I meant real child porn, not what weirdo US legislators define as child porn.
Maybe you did.
But to make the evening TV news, people doing bad things have to photographed. Is your logic that it must be illegal to make money out of something bad happening? So we can't make money out of news that shows violent theft, or invading armies, or murder. It is a fairly compelling argument in some ways. Almost certainly, one of things driving terrorism is the publicity it generates for the cause. 911 was a slam dunk in that regard. Surely by this logic, there is a certain appeal to banning all reporting of the towers crashing down, taking 1000's of lives with them as they did so. That news footage has reverberated around the world for years since, and inspired more than a few budding terrorists.
No no, you say, that is not my logic. Unlike the news there is a very clear and strong link between child porn and kids being harmed. One directly leads to the other.
The only problem is, that claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If that logic is true then coming of the internet and the huge uptick in the trading of child porn it made possible must be accompanied by an equally huge uptick in kids being abused. Have a look at the statistics some time. No matter how you measure it - children in care, convictions, reported abuse - it just didn't happen. There was no uptick. In fact it has remained pretty much flat.
So what is the logic behind the banning of child porn? I don't think there is any. It is just that most people don't like it. On a personal level this just boils down to you not liking it, so you want it banned.
The funny thing is, you will be punished for your selfishness. Our Conroy doesn't just want to ban child porn, and I doubt he is unique among wantabe censors in this regard. He wants to ban the reporting of all sorts of things on the internet - euthanasia, abortion, games not to his taste, and... the list of what is considered highly indecent goes on and on. All will be filtered. He has said he wants viewing of such illegal sites monitored by the police. I can guarantee you will find the banning of some things on Conroy's list highly troubling. And yet, here you are, allowing yourself to be suckered into it by an appeal to your basest instincts - a dislike of child porn.
In essence, encrypted data sticks out like dogs balls because of its high entropy, yet there are enough patterns in it to make it obvious to an expert it isn't just random data. Even if it did look like random data who in the hell is going to believe you are carrying around gig's of data you can trivially generate as needed from/dev/urandom? Nobody.
So, the problem you have to solve is how you are going to plausibly explain away gig's of what is clearly encrypted crap. Forget TrueCrypt, or any special tools that don't normally come with your Operating System. Their very presence screams "liar!". Forget large encrypted files that don't have any conceivable use, even if they aren't named "my-porn-collection.zip.gpg". After all, its your laptop so a program you use must have put them there, so some program should break if you move them out of the way.
And finally, once you come up with a way of hiding your encrypted crap, don't go blasting it over the internet. If it became common knowledge the men with rubber hoses may hear of it, rendering your lovely invention useless.
Some evidently don't agree with this last piece of advise because they have posted their solutions to the problem right here, on one the largest megaphones on the 'net. Fortunately for them, Slashdot has in typical Slashdot fashion come to their rescue. Unlike the piece of miss-information I am responding to which is rated "5, informative", these insightful and informative posts are rated 1. Probably because they necessarily involve long complex commands which are utterly beyond your average slashdotter, which probably means they will rarely be used, which probably means they are right - my last piece of advise is alarmist.
I suppose the authors are from a land where hard drive space is infinite, database server resources are always guaranteed ahead of time...
No, actually. They come from the land that drops a replica if it hits one of these problems.
Also, they don't actually mean you can't do aborts. A transaction can abort. It is just that all replica's must do the same thing with the transaction - commit or abort. Given you can achieve that, the rest of the paper follows easily. The magical bit is the pre-processor that guarantees all nodes (which might have different data) guarantee that without being a bottle neck or a central point of failure. Now that is magical, and I don't know how they do it.
Assange broke the laws of Australia, where he is a citizen
If he did, apparently the people in charge here don't care that much, given our intelligence agency warned him that a rape accusation was likely.
I'd go so far to as to say most Australian's think of him as a hero, albeit a somewhat eccentric one. Not that eccentricity is going to get you in trouble in Australia. Treasuring our eccentrics is a habit we inherited from our British forebears, I think, and it is something for which we owe them a great deal. We only ask they be mostly harmless, which so far Assange has been. All he has managed to do is get up the nose of some pompous Americans.
The more I think about that, the more endearing he seems.
Hell, even Australia is doing censorship and filtering
As an Australian I feel compelled to correct this.
Certainly politicians have tried to get a filter implemented. In fact there have been a series of them. It started with Kim Beazly (leader of the opposition at the time, who first made it ALP Policy, the ALP being the mob who ran the country for the last 3 years), then we had Kevin Rudd (Prime Minster), Stephen Conroy (Communications Minister), Brian Harradine (independent who held the balance of power in the Senate), and Steve Fielding (who saw himself as Harradine's successor) all pushed very hard for it. They were aided and abetted some the local elites, such as Clive Hamilton (a Professor of Public Ethics and Vice-Chancellor's of Charles Sturt University) churning out papers in support of the filter. It is a truly impressive list of heavy hitters.
Yet, they failed. Now the opposition has formally rejected the idea it looks dead and buried.
For me it was a painful period in Australia's political history. Every time the issue was brought up on a forum that allowed public comments, the comments ran at about 20 to 1 against the idea. Regardless this mob tried to ram it though for 3 electoral cycles. Had they succeeded you could have truly said Australia democracy was doing a lousy job of representing the people doing the voting.
But despite having their hands firm on the leavers of power and the public megaphones (no newspaper editorial outside of the tech industry strongly rejected the idea) they didn't succeed. I don't know whether this means Australia's hands are safer than the US's, as the US has a better constitution. But it certainly has given me a new found faith in Australian style democracy.
A wise person votes both above and below the line. If you do that and stuff your below the line vote up then your above the line vote gets used instead.
Call me a nerd, but I think he should have called this thing a torque transistor. Like a transistor, it allows small torque input to control the transmission of a much larger torque. Also like a transistor, it has three connectors - the big torque in, the big torque out, and the small torque in.
And finally the one of the more important figures in gauging how effective it is its gain - the ratio of the small torque to the large one. If the gain is huge - as in a small electric motor can control the output of a great honking diesel engine, then we have a winner. It is is closer to 1 to 1, then ho hum. I wish they had said what the gain was.
Not really. There are a couple of applications for SSD's. One is to speed up boot times. Obviously a RAM cache is useless in that application.
Another is if you want to speed up a transaction server (one that is writing as much as it is reading), then the answer is again no. Think of the battery backed up RAM cache RAID arrays have. Those caches are there for a reason. RAM can do read caching, but it can't do write caching and still be secure across power failure.
My interest is in the second application, and like the guy who wrote this article I have been patiently waiting for someone to produce a nice local file system cache for Linux. So far I haven't seen anything that comes close.
some Mercedes drivers found that their seats moved if they pushed a certain button; the problem was that the button was supposed to operate the navigation system.
If the systems aren't isolated, it doesn't matter what the code is supposed to control. For example, if the internal light control just sends control signals across a CAN bus which is also connected to the ECU, the software (say via a memory overflow error) could write the wrong address onto the bus and send throttle information by mistake.
I don't think it could be called a breakthrough. My guess they use sound to approximately locate the mozzie, then focus two cameras at that spot. The software doesn't have to do much. Just find some changing pixels, roughly mozzia size, colour and moving at mozzie speed.
Even I could do that. Building cameras, lasers and optics that they can position within a micrometer is another proposition entirely. If I could do that, I would build one the things myself.
The primary point being that you can often not actually hear these electrical bikes coming up behind you.
They make about as much noise as a normal bicycle - which as you say is almost none. The assist on e-bikes usually cuts off at 20 mph, which just happens to be the speed an experienced road cyclist curses at. In other words, there is almost difference between e-bike and a normal bicycle coming up behind you safety wise.
The second issue is where do we charge up these bikes? is there any environmental impact to charging the bikes or is it just going to be moving the carbon from cars in the city to coal fired plants in the rural areas?.
Where do you charge an e-bike - are you serious? Right next to the nearest power point, usually. A recharge consumes about as much as running a 100W light bulb for 10 hours. In carbon equivalents, that is about the same as driving your car to the end of the street, except the e-bike took you to work and back.
I also wonder who is going to get heart disease and other health problems from no longer exercising on a daily basis by riding. Are we all going to have to buy gym memberships to keep fit rather than simple lifestyle changes like walking or cycling?
Most people who commute regularly don't use the engine as a replacement. It is an assist - something that makes it easier to get up hills. Look at the comments above. You will see one poster say his heart rate and cadence (speed he pushes the pedals) are the same for both his e-bike and normal bike. That is my experience too. It seems we have an energy output rate we are comfortable at, and we do that regardless of whether it is an e-bike or a normal bike. The only difference is the e-bike goes faster - or in my case remains off until I hit a hill.
Yeah, well I suspect e-bikes in China are different to those in the west.
The batteries in Western bikes they are mostly Lithium batteries of some sort. The result is the batteries cost more than the bike + motor combined, and they are both lighter than a lead acid and have much higher capacity.
The second difference is the entire thing is sealed. You can literally submerge the bike, and then pick it up and keep riding.
And finally electricity costs 2/3's of stuff all of nothing. As a consequence everybody is happy to let you charge your bike anywhere there is a power point, which turns out to be just about everywhere.
Add that all up, and a good e-bike has no difficultly taking you 50 km or so. I ride 22 km's to work myself (44 kms round trip), and charge only when home. The limitation ends up not being the e-bike at all. It is the amount of time you are prepared to send doing the commute.
No seriously. The IEA and USGS (US Geological Survey) were both formed after the 1970's oil shock to provide us with reliable data about future oil supplies. They idea was to provide us with plenty of time to prepare ourselves for future oil shocks. And they did just that - delivering solid if boring data for 30 years.
The suddenly in 2000 everything changed. Sources hereto though uneconomic were included, assumptions like magic improvements in extraction efficiency were added. And the projections altered accordingly.
Seems Bush put about as much store in solid reliable oil data as he did in solid reliable Iraqi intelligence, or scientific advice on global warming for that matter. He was nothing if not consistent.
Compare Apple to Nokia. Both allow the phones they sell to be locked down. Both do it in a similar way - the carrier loads a file into the phone. It's called the mobileconfig by Apple, I gather. The difference? If you buy a Nokia outright, nothing is locked down. That makes sense - it is your phone after all. The only way a carrier can lock a Nokia down is to sell it to you locked - presumably at a discount for the privilege.
In typical Apple fashion however, when they sell you an iPhone everything is locked down. You have to go begging for a mobileconfig from your carrier so you can use the features you thought you paid a premium. But the carrier can't produce one unless Apple has given them the cryptographic keys, and if the carrier doesn't have a business relationship with Apple (ie pays them), they can't give you one.
It is all a huge con on Apple's part. You can't really buy an unlocked iPhone outright, in the same way as you can from Nokia. Sure Apple is happy to charge you the premium for what you think is outright ownership. But you still can't use all the features on the phone unless you pay Apple addition rent for those features via the tax they put on the carrier.
The first copyright laws were implemented at the request of the first publishers - the printing press owners. This was rather odd at the time, because earlier they had campaigned long and hard to get restrictions on printing presses put in place by their feudal overlords lifted. The Kings and Queens viewed the presses as a threat to their monopoly on news (think China and the Internet) and thus tried to restrict who could own them.
But the technology escaped, as technology tends do to. The laws were repealed, the publishers got their freedom at last. Then many went broke. Turned out a free for all didn't make economic sense. Printing presses cost at lot, which the owners tried to recover by finding a popular book to print. Finding a popular one involved first loosing money printing duds. But without some law to prevent other publishers from pinching their golden goose, it was all for nought. So the printing press owners petitioned the King for new restrictions on printing. They had thrashed out an agreement between themselves - they would not pinch each others books, and then asked the King to give it the force of law. This copyright was born.
And its been that way ever since. Every time a new technology comes along that copies things a new fight breaks out. The new publishers and old publishers eventually thrash out some compromise, which is then presented to King / Parliament to enact into law.
It is has never been about the artists. That is why the RIAA - the publishers industry group, who is suing all and sundry, not some artist group.
Perhaps the internet means the artists will ditch the RIAA members and publish their own work, in which case they will become publishers. Then perhaps it will be about the artists.
> Forced filtering of the internet is nothing like government > control of political speech.
On the contrary. It is exactly the same thing. You are thinking of filtering "child porn" or some such. If the proposed legislation actually said it was a "child porn" filter I might even agree, but that term was purely for media consumption. The term used in the proposed legislation is "illegal content". In other words, any content that any current law or schedule attached to a law deems to be illegal.
The problem is once you have the infrastructure in place, it is so dammed easy to define anything inconvenient as illegal. Just stick it in a the list. Whats more - no one knows you have done it. That list is conveniently defined to be a government secret. But even if it wasn't this is the government we are talking about - the same mob who said Haneef did something illegal, who claimed children were thrown overboard, who refused defend David Hicks even though he had done nothing illegal as defined by Australian law. In the politicians hands it seems illegal becomes a very rubbery concept.
This may seem like scare mongering, but I have a real, live example. From Finland, a country with just as strong democratic traditions as Australia. Finland recently went down the path Australia is proposing to go down. They blocked an anti-censorship campaigner's website. The reason they blocked it is because it contained a leaked copy of the Finnish blacklist. Did they bock this because it contains lots of bad URL's? No. Even after the Finnish Government's expenditure of their equivalent of tens of millions of dollars in collating the list hadn't actually managed to find many child abuse sites, so they'd padded the list with thousands of other sites instead. Then, when exposed, they censored the anti-censorship site to cover it up.
That, in my mind, would rank as censorship. We have recently seen a number of Australian Federal Police raids because of leaks. I'd guess those all those be considered illegal as well. If you put them up on a web site they would silently disappear. Bye, bye Wikileaks.
If that hasn't convinced you Conroy is creating a monster, then try and use your imagination to think something that is currently deemed illegal, yet nonetheless you would be dismayed to see disappear from the Internet. Here, I give you a start:
- Euthanasia, - Marijuana (for medicinal purposes), - Stem cell therapy, - Abortion in some states, - French museum sites (pictures of naked children are legal in France), - Mod chip circuits for games machines, - BluRay encryption keys, - Henati.
I have often read the Nokia engineer's whinge about how they make phones with tons of features, then the US carriers ask they all be removed. I presume the simply don't bother trying to sell phones in the US that require them to put a whole pile of effort into removing features.
Apple is about to be bitten by the same thing, only in reverse. The DRM, the "thou shall not run applications in the background", the "thou shall only sell software through Apple" - all those things aren't consumer friendly. I presume its just Apple crippling their phones at fit in with the carriers wishes, just like Nokia has to do.
Only there is one difference. Nokia doesn't sell crippled phones to the rest of the world, only to the US. Consequently, they dominate the world market. From what I can tell, Apple is going to try and sell their US crippled phone to the world. If so, they are in for a bit of a shock.
I personally would buy an iPhone V2, if I could use it with a blue tooth keyboard and run applications on it just like I can with the Nokia. Nothing out of the ordinary - just things like download my pod-casts in the background over WiFi with my favourite 3rd party podcast app, run a GPS tracker in the background when bushwalking, a keyboard monitor - all pretty simple stuff really which works now on my Nokia. But I can't. Sort of kills it, really.
This is another vote for the E70. It is far from perfect, others here have pointed out some of its defects. It has a small (but very good) screen, some commonly used keys are hard to get to (eg escape), the browser can't handle complex pages. These all stem from fact that the E70 was the first of its kind in many ways - it was the first Symbian 3rd edition device I think. Newer Symbian 3rd Edition devices have fixed most of these problems.
However, the E70 has other features that make up for its shortcomings. It has WiFi, and Nokia has a free podcast client for it. This means I can download my favourite directly onto the device and listen to them as I ride home.
Its email client is rather good, handling IMAP, SSL and DIGEST auth. This together with the cheap 3G data plans available now make it a very useful email client.
There are lots of third party Symbian apps about. PuTTY is of course one, another I find useful is GPS. Hook it up to a Bluetooth GPS and its just magic. The battery can last for a couple of days. If you want street navigation the app that runs on the 6110 works on it.
It is a great VOIP (SIP) phone. Not just good - great. VOIP is seamlessly integrated into the phone. I run the Asterisk PABX at work. I don't have a normal desk phone. When I am at work if someone rings my extension my E70 rings. When I make outgoing calls at work they go via VOIP by default, and thus don't cost me a cent. Running Asterisk at home with a SPA3102 means you don't have to run around like a headless chook to find a handset so you can answer an incoming call. If I am at a conference somewhere that provides WiFi I can make free VOIP calls. The audio quality is so good we use it here at work to make all our voice responses - it is better than the Aastra / Linksys / CISCO desk phones we have here.
Last but not least the gull wing keyboard design works very well. The split design works better than the N810 (or any solid block of keys), because you can devote a thumb to each side and they never interfere with each other.
Sadly the E70 has been discontinued for some time and Nokia hasn't produced any successors. Sales were very poor, I hear - its chunky design and bleeding edge features only appealed to geeks. I tried the iPhone, but it isn't a good replacement. I tried a HTC WinCE phone but had to reboot it 3 or 4 times in the first week - I sold it after a month or so. Right now there is nothing on the market that can replace it. I am taking very good care of it as a consequence.
I am hoping that will change, and we will see a replacement. I was at the supermarket the other day - waiting in the line I looked something up on the web. While I was doing that it rang, so I folded the keyboard away and answered it. The checkout chick, who looked to be still at school, spun around (she must of been watching) and said WOW! Perhaps its time to try again, Nokia?
Ebay could fix the feedback problem by not displaying
the feedback for a particular auction until both seller
and buyer have left feedback. Retaliatory feedback then
becomes impossible. It also cures another problem -
you leave feedback and then the other person doesn't,
usually I suspect out of laziness. You would have to
make this optional so it can't be abused, but it should
be the default behaviour IMHO.
As for features: it has them all.
ACID, triggers, stored procedures, will maintain
identical copies of the one database on two drives
for you, etc, etc.
Possibly because of this when I went looking for a
database to replace Oracle it seemed to be the one
most recommended.
At least one commercial vendor has an add on that
provides the one thing missing in this role: a stored
procedure language compatible with Oracle's PL/SQL.
And yes, I am a happy Firebird user. But not for
any of the reasons mentioned so far. I use it
because it is dammed easy to bolt onto your current
project. No configuration. Small footprint.
Ports to anything. Zero ongoing maintenance.
That is its heritage you see - it always was a
bolt on library for applications that don't
even mention the word SQL in their description.
So Firebird is doing its job well if the end
users and sysadmins aren't aware of its existence.
Think about that when you are next tearing your
hair out trying to set up some MYSQL database
when all you wanted to do is install some tiny
web app someone else in the office asked for.
And that leads us to what turns most people off.
There are no flashy front ends out of the box.
Is comes with three utilities of note: backup,
restore and isql: all very simple command line
tools. Its an embedded database - you are meant
to provide the front end yourself. And the doco,
while present, is patchwork of old stuff and
separate "changes since..." files.
But if you are need a backend for a application that
doesn't parade its "SQL" credentials Firebird is one
possibility. The others are sleepycat (for speed)
and SQLLite (for simplicity). You'd be nuts to use
anything else, and I wish a lot of projects out there
hadn't.
There was a time when I would of agreed with the parent.
At that time I regarded Senator Alston as the
worlds greatest luddite, too.
But in retrospect, it doesn't stand up to analysis.
When the government wanted to regulate the Internet, they
have been very effective. The anti-spam act was, after a
few prosecutions 100% successful. They hounded wayward DNS
registrars
into obligation, and similarly with
phishing web sites. What drove the point home for me was
the internet gambling laws. Can you imagine a better way
to keep gambling money in Australia than
this?
Yes they appear to have done things that, if you accept their
stated aims, were odd. For example, the
web page classification system they put in place could never
of worked. (For the non-Aussies out their, the law was/is that
potentially offensive web pages had to get a classification from
the same body that classified films. The cost per page was the
same as getting an entire film classified - approx $3000.)
Now either the government was totally brain dead, or it was
deliberately designed to not work. Why design something
that would not work at all? Well it is effectively that same
as not doing it, as far as the internet users are concerned.
After the dust settled the observed effect was 0. If the
observed effect is 0, then by election time no one is going
to remember it anyway. Certainly it isn't going to effect their
vote. So why do
in the first place? Well it wasn't for the reasons they said,
obviously. But I do recall they needed Senator Harradine's
vote on GST. Harradine was to say the least a highly religious
man. For example, he
opposed family planning on religious grounds.
Ditto for family porn filters. How to you appease the moral
minority on porn, while not actually interfering with any
voting persons daily dose? Since people who want to view porn
make up roughly the half voting population, this is quite a dilemma.
How about making it mandatory for ISP's to provide porn filters for
free? Absolutely no one is inconvenienced by this - not the
ISP's, not the users - no one, simply because no one takes
up the offer. Yet it was championed as mandatory porn
filtering.
Far from being brain dead, as far as I can tell Howard's
government is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to
controlling the internet. They know what works, and they
know to finesse a sop when required. When they really want
to take down a web page,
they do it,
law or no law. Love it or hate it, these are not the
actions of people who don't understand the internet.
So what are they doing now? As a famous politician who
once ran sunny Queensland said, they are
feeding the chooks. I was always wondered where that
came from. After reading the posts here it suddenly hit me.
After feeding, it appears the said chooks run around like,
well, chooks with their heads cut off. The resulting
commotion makes a great smoke screen. The government
can get along with the real job at hand in peace and quiet.
In retrospect when you look at the children overboard affair
and other things, it appear the Howard government has honed
this technique into a fine art.
On key piece of information I go looking for in new wireless schemes like this is how much information a "cell" can carry. For example, from memory a GSM cell carries about 400 kbps, a 3G cell carries 4 Mbps, a WiMax cell about 70 Mbps. The figure gives you a feel for how useful the technology will be for broadband.
If you follow the links already posted here, you will see it has FCC approval, it travels a looong way at low power levels, the chip set is expected to be under $10, has bugger all side-band interference, and so on. All well and good, but its useless if it can't carry information at broadband speeds. As far as I can tell that is the one figure they aren't not revealing.
I am not a radio guru, so there is probably some perfectly good reason why they have not published it. It would be nice to know what it is. It would also be nice to know what power is consumed by the thing. A long distance unlicensed transmitter that can be powered by a lithium battery for months (like bluetooth) sounds like it would be very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you did.
But to make the evening TV news, people doing bad things have to photographed. Is your logic that it must be illegal to make money out of something bad happening? So we can't make money out of news that shows violent theft, or invading armies, or murder. It is a fairly compelling argument in some ways. Almost certainly, one of things driving terrorism is the publicity it generates for the cause. 911 was a slam dunk in that regard. Surely by this logic, there is a certain appeal to banning all reporting of the towers crashing down, taking 1000's of lives with them as they did so. That news footage has reverberated around the world for years since, and inspired more than a few budding terrorists.
No no, you say, that is not my logic. Unlike the news there is a very clear and strong link between child porn and kids being harmed. One directly leads to the other.
The only problem is, that claim doesn't stand up to scrutiny. If that logic is true then coming of the internet and the huge uptick in the trading of child porn it made possible must be accompanied by an equally huge uptick in kids being abused. Have a look at the statistics some time. No matter how you measure it - children in care, convictions, reported abuse - it just didn't happen. There was no uptick. In fact it has remained pretty much flat.
So what is the logic behind the banning of child porn? I don't think there is any. It is just that most people don't like it. On a personal level this just boils down to you not liking it, so you want it banned.
The funny thing is, you will be punished for your selfishness. Our Conroy doesn't just want to ban child porn, and I doubt he is unique among wantabe censors in this regard. He wants to ban the reporting of all sorts of things on the internet - euthanasia, abortion, games not to his taste, and ... the list of what is considered highly indecent goes on and on. All will be filtered. He has said he wants viewing of such illegal sites monitored by the police. I can guarantee you will find the banning of some things on Conroy's list highly troubling. And yet, here you are, allowing yourself to be suckered into it by an appeal to your basest instincts - a dislike of child porn.
Nope. This assertion has been made here over and over again, and it is out and out wrong . See: http://opensource.dyc.edu/random-vs-encrypted
In essence, encrypted data sticks out like dogs balls because of its high entropy, yet there are enough patterns in it to make it obvious to an expert it isn't just random data. Even if it did look like random data who in the hell is going to believe you are carrying around gig's of data you can trivially generate as needed from /dev/urandom? Nobody.
So, the problem you have to solve is how you are going to plausibly explain away gig's of what is clearly encrypted crap. Forget TrueCrypt, or any special tools that don't normally come with your Operating System. Their very presence screams "liar!". Forget large encrypted files that don't have any conceivable use, even if they aren't named "my-porn-collection.zip.gpg". After all, its your laptop so a program you use must have put them there, so some program should break if you move them out of the way.
And finally, once you come up with a way of hiding your encrypted crap, don't go blasting it over the internet. If it became common knowledge the men with rubber hoses may hear of it, rendering your lovely invention useless.
Some evidently don't agree with this last piece of advise because they have posted their solutions to the problem right here, on one the largest megaphones on the 'net. Fortunately for them, Slashdot has in typical Slashdot fashion come to their rescue. Unlike the piece of miss-information I am responding to which is rated "5, informative", these insightful and informative posts are rated 1. Probably because they necessarily involve long complex commands which are utterly beyond your average slashdotter, which probably means they will rarely be used, which probably means they are right - my last piece of advise is alarmist.
I suppose the authors are from a land where hard drive space is infinite, database server resources are always guaranteed ahead of time...
No, actually. They come from the land that drops a replica if it hits one of these problems.
Also, they don't actually mean you can't do aborts. A transaction can abort. It is just that all replica's must do the same thing with the transaction - commit or abort. Given you can achieve that, the rest of the paper follows easily. The magical bit is the pre-processor that guarantees all nodes (which might have different data) guarantee that without being a bottle neck or a central point of failure. Now that is magical, and I don't know how they do it.
Assange broke the laws of Australia, where he is a citizen
If he did, apparently the people in charge here don't care that much, given our intelligence agency warned him that a rape accusation was likely.
I'd go so far to as to say most Australian's think of him as a hero, albeit a somewhat eccentric one. Not that eccentricity is going to get you in trouble in Australia. Treasuring our eccentrics is a habit we inherited from our British forebears, I think, and it is something for which we owe them a great deal. We only ask they be mostly harmless, which so far Assange has been. All he has managed to do is get up the nose of some pompous Americans.
The more I think about that, the more endearing he seems.
Hell, even Australia is doing censorship and filtering
As an Australian I feel compelled to correct this.
Certainly politicians have tried to get a filter implemented. In fact there have been a series of them. It started with Kim Beazly (leader of the opposition at the time, who first made it ALP Policy, the ALP being the mob who ran the country for the last 3 years), then we had Kevin Rudd (Prime Minster), Stephen Conroy (Communications Minister), Brian Harradine (independent who held the balance of power in the Senate), and Steve Fielding (who saw himself as Harradine's successor) all pushed very hard for it. They were aided and abetted some the local elites, such as Clive Hamilton (a Professor of Public Ethics and Vice-Chancellor's of Charles Sturt University) churning out papers in support of the filter. It is a truly impressive list of heavy hitters.
Yet, they failed. Now the opposition has formally rejected the idea it looks dead and buried.
For me it was a painful period in Australia's political history. Every time the issue was brought up on a forum that allowed public comments, the comments ran at about 20 to 1 against the idea. Regardless this mob tried to ram it though for 3 electoral cycles. Had they succeeded you could have truly said Australia democracy was doing a lousy job of representing the people doing the voting.
But despite having their hands firm on the leavers of power and the public megaphones (no newspaper editorial outside of the tech industry strongly rejected the idea) they didn't succeed. I don't know whether this means Australia's hands are safer than the US's, as the US has a better constitution. But it certainly has given me a new found faith in Australian style democracy.
A wise person votes both above and below the line. If you do that and stuff your below the line vote up then your above the line vote gets used instead.
See http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2010/07/how-to-vote-guide.html, in the last section titled What happens if I vote both above and below the line? .
So, the oceans contain roughly 1 cubic mega meter of water. That is an easy number to remember.
Oh, how I love metric.
Call me a nerd, but I think he should have called this thing a torque transistor. Like a transistor, it allows small torque input to control the transmission of a much larger torque. Also like a transistor, it has three connectors - the big torque in, the big torque out, and the small torque in.
And finally the one of the more important figures in gauging how effective it is its gain - the ratio of the small torque to the large one. If the gain is huge - as in a small electric motor can control the output of a great honking diesel engine, then we have a winner. It is is closer to 1 to 1, then ho hum. I wish they had said what the gain was.
Here is a different video of it. It occupies the last 1/3 of the show: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/tv/newinventors/vodcast/newinventors_2010_ep10.mp4 The video is actually episode 10 from here: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/newinventors/video/video.htm Two of commentators are engineers, one of which was the chief systems engineer for FedSat, an Australian Satellite. I can't imagine doing a snow job on him would be easy.
Not really. There are a couple of applications for SSD's. One is to speed up boot times. Obviously a RAM cache is useless in that application.
Another is if you want to speed up a transaction server (one that is writing as much as it is reading), then the answer is again no. Think of the battery backed up RAM cache RAID arrays have. Those caches are there for a reason. RAM can do read caching, but it can't do write caching and still be secure across power failure.
My interest is in the second application, and like the guy who wrote this article I have been patiently waiting for someone to produce a nice local file system cache for Linux. So far I haven't seen anything that comes close.
As it happens, I do embedded work too. And yes, it could be isolated. That is not the point. The point is it wasn't.
No, no. That is not the relevant quote. This is:
some Mercedes drivers found that their seats moved if they pushed a certain button; the problem was that the button was supposed to operate the navigation system.
If the systems aren't isolated, it doesn't matter what the code is supposed to control. For example, if the internal light control just sends control signals across a CAN bus which is also connected to the ECU, the software (say via a memory overflow error) could write the wrong address onto the bus and send throttle information by mistake.
Jesus. That scares the shit out of me.
I don't think it could be called a breakthrough. My guess they use sound to approximately locate the mozzie, then focus two cameras at that spot. The software doesn't have to do much. Just find some changing pixels, roughly mozzia size, colour and moving at mozzie speed.
Even I could do that. Building cameras, lasers and optics that they can position within a micrometer is another proposition entirely. If I could do that, I would build one the things myself.
The primary point being that you can often not actually hear these electrical bikes coming up behind you.
They make about as much noise as a normal bicycle - which as you say is almost none. The assist on e-bikes usually cuts off at 20 mph, which just happens to be the speed an experienced road cyclist curses at. In other words, there is almost difference between e-bike and a normal bicycle coming up behind you safety wise.
The second issue is where do we charge up these bikes? is there any environmental impact to charging the bikes or is it just going to be moving the carbon from cars in the city to coal fired plants in the rural areas?.
Where do you charge an e-bike - are you serious? Right next to the nearest power point, usually. A recharge consumes about as much as running a 100W light bulb for 10 hours. In carbon equivalents, that is about the same as driving your car to the end of the street, except the e-bike took you to work and back.
I also wonder who is going to get heart disease and other health problems from no longer exercising on a daily basis by riding. Are we all going to have to buy gym memberships to keep fit rather than simple lifestyle changes like walking or cycling?
Most people who commute regularly don't use the engine as a replacement. It is an assist - something that makes it easier to get up hills. Look at the comments above. You will see one poster say his heart rate and cadence (speed he pushes the pedals) are the same for both his e-bike and normal bike. That is my experience too. It seems we have an energy output rate we are comfortable at, and we do that regardless of whether it is an e-bike or a normal bike. The only difference is the e-bike goes faster - or in my case remains off until I hit a hill.
Yeah, well I suspect e-bikes in China are different to those in the west.
The batteries in Western bikes they are mostly Lithium batteries of some sort. The result is the batteries cost more than the bike + motor combined, and they are both lighter than a lead acid and have much higher capacity.
The second difference is the entire thing is sealed. You can literally submerge the bike, and then pick it up and keep riding.
And finally electricity costs 2/3's of stuff all of nothing. As a consequence everybody is happy to let you charge your bike anywhere there is a power point, which turns out to be just about everywhere.
Add that all up, and a good e-bike has no difficultly taking you 50 km or so. I ride 22 km's to work myself (44 kms round trip), and charge only when home. The limitation ends up not being the e-bike at all. It is the amount of time you are prepared to send doing the commute.
No seriously. The IEA and USGS (US Geological Survey) were both formed after the 1970's oil shock to provide us with reliable data about future oil supplies. They idea was to provide us with plenty of time to prepare ourselves for future oil shocks. And they did just that - delivering solid if boring data for 30 years.
The suddenly in 2000 everything changed. Sources hereto though uneconomic were included, assumptions like magic improvements in extraction efficiency were added. And the projections altered accordingly.
Seems Bush put about as much store in solid reliable oil data as he did in solid reliable Iraqi intelligence, or scientific advice on global warming for that matter. He was nothing if not consistent.
http://www.peakoil.net/uhdsg/weo2004/TheUppsalaCode.html.
Throw this down at AT&T's feet, not Apple's.
Nope, I'd definitely lay it at Apples feet.
Compare Apple to Nokia. Both allow the phones they sell to be locked down. Both do it in a similar way - the carrier loads a file into the phone. It's called the mobileconfig by Apple, I gather. The difference? If you buy a Nokia outright, nothing is locked down. That makes sense - it is your phone after all. The only way a carrier can lock a Nokia down is to sell it to you locked - presumably at a discount for the privilege.
In typical Apple fashion however, when they sell you an iPhone everything is locked down. You have to go begging for a mobileconfig from your carrier so you can use the features you thought you paid a premium. But the carrier can't produce one unless Apple has given them the cryptographic keys, and if the carrier doesn't have a business relationship with Apple (ie pays them), they can't give you one.
It is all a huge con on Apple's part. You can't really buy an unlocked iPhone outright, in the same way as you can from Nokia. Sure Apple is happy to charge you the premium for what you think is outright ownership. But you still can't use all the features on the phone unless you pay Apple addition rent for those features via the tax they put on the carrier.
You realise copyright was never about artist?
The first copyright laws were implemented at the request of the first publishers - the printing press owners. This was rather odd at the time, because earlier they had campaigned long and hard to get restrictions on printing presses put in place by their feudal overlords lifted. The Kings and Queens viewed the presses as a threat to their monopoly on news (think China and the Internet) and thus tried to restrict who could own them.
But the technology escaped, as technology tends do to. The laws were repealed, the publishers got their freedom at last. Then many went broke. Turned out a free for all didn't make economic sense. Printing presses cost at lot, which the owners tried to recover by finding a popular book to print. Finding a popular one involved first loosing money printing duds. But without some law to prevent other publishers from pinching their golden goose, it was all for nought. So the printing press owners petitioned the King for new restrictions on printing. They had thrashed out an agreement between themselves - they would not pinch each others books, and then asked the King to give it the force of law. This copyright was born.
And its been that way ever since. Every time a new technology comes along that copies things a new fight breaks out. The new publishers and old publishers eventually thrash out some compromise, which is then presented to King / Parliament to enact into law.
It is has never been about the artists. That is why the RIAA - the publishers industry group, who is suing all and sundry, not some artist group.
Perhaps the internet means the artists will ditch the RIAA members and publish their own work, in which case they will become publishers. Then perhaps it will be about the artists.
> Forced filtering of the internet is nothing like government
> control of political speech.
On the contrary. It is exactly the same thing. You are thinking of filtering "child porn" or some such. If the proposed legislation actually said it was a "child porn" filter I might even agree, but that term was purely for media consumption. The term used in the proposed legislation is "illegal content". In other words, any content that any current law or schedule attached to a law deems to be illegal.
The problem is once you have the infrastructure in place, it is so dammed easy to define anything inconvenient as illegal. Just stick it in a the list. Whats more - no one knows you have done it. That list is conveniently defined to be a government secret. But even if it wasn't this is the government we are talking about - the same mob who said Haneef did something illegal, who claimed children were thrown overboard, who refused defend David Hicks even though he had done nothing illegal as defined by Australian law. In the politicians hands it seems illegal becomes a very rubbery concept.
This may seem like scare mongering, but I have a real, live example. From Finland, a country with just as strong democratic traditions as Australia. Finland recently went down the path Australia is proposing to go down. They blocked an anti-censorship campaigner's website. The reason they blocked it is because it contained a leaked copy of the Finnish blacklist. Did they bock this because it contains lots of bad URL's? No. Even after the Finnish Government's expenditure of their equivalent of tens of millions of dollars in collating the list hadn't actually managed to find many child abuse sites, so they'd padded the list with thousands of other sites instead. Then, when exposed, they censored the anti-censorship site to cover it up.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9874155-38.html
That, in my mind, would rank as censorship. We have recently seen a number of Australian Federal Police raids because of leaks. I'd guess those all those be considered illegal as well. If you put them up on a web site they would silently disappear. Bye, bye Wikileaks.
If that hasn't convinced you Conroy is creating a monster, then try and use your imagination to think something that is currently deemed illegal, yet nonetheless you would be dismayed to see disappear from the Internet. Here, I give you a start:
- Euthanasia,
- Marijuana (for medicinal purposes),
- Stem cell therapy,
- Abortion in some states,
- French museum sites (pictures of naked children are legal in France),
- Mod chip circuits for games machines,
- BluRay encryption keys,
- Henati.
I have often read the Nokia engineer's whinge about how they make phones with tons of features, then the US carriers ask they all be removed. I presume the simply don't bother trying to sell phones in the US that require them to put a whole pile of effort into removing features.
Apple is about to be bitten by the same thing, only in reverse. The DRM, the "thou shall not run applications in the background", the "thou shall only sell software through Apple" - all those things aren't consumer friendly. I presume its just Apple crippling their phones at fit in with the carriers wishes, just like Nokia has to do.
Only there is one difference. Nokia doesn't sell crippled phones to the rest of the world, only to the US. Consequently, they dominate the world market. From what I can tell, Apple is going to try and sell their US crippled phone to the world. If so, they are in for a bit of a shock.
I personally would buy an iPhone V2, if I could use it with a blue tooth keyboard and run applications on it just like I can with the Nokia. Nothing out of the ordinary - just things like download my pod-casts in the background over WiFi with my favourite 3rd party podcast app, run a GPS tracker in the background when bushwalking, a keyboard monitor - all pretty simple stuff really which works now on my Nokia. But I can't. Sort of kills it, really.
However, the E70 has other features that make up for its shortcomings. It has WiFi, and Nokia has a free podcast client for it. This means I can download my favourite directly onto the device and listen to them as I ride home.
Its email client is rather good, handling IMAP, SSL and DIGEST auth. This together with the cheap 3G data plans available now make it a very useful email client.
There are lots of third party Symbian apps about. PuTTY is of course one, another I find useful is GPS. Hook it up to a Bluetooth GPS and its just magic. The battery can last for a couple of days. If you want street navigation the app that runs on the 6110 works on it.
It is a great VOIP (SIP) phone. Not just good - great. VOIP is seamlessly integrated into the phone. I run the Asterisk PABX at work. I don't have a normal desk phone. When I am at work if someone rings my extension my E70 rings. When I make outgoing calls at work they go via VOIP by default, and thus don't cost me a cent. Running Asterisk at home with a SPA3102 means you don't have to run around like a headless chook to find a handset so you can answer an incoming call. If I am at a conference somewhere that provides WiFi I can make free VOIP calls. The audio quality is so good we use it here at work to make all our voice responses - it is better than the Aastra / Linksys / CISCO desk phones we have here.
Last but not least the gull wing keyboard design works very well. The split design works better than the N810 (or any solid block of keys), because you can devote a thumb to each side and they never interfere with each other.
Sadly the E70 has been discontinued for some time and Nokia hasn't produced any successors. Sales were very poor, I hear - its chunky design and bleeding edge features only appealed to geeks. I tried the iPhone, but it isn't a good replacement. I tried a HTC WinCE phone but had to reboot it 3 or 4 times in the first week - I sold it after a month or so. Right now there is nothing on the market that can replace it. I am taking very good care of it as a consequence.
I am hoping that will change, and we will see a replacement. I was at the supermarket the other day - waiting in the line I looked something up on the web. While I was doing that it rang, so I folded the keyboard away and answered it. The checkout chick, who looked to be still at school, spun around (she must of been watching) and said WOW! Perhaps its time to try again, Nokia?
Ebay could fix the feedback problem by not displaying the feedback for a particular auction until both seller and buyer have left feedback. Retaliatory feedback then becomes impossible. It also cures another problem - you leave feedback and then the other person doesn't, usually I suspect out of laziness. You would have to make this optional so it can't be abused, but it should be the default behaviour IMHO.
A seemingly unbiased speed comparison (well at least not biased towards Firebird, anyway) can be found here: http://www.sqlite.org/cvstrac/wiki?p=SpeedComparis on
As for features: it has them all. ACID, triggers, stored procedures, will maintain identical copies of the one database on two drives for you, etc, etc. Possibly because of this when I went looking for a database to replace Oracle it seemed to be the one most recommended. At least one commercial vendor has an add on that provides the one thing missing in this role: a stored procedure language compatible with Oracle's PL/SQL.
And yes, I am a happy Firebird user. But not for any of the reasons mentioned so far. I use it because it is dammed easy to bolt onto your current project. No configuration. Small footprint. Ports to anything. Zero ongoing maintenance. That is its heritage you see - it always was a bolt on library for applications that don't even mention the word SQL in their description. So Firebird is doing its job well if the end users and sysadmins aren't aware of its existence. Think about that when you are next tearing your hair out trying to set up some MYSQL database when all you wanted to do is install some tiny web app someone else in the office asked for.
And that leads us to what turns most people off. There are no flashy front ends out of the box. Is comes with three utilities of note: backup, restore and isql: all very simple command line tools. Its an embedded database - you are meant to provide the front end yourself. And the doco, while present, is patchwork of old stuff and separate "changes since ..." files.
But if you are need a backend for a application that doesn't parade its "SQL" credentials Firebird is one possibility. The others are sleepycat (for speed) and SQLLite (for simplicity). You'd be nuts to use anything else, and I wish a lot of projects out there hadn't.
There was a time when I would of agreed with the parent. At that time I regarded Senator Alston as the worlds greatest luddite, too. But in retrospect, it doesn't stand up to analysis.
When the government wanted to regulate the Internet, they have been very effective. The anti-spam act was, after a few prosecutions 100% successful. They hounded wayward DNS registrars into obligation, and similarly with phishing web sites. What drove the point home for me was the internet gambling laws. Can you imagine a better way to keep gambling money in Australia than this?
Yes they appear to have done things that, if you accept their stated aims, were odd. For example, the web page classification system they put in place could never of worked. (For the non-Aussies out their, the law was/is that potentially offensive web pages had to get a classification from the same body that classified films. The cost per page was the same as getting an entire film classified - approx $3000.) Now either the government was totally brain dead, or it was deliberately designed to not work. Why design something that would not work at all? Well it is effectively that same as not doing it, as far as the internet users are concerned. After the dust settled the observed effect was 0. If the observed effect is 0, then by election time no one is going to remember it anyway. Certainly it isn't going to effect their vote. So why do in the first place? Well it wasn't for the reasons they said, obviously. But I do recall they needed Senator Harradine's vote on GST. Harradine was to say the least a highly religious man. For example, he opposed family planning on religious grounds.
Ditto for family porn filters. How to you appease the moral minority on porn, while not actually interfering with any voting persons daily dose? Since people who want to view porn make up roughly the half voting population, this is quite a dilemma. How about making it mandatory for ISP's to provide porn filters for free? Absolutely no one is inconvenienced by this - not the ISP's, not the users - no one, simply because no one takes up the offer. Yet it was championed as mandatory porn filtering.
Far from being brain dead, as far as I can tell Howard's government is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to controlling the internet. They know what works, and they know to finesse a sop when required. When they really want to take down a web page, they do it, law or no law. Love it or hate it, these are not the actions of people who don't understand the internet.
So what are they doing now? As a famous politician who once ran sunny Queensland said, they are feeding the chooks. I was always wondered where that came from. After reading the posts here it suddenly hit me. After feeding, it appears the said chooks run around like, well, chooks with their heads cut off. The resulting commotion makes a great smoke screen. The government can get along with the real job at hand in peace and quiet. In retrospect when you look at the children overboard affair and other things, it appear the Howard government has honed this technique into a fine art.
Replying to my own post, this article http://news.com.com/An+energy-conscious+wireless+t echnology/2100-1039_3-5778423.html?part=rss&tag=57 78423&subj=news
answers that question and a lot more. (Beware the extraneous spaces slashcode sticks into the link.)
On key piece of information I go looking for in new wireless schemes like this is how much information a "cell" can carry. For example, from memory a GSM cell carries about 400 kbps, a 3G cell carries 4 Mbps, a WiMax cell about 70 Mbps. The figure gives you a feel for how useful the technology will be for broadband.
If you follow the links already posted here, you will see it has FCC approval, it travels a looong way at low power levels, the chip set is expected to be under $10, has bugger all side-band interference, and so on. All well and good, but its useless if it can't carry information at broadband speeds. As far as I can tell that is the one figure they aren't not revealing.
I am not a radio guru, so there is probably some perfectly good reason why they have not published it. It would be nice to know what it is. It would also be nice to know what power is consumed by the thing. A long distance unlicensed transmitter that can be powered by a lithium battery for months (like bluetooth) sounds like it would be very useful.