I had been under the impression that the BSA data was faulty due to their business plan rather than anything else. No car salesman is ever going to tell you the transmission is about to crap out. Of course this car is a great deal!
I'm glad you were modded up. Running everything in a sandbox that disappears on reboot, and other methods to keep real data away from what your doing online is the what will make it safe(r). In the case of simply separating user data and system data, such malware still has a chance to truly fsck with you. The need is to keep online malware 'away' from your user data AND system data. To do that, you need to do the equivalent of putting on rubber gloves, mask, protective goggles and going over to your neighbor's house to surf the web.
In general principle, and probably in practice, this is one thing that virtualization can do to improve the average user's environment.
If you are only remote from a town with broadband by a few tens of miles, why not take that $30k and build a couple of towers with WiFi or WiMax relays?
That's, erm, considerableâ"beyond the obvious graphics applications, that's the sort of computing power that may one day enable men to figure out what women want.
If you are a guy and are looking at video cards to figure out what women want... errr, you're doing it wrong!
Even if you are referring to CPU cycles, they've tried this once, almost unanimously across the galaxy, 42 is not what women want.
I'm with this poster. There are various simple tech inventions that have changed the world outside of the 1st world countries. I'd like to see how these can be applied to the 1st world to change how we live. In many 3rd world areas, it is not by choice that communities choose some technology. How can what they have learned be applied to westernized 1st world areas. A possible example is: if there are filters that can make any water safe to drink in seconds, can't we use that technology to recapture gray water and use it in our communities without having to have big wastewater treatment facilities? Water is becoming pretty important to even to many places in the USA.
A better questions is: You mean they don't? WTF, somebody call Mr Brin! This is a serious oversight. I've been hankerin' to trawl me through some archeology street views, I want to see those humans that lived with dinosaurs.
" [The spokesman] said these moves by the telecom and cable industries may be good for the respective businesses, but they almost surely won't be good for consumers. 'All they're doing is creating obstacles to each other's industry from gaining an advantage,' he said. 'That's not competition.' Well, it is. But not the kind that benefits customers."
People have been saying this all along. There is no move by either company that is aimed at achieving anything other than coin for the shareholder. Their level of collusion with the **AA et al is debated, but seems inevitable. We are seeing the beginnings of the next level of content cartel being born. Each is seeking to be the biggest triple or quadruple-play content provider. The rumors that they want to charge you for access to various content on the Internet is not so far fetched as you might at first think. The large ISPs finally figured out that they now own the distribution channel for content in the foreseeable future and want to own it the way that the **AA have previously done.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, this is a logical conclusion. Without control of distribution there is no big bucks to be made, no expensive houses, cars, coke parties. Yes, $45 for your standard package, with tiered charges for extra 'Internet channels' like YouTube or Google or MP3World etc.
What they are fighting about now is how to legally divide up the Internet content and not be taken to court. Comcast just lost one of the test battles.
If remuneration for good services rendered were their goal, there would be no court cases. There would be no throttling of traffic. There would be no hints of collusion with the **AA. There would be no one questioning what ISPs should monitor and what they should not.
In an ideal world, a massive boycott of commercial content would put everything in perspective for them. Unfortunately that won't happen. We are all the poorer for it.
What can be done? support independent content makers now. Encourage more bands to use the pay what you like model. Eventually the message that if people won't even pirate your content, you are not worth supporting will become an industry insiders golden rule.
It's time that such a message was sent to those spending money in Washington. Sad that it will never get there.
You are correct, Obama has changed tunes and the reason is unclear. The CIA was told what information to feed the rest of government; they tried to give the right information.
Obama is for all intents and purposes looking exactly like a bait and switch candidate. Not like we've not seen any of those before. The only thing that can change this is things like this lawsuit, massive communications among the people/bloggers/news outlets etc. as to what it does mean.
I'm still waiting to hear what that Obama change is going to be. So far it's looking like only a change of skin color, politics and lawlessness remains the same. Paul and Barr would both bring change. The fact that they are against much of what supports the current corruption and lack of support for them by both main parties is significant.
The one certain way to find out what that 'SAME CURIOUS REASON' is would be to elect someone that seems unaffected by it to see what rats jump ship while it's burning.
OT: BTW does anyone know of any snippet of code to mail spam legislators with emails regarding how they should vote? There is probably a website that does, many let you write them on specific issues, but does anyone know of one that allows a person to contact all of them with a single letter?
Generally, there are two distinct characteristics involved - structure (syntax, grammar, etc) and bandwidth (the scope of the information that can be delivered, and how long it takes to deliver it). A dog can communicate, but the structure is minimal and the bandwidth is - frankly - pathetic. However, it's quite sufficient for the purposes of hunters trying to coordinate a large pack for a successful foray. Humans have very complex speech patterns requiring elaborate structure and extremely high bandwidth, but it delivers rather more than the next meal.
Now staying completely in context, is it the desire to express more than 'get off the grass in front of my cave' the driving factor for evolution? The need to communicate more and more?
Relating this to modern day: I think that society preserves a lot of people who do nothing more than communicate whereas if our most important tool was fire or a spear they would long ago be dead. While that was somewhat humorous, it indicates that evolution may not yet be done with the modern human. It also inversely indicates that the ability to communicate (paint, sing, dance) was highly valued in earliest times, thus driving the evolution in that direction.
I'm with you on that. Evolution has more than one input or constraint. Even in the non-speaking animal world, communication occurs regularly. I find it difficult to surmise that because there is no record, it probably didn't happen. The development of many varied languages does not wholly support a sudden explosion of language, but a long history of developing communication methods. If it had started and caught on like some meme, it would look more or less alike all over the world despite local variations. It just doesn't seem to make sense that language could have arrived any other way than slowly with local variations vastly different from one another.. such as we see in the many languages spoken on the planet now. We see this even in the written word.
When the world was much larger (so to speak) assimilation of other cultures did not happen often or on the scales we see now, creating pockets of population that developed on their own-ish. This causes different needs for communication, and eventually different languages.
By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts.
In one short sentence, if the ability to speak/hear is innate in the human brain, then to say language only began abruptly 50,000 years ago is to say that the modern human brain really only developed abruptly 50,000 years ago. Forget the 10,000 year barrier some believe. Evolution is capable of many things, but I believe that the modern human brain was basically intact as we know it today before 50,000 years ago.
The paper at ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/bbs.donald.html also suggests that it's possible that what we think we know may not be true as there seems no direct evidence to support explosive changes in hominids at that 45,000-50,000 point, only fossil evidence of physical changes. It's a good guess, but still a guess. Communication happened from day one, when spoken language we might recognize as such began is nothing but a guess without some evidence of the actual brain structure or perhaps a nice wall painting of someone giving a speech?
Nice information. I've been running the cable modem, and three linksys routers (one is wireless, one is the Vonage link point) off of my server's UPS system for years. The only reboots that I've ever needed in some 5 years was a firmware upgrade, and for DNS server changes that are no longer needed thanks to OpenDNS. I can't actually remember having to reboot them for the last 1.8 years or so, even when I had to replace the cable modem they just reconnected and all was good. I hope that the UPS power is really helping me there. I had just thought they were damned reliable... hmmm As for router versions, see nuintari's post, I don't think any of mine are version 4 or later. Mine have just been working like champs, no need to upgrade... go figure.
BTW, I'm using a Fry's cheap APC UPS, 350 model or something like that. It's years old now, but also has not failed even in power outages from storms etc.
IANA nanotechnology specialist, but IMO the 'next big thing' might be something like an i686 on the same die as a Xilinx whopping-big FPGA so that you can do hardware encryption at memory bus speeds or things like that. When the hardware gets smaller you can be more creative about how you combine it with other hardware.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the ARM-23 running ARMLinux on a PDA with realtime encryption and DSL sized wireless bandwidth. When you can jam a bunch of hardware in a tiny place, things like that become possible. So I opine that the next big things will be systems on die where hardware is combined with what is now considered ancillary hardware so that the Dick Tracy wristwatch tv will become a reality.
Sorry, not sure how this helps with flying cars, but I can see the Dick Tracy thing.
There are ways to help work out the kinks before we have people voting to imprison Buddhists for terrorism. The process of voting from home can be asked to read some information regarding the subject matter of the vote before voting. Additionally a double opt-in vote would require that you insert your voter number to place the vote, then reply to the email sent to your registered email address before your vote is counted. This stops bots and gives those voting time to think it through and read about it a bit before just voting.
The key to getting a veracious vote result is education. The harder that you work to educate people on the issues, the more likely they are to vote using an informed opinion.
Yes, there are always those that oppose things out of ignorance or in support of something else, but perhaps if you informed people who Buddhists were before asking them the question they would not be so quick to say they should be nuked.
Education is the key to solving quite a few problems in the world.
Well, there is one main difference between Windows and those other 'even worse' systems, uptime. If you have more than a month uptime on a Windows system, you are not applying the patches correctly.
Solaris and those others, OTOH will happily run for months and years without requiring a reboot. I recently ran across a system at work (RedHat 5) that nobody bothered with because it always did it's job. When I had to go look to see what the problem was, imagine my surprise to find it running RH5. Everyone that knew the root password had either quit or forgot they knew it, it had been sitting there running for several years. Windows will NOT do that.
Did you just say that if he screws you over, then says, oops I was wrong... it's ok? Put the crack pipe down! How is he going to fix this is the question, not whether he was wrong or not. wow.
This will be problematic for the ISPs because now who are they going to blame for bad network design? If P2P can use all their bandwidth now, and this gives them >60% more bandwidth, what are they going to do? In the court of public opinion, it will be demanded that ISPs upgrade to increase bandwidth, and then they will have to explain that the problem is either poor network design or traffic is slowed so they can inspect packets deeply for terrorist activity.
Either way, this is not good for them as it will stick the egg to their face in a rather unseemly way.
Wouldn't Google Trends do exactly this? By carefully crafting a set of queries, you should be able to see what country is looking the most of any number of disease related topics, including symptoms. I'm sure that some fine tuning of the algorithms would help, but it does not require personal information to find out what disease is of concern to local populations.
Additionally, I'd like to see something about health information available on the Internet. I'd like to know what the incidence of sickness is during flu season and cold season etc. I don't care who has it, or how many times, but I would like to know what percentage of the local population is currently sick, what percentage of the sick are elderly/feeble/children/women/men etc.
This is like a health weather report, and I think it would be most useful, despite the danger of collecting such information, and the problems inherent in trying to not track personal information tied to that health 'weather'.
5. [pure personal intuition] Nowadays, mouth-to-mouth is still the best way to spread Ubuntu, or any Linux distro, and hey, the initial mouths know where to get it, and that won't be Best Buy. And that relates to your comment.
Emphasis is mine.
Either this guy is only telling women about Ubuntu, or I'm glad he didn't tell me about Ubuntu!
and some of the other Heinlein are definitely darker and more political than I remember..
is precisely one of the reasons that they should read them. Explaining a bit of Heinlein is a sight easier than explaining how Bush has gotten away with all that he has... IMO
Bad news for your company. Have you seen the people that are able to use SecondLife? If your product strategy people can't do LiveMeeting or SL... you need to be looking for another place to work IMO.
I have a small issue with your argument. As tools become more complex, learning to use them becomes more complex. Reasoning and logical thinking are not harmed/hampered by having complex tools available. They are harmed by teachers who use complex tools to avoid doing the harder part, teaching kids to reason and think. Sure, a laptop or calculator makes fast work of math problems yet structuring a mathematical proof is something the calculator won't do. If kids want to copy someone else's work off the Internet, teachers need to ensure that testing requires the child to prove they know the material.
Did nailing guns make carpenters less skillful?
Did spreadsheets make accountants less skillful?
and so on....
You are blaming the problem on the tool instead of the teacher.
Slashdot Mirror
I had been under the impression that the BSA data was faulty due to their business plan rather than anything else. No car salesman is ever going to tell you the transmission is about to crap out. Of course this car is a great deal!
The BS Alliance has a history of some shady tactics, many worthy of SCO fame. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bsa+complaint+software&btnG=Search gets about 133,000 hits. That usually means there are plenty of people in the world ready to tell you they are unhappy about the BSA.
Yep, no flaws in that data. It's showing you exactly what they want you to see.
I'm glad you were modded up. Running everything in a sandbox that disappears on reboot, and other methods to keep real data away from what your doing online is the what will make it safe(r). In the case of simply separating user data and system data, such malware still has a chance to truly fsck with you. The need is to keep online malware 'away' from your user data AND system data. To do that, you need to do the equivalent of putting on rubber gloves, mask, protective goggles and going over to your neighbor's house to surf the web.
In general principle, and probably in practice, this is one thing that virtualization can do to improve the average user's environment.
If you are only remote from a town with broadband by a few tens of miles, why not take that $30k and build a couple of towers with WiFi or WiMax relays?
WiFi on cantennas gets some decent travel and even better on purpose built antennas. Two or three hops might add some latency, but I'm betting it won't be as bad as you are seeing now. See http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=googleabout&btnG=Search+our+site&q=WiFi%20distance for some examples of how to do it. Some of those records are impressive.
FTFA:
That's, erm, considerableâ"beyond the obvious graphics applications, that's the sort of computing power that may one day enable men to figure out what women want.
If you are a guy and are looking at video cards to figure out what women want... errr, you're doing it wrong!
Even if you are referring to CPU cycles, they've tried this once, almost unanimously across the galaxy, 42 is not what women want.
I'm with this poster. There are various simple tech inventions that have changed the world outside of the 1st world countries. I'd like to see how these can be applied to the 1st world to change how we live. In many 3rd world areas, it is not by choice that communities choose some technology. How can what they have learned be applied to westernized 1st world areas. A possible example is: if there are filters that can make any water safe to drink in seconds, can't we use that technology to recapture gray water and use it in our communities without having to have big wastewater treatment facilities? Water is becoming pretty important to even to many places in the USA.
A better questions is: You mean they don't? WTF, somebody call Mr Brin! This is a serious oversight. I've been hankerin' to trawl me through some archeology street views, I want to see those humans that lived with dinosaurs.
That was funny.... just wait till there is a PERL mod for that API. Freakenstein, here we come.
" [The spokesman] said these moves by the telecom and cable industries may be good for the respective businesses, but they almost surely won't be good for consumers. 'All they're doing is creating obstacles to each other's industry from gaining an advantage,' he said. 'That's not competition.' Well, it is. But not the kind that benefits customers."
People have been saying this all along. There is no move by either company that is aimed at achieving anything other than coin for the shareholder. Their level of collusion with the **AA et al is debated, but seems inevitable. We are seeing the beginnings of the next level of content cartel being born. Each is seeking to be the biggest triple or quadruple-play content provider. The rumors that they want to charge you for access to various content on the Internet is not so far fetched as you might at first think. The large ISPs finally figured out that they now own the distribution channel for content in the foreseeable future and want to own it the way that the **AA have previously done.
No, I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat, this is a logical conclusion. Without control of distribution there is no big bucks to be made, no expensive houses, cars, coke parties. Yes, $45 for your standard package, with tiered charges for extra 'Internet channels' like YouTube or Google or MP3World etc.
What they are fighting about now is how to legally divide up the Internet content and not be taken to court. Comcast just lost one of the test battles.
If remuneration for good services rendered were their goal, there would be no court cases. There would be no throttling of traffic. There would be no hints of collusion with the **AA. There would be no one questioning what ISPs should monitor and what they should not.
In an ideal world, a massive boycott of commercial content would put everything in perspective for them. Unfortunately that won't happen. We are all the poorer for it.
What can be done? support independent content makers now. Encourage more bands to use the pay what you like model. Eventually the message that if people won't even pirate your content, you are not worth supporting will become an industry insiders golden rule.
It's time that such a message was sent to those spending money in Washington. Sad that it will never get there.
You are correct, Obama has changed tunes and the reason is unclear. The CIA was told what information to feed the rest of government; they tried to give the right information.
Obama is for all intents and purposes looking exactly like a bait and switch candidate. Not like we've not seen any of those before. The only thing that can change this is things like this lawsuit, massive communications among the people/bloggers/news outlets etc. as to what it does mean.
I'm still waiting to hear what that Obama change is going to be. So far it's looking like only a change of skin color, politics and lawlessness remains the same. Paul and Barr would both bring change. The fact that they are against much of what supports the current corruption and lack of support for them by both main parties is significant.
The one certain way to find out what that 'SAME CURIOUS REASON' is would be to elect someone that seems unaffected by it to see what rats jump ship while it's burning.
OT: BTW does anyone know of any snippet of code to mail spam legislators with emails regarding how they should vote? There is probably a website that does, many let you write them on specific issues, but does anyone know of one that allows a person to contact all of them with a single letter?
I love this:
Generally, there are two distinct characteristics involved - structure (syntax, grammar, etc) and bandwidth (the scope of the information that can be delivered, and how long it takes to deliver it). A dog can communicate, but the structure is minimal and the bandwidth is - frankly - pathetic. However, it's quite sufficient for the purposes of hunters trying to coordinate a large pack for a successful foray. Humans have very complex speech patterns requiring elaborate structure and extremely high bandwidth, but it delivers rather more than the next meal.
Now staying completely in context, is it the desire to express more than 'get off the grass in front of my cave' the driving factor for evolution? The need to communicate more and more?
Relating this to modern day: I think that society preserves a lot of people who do nothing more than communicate whereas if our most important tool was fire or a spear they would long ago be dead. While that was somewhat humorous, it indicates that evolution may not yet be done with the modern human. It also inversely indicates that the ability to communicate (paint, sing, dance) was highly valued in earliest times, thus driving the evolution in that direction.
Hey, want a laugh?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&output=googleabout&btnG=Search+our+site&q=habib%20tata%20lawsuit
Only 2270 hits on Google for habib+tata+lawsuit
I'm with you on that. Evolution has more than one input or constraint. Even in the non-speaking animal world, communication occurs regularly. I find it difficult to surmise that because there is no record, it probably didn't happen. The development of many varied languages does not wholly support a sudden explosion of language, but a long history of developing communication methods. If it had started and caught on like some meme, it would look more or less alike all over the world despite local variations. It just doesn't seem to make sense that language could have arrived any other way than slowly with local variations vastly different from one another.. such as we see in the many languages spoken on the planet now. We see this even in the written word.
When the world was much larger (so to speak) assimilation of other cultures did not happen often or on the scales we see now, creating pockets of population that developed on their own-ish. This causes different needs for communication, and eventually different languages.
From http://www.trueorigin.org/language01.asp
By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts.
In one short sentence, if the ability to speak/hear is innate in the human brain, then to say language only began abruptly 50,000 years ago is to say that the modern human brain really only developed abruptly 50,000 years ago. Forget the 10,000 year barrier some believe. Evolution is capable of many things, but I believe that the modern human brain was basically intact as we know it today before 50,000 years ago.
The paper at ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/bbs.donald.html also suggests that it's possible that what we think we know may not be true as there seems no direct evidence to support explosive changes in hominids at that 45,000-50,000 point, only fossil evidence of physical changes. It's a good guess, but still a guess. Communication happened from day one, when spoken language we might recognize as such began is nothing but a guess without some evidence of the actual brain structure or perhaps a nice wall painting of someone giving a speech?
Nice information. I've been running the cable modem, and three linksys routers (one is wireless, one is the Vonage link point) off of my server's UPS system for years. The only reboots that I've ever needed in some 5 years was a firmware upgrade, and for DNS server changes that are no longer needed thanks to OpenDNS. I can't actually remember having to reboot them for the last 1.8 years or so, even when I had to replace the cable modem they just reconnected and all was good. I hope that the UPS power is really helping me there. I had just thought they were damned reliable... hmmm As for router versions, see nuintari's post, I don't think any of mine are version 4 or later. Mine have just been working like champs, no need to upgrade... go figure.
BTW, I'm using a Fry's cheap APC UPS, 350 model or something like that. It's years old now, but also has not failed even in power outages from storms etc.
IANA nanotechnology specialist, but IMO the 'next big thing' might be something like an i686 on the same die as a Xilinx whopping-big FPGA so that you can do hardware encryption at memory bus speeds or things like that. When the hardware gets smaller you can be more creative about how you combine it with other hardware.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the ARM-23 running ARMLinux on a PDA with realtime encryption and DSL sized wireless bandwidth. When you can jam a bunch of hardware in a tiny place, things like that become possible. So I opine that the next big things will be systems on die where hardware is combined with what is now considered ancillary hardware so that the Dick Tracy wristwatch tv will become a reality.
Sorry, not sure how this helps with flying cars, but I can see the Dick Tracy thing.
There are ways to help work out the kinks before we have people voting to imprison Buddhists for terrorism. The process of voting from home can be asked to read some information regarding the subject matter of the vote before voting. Additionally a double opt-in vote would require that you insert your voter number to place the vote, then reply to the email sent to your registered email address before your vote is counted. This stops bots and gives those voting time to think it through and read about it a bit before just voting.
The key to getting a veracious vote result is education. The harder that you work to educate people on the issues, the more likely they are to vote using an informed opinion.
Yes, there are always those that oppose things out of ignorance or in support of something else, but perhaps if you informed people who Buddhists were before asking them the question they would not be so quick to say they should be nuked.
Education is the key to solving quite a few problems in the world.
Well, there is one main difference between Windows and those other 'even worse' systems, uptime. If you have more than a month uptime on a Windows system, you are not applying the patches correctly.
Solaris and those others, OTOH will happily run for months and years without requiring a reboot. I recently ran across a system at work (RedHat 5) that nobody bothered with because it always did it's job. When I had to go look to see what the problem was, imagine my surprise to find it running RH5. Everyone that knew the root password had either quit or forgot they knew it, it had been sitting there running for several years. Windows will NOT do that.
Did you just say that if he screws you over, then says, oops I was wrong... it's ok? Put the crack pipe down! How is he going to fix this is the question, not whether he was wrong or not. wow.
This will be problematic for the ISPs because now who are they going to blame for bad network design? If P2P can use all their bandwidth now, and this gives them >60% more bandwidth, what are they going to do? In the court of public opinion, it will be demanded that ISPs upgrade to increase bandwidth, and then they will have to explain that the problem is either poor network design or traffic is slowed so they can inspect packets deeply for terrorist activity.
Either way, this is not good for them as it will stick the egg to their face in a rather unseemly way.
Better than that... panic and quick, write a blog about how you feel about this as a congress person...
Wouldn't Google Trends do exactly this? By carefully crafting a set of queries, you should be able to see what country is looking the most of any number of disease related topics, including symptoms. I'm sure that some fine tuning of the algorithms would help, but it does not require personal information to find out what disease is of concern to local populations.
Additionally, I'd like to see something about health information available on the Internet. I'd like to know what the incidence of sickness is during flu season and cold season etc. I don't care who has it, or how many times, but I would like to know what percentage of the local population is currently sick, what percentage of the sick are elderly/feeble/children/women/men etc.
This is like a health weather report, and I think it would be most useful, despite the danger of collecting such information, and the problems inherent in trying to not track personal information tied to that health 'weather'.
5. [pure personal intuition] Nowadays, mouth-to-mouth is still the best way to spread Ubuntu, or any Linux distro, and hey, the initial mouths know where to get it, and that won't be Best Buy. And that relates to your comment.
Emphasis is mine.
Either this guy is only telling women about Ubuntu, or I'm glad he didn't tell me about Ubuntu!
and some of the other Heinlein are definitely darker and more political than I remember..
is precisely one of the reasons that they should read them. Explaining a bit of Heinlein is a sight easier than explaining how Bush has gotten away with all that he has... IMO
considered locking passengers in their seats after fitting them with "depends" and feeding them thorazine?
Bad news for your company. Have you seen the people that are able to use SecondLife? If your product strategy people can't do LiveMeeting or SL... you need to be looking for another place to work IMO.
I have a small issue with your argument. As tools become more complex, learning to use them becomes more complex. Reasoning and logical thinking are not harmed/hampered by having complex tools available. They are harmed by teachers who use complex tools to avoid doing the harder part, teaching kids to reason and think. Sure, a laptop or calculator makes fast work of math problems yet structuring a mathematical proof is something the calculator won't do. If kids want to copy someone else's work off the Internet, teachers need to ensure that testing requires the child to prove they know the material.
Did nailing guns make carpenters less skillful?
Did spreadsheets make accountants less skillful?
and so on....
You are blaming the problem on the tool instead of the teacher.