It's not all angry or insane, sometimes it's sent to us for no apparent reason.
Everything is done for a reason- in this case, it's probably to try and troll Slashdot staff, though some of the babbling nonsense may be spammers; they're known for taking text off the internet and using it. Now that you're posting the emails, expect the volume to skyrocket from the people who are purposefully sending the email to you.
I honestly don't find any values in these emails. They're either assholes or babbling idiots, neither of them interesting or funny.
Yup, videos of Jihadists killing American Soldiers can stay up. Videos recruiting terrorists can stay up.
It inflames and "reminds" the american public, particularly the youth. What better way to inspire a 18 year old kid to join the Marines, than to show him a video of a bunch of "towelheads" celebrating blowing up a humvee?
Also, those clips probably generate a ton of hits from both the fans and the haters, in terms of linkage, and comment activity- and thus ad revenue.
data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions,
Note the "OR". The magstripe card is storage. The -card- does logical, arithmetic, AND storage functions- it's an intelligent device.
Furthermore, they openly admit to trespassing both physically (at stations, offices, AND networks they knew were private.)
Frankly, I'm astounded they're not sitting in a jail cell right now. Chances are that right now the MBTA are going through CCTV footage looking for them trespassing, and once they've found some- they'll be arrested.
It's one thing to play with the cards (and ride the coat-tails of other researchers who published all of this 8 months ago). It's another to wander into offices and plug into internal networks you know you don't belong to (in fact, the very definition of trespassing in some states is "you're somewhere you know you don't belong.")
Altruism neither pays for the scientists' mortgages nor pays for all the equipment they use to develop their theories.
Linus never charged for, nor patented the Linux kernel. Seems to be doing rather well for himself. Furthermore, you don't understand how research at MIT works. You write a proposal, get grant money, and then find something worked. It's not like Dr. Joe Blo spends his own personal money to buy a microscope. Everything he or she buys comes from grant money, and most of that comes from taxpayer-supported government grants. There are some exceptions, but they're rare (Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one good example.)
I'm all for smacking down ridiculously-long copyrights, invalidating silly trademarks or getting rid of obvious patents (one-click shopping?), but this is the _exact_ thing that patents is supposed to support. These scientists (and by proxy, their granteurs (sp?)) took a gamble on developing a technology and they were successful.
You seem to have interpreted my post as a rant against the patent/IP system, and you've done a great job at stuffing words into my mouth. My point was simply that it would be nice if scientists for once recognized the needs of society and the planet, ahead of their own money-grubbing desires. Science used to be about discovery- now it's all about profit (get enough money for the next project) and vanity (getting published as much as you can in the best journals.)
According to Reuters, the discovery of the a new catalyst for separating hydrogen+oxygen from water requires only 10% of the electricity of current methods
Great. So when do we see it? If it's anything like almost every other "alternative energy" advancement, it will either get snapped up by an oil-company owned holding company, or strangled by licensing fees/requirements/exclusivity deals.
Seriously- let's take a look back. Have there been any major advancements in solar energy technology in the last fifty or so years?
MIT = MIT Technology Licensing Office, and I used to work there. Six figure checks to professors were not uncommon...and it was the only part of the university that turned a profit.
It'd be really refreshing to see scientists develop a bit of altruism. It's the ultimate Open Source, and they'd be guaranteed decades, if not centuries, of good will and fame. That's worth a lot more than a few *possible* royalty checks.
So we shouldn't call out abuses of human rights because the people we are calling out are "especially sensitive to criticism"?
No. My point was that if you're hoping to boycott to affect change, it won't work. TV networks won't do it, IOC will never cave (they consider themselves gods and above everyone else), and the Chinese government will just engage in ad hominem. They'll find a sympathetic ear with countries not friendly to the US, who will accuse the US of further meddling, and that will spill over into countries sympathetic to said enemy states.
Look at the big picture, here. China is one of the world's most populous countries. Pissing them off sufficiently has a lot greater stakes than just human rights abuses. They're developing a massive inferiority complex- not that it isn't deserved, but...we're talking World-scale war if they feel sufficiently alienated, pissed off, and robbed of trade (for political reasons.)
The Chinese government would hop to right quick if their biggest PR stunt since the rise of Communism was going to get no coverage in the foreign media.
Not in the way you'd think. The massive attention they've been getting has apparently resulted in a surge of patriotism and xenophobia. We're seen as goodie-twoshoe, meddling complainers by many Chinese...and they're especially sensitive to criticism.
The Chinese government (and IOC) response would be to accuse said agencies of "politicizing The Games". Media would never do it anyway- the purpose of TV is to provide programming to attract eyeballs for advertisers. Advertisers have already signed contracts and paid money for ad space- and networks have already signed contracts and paid money for broadcast rights. A boycott would might not bankrupt them, but it would be an enormous financial blow.
Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.
an annoyance (such as spewing diagnostic messages under certain circumstances on certain hardware).
A system which spews diagnostic messages will fill up/var, and is far more than an "annoyance". If Debian Stable had such a bug, it would be inexcusable. People rely on it to run critical production systems.
How often do we complain about vendors shipping buggy software? And look at the graph for bugs for stable- in the last few months, it's skyrocketed!
Ubuntu has stuck to its schedules by releasing with plenty of release-critical bugs still in the air, and fixing most of them in post-release updates.
Yeah, I still shudder from the utter mess of Gutsy upgrades from Feisty. Not a single Ubuntu user in the office had a clean upgrade...
I've noticed that Debian, Mozilla, and Gentoo all have a nasty habit of saying, "that's not a bug!", and then when finally convinced:
"Well. We can't look at it for THIS release." And then your perfectly valid bug is shuffled off into a nice category where it won't upset their bug count for the release effort.
Note that the total number of bugs in Lenny is actually around 1800- only by a pretty fine comb have they been able to claim "only" 360 bugs.
The biggest barrier to pure electrics right now is the time it takes to charge a vehicle.
Wrong. Where did you get this idea from?
The top problems are a)energy density, and b)electric grid. A: availability and expense of lithium-based rechargeable batteries (and patent/licensing restrictions on NiMH). B: the grid can't support the load of everyone coming home at 6pm and plugging in their car to charge. 20 gallons of gas contains 34KWhr, of which your average car can extract 1/4 of that for motive force...so 8.5KWHr. Let's say the average commute is 60 miles both ways for a suburbanite- about 2 gallons of gas, or 17KWHr. Let's guess that you need to do this in 12 hours. That translates to more than 1.4KW (there are losses at the charger and in the batteries- neither is 100% efficient) all night, and I'm assuming 100% efficiency on the part of the electric car.
Super Capacitors are supposed to change that by allowing charge times equivalent or less than the time spent at the petrol pump.
Ultra Capacitors (get it right) don't have the necessary energy density, which is why they're used to provide short-term high power and to 'soak' regenerative braking currents, usually in electric city busses. They also present some nasty safety problems because of their nearly unlimited discharge currents.
Furthermore, Lithium rechargeable batteries have made leaps and bounds with regards to charge rate- a pack large enough for a small car can now be charged faster than even your average electric dryer outlet can 'feed' it. People will need to have very heavy-duty wiring installed by an electrician, and if there's no electric stove or other large-current device, there may be quite a bit of upgrade work.
Oh, and GM is looking to solve a problem they already solved. It's called magnecharge. It's completely safe, and what was used in the EV-1 and several other electric vehicles (I think EV RAV4's used them too, not sure.)
In Enfield they have a lego-brick knight statue commemorating their ISO 9001 certification. Not so sure how many toy factories hit that mark.
ISO 9001 is bullshit- it's not a mark of quality. It's simply a process that verifies that you write down what you do, and you stick to it. You could turn out complete crap, and still be ISO-9001 certified.
Seriously, talk to someone who's done the whole process. It's virtually worthless for a toy company; it's only really important for suppliers to other companies making stuff, that need a consistent product from said supplier.
But they aren't wrong to do that, exactly -- they have limited resources, and as a citizen I don't necessarily want them wasting their time on a case with no witnesses, no suspect, and no leads. A 5000 dollar property crime doesn't exactly warrant bringing in the CSI team to look for DNA. If it did, they would need a hell of a lot of CSI teams.
The reason people commit $5000 property crimes is specifically because the police no longer bother to investigate.
If the police thoroughly investigated and had a high conviction ratio on even a relatively small number of crimes, people would be less likely to try it.
Furthermore, we're always preached to about how there are "gateway" drugs (I won't dispute or agree), but nobody ever seems to talk about how important it is to investigate and prosecute "gateway" crimes like B&E.
This is an uber product. The ability to generate electricity up to 40 times the amount of existing solar while allowing as low as 10% of the light to enter?
It's uber bullshit, given that commercially available panels are anywhere from 10-20% efficient; that efficiency calculation is based upon the maximum amount of solar radiation hitting a certain area of the earth, and you can't change it. The maximum improvement would therefore be 5-10x.
Also- as other posters have pointed out, there have been several advancements in solar panel technology ranging from efficiency improvements to cheaper production methods (aka the whole "printable" segment.) Not a single bit of it has yet to enter the market.
It's probably some combination of patent acquisitions (oil companies own a large number of solar technology companies. BP Solar is one good example) and outright greed on the part of inventors (ie, asking for royalties so expensive commercialization is impossible.)
It'd be really nice if one of these scientists recognized how desperately we need their work, and released it publicly. The fame it would generate would assure fortune alone...
Now, what about the hidden speed cap? They "upgraded" everyone to "1 Mbit", but you only get that for a few minutes before the connection is horribly, horribly degraded.
When the hidden cap hits, ping times go from 30ms to sometimes 1000ms, 3000ms, or more, and it doesn't go away until you almost completely stop doing ANY uploading.
It's doomed. Why? People selfishly look for their representative to represent them best personally, when people instead should have the maturity to look for someone who represents them collectively.
A good representative is not someone who conducts polling every time something comes up. A good representative makes as sound an educated a decision as he or she can, weighing the good of ALL the people they represent against the good of the commonwealth, against the good of the planet...and more importantly, they should not make a career of it.
I don't see the voting populous having that kind of foresight. I'd be a happier if representation was randomly assigned amongst people.
that's enough circumstantial evidence to arrest and probably convict somebody in any state in this country.
If you want to see a great example of circumstantial evidence used to do just that in a horrible way, look no further than The Innocent Man. Half the evidence was based on jailhouse snitches, and it was corroborated by laughably unscientific "hair analysis".
Or, if you prefer, look at the huge number of supposed murderers and rapists that have sat in jail for decades, whom we're freeing left and right when someone like The Innocence Project finally gets around to paying for DNA analysis.
Not very surprisingly, the vast majority of these falsely imprisoned people are a)black and b)male.
The subject says it all. For years, we've seen stories like this. Things aren't getting better.
What can readers do about it? What are you going to do about it?
Also the reason it uses GSM is that the team have tried as far as possible to use OPEN HARDWARE ie fully documented and not lumbered with proprietary closed-source drivers.
The CPU docs are available only after registering and "qualifying". They've (possibly illegally) hosted a copy of the PDF publicly.
The modem has proprietary extensions, and they illegally posted a leaked NDA-only doc with the proprietary stuff documented. Posting the NDA-only doc means they'll have a tough time convincing anyone their driver isn't tainted.
The WiFi chipset (Atheros) has no documentation available.
The graphics chipset is NDA-docs only.
The LCD has no documentation available.
Now. What was that about this being an "open" cell phone design?
I think it's a great idea, but the current revision sucks. They have little software available for it, it's a huge pricetag, and for chrissakes, it's not even EDGE- only basic GPRS, which means you'll get at most about 10KB/sec line-speed.
The French government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favor of French companies (especially in cases where the opposition are American or British companies), but this is disturbing even by their standards.
Problems stem from some companies demanding that their merchandise (even legal merchandise) not be displayed nor sold as it is a violation of their 'property.'
Slashdot Mirror
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/questions/2005-01/2996.html In short, that email was sent to a bunch of techie related lists. If you had bothered to search on a phrase in the email, you would have found it too.
It's not all angry or insane, sometimes it's sent to us for no apparent reason.
Everything is done for a reason- in this case, it's probably to try and troll Slashdot staff, though some of the babbling nonsense may be spammers; they're known for taking text off the internet and using it. Now that you're posting the emails, expect the volume to skyrocket from the people who are purposefully sending the email to you.
I honestly don't find any values in these emails. They're either assholes or babbling idiots, neither of them interesting or funny.
Yup, videos of Jihadists killing American Soldiers can stay up. Videos recruiting terrorists can stay up.
It inflames and "reminds" the american public, particularly the youth. What better way to inspire a 18 year old kid to join the Marines, than to show him a video of a bunch of "towelheads" celebrating blowing up a humvee?
Also, those clips probably generate a ton of hits from both the fans and the haters, in terms of linkage, and comment activity- and thus ad revenue.
data processing device performing logical, arithmetic, or storage functions,
Note the "OR". The magstripe card is storage. The -card- does logical, arithmetic, AND storage functions- it's an intelligent device.
Furthermore, they openly admit to trespassing both physically (at stations, offices, AND networks they knew were private.)
Frankly, I'm astounded they're not sitting in a jail cell right now. Chances are that right now the MBTA are going through CCTV footage looking for them trespassing, and once they've found some- they'll be arrested.
It's one thing to play with the cards (and ride the coat-tails of other researchers who published all of this 8 months ago). It's another to wander into offices and plug into internal networks you know you don't belong to (in fact, the very definition of trespassing in some states is "you're somewhere you know you don't belong.")
Altruism neither pays for the scientists' mortgages nor pays for all the equipment they use to develop their theories.
Linus never charged for, nor patented the Linux kernel. Seems to be doing rather well for himself. Furthermore, you don't understand how research at MIT works. You write a proposal, get grant money, and then find something worked. It's not like Dr. Joe Blo spends his own personal money to buy a microscope. Everything he or she buys comes from grant money, and most of that comes from taxpayer-supported government grants. There are some exceptions, but they're rare (Howard Hughes Medical Institute is one good example.)
I'm all for smacking down ridiculously-long copyrights, invalidating silly trademarks or getting rid of obvious patents (one-click shopping?), but this is the _exact_ thing that patents is supposed to support. These scientists (and by proxy, their granteurs (sp?)) took a gamble on developing a technology and they were successful.
You seem to have interpreted my post as a rant against the patent/IP system, and you've done a great job at stuffing words into my mouth. My point was simply that it would be nice if scientists for once recognized the needs of society and the planet, ahead of their own money-grubbing desires. Science used to be about discovery- now it's all about profit (get enough money for the next project) and vanity (getting published as much as you can in the best journals.)
Criminal, residency & credit checks came back clean.
Why the hell do they need to do a credit check?
According to Reuters, the discovery of the a new catalyst for separating hydrogen+oxygen from water requires only 10% of the electricity of current methods
Great. So when do we see it? If it's anything like almost every other "alternative energy" advancement, it will either get snapped up by an oil-company owned holding company, or strangled by licensing fees/requirements/exclusivity deals.
Seriously- let's take a look back. Have there been any major advancements in solar energy technology in the last fifty or so years?
MIT = MIT Technology Licensing Office, and I used to work there. Six figure checks to professors were not uncommon...and it was the only part of the university that turned a profit.
It'd be really refreshing to see scientists develop a bit of altruism. It's the ultimate Open Source, and they'd be guaranteed decades, if not centuries, of good will and fame. That's worth a lot more than a few *possible* royalty checks.
So we shouldn't call out abuses of human rights because the people we are calling out are "especially sensitive to criticism"?
No. My point was that if you're hoping to boycott to affect change, it won't work. TV networks won't do it, IOC will never cave (they consider themselves gods and above everyone else), and the Chinese government will just engage in ad hominem. They'll find a sympathetic ear with countries not friendly to the US, who will accuse the US of further meddling, and that will spill over into countries sympathetic to said enemy states.
Look at the big picture, here. China is one of the world's most populous countries. Pissing them off sufficiently has a lot greater stakes than just human rights abuses. They're developing a massive inferiority complex- not that it isn't deserved, but...we're talking World-scale war if they feel sufficiently alienated, pissed off, and robbed of trade (for political reasons.)
The Chinese government would hop to right quick if their biggest PR stunt since the rise of Communism was going to get no coverage in the foreign media.
Not in the way you'd think. The massive attention they've been getting has apparently resulted in a surge of patriotism and xenophobia. We're seen as goodie-twoshoe, meddling complainers by many Chinese...and they're especially sensitive to criticism.
The Chinese government (and IOC) response would be to accuse said agencies of "politicizing The Games". Media would never do it anyway- the purpose of TV is to provide programming to attract eyeballs for advertisers. Advertisers have already signed contracts and paid money for ad space- and networks have already signed contracts and paid money for broadcast rights. A boycott would might not bankrupt them, but it would be an enormous financial blow.
Manufacturing process is completely different; the release date will be in the last weeks of September
If so, then great! About 4-8 weeks too late for the back-to-school crowd.
Brilliant!
Don't mind the $2500 per-physical-machine-maximum-2-cpus price tag on the version which actually lets you do stuff, like manage the machines, migrate them, share storage, etc.
They just threw the playstation name around for publicity, I think they could have done better.
I have a feeling it's because a character in The Mission Song by John le Carre mentioned it as a use of Coltan.
The book is fiction, and concerns (peripherally) mining of Coltan and other ores.
an annoyance (such as spewing diagnostic messages under certain circumstances on certain hardware).
A system which spews diagnostic messages will fill up /var, and is far more than an "annoyance". If Debian Stable had such a bug, it would be inexcusable. People rely on it to run critical production systems.
How often do we complain about vendors shipping buggy software? And look at the graph for bugs for stable- in the last few months, it's skyrocketed!
Ubuntu has stuck to its schedules by releasing with plenty of release-critical bugs still in the air, and fixing most of them in post-release updates.
Yeah, I still shudder from the utter mess of Gutsy upgrades from Feisty. Not a single Ubuntu user in the office had a clean upgrade...
"Well. We can't look at it for THIS release." And then your perfectly valid bug is shuffled off into a nice category where it won't upset their bug count for the release effort.
Note that the total number of bugs in Lenny is actually around 1800- only by a pretty fine comb have they been able to claim "only" 360 bugs.
The biggest barrier to pure electrics right now is the time it takes to charge a vehicle.
Wrong. Where did you get this idea from?
The top problems are a)energy density, and b)electric grid. A: availability and expense of lithium-based rechargeable batteries (and patent/licensing restrictions on NiMH). B: the grid can't support the load of everyone coming home at 6pm and plugging in their car to charge. 20 gallons of gas contains 34KWhr, of which your average car can extract 1/4 of that for motive force...so 8.5KWHr. Let's say the average commute is 60 miles both ways for a suburbanite- about 2 gallons of gas, or 17KWHr. Let's guess that you need to do this in 12 hours. That translates to more than 1.4KW (there are losses at the charger and in the batteries- neither is 100% efficient) all night, and I'm assuming 100% efficiency on the part of the electric car.
Super Capacitors are supposed to change that by allowing charge times equivalent or less than the time spent at the petrol pump.
Ultra Capacitors (get it right) don't have the necessary energy density, which is why they're used to provide short-term high power and to 'soak' regenerative braking currents, usually in electric city busses. They also present some nasty safety problems because of their nearly unlimited discharge currents.
Furthermore, Lithium rechargeable batteries have made leaps and bounds with regards to charge rate- a pack large enough for a small car can now be charged faster than even your average electric dryer outlet can 'feed' it. People will need to have very heavy-duty wiring installed by an electrician, and if there's no electric stove or other large-current device, there may be quite a bit of upgrade work.
Oh, and GM is looking to solve a problem they already solved. It's called magnecharge. It's completely safe, and what was used in the EV-1 and several other electric vehicles (I think EV RAV4's used them too, not sure.)
In Enfield they have a lego-brick knight statue commemorating their ISO 9001 certification. Not so sure how many toy factories hit that mark.
ISO 9001 is bullshit- it's not a mark of quality. It's simply a process that verifies that you write down what you do, and you stick to it. You could turn out complete crap, and still be ISO-9001 certified.
Seriously, talk to someone who's done the whole process. It's virtually worthless for a toy company; it's only really important for suppliers to other companies making stuff, that need a consistent product from said supplier.
But they aren't wrong to do that, exactly -- they have limited resources, and as a citizen I don't necessarily want them wasting their time on a case with no witnesses, no suspect, and no leads. A 5000 dollar property crime doesn't exactly warrant bringing in the CSI team to look for DNA. If it did, they would need a hell of a lot of CSI teams.
The reason people commit $5000 property crimes is specifically because the police no longer bother to investigate.
If the police thoroughly investigated and had a high conviction ratio on even a relatively small number of crimes, people would be less likely to try it.
Furthermore, we're always preached to about how there are "gateway" drugs (I won't dispute or agree), but nobody ever seems to talk about how important it is to investigate and prosecute "gateway" crimes like B&E.
This is an uber product. The ability to generate electricity up to 40 times the amount of existing solar while allowing as low as 10% of the light to enter?
It's uber bullshit, given that commercially available panels are anywhere from 10-20% efficient; that efficiency calculation is based upon the maximum amount of solar radiation hitting a certain area of the earth, and you can't change it. The maximum improvement would therefore be 5-10x.
Also- as other posters have pointed out, there have been several advancements in solar panel technology ranging from efficiency improvements to cheaper production methods (aka the whole "printable" segment.) Not a single bit of it has yet to enter the market.
It's probably some combination of patent acquisitions (oil companies own a large number of solar technology companies. BP Solar is one good example) and outright greed on the part of inventors (ie, asking for royalties so expensive commercialization is impossible.)
It'd be really nice if one of these scientists recognized how desperately we need their work, and released it publicly. The fame it would generate would assure fortune alone...
Now, what about the hidden speed cap? They "upgraded" everyone to "1 Mbit", but you only get that for a few minutes before the connection is horribly, horribly degraded. When the hidden cap hits, ping times go from 30ms to sometimes 1000ms, 3000ms, or more, and it doesn't go away until you almost completely stop doing ANY uploading.
A good representative is not someone who conducts polling every time something comes up. A good representative makes as sound an educated a decision as he or she can, weighing the good of ALL the people they represent against the good of the commonwealth, against the good of the planet...and more importantly, they should not make a career of it.
I don't see the voting populous having that kind of foresight. I'd be a happier if representation was randomly assigned amongst people.
that's enough circumstantial evidence to arrest and probably convict somebody in any state in this country.
If you want to see a great example of circumstantial evidence used to do just that in a horrible way, look no further than The Innocent Man. Half the evidence was based on jailhouse snitches, and it was corroborated by laughably unscientific "hair analysis".
Or, if you prefer, look at the huge number of supposed murderers and rapists that have sat in jail for decades, whom we're freeing left and right when someone like The Innocence Project finally gets around to paying for DNA analysis.
Not very surprisingly, the vast majority of these falsely imprisoned people are a)black and b)male.
The subject says it all. For years, we've seen stories like this. Things aren't getting better. What can readers do about it? What are you going to do about it?
Also the reason it uses GSM is that the team have tried as far as possible to use OPEN HARDWARE ie fully documented and not lumbered with proprietary closed-source drivers.
Too bad they did a shit job.
Now. What was that about this being an "open" cell phone design?
I think it's a great idea, but the current revision sucks. They have little software available for it, it's a huge pricetag, and for chrissakes, it's not even EDGE- only basic GPRS, which means you'll get at most about 10KB/sec line-speed.
The French government and courts have a long history of issuing prejudiced laws and decisions in favor of French companies (especially in cases where the opposition are American or British companies), but this is disturbing even by their standards.
As opposed to how the US does things? C'mon.
Problems stem from some companies demanding that their merchandise (even legal merchandise) not be displayed nor sold as it is a violation of their 'property.'
Do the French have some sort of equivalent to the first sale doctrine ruling?