1.) Give every student a gun. In fact, make guns mandatory.
2.) Make it a rule that anyone firing a gun under any circumstances is to be shot immediately.
3.) The problem solves itself. Make sure to be far away when it does.
Well, he does have one point - Norway can't lobby the EP. At least not any more than groups like the FFII. Then again, the FFII has been quite successful, so Norway definitely has something to work with, despite not being a member of the EU.
I think you fear your fate too much. At least here, I'd be cleared eventually, and the mark removed. At worst, I'd have to move town. Quite likely, my name would be protected from publishing until the case had concluded (that is standard procedure in these cased). Of course, some wacko might still pin my picture to every available wall, but what's to prevent that from happening in any case?
Where do you live? Over here in Germany it's similar, but that doesn't stop BILD (Europe's biggest tabloid) from "accidentally" printing your name (full) and your face (unscrambled) and calling you a convict before the police are done collecting evidence. Three months later they have to print a reprimand from the German Press Council, which they usually do using a ten-point font.
Yes, the German Press Council is toothless and BILD makes sure we suffer from it.
Norway can ban DRM by local law. They can't repeal the EUCD (the EU's equivalent to the DMCA) because that's a European directive. The best Norway can do is to make the EUCD unenforcable and lobby against it in the EP.
We should welcome this as it is the first big step of defiance against the EUCD. If Norway banned DRM it would give the anti-EUCD lobby some much-needed ammunition.
I never said that it's likely to be GM's fault. In fact I think that's about as likely as the cell phone theory. The chance just happens to be non-zero.
No, you see, by taking the pollen from GM plants the bees are violating Monsanto's Intellectual Property rights. Monsanto has given them an ultimatum to cede all pollination activity and return the pollen within 24 hours, but when they didn't react Monsanto had no choice but to protect its IP with copious amounts of DDT.
On a more serious note: No, GM plants aren't necessarily the culprit, but they might be, since "insect-resistance" is one of the modifications used. Bee-killing pollen could conceivably be an unintended side effect.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered bee community when IDC confirmed that bee market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all insects. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that bees have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The bee population is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Garden Admin comprehensive pollination test.
You don't need to be a Darwin to predict the bees' future. The hand writing is on the wall: The bees face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for bees because the bees are dying. Things are looking very bad for bees. As many of us are already aware, the bees continue to lose market share. Royal jelly flows like a river of nectar.
The honey bee is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core queens. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time honey bee celebrities Maya and Willy only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The honey bee is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Soul bee leader Q-Bee states that there are 7000 soul bees. How many bumblebees are there? Let's see. The number of soul bee versus bumblebee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 bumblebees. Stingless bee posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of bumblebee posts. Therefore there are about 700 stingless bees. A recent article put africanized bees at about 80 percent of the bee market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 africanized bees. This is consistent with the number of africanized bee Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Pitcairn Island, abysmal sales and so on, the africanized bees went out of business and were taken over by the hornets who sell another troubled species. Now the hornets are also dead, their corpses turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that bees have steadily declined in market share. The bees are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If bee are to survive at all it will be among insect dilettante dabblers. The bees continue to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save the bees from their fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the bees are dead.
It really depends who you're looking at. My observations mainly apply to two areas:
Firstly, there's university. I study CS and among the laptop population I see (estimated, of course) 40% Windows, 35% Linux and 25% OS X with Mac numbers steadily climbing. Especially MBPs are getting quite popular.
Secondly, online contacts. I'm a moderator in a biggish (2k active users) forum system for mostly non-technical users. Our PC sub-forum usually deals with threads like "Do I have a virus?" or "I think my graphics card is breaking". However, requests regarding Macs and Linux have both been way up in the last year, with most questions regarding beginner-friendly Linux distros, dualbooting Windows and Linux and purchase recommendations of Macs vs. other PC brands.
Also, Apple is quickly losing its status as a luxury brand. People are catching on to the fact that (especially in the notebook sector) Apple computers can be quite competitive. I don't doubt that Linux is much more popular with civil service - in fact I agree that Linux belongs there much more than Mac OS does - but as for home users, Apple is becoming more and more attractive.
Doesn't need to be just programmers. Apple does a lot of QA (at least compared to certain other software vendors) and an integrated device like the iPhone requires a bit more attention to QA as it's not as easy to fix bugs after release. I think that much of the delay comes from the fact that Apple allocated most QA resources to the iPhone, leaving too few for Mac OS testing to stay on schedule.
Product testing, at least certain parts of it, can be parallelized a bit better than programming.
So, for OS issues. Since OS X 10.3 to 10.4.9, I still have issues with default Samba setups. Windows can't see the Mac on the network, OS X can't see windows etc. (it alternates between releases). What the hell is that?
That happens on pure Windows networks ever since Windows for Workgroups. Out of all Windows networks I've seen so far the minority actually had a working Network Neighbourhood...
Not that OS X can't screw up networking in weird ways (like when a network share unexpectedly disappears from the network and OS X tries to access it), but screwy SMB networks are far from being unusual.
OTOH, Microsoft put(s) Vista ads everywhere. If Apple released Leopard at the same time Microsoft released Vista, Leopard might actually be drowned out by the sheer amount of Vista ads.
Actually, if Vista keeps faring as bad as it has so far (with some users loving it and some comparing it to Windoes Me), Apple can wait for people (especially the more experienced ones) to become disillusioned with Microsoft's latest OS and then tell people that Leopard is out.
They might actually profit from the delay. Maybe yes, maybe no... time will tell.
As for Germany, the GP's observation applies. Apple is luring in people from both the Windows and Linux camps (I should know, having gone from a Linux/Mac configuration to being a pure Mac user - even though the Linux machine's hardware going haywire is a major factor in that). While people are starting to become aware of Linux, Apple's mindshare is much bigger and thus Apple receives more switchers.
People know that Apple is cool. People know that Apple creates sleek Hardware and the ones that have taken a closer look also know that their software is much more polished than anything Microsoft has delivered ever since 1995 (grated, ever since 1995 Windows has the ongoing image of being unpolished, even among those who don't know any alternatives). Linux still has the "for geeks" image, but Apple is really starting to get attention.
Given the average Slashdotter's inabaility to proof-read the post before clicking the Submit button, random and malformed "inpit" probably doesn't only occur with Word... as evidenced by me.
Now as far as setting up a new internet, the trick is to keep quite a few countries outside of the US and the majority of the EU from having a say how things are set up because far too many of them want way too much control over what people can do.
That applies to every single country everywhere. Countries shouldn't have a say in how the internet works technologically because they get bright ideas like "the protocol needs explicit support for NSA data collection", "all cryptography needs to be underminable by law enforcement", "identifying and locating single users must be made easier for legal/tax/whatever reasons" or "there needs to be ground-up support for uncircumventable censorship so we can block evil communist/nazi/capitalist/liberal/whatever web sites". And, of course, "DRM needs to be implemented everywhere because Microsoft and Hollywood bought me into office".
Yeah, but some people are waiting for Leopard to come out before they buy a new Mac. Tiger came out two months after I bought my iBook. Tough luck, I was without Java 5 (which is a problem at a Java-centric university). I want to make it better when I buy my next Apple notebook... But the fact that I have to extend the lifetime of my overworked little iBook by another four months does not exactly fill me with happy thoughts.
Well, at least I can be pretty sure that they'll have bumped the MBP specs until then.
It can be argued that the comment contains Too Much Information and I don't want to have to judge whether that man's penis is Underrated or not, thank you.
If I was Rob Malda I'd write a script that scans/. discussions for UID length comparisons, just to rush in and make comments like "frist accnout" and "Get off my lawn, you stupid kids!". Yes, I'm a spiteful little man. I like it that way.
And now I'll be silent before someone gets the idea of looking at my actual UID.
We have.gov for the US government sites. This makes sense. All government-owned web sites are then managed in one place. We have.edu for education institutions.
And we (= everyone outside the USA) don't. We have our own ccTLD, period. Of course we could say that a TLD like.bank works globally, but then we have the issue of scammers setting up a pseudo-bank on the Cayman Island, registering their domain with.bank and continuing to scam people.
Besides, if we get.bank,.lib and.med, where are.band,.studio,.software and.construction?
I'm not really into nanostructures, but this sounds pretty fragile. Someone has already pointed out that mere dirt could render it useless - but what about damage? Military vehicles aren't exactly going to be dusted off with badger hair brushes, so if the nanostructure is eroded by water (and cleaning brushes) the coat isn't going to last long. And if water can't do it small stones probably can and there are lots of those in the field.
I see this as a general problem with light-bending nanomaterials - while they might work in a lab environment, real-world environments have enough ways of disrupting them to make them much less useful.
Slashdot Mirror
1.) Give every student a gun. In fact, make guns mandatory.
2.) Make it a rule that anyone firing a gun under any circumstances is to be shot immediately.
3.) The problem solves itself. Make sure to be far away when it does.
Well, he does have one point - Norway can't lobby the EP. At least not any more than groups like the FFII. Then again, the FFII has been quite successful, so Norway definitely has something to work with, despite not being a member of the EU.
I think you fear your fate too much. At least here, I'd be cleared eventually, and the mark removed. At worst, I'd have to move town. Quite likely, my name would be protected from publishing until the case had concluded (that is standard procedure in these cased). Of course, some wacko might still pin my picture to every available wall, but what's to prevent that from happening in any case?
Where do you live? Over here in Germany it's similar, but that doesn't stop BILD (Europe's biggest tabloid) from "accidentally" printing your name (full) and your face (unscrambled) and calling you a convict before the police are done collecting evidence. Three months later they have to print a reprimand from the German Press Council, which they usually do using a ten-point font.
Yes, the German Press Council is toothless and BILD makes sure we suffer from it.
Norway can ban DRM by local law. They can't repeal the EUCD (the EU's equivalent to the DMCA) because that's a European directive. The best Norway can do is to make the EUCD unenforcable and lobby against it in the EP.
We should welcome this as it is the first big step of defiance against the EUCD. If Norway banned DRM it would give the anti-EUCD lobby some much-needed ammunition.
I never said that it's likely to be GM's fault. In fact I think that's about as likely as the cell phone theory. The chance just happens to be non-zero.
No, you see, by taking the pollen from GM plants the bees are violating Monsanto's Intellectual Property rights. Monsanto has given them an ultimatum to cede all pollination activity and return the pollen within 24 hours, but when they didn't react Monsanto had no choice but to protect its IP with copious amounts of DDT.
On a more serious note: No, GM plants aren't necessarily the culprit, but they might be, since "insect-resistance" is one of the modifications used. Bee-killing pollen could conceivably be an unintended side effect.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered bee community when IDC confirmed that bee market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all insects. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that bees have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The bee population is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Garden Admin comprehensive pollination test.
You don't need to be a Darwin to predict the bees' future. The hand writing is on the wall: The bees face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for bees because the bees are dying. Things are looking very bad for bees. As many of us are already aware, the bees continue to lose market share. Royal jelly flows like a river of nectar.
The honey bee is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core queens. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time honey bee celebrities Maya and Willy only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The honey bee is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Soul bee leader Q-Bee states that there are 7000 soul bees. How many bumblebees are there? Let's see. The number of soul bee versus bumblebee posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 bumblebees. Stingless bee posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of bumblebee posts. Therefore there are about 700 stingless bees. A recent article put africanized bees at about 80 percent of the bee market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 africanized bees. This is consistent with the number of africanized bee Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Pitcairn Island, abysmal sales and so on, the africanized bees went out of business and were taken over by the hornets who sell another troubled species. Now the hornets are also dead, their corpses turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that bees have steadily declined in market share. The bees are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If bee are to survive at all it will be among insect dilettante dabblers. The bees continue to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save the bees from their fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the bees are dead.
Fact: The bees are dying.
It really depends who you're looking at. My observations mainly apply to two areas:
Firstly, there's university. I study CS and among the laptop population I see (estimated, of course) 40% Windows, 35% Linux and 25% OS X with Mac numbers steadily climbing. Especially MBPs are getting quite popular.
Secondly, online contacts. I'm a moderator in a biggish (2k active users) forum system for mostly non-technical users. Our PC sub-forum usually deals with threads like "Do I have a virus?" or "I think my graphics card is breaking". However, requests regarding Macs and Linux have both been way up in the last year, with most questions regarding beginner-friendly Linux distros, dualbooting Windows and Linux and purchase recommendations of Macs vs. other PC brands.
Also, Apple is quickly losing its status as a luxury brand. People are catching on to the fact that (especially in the notebook sector) Apple computers can be quite competitive. I don't doubt that Linux is much more popular with civil service - in fact I agree that Linux belongs there much more than Mac OS does - but as for home users, Apple is becoming more and more attractive.
Doesn't need to be just programmers. Apple does a lot of QA (at least compared to certain other software vendors) and an integrated device like the iPhone requires a bit more attention to QA as it's not as easy to fix bugs after release. I think that much of the delay comes from the fact that Apple allocated most QA resources to the iPhone, leaving too few for Mac OS testing to stay on schedule.
Product testing, at least certain parts of it, can be parallelized a bit better than programming.
So, for OS issues. Since OS X 10.3 to 10.4.9, I still have issues with default Samba setups. Windows can't see the Mac on the network, OS X can't see windows etc. (it alternates between releases). What the hell is that?
That happens on pure Windows networks ever since Windows for Workgroups. Out of all Windows networks I've seen so far the minority actually had a working Network Neighbourhood...
Not that OS X can't screw up networking in weird ways (like when a network share unexpectedly disappears from the network and OS X tries to access it), but screwy SMB networks are far from being unusual.
OTOH, Microsoft put(s) Vista ads everywhere. If Apple released Leopard at the same time Microsoft released Vista, Leopard might actually be drowned out by the sheer amount of Vista ads.
Actually, if Vista keeps faring as bad as it has so far (with some users loving it and some comparing it to Windoes Me), Apple can wait for people (especially the more experienced ones) to become disillusioned with Microsoft's latest OS and then tell people that Leopard is out.
They might actually profit from the delay. Maybe yes, maybe no... time will tell.
As for Germany, the GP's observation applies. Apple is luring in people from both the Windows and Linux camps (I should know, having gone from a Linux/Mac configuration to being a pure Mac user - even though the Linux machine's hardware going haywire is a major factor in that). While people are starting to become aware of Linux, Apple's mindshare is much bigger and thus Apple receives more switchers.
People know that Apple is cool. People know that Apple creates sleek Hardware and the ones that have taken a closer look also know that their software is much more polished than anything Microsoft has delivered ever since 1995 (grated, ever since 1995 Windows has the ongoing image of being unpolished, even among those who don't know any alternatives). Linux still has the "for geeks" image, but Apple is really starting to get attention.
If you think Word horribly butchers documents you haven't yet seen what Powerpoint does to informations...
I write a post to comment on my typo-riddled parent post and then make a typo in "inability". I'm so god damn awesome.
Given the average Slashdotter's inabaility to proof-read the post before clicking the Submit button, random and malformed "inpit" probably doesn't only occur with Word... as evidenced by me.
Actually, given the average computer user, random inpit is normal usage, so there's no need to differentiate...
Now as far as setting up a new internet, the trick is to keep quite a few countries outside of the US and the majority of the EU from having a say how things are set up because far too many of them want way too much control over what people can do.
That applies to every single country everywhere. Countries shouldn't have a say in how the internet works technologically because they get bright ideas like "the protocol needs explicit support for NSA data collection", "all cryptography needs to be underminable by law enforcement", "identifying and locating single users must be made easier for legal/tax/whatever reasons" or "there needs to be ground-up support for uncircumventable censorship so we can block evil communist/nazi/capitalist/liberal/whatever web sites". And, of course, "DRM needs to be implemented everywhere because Microsoft and Hollywood bought me into office".
Yeah, but some people are waiting for Leopard to come out before they buy a new Mac. Tiger came out two months after I bought my iBook. Tough luck, I was without Java 5 (which is a problem at a Java-centric university). I want to make it better when I buy my next Apple notebook... But the fact that I have to extend the lifetime of my overworked little iBook by another four months does not exactly fill me with happy thoughts.
Well, at least I can be pretty sure that they'll have bumped the MBP specs until then.
It can be argued that the comment contains Too Much Information and I don't want to have to judge whether that man's penis is Underrated or not, thank you.
That's easy. The power suppply is the socket in the wall that you plug the CPU into!
If I was Rob Malda I'd write a script that scans /. discussions for UID length comparisons, just to rush in and make comments like "frist accnout" and "Get off my lawn, you stupid kids!". Yes, I'm a spiteful little man. I like it that way.
And now I'll be silent before someone gets the idea of looking at my actual UID.
We have .gov for the US government sites. This makes sense. All government-owned web sites are then managed in one place. We have .edu for education institutions.
.bank works globally, but then we have the issue of scammers setting up a pseudo-bank on the Cayman Island, registering their domain with .bank and continuing to scam people.
.bank, .lib and .med, where are .band, .studio, .software and .construction?
And we (= everyone outside the USA) don't. We have our own ccTLD, period. Of course we could say that a TLD like
Besides, if we get
That should've read "settle on a sane, easy-to-comprehend alternative". I am by no means implying that we should build a town in a member function.
Let's just settle in a sane, easy-to-comprehend alternative like virus.getPlural().
I'm not really into nanostructures, but this sounds pretty fragile. Someone has already pointed out that mere dirt could render it useless - but what about damage? Military vehicles aren't exactly going to be dusted off with badger hair brushes, so if the nanostructure is eroded by water (and cleaning brushes) the coat isn't going to last long. And if water can't do it small stones probably can and there are lots of those in the field.
I see this as a general problem with light-bending nanomaterials - while they might work in a lab environment, real-world environments have enough ways of disrupting them to make them much less useful.