Instead of mindlessly repeating Free Software adages that, while important in the right contexts, don't even apply to the present situation, you ought to learn how the Kindle works. The Kindle is jailbreakable and one can run any custom software they like on it. While there was a scandal some years back about Amazon deleting content from Kindles, you have nothing to fear if you simply keep your device in airplane mode all the time (if you don't plan on buying from Amazon, there's no real reason to use the device's wifi or 3G capabilities anyway).
If you can convert energy to matter and have a near limitless source of energy, where's your limitation?
As long as the near-limitless source of energy is being used on Earth, the limitation is the ability of the Earth to dissipate heat. That civilizations may find themselves overwhelmed by their own waste heat is an idea that has been considered in science-fiction for decades now. (It forms a major subplot of Niven's Ringworld for instance.)
The main limitation I could see is space, but as long as you can put people off world, even that's no limit.
I have never actually verified the claim from a non-fictional publication, but in his trilogy starting with Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson notes that with the world population being what it is, even with multiple space elevators you could not move more people off-planet then are simultaneously being born on it.
There would be cost savings when no ticket system (or inspectors) are needed.
Even in Tallinn, there are still tickets and inspectors. While public transportation has been made free for residents, the city wishes to make money from the hordes of tourists, and they are obliged to pay to use the system. I am sure that Helsinki would do the same if it moved to partially-free public transportation (there are already different fare levels for residents and non-residents).
For example, the NSA isn't the only signal intelligence organisation in the US. The military has their own.
Military SIGINT groups (like Naval Security Group or Army Security Agency) have historically been under the NSA. When someone trains in the Navy as a cryptologic technician interpretive, for example, one of the possible places they can be assigned is Ft. Mead.
if you don't do this, then the US will have you extradited and jailed.
Cite this please. Living abroad, knowing a large number of US citizens who have renounced their citizenship to avoid tax hassles, I have never heard of anyone being "extradited and jailed". Even those who were challenged to pay blew the bill off without consequence. I can understand the US going after a few big fish, but the majority of US citizens abroad renouncing their citizenship these days are not particularly wealthy and not worth the effort to prosecute internationally.
The USB was believed to contain data about a suspected fraud unconnected with national security.
Human beings are capable of doing multiple things, and thus getting multiple criminal charges against them, at once. He may well be a terrorist, but this particular story deals with fraud.
Patronage and donations are voluntary funding. Taxation is involuntary funding.
When the patron is an aristocrat or a state church, whose wealth is largely drawn from taxation of the broad population, then the production of works now recognized as masterpieces and part of our society's canon was the fruit of involuntary funding. The idea that production of artistic works should be solely the fruit of voluntary funding in private enterprise is alien to Western culture in general.
The Archduke wasn't levying a tax on all people under Hapsburg dominion to pay Beethoven to compose.
Where do you think the Archduke's wealth came from? It was ultimately derived from taxation of his subjects. Many of Beethoven's contemporaries also received patronage from the church, and again the church (besides individual tithes) was able to receive some proportion of the taxes that the state imposed on the people, a system which still continues in many European countries. The OP is entirely right when he shows that historically, cultural works that are eventually recognized as masterpieces were the fruit of broad taxation. The idea that production of artistic works should be solely the fruit of private enterprise is simply alien to Western culture in general.
Why are the specs so low? This is like a phone from 3 years ago.
Is that really a problem for a phone that is here announced on a News for Nerds site? It's a phone open to tinkering and running Linux software, which should interest us all. I know that I've breathed new life into my old Nokia N900 by discovering how to work with Emacs on it, which as the old saw goes, is a great operating system. Of course it has always had support for most audio formats (including libre ones), so it continues to satisfying me as a music player. Watching videos, video conferencing, extremely complicated web stuff, well, I can do that on a desktop.
Sure, one can make the point that the phone does not have features state-of-the-art enough to appeal to a mass demographic that could keep the company afloat, but I'm a bit surprised to see Slashdot denizens complaining that it isn't whizbang enough.
Lumia phones have an encrypted bootloader. Windows Mobile is the only operating system that can be installed. While there may be a way around this, it has not be discovered by the hacker community yet.
So now, I'm suddenly expected to constantly carry around bag(s) in my pocket
Yes, and as the experience of countries that have gone hard-core with charging for bags shows (Finland sells a bag for 0.20 euro, for example), this is not an unreasonable request. Many people are already carrying a briefcase, message bag or backpack. Others fold up a high-quality plastic bag previously bought from the supermarket and tuck it deep in their pockets. You can even get a highly durable fabric bag that folds up so small, you can carry it on your keychain.
Say what you will about the NSA, corporate espionage isn't their thing. That's other countries. Show some evidence to the contrary if you have it.
One of the revelation in the ECHELON scandal back in 2001 was that Bill Clinton give the OK to the NSA to engage in economic espionage in order to "level the playing field" against those other countries you mention. Perhaps before that corporate espionage wasn't the NSA's thing, but things changed.
Oh, and I do believe that first hand accounts [youtube.com] still count for quotes do they not?
First-hand accounts that are first provided over fifty years later, when the quotation of whatever origin has already spread through popular culture, don't count for much. Human memory is very fallible, and people can easily come to believe strongly in something that never happened.
I see, so within the heart of the sun there is a huge mix of other elements as fusion products, even though from Earth we just see it as an undifferentiated ball of fire?
When this fuel is exhausted, the star collapses under its own gravity.
It's own gravity is due to its own mass. However, if all fuel is exhausted, then what mass remains that the star is still endowed with such immense gravity? That is, what mass does a star have besides the helium and hydrogen that should be all gone at this point?
My problem is thining that a report from something calling itself "Christian Science Monitor" on anything cutting edge in astronomy is entirely suspect.
Only if you are entirely uninformed about American media. The CSM has no further connection to Christian Science in its editorial policy than the name its bylaws have stuck it with. (Even Mary Baker Eddy's desire that there be coverage of a religious theme has been opened up to any of the world's religions at all). It has won a number of Pulitzers and is one of the most respected publications in the country.
The Chinese bogeyman is somewhat more realistic. Terrorism has never been a real danger to Americans (as horrible as 9/11 was, less than 4000 people were killed, just compare that to road statistics). On the other hand, social unrest with huge numbers of dead has continually erupted through Chinese history. Now, I don't think that merely allowing Facebook is necessarily going to lead to that again, and I personally would prefer to see more emphasis on individual rights in China, but the Chinese government obviously wants to tread cautiously, and they have fairly broad support because the population is convinced of the danger too.
As long as one has no real proof that person X said quotation Y, the decent and honest thing to not is to not attribute the quotation to him. The quotation is still insightful and stands on its out without the spurious attribution to Stalin, Hitler or whatever other historical figure is claimed to have said it.
I recently flew from Tampere to Málaga and the flight took 3 hours 50 minutes (left Tampere at 2050, arrived in southern Spain, which is on hour behind Finland, at 2340). I could only assume that by "southern Spain" you actually mean the Canaries instead of Andalucia.
It already appears to not apply on ferries between EU countries.
Most Baltic Sea ferries already have free wi-fi, so one can just use an alternate channel to get in touch with someone (Skype, Internet SMS gateway) instead of calling or sending an SMS from one's phone.
No. They cannot. You control if you want to let your friends tag you, approve tags, or flat out block tags.
While Facebook won't apply the tag, they will record that one of your friends tried to tag you. Facebook's name-completion feature notifies the server that user X has begun typing user Y's name in the tag dialog.
What I find amazing is that people who have such privacy problems with a voluntary service where you yourself fully control what information you choose to share,
If only it were that simple. Even if you choose not to share any information, your friends can tag you in photos, letting Big Brother know you were in a certain place at a certain time with certain people. Even if you don't use your real name, Facebook has ways of figuring out who you are by picking up on a single slip-up and asking your friends "Is this user's real name X"? Facebook even creates "ghost profiles" for people who don't even sign up for an account, so without you ever giving consent, any interaction you have with those who do have account is logged. The site is a privacy nightmare.
... and I am glad I never waste any of my time in fb
It doesn't matter. Whatever alternate channel you are using to communicate electronically with friends and family in lieu of Facebook (e-mail, telephone calls, XMPP...), the NSA is vacuuming up that information too. (Sure, for a handful of tech savvy friends you can convince them to use PGP, but that probably flags you as more suspicious, and only the message content is hidden, not who is writing to who.)
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of mindlessly repeating Free Software adages that, while important in the right contexts, don't even apply to the present situation, you ought to learn how the Kindle works. The Kindle is jailbreakable and one can run any custom software they like on it. While there was a scandal some years back about Amazon deleting content from Kindles, you have nothing to fear if you simply keep your device in airplane mode all the time (if you don't plan on buying from Amazon, there's no real reason to use the device's wifi or 3G capabilities anyway).
As long as the near-limitless source of energy is being used on Earth, the limitation is the ability of the Earth to dissipate heat. That civilizations may find themselves overwhelmed by their own waste heat is an idea that has been considered in science-fiction for decades now. (It forms a major subplot of Niven's Ringworld for instance.)
I have never actually verified the claim from a non-fictional publication, but in his trilogy starting with Red Mars , Kim Stanley Robinson notes that with the world population being what it is, even with multiple space elevators you could not move more people off-planet then are simultaneously being born on it.
Even in Tallinn, there are still tickets and inspectors. While public transportation has been made free for residents, the city wishes to make money from the hordes of tourists, and they are obliged to pay to use the system. I am sure that Helsinki would do the same if it moved to partially-free public transportation (there are already different fare levels for residents and non-residents).
Military SIGINT groups (like Naval Security Group or Army Security Agency) have historically been under the NSA. When someone trains in the Navy as a cryptologic technician interpretive, for example, one of the possible places they can be assigned is Ft. Mead.
Cite this please. Living abroad, knowing a large number of US citizens who have renounced their citizenship to avoid tax hassles, I have never heard of anyone being "extradited and jailed". Even those who were challenged to pay blew the bill off without consequence. I can understand the US going after a few big fish, but the majority of US citizens abroad renouncing their citizenship these days are not particularly wealthy and not worth the effort to prosecute internationally.
It's right there in the article summary:
Human beings are capable of doing multiple things, and thus getting multiple criminal charges against them, at once. He may well be a terrorist, but this particular story deals with fraud.
When the patron is an aristocrat or a state church, whose wealth is largely drawn from taxation of the broad population, then the production of works now recognized as masterpieces and part of our society's canon was the fruit of involuntary funding. The idea that production of artistic works should be solely the fruit of voluntary funding in private enterprise is alien to Western culture in general.
Where do you think the Archduke's wealth came from? It was ultimately derived from taxation of his subjects. Many of Beethoven's contemporaries also received patronage from the church, and again the church (besides individual tithes) was able to receive some proportion of the taxes that the state imposed on the people, a system which still continues in many European countries. The OP is entirely right when he shows that historically, cultural works that are eventually recognized as masterpieces were the fruit of broad taxation. The idea that production of artistic works should be solely the fruit of private enterprise is simply alien to Western culture in general.
Is that really a problem for a phone that is here announced on a News for Nerds site? It's a phone open to tinkering and running Linux software, which should interest us all. I know that I've breathed new life into my old Nokia N900 by discovering how to work with Emacs on it, which as the old saw goes, is a great operating system. Of course it has always had support for most audio formats (including libre ones), so it continues to satisfying me as a music player. Watching videos, video conferencing, extremely complicated web stuff, well, I can do that on a desktop.
Sure, one can make the point that the phone does not have features state-of-the-art enough to appeal to a mass demographic that could keep the company afloat, but I'm a bit surprised to see Slashdot denizens complaining that it isn't whizbang enough.
Lumia phones have an encrypted bootloader. Windows Mobile is the only operating system that can be installed. While there may be a way around this, it has not be discovered by the hacker community yet.
Yes, and as the experience of countries that have gone hard-core with charging for bags shows (Finland sells a bag for 0.20 euro, for example), this is not an unreasonable request. Many people are already carrying a briefcase, message bag or backpack. Others fold up a high-quality plastic bag previously bought from the supermarket and tuck it deep in their pockets. You can even get a highly durable fabric bag that folds up so small, you can carry it on your keychain.
One of the revelation in the ECHELON scandal back in 2001 was that Bill Clinton give the OK to the NSA to engage in economic espionage in order to "level the playing field" against those other countries you mention. Perhaps before that corporate espionage wasn't the NSA's thing, but things changed.
First-hand accounts that are first provided over fifty years later, when the quotation of whatever origin has already spread through popular culture, don't count for much. Human memory is very fallible, and people can easily come to believe strongly in something that never happened.
I see, so within the heart of the sun there is a huge mix of other elements as fusion products, even though from Earth we just see it as an undifferentiated ball of fire?
It's own gravity is due to its own mass. However, if all fuel is exhausted, then what mass remains that the star is still endowed with such immense gravity? That is, what mass does a star have besides the helium and hydrogen that should be all gone at this point?
Only if you are entirely uninformed about American media. The CSM has no further connection to Christian Science in its editorial policy than the name its bylaws have stuck it with. (Even Mary Baker Eddy's desire that there be coverage of a religious theme has been opened up to any of the world's religions at all). It has won a number of Pulitzers and is one of the most respected publications in the country.
The Chinese bogeyman is somewhat more realistic. Terrorism has never been a real danger to Americans (as horrible as 9/11 was, less than 4000 people were killed, just compare that to road statistics). On the other hand, social unrest with huge numbers of dead has continually erupted through Chinese history. Now, I don't think that merely allowing Facebook is necessarily going to lead to that again, and I personally would prefer to see more emphasis on individual rights in China, but the Chinese government obviously wants to tread cautiously, and they have fairly broad support because the population is convinced of the danger too.
As long as one has no real proof that person X said quotation Y, the decent and honest thing to not is to not attribute the quotation to him. The quotation is still insightful and stands on its out without the spurious attribution to Stalin, Hitler or whatever other historical figure is claimed to have said it.
Stalin never said that. Please don't perpetuate spurious quotations.
I recently flew from Tampere to Málaga and the flight took 3 hours 50 minutes (left Tampere at 2050, arrived in southern Spain, which is on hour behind Finland, at 2340). I could only assume that by "southern Spain" you actually mean the Canaries instead of Andalucia.
Most Baltic Sea ferries already have free wi-fi, so one can just use an alternate channel to get in touch with someone (Skype, Internet SMS gateway) instead of calling or sending an SMS from one's phone.
While Facebook won't apply the tag, they will record that one of your friends tried to tag you. Facebook's name-completion feature notifies the server that user X has begun typing user Y's name in the tag dialog.
Try reading my post again. Facebook gathers information about you based on what other people say, even if you choose not to share any information.
If only it were that simple. Even if you choose not to share any information, your friends can tag you in photos, letting Big Brother know you were in a certain place at a certain time with certain people. Even if you don't use your real name, Facebook has ways of figuring out who you are by picking up on a single slip-up and asking your friends "Is this user's real name X"? Facebook even creates "ghost profiles" for people who don't even sign up for an account, so without you ever giving consent, any interaction you have with those who do have account is logged. The site is a privacy nightmare.
It doesn't matter. Whatever alternate channel you are using to communicate electronically with friends and family in lieu of Facebook (e-mail, telephone calls, XMPP...), the NSA is vacuuming up that information too. (Sure, for a handful of tech savvy friends you can convince them to use PGP, but that probably flags you as more suspicious, and only the message content is hidden, not who is writing to who.)