4 million people isn't a lot and perhaps half of them are eligible to vote.
So Start a Party call it th will of the people and if elected will take the majority view on any issue. Each topic would have a poll I doubt it would be able to be a huge part of Politics but every vote would b e reflecting what people want. Just as the Green Party doesn't control any countries government it certainly influences both the left and right.
In a PR system 5% of 4 Million is 200,000, probably could be a working reality with 100,000 people voting for it.
could kick something like that off with a facebook page.
Do you really think any amount of jail time is worse than the heart tearing pain caused by the loss of a child through your own fault? I'd say he wishes his son killed him instead right now. Jail time is going to do nothing.
The mistake your making is the assumption that a person who leaves a loaded firearm around a 3 year old child gives a crap.
He should receive a heavy custodial sentence not to make him feel bad, but as an attempt to get people to take a little more care over where they stick their firearms. This idiocy needs to be stamped on hard when ever it occurs even when the end result is the death of a small child.
I couldn't find a resolution to that case however recently
On February 14th, 2010, lead singer Doug Fieger died in Woodland Hills, California after battling both brain and lung cancer for several years.
Bruce Gary died from lymphoma on August 22, 2006 at the age of 55.
Of the four original members of The Knack (Fieger, Berton Averre - Guitar, Prescott Niles - Bass, and Bruce Gary - Drums), only Averre and Niles still currently play as The Knack.
If you could manage to mount the new screen to the outside of the netbook with a touch screen mod and switch the connections between the internal and external screen. It might be able to create a netbook/tablet. I know i'd find that useful.
So heres a situation my niece has junior rheumatoid arthritis. It takes her from being a typically healthy teenager to one thats in constant pain and in a wheel chair. There are injections which she has which bring her back to normal health.
The cost of these injections is more than twice my sisters take home pay but its paid for by the NHS through everybody's National Insurance contributions. You are looked after by this system from before you are born and through to your last breath and you contribute to this system throughout your working life. There is a maximum contribution so its never totally unreasonable.
but put this in your situation and its your son or daughter with this illness and it costs twice your salary to keep him or her normal. In the UK that government bureaucrat actually pays out more than you could pay for.
so your welcome to a system where you have to accept and see the pain of your family suffering because you can't afford it. ah but you have insurance part of your work package but hey you are almost certainly not immune to redundancy even with a solid company like IBM. HR doesn't care about you and your family especially so if your raising premiums. If your selfemployed and you lose a major contract you can end up unable to pay to keep your family safe and well.
so tell me how you manage to pay more than you earn to look after the medical needs of your family and while currently your a major bread winner a small clot of blood can stop the flow of blood to your heart or worse still to your brain and recovering from this stroke and the brain damage it caused your now caught in a world of pain and debt and misery. Even if your in perfect health someone could hit your car on your way into work tomorrow and change your life forever are you really prepared for that?
The real problem with the American healthcare system is that the cost of treatment often has to be met by the family of the sick patient.
Should people be made to face the choice of continuing treatment or costing their families future. Should your wife be forced into living in a trailer park as your widow your children forced to withdraw from college in order to maintain your life for a few more years?
Essentially it becomes a choice of suicide or putting the people you love most through intense hardship, probably worse than that since suicide would invalidate any life insurance so you need to bare the pain of cancer for as long as your body holds out.
I'm lucky I live in a country where most of my medical needs are taken care of some options will be limited due to cost and the benefit they provide. However I will get treatment and my family will be ok.
Health care is the number one reason for not wanting to live in the usa.
How about downloading the ads and not displaying them? Its not really ad views but ad downloads thats counted isn't it.
GQ is elitist crap full of soft porn and over priced clothes, the fusion razer is very good a blade lasts for ages and isnt dead if you shave off a beard. I didnt see the ads or read the article
Microsoft is well Microsoft and i don't use windows. Hmm I guess as a beardy Linux user I am not the target audience for these ads. Doesn't that mean I would be helping ARS exploit their advertisers by making them pay for useless page views if I viewed the Ads. Ars is being paid to deliver customers for the advertisers products i'm not the customer. It would be dishonest of me to encourage this fraud by colluding with Ars.
If Ars can tell when ads are blocked then they should block me and others like me from their site and I will maintain my boycott of Sony products and RIAA recording labels. I have to admit I've never bought a new sony product and my Cd buying days were before CD's but these days its a legitimate boycott;) Oh and I will boycott Ars as well from now on i will be not going to their site because i'm boycotting them too not because I never go there.
The reviews of it are terrible, main complaints are it is slow runs hot and has authentication issues. one of the complaints was it overwriting config files on bootup.
its a nice idea and it might even be hackable it does run Linux but its not quite good enough from the sounds of the reviews.
The netgear options seem to run at 3 -500 dollars on amazon.
At that price a simple atom machine could be practical power draw for a netbook is around 12 watts typically with wol and drive spin down you could have an economical solution that is quite fast.
Arm would probably be even better on the power front and might be even cheaper.
disclaimer i'm sure badoo isn't getting people to solve captures for black hat reasons.
In badoo if you give a website address or a user name for msn or such like when your chatting, you have to solve a capture to continue and send the Link or email address.
Why?
As you are allowed to send the address anyway once you solve it there is no point asking really unless the point is to solve captures.
Badoo doesnt seem to have a visible means of support but it does have many 1000's of users solving captures.
samples may be retained after they have fulfilled the purposes for which they were taken but shall not be used by any person except for purposes related to the prevention or detection of crime, the investigation of an offence [F4 , the conduct of a prosecution or the identification of a deceased person or of the person from whom a body part came
actually the above quote seems to show you are wrong about that. If they think your dna can be useful in identifying a crime or your body then they can and will use it.
USA has illegal search and seizure the UK doesn't and Scotland is on a different legal basis to the rest of the UK as has been said.
you say that , but as I look outside where its currently foggy I know in a few hours it will be sunny.
Most days have some cloud for some of the day. so while you can't expect full output all the time to say you will get minimal output is just as misleading. Assuming an hour of sun and an hour of cloud and maximum and minimum of 1 and 10 kwh the average over 2 hours is 5.5kwh for your lucky 1kwh production you would need cloud 90% of the time.
Unfortunately the Police are under no obligation to remove the DNA from the database until your 100th birthday I've read through the regulations they work under. In the appendix there are form letters for the chief constable to tell you that your dna can not be removed, there is no example of a letter saying it can.
In the UK the police retain records of everyone even if you have never been arrested or charged with anything it is enough to be associated with someone with a criminal record for this to be recorded on your record. I believe they refer to these as non arrestable offenses. I say your record but its the polices record of you. Over time the Police are not forced to share what they have on you with other agencies but everything is kept on record for their use and they do have the option of clearing your record once you reach the age of 100.
Of course your Dna will not only identify you but close matches may suggest a brother or a son or other close relative may be worth investigating. There is no political will from either of the main parties to curb the current legislation they have both contributed to it. So you either live with it or leave and hope that there is no worldwide database created in your lifetime.
Rule number one where ever you are don't get involved with the Police if you can possibly avoid it.
The second link spells it out for you using big letters and crayon, yes you are on record and for all practical meanings of for the rest of your life.
The European Court of Human Rights
In December 2008, in the case of S. and Marper v. the UK, the Grand Chamber of European Court of Human Rights reached a unanimous judgment that the blanket retention of innocent people's DNA and fingerprints by the UK Government contravenes Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to privacy).
At the time of writing, the Government has yet to implement a response to the judgment. Its initial proposals to retain DNA records from innocent people for 6 or 12 years, depending on the offence for which they were arrested, were widely criticised. They have been replaced with an alternative 6 year retention time for innocent adults (3 years for under-16s), in the Crime and Security Bill 2009/10. However, both opposition parties regard these proposals as unacceptable.. The Government has also made a welcome proposal to destroy the original DNA samples (biological samples), which are currently stored by the commercial laboratories which analyse them, and which contain unlimited genetic information which is not needed for identification purposes.
I guess that this judgment may change things but currently there is no change and it will remain that way until compelled to change. note the opposition fighting against the change it can be viewed as because the proposals are still draconian or more cynically to block any change in the current status quo.
Unless legislation does go through and so far it hasn't then any plea to the chief constable to get the dna record removed due to exceptional circumstances will fall on deaf ears because after all being innocent of any crime is hardly exceptional in that database.
Heart disease is largely a consequence of a life time of eating processed crap that we wouldn't even eat without the addition of chemicals to make them taste reasonable (some products don't even manage that).
its pretty much a given that processed food contains too much salt sugar , transfats saturated fats and some lovely additions that are at least suspected of being carcinogenic.
natural food fresh veg and fruit and meat sliced (not pureed and reconstituted) are far better for you than the processed junk that is maybe 90% of what the average supermarket sells.
Heart disease is clearly related to he junk that we put in our mouths.
when i was a student there was a bus stop outside the house one morning chris woke up flung the curtains open to see the top deck of the bus looking back at him.
Another friend was driving a coal lorry in yorkshire and he was bustin for a dump any way after not finding anywhere he decided to jump in the back of the coal lorry, you know he says thats the first time he ever saw a double decker bus in holmfirth.
but say a broadcast starts at 6 and your dvr begins to record it you come in 15 minutes later and start watching at the start while the dvr is recording with now a 15 minute buffer. you decide to take a leak and pause then return to watching 3 minutes later now 18 minutes behind the broadcast. An ad break comes on and you skip through 5 minutes of ads putting you 13 minutes behind broadcast time.
now you could perhaps use a vcr to record a program but you couldnt start watching it while it was still being recorded.
its also great if your stopped in the middle of your program by somebody at the door. you can go back to your program and catch up from where you left off. A vcr you would have to slam in a tape and wait for your program to finish before resuming. Did i mention you can change channels automatically if you planned your evenings viewing. having programs on the hdd means you can grab something you want to watch when there is nothing worth watching.
VCR barely scratches the surface of what can be done with time shifting. Of course the networks will try to make things difficult no easy way of cherry picking the olympics but at least you can fast forward.
The Vcr allowed people to record stuff to hopefully watch at another date. Tivo brought the ability to timeshift in real time while recording something a vcr cant do.
the amount that can be recorded is also completely different you can decide to record a season of something and a tivo will do it.
Sad thing is that the content providers still won't let us have the freedom we want to choose what and when we view. Luckily there is an alternative usually referred to as bit torrent.
what kind of an arguement is that? I would consider a netbook pretty portable and capable of running a "Desktop OS" which can be a flavour of Linux, Windows or OSX. In general the biggest restriction is screen size and quite a few applications have been redesigned to fit on the shorter screen.
So just what are the gains of a portable hand held OS? Ok you can argue that touch works better with the handheld os but no multitasking is a big thing to lose for the sake of that ui.
Applications can be adapted for better use with touch screens. It's largely a change in design of the view.
with Linux not being tied to the desktop in the same way as windows it seems likely a window manager could be deployed which would be designed for touch screen input.
You seem to be saying handheld os isnt as good because its a handheld device. Yet ignoring all the netbooks that do run desktop os versions (generally very effectively). The iPad is capable of more just Apple don't want you to confuse it with your macbook.
Trouble with your analogy is that wifi routers default to being relatively secure these days. you would be hard pressed to buy a router within the last few years that wasnt secure by default.
If the owner has made his router open its practically certain that it was intentional.
When you ask what a kindle is for -the answer is easy reading ebooks. It's tailored to that task and has a battery life that doesn't require you to charge it everyday.
Where does it live? probably on a book case at home or on your bedside cabinet it's not that big on traveling I guess some people would take it with them on the way to work in a briefcase or to read on the train.
The role of the kindle is well defined you read ebooks on it.
The iPad is a much looser concept its a media device says Steve you can browse the web do your web based stuff on it.
However it is looking more and more like you can't do everything you expect to be able to do on the net. I use skype pidgin (irc msn yahoo) and I will be browsing at the same time. If I understand correctly multitasking isnt possible with the ipad/itouch series of devices so I would have to choose one messaging service to be connected to.
Why do I want one - I don't know yet.
Perhaps someone can make a list of cool things to do with an iPad.
To be honest a netbook with dual screen or a reversible screen would be more interesting switching to the external screen when the lid is closed. it might be a bit thicker than an iPad but its going to be more flexible to use.
theres an interesting hack for someone to try Netbook screens are quite cheap and as its the same as the internal screen it would be easy to drive add a touch screen and its pretty much there.
Would it really hurt apple to put a usb or sd card slot on to the ipad. I mean seriously people like to take photo's and the iPad screen is a useful size.
Surely Putting your photo card in your iPad and selecting the good shots and uploading to your fliker account or emailing to friends or posting on facebook are things a lot of iPad owners will want to do?
What is it good for oversized media player ? there has to be i/o someway of connecting to a printer at least. ok probably not.
I'm struggling to see why the iPad has any potential to be a popular product if its going to be so limited. The one thing going for it is the well developed touch interface. I don't think it is enough, however it will encourage competing products which will have to be competitively priced and do more to succeed so I like the iPad I just wouldnt ever buy one I need more functionality than Apple want to give me. maybe asus will give me what i want.
THe trouble is smaller companies struggle to bring products to the market. There is an arm powered netbook with two modes a detachable keyboard battery section you dont even have to buy it looks like it could be nice but can you actually buy one...
The big problem is note taking has never properly been addressed. we are still using mice/trackpad and a keyboard
for somethings they can be almost adequate but as soon as you want to write something unusual like a formula or sketch a diagram or graph they fall down.
now i don't know how good the ipad's touch screen is and i'm not sure if its a solution to this issue. (The lack of a keyboard is a major downside and its not a computer its an iphone with a big screen). you tend to want to write things as well as sketch. Notes can do with annotations, say a relevant passage of a text book. so theres both the input issues and the desired composition of the output which must be fast and easy to achieve.
There isn't really the software or the hardware to tackle this problem of note taking.
The hardware issue isn't too bad its quite possible to make a usb powered touch screen which can be used for this task and with pixelQI's epaper mode it can double up as an ereader screen or even for multimedia.
so you use the usb screen as a sketch pad and the keyboard for text entry. (admittedly theres a gap in the market for software able to take advantage of such a set up.
Graphing for example could be easily addressed as some things like axis are standard and setting scale could be done in a couple of clicks with the manual bit being the graph line itself.
I've been trying hard to prototype such a device but trying to get the components has been hell. I know what I need and i'm optimistic the hardware could be made available for the price of a commercial game.
wacom do something similar but expensive and still limited.
It's quite possible to have a full install of ubuntu on a EEE701 with a 4GB sdd drive and still have swap on.
Space isn't that much of an issue with the sd card slot or usb drives adding more storage is easy. Data can be used easily from anywhere.
Ubuntu does have a few dependency issues with packages being connected that don't need to be really. For example default games or no default games there is no middle ground can't just keep the couple i play now and again.
UNR is a failure for me because they do silly things like this. open office is a good thing to have on a base install disk. However it shouldn't be made awkward to delete it.
UNR could concentrate on fixing the UI's of applications that don't fit on the screen. or removing unnecessary dependencies such as mono or lumping all the default games into one package
They shouldnt be tweaking the kernel (dropping reiserfs support for one example) taking nano out of the default install was another annoyance (at least that was easy to add back).
The people working on unr seem to be lacking in experience in fact recently even mainstream ubuntu maintainers seem to be intent on driving people to debian.
I won't use UNR I have no confidence in the maintainers at all. Seems like UNR is training wheels for new distro maintainers.
Slashdot Mirror
actually i had a stent put in recently and the dr messed up on his first attempt and the team were joking about the 600 euro cost.
Thats a good deal cheaper than the hearing aid.
4 million people isn't a lot and perhaps half of them are eligible to vote.
So Start a Party call it th will of the people and if elected will take the majority view on any issue. Each topic would have a poll I doubt it would be able to be a huge part of Politics but every vote would b e reflecting what people want. Just as the Green Party doesn't control any countries government it certainly influences both the left and right.
In a PR system 5% of 4 Million is 200,000, probably could be a working reality with 100,000 people voting for it.
could kick something like that off with a facebook page.
Do you really think any amount of jail time is worse than the heart tearing pain caused by the loss of a child through your own fault? I'd say he wishes his son killed him instead right now. Jail time is going to do nothing.
The mistake your making is the assumption that a person who leaves a loaded firearm around a 3 year old child gives a crap.
He should receive a heavy custodial sentence not to make him feel bad, but as an attempt to get people to take a little more care over where they stick their firearms. This idiocy needs to be stamped on hard when ever it occurs even when the end result is the death of a small child.
I couldn't find a resolution to that case however recently
On February 14th, 2010, lead singer Doug Fieger died in Woodland Hills, California after battling both brain and lung cancer for several years.
Bruce Gary died from lymphoma on August 22, 2006 at the age of 55.
Of the four original members of The Knack (Fieger, Berton Averre - Guitar, Prescott Niles - Bass, and Bruce Gary - Drums), only Averre and Niles still currently play as The Knack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knack
If you could manage to mount the new screen to the outside of the netbook with a touch screen mod and switch the connections between the internal and external screen. It might be able to create a netbook/tablet. I know i'd find that useful.
So heres a situation my niece has junior rheumatoid arthritis. It takes her from being a typically healthy teenager to one thats in constant pain and in a wheel chair. There are injections which she has which bring her back to normal health.
The cost of these injections is more than twice my sisters take home pay but its paid for by the NHS through everybody's National Insurance contributions. You are looked after by this system from before you are born and through to your last breath and you contribute to this system throughout your working life. There is a maximum contribution so its never totally unreasonable.
but put this in your situation and its your son or daughter with this illness and it costs twice your salary to keep him or her normal. In the UK that government bureaucrat actually pays out more than you could pay for.
so your welcome to a system where you have to accept and see the pain of your family suffering because you can't afford it.
ah but you have insurance part of your work package but hey you are almost certainly not immune to redundancy even with a solid company like IBM. HR doesn't care about you and your family especially so if your raising premiums. If your selfemployed and you lose a major contract you can end up unable to pay to keep your family safe and well.
so tell me how you manage to pay more than you earn to look after the medical needs of your family and while currently your a major bread winner a small clot of blood can stop the flow of blood to your heart or worse still to your brain and recovering from this stroke and the brain damage it caused your now caught in a world of pain and debt and misery. Even if your in perfect health someone could hit your car on your way into work tomorrow and change your life forever are you really prepared for that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_National_Health_Service_(England)
the above link gives a little of the history of the founding of the NHS and why it was done
The real problem with the American healthcare system is that the cost of treatment often has to be met by the family of the sick patient.
Should people be made to face the choice of continuing treatment or costing their families future. Should your wife be forced into living in a trailer park as your widow your children forced to withdraw from college in order to maintain your life for a few more years?
Essentially it becomes a choice of suicide or putting the people you love most through intense hardship, probably worse than that since suicide would invalidate any life insurance so you need to bare the pain of cancer for as long as your body holds out.
I'm lucky I live in a country where most of my medical needs are taken care of some options will be limited due to cost and the benefit they provide. However I will get treatment and my family will be ok.
Health care is the number one reason for not wanting to live in the usa.
How about downloading the ads and not displaying them?
Its not really ad views but ad downloads thats counted isn't it.
GQ is elitist crap full of soft porn and over priced clothes, the fusion razer is very good a blade lasts for ages and isnt dead if you shave off a beard. I didnt see the ads or read the article
Microsoft is well Microsoft and i don't use windows. Hmm I guess as a beardy Linux user I am not the target audience for these ads. Doesn't that mean I would be helping ARS exploit their advertisers by making them pay for useless page views if I viewed the Ads. Ars is being paid to deliver customers for the advertisers products i'm not the customer. It would be dishonest of me to encourage this fraud by colluding with Ars.
If Ars can tell when ads are blocked then they should block me and others like me from their site and I will maintain my boycott of Sony products and RIAA recording labels. I have to admit I've never bought a new sony product and my Cd buying days were before CD's but these days its a legitimate boycott ;)
Oh and I will boycott Ars as well from now on i will be not going to their site because i'm boycotting them too
not because I never go there.
The simplenet nas solution looked interesting priced below $79
http://www.search.ie/shop/digital-502394-B002CMEIV6-Hitachi_SimpleNET_NAS_Head_USB_20_Portable_Dongle_SNET_Black.html#reviews
The reviews of it are terrible, main complaints are it is slow runs hot and has authentication issues.
one of the complaints was it overwriting config files on bootup.
its a nice idea and it might even be hackable it does run Linux but its not quite good enough from the sounds of the reviews.
The netgear options seem to run at 3 -500 dollars on amazon.
At that price a simple atom machine could be practical power draw for a netbook is around 12 watts typically with wol and drive spin down you could have an economical solution that is quite fast.
Arm would probably be even better on the power front and might be even cheaper.
Why pay to get them solved?
disclaimer i'm sure badoo isn't getting people to solve captures for black hat reasons.
In badoo if you give a website address or a user name for msn or such like when your chatting, you have to solve a capture to continue and send the Link or email address.
Why?
As you are allowed to send the address anyway once you solve it there is no point asking really unless the point is to solve captures.
Badoo doesnt seem to have a visible means of support but it does have many 1000's of users solving captures.
samples may be retained after they have fulfilled the purposes for which they were taken but shall not be used by any person except for purposes related to the prevention or detection of crime, the investigation of an offence [F4 , the conduct of a prosecution or the identification of a deceased person or of the person from whom a body part came
actually the above quote seems to show you are wrong about that. If they think your dna can be useful in identifying a crime or your body then they can and will use it.
USA has illegal search and seizure the UK doesn't and Scotland is on a different legal basis to the rest of the UK as has been said.
you say that , but as I look outside where its currently foggy I know in a few hours it will be sunny.
Most days have some cloud for some of the day. so while you can't expect full output all the time to say you will get minimal output is just as misleading. Assuming an hour of sun and an hour of cloud and maximum and minimum of 1 and 10 kwh the average over 2 hours is 5.5kwh for your lucky 1kwh production you would need cloud 90% of the time.
Unfortunately the Police are under no obligation to remove the DNA from the database until your 100th birthday I've read through the regulations they work under. In the appendix there are form letters for the chief constable to tell you that your dna can not be removed, there is no example of a letter saying it can.
In the UK the police retain records of everyone even if you have never been arrested or charged with anything it is enough to be associated with someone with a criminal record for this to be recorded on your record. I believe they refer to these as non arrestable offenses. I say your record but its the polices record of you. Over time the Police are not forced to share what they have on you with other agencies but everything is kept on record for their use and they do have the option of clearing your record once you reach the age of 100.
Of course your Dna will not only identify you but close matches may suggest a brother or a son or other close relative may be worth investigating. There is no political will from either of the main parties to curb the current legislation they have both contributed to it. So you either live with it or leave and hope that there is no worldwide database created in your lifetime.
Rule number one where ever you are don't get involved with the Police if you can possibly avoid it.
http://www.genewatch.org/sub-539482
http://www.runnymedetrust.org/events-conferences/econferences/ethnic-profiling-in-uk-law-enforcement/the-report/the-national-dna-database/the-national-dna-database-2.html
The second link spells it out for you using big letters and crayon, yes you are on record and for all practical meanings of for the rest of your life.
The European Court of Human Rights
In December 2008, in the case of S. and Marper v. the UK, the Grand Chamber of European Court of Human Rights reached a unanimous judgment that the blanket retention of innocent people's DNA and fingerprints by the UK Government contravenes Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to privacy).
At the time of writing, the Government has yet to implement a response to the judgment. Its initial proposals to retain DNA records from innocent people for 6 or 12 years, depending on the offence for which they were arrested, were widely criticised. They have been replaced with an alternative 6 year retention time for innocent adults (3 years for under-16s), in the Crime and Security Bill 2009/10. However, both opposition parties regard these proposals as unacceptable.. The Government has also made a welcome proposal to destroy the original DNA samples (biological samples), which are currently stored by the commercial laboratories which analyse them, and which contain unlimited genetic information which is not needed for identification purposes.
I guess that this judgment may change things but currently there is no change and it will remain that way until compelled to change. note the opposition fighting against the change it can be viewed as because the proposals are still draconian or more cynically to block any change in the current status quo.
Unless legislation does go through and so far it hasn't then any plea to the chief constable to get the dna record removed due to exceptional circumstances will fall on deaf ears because after all being innocent of any crime is hardly exceptional in that database.
Heart disease is largely a consequence of a life time of eating processed crap that we wouldn't even eat without the addition of chemicals to make them taste reasonable (some products don't even manage that).
its pretty much a given that processed food contains too much salt sugar , transfats saturated fats and some lovely additions that are at least suspected of being carcinogenic.
natural food fresh veg and fruit and meat sliced (not pureed and reconstituted) are far better for you than the processed junk that is maybe 90% of what the average supermarket sells.
Heart disease is clearly related to he junk that we put in our mouths.
when i was a student there was a bus stop outside the house one morning chris woke up flung the curtains open to see the top deck of the bus looking back at him.
Another friend was driving a coal lorry in yorkshire and he was bustin for a dump any way after not finding anywhere he decided to jump in the back of the coal lorry, you know he says thats the first time he ever saw a double decker bus in holmfirth.
well its not quite realtime
but say a broadcast starts at 6 and your dvr begins to record it you come in 15 minutes later and start watching at the start while the dvr is recording with now a 15 minute buffer.
you decide to take a leak and pause then return to watching 3 minutes later now 18 minutes behind the broadcast. An ad break comes on and you skip through 5 minutes of ads putting you 13 minutes behind broadcast time.
now you could perhaps use a vcr to record a program but you couldnt start watching it while it was still being recorded.
its also great if your stopped in the middle of your program by somebody at the door. you can go back to your program and catch up from where you left off. A vcr you would have to slam in a tape and wait for your program to finish before resuming. Did i mention you can change channels automatically if you planned your evenings viewing. having programs on the hdd means you can grab something you want to watch when there is nothing worth watching.
VCR barely scratches the surface of what can be done with time shifting.
Of course the networks will try to make things difficult no easy way of cherry picking the olympics but at least you can fast forward.
The Vcr allowed people to record stuff to hopefully watch at another date.
Tivo brought the ability to timeshift in real time while recording something a vcr cant do.
the amount that can be recorded is also completely different you can decide to record a season of something and a tivo will do it.
Sad thing is that the content providers still won't let us have the freedom we want to choose what and when we view. Luckily there is an alternative usually referred to as bit torrent.
what kind of an arguement is that?
I would consider a netbook pretty portable and capable of running a "Desktop OS" which can be a flavour of Linux, Windows or OSX. In general the biggest restriction is screen size and quite a few applications have been redesigned to fit on the shorter screen.
So just what are the gains of a portable hand held OS? Ok you can argue that touch works better with the handheld os but no multitasking is a big thing to lose for the sake of that ui.
Applications can be adapted for better use with touch screens. It's largely a change in design of the view.
with Linux not being tied to the desktop in the same way as windows it seems likely a window manager could be deployed which would be designed for touch screen input.
You seem to be saying handheld os isnt as good because its a handheld device. Yet ignoring all the netbooks that do run desktop os versions (generally very effectively). The iPad is capable of more just Apple don't want you to confuse it with your macbook.
its not that ubiquity isnt good it is but most people don't know what it is or how to use it.
I use ubiquity mainly for translation if i need a language i use ubiquity to translate in either direction this makes it possible to talk with anyone.
Thing is this is one small part of what ubiquity can do i havent a clue about 99% of its functionality.
Trouble with your analogy is that wifi routers default to being relatively secure these days. you would be hard pressed to buy a router within the last few years that wasnt secure by default.
If the owner has made his router open its practically certain that it was intentional.
Actually I think you will find its the gulf stream which warms the UK and Ireland.
When you ask what a kindle is for -the answer is easy reading ebooks. It's tailored to that task and has a battery life that doesn't require you to charge it everyday.
Where does it live? probably on a book case at home or on your bedside cabinet it's not that big on traveling I guess some people would take it with them on the way to work in a briefcase or to read on the train.
The role of the kindle is well defined you read ebooks on it.
The iPad is a much looser concept its a media device says Steve you can browse the web do your web based stuff on it.
However it is looking more and more like you can't do everything you expect to be able to do on the net. I use skype pidgin (irc msn yahoo) and I will be browsing at the same time. If I understand correctly multitasking isnt possible with the ipad /itouch series of devices so I would have to choose one messaging service to be connected to.
Why do I want one - I don't know yet.
Perhaps someone can make a list of cool things to do with an iPad.
To be honest a netbook with dual screen or a reversible screen would be more interesting switching to the external screen when the lid is closed. it might be a bit thicker than an iPad but its going to be more flexible to use.
theres an interesting hack for someone to try Netbook screens are quite cheap and as its the same as the internal screen it would be easy to drive add a touch screen and its pretty much there.
Would it really hurt apple to put a usb or sd card slot on to the ipad. I mean seriously people like to take photo's and the iPad screen is a useful size.
Surely Putting your photo card in your iPad and selecting the good shots and uploading to your fliker account or emailing to friends or posting on facebook are things a lot of iPad owners will want to do?
What is it good for oversized media player ? there has to be i/o someway of connecting to a printer at least.
ok probably not.
I'm struggling to see why the iPad has any potential to be a popular product if its going to be so limited. The one thing going for it is the well developed touch interface. I don't think it is enough, however it will encourage competing products which will have to be competitively priced and do more to succeed
so I like the iPad I just wouldnt ever buy one I need more functionality than Apple want to give me. maybe asus will give me what i want.
THe trouble is smaller companies struggle to bring products to the market. There is an arm powered netbook with two modes a detachable keyboard battery section you dont even have to buy it looks like it could be nice but can you actually buy one ...
The big problem is note taking has never properly been addressed. we are still using mice/trackpad and a keyboard
for somethings they can be almost adequate but as soon as you want to write something unusual like a formula or sketch a diagram or graph they fall down.
now i don't know how good the ipad's touch screen is and i'm not sure if its a solution to this issue. (The lack of a keyboard is a major downside and its not a computer its an iphone with a big screen). you tend to want to write things as well as sketch. Notes can do with annotations, say a relevant passage of a text book.
so theres both the input issues and the desired composition of the output which must be fast and easy to achieve.
There isn't really the software or the hardware to tackle this problem of note taking.
The hardware issue isn't too bad its quite possible to make a usb powered touch screen which can be used for this task and with pixelQI's epaper mode it can double up as an ereader screen or even for multimedia.
so you use the usb screen as a sketch pad and the keyboard for text entry. (admittedly theres a gap in the market for software able to take advantage of such a set up.
Graphing for example could be easily addressed as some things like axis are standard and setting scale could be done in a couple of clicks with the manual bit being the graph line itself.
I've been trying hard to prototype such a device but trying to get the components has been hell.
I know what I need and i'm optimistic the hardware could be made available for the price of a commercial game.
wacom do something similar but expensive and still limited.
It's quite possible to have a full install of ubuntu on a EEE701 with a 4GB sdd drive and still have swap on.
Space isn't that much of an issue with the sd card slot or usb drives adding more storage is easy. Data can be used easily from anywhere.
Ubuntu does have a few dependency issues with packages being connected that don't need to be really. For example default games or no default games there is no middle ground can't just keep the couple i play now and again.
UNR is a failure for me because they do silly things like this. open office is a good thing to have on a base install disk. However it shouldn't be made awkward to delete it.
UNR could concentrate on fixing the UI's of applications that don't fit on the screen.
or removing unnecessary dependencies such as mono or lumping all the default games into one package
They shouldnt be tweaking the kernel (dropping reiserfs support for one example)
taking nano out of the default install was another annoyance (at least that was easy to add back).
The people working on unr seem to be lacking in experience in fact recently even mainstream ubuntu maintainers seem to be intent on driving people to debian.
I won't use UNR I have no confidence in the maintainers at all. Seems like UNR is training wheels for new distro maintainers.