It's a no-brainer to see why municipal wi-fi wouldn't work without significant investment. I'd guess we're talking about millions of dollars even for smallish towns. And yes, the last mile (or even the last few feet) can be a real problem.
I was recently at a conference in Göttingen (Germany). My hotel room had wifi (that I paid for). Still the connection was intermittent and had tiny bandwidth, even though the router was in the hall outside. One morning, I had to start an x-terminal session to a computer at my home university to run Mathematica. The connection was so slow that I just gave up and went to use the local campus machines.
It would be nice to have free wifi, and maybe this could work as a low quality service for those who can't afford anything better, but for the moment, I can only see this happening through increased taxation, and probably only in the richer neighbourhoods.
I'd say the reality for communal wifi is that it could work on a much smaller scale to begin with. Maybe a street could pool together some money to pay for local wifi and lock it in with WPA passphrases. We might eventually see a network of these streets, building Municipal wifi one block at a time.
Yes you're right. I realised my mistake just after I made the post, but subsequently forgot to correct it. My bad!
However, I still don't think that law-making by the people is a particularly good idea. I imagine that it would just lead to a tyranny of the majority. Moreover, it could lead to a real marginalisation of the disenfranchised (that means children, criminals, and illegal immigrants).
An official Bill is currently being written-up by parliamentary drafters, but in parallel there's an opportunity for others to suggest how a new Policing Act might look by contributing to a wiki Act.
OK, it's unrealistic to believe that New Zealand would let anyone write the law. That would lead to anarchy. However, what they're doing is trying to get people interested in the law-making process, and in the laws themselves by opening up this wiki. I can see a number of purposes this could serve:
Educational: teaches citizens about laws and law-making.
Political: by getting citizens involved in the process, they're more likely to support the new Act.
Police PR: gets citizens to think about policing in a new way and perhaps gain a new respect for the Police.
Any bureaucracy can fail those at the extremes. However, I don't think it's necessarily such a bad thing that we're spending more on developmentally challenged children than on geniuses. After all, shouldn't the geniuses have a better chance of being able to succeed even without extra assistance?
None the less, it is vital that we do as much as possible to encourage bright young children. One of the recent recipients of the Fields medal (the 'Nobel prize for math'), Terrence Tao was raised in Australia and quickly progressed to University there, gaining his degree aged 17. He then moved to Princeton for graduate study! It seems that private educational institutions, especially the better Universities, do recognise exceptional talent and take it very seriously, even when the vessel is physically immature. The real problem arises when the children come from underprivileged backgrounds, where there parents do not have the financial resources or contacts to further assist their child. I don't think we need special schools for gifted children, but it would be prudent to send bright children to the best schools, and indeed to let them skip grades. For this to happen, parents need information about scholarship opportunities, and to be able to communicate with the better schools.
...why don't they replace the tiles anyway, just to be sure? The article suggests that a spacewalk would create added risk, but we know that spacewalks occur all the time routinely. Perhaps there is a financial motivation for not carrying out the repair? I don't know.
What I'd like to see is an actual breakdown of the possible positive and negative consequences of each course of action and the probabilities that NASA has assigned to the outcomes. I'm really hoping that they've put some serious statistical analysis into this decision and aren't just flying by the seat of their pants. Certainly, the article quotes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Douglas Osheroff, as saying that the repairs "can only increase their chances of making it down."
I was looking forward to reading reports of stormy weather ahead, or even of bright skies. But this seems be be more of a roadmap, not really a forecast. If someone can read this more deeply and see the analogy, then please enlighten me!
The major source of the confusion is the definition of Great Britain. Great Britain is the largest of the British Isles, an archipelago off the northwest coast of continental Europe. Ireland is also one of the British Isles, though the term isn't used much in Ireland due to associations between 'British Isles' and 'Great Britain'. The United Kingdom is the union of Great Britain with Northern Ireland. A slighlty unusual case is the Isle of Man which is one of the British Isles (though not part of Great Britain!), but isn't technically part of the UK — it is a Crown dependency.
-stall doors that freaking go all the way to the floor!
Interesting that you mention this point. In the UK (and most countries I've been to), it is generally impossible to see into a toilet stall from outside. I've only encountered the 'open' stall in the US. I really don't understand why it's necessary to have a small gap at the floor. More disconcerting are the gaps at the door hinges. Anyone can walk up to the stall and peer in. I wonder if this is aimed at making the toilet experience somewhat less leisurely and thereby increasing productivity?
Ah, this comment makes me feel old. Unbundling IE from Windows was the main issue in the United States v. Microsoft court case (1998-2000). Bundling IE had essentially knocked Netscape off the browser throne and Microsoft were being investigated for anti-competitive behaviour.
Microsoft argued (successfully) that IE is an integral part of Windows, hence cannot be unbundled. To an extent, they are correct and it wouldn't be a trivial a trivial matter for an OEM to remove IE and still retain a working system. For instance, one serious problem is that IE is required to access the Windows Update site.
Do we need to encourage evangelism?
on
World Firefox Day
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Firefox has reached sufficient popularity and code maturity that it doesn't need to encourage evangelism. Sure, I use Firefox and I'd recommend it to most Explorer users, and I've already converted those close to me. However, I'm not going to go on a Firefox Crusade as that would stink of zealotry and probably hurt the cause. As other posters have said, Mozilla should put their efforts into bug fixes and usability issues. Yes, I know this isn't a zero-sum game, but we'd all be more likely to recommend Firefox if they could clear up the excessive memory usage 'feature' and the odd keyboard scrolling problem that took me ages to figure out.
That's pretty funny. But you do model from electrons. Ultimately you're shifting electrons around inside your computer when you make things in Blender. The same as when you write a document in Word (or OpenOffice) or make a post on Slashdot. I was using figurative language, but I see that my figure of speech was entirely lost on you:(
Having spent many many hours playing with Blender, I can say that the UI is not the major hurdle. It takes at most one hour of sustained effort to get to grips with the UI — the main problem is actually doing creative things once you've mastered it. 'Modelling', the art of constructing 3D structures out of mere electrons is the most time-consuming part of the process. My advice is to steer clear of Blender, unless you find that your WoW addiction still leaves you with time to kill.
The benefit in knowing collision dates is that we'll be able to partially protect our assets from the storm. For example, power companies can issue a planned outage, taking their transformers off-line for a brief period during the storm in order to prevent a longer outage caused by damage.
This is like our desire to know how the (terrestrial) weather is going to behave, even though we can't influence it. Advance warning helps us to prepare for adverse weather.
If you want to read the Sidekick story without having to log in at the NY Times, the same reporter (Nicholas Confessore) has written another article, delivered up by the good folks over at the International Herald Tribune.
I'm sure there are plenty of less-than-ethical developers who wouldn't scoff at the potential of a BMW (note the article says 10-cyclinder whereas the summary says 12-cylinder) or the $100,000. Developers don't own their work, so the question of stealing work becomes irrelevant. The relevant question is whether an SCO manager will just give the cash prize to his nephew.
To reiterate: developers aren't clients so the trust question doesn't arise, or at least takes a different form.
This is somewhat hyperbolic. The GP isn't claiming that we "shouldn't bother with the evils of science", and makes no detracting comments about fission research. Specifically, he or she has issues with the development of weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, you are implicitly arguing that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently a superior activity. Tell that to the London victims of Werner von Braun's V2 rocket.
My point is that rocket reseach and fission research can be carried out in the absence of a military goal, but unfortunately funding seems to come easily in times of war. Suppose a rogue state pumps a lot of money into the development of new pathogens, with a view to carrying out biological warfare. You could argue that this research helps us to better understand the action of pathogens and could help in developing effective countermeasures. However, in doing so, it is not necessary to cause large-scale devastation of human life.
I'm calling BS on this one. Though I disagree with the grandparent, I also take issue with most of your post:
Reference to an external God is not a prerequisite for 'drive'. No matter what you may think of his politics, there is no denying that Mao Zedong had 'drive'. If you want examples from science, then you need look no further than Betrand Russell or Richard Feynman.
Most Eastern religions do make reference to an external God or Gods. Islam has (essentially) the same God as Judaism and Christianity, Hinduism exhibits a vast pantheon of gods. The Japanese are largely Buddhist/Shinto. Shintoism is an animist practice which (to be brutally simple in my description) treats every natural thing as being sacred.
None of the Christians I know believe that God is 'above us' and that we can meet him by 'building towers and spaceships'. This is either some pre-Copernican fantasy or a twisting of the facts to suit your argument.
To stay on topic, I'm strongly in favour of Professor Hawking's suggestion. At least in the very long term, human life on this planet is not sustainable, unless we evolve into some kind of creature which can live in the corona of a red giant.
Controls with opposite effects should not be right next to each other.
So we'll be seeing a great reduction in 'driver error' when the brake pedal is moved away from the accelerator? Actually, this isn't a joke, a new scientist article discusses the possibilty of combining the brake and accelerator into one pedal, with completely different foot actions required to trigger the appropriate response. They do mention that accidents are sometimes caused by drivers applying the incorrect pedal.
Anyway, I thought I should mention a great essay of Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness. His argument takes the extreme view that we should only need to work for four hours a week. Empirically, the argument derives from the experience of Britain during the second world war when most of the productive capacity of the country was spent on maintaining the war. And we didn't starve.
Of course, Russell is being a little toungue-in-cheek by calling his essay In Praise of Idleness. He doesn't really mean that we should watch TV for the remaining 108 hours of the (waking) week. Rather, he imagines a regime in which we need only do 'unpleasant' work for four hours to earn our income, and the rest of the time could be spent wisely on whatever might suit our tastes. Partially, this seems to be the ethos of Google labs, where a third (I think) of developers' time is given over to their own projects.
Huh? This is the same type of bull that makes me hate IE only websites. At least most IE-only problems can be attributed to stupidity instead of malice. If someone tried to deliberately hinder my access to their site because I use Firefox, I'd likely never visit the site again.
Worryingly, the wording of this site makes it sound as though Google is affiliated with ExplorerDestroyer, which is very far from the truth. In fact, I imagine that Google would be worried by this page as it detracts from their "do not evil" ethos.
Ricardo Montalbon? You want to be a genetically engineered superman, escape Earth on the SS Botany Bay and engage in an interstellar battle with James Tiberius Kirk?
Part of the problem is that we junk our old computers or 'recycle' them. There are plenty of individuals and organisations that don't want or need a brand-new computer and would happily take our old machine. When I was a graduate student, I used to buy second-hand computers from my department every couple of years. I passed on my old machine to my 88-year-old neighbour and slapped Debian Woody on it (it works fine, by the way, and she now uses it constantly for keeping in contact with her family and for genealogy).
These days, if I wanted an old machine, I'd probably use Freecycle. This is simply a Yahoo forum for people who want to give away (or get for free!) unneeded items.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a no-brainer to see why municipal wi-fi wouldn't work without significant investment. I'd guess we're talking about millions of dollars even for smallish towns. And yes, the last mile (or even the last few feet) can be a real problem.
I was recently at a conference in Göttingen (Germany). My hotel room had wifi (that I paid for). Still the connection was intermittent and had tiny bandwidth, even though the router was in the hall outside. One morning, I had to start an x-terminal session to a computer at my home university to run Mathematica. The connection was so slow that I just gave up and went to use the local campus machines.
It would be nice to have free wifi, and maybe this could work as a low quality service for those who can't afford anything better, but for the moment, I can only see this happening through increased taxation, and probably only in the richer neighbourhoods.
I'd say the reality for communal wifi is that it could work on a much smaller scale to begin with. Maybe a street could pool together some money to pay for local wifi and lock it in with WPA passphrases. We might eventually see a network of these streets, building Municipal wifi one block at a time.
Yes you're right. I realised my mistake just after I made the post, but subsequently forgot to correct it. My bad!
However, I still don't think that law-making by the people is a particularly good idea. I imagine that it would just lead to a tyranny of the majority. Moreover, it could lead to a real marginalisation of the disenfranchised (that means children, criminals, and illegal immigrants).
Any bureaucracy can fail those at the extremes. However, I don't think it's necessarily such a bad thing that we're spending more on developmentally challenged children than on geniuses. After all, shouldn't the geniuses have a better chance of being able to succeed even without extra assistance?
None the less, it is vital that we do as much as possible to encourage bright young children. One of the recent recipients of the Fields medal (the 'Nobel prize for math'), Terrence Tao was raised in Australia and quickly progressed to University there, gaining his degree aged 17. He then moved to Princeton for graduate study! It seems that private educational institutions, especially the better Universities, do recognise exceptional talent and take it very seriously, even when the vessel is physically immature. The real problem arises when the children come from underprivileged backgrounds, where there parents do not have the financial resources or contacts to further assist their child. I don't think we need special schools for gifted children, but it would be prudent to send bright children to the best schools, and indeed to let them skip grades. For this to happen, parents need information about scholarship opportunities, and to be able to communicate with the better schools.
...why don't they replace the tiles anyway, just to be sure? The article suggests that a spacewalk would create added risk, but we know that spacewalks occur all the time routinely. Perhaps there is a financial motivation for not carrying out the repair? I don't know. What I'd like to see is an actual breakdown of the possible positive and negative consequences of each course of action and the probabilities that NASA has assigned to the outcomes. I'm really hoping that they've put some serious statistical analysis into this decision and aren't just flying by the seat of their pants. Certainly, the article quotes a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Douglas Osheroff, as saying that the repairs "can only increase their chances of making it down."
I was looking forward to reading reports of stormy weather ahead, or even of bright skies. But this seems be be more of a roadmap, not really a forecast. If someone can read this more deeply and see the analogy, then please enlighten me!
Ah, the subtleties of the British Isles!
Myths:
The major source of the confusion is the definition of Great Britain. Great Britain is the largest of the British Isles, an archipelago off the northwest coast of continental Europe. Ireland is also one of the British Isles, though the term isn't used much in Ireland due to associations between 'British Isles' and 'Great Britain'. The United Kingdom is the union of Great Britain with Northern Ireland. A slighlty unusual case is the Isle of Man which is one of the British Isles (though not part of Great Britain!), but isn't technically part of the UK — it is a Crown dependency.
Interesting that you mention this point. In the UK (and most countries I've been to), it is generally impossible to see into a toilet stall from outside. I've only encountered the 'open' stall in the US. I really don't understand why it's necessary to have a small gap at the floor. More disconcerting are the gaps at the door hinges. Anyone can walk up to the stall and peer in. I wonder if this is aimed at making the toilet experience somewhat less leisurely and thereby increasing productivity?
Ah, this comment makes me feel old. Unbundling IE from Windows was the main issue in the United States v. Microsoft court case (1998-2000). Bundling IE had essentially knocked Netscape off the browser throne and Microsoft were being investigated for anti-competitive behaviour.
Microsoft argued (successfully) that IE is an integral part of Windows, hence cannot be unbundled. To an extent, they are correct and it wouldn't be a trivial a trivial matter for an OEM to remove IE and still retain a working system. For instance, one serious problem is that IE is required to access the Windows Update site.
Firefox has reached sufficient popularity and code maturity that it doesn't need to encourage evangelism. Sure, I use Firefox and I'd recommend it to most Explorer users, and I've already converted those close to me. However, I'm not going to go on a Firefox Crusade as that would stink of zealotry and probably hurt the cause. As other posters have said, Mozilla should put their efforts into bug fixes and usability issues. Yes, I know this isn't a zero-sum game, but we'd all be more likely to recommend Firefox if they could clear up the excessive memory usage 'feature' and the odd keyboard scrolling problem that took me ages to figure out.
That's pretty funny. But you do model from electrons. Ultimately you're shifting electrons around inside your computer when you make things in Blender. The same as when you write a document in Word (or OpenOffice) or make a post on Slashdot. I was using figurative language, but I see that my figure of speech was entirely lost on you :(
I agree with you. I was going for a Funny mod, but I guess the moderators were on crack again.
Seriously though, I found that Blender ate up my life when I was using it. It can be very addictive to create and manipulate your own virtual world.
Having spent many many hours playing with Blender, I can say that the UI is not the major hurdle. It takes at most one hour of sustained effort to get to grips with the UI — the main problem is actually doing creative things once you've mastered it. 'Modelling', the art of constructing 3D structures out of mere electrons is the most time-consuming part of the process. My advice is to steer clear of Blender, unless you find that your WoW addiction still leaves you with time to kill.
The benefit in knowing collision dates is that we'll be able to partially protect our assets from the storm. For example, power companies can issue a planned outage, taking their transformers off-line for a brief period during the storm in order to prevent a longer outage caused by damage.
This is like our desire to know how the (terrestrial) weather is going to behave, even though we can't influence it. Advance warning helps us to prepare for adverse weather.
If you want to read the Sidekick story without having to log in at the NY Times, the same reporter (Nicholas Confessore) has written another article, delivered up by the good folks over at the International Herald Tribune.
Support login-free reading on the Internet!
I'm sure there are plenty of less-than-ethical developers who wouldn't scoff at the potential of a BMW (note the article says 10-cyclinder whereas the summary says 12-cylinder) or the $100,000. Developers don't own their work, so the question of stealing work becomes irrelevant. The relevant question is whether an SCO manager will just give the cash prize to his nephew.
To reiterate: developers aren't clients so the trust question doesn't arise, or at least takes a different form.
This is somewhat hyperbolic. The GP isn't claiming that we "shouldn't bother with the evils of science", and makes no detracting comments about fission research. Specifically, he or she has issues with the development of weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, you are implicitly arguing that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently a superior activity. Tell that to the London victims of Werner von Braun's V2 rocket.
My point is that rocket reseach and fission research can be carried out in the absence of a military goal, but unfortunately funding seems to come easily in times of war. Suppose a rogue state pumps a lot of money into the development of new pathogens, with a view to carrying out biological warfare. You could argue that this research helps us to better understand the action of pathogens and could help in developing effective countermeasures. However, in doing so, it is not necessary to cause large-scale devastation of human life.
I'm calling BS on this one. Though I disagree with the grandparent, I also take issue with most of your post:
To stay on topic, I'm strongly in favour of Professor Hawking's suggestion. At least in the very long term, human life on this planet is not sustainable, unless we evolve into some kind of creature which can live in the corona of a red giant.
I don't know if anyone is still reading this story, but it looks like one Doctor Fun cartoon contains the kernel of Monsters Inc.
Having many Canadian friends, I also love Maplefinger.
It seems this is the only thread going today.
Anyway, I thought I should mention a great essay of Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness . His argument takes the extreme view that we should only need to work for four hours a week. Empirically, the argument derives from the experience of Britain during the second world war when most of the productive capacity of the country was spent on maintaining the war. And we didn't starve.
Of course, Russell is being a little toungue-in-cheek by calling his essay In Praise of Idleness. He doesn't really mean that we should watch TV for the remaining 108 hours of the (waking) week. Rather, he imagines a regime in which we need only do 'unpleasant' work for four hours to earn our income, and the rest of the time could be spent wisely on whatever might suit our tastes. Partially, this seems to be the ethos of Google labs, where a third (I think) of developers' time is given over to their own projects.
Huh? This is the same type of bull that makes me hate IE only websites. At least most IE-only problems can be attributed to stupidity instead of malice. If someone tried to deliberately hinder my access to their site because I use Firefox, I'd likely never visit the site again.
Worryingly, the wording of this site makes it sound as though Google is affiliated with ExplorerDestroyer, which is very far from the truth. In fact, I imagine that Google would be worried by this page as it detracts from their "do not evil" ethos.
Ricardo Montalbon? You want to be a genetically engineered superman, escape Earth on the SS Botany Bay and engage in an interstellar battle with James Tiberius Kirk?
Sign me up.
Perhaps you were responding to the wrong comment? My comment was about giving old machines to people in my neighbourhood, not to developing countries.
Part of the problem is that we junk our old computers or 'recycle' them. There are plenty of individuals and organisations that don't want or need a brand-new computer and would happily take our old machine. When I was a graduate student, I used to buy second-hand computers from my department every couple of years. I passed on my old machine to my 88-year-old neighbour and slapped Debian Woody on it (it works fine, by the way, and she now uses it constantly for keeping in contact with her family and for genealogy).
These days, if I wanted an old machine, I'd probably use Freecycle. This is simply a Yahoo forum for people who want to give away (or get for free!) unneeded items.