd party applications, including Skype and SIP software. Not considering buying one as long as I have to hack it to install stuff on it.
-As long as it doesn't get a lot more storage (over 40 gigs), it won't replace my current (60gb) iPod, so I still would have to carry 2 devices.
-Being able to use all your songs as ringtones should be a given. My understanding is that the music majors don't want that to happen, but then why can I do it on my 2-year-old Sony Ericsson?
-GPS would be kind of nice, sort of, but I can live without it.
piracy of the OS itself is almost non-existent on Macs
What?
Either you and I live on different planets, or it's a joke and I didn't catch it. I know exactly two types of Mac users: -those who keep the Mac loaded with whatever OS it came with, -those who borrow the latest OS from a friend who just bought a new Mac, or leech it off bittorrent.
I've never, ever, seen anyone actually buy a boxed copy of OS X (or 9, or 8, for that matter). I would add that mac users feel "entitled" to the latest copies of the OS since they've usually spent quite a lot on the hardware.
160GB of storage? WTF?!
Mobile backup solution. That also plays music.
At the moment I carry around a large external hard drive together with my Powerbook, to do weekly or daily backups when I'm traveling. I also carry a 60 gb iPod. I'm thinking I could buy the 160gb, dedicate 60gb to music, and set up 100 gb for backup. One less piece of e-junk in the luggage.
(My only issue being, will I be able to boot from the iPod backup if my hard drive fails?)
I agree with the rest of your post. Methinks the fact that they're going with 8-16gb on the Touch shows that they expect people to use it primarily as an internet tablet rather than an actual iPod. That, or they couldn't fit 1.8" drives in there.
Honest question here (IANAL): can it even be legal for the employer to issue guidelines/codes of conduct for activities that are presumably not happening at the workplace?
Sure, I understand the appeal and the flexibility and having a shared space with friends. It's a neat tool for people like me who live abroad, far from their friends and families. I don't consider myself to be a privacy nuts (or otherwise I wouldn't have a facebook account to start with) and I agree with your post in this respect.
But: As opposed to before when they were using public telephone networks, public electronic infrastructure, or business cards with personally identifying information?
Now, come on - who has access to your telephone conversations? Your email? Wiretapping requires a fair amount of technical expertise and/or legal clout. So either you are the victim of some kind of high-profile identity thief, or some big government agency. In both cases you're screwed anyways, I'd say.
Facebook, on the other hand, by default lets anyone in your network have access to your pictures, your public (wall) discussions with all your other friends, and (the thing which freaks me out most), your complete friends list (which, apparently, cannot be hidden from the people in your network?).
Of course, people on your network are all supposed to be your friends. But what tells me that this girl that added me in her network yesterday, and that I vaguely know from one course back in college, is really her? It's not on the phone, so I can't rely on her voice to identify her. She's not using the college's email account (which I can fairly reasonably assume to be held by her and her only). In short, there is no way to make sure she really is who she claims to be. Sure, it sounds far-fetched - but I would say it is comparatively much easier to access someone's Facebook profile by posing as an old friend of his/her, than to wiretap that person's phone conversations and/or emails. It can also potentially tell you much more.
Also, my (limited) experience with Facebook tells me that people trust absolutely anyone that asks to be their friend (I suspect it is because they want to have that ever-impressive list of 150+ "friends"), keep their entire profile public, and write very personal things on other people's walls, on which they have no control at all. I'm wondering how many of them will come to regret it later on, when an ex-"friend" of theirs proves to be a stalker, or for some reason decides that he/she has an axe to grind and gets him fired from his company by using these party pics from 5 years ago.
"Email is sooo dead", the kids say...
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Kids Say Email is Dead
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... until they have to send their first resumé and cover letter:)
On a more serious note, I have just been sucked into the wonderful/scary world of Facebook, and I must say, wow. I knew people liked to reinvent the wheel all the time, but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails? What was wrong with emails in the first place? I mean, I can see the attraction of writing fun things on these "walls", but many go much beyond that and use it to organize meetings, leave their phone numbers, addresses, and whereabouts for the next 3 weeks, for the recipient, but also everyone else to see.
So either this generation does not realize what it's doing (basically posting their contact details while broadcasting their private lives on teh internets), or it doesn't care at all about that thing called privacy.
I haven't even reached 30, and I already feel like I'm getting old:)
They also have to maintain a near 100% compatibility with Vista and/or XP.
But if they do that, they'll end up with tons of legacy code, just like now, and nothing ever gets solved.
And to they really have to do it? They could (and should, in my opinion) do what Apple did from the OS9-to-OSX transition: build an abstraction layer similar to the Classic environment, that loads only when needed, is sandboxed, and runs things the old fashioned way.
But this takes the balls to jump into the "there be dragons" territory of totally new code and new ways of doing things, and also to take the risk to piss off developers and consumers if (or rather when) anything goes wrong. If Apple could, there is no reason, *in theory*, that MS couldn't, although Apple had it easier since they have a much smaller customer base, it was easier to determine what they COULD NOT afford to break, and what could be jettisoned with the old code.
I think Vista might be the last time that software companies will even bother to rewrite software for a new Windows. By the time 7 comes, Linux and Mac will have a significant part of the market share (I would guess at least 15-20%).
I think you're being somewhat optimistic. OSX's share on the market is only proportional to the number of Macs sold. They are on the rise but are still ridiculously small in comparison to the number of PCs sold. I wish Apple started competing directly with Microsoft and sell OSX for at least some PC boxes, but it apparently won't happen too soon. As for Linux, well, I say, "wait and see", as we've seen the "year of Linux on the desktop" meme come and go, far too often by now.
Also don't underestimate the sheer power of... inertia. Maybe 90% of the software out there is Windows-only, most developers & software companies have most likely never coded for any other platform, and for as long as the current XP and Vista boxes survive, Windows will still be largest platform out there. Also, most people and organizations seem to be happy with Windows.
The Slashdot blurb is not very accurate. Makes it sound like the gamblers wouldn't notice the fault. Instead, the machine credited the players $10 each time $1 was inserted, according TFA. So the gamblers can't claim they didn't know the machine was faulty.
Still, I think it's the responsibility of the casino to ensure the machines are working correctly. This is just like having an ATM spewing $100 bills at random, and expecting people to not take the money.
I also think the casino is also doing a very bad, very dumb move by publicizing the issue. They lost close to 500,000 (small change for a casino) and want it back. But now the press is all over how Caesars Indiana is considering suing its patrons because their own machines failed - definetely high potential for PR damage.
(Once, I put 1.5 euros in an automatic vending machine. The machine gave me my coffee, and returned 2 euros, which I obviously kept. Should the owner of the machine sue me?)
Slashdot Mirror
I quote the Live Science article: "More often than not, guys interpret even friendly cues, such as a subtle smile from a gal, as a sexual come-on" .
/. summary: Men were found commonly to perceive more sexual intent in women's behavior than women were intending to convey.
Well, actually the study (see findings table, last page of the PDF) shows that 79.9 percent of guys correctly identified friendliness and only 12.1pct mistook it for sexual interest. Sadness and rejection were also correctly interpreted most of the times (and almost never mistaken for sexual interest).
And now I quote the
Wrong again: sexual interest is the only intent that just less than half of the male sample correctly interpreted, with almost 40% of them mistaking it for friendliness.
So it seems that we don't do too bad after all. Of course, this doesn't fly too well with the typical "horny males think all girls 'want some' " stereotypes.
Now, I'd be willing to see the results of the same research, applied to girls. My anecdotal evidence indicates that girls fare even worse than guys at interpreting "sexual interest" signals. My "sexual interest" signals consistently get ignored (maybe I'm just too shy) or, even worse, mistaken for an invitation to be friends and tell me their ex-boyfriend stories (when this happens: run!). I also find that a non-trivial number of girls mistakes friendliness for sexual interest (usually the same ones who think of themselves as hot and intersting).
"South African Minister Locks Horns with Microsoft
Yes but, were they long horns?
-Tries to tackle industrial piracy through technology - Check
-Strong financial incentive to break the scheme exists - Check
-Can be broken or crippled in a number of ways - Check
-Attempts to address a problem involving dozens of manufacturers, hundreds of factories, producing billions of microchips which get integrated into everything from toasters to cellphones, planes, and oil rigs - Check
-Scheme conveniently relies on the Internet for authentication- Check
-And, last but not least: features cheesy acronym forming a heroic-sounding name - Check
Okay, I think it is safe to assume this will lead nowhere. Or nowhere good at least.
Seriously, I can't wait to see what happens until someone DDoSes an authentication server and about half a billion different devices, from fridges to routers, all suddenly stop working because they all use the same chip, (say, the one that handles temperature control).
Thanks for the tip. We do have a phone wiring indeed, so I'll start looking into that HPNA thingie, which I'd never heard about. Do you recommend any product / brand in particular?
The ethernet-over-power plugs we tried are the fastest available (85 Mbps) and it's absolutely unusable. It probably has to do with our electrical wiring than the technology itself, as many people seem to use it without problems.
Cheers!
Why do you consider IP over the power line unreliable?
Umm, because we already tried. The image is lagging and the sound is jittery, despite the fact that we got the fastest IP over power line converters available - they're rated at something like 85Mbps and sold as "HD" by our provider (Orange) - and although my dad actually re-organized the wiring to get as direct a route as possible. It still sucks.
That said, what else would it really replace or be used in?
Short-range wireless video transmission, for one. From your IPTV box to your TV(s).
Case in point: at home, we just ditched cable and DSL and switched to an optic fibre triple-play (internet/IP TV/telephone) offer, which is much cheaper. For technical reasons the main receiver box can only be located near our entrance door, while the TV sits at the other side of the house.
Out of three possible solutions, none work well:
-laying an ethernet cable in the ceiling is possible, but a headache
-IP over the power lines is unreliable
-WiFi, regardless of the flavor, doesn't provide enough bandwidth (keep in mind that the box streams several HDTV channels at once, for instance when recording one while watching another)
So in our case, the proposed chip and protocol sounds ideal. 10m doesn't seem like a lot, but it's more than enough to cover most apartments / houses, and I expect it will be possible to get signal at much greater distances, with degraded signal. 2.5Gbps over 20m, wirelessly, would rock.
how many more cables would have to be cut to effectively take the middle east off the net?
:)
Not too many: since FLAG and SEA-ME-WE-4 (the two fastest links, by far, connecting the region to the rest of the world) are already partially or completely down, I think cutting SEA-ME-WE-3 would be enough to bring what remains of the infrastructure to its knees. If any backbone nerd cared to provide any details...
I'm pretty sure there are other routes; however, they are much slower lines and are mostly dedicated to telephony. Most countries in the middle east also have at least one satellite link of some sort, which are hard to scramble (or so they say).
However, in case of actual, long-term, bandwidth shortage, it would be quite trivial for most Middle Eastern countries (where telcos and access to international connectivity are typically state-controlled) to block bittorrent, FTP, YouTube, Kazaa, etc, and dedicate all the remaining bandwidth to essential services, such as e-mail, or allocate all the bandwidth to the government and administration.
The problem of many Middle-Eastern and North African countries is that they never really developed neighbour-to-neighbour communication links. For instance a ping from Tunisia to Morocco has good chances of going through Palermo (Italy) or Marseille (France). I'm pretty sure a ping between two countries in the Gulf would give surprising results too.
For once you might want to take a good look at what has happened in France ;)
:p). It's essentially the same price as his previous DSL suscription.
A few years back, local loop unbundling (a EU requirement) created competition among private ISPs and the formerly public operator/monopoly, France Telecom (FT). FT had to give up their stranglehold on DSL (and subsequently on telephony as well), many private ISPs started offering DSL services, and available speeds quickly rose to 20 Mbps (and now even 28 for some operators). The typical offer, which costs you 29.99 euros/month, gets you not just unlimited Internet, but also dozens of TV channels (including some in HD) and free unlimited phone calls to landlines in France, the EU, and dozens of foreign countries. That would have been considered totally impossible just a few years back.
Now, the DSL market is facing saturation, particularly in urban areas. So the telcos have naturally started laying out 100Mbps fiber - my dad just got his installed, and it seems to work extremely well (the only downside is that I'll have to look into 802.11n, because his Airport Extreme is now officially slower than his internet connection
Note that fibre network operators are not affected by LLU - in order to protect their revenue and provide an incentive to invest in the fibre network. A good move IMHO, as otherwise I'm not sure anyone would have bothered to pay for the initial network investment. Whether or not LLU is required for fibre in the future, competition from DSL (and soon WiMax?) should be enough to keep fibre prices down.
In Paris, I think the municipality is making money from fibre, as telcos pay a fee to lay out their network through the sewer system. Other cities have paid for the initial investment cost, and now rent the infrastructure to ISPs. In both scenarios, public investment has been kept to a minimum.
The interesting thing is that both the fast DSL and fibre markets were initially pushed and led by Free, an independent and extremely aggressive (and geek-friendly!) ISP for whom price-slashing was the only way to become a recognized player.
So, in theory all the US of A needs to fix its telecom infrastructure is:
-local loop unbundling on DSL, *asap*
-its own version of Free
-as far as fibre is concerned, maybe some level of investment by local or federal authorities to Get Things Done quicker (but probably nowhere close to 100bn though - maybe 1/10th of that amount)
Competition and economies of scale should be able to do the rest.
Those dirty, scheming, lying, backstabbing bastards are at it again - covering their ass, just in time before the White House changes hands. Blaming it on 'recycling' too - what a nice "fuck you" to Americans... This administration will go down in history as the most egregiously shameful, dishonest, dirty in the history of the United States. I still can't get over the fact that he managed to get elected again after he stole an election, started a war on fake motives, and let his rich friends get richer on the back of troops and taxpayers.
[...] a flash swf file capable of opening open ports into your network [...]
:D
Hold on, now I'm confused: does this attack open open ports, or does it open ports open? Or even worse, does it open open open ports?
No iPod connector. No backseat DVD player. No hybrid engine. Lame.
The "Pimp my Ride" guys do better.
This application looks cool, but I can't find the content I'm looking for (French TV shows). I checked tvrss.net but it seems to have US programmes only.
Does anybody know a good source of RSS feeds for European/French shows?
Cheers,
ElGanzoLoco
OK, I'm a bit late to the party, but I'll still comment. You make interesting and valid points, but here are a few thoughts:
Their first and most important foreign policy objective is to retake Taiwan.
I don't agree. They know damn well that the US won't let that happen anytime soon. In addition, China's economy is extremely dependent on East-Asian investment: keep in mind that Asia-Pacific countries' foreign direct investment (FDI) to China is larger than combined Western FDI to China! A conflict in the Pacific could be fatal to the Chinese economy and, right now (not that it couldn't change), it's all about the economy as far as the Chinese Communist party is concerned.
In my opinion, China's ramping up of its Navy has much more to do with South-Asian seas, and more specifically, control over the Strait of Malacca. IIRC, about 80% of China's energy imports and 50% of its goods exports transit through that strait. China knows damn well that the US (or anybody else for that matter) blocking the strait would result in massive economic losses. Hence the necessity of China to be able to un-block the strait militarily if necessary. If anything, a war with Taiwan would probably be massively unpopular, especially if it means economic recession, and that could stir even more internal trouble than there currently is. (Nationalism / Patriotism are not driving forces among the Chinese populace, at least not if they mean conflict. Don't believe for a second that the "rallies" against Taiwan and Japan a few years back were not entirely staged by the authorities.)
China has also been trying to extend its control in the Philippines Sea and the Indian ocean, and has been island-hopping and flag-planting at the expense of Indonesia for some time now (and maybe Philippines as well?). Reasons for this are: speculations that there may be huge amounts of natural gas waiting to be discovered in the area; fishing rights in territorial waters; installation of military bases, radar stations; etc.
China is also trying to get access to the Gulf of Bengal and Gulf of Thailand, for similar reasons, and also because having a strong Navy presence there would make a lot of sense in the event of a show-down with India, or even the US. China is making great efforts to improve its control of countries in the region, particularly in Burma (confirmed presence of Chinese military bases on the Andaman coast) and Cambodia (China is busy linking the city of Nanning to Laos and Cambodia, by road, and, apparently, train; and there are persistent rumors that the Chinese might build a Navy base in or close to Sihanoukville, Cambodia's largest port city).
So, they're playing a long game on all the important levels, and it's about the scariest thing imaginable and it's right around the corner.
Of course they're playing a long game. Why would they do otherwise? But does that mean that they're preparing to get aggressive? I don't know, but I wouldn't bet on it. China's "next frontier" is... to the West, and inside its own borders. That means that they have close to 1bn people not benefitting from economic growth, and that could result in unrest, riots, instability. I think China's government is focusing on this more than on anything else and that this is, at least, buying everybody else some time. I'd say no less than 10 years.
And the United States government has its head so far up its own ass about Iraq and Iran and whatever enemy AIPAC thinks we need to fight, that it will be completely surprised when China does make its move.
I think Iraq/Iran and a potential show-down with China would be dealt with on completely different levels. Regarless of the level of American stupidity in dealing with that country, the war in Iraq is a purely tactial/operational affair. Same thing for hypothetical strikes over Iran. A war with China, on the other hand, would have pretty good chances of escalating to the nuclear stage pretty quickly (or at least to strate
I've been using the free Carbon Copy Cloner for a while to do bootable backups of my entire hard drive. Crude, but it works well and I currently don't really need other features. The only downside is that it can take forever to back up everything.
When I'm away from my backup harddrive, I do just as you say and drag and drop my most important files to my iPod.
Of course, once I upgrade to 10.5 I'll probably wonder how I've been living without Time Machine all this time. Plus ça change...
I was wondering what had prompted Apple to suddenly go out and publish the iPhone SDK. Now I get it - they don't want to risk letting developers flee to Android and miss potential killer apps.
Now let's see what comes out of Android. It can't be any worse than most current phone OSs anyways.
Also, any decent public transportation system should have much less than a mile between two metro/bus/tramway stations - leaving the maximum walking distance to half a mile. That is the case of many European cities.
On a related note, the ever-awesome Dutchs invented the Bike Dispenser, which I have yet to see in real life but which looks absolutely wicked. In my opinion this looks much more manageable than 1,200-pounds electric stackable cars.
... I mean, forget Cmdr Taco, I want to ask questions to this CowboyNeal guy instead :D
-Please, please, please give us iChat, even if only through WiFi (that way the carriers don't lose too much business). I'm not even considering buying one if it doesn't have iChat. I can live without videoconferencing, but it would be trivial to add, so... -Ability to install any 3rd party applications, including Skype and SIP software. Not considering buying one as long as I have to hack it to install stuff on it. -As long as it doesn't get a lot more storage (over 40 gigs), it won't replace my current (60gb) iPod, so I still would have to carry 2 devices. -Being able to use all your songs as ringtones should be a given. My understanding is that the music majors don't want that to happen, but then why can I do it on my 2-year-old Sony Ericsson? -GPS would be kind of nice, sort of, but I can live without it.
piracy of the OS itself is almost non-existent on Macs
What?
Either you and I live on different planets, or it's a joke and I didn't catch it. I know exactly two types of Mac users:
-those who keep the Mac loaded with whatever OS it came with,
-those who borrow the latest OS from a friend who just bought a new Mac, or leech it off bittorrent.
I've never, ever, seen anyone actually buy a boxed copy of OS X (or 9, or 8, for that matter). I would add that mac users feel "entitled" to the latest copies of the OS since they've usually spent quite a lot on the hardware.
160GB of storage? WTF?! Mobile backup solution. That also plays music. At the moment I carry around a large external hard drive together with my Powerbook, to do weekly or daily backups when I'm traveling. I also carry a 60 gb iPod. I'm thinking I could buy the 160gb, dedicate 60gb to music, and set up 100 gb for backup. One less piece of e-junk in the luggage. (My only issue being, will I be able to boot from the iPod backup if my hard drive fails?) I agree with the rest of your post. Methinks the fact that they're going with 8-16gb on the Touch shows that they expect people to use it primarily as an internet tablet rather than an actual iPod. That, or they couldn't fit 1.8" drives in there.
Honest question here (IANAL): can it even be legal for the employer to issue guidelines/codes of conduct for activities that are presumably not happening at the workplace?
Sure, I understand the appeal and the flexibility and having a shared space with friends. It's a neat tool for people like me who live abroad, far from their friends and families. I don't consider myself to be a privacy nuts (or otherwise I wouldn't have a facebook account to start with) and I agree with your post in this respect.
But:
As opposed to before when they were using public telephone networks, public electronic infrastructure, or business cards with personally identifying information?
Now, come on - who has access to your telephone conversations? Your email? Wiretapping requires a fair amount of technical expertise and/or legal clout. So either you are the victim of some kind of high-profile identity thief, or some big government agency. In both cases you're screwed anyways, I'd say.
Facebook, on the other hand, by default lets anyone in your network have access to your pictures, your public (wall) discussions with all your other friends, and (the thing which freaks me out most), your complete friends list (which, apparently, cannot be hidden from the people in your network?).
Of course, people on your network are all supposed to be your friends. But what tells me that this girl that added me in her network yesterday, and that I vaguely know from one course back in college, is really her? It's not on the phone, so I can't rely on her voice to identify her. She's not using the college's email account (which I can fairly reasonably assume to be held by her and her only). In short, there is no way to make sure she really is who she claims to be. Sure, it sounds far-fetched - but I would say it is comparatively much easier to access someone's Facebook profile by posing as an old friend of his/her, than to wiretap that person's phone conversations and/or emails. It can also potentially tell you much more.
Also, my (limited) experience with Facebook tells me that people trust absolutely anyone that asks to be their friend (I suspect it is because they want to have that ever-impressive list of 150+ "friends"), keep their entire profile public, and write very personal things on other people's walls, on which they have no control at all. I'm wondering how many of them will come to regret it later on, when an ex-"friend" of theirs proves to be a stalker, or for some reason decides that he/she has an axe to grind and gets him fired from his company by using these party pics from 5 years ago.
... until they have to send their first resumé and cover letter :)
:)
On a more serious note, I have just been sucked into the wonderful/scary world of Facebook, and I must say, wow. I knew people liked to reinvent the wheel all the time, but what's with this new thing of "writing" on each other's "wall" instead of just sending emails? What was wrong with emails in the first place? I mean, I can see the attraction of writing fun things on these "walls", but many go much beyond that and use it to organize meetings, leave their phone numbers, addresses, and whereabouts for the next 3 weeks, for the recipient, but also everyone else to see.
So either this generation does not realize what it's doing (basically posting their contact details while broadcasting their private lives on teh internets), or it doesn't care at all about that thing called privacy.
I haven't even reached 30, and I already feel like I'm getting old
They also have to maintain a near 100% compatibility with Vista and/or XP.
But if they do that, they'll end up with tons of legacy code, just like now, and nothing ever gets solved.
And to they really have to do it? They could (and should, in my opinion) do what Apple did from the OS9-to-OSX transition: build an abstraction layer similar to the Classic environment, that loads only when needed, is sandboxed, and runs things the old fashioned way.
But this takes the balls to jump into the "there be dragons" territory of totally new code and new ways of doing things, and also to take the risk to piss off developers and consumers if (or rather when) anything goes wrong. If Apple could, there is no reason, *in theory*, that MS couldn't, although Apple had it easier since they have a much smaller customer base, it was easier to determine what they COULD NOT afford to break, and what could be jettisoned with the old code.
I think Vista might be the last time that software companies will even bother to rewrite software for a new Windows. By the time 7 comes, Linux and Mac will have a significant part of the market share (I would guess at least 15-20%).
I think you're being somewhat optimistic. OSX's share on the market is only proportional to the number of Macs sold. They are on the rise but are still ridiculously small in comparison to the number of PCs sold. I wish Apple started competing directly with Microsoft and sell OSX for at least some PC boxes, but it apparently won't happen too soon. As for Linux, well, I say, "wait and see", as we've seen the "year of Linux on the desktop" meme come and go, far too often by now.
Also don't underestimate the sheer power of... inertia. Maybe 90% of the software out there is Windows-only, most developers & software companies have most likely never coded for any other platform, and for as long as the current XP and Vista boxes survive, Windows will still be largest platform out there.
Also, most people and organizations seem to be happy with Windows.
The Slashdot blurb is not very accurate. Makes it sound like the gamblers wouldn't notice the fault. Instead, the machine credited the players $10 each time $1 was inserted, according TFA. So the gamblers can't claim they didn't know the machine was faulty.
Still, I think it's the responsibility of the casino to ensure the machines are working correctly. This is just like having an ATM spewing $100 bills at random, and expecting people to not take the money.
I also think the casino is also doing a very bad, very dumb move by publicizing the issue. They lost close to 500,000 (small change for a casino) and want it back. But now the press is all over how Caesars Indiana is considering suing its patrons because their own machines failed - definetely high potential for PR damage.
(Once, I put 1.5 euros in an automatic vending machine. The machine gave me my coffee, and returned 2 euros, which I obviously kept. Should the owner of the machine sue me?)