In the meantime, they buy shit like this car instead of plowing the money back into their own society and peoples.
The Gulf Arab states are massive examples of the state "plowing the mony back into their own society and peoples". If you are a native, life is good: free universities, high-salary jobs that don't require much work, all kinds of subsidies. It is the migrant workers from mainly the Indian Subcontinent that have it bad, but even the simplest UAE native enjoys a very high quality of life.
Your vision of poor masses held down and turned against Israel and the US may hold to some degree for Saudi Arabia or pre-revolutionary Syria, but it does not hold for the welfare states of the Gulf.
Wearing only non-breathing boots in a tropical environment may protect you from the somewhat unlikely risk of sand fleas, but they are likely to lead to fungal infection. Sandals are in fact the best option for Madagascar.
All that new infrastructure and space isn't cheap. Unfortunately, only affluent areas can offer your vision of libraries of the future. Back in the pre-internet area, when print was king, even poorer communities could provide a reasonable standard of information to citizens. As it is playing out, wealthier areas are getting what you describe, and poorer areas are ending up with nothing at all.
I lost my stylus about a week after buying my N900 back in 2010. For three years now, I've tapped on the screen with my finger, and I've never had a problem with it.
Sign language isn't actually much relevant these days. Almost no one understands sign language and it is quicker and more convenient for the disabled to send a text message.
This is one of the stupidest things I've read all day. You think that pupils at a school for the deaf are sending each other text messages as they stand next to each other? Signing is still very popular among the deaf, and is even a part of the distinct culture that has arisen in deaf communities.
That is only due to the US's relative geographical isolation. In Europe, if you are unhappy with the free care offered to you (typically because cosmetic treatments require long waiting times or prohibitive prices), even people who are not particularly wealthy can take a Ryanair flight a few countries over and get it done there right away for cheap. Hungary and Estonia do a brisk trade in laser eye surgery, and all of Eastern Europe is attractive for people wanting cheap dental treatments. It's not wealthy people going there, but any citizen who can pony up the paltry cost of a Ryanair flight.
Lets also factor in region locking of content. The US generally does not suffer from the issue. Other regions around the world are simple blocked from content due to the region they are in. Again the US is at a significant advantage here.
What a bizarre argument for the superiority of US broadband. Content produced in the US tends to be region-locked to the US because the country of origin is also the initial audience for it, and there is already infrastructure in place to sell that content. However, when other countries show sufficient interest in that same content, some local entity ends up purchasing the rights to present it in those territories, and then it is no longer region-locked.
Even when region-locking means that other countries cannot view the content through the channel set by the rights holder, the better quality internet (faster speeds, no usage caps) we have here means we can get the same content from other sources. Here in Romania, where I get a fiber-optic connection for about $12 a month, I cannot view Hulu or Netflix, but I can torrent any HD episode of e.g. Saturday Night Live or Arrested Development I want to watch in just a few seconds.
Just look at all the muslim countries. Alcohol is prohibited.
Have you actually travelled in "all the Muslim countries"? Alcohol is widely available in the majority of Muslim countries, especially ones that have contributed immigrants to France (Algeria may be the sole exception).
Stupid theocracies run by fanatics.
Of the Muslim countries that have contributed immigrants to France, Morocco is a kingdom whose king has an uneasy relationship with fanatical clerics and wishes they would go away, while the West African countries are by and large secular kleptocracies, and Algeria came out of a civil war by privileging neither Islamist nor leftist parties.
Certainly the inability of some French immigrants to integrate (and for second generations to feel torn between two cultures) is a valid concern, but if you want to take any productive steps toward that problem, you have to understand the situation first. Your understanding of the Muslim world is a caricature.
EPUB is an XML-based format. Writing an XSLT stylesheet to convert it to any future format is fairly trivial, certainly within the capabilities of many readers of this News for Nerds site. (Look at how Calibre can translate EPUB on the fly when saving an ebook to e.g. a Kindle device). EPUB is no more destined to be unreadable in a few years than the future-proof ASCII books that Project Gutenberg has offered for decades now.
You sir... are an idiot. I'd counterpoint all your arguments but I'm much too busy reading old out of print books on my Nexus 7.
20th-century out-of-print books still under copyright where it is unclear who the rights holder is? If you are reading them on your Nexus, it's because you got them from a filesharing site.
I see plenty of people reading in cafes and parks here in the US. What is disappearing are paper books. people are reading on tablets, ebook readers, computers, even phones.
Sure, people still read, but they read less serious literature than they used to. The entire West is becoming a post-literary culture. France, with its intelligentsia's concern with protecting high culture, is trying to resist that. Paris bookshops tend to stock genres like poetry and drama which are not making the transition to e-books like mass-market novels.
. I'd be concerned if there were some unique paper books that would never be put into electronic form, but even those books are being converted to electronic readable formats.
No, they aren't. If a book is out of print but under copyright (perhaps it is unclear who the rights belong to), it is not being digitized and made widely available to those with e-readers. A huge amount of publications, which would have its audience if it were brought back out of print, is being lost to the digital generation. I participate in the ebook filesharing scene, and for a lot of 20th-century literature, we the community have to undertake the digitization process by ourselves because no publisher wants to deal with the rights situation.
As learned from the traditional book/eBook publisher, the biggest cost of publication is not the printing, it is the correcting, the formating, and the setting in a correct format. *all* of that is handled during the review, or for the format by the maker of the article
Many journal publishers no longer correct and format your article. Rather, they expect you to send camera-ready text so they can just send it straight to the printer, and they do not provide any hands-on editing. For example, if you are a non-native speaker and slip up in the language anywhere, they expect the writer to have it corrected at his own expense before they accept it. Even peer review doesn't cost the publisher much money, since the peer reviewers are expected to work for free. Journal publishing is pretty much pure profit for the publisher.
Even if you encrypt your messages yourself, you must still push those messages through a service to its recipient. So, you are inevitably at risk of traffic analysis, and in Snowden's case the NSA was just as interested in who he was communicating with as what exactly was being said. So, laugh at users of Lavabit all you want, but it's not like plain e-mail with both sides PGPing their messages is any better.
But the only way to get there is for people to adopt it, and to help their friends and family adopt it.
Friends and family are likely using Windows, which is already compromised, so having them adopt GPG won't offer any resistence against government surveillance. It would just be a false sense of security.
That the US outfitted a submarine (the USS Jimmy Carter) some years back to tap undersea fiber has been widely reported. I am unaware that any continental European nation has developed the same capability. Perhaps you can enlighten me by linking to some report?
People act like the US is the only country to have ever spied, when really, in this case, they just got caught. How do you know that others wouldn't be doing the same sort of monitoring?
While some level of monitoring goes on in every Western country, most national intelligence bodies don't have the resources to tap at the same level as the NSA. Just look at the budget of the NSA compared to that of Finland or Poland's intelligence ministries. The NSA can tap fiber even outside the US, but even wealthier and more powerful European governments don't enjoy that same luxury.
While the Tor Browser Bundle exploit was old, it is worth assuming that with the NSA's resources, they can find exploits in any new version of Firefox before they are discovered publicly and patched by Mozilla.
It was revealed this month that the NSA was tracing Tor users by exploiting Firefox. I think the NSA is pretty savvy at finding holes in Mozilla products.
But libraries aren't just books and never were. I checked out a lot of records when I was in high school. More recently, I've checked out DVDs of movies. RedBox and Netflix can offer similar services, but I still scan the library shelves.
My well-funded local library stocks all the CDs and DVDs one would ever want to watch, but even the library is trying to get everyone to transition to digital by offering free access to Spotify- and Netflix-like services to those holding a library card.
In Tallinn, it makes sense to fund the bus network from general taxes, because only local residents are going to use the bus network: the area that tourists confine themselves to (the port and the Old Town) is so small that they don't really need to use buses.
In Helsinki on the other hand, the tourist attractions are quite spread out, so you get a lot of tourists using public transit, and if you have to keep the army of ticket inspectors working to check up on them, you might as well maintain the fare system as it is.
That said, public transportation is heavily subsidized for those who can prove they are Helsinki residents, and a monthly pass for unlimited use costs only around 40â, which I feel is reasonable.
In the mean time, why can't people simply enjoy a film, without trying to pick apart ever millisecond?
Mistakes in science-fiction films reveal an ignorance among those working on the film which can perpeuate ignorance among the public. A better understanding of science among the American public is desirable to ensure the nation keeps a technological edge and maintains the innovation that benefits our lives. With the worlds of fantasy films, one can suspend disbelief because the lessons to be drawn are moral ones (or no lessons are intended at all and it is no more than entertainment), and the differences between the real world and the fantasy one is intentional and irrelevant.
Why is he more correct than those who have a 180 degree opposing view?
Who said he was right? But before deciding whether he is right or wrong, one ought to understand what he is arguing for.
Part of the problem is that Stalman [sic] is to a degree, has a very alienating personality that has not endeared him to many people.
Regardless of how odious Stallman's personality is to many, you'd think that on a news for nerds site that historically attracts people clued up about the Free Software debate, people wouldn't post the misunderstanding that Stallman is anti-money-making.
Slashdot Mirror
The Gulf Arab states are massive examples of the state "plowing the mony back into their own society and peoples". If you are a native, life is good: free universities, high-salary jobs that don't require much work, all kinds of subsidies. It is the migrant workers from mainly the Indian Subcontinent that have it bad, but even the simplest UAE native enjoys a very high quality of life.
Your vision of poor masses held down and turned against Israel and the US may hold to some degree for Saudi Arabia or pre-revolutionary Syria, but it does not hold for the welfare states of the Gulf.
Wearing only non-breathing boots in a tropical environment may protect you from the somewhat unlikely risk of sand fleas, but they are likely to lead to fungal infection. Sandals are in fact the best option for Madagascar.
All that new infrastructure and space isn't cheap. Unfortunately, only affluent areas can offer your vision of libraries of the future. Back in the pre-internet area, when print was king, even poorer communities could provide a reasonable standard of information to citizens. As it is playing out, wealthier areas are getting what you describe, and poorer areas are ending up with nothing at all.
I lost my stylus about a week after buying my N900 back in 2010. For three years now, I've tapped on the screen with my finger, and I've never had a problem with it.
This is one of the stupidest things I've read all day. You think that pupils at a school for the deaf are sending each other text messages as they stand next to each other? Signing is still very popular among the deaf, and is even a part of the distinct culture that has arisen in deaf communities.
That is only due to the US's relative geographical isolation. In Europe, if you are unhappy with the free care offered to you (typically because cosmetic treatments require long waiting times or prohibitive prices), even people who are not particularly wealthy can take a Ryanair flight a few countries over and get it done there right away for cheap. Hungary and Estonia do a brisk trade in laser eye surgery, and all of Eastern Europe is attractive for people wanting cheap dental treatments. It's not wealthy people going there, but any citizen who can pony up the paltry cost of a Ryanair flight.
What a bizarre argument for the superiority of US broadband. Content produced in the US tends to be region-locked to the US because the country of origin is also the initial audience for it, and there is already infrastructure in place to sell that content. However, when other countries show sufficient interest in that same content, some local entity ends up purchasing the rights to present it in those territories, and then it is no longer region-locked.
Even when region-locking means that other countries cannot view the content through the channel set by the rights holder, the better quality internet (faster speeds, no usage caps) we have here means we can get the same content from other sources. Here in Romania, where I get a fiber-optic connection for about $12 a month, I cannot view Hulu or Netflix, but I can torrent any HD episode of e.g. Saturday Night Live or Arrested Development I want to watch in just a few seconds.
Have you actually travelled in "all the Muslim countries"? Alcohol is widely available in the majority of Muslim countries, especially ones that have contributed immigrants to France (Algeria may be the sole exception).
Of the Muslim countries that have contributed immigrants to France, Morocco is a kingdom whose king has an uneasy relationship with fanatical clerics and wishes they would go away, while the West African countries are by and large secular kleptocracies, and Algeria came out of a civil war by privileging neither Islamist nor leftist parties.
Certainly the inability of some French immigrants to integrate (and for second generations to feel torn between two cultures) is a valid concern, but if you want to take any productive steps toward that problem, you have to understand the situation first. Your understanding of the Muslim world is a caricature.
In the EU, copyright holds for 70 years from publication. That means the greater portion of 20th-century literature is still covered.
EPUB is an XML-based format. Writing an XSLT stylesheet to convert it to any future format is fairly trivial, certainly within the capabilities of many readers of this News for Nerds site. (Look at how Calibre can translate EPUB on the fly when saving an ebook to e.g. a Kindle device). EPUB is no more destined to be unreadable in a few years than the future-proof ASCII books that Project Gutenberg has offered for decades now.
20th-century out-of-print books still under copyright where it is unclear who the rights holder is? If you are reading them on your Nexus, it's because you got them from a filesharing site.
Sure, people still read, but they read less serious literature than they used to. The entire West is becoming a post-literary culture. France, with its intelligentsia's concern with protecting high culture, is trying to resist that. Paris bookshops tend to stock genres like poetry and drama which are not making the transition to e-books like mass-market novels.
No, they aren't. If a book is out of print but under copyright (perhaps it is unclear who the rights belong to), it is not being digitized and made widely available to those with e-readers. A huge amount of publications, which would have its audience if it were brought back out of print, is being lost to the digital generation. I participate in the ebook filesharing scene, and for a lot of 20th-century literature, we the community have to undertake the digitization process by ourselves because no publisher wants to deal with the rights situation.
Many journal publishers no longer correct and format your article. Rather, they expect you to send camera-ready text so they can just send it straight to the printer, and they do not provide any hands-on editing. For example, if you are a non-native speaker and slip up in the language anywhere, they expect the writer to have it corrected at his own expense before they accept it. Even peer review doesn't cost the publisher much money, since the peer reviewers are expected to work for free. Journal publishing is pretty much pure profit for the publisher.
Even if you encrypt your messages yourself, you must still push those messages through a service to its recipient. So, you are inevitably at risk of traffic analysis, and in Snowden's case the NSA was just as interested in who he was communicating with as what exactly was being said. So, laugh at users of Lavabit all you want, but it's not like plain e-mail with both sides PGPing their messages is any better.
Friends and family are likely using Windows, which is already compromised, so having them adopt GPG won't offer any resistence against government surveillance. It would just be a false sense of security.
That the US outfitted a submarine (the USS Jimmy Carter) some years back to tap undersea fiber has been widely reported. I am unaware that any continental European nation has developed the same capability. Perhaps you can enlighten me by linking to some report?
While some level of monitoring goes on in every Western country, most national intelligence bodies don't have the resources to tap at the same level as the NSA. Just look at the budget of the NSA compared to that of Finland or Poland's intelligence ministries. The NSA can tap fiber even outside the US, but even wealthier and more powerful European governments don't enjoy that same luxury.
While the Tor Browser Bundle exploit was old, it is worth assuming that with the NSA's resources, they can find exploits in any new version of Firefox before they are discovered publicly and patched by Mozilla.
It was revealed this month that the NSA was tracing Tor users by exploiting Firefox. I think the NSA is pretty savvy at finding holes in Mozilla products.
Could you please cite the figure of "thousands per year" coming out of the Afghanistan training camps?
Immigration from Afghanistan and Pashto areas of Pakistan (the only places where burqas are commonly worn) to northern Europe is negligible.
My well-funded local library stocks all the CDs and DVDs one would ever want to watch, but even the library is trying to get everyone to transition to digital by offering free access to Spotify- and Netflix-like services to those holding a library card.
In Tallinn, it makes sense to fund the bus network from general taxes, because only local residents are going to use the bus network: the area that tourists confine themselves to (the port and the Old Town) is so small that they don't really need to use buses.
In Helsinki on the other hand, the tourist attractions are quite spread out, so you get a lot of tourists using public transit, and if you have to keep the army of ticket inspectors working to check up on them, you might as well maintain the fare system as it is.
That said, public transportation is heavily subsidized for those who can prove they are Helsinki residents, and a monthly pass for unlimited use costs only around 40â, which I feel is reasonable.
Mistakes in science-fiction films reveal an ignorance among those working on the film which can perpeuate ignorance among the public. A better understanding of science among the American public is desirable to ensure the nation keeps a technological edge and maintains the innovation that benefits our lives. With the worlds of fantasy films, one can suspend disbelief because the lessons to be drawn are moral ones (or no lessons are intended at all and it is no more than entertainment), and the differences between the real world and the fantasy one is intentional and irrelevant.
Who said he was right? But before deciding whether he is right or wrong, one ought to understand what he is arguing for.
Regardless of how odious Stallman's personality is to many, you'd think that on a news for nerds site that historically attracts people clued up about the Free Software debate, people wouldn't post the misunderstanding that Stallman is anti-money-making.