The "eurocrats" tend to be fairly reasonable compared to the "member-state-crats".
Besides this, the article is wrong, it is not the EU that is sending the probe, it is the ESA which is a separate entity and international organisation.
What phone did you use that had context sensitive voice control? I have not seen one yet. The only stuff I have seen is voice command like "call mom". If Siri tells you you have received a text with "your mom just texted you", you can reply with "call her". With "her" being interpreted based on the context.
I would say that it seems that Siri is just plain voice control with wolfram alpha searches and context sensitivity. In my humble opinion, the context sensitivity may actually make the voice control useful.
We had a large empire around in this region some one thousand years ago. They also had a "million" different languages, but they made two the lingua-franca. The Roman empire used Latin and Greek as the main tongues, despite every little province had different local languages.
I propose we standardize on English, French and German as official languages (since this is the only practical way to do it), people can keep on speaking whatever they want locally though.
Note, that I am not very positive about French, but political realities would mandate this. The other two comes naturally as for English it has the largest number of speakers in the EU, and German has the largest number of native speakers.
No, but you can pipeline it and have one baby per month if you wait one month between creating each baby. This gives you a throughput of one per month after the initial setup time.
I had one for a 17 inch MBP, but it really was too small for the Mac (it did fit in, but just barely and it was very cramped). I also tried to fit in a D7000 with a 18-105 lens. I cannot recommend you to do in the CompuDayPack for a MBP 17 with DSLR.
I sent the rucksack back to the seller and got a CompuRover AW as replacement. It is quite large, but will fit the D7000 and a 17 inch MBP fine. A warning though, the laptop compartment of the CompuRover is on the side (the Daypack has the opening on the top), meaning that if you forget to close it your laptop will fall out of the CompuRover. I ruined my screen this way and had to get a new laptop (though my employer paid for that), I can guarantee that I will never forget to close it again though. Even though this accident happened, I am in general very happy with the CompuRover AW and highly recommend it, unless you are a forgetful person that tend to forget closing zippers often. Honestly, I cannot say wether a 200 mm lens will fit as I don't have one, the pockets for storing lenses and cameras are 200 mm deep, so assuming it is a zoom lens, it will probably be OK. Whether the camera fits depends on the model, so I highly recommend that you try it out (if you can only find one online, you can always return the backpack if it doesn't fit).
OK, that sounds great! The problem is that Apple has denied that it is possible to make a bootable DVD. Your post does make me calm down, I was actually planning on not upgrading due to the issues you mention.
The recovery partition (which I will never use for reinstall since it is on writable media), will it be a proper partition (so my partition tables gets messed up) or will it be a DMG on the normal OSX partition?
Another issue: Does it include Xcode? Xcode has been included in every OS X release ever. I could understand they want to charge for the IDE, but they should at least include an installer with all the headers and tools (git, svn, clang, gcc, make, xcodebuild et.c.) with the OS. This is after all fundamental infrastructure for the OS.
That is a good question, 440 commercial reactors in the world times 40 years / 5 = 3520 years between incidents. Though, the reactors failing have not been of modern design. I would not be surprised if a modern design would be 10 times safer than the older reactors that have failed.
Note that TMI was not a full meltdown, so I am not sure we should include it in the equation.
Assuming 4000 deaths from Chernobyl over a 45 year period that WHO did, you get 0.037 deaths per TWh of nuclear power. Coal in the US scores 15 deaths per TWh.
Even if you come up with an absolute ridiculous number like 400 000 killed by Chernobyl, you only get 3.7 deaths per TWh of nuclear power.
Yes, Chernobyl led to around 4000 cases of thyroid cancer in children, however since that cancer type is easy to treat all but 9 of them recovered. Ironically, the treatment is based on radioisotopes only produced in nuclear reactors.
The "original" icon in turn was a ripoff of the Mac OS WiFi and iSync menu bar icons. If I would design an icon for wireless syncing, a combination of these sounds pretty natural, and Apple would probably have arrived at the same icon even without having seen the other application.
The idea was to replace it with renewables... however, the hippies thought that technology would develop faster than it did. So, when the plants would actually be shutdown, renewables where not up to the task.
The current government where pragmatic and cancelled the closure dates and also updated the law so new reactors could be installed under the condition that they replaced an old one that was decommissioned.
And by the way, renewables are still not up to the task.
Maybe, you need to compare the alternatives though. IF the German government have a realistic idea of how to compensate for the loss of 30% of their energy production, by all means go ahead. Otherwise, Germany will need to import and compensate for the loss by laying more cables to Sweden, Poland and France.
Sweden can only sell energy during the summer, and then 30 % will be from nuclear, France will sell energy but something like 80-90% will be from nuclear and Poland will happily deliver coal based power. It may be possible to build gas powered plants as well, but then Germany would have to rely even more on Russia. This would naturally not be good for Europe, whose large scale goal should be independence from foreign (non European) energy.
It is doable to guarantee base load power supply in Germany and dismantle all the nuclear power plants, but the compensation will most likely need to come from outside of Germany. In general you need about 1000 windmills per dismantled nuclear power plant. Each with a safety radius of 300 m (assuming 2x the height of the windmill for a 2 MW plant with 30-40% average efficiency). The problem with replacing with wind is the following: in the case of no wind, no power will be produced (this happens, but most likely not covering entire Germany), in the case of to much wind (this happens, probably even covering all of Germany), the wind power plants must be stopped to prevent them from breaking apart.
Another way would be to increase the efficiency of coal plants. This may work for reducing CO2 if nuclear plants are still operational, but when the nuclear plants are turned off, it will not result in any CO2 reductions, since they need to produce more power. Germany will thus not be able to reach its stated goals of CO2 reduction.
As said, they better have a very good plan for this!
They are members of the EEA, which means that they are obliged to implement all Union directives regarding the single market. A perfect arrangement: Let's join the Union, but only so we need to implement the laws, we actually don't want to have a say in how these laws are implemented, so we can claim that we are outside the Union.
Luckily it wasn't well received, however, this is not a unique idea. In the Netherlands the debt collection agency (which also collects fines) already send out very brightly coloured envelopes.
I know for a fact that iTunes music store is available in Finland. Not sure you can get anything else, but the FIFPI has apparently no clue. The development of online markets in the EU is a complete stone age thanks to the likes of the FIFPI who continuously oppose the establishment of the digital single market. Usually the arguments is that it is bad for diversity, something that I don't understand... how is it diverse if it is impossible for me to download French or Italian music just because the record companies refuse to sign a EU wide license.
As soon as the Commission manages to set up the rules for the digital single market, that they have promised to establish within the current term, the European digital market will bloom.
Hmm... I've heard both Brits and Dutch complaining that they implement all the directives but everyone else ignores them. So apparently at least three states implement all the directives and everyone else (including the other two states that implement them), refuse to implement directives.
Logical? Hardly... but neither is any other myth about the Union.
Of-course, directives should be implemented! The main problem now is the lack of reporting of Union centric news, it would be good if normal newspapers would have a couple of pages of Union centric news since the general population is unlikely to read the EU Observer or similar publication.
No, this illustrates what happens when a state like Hungary who is at the moment being run into the drain by an enormously authoritarian majority government (the last govt was really crappy as well, but more in terms of being corrupted), runs the Council. In fact, I would not be surprised if this was something that the Hungarian presidency have not synchronized with the rest of the trio.
The problem with the ideas presented is that, 1. it has no support in the Council (just Hungary saying they will try to push this through), 2. it has no support in the Parliament, and 3. it has most likely no support in the Commission in the form that Hungary is trying to push this, and 4. recent verdicts from the EU court that has struck down court mandated blocking.
This clearly demonstrates how dangerous it is to have the member states themselves being in charge of the Council, where a proper elected and directly accountable senate would have been to be preferred instead of a Council formed by the member states' governments. That the Union exist is something necessary and also the centralization of power to Brussels in some areas since the Chinese will otherwise carry out a divide and conquer policy to crush Europe when they have the ability to do so.
I said "most" as a disclaimer, I have only written desktop GL code and not looked into ES.
I just checked, and according to Khronos, OpenGL ES is a subset of desktop OpenGL, thus all ES code should run in a normal GL implementation.
Regarding your A) reply, while a system may be a de-facto standard, it does not make it standardised. Standardisation normally means that there are multiple implementations from different vendors. This is the case with OpenGL, but I don't see any D3D libraries floating around for OS X, Linux, BSD or Solaris. D3D is no more a standard than Windows is. B) as clarified, ES is a subset of normal GL. C) COM APIs while making language bindings possible certainly does not enable portability to other platforms.
Further, even if there where some minute non subset part of ES despite what Khronos writes, this will be minor and can be solved with a few #ifdefs. If I want to port a D3D app, I either have to re-implement everything in OpenGL, or implement the D3D API (using OpenGL). This is several tens of thousands of lines of code most likely compared to potentially a few hundred lines of #ifdefed code.
Most of ES is available in the "normal" OpenGL. Further, even if D3D had a cleaner API (my impression is that it is C++ based), it fails in the following areas: not standardised, not portable, C++ API (making language bindings can be a big mess).
Until MS fixes those three MAJOR issues, OpenGL will be lightyears better for any project, independent on how much nicer the API is.
The only non-portable APIs that I can stomach are GUI APIs, as an application written with proper MVC can be easily ported anyway (i.e. keep the model part platform independent).
Confessions without proof are not valid in Sweden (you cannot for example do plea-bargains in the Swedish court system). It is well known that people make up confessions; for example the Swedish police has received the confessions of over a 100 people, who all confessed murdering the former prime minister Olof Palme. Confessions are only counted (but only marginally so) if there is also technical evidence and / or witnesses.
The point is, if they trace the guys IP, it is doubtful that the Swedish court would grant a request to reveal the identity behind the IP address, you need to have at-least some bit of concrete technical evidence (e.g. logs identifying him in a bit-torrent swarm) to do that.
No one stole anything through pirate bay, they may have committed copyright infringement, but that is an entirely different thing.
As a side note, the postal office enables people to send drugs and bombs to each other, they are still not held accountable, despite they knowingly do this. The "enabling" part is a faulty argument. However, they did definitely knowingly host links to the files, and did not act when made aware of such files; that is a proper argument that you can build on and probably argue in a court.
Google requiring log-in = people start using bing (have they renamed it again yet?) / yahoo / altavista. Really... this is what would happen.
I have seen plenty of people who, when encountering a log-in / register window, they just close the web-page and do something else. Come, to think of it, all sites requiring log-ins, would be a huge boost for productivity.
Slashdot Mirror
The "eurocrats" tend to be fairly reasonable compared to the "member-state-crats".
Besides this, the article is wrong, it is not the EU that is sending the probe, it is the ESA which is a separate entity and international organisation.
What phone did you use that had context sensitive voice control? I have not seen one yet. The only stuff I have seen is voice command like "call mom". If Siri tells you you have received a text with "your mom just texted you", you can reply with "call her". With "her" being interpreted based on the context.
I would say that it seems that Siri is just plain voice control with wolfram alpha searches and context sensitivity. In my humble opinion, the context sensitivity may actually make the voice control useful.
We had a large empire around in this region some one thousand years ago. They also had a "million" different languages, but they made two the lingua-franca. The Roman empire used Latin and Greek as the main tongues, despite every little province had different local languages.
I propose we standardize on English, French and German as official languages (since this is the only practical way to do it), people can keep on speaking whatever they want locally though.
Note, that I am not very positive about French, but political realities would mandate this. The other two comes naturally as for English it has the largest number of speakers in the EU, and German has the largest number of native speakers.
And no, I am not native in any of the three.
No, but you can pipeline it and have one baby per month if you wait one month between creating each baby. This gives you a throughput of one per month after the initial setup time.
I had one for a 17 inch MBP, but it really was too small for the Mac (it did fit in, but just barely and it was very cramped). I also tried to fit in a D7000 with a 18-105 lens. I cannot recommend you to do in the CompuDayPack for a MBP 17 with DSLR.
I sent the rucksack back to the seller and got a CompuRover AW as replacement. It is quite large, but will fit the D7000 and a 17 inch MBP fine. A warning though, the laptop compartment of the CompuRover is on the side (the Daypack has the opening on the top), meaning that if you forget to close it your laptop will fall out of the CompuRover. I ruined my screen this way and had to get a new laptop (though my employer paid for that), I can guarantee that I will never forget to close it again though. Even though this accident happened, I am in general very happy with the CompuRover AW and highly recommend it, unless you are a forgetful person that tend to forget closing zippers often. Honestly, I cannot say wether a 200 mm lens will fit as I don't have one, the pockets for storing lenses and cameras are 200 mm deep, so assuming it is a zoom lens, it will probably be OK. Whether the camera fits depends on the model, so I highly recommend that you try it out (if you can only find one online, you can always return the backpack if it doesn't fit).
OK, that sounds great! The problem is that Apple has denied that it is possible to make a bootable DVD. Your post does make me calm down, I was actually planning on not upgrading due to the issues you mention.
The recovery partition (which I will never use for reinstall since it is on writable media), will it be a proper partition (so my partition tables gets messed up) or will it be a DMG on the normal OSX partition?
Another issue: Does it include Xcode? Xcode has been included in every OS X release ever. I could understand they want to charge for the IDE, but they should at least include an installer with all the headers and tools (git, svn, clang, gcc, make, xcodebuild et.c.) with the OS. This is after all fundamental infrastructure for the OS.
That is a good question, 440 commercial reactors in the world times 40 years / 5 = 3520 years between incidents. Though, the reactors failing have not been of modern design. I would not be surprised if a modern design would be 10 times safer than the older reactors that have failed.
Note that TMI was not a full meltdown, so I am not sure we should include it in the equation.
Assuming 4000 deaths from Chernobyl over a 45 year period that WHO did, you get 0.037 deaths per TWh of nuclear power.
Coal in the US scores 15 deaths per TWh.
Even if you come up with an absolute ridiculous number like 400 000 killed by Chernobyl, you only get 3.7 deaths per TWh of nuclear power.
[Source: http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html%5D
Yes, Chernobyl led to around 4000 cases of thyroid cancer in children, however since that cancer type is easy to treat all but 9 of them recovered. Ironically, the treatment is based on radioisotopes only produced in nuclear reactors.
The "original" icon in turn was a ripoff of the Mac OS WiFi and iSync menu bar icons. If I would design an icon for wireless syncing, a combination of these sounds pretty natural, and Apple would probably have arrived at the same icon even without having seen the other application.
By coal, nuclear power plants in France or gas from Russia?
The idea was to replace it with renewables... however, the hippies thought that technology would develop faster than it did. So, when the plants would actually be shutdown, renewables where not up to the task.
The current government where pragmatic and cancelled the closure dates and also updated the law so new reactors could be installed under the condition that they replaced an old one that was decommissioned.
And by the way, renewables are still not up to the task.
Maybe, you need to compare the alternatives though. IF the German government have a realistic idea of how to compensate for the loss of 30% of their energy production, by all means go ahead. Otherwise, Germany will need to import and compensate for the loss by laying more cables to Sweden, Poland and France.
Sweden can only sell energy during the summer, and then 30 % will be from nuclear, France will sell energy but something like 80-90% will be from nuclear and Poland will happily deliver coal based power. It may be possible to build gas powered plants as well, but then Germany would have to rely even more on Russia. This would naturally not be good for Europe, whose large scale goal should be independence from foreign (non European) energy.
It is doable to guarantee base load power supply in Germany and dismantle all the nuclear power plants, but the compensation will most likely need to come from outside of Germany. In general you need about 1000 windmills per dismantled nuclear power plant. Each with a safety radius of 300 m (assuming 2x the height of the windmill for a 2 MW plant with 30-40% average efficiency). The problem with replacing with wind is the following: in the case of no wind, no power will be produced (this happens, but most likely not covering entire Germany), in the case of to much wind (this happens, probably even covering all of Germany), the wind power plants must be stopped to prevent them from breaking apart.
Another way would be to increase the efficiency of coal plants. This may work for reducing CO2 if nuclear plants are still operational, but when the nuclear plants are turned off, it will not result in any CO2 reductions, since they need to produce more power. Germany will thus not be able to reach its stated goals of CO2 reduction.
As said, they better have a very good plan for this!
They are members of the EEA, which means that they are obliged to implement all Union directives regarding the single market. A perfect arrangement: Let's join the Union, but only so we need to implement the laws, we actually don't want to have a say in how these laws are implemented, so we can claim that we are outside the Union.
Luckily it wasn't well received, however, this is not a unique idea. In the Netherlands the debt collection agency (which also collects fines) already send out very brightly coloured envelopes.
Most likely not as Finnish courts have to abide by rulings from the Union courts: http://euobserver.com/893/32190
I know for a fact that iTunes music store is available in Finland. Not sure you can get anything else, but the FIFPI has apparently no clue. The development of online markets in the EU is a complete stone age thanks to the likes of the FIFPI who continuously oppose the establishment of the digital single market. Usually the arguments is that it is bad for diversity, something that I don't understand... how is it diverse if it is impossible for me to download French or Italian music just because the record companies refuse to sign a EU wide license.
As soon as the Commission manages to set up the rules for the digital single market, that they have promised to establish within the current term, the European digital market will bloom.
Did you consider the LEONx cores? They are available as GPL code and are a great deal simpler and more FPGAable then the UltraSPARC II.
Hmm... I've heard both Brits and Dutch complaining that they implement all the directives but everyone else ignores them. So apparently at least three states implement all the directives and everyone else (including the other two states that implement them), refuse to implement directives.
Logical? Hardly... but neither is any other myth about the Union.
Of-course, directives should be implemented! The main problem now is the lack of reporting of Union centric news, it would be good if normal newspapers would have a couple of pages of Union centric news since the general population is unlikely to read the EU Observer or similar publication.
No, this illustrates what happens when a state like Hungary who is at the moment being run into the drain by an enormously authoritarian majority government (the last govt was really crappy as well, but more in terms of being corrupted), runs the Council. In fact, I would not be surprised if this was something that the Hungarian presidency have not synchronized with the rest of the trio.
The problem with the ideas presented is that, 1. it has no support in the Council (just Hungary saying they will try to push this through), 2. it has no support in the Parliament, and 3. it has most likely no support in the Commission in the form that Hungary is trying to push this, and 4. recent verdicts from the EU court that has struck down court mandated blocking.
This clearly demonstrates how dangerous it is to have the member states themselves being in charge of the Council, where a proper elected and directly accountable senate would have been to be preferred instead of a Council formed by the member states' governments. That the Union exist is something necessary and also the centralization of power to Brussels in some areas since the Chinese will otherwise carry out a divide and conquer policy to crush Europe when they have the ability to do so.
I said "most" as a disclaimer, I have only written desktop GL code and not looked into ES.
I just checked, and according to Khronos, OpenGL ES is a subset of desktop OpenGL, thus all ES code should run in a normal GL implementation.
Regarding your A) reply, while a system may be a de-facto standard, it does not make it standardised. Standardisation normally means that there are multiple implementations from different vendors. This is the case with OpenGL, but I don't see any D3D libraries floating around for OS X, Linux, BSD or Solaris. D3D is no more a standard than Windows is. B) as clarified, ES is a subset of normal GL. C) COM APIs while making language bindings possible certainly does not enable portability to other platforms.
Further, even if there where some minute non subset part of ES despite what Khronos writes, this will be minor and can be solved with a few #ifdefs. If I want to port a D3D app, I either have to re-implement everything in OpenGL, or implement the D3D API (using OpenGL). This is several tens of thousands of lines of code most likely compared to potentially a few hundred lines of #ifdefed code.
So yeah... ES is a lot more portable.
Most of ES is available in the "normal" OpenGL. Further, even if D3D had a cleaner API (my impression is that it is C++ based), it fails in the following areas: not standardised, not portable, C++ API (making language bindings can be a big mess).
Until MS fixes those three MAJOR issues, OpenGL will be lightyears better for any project, independent on how much nicer the API is.
The only non-portable APIs that I can stomach are GUI APIs, as an application written with proper MVC can be easily ported anyway (i.e. keep the model part platform independent).
If you read what I said, you actually agree with me... ;)
Confessions without proof are not valid in Sweden (you cannot for example do plea-bargains in the Swedish court system). It is well known that people make up confessions; for example the Swedish police has received the confessions of over a 100 people, who all confessed murdering the former prime minister Olof Palme. Confessions are only counted (but only marginally so) if there is also technical evidence and / or witnesses.
The point is, if they trace the guys IP, it is doubtful that the Swedish court would grant a request to reveal the identity behind the IP address, you need to have at-least some bit of concrete technical evidence (e.g. logs identifying him in a bit-torrent swarm) to do that.
No one stole anything through pirate bay, they may have committed copyright infringement, but that is an entirely different thing.
As a side note, the postal office enables people to send drugs and bombs to each other, they are still not held accountable, despite they knowingly do this. The "enabling" part is a faulty argument. However, they did definitely knowingly host links to the files, and did not act when made aware of such files; that is a proper argument that you can build on and probably argue in a court.
Google requiring log-in = people start using bing (have they renamed it again yet?) / yahoo / altavista.
Really... this is what would happen.
I have seen plenty of people who, when encountering a log-in / register window, they just close the web-page and do something else. Come, to think of it, all sites requiring log-ins, would be a huge boost for productivity.