Re:Americans talk about freedom
on
Press freedom
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· Score: 1
Well, from the news I get also the feeling that if you are a goverment emplyee and want to expose breking of laws by authorities or corruption or similar you cannot go to the press in US currently as the courts will threaten to jail the journalist to get him to tell who you are and most journalists will just cave in.
Re:I am amazed that US is so high.
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 2, Informative
well, close to the time you indicated (1954) US still had Senator McCarthy, so I am not sure what you mean?
Re:How did they decide?
on
Press freedom
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think you ae partly missing the point.
There are no really objective ways of measuring press freedom, as in the all repressed countires the press uses self-censure.
Indeed you can mesure how many journalists are in jail and how many journalists are required to give up their sources and such on certain level, but the "but I cannot write about those things" cannot be measured in objective way.
Thus the only way to try to get a grip on these issues is to ask the people in question, with anonymity.
The real reasons are probably more in the line:
-They have mutual lisencing treaties with Microsoft as the first versions were developped together with microsoft, thus they canot give away other peoples' code
-They probably have other parts of the system lisenced from other parties and thus again cannot give away other peoples' code.
-Last but not least: by now they probably just want the thing to silently die as it is not a commercially viable product, but they are encumbered by it.
Weather forecasting (as it is done now) consists of trying to simulate what happens in every local area.
Basically a few places in the world calculate a large scale model that is then used worldwide as reference data.
Then each other place that calculates weather has their own area that they calculate for their use.
The base data for these calculations are the observed data.
All these calculations are done is "cells", basically more computer power will allow you to increase the cell resolution, making them smaller and allowing you thus to get a better picture of what is going.
Ofcourse there has been much increase in the actual understanding of the prossesss of weather and the ways to calculate the effects, but the biggests single advance allowing for more accurate weather predictions has been the increase the the prosessing power of the computer used for the task.
Indeed it is the hardware, and no you cannot directly claim it is a open source victory except for one small thing...
Wonder why they run open source instead of proprprietary operating system on this?
Maybe the multitude of answers to that question can show you why it can be considered open source victory.
"NASA Secures Approval in 30 Days"
Knowing how govermental processes normally go, this part really seems incredible.
Normally even the "fluffy" pre-study would take that long(or way more), before anyone actually sits down to discuss actual details and such.
Specially the way most everything with NASA seems to be over budget and way late.
It is indeed good to see that there is still some hope, so lets hope they get the procurement prosesses in general more working.
Indeed, Breaking up computational tasks to smaller pieces that can be processed by these architectures is on of the biggest challenges in the high end computing.
Many processes are indeed easy to divide to parts. Take for example ray-tracing, you can have one processor run each ray if you want, getting huge benefits compared to singleprocessor designs. But many tasks are such that the normal way of calculting them requires you to know the previous result. Trying to break up these tasks is one of the focuses in the reserearch around supercomputing.
Reflecting on the comment: "hould still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November."
There seems to be a serious push for multiprosessor systems, currently the ranking seem to consist of a couple of stars, few big ones(this computer among them) and a huge group of third category, and then the "used to be great" computers.
But from my reading of the trends seems that there will be more and more crowding at near the top, so I expect the second category to be much larger, with much smaller differences.
Well, I agree on most of these, but not the public transporation part. One of the specific reasons I took often public transportation when in my previous job, was that I could work while traveling, I had my laptop open, and was actually handling email and then making occasional simple calls and such. Now travel with car is just waste of time.
Well, the difference is that someone who is talking loudly is missbehaving, whereas most people with the mobile on have simply forgotten to switch it off.
From the reactions of most of the people I have seen with the mobiles in the theaters, they seem very embarrased, but by that time others have allready been disturbed.
Personally there are times I would welome this too, as long as there are clear signs at the doors telling about it. So i would not go to such a place if I needed to be reachable, but would go if I need to relax without the disturbances they cause.
I have been to many theater preformances where suddenly in the middle there is some totally unsuitable melody ringing from the mobile phone of someone sitting nearby.
For me atleast it causes a loss of the "magic" that I get from a good preformance and thus it really affects the overall impression.
Like once in middle of a serious scene there were double mobilephone rings with some really annoying happy tunes at highest possible volume. If I had been armed at the moment there might have been two extra bodies...
The fact is, national ID cards are going to come to the country near you. The reasons given are many, but in the end it comes down to the fact that any nation wants to have the monopoly on certain things, like setting rules and violence. Thus they want to try to track people who break any of these. In the past people knew other people so if we had someone breaking the law "everyone knew about it", but now many people do not even know the names of some of their neighbours, so the old ways do not work. There are ofcourse major problems with this thing too, that have to do with the fact that in the past, if you were hunted at some place, you could start anew by going far enough and living straight, but that possibility is getting harder and harder.
You have to remember that in nature we are talking about solutions that have actually been tested to work. So taking general concepts from allready tested things is a good way to shorten your prototyping time.
The only part of robotics that actually has a good set of working solutions is the industrial robots. For all other branches of robotics we are still in quite early stages, where the number or working, let alone good, solutions inside the science is quite low.
Ofcourse in the end robotics is quite different from the source of inspiration, but the basic design decisions have to be based on something.
Actually having seen quite many "expert" systems doing their thing in several fields (not stock trading though), I would say that the automated systems are likely much better than idiots/newbies at the thing, but any person who is actually good at the thing is much better than any machine. (it seems that programming intuition is "quite hard")
The online pokerface they are talking about is the skill to act cool and not let your emotions run away in your actions. In a way is is actually harder when you do not "see" the other players.
The fact is, the way our world is getting more and more computerised and at the same time getting shorter and shorter in attention span and quicker and quicker in requiring responses, the skills of quick analysis of things and then acting on them is getting important in many things.
The traders are just a tip of the iceberg, with the advent of the generation of people who expect instant response to things, the skills of analysing data and leaping to right conclusion most of the time is going to be a major requirement in all fields that deal with humans.
I would love to have a system with the BSD core and the finetuned way things work together in Mac.
Running the thing in intel plantform would allow me to get a notebook with 3 mouse buttons.
The only reason I have not have mac as my laptop is the single mousebutton. The day apple comes out with a computer with 3 mousebuttons or a software for computers with that capability and based on the BSD core, is the day I buy that.
I know that for historical reasons they have the single mousebutton, but I wounder why it would be so hard to segment the button on the touchpad and have all the parts work as one button while in macintosh programs, and allow me to use them as separate when in X11 programs.
Yes I know, you can connect external mouse to a mac, but I really need to use the built in mouse in many situations.
For me the Cell phone is a real help. When in work situation doing things, free flow of communication regardless where you are (I work a lot in customer sites and such) really helps to get things done.
For situations where I do not want to be bothered (outside work time and such) I have used the features given by modern mobile phones:
Caller groups - making everyone ring silently except a group of friends that I want to be able to reach me
Silent button - my mobile has a button to instantly make it silent without having to decline the call so people do not know you are snubbing them. I instinctively press that button nowadays when the phone is in the "ring" mode, even before looking at the caller id:)
Turn off - when really not want to be bothered
Caller id - See who is calling before answering, works well and takes only 5 seconds total.
List of missed calls - I look through that in the mornings when at work to see if anyone who I want to talk to tried to reach me when I was being uncommunicative. Thus I can call them back when I am being paid to work.
With all these things, I have to say I am hooked. I do not even own a landline phone anymore as before disconnection I had made a total of one call with it in the previous 6 months.
and not to forget the best part.. The company pays for my cell phone..:)
I use Spamgourmet.com for these purposes. The benefit is that I can actually say I want 2 messages to come to my mailbox and then rest is silently "lost"
Actually atleast the biggest Newspaper in Finland "Helsingin Sanomat" has the option of subscribing to it via the web. Their web page has basic news for free, but to get the rest, you need to either get the physical paper or pay them 9,95/month or 3 single.
But on the archive thing, they actualy do not make it free, instead they charge extra for doing searches in old archives, for the daily cost you only get week old papers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, from the news I get also the feeling that if you are a goverment emplyee and want to expose breking of laws by authorities or corruption or similar you cannot go to the press in US currently as the courts will threaten to jail the journalist to get him to tell who you are and most journalists will just cave in.
well, close to the time you indicated (1954) US still had Senator McCarthy, so I am not sure what you mean?
There are no really objective ways of measuring press freedom, as in the all repressed countires the press uses self-censure.
Indeed you can mesure how many journalists are in jail and how many journalists are required to give up their sources and such on certain level, but the "but I cannot write about those things" cannot be measured in objective way.
Thus the only way to try to get a grip on these issues is to ask the people in question, with anonymity.
The real reasons are probably more in the line:
-They have mutual lisencing treaties with Microsoft as the first versions were developped together with microsoft, thus they canot give away other peoples' code -They probably have other parts of the system lisenced from other parties and thus again cannot give away other peoples' code. -Last but not least: by now they probably just want the thing to silently die as it is not a commercially viable product, but they are encumbered by it.
Basically a few places in the world calculate a large scale model that is then used worldwide as reference data.
Then each other place that calculates weather has their own area that they calculate for their use.
The base data for these calculations are the observed data.
All these calculations are done is "cells", basically more computer power will allow you to increase the cell resolution, making them smaller and allowing you thus to get a better picture of what is going.
Ofcourse there has been much increase in the actual understanding of the prossesss of weather and the ways to calculate the effects, but the biggests single advance allowing for more accurate weather predictions has been the increase the the prosessing power of the computer used for the task.
Wonder why they run open source instead of proprprietary operating system on this? Maybe the multitude of answers to that question can show you why it can be considered open source victory.
http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/04/05/03/2235255.shtml ?tid=122&tid=126&tid=137&tid=185&tid=190&tid=215&t id=95
"NASA Secures Approval in 30 Days" Knowing how govermental processes normally go, this part really seems incredible. Normally even the "fluffy" pre-study would take that long(or way more), before anyone actually sits down to discuss actual details and such. Specially the way most everything with NASA seems to be over budget and way late. It is indeed good to see that there is still some hope, so lets hope they get the procurement prosesses in general more working.
Many processes are indeed easy to divide to parts. Take for example ray-tracing, you can have one processor run each ray if you want, getting huge benefits compared to singleprocessor designs. But many tasks are such that the normal way of calculting them requires you to know the previous result. Trying to break up these tasks is one of the focuses in the reserearch around supercomputing.
Reflecting on the comment: "hould still be in the top 5 when the new rankings come out in November." There seems to be a serious push for multiprosessor systems, currently the ranking seem to consist of a couple of stars, few big ones(this computer among them) and a huge group of third category, and then the "used to be great" computers. But from my reading of the trends seems that there will be more and more crowding at near the top, so I expect the second category to be much larger, with much smaller differences.
Well, I agree on most of these, but not the public transporation part. One of the specific reasons I took often public transportation when in my previous job, was that I could work while traveling, I had my laptop open, and was actually handling email and then making occasional simple calls and such. Now travel with car is just waste of time.
Well, the difference is that someone who is talking loudly is missbehaving, whereas most people with the mobile on have simply forgotten to switch it off. From the reactions of most of the people I have seen with the mobiles in the theaters, they seem very embarrased, but by that time others have allready been disturbed.
Personally there are times I would welome this too, as long as there are clear signs at the doors telling about it. So i would not go to such a place if I needed to be reachable, but would go if I need to relax without the disturbances they cause.
For me atleast it causes a loss of the "magic" that I get from a good preformance and thus it really affects the overall impression.
Like once in middle of a serious scene there were double mobilephone rings with some really annoying happy tunes at highest possible volume. If I had been armed at the moment there might have been two extra bodies...
well, I think is is only matter of time until you will need Id on those transportation methods also.
The fact is, national ID cards are going to come to the country near you. The reasons given are many, but in the end it comes down to the fact that any nation wants to have the monopoly on certain things, like setting rules and violence. Thus they want to try to track people who break any of these. In the past people knew other people so if we had someone breaking the law "everyone knew about it", but now many people do not even know the names of some of their neighbours, so the old ways do not work. There are ofcourse major problems with this thing too, that have to do with the fact that in the past, if you were hunted at some place, you could start anew by going far enough and living straight, but that possibility is getting harder and harder.
The only part of robotics that actually has a good set of working solutions is the industrial robots. For all other branches of robotics we are still in quite early stages, where the number or working, let alone good, solutions inside the science is quite low.
Ofcourse in the end robotics is quite different from the source of inspiration, but the basic design decisions have to be based on something.
Actually having seen quite many "expert" systems doing their thing in several fields (not stock trading though), I would say that the automated systems are likely much better than idiots/newbies at the thing, but any person who is actually good at the thing is much better than any machine. (it seems that programming intuition is "quite hard")
please read what I said about the laptop and the need to use the internal mouse. please tell me how can I plug in an internal mouse to a mac laptop?
The online pokerface they are talking about is the skill to act cool and not let your emotions run away in your actions. In a way is is actually harder when you do not "see" the other players.
The traders are just a tip of the iceberg, with the advent of the generation of people who expect instant response to things, the skills of analysing data and leaping to right conclusion most of the time is going to be a major requirement in all fields that deal with humans.
Running the thing in intel plantform would allow me to get a notebook with 3 mouse buttons.
The only reason I have not have mac as my laptop is the single mousebutton. The day apple comes out with a computer with 3 mousebuttons or a software for computers with that capability and based on the BSD core, is the day I buy that.
I know that for historical reasons they have the single mousebutton, but I wounder why it would be so hard to segment the button on the touchpad and have all the parts work as one button while in macintosh programs, and allow me to use them as separate when in X11 programs.
Yes I know, you can connect external mouse to a mac, but I really need to use the built in mouse in many situations.
For me the Cell phone is a real help. When in work situation doing things, free flow of communication regardless where you are (I work a lot in customer sites and such) really helps to get things done.
For situations where I do not want to be bothered (outside work time and such) I have used the features given by modern mobile phones:
Caller groups - making everyone ring silently except a group of friends that I want to be able to reach me
Silent button - my mobile has a button to instantly make it silent without having to decline the call so people do not know you are snubbing them. I instinctively press that button nowadays when the phone is in the "ring" mode, even before looking at the caller id :)
Turn off - when really not want to be bothered
Caller id - See who is calling before answering, works well and takes only 5 seconds total.
List of missed calls - I look through that in the mornings when at work to see if anyone who I want to talk to tried to reach me when I was being uncommunicative. Thus I can call them back when I am being paid to work.
With all these things, I have to say I am hooked. I do not even own a landline phone anymore as before disconnection I had made a total of one call with it in the previous 6 months.
and not to forget the best part.. The company pays for my cell phone.. :)
I use Spamgourmet.com for these purposes. The benefit is that I can actually say I want 2 messages to come to my mailbox and then rest is silently "lost"
Actually atleast the biggest Newspaper in Finland "Helsingin Sanomat" has the option of subscribing to it via the web. Their web page has basic news for free, but to get the rest, you need to either get the physical paper or pay them 9,95 /month or 3 single.
But on the archive thing, they actualy do not make it free, instead they charge extra for doing searches in old archives, for the daily cost you only get week old papers.