The real solution to this is to simply abolish the classification board on it's current form. Instead replace it with a voluntary games classification system run by industry, with regular audits by a government body to ensure industry is complying by it's own rules.
Oh and keep it at the federal level, I'm sick of some dickhead ex-lawyer hicks at the state level blocking everything that doesn't agree with their mates in the Christian lobby.
You really didn't understand the point he was making, but it's very important to understand when anything about 'hydrogen cars' comes up:
The only practical and economical way to 'produce' hydrogen is to extract it from natural gas. This is mostly pointless and wasteful since you could just use the natural gas (compressed) to fuel the car, as is common in Australia and New Zealand for example, without the extra expense and loss of energy from turning it into hydrogen. When the fossil fuels run out so does the hydrogen.
Even worse is trying to create it through electrolysis from power stations, it wastes something like 90% of the electrical energy. You're far better off transmitting that power into battery storage in electric cars, especially since the electrical grid already exists and transmission losses are fairly minor.
On the 2 distros I've used most in the last 8 years (Mandriva and Opensuse) unrar is already included (in Mandriva from the PLF repo, in Opensuse from the non-oss repo). So what's the advantage of this new program?
Except if my apartment gets burgled, burnt down, has a pipe burst and flood everything (or any number of surprisingly common scenarios) then all my hard drives are as useless as each other. There is definitely something to be said for off-site backups, maybe not for my collection of TV shows and movies but definitely for photos, documents and other information like that.
(of course you should use a backup program that encrypts the files on your local machine with a key known only by you before you upload anything)
UK bank accounts are free, both the 'everyday' accounts and the savings ones. The UK banks make enough money off their mortgage and investment bank activities, at least up until 2008. Now they're effectively supported by government.
"This isn't the only piece of fiction in this article but this is so damingly wrong I'm in disbelief that an editor of a newspaper could make such a error."
That's the Daily Mail for you, to even call it a newspaper is really stretching the definition of the word.
almost 70% of electricity is from hydro according to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Austria Makes sense if you've ever visited the place - it really is that half the country is all mountains and valleys.
I agree that it'll be all but impossible to ban cars outright or even in large areas of cities. However car-free city centres are coming to Europe and it's not some pipe-dream for 40 years in the future.
London, capital of the car-loving UK, already has the congestion charge which makes it prohibitively expensive for most private car owners to drive into central London (a totally unnecessary activity with the excellent public transport in that area). It's official government policy to encourage cycle-commuting as much as possible. Many EU cities are looking at or have already implemented bans on trucks and other heavy vehicles in city centres.
It's the old "you're just shifting emissions from tailpipe to powerplant" myth: In the EU today: France 85% from Nuclear UK 25% from Nuclear/Renewables/Hydro Germany 25% Nuclear and renewable combined Austria 70% renewable
This describes EVs running on the UK's current electricity generation mix in comparison with small, fuel efficient petrol cars: "If we look only at the three smallest categories of conventional car, average exhaust pipe emissions from new cars in 2009 were about 130g CO2/km. Emissions from producing the fuel (extracting and refining the oil) typically adds another 10% to 18% on top, bringing the total for new small cars in 2009 to 145155g CO2/km. Based on these figures, electric cars currently emit about a third less carbon on average than small conventional cars." http://www.guardian.co.uk/electric-vision/electricity-supply-fossil-fuels
So some time early-mid 2012 we can expect to see proper dom0 support in the kernel, ie. you won't need a specially patched kernel to run a Xen server as you do today (even with 2.6.37)? This is good but still about 5 years after KVM entered the mainline kernel.
As I said above, in laptops and netbooks you can't choose your wifi hardware. It's not a simple matter of replacing a non-free driver with a free one or replacing your wifi hardware.
In your distro most laptops and netbooks will not have working wifi.
That's not true. They require the distros to not include non-free software (including not having official 'non-free' repositories), but the user can be allowed to install non-free software.
Except that having a 'non-free' repo is the means by which users install non-free software. So according to the FSF it's all right if users install non-free software from a repo run by a 3rd party, but it's not all right if the non-free repo is hosted by the Linux distro maker/project itself? Even if the non-free repo is optional. What a pointless, splitting-hairs argument from the FSF.
As far as wifi adapters, there are those that it will work with and are likely easily replaceable. This is not a libre issue only, as Linux has been dealing with this for years...
This statement makes no sense. I can tell you from bitter experience that if a wifi driver in Linux requires a binary blob it's for a bloody good reason - it simply won't work otherwise. And wifi cards are not easily, and usually not at all, replaceable in laptops and netbooks.
Xen 4.1 is aiming to be integrated into the native Kernel, it is very close already having some dom0 support now, native guest support as of 2.6.36 and will have full dom0 support soon
This is the crux of the matter, Xen has been going into the mainline kernel 'any day now' for the past 3 or 4 years. It's hard to believe that it took them until 2.6.36 (October 2010) to even get the domU support in there. Either Xen development proceeds at a snail's pace or the project is run by people who don't want to fit into the guidelines for code submitted to the kernel. Either way I can only see KVM running ahead in leaps and bounds while Xen struggles with getting into the kernel, and people struggle to get Xen installed.
Your right that Redhat has gone away from Xen, although it was only last month with the release of RHEL6, their first version without official Xen support. Novell's keeping up Xen probably mainly for competitive reasons - to have a differentiated product from Redhat, but it also fully supports KVM: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Novell-supports-KVM-963031.html
In every country I've lived in (Australia, the UK, Germany) bank transfers are completely free and easy to do over online banking. If I book holidays with my friends and we don't settle who owes what to who in cash during the trip we can simply transfer the difference over to them once back home.
In Germany it's particularly pervasive - you pay for everything with bank transfers, it's even the preferred method to pay on ebay (preferred by users not paypal/ebay obviously).
Not sure if Americans realise this but the resolution was pushed forward by the UK, France and Lebanon (as representative of the Arab league). The US wavered until the last minute before supporting it. The UK and France have been the first to commit to deploying actual fighter aircraft today. Still nothing concrete on deployments from the US side, which is fine as it should stay a primarily European/Arab show. The US has enough to worry about with the mess you guys created in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Germans have an almost allergic reaction to any kind of war since some rather unpleasant events in the middle of last century - consider it a minor miracle that they're in Afghanistan at all. Plus the current government is in serious trouble on other issues and with state elections coming up (which seem important for the federal side of things too) there's no way they're going to do anything risky.
While this would be the ideal setup most of us simply don't care enough about a (to most people) imperceptible difference in quality to go through all this hassle. Also if your typical MP3 collection was in FLAC it would be impractical to backup online. Online/cloud backup and syncing is what the consumer world is moving very rapidly towards.
AFAIK fd.o only exists as a forum for co-operation between KDE and GNOME. So it's no good for GNOME developers to whine 'fd.o is broken' since it's just as much their responsibility as it is KDE's. No one wants to go back to the mind-numblingly fucked-up design decisions evident in Linux desktops ~10 years ago where, for example, you had a separate application menu for each desktop.
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The real solution to this is to simply abolish the classification board on it's current form. Instead replace it with a voluntary games classification system run by industry, with regular audits by a government body to ensure industry is complying by it's own rules.
Oh and keep it at the federal level, I'm sick of some dickhead ex-lawyer hicks at the state level blocking everything that doesn't agree with their mates in the Christian lobby.
You really didn't understand the point he was making, but it's very important to understand when anything about 'hydrogen cars' comes up:
The only practical and economical way to 'produce' hydrogen is to extract it from natural gas. This is mostly pointless and wasteful since you could just use the natural gas (compressed) to fuel the car, as is common in Australia and New Zealand for example, without the extra expense and loss of energy from turning it into hydrogen. When the fossil fuels run out so does the hydrogen.
Even worse is trying to create it through electrolysis from power stations, it wastes something like 90% of the electrical energy. You're far better off transmitting that power into battery storage in electric cars, especially since the electrical grid already exists and transmission losses are fairly minor.
On the 2 distros I've used most in the last 8 years (Mandriva and Opensuse) unrar is already included (in Mandriva from the PLF repo, in Opensuse from the non-oss repo). So what's the advantage of this new program?
Except if my apartment gets burgled, burnt down, has a pipe burst and flood everything (or any number of surprisingly common scenarios) then all my hard drives are as useless as each other. There is definitely something to be said for off-site backups, maybe not for my collection of TV shows and movies but definitely for photos, documents and other information like that.
(of course you should use a backup program that encrypts the files on your local machine with a key known only by you before you upload anything)
The UK petitions aren't really that bad, this is the list sorted by how many signatures they got:
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/list/closed?sort=signers
The most popular is scrapping the vehicle tracking/road pricing scheme, which AFAIK has now been scrapped.
UK bank accounts are free, both the 'everyday' accounts and the savings ones. The UK banks make enough money off their mortgage and investment bank activities, at least up until 2008. Now they're effectively supported by government.
"This isn't the only piece of fiction in this article but this is so damingly wrong I'm in disbelief that an editor of a newspaper could make such a error."
That's the Daily Mail for you, to even call it a newspaper is really stretching the definition of the word.
Exactly, I am sorely tempted to read the article but I know it will just piss me off. The daily dose of horseshit from the Daily Mail.
almost 70% of electricity is from hydro according to this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Austria
Makes sense if you've ever visited the place - it really is that half the country is all mountains and valleys.
I agree that it'll be all but impossible to ban cars outright or even in large areas of cities. However car-free city centres are coming to Europe and it's not some pipe-dream for 40 years in the future.
London, capital of the car-loving UK, already has the congestion charge which makes it prohibitively expensive for most private car owners to drive into central London (a totally unnecessary activity with the excellent public transport in that area). It's official government policy to encourage cycle-commuting as much as possible. Many EU cities are looking at or have already implemented bans on trucks and other heavy vehicles in city centres.
It's the old "you're just shifting emissions from tailpipe to powerplant" myth:
In the EU today:
France 85% from Nuclear
UK 25% from Nuclear/Renewables/Hydro
Germany 25% Nuclear and renewable combined
Austria 70% renewable
For the future the EU has a target of 20% renewable energy by 2020, and something like 80% or 90% by 2050. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_European_Union
This describes EVs running on the UK's current electricity generation mix in comparison with small, fuel efficient petrol cars:
"If we look only at the three smallest categories of conventional car, average exhaust pipe emissions from new cars in 2009 were about 130g CO2/km. Emissions from producing the fuel (extracting and refining the oil) typically adds another 10% to 18% on top, bringing the total for new small cars in 2009 to 145155g CO2/km. Based on these figures, electric cars currently emit about a third less carbon on average than small conventional cars."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/electric-vision/electricity-supply-fossil-fuels
I never said they were trying to control anyone, I was just pointing out that the reasoning behind their recommendations makes little sense.
So some time early-mid 2012 we can expect to see proper dom0 support in the kernel, ie. you won't need a specially patched kernel to run a Xen server as you do today (even with 2.6.37)? This is good but still about 5 years after KVM entered the mainline kernel.
As I said above, in laptops and netbooks you can't choose your wifi hardware. It's not a simple matter of replacing a non-free driver with a free one or replacing your wifi hardware.
In your distro most laptops and netbooks will not have working wifi.
That's not true. They require the distros to not include non-free software (including not having official 'non-free' repositories), but the user can be allowed to install non-free software.
Except that having a 'non-free' repo is the means by which users install non-free software. So according to the FSF it's all right if users install non-free software from a repo run by a 3rd party, but it's not all right if the non-free repo is hosted by the Linux distro maker/project itself? Even if the non-free repo is optional. What a pointless, splitting-hairs argument from the FSF.
As far as wifi adapters, there are those that it will work with and are likely easily replaceable. This is not a libre issue only, as Linux has been dealing with this for years...
This statement makes no sense. I can tell you from bitter experience that if a wifi driver in Linux requires a binary blob it's for a bloody good reason - it simply won't work otherwise. And wifi cards are not easily, and usually not at all, replaceable in laptops and netbooks.
Xen 4.1 is aiming to be integrated into the native Kernel, it is very close already having some dom0 support now, native guest support as of 2.6.36 and will have full dom0 support soon
This is the crux of the matter, Xen has been going into the mainline kernel 'any day now' for the past 3 or 4 years. It's hard to believe that it took them until 2.6.36 (October 2010) to even get the domU support in there. Either Xen development proceeds at a snail's pace or the project is run by people who don't want to fit into the guidelines for code submitted to the kernel. Either way I can only see KVM running ahead in leaps and bounds while Xen struggles with getting into the kernel, and people struggle to get Xen installed.
Your right that Redhat has gone away from Xen, although it was only last month with the release of RHEL6, their first version without official Xen support. Novell's keeping up Xen probably mainly for competitive reasons - to have a differentiated product from Redhat, but it also fully supports KVM: http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Novell-supports-KVM-963031.html
In every country I've lived in (Australia, the UK, Germany) bank transfers are completely free and easy to do over online banking. If I book holidays with my friends and we don't settle who owes what to who in cash during the trip we can simply transfer the difference over to them once back home.
In Germany it's particularly pervasive - you pay for everything with bank transfers, it's even the preferred method to pay on ebay (preferred by users not paypal/ebay obviously).
Not sure if Americans realise this but the resolution was pushed forward by the UK, France and Lebanon (as representative of the Arab league). The US wavered until the last minute before supporting it. The UK and France have been the first to commit to deploying actual fighter aircraft today. Still nothing concrete on deployments from the US side, which is fine as it should stay a primarily European/Arab show. The US has enough to worry about with the mess you guys created in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Germans have an almost allergic reaction to any kind of war since some rather unpleasant events in the middle of last century - consider it a minor miracle that they're in Afghanistan at all. Plus the current government is in serious trouble on other issues and with state elections coming up (which seem important for the federal side of things too) there's no way they're going to do anything risky.
While this would be the ideal setup most of us simply don't care enough about a (to most people) imperceptible difference in quality to go through all this hassle. Also if your typical MP3 collection was in FLAC it would be impractical to backup online. Online/cloud backup and syncing is what the consumer world is moving very rapidly towards.
AFAIK fd.o only exists as a forum for co-operation between KDE and GNOME. So it's no good for GNOME developers to whine 'fd.o is broken' since it's just as much their responsibility as it is KDE's. No one wants to go back to the mind-numblingly fucked-up design decisions evident in Linux desktops ~10 years ago where, for example, you had a separate application menu for each desktop.
Fedora does it too http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
Not sure about other distros
There's an even better way than that - measuring the number of unique IPs which hit the update servers to download security and bug fix updates.
Opensuse has done this for years: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Statistics
Yeah the Register is pretty terrible sometimes, the Daily Mail of the IT press when it comes to sensationalism and making a huge storey about nothing.