Please, read about the people in 1960s Russia, because of course Russia didn't change a bit over the past forty years. Similarly, I advice all people who want to understand Obama to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin", or people that want to understand current Iranian politics to read "1001 nights".
Do not consider at all that in the main Russian towns you could get a decent prepaid umts before you could get it in europe, or the many russian freelance IT workers that work online via sites like elance, and earn a pretty income with that.
Putin is not talking out of his ass, and the one to read up about how to do business with Russians is Mr. Dell. He could have just hired an experienced advisor on how to get his product in Russia, paid a few bucks for that, and probably sold quite a bit. Instead he preferred to be a dickhead and screw his perspectives of getting in this growing market. Well done!
Aha, so true. The problem is that, in theory, linux should be salvageable without rebooting, but in practice you can have one process locking up even the data from the input devices, so you cannot even interact anymore. Memory leaks from e.g. flash applications or network-mounts that fall offline are some of the frequent reasons the system crashes in my case. It's very nasty, and worst of all, there doesn't seem to be much progress in this area, it's not much better than 10 years ago, maybe even worse.
The fact that it is written in perl should have rang some bells with him. I really wonder why they've chosen such a slow person for the experiment. Oh well, back to work, there will be a thread about UK CCTV cameras that he's supposed to read soon, hope I can finish it on time.
These phones are available in Europe in all kinds and shapes. Mostly in prepaid packages for 10-20 euros, but also without a sim lock for about 50. Didn't have a phone with a camera yet. I guess there is a substantial market for it and the manufacturers recognize it.
What's also very nice: I just went there to change it. The change password feature does NOT ask you for your old password. So anyone who finds an open monster session e.g. in an internet cafe can change the password of that user and kidnap the account. This is the situation after their attack, not very promising what the future concerns. These are really basic security features that take at most a few hours to implement.
Simple! Either you are adept enough to find out how to get Gnash working, or you just start being pragmatic and start using the stuff that Just Works (Tm), no matter if it is not 100% open source.
the ubuntu preinstalled on my dell came with a yahoo toolbar in firefox (and yahoo as homepage) and a dell video chat application. There are also several links to yahoo websites and to last.fm, but since it's just a link I can't call it bloatware, still bloat, though.
Indeed, in the beginning they were even called "promotional videos" if I remember correctly. I don't think they understand the idea of advertising very well. Do people ever buy video clips? It's not really the product they're selling, is it.
Today I was searching for "acceptable in the 80s" by calvin harris, found the video clip at the sony bmg channel: "This video is not available in your country" (we're talking germany here, where btw everything from the 80s is unfortunately still acceptable, but that's another story). I bet Calvin Harris is happy that sony is in his best interest spreading the word about his music worldwide.
If salaries for doctors in the US are more profitable than in Canada, doesn't that just mean that the "customers" of health care in the US are actually paying too much?
But at least it was *MY* choice, I'd rather die of a disease my health insurance didn't cover than from a disease the State Health Insurance Plan didn't provide for.
You seem to think that just by the state making sure you have a health insurance, you loose all capabilities to think for yourself (assuming you had them before).
Fun facts from a european country with state-regulated healthcare, for the misinformed:
if you have a salary below a certain amount, you have the right and plight to get state-regulated health insurance. The amount you pay is a percentage of your income (15%). You can choose which company insures you, the basic package will be the same. You can get additional insurances, e.g. if you need a chiropractor, or have glasses, or dental stuff, etc.
if own more, or have your own business, you cannot use state-regulated insurance, you have to get a private one. This you can get at mostly the same insurers that do the state-regulated plans, at about the same price. Some people that have a business that doesn't make much (e.g. hairdresser) end up not having an insurance at all, which will bring you in immense troubles when you get medical problems of course. That is your own responsibility, though.
Then again, maybe you're a winner, and having health issues is only for losers.
don't fool yourself into thinking that you can plan for all medical expenses by preparing a little ahead of time.
Insurances are useful when there are risks that are hard to estimate and have larger consequences than you can carry individually. If I want to drive a car in Germany, it has to be insured because there is an unforeseeable likelihood on accidents that I as a driver can inflict damage with immense costs.
Same goes for my health. I, as a citizen, need to be healthy for the sake of myself and others. Being ill is likely to damage my economic situation, if not for medicinal costs, also for my ability to perform a job. It is unforeseeable for each and every citizen whether they become ill or not.
A government is supposed to have taken over collective responsibilities of the inhabitants of a country for practical reasons. As such, it is supposed to optimize the well-being of those they represent. Reducing the most prominent financial and health risks of their citizens by enforcing health-care on them, just as they enforce road-laws, or fire brigades, should be a logical thing to do.
I am very disappointed in many of the reactions in this topic. A fast and reliable internet connection is a source of information that is actually used. If just to read up on products you are planning to buy or compare prices. It is not that every American will become a genius of physics just by using the internet, but the quick availability of any kind of information will advance every single American.
The rest of the world has accepted that a fast internet is not a hobby or an extra, it is the basic part of communication infrastructure. Mauritius has nationwide wifi, just to name an example.
Why use these fancy telephones if 2/3th of the population did fine before with the post or an occasional telegram? As far as I understand from contributions from Americans on slashdot so far, freedom of choice is an important part of the lifestyle, that seems to be why many oppose healthcare systems. But to have a choice to use broadband or not, it should be available to all in the first place.
About 10 years ago I installed linux for the first time. The internet was there, and every time Internet Explorer crashed in windows 95 on my pentium 100, it took the network interface with it, and I had to reboot. At one point I had enough, and because some friends were sgi or linux users, they got me convinced to try it, and I went to a store and bought a box-set of linux install cds and manuals by SuSE. After loads and loads of puzzling I got everything working.
I redid this several times, with several linux versions, just like you. I ran openbsd for a while (one of the easier installs by the way), tried slackware. Knoppix was fine, but installing it instead of just running the live cd was no trivial task. My interest in figuring out how to install linux went down over the years, since at some point it isn't a learning process anymore, you're just hopelessly searching for ideas how to install some specific kernel module for some specific piece of hardware.
Big jump to: now. You can buy several netbooks with several versions of linux preinstalled. I did, because I like linux, but I don't like installing it. And it really works. There are some problems of course, but the effort to configure my linux machine is not more, probably even less, than on the xp machines I am asked to check every once in a while. Installing software and hardware is getting easier almost by the day.
By the way: if vista would really be such a good OS, I wonder why MS has such a hard time with it, and even Bill Gates admits that he'd rather not talk about it until the next OS is out.
I have no significant experience with either Vista or Windows 7, but in the last 12 months I bought two computers with adapted and language-localized versions linux preinstalled by default and supported by online repositories at the manufacturers. I didn't have to go to some obscure store either, I got them at main outlets, an asus eee at a big german electronics store, a dell mini at dell.com. I could have bought similar linux-based systems at about 4 other sources/manufacturers (acer, lenovo, etc.).
Today I plugged in my hp printer/scanner combo in the dell mini for the first time, it f-ing just worked (tm). Even without starting a wizard, a printer icon appeared, and both printing and scanning were enabled. Same goes for my bluetooth mouse. The year of linux on the desktop might not be there, but the year of linux on the netbook is already there, my friend, and it's kicking some serious ass.
I hate doing this because I'm not a Christian, but there is a lot of FUD among atheists with regard to the Bible. They use bad translations and don't interpret the text with the proper context, they just pick and choose specific lines and say here, this is proof of contradiction (ironically this is not so dissimilar of the behavior which they accuse Christians of only picking and choosing which parts to follow).
Did you get your definition for "ironic" from Alanis Morisette? The current interpretation of Christianity is not the actual text of the bible, it's the bible filtered by clerics' ideas about morality. Why should atheists not do the same? And where do you think do atheists get these "bad" translations? Is there a special superbad bible edition for atheists? If atheists have access to these bad translations, then so have Christians. Are you really sure that your bible is a correct translation? Did you check?
>... since the article mentions two searches per cup
Personally, I'm still waiting for the "two searches, one cup" video;)
Seriously, These 500kW systems will not be dedicated to this one search, I bet any single one of them can handle a few hundred requests at a time. Quite likely that this study is off by a few magnitudes indeed.
I kid, I kid. Even though his articles were missing some necessary criticism of the news items, he did a nice job keeping up an interest in scientific progress and making it available to a wider public. Also cool to see he did some nice stuff at the big players in the day.
In europe you have some pretty hefty tests specific to your area of expertise before you can even become a patent officer. Still, this doesn't stop stupid patents to pass. Work pressure is too high, there are just way too many patents going along. Come to think of it, it just means that there are not enough patent officers to handle all patents. Basically that, and most of our other patent-related problems, can only exit because patents are too cheap. If the price of patents would go up it would probably be possible to hire more patent officers to reduce the workload, and maybe companies and people would think twice before getting their ininnovative ideas out as a patent. Probably the patent is currently used as a measure of workflow, a bit like lines of code. Useless measure for the actual performance of a company, but it's a number so it's used anyway.
As a non-US citizen living outside of the US, I don't think the problem is Obama. The problem is that the US allows a ridiculous "democratic" system where corporates are allowed to sponsor elections, at all. This is an institutionalized form of corruption and I don't think it exists in countries that call themselves democratic other than the US.
For the rest I agree, Obama was the best choice, even if he was overhyped. This is for a big part due to the fact that the combination of candidates from the Republican party was an outright failure. I really wonder how they got to Palin. Maybe they thought that voters were already dumb enough to fall for just the show value of Palin. Could they, in all their members, not find ANY CANDIDATE that would be at least halfway competent to do the job better than Palin?
As it is now, you are probably right, but I think that landlines will go away as new technologies emerge.
As far as TV is concerned: in Germany the remote parts were scheduled first for DVB-T, if I remember correctly. In remote areas it can be cheaper to just put a few antennas up than to upgrade the cable/telephone connection of every single farm.
A lot also depends on the dataplans available. In Germany competition is doing its work nicely at the moment: decent "unlimited" 10 GB dataplans for UMTS-modems are available for 15-25 eur per month. For me it was attractive enough to dump my land-line completely.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, read about the people in 1960s Russia, because of course Russia didn't change a bit over the past forty years. Similarly, I advice all people who want to understand Obama to read "Uncle Tom's Cabin", or people that want to understand current Iranian politics to read "1001 nights".
Do not consider at all that in the main Russian towns you could get a decent prepaid umts before you could get it in europe, or the many russian freelance IT workers that work online via sites like elance, and earn a pretty income with that.
Putin is not talking out of his ass, and the one to read up about how to do business with Russians is Mr. Dell. He could have just hired an experienced advisor on how to get his product in Russia, paid a few bucks for that, and probably sold quite a bit. Instead he preferred to be a dickhead and screw his perspectives of getting in this growing market. Well done!
Aha, so true. The problem is that, in theory, linux should be salvageable without rebooting, but in practice you can have one process locking up even the data from the input devices, so you cannot even interact anymore. Memory leaks from e.g. flash applications or network-mounts that fall offline are some of the frequent reasons the system crashes in my case. It's very nasty, and worst of all, there doesn't seem to be much progress in this area, it's not much better than 10 years ago, maybe even worse.
Nice idea, but it has already been done, it's called "Microsoft Excel"
The fact that it is written in perl should have rang some bells with him. I really wonder why they've chosen such a slow person for the experiment. Oh well, back to work, there will be a thread about UK CCTV cameras that he's supposed to read soon, hope I can finish it on time.
Even better, a switch to turn the "driving backwards" light on. That should make sure they'll break :p
These phones are available in Europe in all kinds and shapes. Mostly in prepaid packages for 10-20 euros, but also without a sim lock for about 50. Didn't have a phone with a camera yet. I guess there is a substantial market for it and the manufacturers recognize it.
oh, and... it's not even using an SSL connection, just plain http. Crazy.
What's also very nice: I just went there to change it. The change password feature does NOT ask you for your old password. So anyone who finds an open monster session e.g. in an internet cafe can change the password of that user and kidnap the account. This is the situation after their attack, not very promising what the future concerns. These are really basic security features that take at most a few hours to implement.
Simple! Either you are adept enough to find out how to get Gnash working, or you just start being pragmatic and start using the stuff that Just Works (Tm), no matter if it is not 100% open source.
the ubuntu preinstalled on my dell came with a yahoo toolbar in firefox (and yahoo as homepage) and a dell video chat application. There are also several links to yahoo websites and to last.fm, but since it's just a link I can't call it bloatware, still bloat, though.
Today I was searching for "acceptable in the 80s" by calvin harris, found the video clip at the sony bmg channel: "This video is not available in your country" (we're talking germany here, where btw everything from the 80s is unfortunately still acceptable, but that's another story). I bet Calvin Harris is happy that sony is in his best interest spreading the word about his music worldwide.
If salaries for doctors in the US are more profitable than in Canada, doesn't that just mean that the "customers" of health care in the US are actually paying too much?
But at least it was *MY* choice, I'd rather die of a disease my health insurance didn't cover than from a disease the State Health Insurance Plan didn't provide for.
You seem to think that just by the state making sure you have a health insurance, you loose all capabilities to think for yourself (assuming you had them before).
Fun facts from a european country with state-regulated healthcare, for the misinformed:
Then again, maybe you're a winner, and having health issues is only for losers.
don't fool yourself into thinking that you can plan for all medical expenses by preparing a little ahead of time.
Insurances are useful when there are risks that are hard to estimate and have larger consequences than you can carry individually. If I want to drive a car in Germany, it has to be insured because there is an unforeseeable likelihood on accidents that I as a driver can inflict damage with immense costs.
Same goes for my health. I, as a citizen, need to be healthy for the sake of myself and others. Being ill is likely to damage my economic situation, if not for medicinal costs, also for my ability to perform a job. It is unforeseeable for each and every citizen whether they become ill or not.
A government is supposed to have taken over collective responsibilities of the inhabitants of a country for practical reasons. As such, it is supposed to optimize the well-being of those they represent. Reducing the most prominent financial and health risks of their citizens by enforcing health-care on them, just as they enforce road-laws, or fire brigades, should be a logical thing to do.
The rest of the world has accepted that a fast internet is not a hobby or an extra, it is the basic part of communication infrastructure. Mauritius has nationwide wifi, just to name an example.
Why use these fancy telephones if 2/3th of the population did fine before with the post or an occasional telegram? As far as I understand from contributions from Americans on slashdot so far, freedom of choice is an important part of the lifestyle, that seems to be why many oppose healthcare systems. But to have a choice to use broadband or not, it should be available to all in the first place.
Of course, angry video game nerd has the best review on how shitty the ghostbusters game really was. His reviews are about 10 minutes of pure poetry about shitty games, watch them!
About 10 years ago I installed linux for the first time. The internet was there, and every time Internet Explorer crashed in windows 95 on my pentium 100, it took the network interface with it, and I had to reboot. At one point I had enough, and because some friends were sgi or linux users, they got me convinced to try it, and I went to a store and bought a box-set of linux install cds and manuals by SuSE. After loads and loads of puzzling I got everything working. I redid this several times, with several linux versions, just like you. I ran openbsd for a while (one of the easier installs by the way), tried slackware. Knoppix was fine, but installing it instead of just running the live cd was no trivial task. My interest in figuring out how to install linux went down over the years, since at some point it isn't a learning process anymore, you're just hopelessly searching for ideas how to install some specific kernel module for some specific piece of hardware. Big jump to: now. You can buy several netbooks with several versions of linux preinstalled. I did, because I like linux, but I don't like installing it. And it really works. There are some problems of course, but the effort to configure my linux machine is not more, probably even less, than on the xp machines I am asked to check every once in a while. Installing software and hardware is getting easier almost by the day. By the way: if vista would really be such a good OS, I wonder why MS has such a hard time with it, and even Bill Gates admits that he'd rather not talk about it until the next OS is out.
I have no significant experience with either Vista or Windows 7, but in the last 12 months I bought two computers with adapted and language-localized versions linux preinstalled by default and supported by online repositories at the manufacturers. I didn't have to go to some obscure store either, I got them at main outlets, an asus eee at a big german electronics store, a dell mini at dell.com. I could have bought similar linux-based systems at about 4 other sources/manufacturers (acer, lenovo, etc.).
Today I plugged in my hp printer/scanner combo in the dell mini for the first time, it f-ing just worked (tm). Even without starting a wizard, a printer icon appeared, and both printing and scanning were enabled. Same goes for my bluetooth mouse. The year of linux on the desktop might not be there, but the year of linux on the netbook is already there, my friend, and it's kicking some serious ass.
Did you get your definition for "ironic" from Alanis Morisette? The current interpretation of Christianity is not the actual text of the bible, it's the bible filtered by clerics' ideas about morality. Why should atheists not do the same? And where do you think do atheists get these "bad" translations? Is there a special superbad bible edition for atheists? If atheists have access to these bad translations, then so have Christians. Are you really sure that your bible is a correct translation? Did you check?
I think the headline got mixed up with the title of the Scripps institute internal course on flirting for scientists.
> ... since the article mentions two searches per cup
Personally, I'm still waiting for the "two searches, one cup" video ;)
Seriously, These 500kW systems will not be dedicated to this one search, I bet any single one of them can handle a few hundred requests at a time. Quite likely that this study is off by a few magnitudes indeed.
Bitten by an unexpectedly venomous shrew.
I kid, I kid. Even though his articles were missing some necessary criticism of the news items, he did a nice job keeping up an interest in scientific progress and making it available to a wider public. Also cool to see he did some nice stuff at the big players in the day.
In europe you have some pretty hefty tests specific to your area of expertise before you can even become a patent officer. Still, this doesn't stop stupid patents to pass. Work pressure is too high, there are just way too many patents going along. Come to think of it, it just means that there are not enough patent officers to handle all patents. Basically that, and most of our other patent-related problems, can only exit because patents are too cheap. If the price of patents would go up it would probably be possible to hire more patent officers to reduce the workload, and maybe companies and people would think twice before getting their ininnovative ideas out as a patent. Probably the patent is currently used as a measure of workflow, a bit like lines of code. Useless measure for the actual performance of a company, but it's a number so it's used anyway.
As a non-US citizen living outside of the US, I don't think the problem is Obama. The problem is that the US allows a ridiculous "democratic" system where corporates are allowed to sponsor elections, at all. This is an institutionalized form of corruption and I don't think it exists in countries that call themselves democratic other than the US.
For the rest I agree, Obama was the best choice, even if he was overhyped. This is for a big part due to the fact that the combination of candidates from the Republican party was an outright failure. I really wonder how they got to Palin. Maybe they thought that voters were already dumb enough to fall for just the show value of Palin. Could they, in all their members, not find ANY CANDIDATE that would be at least halfway competent to do the job better than Palin?
As it is now, you are probably right, but I think that landlines will go away as new technologies emerge.
As far as TV is concerned: in Germany the remote parts were scheduled first for DVB-T, if I remember correctly. In remote areas it can be cheaper to just put a few antennas up than to upgrade the cable/telephone connection of every single farm.
A lot also depends on the dataplans available. In Germany competition is doing its work nicely at the moment: decent "unlimited" 10 GB dataplans for UMTS-modems are available for 15-25 eur per month. For me it was attractive enough to dump my land-line completely.