I am not sure if this is a joke. If it is the moderators certainly missed that (I would spend my mod points moderating it but I have already commented on this discution so can't). The BBC spends far too much of its money 'embracing' new technologies like Digital TV which too few people use at the moment not too little. Its web sites (particularly news) are great (and have won lots of awards). It does a good job with TV as well.
You seem to have missed the point of doing this. Governments run the radio spectrum very badly giving control of it to too few people. This is likly to help with this problem. You are not going to have pay for radio or TV (do you see people encrypting their TV broadcasts now or any reason this will make it more likly)
Also GET OVER YOURSELVES. No-one cares if the US has done something first except perhaps if they were seen to be copying the US it might be considered bad since the opinion of the US in Europe is now so low they don't want to feel they are doing the same thing.
Russia is far too powerful for the US to risk a war with at the moment. The US militarization of space will eventually lead to them being able to completely deny the use of any space based communication, surveillance or weapon systems to any other power. This situation will be very difficult to reverse. They will never willingly give up this power and no one else will be able to take it from them. The development and deployment of space weapons is a turning point like the construction of the first nuclear weapon. After space becomes a real military issue we will never be able to go back to the time when our wars were confined to this planet.
Tipping the balance of power so drastically like this poses a serious threat to stability everywhere. Once the US can rely on their missile shields they will be much likely to use nuclear weapons against other powers. They already have the most dangerous policy towards their use of any nuclear power (it is US policy, for example, to use nuclear weapons against anyone who sinks one of their aircraft carriers). The advantage they will have as a result of being the only power with access to space will be huge and will mean there is no realistic chance of anyone defending themselves successfully against the US in a conventional war. This will lead to the US being much more demanding in its trade and foreign policy negotiations since there is little the other side can do to stop them having what they want. Once a situation like this develops the last option to fight US power left to the rest of the world will be terrorism and they will use it. It is in neither the interests of the US or the rest of the world to initiate a space arms race or to deploy space based weapons.
This seemingly simple problem like many other (more important problems like understanding air turbalance) is an exercise in solving the navier-stokes equation for a fixed set of boundary or initial conditions. The Navier-Stokes equation is the equation that describes the flow of fluids on the large scale. It is a non-linear partial differential equation and is in some cases extremely difficuilt to solve (There is a $1,000,000 prize for the answer to the question: Do smooth initial conditions always lead to smooth solutions?). This may not seem very significant but it is probably very difficuilt to solve.
"The War on Terror. Yep that's working: so far two countried [sic] fucked up and Iran's next."
The war on terror is not that new. It was around in Regan's time. There are countless millions of victims in the numerous countries the US has destroyed (mostly for financial gain). Nicaragua is in ruins as a result of the US war on terror. There have been countless deaths in Sudan after Clinton ordered the destruction of the pharmaceuticals factory that produced most of the country's medicine supplies. Unfortunately it doesn't stop there.
What makes you think the DMCA only stops a US coder from writing/distributing the hacked app? The US's policy is that their laws apply on the net even to people outside the US so if you are distributing it online the US could legally ask for your extradition to be tried for distributing the app (if your government is relatively hostile to the US convincing it to extradite you might be a little more difficult).
The article says that google claim it is done to improve the quality of their service by not showing results that are not accessible. Although I think there should be an option to turn it off if I was looking for news I wouldn't want to trawl through lots of results I wasn't going to be able to use because the goverment filtered them most of the time. Although I would like to be able to to see what is being blocked on occasions, hence the wish for an option to turn this 'feature' off
I don't know what the US equivalent of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission or Competition Commission or what ever it is called now is called but if they are not all asleep at the wheel they would never allow that.
I may be wrong but I don't think they have released a single line of code as open source yet. I can see there would be problems with telling people how they rank pages. People would then be able to exploit this knowledge to get to the top but with more people working on it maybe this could be prevented. I can also see that if people knew more about how Gmail worked there would be more people using it to store files etc and generally use it while avoiding the ads that pay for it but it would be nice if they opened up a bit more.
I don't really have a problem with him copying the pictures in the usual copytright sense but he has given out something that the photographer did not intend to publically display. If these were my pictures I would be pleased with the site. It is funny and as a creative work it is valuable but realesing photos like this into the public is something that can never be undone. What if the author wanted them to be kept private (unlikly in this case I would say since the few that I have seen are taken in public places). You can not say for certain how the photographer feels about this and it should be his decision. If you can't ask him you shouldn't display them.
It seemed to be surprisingly fast in these benchmarks. Did you see the size of the icc binaries. I am not sure what the options for icc mean but I guess they must be doing loop unrolling/peeling and aligning functions to improve the cache useage. If you enable these on gcc you can gain a huge increase in performance (at the expense of larger code size). It may well be able to produce faster binaries than icc for the same size in many of the tests.
"it seems to me that just about any PC on the market right now is Fast Enough for most everone's daily use"
This has been true for ages but the problem is that applications get more and more bloated and people want more and more shiney graphics. I have 3 PCs one Athlon XP 2200+ with Windows XP (and Gentoo), one P3 450MHz with Windows 2000 (and Slackware 9.1) and one Ppro 200MHz with Windows 98. Each of these is just capable of reading mail, surfing, playing MP3s, recording CDs in their respective windows versions as fast as I would like (no significant slow down) but the newest one is many times as powerful as the oldest. The problem is that newer versions of windows need faster computers to be able to do the same thing. (The problem is much less severe in Linux as you can easily disable features you don't need/want)
I don't understand the whole issue. If you want to stop people writing to USB devices on a system can't you just not give them permission to write to the device files? If you want to stop other people from getting the data of your USB keychain than why not just encrypt it?
Why do you need harddisks with built in encryption? Can't you just encrypt the files on the hardisk (or have an encrypted disk image to load if you wanted to prevent them getting information like files sizes)? If it is speed you are worried about can't you get hardware to do encryption/decryption for you already?
I agree with what you are saying. Just because something is open source it does not mean it is secure. Open source projects potentially have a huge advantage though because they have so many people working on them. What is needed is more discussion about how projec ts are going to work so they can be disigned to be secure from day one. Security is not something you can just add after you have finnished.
It's ok if you don't mind not having CDs but there are lots of people who like to have the album because it is nice and it has all the artwork and it is an easy way to support your favourite artist (although most of the profit goes to a record lable so mostly the artwork is good). It will always be easy to get music off iTunes or illegally on P2P or through some other distributiion method but I like CDs and I don't want to have to stop buying them. Unfortunately though Copy protection is forcing me to.
It is annoying how easy it is to just use windows because it is already booted because you were just playing your favourite game that doesn't run on Linux. I have a great perfectly working Linux system just a reboot away yet here I am using Windows to surf the web because I was too lazy to reboot. It is really stupid. I hate windows. I have a Athlon 2200+ and it is still incapable of playing MP3's, surfing the web and burning a CD at the same time. Still in a few minutes it will have crashed and I will be using Linux.
Encouraging game manufactures to port their games to Linux though is important. Lots of people play games and although you can get them to run on Linux with Winex etc it is no subsitute. It is much harder, they never feel exactly the same and people can't be bothered. For many people it is the only reason they haven't demanded the refund for Windows preinstalled on their computer promised to the in the Windows EULA if they don't accept the agreement, don't run it etc. It is lots of people demanding refunds from Microsoft or buying PCs with Linux pre installed that will eventually kill them.
To be honest it is not only windows that suffers from this. Have you compared the speed and responsiveness of recent and old versions of KDE recently or compared KDE to Windows. I know GNOME is faster than KDE and KDE is still better than Windows and that the new versions of KDE at least add features when they slow down but it is still a problem. I know features inevitivly come at a cost but the developers need to consider the performance of their code more (I am aware that they are doing a very good job, I am just trying to see how it could be better).
You will never have to settle for that. You will always be able to get the analogue signal before the amplifier and so get a near perfect copy. By copying it multiple times and comparing the signals you can improve the signal to arbitrarily near the quality of the original. If you don't want to do that then you just have to 'convince' (Mitnick has a good book about this kind of thing) some employee of the companies making the players to tell you how they are made so you can make one that outputs an unencrypted digital signal. Failing that you could just hack the one of the computers the digital copy is stored on before the CDs are made and get it that way. DRM is doomed to fail because it is impossible. Fundamentally they have to make the CD playable on hardware that the consumer has access to. Imagine being told by your boss to develop a system to make piracy impossible before they started talking about DRM. You would just laugh in his face any sane person can see it can't be done.
Sun is only open sourcing Solaris so they can get free contributions and free publicity. They intend to hold onto the pattents on it and use them to stop the ideas being exported to free (as in speach) opperating systems while profiting from other's contributions. They only want the bits of open source that help them. They have talked about opening up Java but refuse to relinquish any real control.
GileadGreene's comment in reply to the parent is right on the ball.
I hope that Solaris is make open enough that ideas from it can hep imporve other opperating systems. There are certainly many nice features (dtrace, zones, scalability to very large numbers of processors etc) which it would be nice to see in Linux or BSD.
Slashdot Mirror
In the economist there are editors that decide which articles to publish. It is this that gives it its credability
I am not sure if this is a joke. If it is the moderators certainly missed that (I would spend my mod points moderating it but I have already commented on this discution so can't). The BBC spends far too much of its money 'embracing' new technologies like Digital TV which too few people use at the moment not too little. Its web sites (particularly news) are great (and have won lots of awards). It does a good job with TV as well.
Also GET OVER YOURSELVES. No-one cares if the US has done something first except perhaps if they were seen to be copying the US it might be considered bad since the opinion of the US in Europe is now so low they don't want to feel they are doing the same thing.
Thanks
I am not disputing your claim but if you are able to provide a realiable source for this information I would appreciate it.
Tipping the balance of power so drastically like this poses a serious threat to stability everywhere. Once the US can rely on their missile shields they will be much likely to use nuclear weapons against other powers. They already have the most dangerous policy towards their use of any nuclear power (it is US policy, for example, to use nuclear weapons against anyone who sinks one of their aircraft carriers). The advantage they will have as a result of being the only power with access to space will be huge and will mean there is no realistic chance of anyone defending themselves successfully against the US in a conventional war. This will lead to the US being much more demanding in its trade and foreign policy negotiations since there is little the other side can do to stop them having what they want. Once a situation like this develops the last option to fight US power left to the rest of the world will be terrorism and they will use it. It is in neither the interests of the US or the rest of the world to initiate a space arms race or to deploy space based weapons.
so now I can spend my holidays with computers too.
This seemingly simple problem like many other (more important problems like understanding air turbalance) is an exercise in solving the navier-stokes equation for a fixed set of boundary or initial conditions. The Navier-Stokes equation is the equation that describes the flow of fluids on the large scale. It is a non-linear partial differential equation and is in some cases extremely difficuilt to solve (There is a $1,000,000 prize for the answer to the question: Do smooth initial conditions always lead to smooth solutions?). This may not seem very significant but it is probably very difficuilt to solve.
The war on terror is not that new. It was around in Regan's time. There are countless millions of victims in the numerous countries the US has destroyed (mostly for financial gain). Nicaragua is in ruins as a result of the US war on terror. There have been countless deaths in Sudan after Clinton ordered the destruction of the pharmaceuticals factory that produced most of the country's medicine supplies. Unfortunately it doesn't stop there.
What makes you think the DMCA only stops a US coder from writing/distributing the hacked app? The US's policy is that their laws apply on the net even to people outside the US so if you are distributing it online the US could legally ask for your extradition to be tried for distributing the app (if your government is relatively hostile to the US convincing it to extradite you might be a little more difficult).
Surely if there servers are so great no one will use independant ones that are set up using bnetd and there will be no problem.
The article says that google claim it is done to improve the quality of their service by not showing results that are not accessible. Although I think there should be an option to turn it off if I was looking for news I wouldn't want to trawl through lots of results I wasn't going to be able to use because the goverment filtered them most of the time. Although I would like to be able to to see what is being blocked on occasions, hence the wish for an option to turn this 'feature' off
I don't know what the US equivalent of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission or Competition Commission or what ever it is called now is called but if they are not all asleep at the wheel they would never allow that.
I may be wrong but I don't think they have released a single line of code as open source yet. I can see there would be problems with telling people how they rank pages. People would then be able to exploit this knowledge to get to the top but with more people working on it maybe this could be prevented. I can also see that if people knew more about how Gmail worked there would be more people using it to store files etc and generally use it while avoiding the ads that pay for it but it would be nice if they opened up a bit more.
I don't really have a problem with him copying the pictures in the usual copytright sense but he has given out something that the photographer did not intend to publically display. If these were my pictures I would be pleased with the site. It is funny and as a creative work it is valuable but realesing photos like this into the public is something that can never be undone. What if the author wanted them to be kept private (unlikly in this case I would say since the few that I have seen are taken in public places). You can not say for certain how the photographer feels about this and it should be his decision. If you can't ask him you shouldn't display them.
It seemed to be surprisingly fast in these benchmarks. Did you see the size of the icc binaries. I am not sure what the options for icc mean but I guess they must be doing loop unrolling/peeling and aligning functions to improve the cache useage. If you enable these on gcc you can gain a huge increase in performance (at the expense of larger code size). It may well be able to produce faster binaries than icc for the same size in many of the tests.
This has been true for ages but the problem is that applications get more and more bloated and people want more and more shiney graphics. I have 3 PCs one Athlon XP 2200+ with Windows XP (and Gentoo), one P3 450MHz with Windows 2000 (and Slackware 9.1) and one Ppro 200MHz with Windows 98. Each of these is just capable of reading mail, surfing, playing MP3s, recording CDs in their respective windows versions as fast as I would like (no significant slow down) but the newest one is many times as powerful as the oldest. The problem is that newer versions of windows need faster computers to be able to do the same thing. (The problem is much less severe in Linux as you can easily disable features you don't need/want)
Why do you need harddisks with built in encryption? Can't you just encrypt the files on the hardisk (or have an encrypted disk image to load if you wanted to prevent them getting information like files sizes)? If it is speed you are worried about can't you get hardware to do encryption/decryption for you already?
I agree with what you are saying. Just because something is open source it does not mean it is secure. Open source projects potentially have a huge advantage though because they have so many people working on them. What is needed is more discussion about how projec ts are going to work so they can be disigned to be secure from day one. Security is not something you can just add after you have finnished.
It's ok if you don't mind not having CDs but there are lots of people who like to have the album because it is nice and it has all the artwork and it is an easy way to support your favourite artist (although most of the profit goes to a record lable so mostly the artwork is good). It will always be easy to get music off iTunes or illegally on P2P or through some other distributiion method but I like CDs and I don't want to have to stop buying them. Unfortunately though Copy protection is forcing me to.
Encouraging game manufactures to port their games to Linux though is important. Lots of people play games and although you can get them to run on Linux with Winex etc it is no subsitute. It is much harder, they never feel exactly the same and people can't be bothered. For many people it is the only reason they haven't demanded the refund for Windows preinstalled on their computer promised to the in the Windows EULA if they don't accept the agreement, don't run it etc. It is lots of people demanding refunds from Microsoft or buying PCs with Linux pre installed that will eventually kill them.
To be honest it is not only windows that suffers from this. Have you compared the speed and responsiveness of recent and old versions of KDE recently or compared KDE to Windows. I know GNOME is faster than KDE and KDE is still better than Windows and that the new versions of KDE at least add features when they slow down but it is still a problem. I know features inevitivly come at a cost but the developers need to consider the performance of their code more (I am aware that they are doing a very good job, I am just trying to see how it could be better).
You will never have to settle for that. You will always be able to get the analogue signal before the amplifier and so get a near perfect copy. By copying it multiple times and comparing the signals you can improve the signal to arbitrarily near the quality of the original. If you don't want to do that then you just have to 'convince' (Mitnick has a good book about this kind of thing) some employee of the companies making the players to tell you how they are made so you can make one that outputs an unencrypted digital signal. Failing that you could just hack the one of the computers the digital copy is stored on before the CDs are made and get it that way. DRM is doomed to fail because it is impossible. Fundamentally they have to make the CD playable on hardware that the consumer has access to. Imagine being told by your boss to develop a system to make piracy impossible before they started talking about DRM. You would just laugh in his face any sane person can see it can't be done.
GileadGreene's comment in reply to the parent is right on the ball.
I hope that Solaris is make open enough that ideas from it can hep imporve other opperating systems. There are certainly many nice features (dtrace, zones, scalability to very large numbers of processors etc) which it would be nice to see in Linux or BSD.
Thanks