Maybe in addition to flexible screens, a brain scanner, and antigravity, this Nexus phone will finally feature the latest in high-bandwidth media transfer technology. An unnamed source tells me this wireless technology will take the revolutionary form of a small, fingernail-sized chip that can be easily inserted into and removed from the phone. Many gigabytes of data from the cloud can be stored on the chip and then transfered between the phone and other compatible devices such as phones, tablets, and notebooks. Some media sources have speculated that this pioneering technology may even allow users to access their media when an Internet connection is not available, although experts have cautioned that the technology to implement such a feature will not be available until 2015 at the earliest...
I'm not really sure what they mean either. Why is it running Android 4.0 when the latest is 4.1? What flavor of Android will it be running? Vanilla Android Open Source Project (AOSP)? Cyanogenmod? Will either the Linux or Android kernels require binary driver blobs for full functionality, or will this thing be totally open? What distribution of GNU/Linux will it run -- Plasma Active on Mer? Can it run Debian or Ubuntu? Is it easy to hack on or upgrade after it ships?
This device sounds cool, and $185 for a 10" capacitive touchscreen with expansion options ain't bad, but it would be nice if the specifications were a little bit more nailed down.
Oh yeah, because this sort of technology worked so well in Fast and Furious when Mexican drug lords used American assault weapons against us after the batterries in the GPS tracking system meant to locate them failed. I am not very convinced this sort of technology would be very difficult to override. The comparison of the Syrian rebels to the Afghan Mujahedeen, aka Taliban, who we are still fighting now, demonstrates an unfornate grasp of history by the people behind this idea. It's still not clear if the Syrian rebels should get military aid from us period -- they are still not a cohesive group, and elements of the rebellion still engage in things like torture and attacks on civilian targets.
What "sorry" track record? Last I checked we've been doing quite well with vaccines. I managed to get into a trial for one of the more recent ones, Chickenpox, and am certainly glad I did. Why are you so worried?
This is precisely why we have a division of power between the federal governments and the state. States, for example, are able to set their own early voting and absentee rules for their own elections (although the federal government may arbitrate if someone sues the state about these). It makes sense -- the absentee voting needs of Texas, which will have temperate weather during the election, are different than Alaska, where residents may be snowed in on election day. Another example would be subsidies for energy efficiency, which would be better spent on heat pumps in Texas, gas furnaces in Alaska.
What bothers me about not-quite-secessionists like you is that you like to apply state purview to issues that have nothing to do with locality, especially issues where you personally disagree with the federal government's stance. Are healthcare needs best left to the states? I suppose work related injuries vary somewhat by location, but lets face it, people get sick and die of cancer no matter where they live. May gays marry? While rural folks tend to have a different view than urbanites on this, I really don't see how it has anything to do with geographic location. Yet these are two issues conservatives seem to cite most when jacking off about State's Rights.
If rumors are true, there should be five new Nexus-branded devices compatible with the Android Open Source Project coming out November 5. In addition to running the most hackable version of Android, it should also be relatively easy to get them running Debian, Ubuntu, or even MeeGo.
While I'm certainly in favor of giving consumers more information, a GMO label doesn't really do this. Corn and bananas have undergone extensive selective breeding to yield products that appear grossly different from their ancestral plants. Does that count as genetically modified? What about seedless varieties of fruit? What about grafting a branch of one species of fruit-bearing tree onto the roots/trunk of another species? What if I take a naturally occurring gene for hardiness from a plant found in the wild and add it to a cultivated plant of the same species? What if I take that naturally occurring gene and add it to a plant from a different species? What if I create a hybrid gene not found in nature and add that to my crops? The average consumer is ill equipped to interpret these distinctions, and so I don't think a carte blanche GMO label really serves consumers' interests or justifies its own cost.
Now that Meego isn't beholden to corporate constraints on technology used, is there any plan to go back to the deb packaging system used in Maemo or are the developers sticking with rpm? It would probably be nice for developers if the phone ran a Meego user interface on top of a standard debian core.
I'm not really sure where you have gotten the impression that fraud is rampant in science, except perhaps by confusing Slashdot with a real news source. At least in the field where I am a graduate student, Neuroscience, fraud is rare to non-existent. I would be much more worried about the political climate for funding. Depending on your field, software patents could also become a concern in the future.
Me too. I think the Kubuntu developers did some great work pushing the envelope on what KDE can do on the desktop and netbook, and a lot of their work has appeared upstream. Kudos to Jonathan Riddell and the other Kubuntu devs! Personally, though, I needed stability more than shiny new features so I switched to Debian (ironically) unstable. Not only does it offer a more stable desktop experience with KDE 4.6 than does Kubuntu, but because its a rolling release distribution the packages are usually fresher than the latest Ubuntu release and I haven't had to reinstall in over a year. Hopefully now we will have more manpower to work on stable, vanilla KDE 4.7 and 4.8 on Debian.
As for Ubuntu, I now have zero reasons to install it.
To clarify, giant magnets can temporarily induce nystagmus if you move around too quickly in their magnetic field. The nystagmus goes away when you leave. MRI machines cause nystagmus like wearing your winter coat in a sauna causes a fever.
If you read the *entire* Wikipedia article on the Thorium fuel cycle, you would understand why Thorium is proliferation resistant instead of calling the parent "ridiculously misinformed".
"Because the 233U produced in thorium fuels is inevitably contaminated with 232U, thorium-based used nuclear fuel possesses inherent proliferation resistance. Uranium-232 can not be chemically separated from 233U and has several decay products which emit high energy gamma radiation. These high energy photons are a radiological hazard that necessitate the use of remote handling of separated uranium and aid in the passive detection of such materials."
"It is verifiable because the epithermal thorium breeder produces only at most 9% more fuel than it burns in each year. Building bombs quickly will take power plants out of operation."
Basically, because almost all naturally occurring Thorium is 232Th, it's possible to isolate Thorium fuel chemically -- without centrifugation. In other words, a country that uses Thorium exclusively for fuel has no reason to develop centrifugation technology. On the other hand, separating 233U from 232U requires centrifugation. Thus, aforementioned countries would be unable to access the 233U they produce for bomb-building purposes.
Also, the poor breeder coefficient of 233U Thorium reactors means that most of the 233U produced by the reactor is required to produce the neutrons that convert fertile Thorium into more 233U. If you were to remove the 233U from the reactor for use in a bomb, you would halt additional production of 233U by the reactor. Either you would have to harvest very little 233U over a long period of time, or you would have to supplement the Thorium fuel with some other fissile material such as bomb-grade plutonium (and if you already had access to that, you wouldn't be trying to produce bomb-grade material in the first place).
While it's possible to produce a bomb using a the thorium fuel cycle, it is inefficient and requires advanced centrifugation technology to mitigate the 232U. It would be easier to just start with uranium ore.
Indeed, Lenovo has made it abundantly clear that they want to Microsoft whores. That's why, although I love my T61, I recently bought a Dell Latitude E6500 when I needed a new computer. Dell couldn't sell it in the configuration I wanted without Windows, but they gave me an $80 discount when I told them I'd be using Linux! It's a solid laptop, metal hinges and all -- good riddance, Lenovo!
You don't have to pay for twice the redundancy, but rather twice the bandwidth in two (or more) different cables. When a cable fails, bandwidth drops below what consumers paid for but Internet is not completely blacked-out.
ClamAV does have a daemon, it just doesn't have on on-access scanner for Windows -- yet. The people over at Clamwin http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/35/27/ are working on one. Linux users interested in on-access scanning should look up Clamuko, but then if you run Linux you probably don't need an on-access virus scanner...
Someone with the technology to engineer a virus to cause your living clothes to numb your nerve endings and eat you in your sleep could just engineer a virus to kill you directly.
And don't think that such a virus could arise spontaneously. It's astronomically more likely that a naturally arising virus would simply cause your bio-clothing to rot. And possible smell like bananas and wintergreen in the process.
Symantec is overly bloated, and this is a problem. A lot of time I spent in part-time IT went into cleaning pre-9.0 versions of Symantec corporate off the hard drives of Win98-XP machines because the Symantec uninstaller doesn't work very well and, wouldn't you know, you can't upgrade to 9.0 corporate without first uninstalling previous versions. Most of the time I didn't spend doing this went into reinstalling Windows on machines that got infected despite having Symantec installed. And now the saga continues at my University.
All those broadcast packets on UDP port 137? That's an improperly configured Symantec corporate looking for servers to manage it. Only for some reason, properly configured Symantec installations start doing this ~a month after being installed anyway. Get 200 of these computers on the same subnet and it's enough to kill a Netgear home router (Linksys home routers seem to handle it, though).
I agree that Symantec is too bloated/complicated and too complacent to be effective, and that the ideal solution is to use a GNU environment of some sort. However for those user who aren't willing to part with Windows, Sophos and F-Protector are far superior to Symantec when it comes to virus removal. BitDefender isn't bad at virus+spyware+firewall. McAfee, of course, is a complete joke.
While the Bells are obviously looking out for their own interests, we should consider the long-term ramifications of municipal, government-funded Internet. What if the government decides that elements of the Internet need to be filtered (e.g. porn)? Legally, they are capable of doing this (as some currently do in public libraries, parks, and such). If the majority of municipal Internet is purchased from government at that point, how much will the rest of us have to pay the remaining Bells to get private, unfiltered Internet?
I don't know. Personally, I don't have any plans to use the Helix player in it's current state. Why bother, when I can already view (and even rip) my favorite Real streams with my Mplayer and Xine browser plugins? And yes, I'm suspicious of Real playing nice with OSS all of a sudden...
Perhaps the Helix player is better suited to the Syllable project (http://www.syllable.org).
Indeed. It's not like Microsoft is going to convince any of us to actually buy their products. If they want to support the Linux community, they can go again.
Anyone who switches from p2p to stream ripping hasn't given anonymous, censorship-resistant p2p apps like GNUnet (http://www.ovmj.org/GNUnet/) a fair chance. Streams don't always have the music you want at the quality you want. Streams for video games, software, etc., don't exist. And streaming can't be used to share information within a repressive regime (think China). These anonymous networks are young and rather low on content now, but in the long term they will offer more options than stream ripping in a mode that will be more difficult for the RIAA to attack.
The situation isn't really dangerous. In fact, HAM radio operators are allowed to use their radios during flight (just not during take off and landing). The problem isn't in interference with avionic equipment but rather, as has already been mentioned, in the cell network.
Normally several adjacent towers pick up your signal, and then decide which one has the best signal quality. That tower then handles the signal. Remember, signal quality/strength is best with a line-of-sight to the cell tower. Well, on an airplane, you have line of site to lots of cell towers - some of which are several miles apart and consequently not programmed to defer your signal. Too many users doing this could crash the cell phone network!
Perhaps a more effective solution would be better tracking software in cell towers. Software that enabled far-away towers to communicate and defer your signal would resolve the problem and be a whole lot cheaper than using sattelite uplinks.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not clean energy?
http://energyfromthorium.com/2...
Oh well, I guess we'll just have to buy it from this guy:
http://www.itheo.org/bill-gate...
Maybe in addition to flexible screens, a brain scanner, and antigravity, this Nexus phone will finally feature the latest in high-bandwidth media transfer technology. An unnamed source tells me this wireless technology will take the revolutionary form of a small, fingernail-sized chip that can be easily inserted into and removed from the phone. Many gigabytes of data from the cloud can be stored on the chip and then transfered between the phone and other compatible devices such as phones, tablets, and notebooks. Some media sources have speculated that this pioneering technology may even allow users to access their media when an Internet connection is not available, although experts have cautioned that the technology to implement such a feature will not be available until 2015 at the earliest...
I'm not really sure what they mean either. Why is it running Android 4.0 when the latest is 4.1? What flavor of Android will it be running? Vanilla Android Open Source Project (AOSP)? Cyanogenmod? Will either the Linux or Android kernels require binary driver blobs for full functionality, or will this thing be totally open? What distribution of GNU/Linux will it run -- Plasma Active on Mer? Can it run Debian or Ubuntu? Is it easy to hack on or upgrade after it ships?
This device sounds cool, and $185 for a 10" capacitive touchscreen with expansion options ain't bad, but it would be nice if the specifications were a little bit more nailed down.
Oh yeah, because this sort of technology worked so well in Fast and Furious when Mexican drug lords used American assault weapons against us after the batterries in the GPS tracking system meant to locate them failed. I am not very convinced this sort of technology would be very difficult to override. The comparison of the Syrian rebels to the Afghan Mujahedeen, aka Taliban, who we are still fighting now, demonstrates an unfornate grasp of history by the people behind this idea. It's still not clear if the Syrian rebels should get military aid from us period -- they are still not a cohesive group, and elements of the rebellion still engage in things like torture and attacks on civilian targets.
What "sorry" track record? Last I checked we've been doing quite well with vaccines. I managed to get into a trial for one of the more recent ones, Chickenpox, and am certainly glad I did. Why are you so worried?
This is precisely why we have a division of power between the federal governments and the state. States, for example, are able to set their own early voting and absentee rules for their own elections (although the federal government may arbitrate if someone sues the state about these). It makes sense -- the absentee voting needs of Texas, which will have temperate weather during the election, are different than Alaska, where residents may be snowed in on election day. Another example would be subsidies for energy efficiency, which would be better spent on heat pumps in Texas, gas furnaces in Alaska.
What bothers me about not-quite-secessionists like you is that you like to apply state purview to issues that have nothing to do with locality, especially issues where you personally disagree with the federal government's stance. Are healthcare needs best left to the states? I suppose work related injuries vary somewhat by location, but lets face it, people get sick and die of cancer no matter where they live. May gays marry? While rural folks tend to have a different view than urbanites on this, I really don't see how it has anything to do with geographic location. Yet these are two issues conservatives seem to cite most when jacking off about State's Rights.
If rumors are true, there should be five new Nexus-branded devices compatible with the Android Open Source Project coming out November 5. In addition to running the most hackable version of Android, it should also be relatively easy to get them running Debian, Ubuntu, or even MeeGo.
While I'm certainly in favor of giving consumers more information, a GMO label doesn't really do this. Corn and bananas have undergone extensive selective breeding to yield products that appear grossly different from their ancestral plants. Does that count as genetically modified? What about seedless varieties of fruit? What about grafting a branch of one species of fruit-bearing tree onto the roots/trunk of another species? What if I take a naturally occurring gene for hardiness from a plant found in the wild and add it to a cultivated plant of the same species? What if I take that naturally occurring gene and add it to a plant from a different species? What if I create a hybrid gene not found in nature and add that to my crops? The average consumer is ill equipped to interpret these distinctions, and so I don't think a carte blanche GMO label really serves consumers' interests or justifies its own cost.
Now that Meego isn't beholden to corporate constraints on technology used, is there any plan to go back to the deb packaging system used in Maemo or are the developers sticking with rpm? It would probably be nice for developers if the phone ran a Meego user interface on top of a standard debian core.
I'm not really sure where you have gotten the impression that fraud is rampant in science, except perhaps by confusing Slashdot with a real news source. At least in the field where I am a graduate student, Neuroscience, fraud is rare to non-existent. I would be much more worried about the political climate for funding. Depending on your field, software patents could also become a concern in the future.
Me too. I think the Kubuntu developers did some great work pushing the envelope on what KDE can do on the desktop and netbook, and a lot of their work has appeared upstream. Kudos to Jonathan Riddell and the other Kubuntu devs! Personally, though, I needed stability more than shiny new features so I switched to Debian (ironically) unstable. Not only does it offer a more stable desktop experience with KDE 4.6 than does Kubuntu, but because its a rolling release distribution the packages are usually fresher than the latest Ubuntu release and I haven't had to reinstall in over a year. Hopefully now we will have more manpower to work on stable, vanilla KDE 4.7 and 4.8 on Debian.
As for Ubuntu, I now have zero reasons to install it.
To clarify, giant magnets can temporarily induce nystagmus if you move around too quickly in their magnetic field. The nystagmus goes away when you leave. MRI machines cause nystagmus like wearing your winter coat in a sauna causes a fever.
If you read the *entire* Wikipedia article on the Thorium fuel cycle, you would understand why Thorium is proliferation resistant instead of calling the parent "ridiculously misinformed".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle
"Because the 233U produced in thorium fuels is inevitably contaminated with 232U, thorium-based used nuclear fuel possesses inherent proliferation resistance. Uranium-232 can not be chemically separated from 233U and has several decay products which emit high energy gamma radiation. These high energy photons are a radiological hazard that necessitate the use of remote handling of separated uranium and aid in the passive detection of such materials."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
"It is verifiable because the epithermal thorium breeder produces only at most 9% more fuel than it burns in each year. Building bombs quickly will take power plants out of operation."
Basically, because almost all naturally occurring Thorium is 232Th, it's possible to isolate Thorium fuel chemically -- without centrifugation. In other words, a country that uses Thorium exclusively for fuel has no reason to develop centrifugation technology. On the other hand, separating 233U from 232U requires centrifugation. Thus, aforementioned countries would be unable to access the 233U they produce for bomb-building purposes.
Also, the poor breeder coefficient of 233U Thorium reactors means that most of the 233U produced by the reactor is required to produce the neutrons that convert fertile Thorium into more 233U. If you were to remove the 233U from the reactor for use in a bomb, you would halt additional production of 233U by the reactor. Either you would have to harvest very little 233U over a long period of time, or you would have to supplement the Thorium fuel with some other fissile material such as bomb-grade plutonium (and if you already had access to that, you wouldn't be trying to produce bomb-grade material in the first place).
While it's possible to produce a bomb using a the thorium fuel cycle, it is inefficient and requires advanced centrifugation technology to mitigate the 232U. It would be easier to just start with uranium ore.
Indeed, Lenovo has made it abundantly clear that they want to Microsoft whores. That's why, although I love my T61, I recently bought a Dell Latitude E6500 when I needed a new computer. Dell couldn't sell it in the configuration I wanted without Windows, but they gave me an $80 discount when I told them I'd be using Linux! It's a solid laptop, metal hinges and all -- good riddance, Lenovo!
They've really fucked the system with this one. Are there any alternatives to icann administered dns out there?
You don't have to pay for twice the redundancy, but rather twice the bandwidth in two (or more) different cables. When a cable fails, bandwidth drops below what consumers paid for but Internet is not completely blacked-out.
ClamAV does have a daemon, it just doesn't have on on-access scanner for Windows -- yet. The people over at Clamwin http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/35/27/ are working on one. Linux users interested in on-access scanning should look up Clamuko, but then if you run Linux you probably don't need an on-access virus scanner...
Someone with the technology to engineer a virus to cause your living clothes to numb your nerve endings and eat you in your sleep could just engineer a virus to kill you directly.
And don't think that such a virus could arise spontaneously. It's astronomically more likely that a naturally arising virus would simply cause your bio-clothing to rot. And possible smell like bananas and wintergreen in the process.
Symantec is overly bloated, and this is a problem. A lot of time I spent in part-time IT went into cleaning pre-9.0 versions of Symantec corporate off the hard drives of Win98-XP machines because the Symantec uninstaller doesn't work very well and, wouldn't you know, you can't upgrade to 9.0 corporate without first uninstalling previous versions. Most of the time I didn't spend doing this went into reinstalling Windows on machines that got infected despite having Symantec installed. And now the saga continues at my University.
All those broadcast packets on UDP port 137? That's an improperly configured Symantec corporate looking for servers to manage it. Only for some reason, properly configured Symantec installations start doing this ~a month after being installed anyway. Get 200 of these computers on the same subnet and it's enough to kill a Netgear home router (Linksys home routers seem to handle it, though).
I agree that Symantec is too bloated/complicated and too complacent to be effective, and that the ideal solution is to use a GNU environment of some sort. However for those user who aren't willing to part with Windows, Sophos and F-Protector are far superior to Symantec when it comes to virus removal. BitDefender isn't bad at virus+spyware+firewall. McAfee, of course, is a complete joke.
While the Bells are obviously looking out for their own interests, we should consider the long-term ramifications of municipal, government-funded Internet. What if the government decides that elements of the Internet need to be filtered (e.g. porn)? Legally, they are capable of doing this (as some currently do in public libraries, parks, and such). If the majority of municipal Internet is purchased from government at that point, how much will the rest of us have to pay the remaining Bells to get private, unfiltered Internet?
I don't know. Personally, I don't have any plans to use the Helix player in it's current state. Why bother, when I can already view (and even rip) my favorite Real streams with my Mplayer and Xine browser plugins? And yes, I'm suspicious of Real playing nice with OSS all of a sudden...
Perhaps the Helix player is better suited to the Syllable project (http://www.syllable.org).
Indeed. It's not like Microsoft is going to convince any of us to actually buy their products. If they want to support the Linux community, they can go again.
Anyone who switches from p2p to stream ripping hasn't given anonymous, censorship-resistant p2p apps like GNUnet (http://www.ovmj.org/GNUnet/) a fair chance. Streams don't always have the music you want at the quality you want. Streams for video games, software, etc., don't exist. And streaming can't be used to share information within a repressive regime (think China). These anonymous networks are young and rather low on content now, but in the long term they will offer more options than stream ripping in a mode that will be more difficult for the RIAA to attack.
The situation isn't really dangerous. In fact, HAM radio operators are allowed to use their radios during flight (just not during take off and landing). The problem isn't in interference with avionic equipment but rather, as has already been mentioned, in the cell network.
Normally several adjacent towers pick up your signal, and then decide which one has the best signal quality. That tower then handles the signal. Remember, signal quality/strength is best with a line-of-sight to the cell tower. Well, on an airplane, you have line of site to lots of cell towers - some of which are several miles apart and consequently not programmed to defer your signal. Too many users doing this could crash the cell phone network!
Perhaps a more effective solution would be better tracking software in cell towers. Software that enabled far-away towers to communicate and defer your signal would resolve the problem and be a whole lot cheaper than using sattelite uplinks.