I suspect that many of these folks sincerely see unrestricted search engines and an uncensored internet as tools of the devil. How far would public opinion have to tip before *all* searches are "safe" searches, and the "sanitized" web becomes the norm?
It's a fallacy to think that the US Christian population is the major drive in pushing Internet censorship. Look at the more advanced European countries where religious practice has been on decline. It doesn't seem we can go a single week here without hearing about yet another country-wide website blocking system being implemented in places like the UK, Germany, Sweden, etc.. At the moment, the US is the most free in regards to the Internet and has no country-wide censorship program.
Just because a populace is educated doesn't somehow protect them from fascism or the stripping of their rights. Having a population that believes in personal liberty is much more important than a highly educated one.
The shuttle will be long forgotten before replacement trees can be grown.
NASA is taking the most environmentally conscious route possible, so much so that they re-routed the transport of the shuttle to preserve the most trees. That said, somehow local flora (which they are replanting) is more historically significant than a vehicle that inspires us to transcend our own planetary existence?
It really depends on where the "knocking off" happens. If the FBI knocks off some bot's C&C network, then it's fair game. If an ISP were to start blocking ports, addresses, etc, for "spam" reasons, it's the start a slippery slope. I've always been against sender-side spam mitigation for this exact reason.
Yes, spam/bots are annoying as hell, but it's not the ISP's responsibility. Anything less threatens the very nature of the Internet as an open platform.
Put another way, if garage-built rockets could make it into space, then we'd have orbital, Lunar and asteroid colonies by now.
Yes, the engineering is fantastic, yes, building a space vehicle is going to be expensive and difficult, but I wouldn't go so far to say that it couldn't be a private effort for a fraction of the cost. The Wright's had a high-school education and DIY engineering background. Today we have supercomputers on our desks, access to infinite amounts of knowledge, and engineering tools that the Wright brothers could never have dreamed of.
I think it's fair to say that a lot of low hanging fruit still exists that eludes multi-billion dollar government projects.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems -- either in the mobile market or the PC market. Microsoft does in the PC market at least. The anti-trust issues with Microsoft and IE had nothing to do with "freedom", they had to do with M$ leveraging its monopoly to shut out competition.
There are many things more important than life, and I'd say exploring another planet is definitely on that list. There are billions of people on Earth; it will go on perfectly without minus a few people that go on to become immortalized heroes.
Just 50 nukes could kick up enough dust that crops would not get enough sunshine for at least 7 years
Didn't we explode hundreds of nuclear test weapons all over the world? I think the local effects of nuclear war would be horrific, but the planet as a whole wouldn't even bat an eye and would be back to normal in a few decades. Nuclear winter was cold war FUD designed to keep us (and the USSR) from actually going through with the crazy. There is a lot of criticism and debate over the accuracy of the nuclear winter hypothesis.
I can't imprison you or execute you...I can't tax you
You could imprison me under citizens arrest. You could also use deadly force if faced with a threat to your life. Obviously you can't murder at will, and neither can the government (we hope).
You could tax me the same way that universities and private toll companies tax drivers for parking and toll crossing. It's voluntary, just like your citizenship, which you can legally forfeit at any time.
....fewer people is the only long term solution....
/sigh
I really appreciate organic products, sustainable farming and renewable energy, but ultimately the argument for all-of-the-above distills down to this when I'm talking to someone with any mild interest in the environment and it's really a shame.
We shouldn't deny the "rest of the world" a first-world standard of living because we want to force our personal vision of what the environment should be on them. You can damn-well bet that world population is going nowhere but up. Instead of resisting change, we should be developing chemicals and processes to modernize the rest of the world (i.e. evil nature-killing chemicals).
As to organic verses chemical based farming, running out of oil will end that debate. It's a finite resource so it's simply a matter of time.
The supply of ideas, engineering, and human spirit is not finite. We're damn clever and with any luck, it will be the chemicals and sciences that pull us out of the population mess that we're in, not conservation or organic (read: inefficient) farming. Arguing the ethics is beyond the point of the conservation. If you play the raw numbers game, we're going to need science to keep people from starving and continue the development of civilization.
Turning off the lights in the room you're not in is dismantling western civilization ?
Conservation has it's applications, but if you spend more time conserving than you do inventing the technology that obsoletes conservation, you're being wasteful.
How is drone technology a "secret"? Mixed UAV/FPV platforms are available for your everyday hobbyist at well under a few hundred $$$. Anyone with a basic grasp of high-school engineering could rig it up to drop bombs/shoot a gun/take pictures in a lazy weekend.
Did someone not tell Iran this? Or is this just dick-waving? The real technology here would be the engines, radio technology and stealth properties of the airframe. Or maybe us hobbyists are good at laying low - considering the potentials of the technology, and Iran just isn't able to do a Google search because they blocked the Internet;)
I'm as excited as anyone at the prospect of a better performing high-res screen and despite PixelQIs history of delivering, this doesn't actually exist until I'm looking at the teardown pictures.
It seems that history repeats itself. Apple invents and mass-produces a new technology. they release it into something perfectly usable that you can go down to your local shop and buy with real money. A matter of weeks/months/years later, everybody else starts claiming they've come up with something revolutionary and better without any physical proof that it exists.
Finally, after months/years of waiting, the competition finally comes up with something that was 20% of what was promised, 100% more expensive, and then oh, look, Apple has already released the next-gen product at my local Walmart and it creates yet another paradigm-shift in new technology.
tl;dr to Apple's competition: Shut up about your new product until it's deliverable.
I'd hate to die in a huge interstate pileup because some dipshit decided to push the overclocking on his car too far and it blue-screened on him at 80 mph.
Why don't we design cars so that software can't physically crash a car? Things like drive-by-wire should be illegal; all controls and linkages should be 100% mechanical.
It's not even like there's a reason we need these things yet. Manufacturers are just doing it to make driving easier, simpler, and more dull. Anything that makes the driver forget they're driving a 2-ton dino-fuel powered death machine is a bad thing. No matter how they dress it up, it is what it is.
Unfortunately this is exactly the consequence of treating cars like appliances.
Drivers are not longer required to understand how a car works in order to drive it. I bet if you polled most American drivers, they wouldn't even know what Neutral was, how it works, what it does, or how to take their car out of gear.
What do you think will happen in London when daily temperatures increase by two degrees?
There will still be snow, because they're average temperatures. Even worse, temperature's globally are going up by 2degC, not regionally. Just because the planet's temperature goes up, doesn't mean the average temperatures in Europe won't go down because of wind currents, weather patterns, and one of a million factors that affects temperature and weather.
Reducing climate change to a "It's simple, the temperature will go up X degrees and the effect will be Y" is just as bad as the FUD against climate change. You might be able to examine our climate on a macro scale (even then there are too many variables), but on a regional scale is pretty much impossible over the long term because of chaos theory.
You're still limited by physics, and ultimately even with an advanced 3D layout only so much sunlight hit's every square meter. Even if we could magically capture 100% efficiency it will never touch other forms of power generation for the same density, and will require large tracts of land for the same effect.
This is pretty neat, but a far cry from ever solving our energy crisis.
Government telling you what you can and can't do while driving car is an intrusion into your private life. Government telling you what you're allowed to do with that privilege is perfectly acceptable. I think you're mixing the two up. A good example is driving intoxicated. A law banning driving "under the influence of alcohol" is absolutely an infringement of rights. A law banning driving "recklessly" is not. One law refers a specific product, another references a behavior.
What happens under our warped system, is that a kid who took cough syrup, and has a BAC of 0.001 gets thrown in jail and loses his license even though their driving was safe, while your typical "Soccer Mom" under emotional distress, is endangering lives, but yet passes the "tests" of compliance with the law. Unfortunately, if laws only referred to behaviors -- law enforcement would actually have to do their job instead of going through a pre-written script of enforcement.
companies that were pushing out devices that were a genuine threat to their sales
None of these devices are a threat to Apple's sales. iPads are outselling every other device 8-to-1. The constant barrage of marketing and advertisements from their competitors doesn't seem to be having any effect.
this is really the point at which it seems clear Apple has accepted that it's hit or nearing it's peak based on innovative product based growth
This is really unbelievable. Do you really think Apple has to create a new type of iDevice every year? Did you follow Apple through the mid-00s? Apple has gone years without releasing new product categories and just updated existing ones until they were polished. The iDevices were a continuous work in progress. I'm sure plenty of the ideas in the pipeline were just physically impossible because the technology didn't exist at the time of creation (Retina Display, "every-band" radios, Siri).
Even more importantly, the fact that Apple is still polishing their product, still releasing software updates for old devices, and is now focusing on financial stability instead of the latest pump-and-dump scheme, makes me appreciate them more as a company. If you've followed Apple throughout their history, this is nothing new and they have always operated this way.
The best part about this is that it's perfect for fuel rationing and insurance tracking. This seems like a glimpse of the terrifying things that lie in the future.
Incorrect. The State of NH does not legally mandate auto insurance unless you are ordered by a court to carry insurance for some reason (DUI, Auto Accident, etc.). Having the government force you to buy services from a private party is outrageous, and not an invasion of privacy as much as an invasion on your civil liberties and a free market.
All the arguments against uninsured motorists actually start to fall apart when it comes to NH. They have the lowest rates of uninsured motorists, a healthy insurance market (lots of options, and inexpensive), and some of the lowest traffic fatality rates in the country.
It's actually quite simple. If you get into an accident and don't carry liability insurance, then you're personally responsible for the costs involved with the accident! Why is personal responsibility such a problem? If I'm involved in a severe accident, the hospital will patch me up regardless, and the bum that hit me will have his wages garnished for the rest of his life to pay off medical bills. If he runs and I get stuck with the bill, then, well, that's the cost of personal freedom.
The more practical reality here, is that I've been in minor accidents without insurance where I settled with the other party for the <i>realistic</i> costs that an insurance company would have dolled out thousands for, which, obviously breaks the free market because insurance repairs are now subsidized, inflating the costs of non-insurance repairs for people who either don't have insurance or didn't get into an accident.
You don't have murder insurance, do you? Do you have walking down the street insurance? Food poisoning insurance? Why don't we just solve the problem like we solve every other problem in the world, more laws? I'd rather take my chances and suffer the consequences than lose liberty (Live Free or Die). Thankfully the people of the State of NH feel the same way.
How would you feel now if the scientists of the 1970s started a campaign to inject large amounts of CFCs to "fix" the global cooling problem? History has consistently shown us that messing with our environment ends in bitter failure. We can't even create a self-sustaining garden if our lives depended on it (see Biosphere II)
Scientists regularly see theories in different ways, our understanding changes, and we adapt. Maybe the science behind this is has some basis. Unfortunately, we jump straight to the solution and start testing hacks to our atmosphere to "fix" a problem that we've barely understood.
You can't have "invented" something if it was in a science fiction TV show
Of course you can. Just because it's hypothesized in fiction doesn't mean it was invented. Just like early writers of science fiction didn't "invent" rockets.
In this case there were slim tablets designs that came before the iPAD (Compaq TC1100). Regardless, while legally Apple has no standing, they certainly have a point. The mass-manufacturer of consumer tablet PCs only happened shortly after the iPad.
BigIPs have since switched to a spun off version of el5 (we have 4 of them):-) . I know this because I did a bit of reverse engineering and even got CentOS x86_64 binaries to run on one. The networking functions are offloaded to an asic, because of the massive speed improvements over software.
Most high-end networking gear uses FreeBSD because of stability for the user interface. The actual network functionality is usually done in hardware. That said, who doesn't love fBSD for being rock solid. Linux is just better suited to bleeding edge performance applications though.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that many of these folks sincerely see unrestricted search engines and an uncensored internet as tools of the devil. How far would public opinion have to tip before *all* searches are "safe" searches, and the "sanitized" web becomes the norm?
It's a fallacy to think that the US Christian population is the major drive in pushing Internet censorship. Look at the more advanced European countries where religious practice has been on decline. It doesn't seem we can go a single week here without hearing about yet another country-wide website blocking system being implemented in places like the UK, Germany, Sweden, etc.. At the moment, the US is the most free in regards to the Internet and has no country-wide censorship program.
Just because a populace is educated doesn't somehow protect them from fascism or the stripping of their rights. Having a population that believes in personal liberty is much more important than a highly educated one.
The shuttle will be long forgotten before replacement trees can be grown.
NASA is taking the most environmentally conscious route possible, so much so that they re-routed the transport of the shuttle to preserve the most trees. That said, somehow local flora (which they are replanting) is more historically significant than a vehicle that inspires us to transcend our own planetary existence?
It really depends on where the "knocking off" happens. If the FBI knocks off some bot's C&C network, then it's fair game. If an ISP were to start blocking ports, addresses, etc, for "spam" reasons, it's the start a slippery slope. I've always been against sender-side spam mitigation for this exact reason.
Yes, spam/bots are annoying as hell, but it's not the ISP's responsibility. Anything less threatens the very nature of the Internet as an open platform.
Put another way, if garage-built rockets could make it into space, then we'd have orbital, Lunar and asteroid colonies by now.
Yes, the engineering is fantastic, yes, building a space vehicle is going to be expensive and difficult, but I wouldn't go so far to say that it couldn't be a private effort for a fraction of the cost. The Wright's had a high-school education and DIY engineering background. Today we have supercomputers on our desks, access to infinite amounts of knowledge, and engineering tools that the Wright brothers could never have dreamed of.
I think it's fair to say that a lot of low hanging fruit still exists that eludes multi-billion dollar government projects.
It's different when you have a monopoly.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly on operating systems -- either in the mobile market or the PC market. Microsoft does in the PC market at least. The anti-trust issues with Microsoft and IE had nothing to do with "freedom", they had to do with M$ leveraging its monopoly to shut out competition.
What's happened to our society?
There are many things more important than life, and I'd say exploring another planet is definitely on that list. There are billions of people on Earth; it will go on perfectly without minus a few people that go on to become immortalized heroes.
Just 50 nukes could kick up enough dust that crops would not get enough sunshine for at least 7 years
Didn't we explode hundreds of nuclear test weapons all over the world? I think the local effects of nuclear war would be horrific, but the planet as a whole wouldn't even bat an eye and would be back to normal in a few decades. Nuclear winter was cold war FUD designed to keep us (and the USSR) from actually going through with the crazy. There is a lot of criticism and debate over the accuracy of the nuclear winter hypothesis.
I can't imprison you or execute you...I can't tax you
You could imprison me under citizens arrest. You could also use deadly force if faced with a threat to your life. Obviously you can't murder at will, and neither can the government (we hope).
You could tax me the same way that universities and private toll companies tax drivers for parking and toll crossing. It's voluntary, just like your citizenship, which you can legally forfeit at any time.
Is there any evidence that the actual :food: from an organic farm is safer than a conventional one?
I would think that advanced synthetic chemicals would be more effective at killing off pesticides and bacteria than natural alternatives.
....fewer people is the only long term solution....
/sigh
I really appreciate organic products, sustainable farming and renewable energy, but ultimately the argument for all-of-the-above distills down to this when I'm talking to someone with any mild interest in the environment and it's really a shame. We shouldn't deny the "rest of the world" a first-world standard of living because we want to force our personal vision of what the environment should be on them. You can damn-well bet that world population is going nowhere but up. Instead of resisting change, we should be developing chemicals and processes to modernize the rest of the world (i.e. evil nature-killing chemicals).
As to organic verses chemical based farming, running out of oil will end that debate. It's a finite resource so it's simply a matter of time.
The supply of ideas, engineering, and human spirit is not finite. We're damn clever and with any luck, it will be the chemicals and sciences that pull us out of the population mess that we're in, not conservation or organic (read: inefficient) farming. Arguing the ethics is beyond the point of the conservation. If you play the raw numbers game, we're going to need science to keep people from starving and continue the development of civilization.
Turning off the lights in the room you're not in is dismantling western civilization ?
Conservation has it's applications, but if you spend more time conserving than you do inventing the technology that obsoletes conservation, you're being wasteful.
How is drone technology a "secret"? Mixed UAV/FPV platforms are available for your everyday hobbyist at well under a few hundred $$$. Anyone with a basic grasp of high-school engineering could rig it up to drop bombs/shoot a gun/take pictures in a lazy weekend.
;)
Did someone not tell Iran this? Or is this just dick-waving? The real technology here would be the engines, radio technology and stealth properties of the airframe. Or maybe us hobbyists are good at laying low - considering the potentials of the technology, and Iran just isn't able to do a Google search because they blocked the Internet
I'm as excited as anyone at the prospect of a better performing high-res screen and despite PixelQIs history of delivering, this doesn't actually exist until I'm looking at the teardown pictures.
It seems that history repeats itself. Apple invents and mass-produces a new technology. they release it into something perfectly usable that you can go down to your local shop and buy with real money. A matter of weeks/months/years later, everybody else starts claiming they've come up with something revolutionary and better without any physical proof that it exists.
Finally, after months/years of waiting, the competition finally comes up with something that was 20% of what was promised, 100% more expensive, and then oh, look, Apple has already released the next-gen product at my local Walmart and it creates yet another paradigm-shift in new technology.
tl;dr to Apple's competition: Shut up about your new product until it's deliverable.
I'd hate to die in a huge interstate pileup because some dipshit decided to push the overclocking on his car too far and it blue-screened on him at 80 mph.
Why don't we design cars so that software can't physically crash a car? Things like drive-by-wire should be illegal; all controls and linkages should be 100% mechanical.
It's not even like there's a reason we need these things yet. Manufacturers are just doing it to make driving easier, simpler, and more dull. Anything that makes the driver forget they're driving a 2-ton dino-fuel powered death machine is a bad thing. No matter how they dress it up, it is what it is.
Unfortunately this is exactly the consequence of treating cars like appliances.
Drivers are not longer required to understand how a car works in order to drive it. I bet if you polled most American drivers, they wouldn't even know what Neutral was, how it works, what it does, or how to take their car out of gear.
What do you think will happen in London when daily temperatures increase by two degrees?
There will still be snow, because they're average temperatures. Even worse, temperature's globally are going up by 2degC, not regionally. Just because the planet's temperature goes up, doesn't mean the average temperatures in Europe won't go down because of wind currents, weather patterns, and one of a million factors that affects temperature and weather.
Reducing climate change to a "It's simple, the temperature will go up X degrees and the effect will be Y" is just as bad as the FUD against climate change. You might be able to examine our climate on a macro scale (even then there are too many variables), but on a regional scale is pretty much impossible over the long term because of chaos theory.
You're still limited by physics, and ultimately even with an advanced 3D layout only so much sunlight hit's every square meter. Even if we could magically capture 100% efficiency it will never touch other forms of power generation for the same density, and will require large tracts of land for the same effect.
This is pretty neat, but a far cry from ever solving our energy crisis.
That is not an intrusion into your private life.
Government telling you what you can and can't do while driving car is an intrusion into your private life. Government telling you what you're allowed to do with that privilege is perfectly acceptable. I think you're mixing the two up. A good example is driving intoxicated. A law banning driving "under the influence of alcohol" is absolutely an infringement of rights. A law banning driving "recklessly" is not. One law refers a specific product, another references a behavior.
What happens under our warped system, is that a kid who took cough syrup, and has a BAC of 0.001 gets thrown in jail and loses his license even though their driving was safe, while your typical "Soccer Mom" under emotional distress, is endangering lives, but yet passes the "tests" of compliance with the law. Unfortunately, if laws only referred to behaviors -- law enforcement would actually have to do their job instead of going through a pre-written script of enforcement.
This I can agree with. Apple has gone off the deep end suing competitors. At the same time, you can't ignore the fact that Google ripped off Apple at early stages in the game (http://www.technobuffalo.com/companies/google/android/android-before-and-after-the-iphone/), and the new Samsung devices has an uncanny similarity to the iPad.
None of these devices are a threat to Apple's sales. iPads are outselling every other device 8-to-1. The constant barrage of marketing and advertisements from their competitors doesn't seem to be having any effect.
This is really unbelievable. Do you really think Apple has to create a new type of iDevice every year? Did you follow Apple through the mid-00s? Apple has gone years without releasing new product categories and just updated existing ones until they were polished. The iDevices were a continuous work in progress. I'm sure plenty of the ideas in the pipeline were just physically impossible because the technology didn't exist at the time of creation (Retina Display, "every-band" radios, Siri). Even more importantly, the fact that Apple is still polishing their product, still releasing software updates for old devices, and is now focusing on financial stability instead of the latest pump-and-dump scheme, makes me appreciate them more as a company. If you've followed Apple throughout their history, this is nothing new and they have always operated this way.
The best part about this is that it's perfect for fuel rationing and insurance tracking. This seems like a glimpse of the terrifying things that lie in the future.
Incorrect. The State of NH does not legally mandate auto insurance unless you are ordered by a court to carry insurance for some reason (DUI, Auto Accident, etc.). Having the government force you to buy services from a private party is outrageous, and not an invasion of privacy as much as an invasion on your civil liberties and a free market.
All the arguments against uninsured motorists actually start to fall apart when it comes to NH. They have the lowest rates of uninsured motorists, a healthy insurance market (lots of options, and inexpensive), and some of the lowest traffic fatality rates in the country.
It's actually quite simple. If you get into an accident and don't carry liability insurance, then you're personally responsible for the costs involved with the accident! Why is personal responsibility such a problem? If I'm involved in a severe accident, the hospital will patch me up regardless, and the bum that hit me will have his wages garnished for the rest of his life to pay off medical bills. If he runs and I get stuck with the bill, then, well, that's the cost of personal freedom.
The more practical reality here, is that I've been in minor accidents without insurance where I settled with the other party for the <i>realistic</i> costs that an insurance company would have dolled out thousands for, which, obviously breaks the free market because insurance repairs are now subsidized, inflating the costs of non-insurance repairs for people who either don't have insurance or didn't get into an accident.
You don't have murder insurance, do you? Do you have walking down the street insurance? Food poisoning insurance? Why don't we just solve the problem like we solve every other problem in the world, more laws? I'd rather take my chances and suffer the consequences than lose liberty (Live Free or Die). Thankfully the people of the State of NH feel the same way.
Or even better: Optical Media
Apocalyptic solar storm crisis averted.
How would you feel now if the scientists of the 1970s started a campaign to inject large amounts of CFCs to "fix" the global cooling problem? History has consistently shown us that messing with our environment ends in bitter failure. We can't even create a self-sustaining garden if our lives depended on it (see Biosphere II)
Scientists regularly see theories in different ways, our understanding changes, and we adapt. Maybe the science behind this is has some basis. Unfortunately, we jump straight to the solution and start testing hacks to our atmosphere to "fix" a problem that we've barely understood.
You can't have "invented" something if it was in a science fiction TV show
Of course you can. Just because it's hypothesized in fiction doesn't mean it was invented. Just like early writers of science fiction didn't "invent" rockets. In this case there were slim tablets designs that came before the iPAD (Compaq TC1100). Regardless, while legally Apple has no standing, they certainly have a point. The mass-manufacturer of consumer tablet PCs only happened shortly after the iPad.
Coincidence? I think not.
BigIPs have since switched to a spun off version of el5 (we have 4 of them) :-) . I know this because I did a bit of reverse engineering and even got CentOS x86_64 binaries to run on one. The networking functions are offloaded to an asic, because of the massive speed improvements over software.
Most high-end networking gear uses FreeBSD because of stability for the user interface. The actual network functionality is usually done in hardware. That said, who doesn't love fBSD for being rock solid. Linux is just better suited to bleeding edge performance applications though.