No form of censorship is ever 100% effective. There will always be ways round it, such as Tor, but the average person will not know about that sort of thing.
If (for the sake of argument) you're covering up a story about a politician taking bribes, it's going to be sufficient to prevent 99% of the population from reading it. Losing 1% of your votes is not going to matter.
There's a similar thing in the UK. It is "voluntary", in the sense that the ISPs have been told by the government that they must volunteer to set up a porn filtering operation, or else one will be forced upon them.
Of course the workings of the censor are entirely secret, so no-one has any idea what we are being protected against. It might be genuine child abuse, or pictures of "models" wearing skimpy clothes. Given that the censor blocks web sites but no-one gets prosecuted, I suspect the latter.
All of this is to "protect the children", but once the hardware for censorship of the web was in place, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before someone realized that it could be used to block anything that the government doesn't want people to see. It looks like that time has now arrived.
It's not a fee for distributing OS/X; it's a fee per machine.
The usual licensing terms that Microsoft force on OEMs are that Microsoft must be paid a fee per machine sold, regardless of whether it has Windows installed on it or not. Of course the idea of this is to encourage OEMs to install Windows on every machine they sell, because they can't make a saving from not doing so. If you try to negotiate a "per copy of Windows" price instead of a "per machine" price, the licensing cost goes up to the retail cost, which is deliberately inflated to make it uneconomic.
No; the fundraising was shut down by the US government.
The US government had been very happy for terrorists to raise money in the US for bomb attacks on their allies the British, so long as they didn't get bombed themselves. Only after someone else attacked America did they decide that supporting terrorism was a bad thing.
Do they still have IRA fundraisers? The IRA haven't been active for years. They're all respectable politicians now.
OTOH the IRA in its heyday were not supporters of terrorism. They were just terrorists.
If I were ever in a space station and a life support system failed, I would be very glad indeed if there were two life support systems and no coordination between them.
Whenever the police shoot an innocent person here in the UK, the cameras are always "undergoing maintenance" or having "technical problems" at the time. See, for example, here.
Surely the reason that Window developers haven't learned from the rest of the universe is Microsoft's fault. Microsoft have done everything thay can to make Windows development an entirely self-contained and proprietory process: you use Microsoft's IDE, write your code in Microsoft's unique language or (if you use C++) using Microsoft's unique proprietory API. You never learn, because you never have to think; you just go along with what Microsoft tell you to do, without ever having to understand it. Microsoft told people to run as administrator, and made it the default, so that's what they did.
The 10 years is the problem. If Sun had produced something usable 10 years ago, they would have had a big success with it. But now the market has fragmented into dozens of lesser offerings to fill the gap that Sun left, and if they re-enter the market now they are just one amongst many, with the added burden that everyone has a bad memory of them from 10 years ago.
Yes. Java was invented as a language for use on small household appliances. It failed in that market. Then Sun tried pushing it as the language for web browser applets. That failed. Then Sun re-invented it as a language for large server-based web applications. That worked reasonably well. Then they pushed it as a solution for small household appliances again. Now they are having another go at the web browser market.
Of course you will get a speed boost by closing it. You said yourself that users only encounter one java applet per reboot, so after that it is just sitting there wasting valuable memory.
IPv4 sites can be accessed with IPv6
Well no, they can't; that's the problem. Certainly all IPv6 implementations also implement IPv4. But there's no way to access (say) google via IPv6, as it hasn't got an IPv6 address. So there's no motivation for ISPs to invest in IPv6 infrastructure, as their customers can't use it. And there's no pressure from their customers to support it, because no-one wants to be the first big web site to cut themselves off from the mass of IPv4 users.
Perhaps the Chinese will adopt it, though; they actually want to cut themselves off from the rest of the internet.
But all those 65-85% will be completely unable to communicate with each other using IPv6, as most ISPs have not adopted it.
And if your ISP does support IPv6, then just for fun try turning off IPv4 and see how far you get. The number of web sites using IPv6 seems to be approximately zero.
Here in the UK we've already got a "great firewall of the UK", to prevent access to child pornography sites. Of course it was easy for the politicians to get that in place: no-one was willing to argue against it.
But once the technology in in place, it's impossible for the ISPs to argue that they "cannot block internet sites", because it is already being done. So there is a steady trickle of calls for the same filter to be used to block sites that "glorify terrorism" or whatever is the buzzword of the day.
Sooner or later, some judge is going to want to ban some website that annoys him, and someone is going to remark in court "yes, you can do that: just add it to the existing list of banned porn sites". And that will be the end of freedom for internet access in the UK.
It might also be relevant that there's an election soon here in the UK, the government is very unpopular, and the home secretary has had his department split into two, and half taken away from him, because of the mess that it has got into. So he is desparately looking for any sound-bite that will sound good to his friends in the right-wing press. Hence this nonsense.
After the election on Thursday we will hear no more about this.
Competition drives price down, so suppliers reduce reliability (and quality and customer service etc) to compensate for the lower prices. Potential customers cannot easily measure quality, but can readily see who has the lowest price, so they usually make their decisions on price alone. This favours the suppliers with the lowest price but the worst reliability.
Now the people operating Iran's nuclear reactors will have had some proper training. That makes accidents less likely to happen. How is this anything other than good news?
However, TFA says that Bolles spent 3 days in jail, presumably waiting for the results of a test.
I've been stopped for a broken tail light in my country, and the police certainly did not use this as an excuse for searching my car. Is it usual in your country for people to be imprisoned for so long on so little evidence, after so minor a motoring offence?
Of course the list is secret, because publishing it would be tantamount to publishing a list of "good terrorist and child porn sites", and no government would want to do that!
If it's the same "clean feed" technology that the UK government forces all ISPs to "voluntarily" use, then you might like to look at this paper (pdf) which describes how to use the system to discover what sites it is blocking, and perhaps will give you some ideas on how to circumvent it.
The trouble with these fancy new machines is that they don't have proper power switches any more. My supposedly power-hungry old laserjet (and PC and television and so on) gets turned off when its not in use. Your fancy new power-efficient machines are using power all the time. I bet I end up paying less for the electricity than you do.
If you only need black-and-white, buy a laser printer. I've got an old HP Laserjet 4 that cost me about £40 several years ago, and is built like a tank. The toner cartridges last almost forever if you're just using to print your thesis, or such like.
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What's more, the cards had 13 rows, not 12, and up until the IBM PC standard screens had 24 rows, not 25.
No form of censorship is ever 100% effective. There will always be ways round it, such as Tor, but the average person will not know about that sort of thing.
If (for the sake of argument) you're covering up a story about a politician taking bribes, it's going to be sufficient to prevent 99% of the population from reading it. Losing 1% of your votes is not going to matter.
There's a similar thing in the UK. It is "voluntary", in the sense that the ISPs have been told by the government that they must volunteer to set up a porn filtering operation, or else one will be forced upon them.
Of course the workings of the censor are entirely secret, so no-one has any idea what we are being protected against. It might be genuine child abuse, or pictures of "models" wearing skimpy clothes. Given that the censor blocks web sites but no-one gets prosecuted, I suspect the latter.
All of this is to "protect the children", but once the hardware for censorship of the web was in place, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before someone realized that it could be used to block anything that the government doesn't want people to see. It looks like that time has now arrived.
File transfer?!?!?
We've had O/S-independent file transfer protocols for decades now. TCPIP, USB, even serial ports. No, that can't be the reason, surely.
It's not a fee for distributing OS/X; it's a fee per machine.
The usual licensing terms that Microsoft force on OEMs are that Microsoft must be paid a fee per machine sold, regardless of whether it has Windows installed on it or not. Of course the idea of this is to encourage OEMs to install Windows on every machine they sell, because they can't make a saving from not doing so. If you try to negotiate a "per copy of Windows" price instead of a "per machine" price, the licensing cost goes up to the retail cost, which is deliberately inflated to make it uneconomic.
No; the fundraising was shut down by the US government.
The US government had been very happy for terrorists to raise money in the US for bomb attacks on their allies the British, so long as they didn't get bombed themselves. Only after someone else attacked America did they decide that supporting terrorism was a bad thing.
Do they still have IRA fundraisers? The IRA haven't been active for years. They're all respectable politicians now.
OTOH the IRA in its heyday were not supporters of terrorism. They were just terrorists.
If I were ever in a space station and a life support system failed, I would be very glad indeed if there were two life support systems and no coordination between them.
The police in the UK are wise to that one.
Whenever the police shoot an innocent person here in the UK, the cameras are always "undergoing maintenance" or having "technical problems" at the time. See, for example, here.
Obviously, whatever the president does is always legal.
The propaganda has had its effect on you, then. But some of us are still resisting it.
Surely the reason that Window developers haven't learned from the rest of the universe is Microsoft's fault. Microsoft have done everything thay can to make Windows development an entirely self-contained and proprietory process: you use Microsoft's IDE, write your code in Microsoft's unique language or (if you use C++) using Microsoft's unique proprietory API. You never learn, because you never have to think; you just go along with what Microsoft tell you to do, without ever having to understand it. Microsoft told people to run as administrator, and made it the default, so that's what they did.
The 10 years is the problem. If Sun had produced something usable 10 years ago, they would have had a big success with it. But now the market has fragmented into dozens of lesser offerings to fill the gap that Sun left, and if they re-enter the market now they are just one amongst many, with the added burden that everyone has a bad memory of them from 10 years ago.
Yes. Java was invented as a language for use on small household appliances. It failed in that market. Then Sun tried pushing it as the language for web browser applets. That failed. Then Sun re-invented it as a language for large server-based web applications. That worked reasonably well. Then they pushed it as a solution for small household appliances again. Now they are having another go at the web browser market.
Of course you will get a speed boost by closing it. You said yourself that users only encounter one java applet per reboot, so after that it is just sitting there wasting valuable memory.
IPv4 sites can be accessed with IPv6
Well no, they can't; that's the problem. Certainly all IPv6 implementations also implement IPv4. But there's no way to access (say) google via IPv6, as it hasn't got an IPv6 address. So there's no motivation for ISPs to invest in IPv6 infrastructure, as their customers can't use it. And there's no pressure from their customers to support it, because no-one wants to be the first big web site to cut themselves off from the mass of IPv4 users.
Perhaps the Chinese will adopt it, though; they actually want to cut themselves off from the rest of the internet.
But all those 65-85% will be completely unable to communicate with each other using IPv6, as most ISPs have not adopted it.
And if your ISP does support IPv6, then just for fun try turning off IPv4 and see how far you get. The number of web sites using IPv6 seems to be approximately zero.
Don't be so sure it won't happen.
Here in the UK we've already got a "great firewall of the UK", to prevent access to child pornography sites. Of course it was easy for the politicians to get that in place: no-one was willing to argue against it.
But once the technology in in place, it's impossible for the ISPs to argue that they "cannot block internet sites", because it is already being done. So there is a steady trickle of calls for the same filter to be used to block sites that "glorify terrorism" or whatever is the buzzword of the day.
Sooner or later, some judge is going to want to ban some website that annoys him, and someone is going to remark in court "yes, you can do that: just add it to the existing list of banned porn sites". And that will be the end of freedom for internet access in the UK.
It might also be relevant that there's an election soon here in the UK, the government is very unpopular, and the home secretary has had his department split into two, and half taken away from him, because of the mess that it has got into. So he is desparately looking for any sound-bite that will sound good to his friends in the right-wing press. Hence this nonsense.
After the election on Thursday we will hear no more about this.
Competition drives price down, so suppliers reduce reliability (and quality and customer service etc) to compensate for the lower prices. Potential customers cannot easily measure quality, but can readily see who has the lowest price, so they usually make their decisions on price alone. This favours the suppliers with the lowest price but the worst reliability.
Now the people operating Iran's nuclear reactors will have had some proper training. That makes accidents less likely to happen. How is this anything other than good news?
However, TFA says that Bolles spent 3 days in jail, presumably waiting for the results of a test.
I've been stopped for a broken tail light in my country, and the police certainly did not use this as an excuse for searching my car. Is it usual in your country for people to be imprisoned for so long on so little evidence, after so minor a motoring offence?
Actually, it makes a crappy barcode reader for cheap.
Of course the list is secret, because publishing it would be tantamount to publishing a list of "good terrorist and child porn sites", and no government would want to do that!
If it's the same "clean feed" technology that the UK government forces all ISPs to "voluntarily" use, then you might like to look at this paper (pdf) which describes how to use the system to discover what sites it is blocking, and perhaps will give you some ideas on how to circumvent it.
The trouble with these fancy new machines is that they don't have proper power switches any more. My supposedly power-hungry old laserjet (and PC and television and so on) gets turned off when its not in use. Your fancy new power-efficient machines are using power all the time. I bet I end up paying less for the electricity than you do.
If you only need black-and-white, buy a laser printer. I've got an old HP Laserjet 4 that cost me about £40 several years ago, and is built like a tank. The toner cartridges last almost forever if you're just using to print your thesis, or such like.