I have to agree that on the USA biofuel production would have an impact on food price. Almost of your land is used. It doesn't matter if you're going to use corn or anything else to produce ethanol, it will replace land used for food crops.
But, you seem to always forget that countries like Brazil and India already have large sugar-cane cultures, used both for sugar and ethanol production. And these have ZERO impact on food production.
The real problem USA have with biofuel is that they can't produce it in a economical viable way. So if biofuel substitute petrol, USA will become dependant on other countries.
Resuming:
Biofuel: * Good for the enviroment * Good for developing nations * Good for Europe * Very bad for the USA economy
Both the USA and the Europe destroyed their own native forests a long time ago. Why don't you stop complaining about the Amazon forest and start complaining about how your farmers aren't giving away their lands for re-forestation?
And can you please explain me how YOUR government, or any other, would be more competent to keep the Amazon from being destructed?
Second,
Sugar-cane culture has nothing to do with the Amazon destruction. The sugar-cane cultures and the forest are separated by hundreds of kilometers. And the Amazon is being destroyed for it's wood and to open space for cattle. No one would even try to grow sugar-cane there, because the soil is extremely poor for any kind of agriculture.
Ethanol might not work for the USA, but don't discard it so fast.
Look at Brazil for an example, here we make Ethanol from sugar-cane.It had virtually no impact on food price or availability, mostly because the culture is concentrated at the north-east region while our grain production is more concentrate on the middle and southern regions.
Also, Ethanol harvested from sugar-cane is a good alternative for lots of developing coutries, because it would give them a valuable commodity to export.
Ethanol would be good for Europe too, because they would have a cheaper alternative to petrol.
But Ethanol is bad for the USA, mostly because you don't get the same level of production from corn, so it's more expensive. And you have to dedicate a bigger slice of land to produce enough to supply the demand for fuel, and this means less space for food.
Also, the North American Petrol industry don't want to see their market taken away.
Ethanol is viable, and it's already a reality here at Brazil. My car can run on both ethanol and gasoline, but since Ethanol is about 30% CHEAPER I almost never put gasoline on it.
Here at Brazil Carrefour also use Linux, or used at some point. I recall reading something like "Calypso Linux" at the LCD on top of the numeric pad you use to input your card password.
Just by googling a bit I've fount this page http://www.unisys.com.br/news/imprensa/release205.htm (portuguese). Calypso Linux is a Linux based POS developed by UNISYS. It's used both by Carrefour and "Pão de Açúcar", two of the largests supermarket chains here at Brazil.
I know there are times when you just have to deal with bad formatted data, but it's true for every data format out there, not just XML.
Usually when I'm dealing with other people generated XML I demand a Schema to validate the document, this way if they manage to garble the document it's their fault and I can prove it! And when someone have to consume XML generated by MY applications I also provide a Schema file, this way I'll be able to prove that my application's data is valid.
XML is nice because when it's properly used it works just like a contract.
But AFAIK they where simulating the BIOLOGICAL behavior of the said mouse brain.
Once we fully understand what makes the neural network of a mammal brain work, we'll be able to create hardware and software that is adequate to work in the same way, without the overhead of simulating every biological process performed.
Also, I suspect that the basic processes are behind every brain, and to be more or less intelligent is a matter of scale. Bigger brain, more complex neural networks, more intelligence. So, once we have a mouse-brain-on-a-chip working, it will be a matter of wiring some together to reach the same processing power of the human brain.
When you're talking about the Microsft's evil twin from the mirror universe... See, an $ is just a S with a goatee.
The only problem is that M$ actually makes money on OpenSource software and services, and it's founder is a bald and well shaved Robert Stalman, AKA M$ Bob.;-)
And, meanwhile elsewhere in the world you'll still have the right to backup the content you purchased.
I'm really amazed by this RIAA and MPAA stories... maybe because here at Brazil we have institutions to look after the consumer interests. Of course selling pirated DVDs or MP3 CDs on the streets is illegal around here, but somehow we managed the same rights we had with vinyl records and tapes.
There's other thing that happens here too, some regional artists actually like having their records copied and shared, and yes, even pirated. These are small bands that would never gain the big Record Industry attention, and sharing is the best way to make their music known... They make money doing shows, so as much people know their songs the better, because it will give them the chance to make shows at more cities.
I'm almost sure that something like this is happening at the USA too... Small bands, that make their records with independent labels, and make more money with shows than with album sales. And also, I'm sure that their music is much more worth listening too than the artists that record with the big evil labels.
And I won't even start to talk about all the great free music you can grab on the net, and share as much as you want.
It's nice to have GTK and all, but look at QT4, it has much more advanced features. KDE3.5 already has a smaller memory footprint than Gnome, thanks to QT4 KDE4 will have an even smaller footprint.
There were the GreenPhone. Also, there's already a Windows Mobile port of QT4, proving that it's well suited for embedded devices. And QT4 has Java bindings, witch is widely used on cellphone development as it is sandboxed.
Pehaps Nokia is looking into replacing Symbian with a Linux stack? Pehaps they found out GTK lacking? Pehaps they fell the need to be able to control more directly the development of their toolkit of choice?
The simple fact that India is able to sustain a car industry focused on it's own internal market proves that they're not as poor and miserable as you might think they are!
AFAIK both OpenMoko and QTopia use C/C++ for development, and so these platforms have one great disadvantage:
Most cellphone development is already done using Java.
Also, Java offers a great feature, isolation from the underlying OS. That means that one ill behaved application won't bring the entire phone down, and reduces the opportunities for security failures. IMHO C/C++ is just too dangerous to be allowed for general development on a phone, try to imagine the kind of mess viruses and trojans could do if they had access to billions of cellphones worldwide?
If HTC re-use some of its existing hardware to deploy some Android phones, maybe... I've seem some threads at xda-developers and MoDaCo with people talking about flashing their phones with alternative WinMo versions.
My guess is: it probably will be possible... but HTC won't support it. Another possibility is that Android might appear as an paid upgrade, but it's very unlikely.
Mind you that you DON'T need to wipe Windows Mobile to try Linux on your smartphone, there are some bootloaders out there that can boot Linux straight from the expansion card... so we might be able to try Android before flashing it definitely into the phone.
I have a HTC s710 BTW, HTC make some cool phones indeed.
I guess that there's two search mechanisms in place at wikipedia, one search for the exact title of the article, and anoter is a fuzzy full text search. The first one is provided by MediaWiki, and the second one is powered by Lucene.
The title search takes only exact matches, and probably that's the crappy one.
But mind you that most school books get revisions and updates every 2 years, or so. So they must be replaced anyways with newer versions, also, sometimes the school decides to change the books they're using altogether. With the OLPC these updates would be easier, and cheaper.
Another advantage is that children will be able to gain access to a larger variety of texts and books.
So, while I agree that books last longer, you must admit that the OLPC offers much more than a regular book.
Down here at Brasil most electricity is generated using Hydroeletric Powerplants, so it's way cleaner than gasoline. We do use some thermoelectric power, but its powered by natural gas (cleaner than coal).
But, the bottom line is: Cars are terrible inefficient, look at traffic jams: how many cars have only one person?
The best solution would be a better public transport system. Trains and buses (Sao Paulo city has electrical buses for over a decade now) are cleaner and help to keep traffic sane.
I'd like to point out that nerfed phones seems to be a problem only in the USA.
Here at Brazil most operators sell their phones without any features disabled, for an example I can upload any application to my phone using an microSD card, also after one year all operators must unlock your phone for free. I think this happens on other countries too.
So, even if this Google initiative fails at the USA... it can succed at the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Android does not use the J2ME VM. Instead it uses the Dalvik VM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_virtual_machine).
One might expect that the Android API's will be more consistent across devices than the various J2ME implementations.
It's funny how USA centric slashdot is.
I have to agree that on the USA biofuel production would have an impact on food price. Almost of your land is used. It doesn't matter if you're going to use corn or anything else to produce ethanol, it will replace land used for food crops.
But, you seem to always forget that countries like Brazil and India already have large sugar-cane cultures, used both for sugar and ethanol production. And these have ZERO impact on food production.
The real problem USA have with biofuel is that they can't produce it in a economical viable way. So if biofuel substitute petrol, USA will become dependant on other countries.
Resuming:
Biofuel:
* Good for the enviroment
* Good for developing nations
* Good for Europe
* Very bad for the USA economy
On top of that,
Here at Brazil the operators can't sell locked phones. It's the law... some laws here were made to actually protect the consumer.
Yes, that's right. IPhone will be sold unlocked here at Brazil.
First of all,
Both the USA and the Europe destroyed their own native forests a long time ago. Why don't you stop complaining about the Amazon forest and start complaining about how your farmers aren't giving away their lands for re-forestation?
And can you please explain me how YOUR government, or any other, would be more competent to keep the Amazon from being destructed?
Second,
Sugar-cane culture has nothing to do with the Amazon destruction. The sugar-cane cultures and the forest are separated by hundreds of kilometers. And the Amazon is being destroyed for it's wood and to open space for cattle. No one would even try to grow sugar-cane there, because the soil is extremely poor for any kind of agriculture.
Ethanol might not work for the USA, but don't discard it so fast.
Look at Brazil for an example, here we make Ethanol from sugar-cane.It had virtually no impact on food price or availability, mostly because the culture is concentrated at the north-east region while our grain production is more concentrate on the middle and southern regions.
Also, Ethanol harvested from sugar-cane is a good alternative for lots of developing coutries, because it would give them a valuable commodity to export.
Ethanol would be good for Europe too, because they would have a cheaper alternative to petrol.
But Ethanol is bad for the USA, mostly because you don't get the same level of production from corn, so it's more expensive. And you have to dedicate a bigger slice of land to produce enough to supply the demand for fuel, and this means less space for food.
Also, the North American Petrol industry don't want to see their market taken away.
Ethanol is viable, and it's already a reality here at Brazil. My car can run on both ethanol and gasoline, but since Ethanol is about 30% CHEAPER I almost never put gasoline on it.
Here at Brazil Carrefour also use Linux, or used at some point. I recall reading something like "Calypso Linux" at the LCD on top of the numeric pad you use to input your card password.
Just by googling a bit I've fount this page http://www.unisys.com.br/news/imprensa/release205.htm (portuguese). Calypso Linux is a Linux based POS developed by UNISYS. It's used both by Carrefour and "Pão de Açúcar", two of the largests supermarket chains here at Brazil.
Well,
I know there are times when you just have to deal with bad formatted data, but it's true for every data format out there, not just XML.
Usually when I'm dealing with other people generated XML I demand a Schema to validate the document, this way if they manage to garble the document it's their fault and I can prove it! And when someone have to consume XML generated by MY applications I also provide a Schema file, this way I'll be able to prove that my application's data is valid.
XML is nice because when it's properly used it works just like a contract.
But AFAIK they where simulating the BIOLOGICAL behavior of the said mouse brain.
Once we fully understand what makes the neural network of a mammal brain work, we'll be able to create hardware and software that is adequate to work in the same way, without the overhead of simulating every biological process performed.
Also, I suspect that the basic processes are behind every brain, and to be more or less intelligent is a matter of scale. Bigger brain, more complex neural networks, more intelligence. So, once we have a mouse-brain-on-a-chip working, it will be a matter of wiring some together to reach the same processing power of the human brain.
Unfortunatelly I don't have mod points... Let's see how long it takes until someone mod you up.
Until then, let me enlight the rest of you that didn't got the reference:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness
Great history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_March_2004_Madrid_attacks
When you're talking about the Microsft's evil twin from the mirror universe... See, an $ is just a S with a goatee.
;-)
The only problem is that M$ actually makes money on OpenSource software and services, and it's founder is a bald and well shaved Robert Stalman, AKA M$ Bob.
And, meanwhile elsewhere in the world you'll still have the right to backup the content you purchased.
I'm really amazed by this RIAA and MPAA stories... maybe because here at Brazil we have institutions to look after the consumer interests. Of course selling pirated DVDs or MP3 CDs on the streets is illegal around here, but somehow we managed the same rights we had with vinyl records and tapes.
There's other thing that happens here too, some regional artists actually like having their records copied and shared, and yes, even pirated. These are small bands that would never gain the big Record Industry attention, and sharing is the best way to make their music known... They make money doing shows, so as much people know their songs the better, because it will give them the chance to make shows at more cities.
I'm almost sure that something like this is happening at the USA too... Small bands, that make their records with independent labels, and make more money with shows than with album sales. And also, I'm sure that their music is much more worth listening too than the artists that record with the big evil labels.
And I won't even start to talk about all the great free music you can grab on the net, and share as much as you want.
Isn't it the first sidescroller platformer?
Suport for Java limmited?
sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre
Is that too difficult?
10 FAST
20 ? ??
30 SLOW
40 ? PROFIT ??
50 GOTO 10
Yeah, my old ZX-Spectrum still works.
Hummm,
It's nice to have GTK and all, but look at QT4, it has much more advanced features. KDE3.5 already has a smaller memory footprint than Gnome, thanks to QT4 KDE4 will have an even smaller footprint.
There were the GreenPhone. Also, there's already a Windows Mobile port of QT4, proving that it's well suited for embedded devices. And QT4 has Java bindings, witch is widely used on cellphone development as it is sandboxed.
Pehaps Nokia is looking into replacing Symbian with a Linux stack? Pehaps they found out GTK lacking? Pehaps they fell the need to be able to control more directly the development of their toolkit of choice?
Time will tell.
Or...
... Oh, nevermind. ;-)
You just can have a linux box with apache doing reverse proxy and caching in front of it, and
Hey,
The simple fact that India is able to sustain a car industry focused on it's own internal market proves that they're not as poor and miserable as you might think they are!
AFAIK both OpenMoko and QTopia use C/C++ for development, and so these platforms have one great disadvantage:
Most cellphone development is already done using Java.
Also, Java offers a great feature, isolation from the underlying OS. That means that one ill behaved application won't bring the entire phone down, and reduces the opportunities for security failures. IMHO C/C++ is just too dangerous to be allowed for general development on a phone, try to imagine the kind of mess viruses and trojans could do if they had access to billions of cellphones worldwide?
That depends,
If HTC re-use some of its existing hardware to deploy some Android phones, maybe... I've seem some threads at xda-developers and MoDaCo with people talking about flashing their phones with alternative WinMo versions.
My guess is: it probably will be possible... but HTC won't support it. Another possibility is that Android might appear as an paid upgrade, but it's very unlikely.
Mind you that you DON'T need to wipe Windows Mobile to try Linux on your smartphone, there are some bootloaders out there that can boot Linux straight from the expansion card... so we might be able to try Android before flashing it definitely into the phone.
I have a HTC s710 BTW, HTC make some cool phones indeed.
I guess that there's two search mechanisms in place at wikipedia, one search for the exact title of the article, and anoter is a fuzzy full text search. The first one is provided by MediaWiki, and the second one is powered by Lucene.
The title search takes only exact matches, and probably that's the crappy one.
Yes, books are far more robust than a notebook.
But mind you that most school books get revisions and updates every 2 years, or so. So they must be replaced anyways with newer versions, also, sometimes the school decides to change the books they're using altogether. With the OLPC these updates would be easier, and cheaper.
Another advantage is that children will be able to gain access to a larger variety of texts and books.
So, while I agree that books last longer, you must admit that the OLPC offers much more than a regular book.
Depends on where you live.
Down here at Brasil most electricity is generated using Hydroeletric Powerplants, so it's way cleaner than gasoline. We do use some thermoelectric power, but its powered by natural gas (cleaner than coal).
But, the bottom line is: Cars are terrible inefficient, look at traffic jams: how many cars have only one person?
The best solution would be a better public transport system. Trains and buses (Sao Paulo city has electrical buses for over a decade now) are cleaner and help to keep traffic sane.
I'd like to point out that nerfed phones seems to be a problem only in the USA.
Here at Brazil most operators sell their phones without any features disabled, for an example I can upload any application to my phone using an microSD card, also after one year all operators must unlock your phone for free. I think this happens on other countries too.
So, even if this Google initiative fails at the USA... it can succed at the rest of the world.
Actually, Im from Brazil ;-)