Everyone (except bankers) would be better off if we used debt-free money issued by your government, rather than debt issued from privately controlled central banks.
The only difference between these two options you cited above is who creates the money: the government or the banks. It's more efficient to let the banks do it because the process is then distributed instead of centralized. And it reduces the direct influence that the government can have on the overall economy, which helps avoid full-scale government corruption. (See most third-world economies.) Having the government print cash is fine because cash is a very small fraction of all the money in existence.
Like it or not, credit (or debt, depending on your perspective) drives our economies and our western way of life. It's the reason you can live in a $100,000 house while only making $35,000 year. If banks were restricted to granting loans based on their actual on-hand cash, they would not be able to offer credit (loans, mortgages, credit cards) anything like they do today. They'd literally have to start turning away most of their customers. "Sorry, we're all out of money today, try again tomorrow!" or "Sure, we can offer you a loan. Today only, we have a low interest rate of just 45%!"
Not only would that put the bank out of business, but it would also sink our spending-based economy overnight and then nobody will have any money.
I don't think I would call AIX a niche. I work in the "enterprise" environment and can guarantee you that AIX on Power hardware forms the backbone of most every mid-size to large business whose main business is not I.T. Yeah, we run a lot of Linux (our Linux machines outnumber AIX 2 to 1), almost everyone does, but those boxes don't do the heavy lifting and can't-go-down-ever business cycle processing that our AIX machines do. Someday, some company will realize that it's completely possible (albeit challenging) to marry a rock-solid Linux distribution to custom Intel-based hardware the same way IBM does on Power and offer unbeatable support at an astronomical price in an effort to unseat IBM in the enterprise. Maybe it won't be soon, but it will happen someday.
Yes, POTS lines work in a power outage but this is dependent on two rather important conditions:
1. You have a direct pair back to the CO. (Most businesses and many apartment complexes have intermediary equipment with no effective battery backup.)
2. Your phone doesn't rely on mains power to operate. (Almost all landline phones sold these days require mains power to operate either because they're cordless or contain an answering machine.)
I have a POTS line to my house and we have an unpowered, corded phone in the basement specifically for emergencies. We have had power outages where it didn't work, so I suspect there should be a #3 added to the list as well, I just don't know what it is.
That's true, but irrelevant. The debug mode doesn't do an end-run around the machine's entire hardware and software security stack as so many posters were implying. By the time you have a chunk of executable code on your machine trying to set specific registers to specific values, all of the security measures in place up to that point have failed. Malicious code is malicious code and it does not need special access to some obscure CPU feature in order to do damage.
People and corporations must be made aware that they have no right to hang on to user's personal data without giving them the choice to export it in an easy and convenient way.
People must be made aware that they have the right to not submit personal data in the first place.
Right now, the biggest complaint that everyone seems to have with SSDs is that they aren't big enough. The SSD manufacturers are in turn reacting to this, producing ever-larger and more expensive drives.
What's I'd like to see is a push toward faster and cheaper, at the expense of capacity. The average out-of-the-box OS should only take on the order of 10GB of space with a few more GB for common applications. Those with a definite need for greater local capacity (gamers, video editors) can either pay through the nose for high-capacity SSDs or continue to use cheap high-capacity mechanical drives.
I guess I will donate $50 in 15 days if nothing comes from the OSS community before.
I'm not going to tell you what to do with your money, but I'd personally rather wait for someone not interested in the financial reward develop and release the drivers. If he had a prototype ready in just three days, he's either the world's most brilliant reverse engineer or the device isn't as complicated as Microsoft has portrayed.
If I had the time and skill, I'd do it myself and give the $3000 to the EFF and FSF.
Organisms are not programs. DNA is not data. Biology is not a branch of computer science.
Biology is distinct from computer science in terms of how we presently study them, yes. But they are both based on the same fundamental truths of the universe we exist in. (Some of which we do not know or fully understand yet.) Discovering these truths allows us to model biological systems and computer systems in much the same way.
DNA sequences are most certainly data. They describe how an organism builds itself, and to a certain extent, behaves. I'm surprised anyone believes that is open for debate.
In bygone times, people would compare animals and indeed human beings to clocks or steam engines. Comparing them to computers is just a flawed and just as misleading. However, it is more fashionable, so I doubt people will stop doing it anytime soon.
Nobody seriously attempts to assert that an organism is comparable in complexity to a man-made machine of our times. But there are cases where an analogy is apt for the purposes of explanation. That there are differences in the complexity or specific mechanisms is usually implied if not explicitly stated. A biology teacher might describe how the human eye works in terms of a camera to a group of photography students, for example.
Network TV executives see "watching content on a TV" and "watching content in a web browser" as two completely different businesses which shall never mingle nor overlap despite, well, reality. It's probably pretty scary to sit there and watch a new business model sneaking up on their billion-dollar empires.
The Facebook situation isn't a good analog to what's going on with Google TV. Web search and television are completely different products and if Google tried removing uncooperative television networks from their index, they would just come off looking like a whiny child.
A better way for Google to "get revenge" would be to censor or remove the networks' YouTube channels. But again, this wouldn't really accomplish anything since the network's aren't violating YouTube's terms and conditions and they don't really gain anything from their YouTube channels except a modicum of advertising and marketing.
Lawsuits are written by lawyers. Being a lawyer means that you don't actually need to know what you are talking about, you just need to sound like you do.
They will be bought when there is a need. There is none at this point, except in very specific applications, like the high-vibration atmosphere at manufacturing plants.
You forgot: Some people want transfer rates that are much faster than today's mechanical disks.
It's worse than that. Used to be, you could easily guess by context whether "hacker" meant someone who programs, tinkers with, or reverse engineers technology or someone who breaks into other people's systems through technological skill (your definition of "cracker"). And even then, the line was sometimes blurry. In the olden days, you had to be a hacker in order to be a cracker but the reverse was obviously never true.
Now, the media uses "hacker" to refer to anyone who is somehow linked to crime involving computers or technology, even when no technical skill whatsoever was required. Very sad.
The complaint with Google was that Google was infringing on Oracle's patents and copyrights via Android. Google's official and legal response was along the lines of, "WTF are you talking about?"
My own theory is that Sun (and now Oracle) liked the profits they were receiving via licensing royalties from mobile phones that shipped with an embedded Java environment. Google did an end-run around these royalties by developing their own third-party JVM, Dalvik. When it looked like Android would gain a decent foothold in the smart phone market, Oracle probably thought they needed to do something. Maybe they have this opinion that they "own" all parts of Java.
(My understanding is that Dalvik and Java(tm) are completely different, except that the human-readable source code for both happens to be the Java programming language. A programming language itself, so far as I know, cannot be copyrighted. Patented, maybe, but you would have a tremendously difficult time trying to find any feature of a "modern" language that doesn't have decades of prior art.)
As for OpenJDK, Oracle appears to be the copyright holder of the source code and are entitled to any Java copyrights or patents applicable to it. Whether they give it away for free or charge for it doesn't matter.
Uh yeah. Because writing a desktop PC operating system in the late 1980's and continuing development of an enterprise-class programming environment in 2010 are exactly the same thing.
It ain't rocket science. Some bubba sets his own house on fire, and then whines because the people he didn't pay, didn't come to put it out. I've lived in Tennesee: they really don't like taxes there. That's fine, but there are consequences.
It's fascinating how many people will read a news article and seek out that one fatal flaw, that one bad decision that was responsible for the whole mess and focus so intently on that one thing that they lose sight of the whole picture.
The fact is, there were two things that went wrong here:
1) The homeowner didn't pay their taxes
2) The fire department didn't respond appropriately to a potentially life-threatening situation
I'm not defending the homeowner here as they absolutely should have paid their taxes and should be punished for it. But not by having their home razed and their family pets killed.
Fire departments are not like car insurance. If you total your ride and didn't pay a premium, of course you aren't entitled to a claim in the event of an accident. All fires are potentially deadly and must be controlled at the earliest possible opportunity to prevent unnecessary loss of life and property. Letting any fire burn out of control regardless of the reason is gross negligence and the fire chief of this particular department ought to be facing jail time for his idiotic decisions.
Nobody seems to be asking: How will this affect the neighbor's trust in the fire department in the future? Now everyone within that deparment's jurisdiction has to worry about what will happen when they call in a fire. Did they forget to pay their fire-fighting taxes? If they did, will the department have a record of it?
Whether or not I had paid my taxes, if I lived in that city, I would move the hell out purely in the interest of my family's safety.
I am not a phone engineer, but I would imagine wifi would be cheaper in terms of power budget. Compare having to transmit a continuous signal to a receiver 20ft away as opposed to 2 miles away.
An interesting idea, but probably not feasible for the attacker. For one, remote code execution vulnerabilities are somewhat rare on Linux. Most vulnerabilities rely on having to trick the user into doing something (e.g., going to a malware-enabled website). Additionally, those few remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities that are discovered are usually mitigated just by having a firewall in place.
It's probably easier for the attackers to keep doing what they already do: scan ranges of IPs for vulnerable services and attack the hosts that haven't had any patches in over a year.
You'll note that the negative moderation was balanced against at least 4 other positive moderations. The moderation system was built on the assumption that some people will moderate poorly but most will moderate appropriately. So Slashdot is working as it's supposed to. You can relax now.
Look at images #3 and #4. The WebP versions are clearly sharper and more detailed than their JPEG counterparts.
That's pretty much impossible since the WebP images were generated from the JPEG versions. The point of the gallery (whether successfully or not) was to show that the image quality as good as or only slightly less as good as JPEG for a considerable reduction in file size.
In order to convince anyone that WebP offers the same (or better) image quality as JPEG, they have to encode both the JPEGs and WebPs from raw lossless images, set the image quality on the encoders as equally as possible, and only then display them side-by-side for subjective comparison. When I viewed the gallery, I was left wondering if I could get a similar size reduction on the JPEGs just by loading them up in gimp and dropping the image quality slider down a few notches.
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The only difference between these two options you cited above is who creates the money: the government or the banks. It's more efficient to let the banks do it because the process is then distributed instead of centralized. And it reduces the direct influence that the government can have on the overall economy, which helps avoid full-scale government corruption. (See most third-world economies.) Having the government print cash is fine because cash is a very small fraction of all the money in existence.
Like it or not, credit (or debt, depending on your perspective) drives our economies and our western way of life. It's the reason you can live in a $100,000 house while only making $35,000 year. If banks were restricted to granting loans based on their actual on-hand cash, they would not be able to offer credit (loans, mortgages, credit cards) anything like they do today. They'd literally have to start turning away most of their customers. "Sorry, we're all out of money today, try again tomorrow!" or "Sure, we can offer you a loan. Today only, we have a low interest rate of just 45%!"
Not only would that put the bank out of business, but it would also sink our spending-based economy overnight and then nobody will have any money.
I don't think I would call AIX a niche. I work in the "enterprise" environment and can guarantee you that AIX on Power hardware forms the backbone of most every mid-size to large business whose main business is not I.T. Yeah, we run a lot of Linux (our Linux machines outnumber AIX 2 to 1), almost everyone does, but those boxes don't do the heavy lifting and can't-go-down-ever business cycle processing that our AIX machines do. Someday, some company will realize that it's completely possible (albeit challenging) to marry a rock-solid Linux distribution to custom Intel-based hardware the same way IBM does on Power and offer unbeatable support at an astronomical price in an effort to unseat IBM in the enterprise. Maybe it won't be soon, but it will happen someday.
Yes, POTS lines work in a power outage but this is dependent on two rather important conditions:
1. You have a direct pair back to the CO. (Most businesses and many apartment complexes have intermediary equipment with no effective battery backup.)
2. Your phone doesn't rely on mains power to operate. (Almost all landline phones sold these days require mains power to operate either because they're cordless or contain an answering machine.)
I have a POTS line to my house and we have an unpowered, corded phone in the basement specifically for emergencies. We have had power outages where it didn't work, so I suspect there should be a #3 added to the list as well, I just don't know what it is.
Parent was modded funny, but that's actually a valid security measure and it does wonders against your garden-variety dictionary attack.
That's true, but irrelevant. The debug mode doesn't do an end-run around the machine's entire hardware and software security stack as so many posters were implying. By the time you have a chunk of executable code on your machine trying to set specific registers to specific values, all of the security measures in place up to that point have failed. Malicious code is malicious code and it does not need special access to some obscure CPU feature in order to do damage.
But it is the most morally rewarding.
Not a security hole. This debug mode is not some kind of eleet hax0r backdoor. It's for debugging the processor and microcode.
It's the OS responsibility to ensure that normal applications can't simply do whatever they like directly to the hardware, including the CPU.
People must be made aware that they have the right to not submit personal data in the first place.
Right now, the biggest complaint that everyone seems to have with SSDs is that they aren't big enough. The SSD manufacturers are in turn reacting to this, producing ever-larger and more expensive drives.
What's I'd like to see is a push toward faster and cheaper, at the expense of capacity. The average out-of-the-box OS should only take on the order of 10GB of space with a few more GB for common applications. Those with a definite need for greater local capacity (gamers, video editors) can either pay through the nose for high-capacity SSDs or continue to use cheap high-capacity mechanical drives.
I'm not going to tell you what to do with your money, but I'd personally rather wait for someone not interested in the financial reward develop and release the drivers. If he had a prototype ready in just three days, he's either the world's most brilliant reverse engineer or the device isn't as complicated as Microsoft has portrayed.
If I had the time and skill, I'd do it myself and give the $3000 to the EFF and FSF.
Instead of working, it would seem...
Biology is distinct from computer science in terms of how we presently study them, yes. But they are both based on the same fundamental truths of the universe we exist in. (Some of which we do not know or fully understand yet.) Discovering these truths allows us to model biological systems and computer systems in much the same way.
DNA sequences are most certainly data. They describe how an organism builds itself, and to a certain extent, behaves. I'm surprised anyone believes that is open for debate.
Nobody seriously attempts to assert that an organism is comparable in complexity to a man-made machine of our times. But there are cases where an analogy is apt for the purposes of explanation. That there are differences in the complexity or specific mechanisms is usually implied if not explicitly stated. A biology teacher might describe how the human eye works in terms of a camera to a group of photography students, for example.
Network TV executives see "watching content on a TV" and "watching content in a web browser" as two completely different businesses which shall never mingle nor overlap despite, well, reality. It's probably pretty scary to sit there and watch a new business model sneaking up on their billion-dollar empires.
The Facebook situation isn't a good analog to what's going on with Google TV. Web search and television are completely different products and if Google tried removing uncooperative television networks from their index, they would just come off looking like a whiny child.
A better way for Google to "get revenge" would be to censor or remove the networks' YouTube channels. But again, this wouldn't really accomplish anything since the network's aren't violating YouTube's terms and conditions and they don't really gain anything from their YouTube channels except a modicum of advertising and marketing.
The specs may be similar, but the tablet reviewed in TFA is definitely a different device.
Where's the button to flag this +1, Hilarious?
You forgot: Some people want transfer rates that are much faster than today's mechanical disks.
It's worse than that. Used to be, you could easily guess by context whether "hacker" meant someone who programs, tinkers with, or reverse engineers technology or someone who breaks into other people's systems through technological skill (your definition of "cracker"). And even then, the line was sometimes blurry. In the olden days, you had to be a hacker in order to be a cracker but the reverse was obviously never true.
Now, the media uses "hacker" to refer to anyone who is somehow linked to crime involving computers or technology, even when no technical skill whatsoever was required. Very sad.
The complaint with Google was that Google was infringing on Oracle's patents and copyrights via Android. Google's official and legal response was along the lines of, "WTF are you talking about?"
My own theory is that Sun (and now Oracle) liked the profits they were receiving via licensing royalties from mobile phones that shipped with an embedded Java environment. Google did an end-run around these royalties by developing their own third-party JVM, Dalvik. When it looked like Android would gain a decent foothold in the smart phone market, Oracle probably thought they needed to do something. Maybe they have this opinion that they "own" all parts of Java.
(My understanding is that Dalvik and Java(tm) are completely different, except that the human-readable source code for both happens to be the Java programming language. A programming language itself, so far as I know, cannot be copyrighted. Patented, maybe, but you would have a tremendously difficult time trying to find any feature of a "modern" language that doesn't have decades of prior art.)
As for OpenJDK, Oracle appears to be the copyright holder of the source code and are entitled to any Java copyrights or patents applicable to it. Whether they give it away for free or charge for it doesn't matter.
Uh yeah. Because writing a desktop PC operating system in the late 1980's and continuing development of an enterprise-class programming environment in 2010 are exactly the same thing.
It's fascinating how many people will read a news article and seek out that one fatal flaw, that one bad decision that was responsible for the whole mess and focus so intently on that one thing that they lose sight of the whole picture.
The fact is, there were two things that went wrong here:
1) The homeowner didn't pay their taxes
2) The fire department didn't respond appropriately to a potentially life-threatening situation
I'm not defending the homeowner here as they absolutely should have paid their taxes and should be punished for it. But not by having their home razed and their family pets killed.
Fire departments are not like car insurance. If you total your ride and didn't pay a premium, of course you aren't entitled to a claim in the event of an accident. All fires are potentially deadly and must be controlled at the earliest possible opportunity to prevent unnecessary loss of life and property. Letting any fire burn out of control regardless of the reason is gross negligence and the fire chief of this particular department ought to be facing jail time for his idiotic decisions.
Nobody seems to be asking: How will this affect the neighbor's trust in the fire department in the future? Now everyone within that deparment's jurisdiction has to worry about what will happen when they call in a fire. Did they forget to pay their fire-fighting taxes? If they did, will the department have a record of it?
Whether or not I had paid my taxes, if I lived in that city, I would move the hell out purely in the interest of my family's safety.
I am not a phone engineer, but I would imagine wifi would be cheaper in terms of power budget. Compare having to transmit a continuous signal to a receiver 20ft away as opposed to 2 miles away.
You might say it's almost as grand as painting open source advocates and Microsoft bashers with the same brush.
An interesting idea, but probably not feasible for the attacker. For one, remote code execution vulnerabilities are somewhat rare on Linux. Most vulnerabilities rely on having to trick the user into doing something (e.g., going to a malware-enabled website). Additionally, those few remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities that are discovered are usually mitigated just by having a firewall in place.
It's probably easier for the attackers to keep doing what they already do: scan ranges of IPs for vulnerable services and attack the hosts that haven't had any patches in over a year.
You'll note that the negative moderation was balanced against at least 4 other positive moderations. The moderation system was built on the assumption that some people will moderate poorly but most will moderate appropriately. So Slashdot is working as it's supposed to. You can relax now.
That's pretty much impossible since the WebP images were generated from the JPEG versions. The point of the gallery (whether successfully or not) was to show that the image quality as good as or only slightly less as good as JPEG for a considerable reduction in file size.
In order to convince anyone that WebP offers the same (or better) image quality as JPEG, they have to encode both the JPEGs and WebPs from raw lossless images, set the image quality on the encoders as equally as possible, and only then display them side-by-side for subjective comparison. When I viewed the gallery, I was left wondering if I could get a similar size reduction on the JPEGs just by loading them up in gimp and dropping the image quality slider down a few notches.