That being said, the overheard from that minimal OS doesn't compare to the overheard of XP or Vista.
How do you know? Do you know the amount of time a Windows game spends doing non game things? How much does an XBox game spend? Do you know the numbers, so you can say one is bigger than other.
My feeling is that desktop Windows has a much bigger memory footprint than the stripped down kernel in the Xbox. But that's ok, because a desktop PC has a lot more Ram to put it in. If you run a CPU limited game, quit and check the Task Manager history, it was pegged at 100% in the game process. It's not as if there is any real overhead. Sure there a lot of processes running, but they are all blocked waiting for something to happen. Windows also has working set trimming, so it chucks out code that isn't executed so you end up with the memory pretty much containing the game and the mininal bits of the OS you need. You can see this when you quit the game and it swaps like a bastard to before it display the desktop. So I'm skeptical that there is much to be gained from a minimal OS.
And in the PC's favour, it has a lot better single threaded CPU performance, due to a more modern CPU with bigger caches, out of order execution, register renaming and the like. And while consolese start off with very good GPU performance, they date quickly compared to a new PC, since PC GPUs get updated more often.
I think the consoles as speed demons is overrated to be honest. If you put together a PC out of decent components, it will outperform any console probably including the newest ones. Of course, it'll cost 2-3x as much, but you get what you pay for.
Well, you find a government building, shoot the guards and all the people inside, shoot holes in the firewall and log on.
Simple really, you silly hippy.
Incidentally, does the right to bear arms include anything that could be used as to kill or injure people, like AA60 tactical nuclear warhead from an old SS-21? I'm planning to acquire American citizenship in the summer and I intend to take full advantage of my rights.
He means shortesy(tm). It's a combination of short and courtesy, used by time efficient hackers and recommended by ESR.
E.g.
Customer: Hi, I tried to use your code with the version 1.6 kernel on a Asus XYZ1 motherboard. I got an Oops and this stack dump. It looks like you're assuming that this pointer is not null, whereas the spec says that this function can fail, especially on SMP motherboards like the XYZ1. Now I have to boot into Windows to use the device. Courtesy: Oh, my mistake, I'll patch it ASAP. Shortesy(tm): stop spreading m$ fud btw asus suxors noob get a real mb.
Concorde was expensive, it's true. That's because it used an afterburner to fly through the atmosphere like a fighter jet.
But space planes which cruise above the atmosphere in a series of bounces sound efficient to me. Once you reach cruising altitude, you can fire the engine a short burst every so often to maintain altitude. Since you're so high up, air resistance should be rather low.
I'm no aero engineer, but it seems like it could be cheaper than Concorde as well as faster. I'm not sure what the cost would be relative to a 747. But Tokyo to LA in 3 hours should allow them to charge a lot more for the tickets, so perhaps it's economic. Also, I reckon there are enough super rich people in the world for a few supersonic planes, regardless of how economic they are.
I think it's a user interface / application compatibility thing.
If people ran as a limited user, all the kernel level security stuff would work pretty well - all the key parts of the registry and filesystem would be protected for example. In practice, home users runs as Admin and most software pretty much requires it. Even in a Domain, most developers have local admin rights. This is the clients, most servers tend to be locked down.
And local admin rights completely disables any kernel level security, just like running as root does on Unix.
In a strange kind of way, the lack of third party binary applications is actually the greatest strength of Unix OS's when it comes to security, since it means most people can run as non root.
That's not true. Osa.exe just calls the Ole initialise function, since Office is so Ole centric. The idea is that the first person to call it will have to pay the time needed to load all the DLL's into Ram. Next time around they will be cached. Back when it was launched, people had 486's and slow drives, and if you didn't use OSA, they took too long to launch.
Any memory it uses will end up being listed under OSA.EXE if the process hangs around, or more usually in the system cache. But the system cache will shrink if someone else needs the memory.
Personally, I always delete it. On a newish machine, Winword and Excel start instantly anyway, since a newish machine is a hell of a lot faster than the machines the code was written to run on. Guess there's something to be said for completely unportable ten year old Win32 C code.
But trusting evil people is what makes us better than them!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/quotes Princess Aura: But my father has never kept a vow in his life! Dale Arden: I can't help that, Aura. Keeping our word is one of the things that make us... better than you.
I mean that you can find out about new threats quickly. E.g. before Pearl Harbour, the US presumably thought that an attack on US territory was unlikely. Before 9/11, they thought the same thing, unbelievable as that now seems. In that case it's crazy to assume that all wars in the future will be like Iraq. You need to plan for wars where the opposition will be much more organised than the Islamists.
You realise that this is not a binary situation don't you? The fact that Rumsfeld lies some of the time doesn't imply that there aren't crazy people plotting to kill unlimited numbers of Americans. And just because I accidently used a Republican catch phrase, doesn't necessarily mean that I'm wrong.
You can't just parse my post for catch phrases, decide which side US politics I'm on and respond accordingly. Actually, I'm nothing to do with US partisan politcs, since I'm not an American. There's a big world out there, and a small minority of people in it are a much bigger threat to the Americans than the current administration could ever be. They'll still be there when Hilary Clinton or whoever wins the next election too.
>Except that these Star Wars projects are the equivalent of the >Maginot Line
I think it would work like this -
In the middle of a US/Iran war, the Iranians rely on French spy satellites. If you have a way to destroy the satellite, it's much easier to negotiate shutter control, i.e. that the French decide not to sell images of secret stuff to Iran. This is a far cry from the Maginot line. I'm not sure what the appropriate military analogy is. Maybe stealth fighters or cruise missiles.
Unlike the Maginot line, it's not the only thing you depend on. Full on Star Wars, i.e. an impenetrable shield against an unlimited number of ICBMs from a technically competent opponenet would be like the Maginot line though.
I think a more limited Star Wars against Iranian or North Korean ICBMS is useful though. At the moment, the US would presumably try to destroy the launchers pre-emptively if they thought they were going to be used. Limited Star Wars would give them one or more systems to destroy ICBMs post launch, at different phases in their flight.
For what it's worth, this is all theoretical. I'm not saying that whatever the Bush admistration is proposing for Star Wars meets these criteria, but there is a case to be made for acquiring the capability to shoot down a handful of 1960's era ICBMS fired from some rogue state. Technically, I think that is possible, and it's much easier than the Full Star Wars which would have to have shot down tens of thousands of 1980's era ICBMs with counter measures fired from all over the Soviet block as well as from submarines. And as you say, a competent opponent can always smuggle in nukes in suitcases and the like.
So long as the politicians know the limits of the system, I don't see the risk.
The hot wars of the future will be with countries like iraq, where the US can
absolutely dominate in air & space
I'm sure the French thought something similar when they built the Maginot line - "Now we're safe from the Germans, all wars will be small colonial ones".
The world can change pretty quickly, as Pearl Harbour or 9/11 show. If you want to survive, you need to prepare for all possible sorts of wars, not just the ones that seem likely at the moment. And a war with China is all two possible. I'm not suggesting that either side want it, but if you look at the regular standoffs over Taiwan, it's always possible that an accident could esacalate into a very dangerous situation. To a lesser extent, it's possible that North Korea could drag the Chinese and the US into a conflict.
And a war between China and the US would be much more evenly balanced in a sortf of Zerg vs Protoss way. It would also be marked by extreme ruthlessness, and it's hard to imagine that shooting down satellites would be regarded as particularly unacceptable.
And there are other possible conflicts where the US would be evenly matched, e.g. against Russia or even Iran. Whilst it's unlikely that Iran would be able to launch satellites, they would be able to buy coverage & GPS like services from European or Russian ones.
Even if none of this happens, shooting down satellites with a ground based laser is a cool trick. AFAIK, the US does have anti satellite weapons already - there was a cold war program to fire missiles from an F15. Looking at that link, the Russians experimented with a load of anti satellite techniques from kamikaze 'figher satellites' to a ground based laser that fry satellite's image sensors.
I doubt you'd find anyone working at the BBC who was pro US or pro Israel, at least people that work as journalists. If you went to a dinner party with BBC people and said anything positive about any right wing politician you'd get shouted down. In fact if you said anything positive most Labour ones you'd also get shouted down. BBC reporters may come seem to come in a healthy variety of colours and genders, but they come from a very narrow part of the political spectrum, comfortably to the left of both Labour and the Tories. In fact I'd say they are comfortably to the left of pretty much any government that is likely to be elected.
The problem with bias is that there is a feedback effect. Quite quickly, people who don't fit the bias of the organisation will become unpopular and leave. Once that happens, there is no one left in the organisation to challenge it's drift towards whatever extreme it had a slight preference for. A bunch of public school educated journalists working for a publicly funded state broadcaster tend to be keen on left wing ideas (e.g the public sector, pacifism) and hostile to right wing ones (free market economics, the US/UK foreign policy consensus). I guess other parts of their world view has a bias too, but I find it less obnoxious than these because I agree with it.
Look at the way they cover any economic issue for example, left wing ideas get a far more sympathetic hearing that right wing ones. Or foreign policy - all their coverage assumes that it's currently dominant by a conspiracy of neocons, without quoting what the Neocons actually wrote, or mentioning that apart from Iraq, Neocons are not that different from regular Cons.
Or whenever the US/UK fight a war, it's always covered as if disaster is imminient until they actually win. E.g in Serbia, I remember seeing reports about how the bombing was pointless right up to the point the Serbs surrendered. Being sceptical about a war is of course not itself a bad thing, but there were good reasons for that war (oddly enough, you could see that from Maggie Kane's reports in the Guardian), and good reasons for the choice of tactics, and the BBC never reported them.
I think BBC journalists want to do their own version of crusading journalism against the Vietnam war, despite the fact that techology has improved since then, and the US/UK guys go to much greated lengths these days to avoid killing innocent people. Today's journalists also forget that when the US left, Vietnam was reunited under a murderous dictatorship, so assertive US foreign policy is not necessarily worse than the alternative.
I guess if you start off with a built in bias, no matter how slight, conformism will amplify it. And since the BBC doesn't have to worry about customers or outside interference, there isn't any force to counter act that. And from the media people I've met in London, the intake to the BBC has a huge bias.
Sod it, I'm wasting my time posting this stuff here. But if you compare the BBC to any American organisation, you can see that it's clearly to the left. Maybe you just like that.
Maybe it's because they are both style obsessed, minority behaviour, regarded with distaste by the majority.
Both are condemned in the bible too, from the book of Leviticus -
"If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman,
both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to
death; their blood will be on their own heads."
and the lesser known verse, added in Leviticus '81.
"If a processor stores the most significant byte in the lowest
location, contrary to logic and the laws of God, it's users
shall be put to death"
The reason businesses require that you have one is (I think) because they can trace you and collect debts via the kronofogden. People with an ID are thus a much lower risk than those without. It's not so much the physical card that makes it possible, more the personummer it contains. And because businesses need it, the tax people can rely on you having one.
Of course, if you're trying to work in the UK without paying tax, or you want to be untraceable, it's a pain, but that's the whole point.
The problem I have with the UK is that well meaning but naive liberals are lining up with scum like George Galloway and old hippies like Glenda Jackson to campaign against something which is designed to make life hard for people who want to welch on their debts and avoid taxes. In fact if you Google for it, the first page or so of entries are uniformly hostile. But if you look at other European countries, an ID register defintely has it's uses.
Not that it matters, both of the parties that actually have a chance of winning an election are committed to some kind of ID register at least.
Hard disks will outpace NAND flash, both in terms capacity and $/GB. So you can choose between a 32GB NAND flash disk or a much bigger hard disk.
But there's a crossover capacity between flash and a rotating media. E.g. at the moment I'd use flash for upto 2-4GB. You can see it with MP3 players - small capacity ones tend to be flash because it's cheaper for low capacities. High cap ones tend to be hard disk based. The crossover capacity should double each 1.5 years with Moore's law, I suspect.
But I'm working on the assumption that for most users 32GB or so is enough. An OS and Office suite will fit in a fraction of that even in five years' time. So ultraportables should switch over. Unless some other, cheaper solid state memory becomes possible of course, but that would just accelerate the switch away from hard disks.
Perhaps because doctors believe in treating humans, rather than deciding that only some "deserve" it.
Wow, so the NHS now has to given unlimited health care to everyone on the planet.
It's cheaper to fly to London than to get treated at a local hospital in most cities in the world.
OMG, those evil immigrants renting video tapes!!! How will we survive!!!
It's not just the video tapes, you can't do anything unless you have an ID. If I came to Sweden and didn't register, I wouldn't be able to survive. Businesses know that people with ID can be traced, so the video shop knows it has a good chance of getting the tapes back.
If the UK had a system like the one in Sweden, I'm sure that people could still work illegally, just like they do in Sweden, but they woudn't be able to do anything else. Buying or renting anything would be hard.
Actually this trip, I made a decision to register early for that reason. Before, I was here on and off for six months without doing it, and everything was hard. So from my own experience, having a national id system 'encourages' people to register. And if people don't register, they won't get sent a tax return.
So lets recap my painfully simple argument backed by personal experience.
1) A national ID system means that businesses choose to only do business with people who have an ID because. 2) That means it's hard to survive without an ID. 3) So people apply for an ID. 4) So the tax people know where they are. 5) So the tax base increases.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus they didn't cosh the shit out of him with 12 Cell Maglites
Pastel, with white rims.
How do you know? Do you know the amount of time a Windows game spends doing non game things? How much does an XBox game spend? Do you know the numbers, so you can say one is bigger than other.
My feeling is that desktop Windows has a much bigger memory footprint than the stripped down kernel in the Xbox. But that's ok, because a desktop PC has a lot more Ram to put it in. If you run a CPU limited game, quit and check the Task Manager history, it was pegged at 100% in the game process. It's not as if there is any real overhead. Sure there a lot of processes running, but they are all blocked waiting for something to happen. Windows also has working set trimming, so it chucks out code that isn't executed so you end up with the memory pretty much containing the game and the mininal bits of the OS you need. You can see this when you quit the game and it swaps like a bastard to before it display the desktop. So I'm skeptical that there is much to be gained from a minimal OS.
And in the PC's favour, it has a lot better single threaded CPU performance, due to a more modern CPU with bigger caches, out of order execution, register renaming and the like. And while consolese start off with very good GPU performance, they date quickly compared to a new PC, since PC GPUs get updated more often.
I think the consoles as speed demons is overrated to be honest. If you put together a PC out of decent components, it will outperform any console probably including the newest ones. Of course, it'll cost 2-3x as much, but you get what you pay for.
Well, you find a government building, shoot the guards and all the people inside, shoot holes in the firewall and log on.
Simple really, you silly hippy.
Incidentally, does the right to bear arms include anything that could be used as to kill or injure people, like AA60 tactical nuclear warhead from an old SS-21? I'm planning to acquire American citizenship in the summer and I intend to take full advantage of my rights.
Q) Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A) the other side. To get to
Q) Why did the multithreaded chicken cross the road?
A) get to the other side. To
He means shortesy(tm). It's a combination of short and courtesy, used by time efficient hackers and recommended by ESR.
E.g.
Customer: Hi, I tried to use your code with the version 1.6 kernel on a Asus XYZ1 motherboard. I got an Oops and this stack dump. It looks like you're assuming that this pointer is not null, whereas the spec says that this function can fail, especially on SMP motherboards like the XYZ1. Now I have to boot into Windows to use the device.
Courtesy: Oh, my mistake, I'll patch it ASAP.
Shortesy(tm): stop spreading m$ fud btw asus suxors noob get a real mb.
Which will lunge at the head, miss and maul him badly.
Concorde was expensive, it's true. That's because it used an afterburner to fly through the atmosphere like a fighter jet.
But space planes which cruise above the atmosphere in a series of bounces sound efficient to me. Once you reach cruising altitude, you can fire the engine a short burst every so often to maintain altitude. Since you're so high up, air resistance should be rather low.
I'm no aero engineer, but it seems like it could be cheaper than Concorde as well as faster. I'm not sure what the cost would be relative to a 747. But Tokyo to LA in 3 hours should allow them to charge a lot more for the tickets, so perhaps it's economic. Also, I reckon there are enough super rich people in the world for a few supersonic planes, regardless of how economic they are.
Sexium, complete with English seaside post card humour in the adverts.
No, it's not
I think it's a user interface / application compatibility thing.
If people ran as a limited user, all the kernel level security stuff would work pretty well - all the key parts of the registry and filesystem would be protected for example. In practice, home users runs as Admin and most software pretty much requires it. Even in a Domain, most developers have local admin rights. This is the clients, most servers tend to be locked down.
And local admin rights completely disables any kernel level security, just like running as root does on Unix.
In a strange kind of way, the lack of third party binary applications is actually the greatest strength of Unix OS's when it comes to security, since it means most people can run as non root.
I guess the alternative was already taken -
http://www.pi55.com/
That's not true. Osa.exe just calls the Ole initialise function, since Office is so Ole centric. The idea is that the first person to call it will have to pay the time needed to load all the DLL's into Ram. Next time around they will be cached. Back when it was launched, people had 486's and slow drives, and if you didn't use OSA, they took too long to launch.
Any memory it uses will end up being listed under OSA.EXE if the process hangs around, or more usually in the system cache. But the system cache will shrink if someone else needs the memory.
Personally, I always delete it. On a newish machine, Winword and Excel start instantly anyway, since a newish machine is a hell of a lot faster than the machines the code was written to run on. Guess there's something to be said for completely unportable ten year old Win32 C code.
But trusting evil people is what makes us better than them!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080745/quotes
Princess Aura: But my father has never kept a vow in his life!
Dale Arden: I can't help that, Aura. Keeping our word is one of the things that make us... better than you.
I mean that you can find out about new threats quickly. E.g. before Pearl Harbour, the US presumably thought that an attack on US territory was unlikely. Before 9/11, they thought the same thing, unbelievable as that now seems. In that case it's crazy to assume that all wars in the future will be like Iraq. You need to plan for wars where the opposition will be much more organised than the Islamists.
You realise that this is not a binary situation don't you? The fact that Rumsfeld lies some of the time doesn't imply that there aren't crazy people plotting to kill unlimited numbers of Americans. And just because I accidently used a Republican catch phrase, doesn't necessarily mean that I'm wrong.
You can't just parse my post for catch phrases, decide which side US politics I'm on and respond accordingly. Actually, I'm nothing to do with US partisan politcs, since I'm not an American. There's a big world out there, and a small minority of people in it are a much bigger threat to the Americans than the current administration could ever be. They'll still be there when Hilary Clinton or whoever wins the next election too.
>Except that these Star Wars projects are the equivalent of the
>Maginot Line
I think it would work like this -
In the middle of a US/Iran war, the Iranians rely on French spy satellites. If you have a way to destroy the satellite, it's much easier to negotiate shutter control, i.e. that the French decide not to sell images of secret stuff to Iran. This is a far cry from the Maginot line. I'm not sure what the appropriate military analogy is. Maybe stealth fighters or cruise missiles.
Unlike the Maginot line, it's not the only thing you depend on. Full on Star Wars, i.e. an impenetrable shield against an unlimited number of ICBMs from a technically competent opponenet would be like the Maginot line though.
I think a more limited Star Wars against Iranian or North Korean ICBMS is useful though. At the moment, the US would presumably try to destroy the launchers pre-emptively if they thought they were going to be used. Limited Star Wars would give them one or more systems to destroy ICBMs post launch, at different phases in their flight.
For what it's worth, this is all theoretical. I'm not saying that whatever the Bush admistration is proposing for Star Wars meets these criteria, but there is a case to be made for acquiring the capability to shoot down a handful of 1960's era ICBMS fired from some rogue state. Technically, I think that is possible, and it's much easier than the Full Star Wars which would have to have shot down tens of thousands of 1980's era ICBMs with counter measures fired from all over the Soviet block as well as from submarines. And as you say, a competent opponent can always smuggle in nukes in suitcases and the like.
So long as the politicians know the limits of the system, I don't see the risk.
I'm sure the French thought something similar when they built the Maginot line - "Now we're safe from the Germans, all wars will be small colonial ones".
The world can change pretty quickly, as Pearl Harbour or 9/11 show. If you want to survive, you need to prepare for all possible sorts of wars, not just the ones that seem likely at the moment. And a war with China is all two possible. I'm not suggesting that either side want it, but if you look at the regular standoffs over Taiwan, it's always possible that an accident could esacalate into a very dangerous situation. To a lesser extent, it's possible that North Korea could drag the Chinese and the US into a conflict.
And a war between China and the US would be much more evenly balanced in a sortf of Zerg vs Protoss way. It would also be marked by extreme ruthlessness, and it's hard to imagine that shooting down satellites would be regarded as particularly unacceptable.
And there are other possible conflicts where the US would be evenly matched, e.g. against Russia or even Iran. Whilst it's unlikely that Iran would be able to launch satellites, they would be able to buy coverage & GPS like services from European or Russian ones.
Even if none of this happens, shooting down satellites with a ground based laser is a cool trick. AFAIK, the US does have anti satellite weapons already - there was a cold war program to fire missiles from an F15. Looking at that link, the Russians experimented with a load of anti satellite techniques from kamikaze 'figher satellites' to a ground based laser that fry satellite's image sensors.
I doubt you'd find anyone working at the BBC who was pro US or pro Israel, at least people that work as journalists. If you went to a dinner party with BBC people and said anything positive about any right wing politician you'd get shouted down. In fact if you said anything positive most Labour ones you'd also get shouted down. BBC reporters may come seem to come in a healthy variety of colours and genders, but they come from a very narrow part of the political spectrum, comfortably to the left of both Labour and the Tories. In fact I'd say they are comfortably to the left of pretty much any government that is likely to be elected.
The problem with bias is that there is a feedback effect. Quite quickly, people who don't fit the bias of the organisation will become unpopular and leave. Once that happens, there is no one left in the organisation to challenge it's drift towards whatever extreme it had a slight preference for. A bunch of public school educated journalists working for a publicly funded state broadcaster tend to be keen on left wing ideas (e.g the public sector, pacifism) and hostile to right wing ones (free market economics, the US/UK foreign policy consensus). I guess other parts of their world view has a bias too, but I find it less obnoxious than these because I agree with it.
Look at the way they cover any economic issue for example, left wing ideas get a far more sympathetic hearing that right wing ones. Or foreign policy - all their coverage assumes that it's currently dominant by a conspiracy of neocons, without quoting what the Neocons actually wrote, or mentioning that apart from Iraq, Neocons are not that different from regular Cons.
Or whenever the US/UK fight a war, it's always covered as if disaster is imminient until they actually win. E.g in Serbia, I remember seeing reports about how the bombing was pointless right up to the point the Serbs surrendered. Being sceptical about a war is of course not itself a bad thing, but there were good reasons for that war (oddly enough, you could see that from Maggie Kane's reports in the Guardian), and good reasons for the choice of tactics, and the BBC never reported them.
I think BBC journalists want to do their own version of crusading journalism against the Vietnam war, despite the fact that techology has improved since then, and the US/UK guys go to much greated lengths these days to avoid killing innocent people. Today's journalists also forget that when the US left, Vietnam was reunited under a murderous dictatorship, so assertive US foreign policy is not necessarily worse than the alternative.
I guess if you start off with a built in bias, no matter how slight, conformism will amplify it. And since the BBC doesn't have to worry about customers or outside interference, there isn't any force to counter act that. And from the media people I've met in London, the intake to the BBC has a huge bias.
Sod it, I'm wasting my time posting this stuff here. But if you compare the BBC to any American organisation, you can see that it's clearly to the left. Maybe you just like that.
Moderating Slashdot is like sifting through a vast latrine for a handful of marginally edible nuggets of corn.
I think the moderators do a great job actually, sometimes in very difficult circumstances.
Maybe it's because they are both style obsessed, minority behaviour, regarded with distaste by the majority.
Both are condemned in the bible too, from the book of Leviticus -
"If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman,
both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to
death; their blood will be on their own heads."
and the lesser known verse, added in Leviticus '81.
"If a processor stores the most significant byte in the lowest
location, contrary to logic and the laws of God, it's users
shall be put to death"
You need to go to Sweden to see the benefits to a well implemented National ID system.
5 37.html
http://www.opendemocracy.net/xml/xhtml/articles/2
The reason businesses require that you have one is (I think) because they can trace you and collect debts via the kronofogden. People with an ID are thus a much lower risk than those without. It's not so much the physical card that makes it possible, more the personummer it contains. And because businesses need it, the tax people can rely on you having one.
Of course, if you're trying to work in the UK without paying tax, or you want to be untraceable, it's a pain, but that's the whole point.
The problem I have with the UK is that well meaning but naive liberals are lining up with scum like George Galloway and old hippies like Glenda Jackson to campaign against something which is designed to make life hard for people who want to welch on their debts and avoid taxes. In fact if you Google for it, the first page or so of entries are uniformly hostile. But if you look at other European countries, an ID register defintely has it's uses.
Not that it matters, both of the parties that actually have a chance of winning an election are committed to some kind of ID register at least.
Hard disks will outpace NAND flash, both in terms capacity and $/GB. So you can choose between a 32GB NAND flash disk or a much bigger hard disk.
But there's a crossover capacity between flash and a rotating media. E.g. at the moment I'd use flash for upto 2-4GB. You can see it with MP3 players - small capacity ones tend to be flash because it's cheaper for low capacities. High cap ones tend to be hard disk based. The crossover capacity should double each 1.5 years with Moore's law, I suspect.
But I'm working on the assumption that for most users 32GB or so is enough. An OS and Office suite will fit in a fraction of that even in five years' time. So ultraportables should switch over. Unless some other, cheaper solid state memory becomes possible of course, but that would just accelerate the switch away from hard disks.
Perhaps because doctors believe in treating humans, rather than deciding that only some "deserve" it.
Wow, so the NHS now has to given unlimited health care to everyone on the planet.
It's cheaper to fly to London than to get treated at a local hospital in most cities in the world.
OMG, those evil immigrants renting video tapes!!! How will we survive!!!
It's not just the video tapes, you can't do anything unless you have an ID. If I came to Sweden and didn't register, I wouldn't be able to survive. Businesses know that people with ID can be traced, so the video shop knows it has a good chance of getting the tapes back.
If the UK had a system like the one in Sweden, I'm sure that people could still work illegally, just like they do in Sweden, but they woudn't be able to do anything else. Buying or renting anything would be hard.
Actually this trip, I made a decision to register early for that reason. Before, I was here on and off for six months without doing it, and everything was hard. So from my own experience, having a national id system 'encourages' people to register. And if people don't register, they won't get sent a tax return.
So lets recap my painfully simple argument backed by personal experience.
1) A national ID system means that businesses choose to only do business with people who have an ID because.
2) That means it's hard to survive without an ID.
3) So people apply for an ID.
4) So the tax people know where they are.
5) So the tax base increases.
Give it 2-5 years, and it will happen I think.
1 80090
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=183698&cid=15