Consider the modern hard disk drive. These have lifetimes measured in decades. With magnetic bearings surely we can create a decent flywheel system that can do the trick for stationary service. They won't do the trick for vehicles though because the loads are too great. I have read about "air cars" and this seems quite reasonable since the internal combustion engine is basically an air pump.
Quote: "The Basel transport authority has saved approx. 20-25% of the energy used by the trolleybus fleet fitted with flywheel accumulators compared to conventional trolleybuses on the same line. After over 10 years of use, the accumulators now average one repair/38,000 hours of operation."
>>Monopolies are bad for business, bad for innovation, bad for consumers. >Well, they're good for somebody. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them.
I want to give you +1 funny but I don't have the points!
..."I was referring to deep cycle batteries. They are called that because they can do far more deep cycling than typical car batteries, but in fact if you research it you will find that the deeper you discharge them the shorter their lifespan. Generally you want to design your system to not go below half in ordinary use, and drop down from time to time in peak use.
"
A few devices with batteries that can be degraded by excessive discharge (LiPo particularly) also have a battery-safe feature that cuts the power when the voltage across the terminals goes below a certain level. If mobile phones, laptops, electric model aircraft and in-car inverters can do it, I imagine houses can do it.
That said, you'd need a lot of space for current solar panels to generate anywhere near the power required by a house. Unless you have a nice big roof and live in a very sunny area, the best you could hope for would be to offset some of the cost of dragging electricity from the grid.
50p per watt would do me nicely for lugging a 40 or 50W panel into a field and charging my aeroplanes up, but unless I buy the field and cover it in panels I'm not going to be able to boil a kettle, never mind power the whole house unaided.
Most of the people I know who have computers have PCs running Windows, with the exception of a couple of people in the design or media industries who both use Macs. I'm the only person I know of (anonymous lines of text on a screen notwithstanding) that uses a Linux distribution, let alone any other kind of FOSS operating system. I wouldn't say All Users Are Stupid, more No User Really Cares How It Works As Long As It Works.
I'd love to see a globally-used operating system and architecture that doesn't have one company owning the keys to the door - that's the main reason I use PCs and Linux - but it would take a serious screw-up by Microsoft (hello, Vista) to be taken advantage of thoroughly by the FOSS crowds (which.. hasn't happened). The reason I don't nominate Macs here is because I've a sneaking suspicion that if Apple or any other single company were to ever replace Microsoft as owners of the keys, they'd go from the cool option to Borg v2.0 in very short order. Bigger, badder, and now we own the hardware as well. Having a GPL'd (or similar) operating system suite that everyone can use, and that maintains standard behaviour across distributions, at least ensures that can't happen.
The problem is, I can't see anything big brewing. The proprietary OS X uses bits of BSD, but I don't think that's so much a success story as a slap in the face as far as a liberated OS layer goes. Ubuntu shows huge promise as a no-brains-required desktop distribution of Linux, but it's still lacking in some areas, and the people who could possibly fix it up probably think some other distribution is better anyway. Or they think that using a computer should be as hard as possible and if you can't roll your own operating systems by inserting voltages manually into memory addresses with some probes and some sticky tape, you don't have the right to a computer, you stupid newbie. There's not enough money for a PR campaign, not many people who'll want to do one for "Linux" rather than "My distribution of Linux", and not enough developers who'll write those killer applications (read: computer games) for anything other than "Windows first, Mac second and once in a blue moon, maybe if we can be arsed we might do a Linux version - if we can embed WineX into it and it behaves without too much effort".
I'm not saying it's impossible to remove the Borg. It would take a level of cooperation and effort though, as well as a hell of a PR campaign and some slick selling, that I don't think is currently possible. "Get Linux, it's Not Windows" doesn't convince most. Especially when they see that "Bloody Chainsaw Revenge 4: Have You Got Guts?" is only available on Windows, PS3 or Xbox 360.
Quote: Coca-Cola did once contain an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass, but in 1903 it was removed. After 1904, Coca-Cola started using, instead of fresh leaves, "spent" leaves - the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with cocaine trace levels left over at a molecular level. To this day, Coca-Cola uses as an ingredient a non-narcotic coca leaf extract prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey. In the United States, Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant.
However until most games companies start releasing Linux versions of their stuff as a matter of course, you won't see any large amount of desktop computers running Linux, however friendly it gets. It does do porn quite well though, so there might be hope.
...and the best alternative pointing device (the tablet) can't be found for much less than an order of magnitude greater expense...
My Medion A4-sized graphics tablet comes in at £25 from the local Aldi, which is £5 less than the Saitek GM-3200 "gaming" laser mouse I bought. Works like a charm.
First of all, I live on the other side of the country from London. As hard as it might be for you to grasp, we aren't all cockneys here.
Second of all, while public transport is not quite the shambles it is in the US, outside of London and other large cities it is still nightmarish enough that unless your job is (a) within 5 miles or (b) in a major city, public transport is not going to be reliable enough to get to work on time. Now if you work in a £5.35p/h warehouse job on the local industrial estate or some shop in the nearest town, the chances are you're OK. If you have a decent job however, the chances are your car is your lifeline.
Third, how many people do you know drive while carefully keeping both hands on the wheel at all times, and never, ever cross their hands over each other when turning? If you cross your hands during your test, you fail.
Fourth, a driving test is a little different to being let loose on the roads by yourself. For one you've a great big red L that tells all the other drivers to back off because you're a learner. That gives you all the room you need (theoretically) to keep one eye on the speedometer at all times. In any other situation, every time you look at the speedometer, you are not looking at the road. Who is safer: Someone with their eyes glued to the dashboard doing 70, or someone doing 75 who is looking at the road ahead?
I'm not making excuses for bad drivers. I'm just pointing out that even car insurance companies - the organisations whose job it is to assess your risk and whose bottom line depends on getting it right - have relaxed their penalties on those who have been caught speeding, largely due to the proliferation of automatic speed cameras and robotic law enforcement. People have not suddenly got less safe, and removing the ability for large swathes of the populace to drive is not going to make them any safer.
"I think if you are over 18, then it is up to you to wear a helmet or seat belt."
I'll point out here that if you are in the back of the car without a seatbelt, you are a danger to the people in the front of the car. As one road safety advert in the UK pointed out some years ago, in a 30MPH collision you weigh approximately as much as a bull elephant. Can you say "squish"?
I always wear a seatbelt in a car, regardless of position. I've had one or two drivers say "what, don't you trust me?" My standard answer is "it's not you, it's every other lousy driver on the road."
"Sounds like they need to get the stigma back. I think they should actually take driving licenses away after a fairly low number of points. Then you'll see the number of speeders decrease."
Or more likely, you'll see a hell of a lot of people losing their licenses and their jobs. It's very, very easy to do 5MPH over the limit, when the limit is 70MPH. Most people don't try to speed, and I'm betting the first thing a lot of people know about it is when the letter drops through the door telling them to cough up. Should it be fair to remove a person's employability for a minor infraction of the rules on a motorway where pedestrians aren't allowed anyway?
A mechanical government makes robots of us all, dearie.
"Anyway, what is wrong with "automatic law enforcement"? It works very well with speed cameras - the automatic systems are much more accurate and fair than the manual ones."
A few years ago, having so much as one point on your license was a shameful thing. These days, at least in the UK where the proliferation of CCTV and speed cameras seems to be increasing at pandemic proportions, automatic fines and points for speeding offences are so commonplace that various insurance companies won't even penalise you for having up to six points on your license. They have simply lost the stigma associated with them.
So how has that made the roads safer? Someone, please tell me how.
Compressed air is very good for blowing dust off, however it can be a little too good. Cleaning a heatsink is very easy and somewhat amusing as the fan makes a great siren sound. However, watching every blade on the fan (or key on the keyboard) blow off because you opened the compressor valve a little too much is less satisfying. Yes, I've been there.
Call me crazy, but an MS Linux could have the capability to rock some serious socks off. Try and buy a piece of hardware that isn't Windows certified (for at least one version anyway).
Now, it would need a major change of heart in a leadership that seems to despise Linux in as visceral a way as any rabid Linux fanboy hates Microsoft, and it would also mean Windows and the concept of a closed OS layer going the way of the dodo. However I think it would be deliciously ironic for Microsoft to end up as a leading standard-bearer for GNU/Linux, with paid-for "MHQL" or "MSQL" stickers on nearly every bit of hardware and software in the shops. They'd be free to charge as much as they like for their leading closed-source applications, any accusations of being a monopoly go the way of Windows, and GNU/Linux (and along with it, the GPL) gets to be the international standard OS suite for just about every computing device out there.
Hm, well it seems there are as many sites who claim the poem isaboutthe Plague as those who claim it isn't. I suppose I could instead mention Roald Dahl's book, Danny, the Champion of the World, which singularly failed to create a generation of pheasant and salmon poachers, instead?
I did discover how to build fire balloons after reading that book though. Much fun.
There is already a perfectly usable pan-European game rating system. It's voluntary, but I haven't seen a single game on sale in the UK that doesn't have it, with occasional mandatory BBFC ratings for more "realistic" games (GTA3 and beyond are all released with an 18 cert). As well as that, you'll find that a lot of stores here will abide by PEGI ratings, which detail exactly why the game has the rating it has (sex, violence, drugs and gambling amongst the reasons) supposedly so parents can make a more informed decision. I don't see how introducing more centralised bureaucracy is going to work any better than the current systems in place in European Union member states. Whatever ratings system you put in, you'll still get 45 year olds coming into the shop with a 12 year old waiting outside and swearing blind that the copy of Bloody Chainsaw Revenge IV they are buying is for their own personal use.
This stuff happens every time some psychopath decides to go on a rampage. Banning violent video games won't work, and is completely bloody stupid when you consider where half of your so-called "traditional" games come from. Chess is a war game. If you think British Bulldog is innocent, try thinking of it as a bunch of people trying to rush a gun platform. "Ring-a-roses" is a warning poem describing the symptoms of bubonic plague. The only difference between these games and video games is the fact that for the first time in history, a war game or zombie horror story can be rendered on a screen in real-time with precise detail.
You can only take a psycho down before they kill too many people. Sometimes you're lucky and someone will spot that a person is acting strangely or getting unstable. Banning violent video games will just mean that the next time someone decides to start dishing out mass lead injections, we'll have slingshots or some other item banned because, well, he started by firing marbles at cats and it progressed from there. Something Must Be Done, Think Of The Children, you catch my drift.
I hope the justice ministers discussing this have a sudden attack of common sense and declare that any mature, sensible adult should be able to engage in as much of an orgy of virtual destruction as they like. Fact is, taking some geek out with a headshot is fun, dammit. It's the old equation of "(fear - danger) == excitement".
"Yeah but when you get into the real world you have to use microsoft products anyway."
..and one of the reasons why, is that schools don't teach you how to use computers. They teach you how to use Microsoft Windows. I'm betting even the most ardent Microsoft fanboy (if such a thing exists) would admit that this is an unfair advantage. Personally I think anything that removes a particular company's products from the curriculum is a good thing. As "Jmorris42" has already touched on, it's far better to teach how to use a word processor, than how to use Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice for that matter).
Yes, I know there are specialised courses for teaching people to use certain niche software or hardware products (Autodesk Inventor, Adobe Photoshop, Cisco routers), but that is hardly the same as the situation where Microsoft's OS monopoly is being, however unwittingly, enhanced and entrenched by the education system. When you start having driving lessons, your instructor will be teaching you how to drive a car. Not how to drive a Ford. Education in any other subject, including computers, should be the same. Due to the unique nature of copylefted software (ie: nobody truly owns it and everyone's free to fiddle with it), there are no worries about perpetuating a monopoly. After all, if you think you can make a better Linux, you're quite free to do so. Try that with Windows.
Well, to be pedantic it is statistical. The UK's census data is available on the macroscopic and mesoscopic levels, but microscopic (ie: individual data) is held in confidence for 100 years. So IIRC, you can find out exactly how many Jedis (seriously) are in a certain census district (mesoscopic - usually resolves to a street, couple of streets or single apartment block) or in the county/country (macroscopic), but not how many are at 13 Anywhere Street, Somewhereshire (microscopic).
That said, I think a census has outlived its purpose. Inland Revenue (or the IRS for Americans) will likely have far more accurate data on how many people there are in the country (the original point of the census), and what they earn. The census itself these days, at least in the UK, is becoming a ten-yearly compulsory market research form, with various ministers and groups trying (thankfully with some lack of success) to add ever more invasive questions to it.
Really, compared to some of the actions of some governments, Google's use of email to compile statistical information is really not a worry. This is after all, the Internet. You're sending plain text via how many machines before it even reaches Google? If people are that worried, they should cut and paste their email as a PGP or GPG-encrypted block. The tools are widely available, and make cracking the message either impossible or so expensive it just isn't viable.
The reason you still have waiting lists is because Nintendo have had major distribution problems. In the UK you'll typically get a £7m/year store getting deliveries of.. oh.. three units? Of course they'll be gone by the time the store closes.
Now don't get me wrong; the Wii is a great machine and I hope it ends up being the next SNES or Game Boy for what it does for Nintendo, but they do really need to get their stock issues sorted and bring some more good games out. Despite its lower technical specifications it has the potential to wipe the floor with the PS3 (and even potentially the 360), mostly because it is cheap (like a toy should be), the games are playable, and because it appeals to people who aren't necessarily "gamers".
God, look at me. Owner of one MegaDrive, Mega CD and Sega Saturn, bigging Nintendo up. WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO?
As I recall, back in 94-ish when the Internet was being commercialised, address spaces were allocated away in blocks. The size of the address space you got depended largely on how well you could negotiate and show a need for them (and whether you had a few fingers in the right pies, no doubt). The people lucky enough to get large amounts of an increasingly valuable resource aren't going to just hand it over, though they may sell it at a premium. There have been RFCs written detailing observations on this and possible answers for it, and appeals to return unused IP addresses going back to at least 1996.
We will need IPv6 if the Internet gets much bigger. Maybe not right now, but at some stage IPv4 will run out no matter how efficiently addresses are allocated. There will simply be more machines than address space. I imagine that the big players who decide when it's time to do something will wait until the last possible moment before making any big (and expensive) changes. That and there'll be less excuse to charge high prices for additional IPs.
'Legal even though there was an "unauthorized access" law or because there was no "unauthorized access" law? What was legal yesterday may not be legal today. Again, without looking at the case or the ruling, it's difficult for me to say the two issues addressed are the same.'
As far as I'm aware, if you host a service on the Internet and do not password protect it, that is an implicit declaration of a public server regardless of whether the host address is indexed by Google or not. The Internet is a public network, and you don't host services on it without expecting someone to find them.
'Do as you wish. Be prepared for the consequences of your own action.'
I run an access point with zero encryption. I don't care if you manage to find out that I'm hosting a chatbot status page or a few script files on my web server. In fact, you're welcome to them. Access is slightly obfuscated (no DHCP, no DNS), but that's more because my Internet service provider would have a hissy fit and cut me off otherwise, than any desire to run a barbed wire fence around the AP. I'd actually like to do things properly and have a redirected login page (with anybody able to create an account for LAN access), but in the area I'm in there really isn't much risk of hackers sending gigabytes of DDOS attacks through my 56k dialup connection. It's also way too much effort for something likely only a few friends will ever know is there, let alone use. I would also regard very oddly some stranger knocking on my door and saying "can I use your WAP?" - that's why it's open, fool!
Basically, I'm not fussed if any bob, joe or jane finds that I've coded a single-word anagram finder or quick Mandelbrot ASCIImation generator for Ruby (I've stuck a gpl.txt with them anyway), and if I find someone has figured out how to type "192.168.0.x" and found my ISP's DNS addresses in order to get any meaningful Internet access, I can just unplug the ethernet cable/firewall their MAC address out if they take too much. I don't want to press charges against anyone for this, I don't want charges being brought against anyone for this, and if it becomes a problem then a simple 64-bit WEP key comprised of a single repeating character is enough to politely say "no entry". If it gets broken into, then and only then am I going to start getting pissed off (and probably move to something more secure, like a wired network).
So as you might have guessed, I think the way the laws in various countries are developing towards wifi is wrong. Setting up encryption is easy, even for complete computer dunces once you explain it in the correct terms to them, and if you get the right kind of router, it is stupidly so. Some routers are as simple to create an encrypted connection to as "press button on router, press button on card." Running an open access point is like placing an electrical outlet outside the boundary of your property and expecting people not to plug stuff into it. You just don't do it, and I hope a few judges and barristers start seeing it that way, too.
...incidentally, if someone did start compromising boxes on the network, then public house or not, I still view that as criminal damage. IE: The landlord will throw you out and/or probably call the police for chucking that barstool through the window!
Slashdot Mirror
Consider the modern hard disk drive. These have lifetimes measured in decades. With magnetic bearings surely we can create a decent flywheel system that can do the trick for stationary service. They won't do the trick for vehicles though because the loads are too great. I have read about "air cars" and this seems quite reasonable since the internal combustion engine is basically an air pump.
Flywheel-powered vehicles have been around for decades, and are still used in some places.
Quote: "The Basel transport authority has saved approx. 20-25% of the energy used by the trolleybus fleet fitted with flywheel accumulators compared to conventional trolleybuses on the same line. After over 10 years of use, the accumulators now average one repair/38,000 hours of operation."
>>Monopolies are bad for business, bad for innovation, bad for consumers.
>Well, they're good for somebody. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them.
I want to give you +1 funny but I don't have the points!
..."I was referring to deep cycle batteries. They are called that because they can do far more deep cycling than typical car batteries, but in fact if you research it you will find that the deeper you discharge them the shorter their lifespan. Generally you want to design your system to not go below half in ordinary use, and drop down from time to time in peak use. "
A few devices with batteries that can be degraded by excessive discharge (LiPo particularly) also have a battery-safe feature that cuts the power when the voltage across the terminals goes below a certain level. If mobile phones, laptops, electric model aircraft and in-car inverters can do it, I imagine houses can do it.
That said, you'd need a lot of space for current solar panels to generate anywhere near the power required by a house. Unless you have a nice big roof and live in a very sunny area, the best you could hope for would be to offset some of the cost of dragging electricity from the grid.
50p per watt would do me nicely for lugging a 40 or 50W panel into a field and charging my aeroplanes up, but unless I buy the field and cover it in panels I'm not going to be able to boil a kettle, never mind power the whole house unaided.
I wouldn't recommend doing this, but it's still cool.
Most of the people I know who have computers have PCs running Windows, with the exception of a couple of people in the design or media industries who both use Macs. I'm the only person I know of (anonymous lines of text on a screen notwithstanding) that uses a Linux distribution, let alone any other kind of FOSS operating system. I wouldn't say All Users Are Stupid, more No User Really Cares How It Works As Long As It Works.
I'd love to see a globally-used operating system and architecture that doesn't have one company owning the keys to the door - that's the main reason I use PCs and Linux - but it would take a serious screw-up by Microsoft (hello, Vista) to be taken advantage of thoroughly by the FOSS crowds (which.. hasn't happened). The reason I don't nominate Macs here is because I've a sneaking suspicion that if Apple or any other single company were to ever replace Microsoft as owners of the keys, they'd go from the cool option to Borg v2.0 in very short order. Bigger, badder, and now we own the hardware as well. Having a GPL'd (or similar) operating system suite that everyone can use, and that maintains standard behaviour across distributions, at least ensures that can't happen.
The problem is, I can't see anything big brewing. The proprietary OS X uses bits of BSD, but I don't think that's so much a success story as a slap in the face as far as a liberated OS layer goes. Ubuntu shows huge promise as a no-brains-required desktop distribution of Linux, but it's still lacking in some areas, and the people who could possibly fix it up probably think some other distribution is better anyway. Or they think that using a computer should be as hard as possible and if you can't roll your own operating systems by inserting voltages manually into memory addresses with some probes and some sticky tape, you don't have the right to a computer, you stupid newbie. There's not enough money for a PR campaign, not many people who'll want to do one for "Linux" rather than "My distribution of Linux", and not enough developers who'll write those killer applications (read: computer games) for anything other than "Windows first, Mac second and once in a blue moon, maybe if we can be arsed we might do a Linux version - if we can embed WineX into it and it behaves without too much effort".
I'm not saying it's impossible to remove the Borg. It would take a level of cooperation and effort though, as well as a hell of a PR campaign and some slick selling, that I don't think is currently possible. "Get Linux, it's Not Windows" doesn't convince most. Especially when they see that "Bloody Chainsaw Revenge 4: Have You Got Guts?" is only available on Windows, PS3 or Xbox 360.
Wikipedia is your friend.
Quote:
Coca-Cola did once contain an estimated nine milligrams of cocaine per glass, but in 1903 it was removed. After 1904, Coca-Cola started using, instead of fresh leaves, "spent" leaves - the leftovers of the cocaine-extraction process with cocaine trace levels left over at a molecular level. To this day, Coca-Cola uses as an ingredient a non-narcotic coca leaf extract prepared at a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey. In the United States, Stepan Company is the only manufacturing plant authorized by the Federal Government to import and process the coca plant.
What are you waiting for?
Nothing!
However until most games companies start releasing Linux versions of their stuff as a matter of course, you won't see any large amount of desktop computers running Linux, however friendly it gets. It does do porn quite well though, so there might be hope.
Actually, I hurt my hand recently and was using my PC one-handed.
Porn?
...and the best alternative pointing device (the tablet) can't be found for much less than an order of magnitude greater expense...
My Medion A4-sized graphics tablet comes in at £25 from the local Aldi, which is £5 less than the Saitek GM-3200 "gaming" laser mouse I bought. Works like a charm.
In some places.
First of all, I live on the other side of the country from London. As hard as it might be for you to grasp, we aren't all cockneys here.
Second of all, while public transport is not quite the shambles it is in the US, outside of London and other large cities it is still nightmarish enough that unless your job is (a) within 5 miles or (b) in a major city, public transport is not going to be reliable enough to get to work on time. Now if you work in a £5.35p/h warehouse job on the local industrial estate or some shop in the nearest town, the chances are you're OK. If you have a decent job however, the chances are your car is your lifeline.
Third, how many people do you know drive while carefully keeping both hands on the wheel at all times, and never, ever cross their hands over each other when turning? If you cross your hands during your test, you fail.
Fourth, a driving test is a little different to being let loose on the roads by yourself. For one you've a great big red L that tells all the other drivers to back off because you're a learner. That gives you all the room you need (theoretically) to keep one eye on the speedometer at all times. In any other situation, every time you look at the speedometer, you are not looking at the road. Who is safer: Someone with their eyes glued to the dashboard doing 70, or someone doing 75 who is looking at the road ahead?
I'm not making excuses for bad drivers. I'm just pointing out that even car insurance companies - the organisations whose job it is to assess your risk and whose bottom line depends on getting it right - have relaxed their penalties on those who have been caught speeding, largely due to the proliferation of automatic speed cameras and robotic law enforcement. People have not suddenly got less safe, and removing the ability for large swathes of the populace to drive is not going to make them any safer.
"I think if you are over 18, then it is up to you to wear a helmet or seat belt."
I'll point out here that if you are in the back of the car without a seatbelt, you are a danger to the people in the front of the car. As one road safety advert in the UK pointed out some years ago, in a 30MPH collision you weigh approximately as much as a bull elephant. Can you say "squish"?
I always wear a seatbelt in a car, regardless of position. I've had one or two drivers say "what, don't you trust me?" My standard answer is "it's not you, it's every other lousy driver on the road."
"Sounds like they need to get the stigma back. I think they should actually take driving licenses away after a fairly low number of points. Then you'll see the number of speeders decrease."
Or more likely, you'll see a hell of a lot of people losing their licenses and their jobs. It's very, very easy to do 5MPH over the limit, when the limit is 70MPH. Most people don't try to speed, and I'm betting the first thing a lot of people know about it is when the letter drops through the door telling them to cough up. Should it be fair to remove a person's employability for a minor infraction of the rules on a motorway where pedestrians aren't allowed anyway?
A mechanical government makes robots of us all, dearie.
"Anyway, what is wrong with "automatic law enforcement"? It works very well with speed cameras - the automatic systems are much more accurate and fair than the manual ones."
A few years ago, having so much as one point on your license was a shameful thing. These days, at least in the UK where the proliferation of CCTV and speed cameras seems to be increasing at pandemic proportions, automatic fines and points for speeding offences are so commonplace that various insurance companies won't even penalise you for having up to six points on your license. They have simply lost the stigma associated with them.
So how has that made the roads safer? Someone, please tell me how.
Compressed air is very good for blowing dust off, however it can be a little too good. Cleaning a heatsink is very easy and somewhat amusing as the fan makes a great siren sound. However, watching every blade on the fan (or key on the keyboard) blow off because you opened the compressor valve a little too much is less satisfying. Yes, I've been there.
Something like this?
Call me crazy, but an MS Linux could have the capability to rock some serious socks off. Try and buy a piece of hardware that isn't Windows certified (for at least one version anyway).
Now, it would need a major change of heart in a leadership that seems to despise Linux in as visceral a way as any rabid Linux fanboy hates Microsoft, and it would also mean Windows and the concept of a closed OS layer going the way of the dodo. However I think it would be deliciously ironic for Microsoft to end up as a leading standard-bearer for GNU/Linux, with paid-for "MHQL" or "MSQL" stickers on nearly every bit of hardware and software in the shops. They'd be free to charge as much as they like for their leading closed-source applications, any accusations of being a monopoly go the way of Windows, and GNU/Linux (and along with it, the GPL) gets to be the international standard OS suite for just about every computing device out there.
Yes, I'm probably crazy.
Hm, well it seems there are as many sites who claim the poem is about the Plague as those who claim it isn't. I suppose I could instead mention Roald Dahl's book, Danny, the Champion of the World, which singularly failed to create a generation of pheasant and salmon poachers, instead?
I did discover how to build fire balloons after reading that book though. Much fun.
There is already a perfectly usable pan-European game rating system. It's voluntary, but I haven't seen a single game on sale in the UK that doesn't have it, with occasional mandatory BBFC ratings for more "realistic" games (GTA3 and beyond are all released with an 18 cert). As well as that, you'll find that a lot of stores here will abide by PEGI ratings, which detail exactly why the game has the rating it has (sex, violence, drugs and gambling amongst the reasons) supposedly so parents can make a more informed decision. I don't see how introducing more centralised bureaucracy is going to work any better than the current systems in place in European Union member states. Whatever ratings system you put in, you'll still get 45 year olds coming into the shop with a 12 year old waiting outside and swearing blind that the copy of Bloody Chainsaw Revenge IV they are buying is for their own personal use.
This stuff happens every time some psychopath decides to go on a rampage. Banning violent video games won't work, and is completely bloody stupid when you consider where half of your so-called "traditional" games come from. Chess is a war game. If you think British Bulldog is innocent, try thinking of it as a bunch of people trying to rush a gun platform. "Ring-a-roses" is a warning poem describing the symptoms of bubonic plague. The only difference between these games and video games is the fact that for the first time in history, a war game or zombie horror story can be rendered on a screen in real-time with precise detail.
You can only take a psycho down before they kill too many people. Sometimes you're lucky and someone will spot that a person is acting strangely or getting unstable. Banning violent video games will just mean that the next time someone decides to start dishing out mass lead injections, we'll have slingshots or some other item banned because, well, he started by firing marbles at cats and it progressed from there. Something Must Be Done, Think Of The Children, you catch my drift.
I hope the justice ministers discussing this have a sudden attack of common sense and declare that any mature, sensible adult should be able to engage in as much of an orgy of virtual destruction as they like. Fact is, taking some geek out with a headshot is fun, dammit. It's the old equation of "(fear - danger) == excitement".
"Yeah but when you get into the real world you have to use microsoft products anyway."
..and one of the reasons why, is that schools don't teach you how to use computers. They teach you how to use Microsoft Windows. I'm betting even the most ardent Microsoft fanboy (if such a thing exists) would admit that this is an unfair advantage. Personally I think anything that removes a particular company's products from the curriculum is a good thing. As "Jmorris42" has already touched on, it's far better to teach how to use a word processor, than how to use Microsoft Office (or OpenOffice for that matter).
Yes, I know there are specialised courses for teaching people to use certain niche software or hardware products (Autodesk Inventor, Adobe Photoshop, Cisco routers), but that is hardly the same as the situation where Microsoft's OS monopoly is being, however unwittingly, enhanced and entrenched by the education system. When you start having driving lessons, your instructor will be teaching you how to drive a car. Not how to drive a Ford. Education in any other subject, including computers, should be the same. Due to the unique nature of copylefted software (ie: nobody truly owns it and everyone's free to fiddle with it), there are no worries about perpetuating a monopoly. After all, if you think you can make a better Linux, you're quite free to do so. Try that with Windows.
Well, to be pedantic it is statistical. The UK's census data is available on the macroscopic and mesoscopic levels, but microscopic (ie: individual data) is held in confidence for 100 years. So IIRC, you can find out exactly how many Jedis (seriously) are in a certain census district (mesoscopic - usually resolves to a street, couple of streets or single apartment block) or in the county/country (macroscopic), but not how many are at 13 Anywhere Street, Somewhereshire (microscopic).
That said, I think a census has outlived its purpose. Inland Revenue (or the IRS for Americans) will likely have far more accurate data on how many people there are in the country (the original point of the census), and what they earn. The census itself these days, at least in the UK, is becoming a ten-yearly compulsory market research form, with various ministers and groups trying (thankfully with some lack of success) to add ever more invasive questions to it.
Really, compared to some of the actions of some governments, Google's use of email to compile statistical information is really not a worry. This is after all, the Internet. You're sending plain text via how many machines before it even reaches Google? If people are that worried, they should cut and paste their email as a PGP or GPG-encrypted block. The tools are widely available, and make cracking the message either impossible or so expensive it just isn't viable.
The reason you still have waiting lists is because Nintendo have had major distribution problems. In the UK you'll typically get a £7m/year store getting deliveries of.. oh.. three units? Of course they'll be gone by the time the store closes.
Now don't get me wrong; the Wii is a great machine and I hope it ends up being the next SNES or Game Boy for what it does for Nintendo, but they do really need to get their stock issues sorted and bring some more good games out. Despite its lower technical specifications it has the potential to wipe the floor with the PS3 (and even potentially the 360), mostly because it is cheap (like a toy should be), the games are playable, and because it appeals to people who aren't necessarily "gamers".
God, look at me. Owner of one MegaDrive, Mega CD and Sega Saturn, bigging Nintendo up. WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO?
As I recall, back in 94-ish when the Internet was being commercialised, address spaces were allocated away in blocks. The size of the address space you got depended largely on how well you could negotiate and show a need for them (and whether you had a few fingers in the right pies, no doubt). The people lucky enough to get large amounts of an increasingly valuable resource aren't going to just hand it over, though they may sell it at a premium. There have been RFCs written detailing observations on this and possible answers for it, and appeals to return unused IP addresses going back to at least 1996.
We will need IPv6 if the Internet gets much bigger. Maybe not right now, but at some stage IPv4 will run out no matter how efficiently addresses are allocated. There will simply be more machines than address space. I imagine that the big players who decide when it's time to do something will wait until the last possible moment before making any big (and expensive) changes. That and there'll be less excuse to charge high prices for additional IPs.
'Legal even though there was an "unauthorized access" law or because there was no "unauthorized access" law? What was legal yesterday may not be legal today. Again, without looking at the case or the ruling, it's difficult for me to say the two issues addressed are the same.'
As far as I'm aware, if you host a service on the Internet and do not password protect it, that is an implicit declaration of a public server regardless of whether the host address is indexed by Google or not. The Internet is a public network, and you don't host services on it without expecting someone to find them.
'Do as you wish. Be prepared for the consequences of your own action.'
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I run an access point with zero encryption. I don't care if you manage to find out that I'm hosting a chatbot status page or a few script files on my web server. In fact, you're welcome to them. Access is slightly obfuscated (no DHCP, no DNS), but that's more because my Internet service provider would have a hissy fit and cut me off otherwise, than any desire to run a barbed wire fence around the AP. I'd actually like to do things properly and have a redirected login page (with anybody able to create an account for LAN access), but in the area I'm in there really isn't much risk of hackers sending gigabytes of DDOS attacks through my 56k dialup connection. It's also way too much effort for something likely only a few friends will ever know is there, let alone use. I would also regard very oddly some stranger knocking on my door and saying "can I use your WAP?" - that's why it's open, fool!
...incidentally, if someone did start compromising boxes on the network, then public house or not, I still view that as criminal damage. IE: The landlord will throw you out and/or probably call the police for chucking that barstool through the window!
Basically, I'm not fussed if any bob, joe or jane finds that I've coded a single-word anagram finder or quick Mandelbrot ASCIImation generator for Ruby (I've stuck a gpl.txt with them anyway), and if I find someone has figured out how to type "192.168.0.x" and found my ISP's DNS addresses in order to get any meaningful Internet access, I can just unplug the ethernet cable/firewall their MAC address out if they take too much. I don't want to press charges against anyone for this, I don't want charges being brought against anyone for this, and if it becomes a problem then a simple 64-bit WEP key comprised of a single repeating character is enough to politely say "no entry". If it gets broken into, then and only then am I going to start getting pissed off (and probably move to something more secure, like a wired network).
So as you might have guessed, I think the way the laws in various countries are developing towards wifi is wrong. Setting up encryption is easy, even for complete computer dunces once you explain it in the correct terms to them, and if you get the right kind of router, it is stupidly so. Some routers are as simple to create an encrypted connection to as "press button on router, press button on card." Running an open access point is like placing an electrical outlet outside the boundary of your property and expecting people not to plug stuff into it. You just don't do it, and I hope a few judges and barristers start seeing it that way, too.