Most of these commuters will have a cellphone with them, so as long as the state can get the cellphone provider to cooperate (and they probably can if they want to), tracking bicycles or even pedestrians is not at all a problem.
I disagree whole-heartedly. I've been using Boost for a number of years, and although it's been a bit hard to get into at times, and although I've barely scratched the surface of the available libraries, it has made my life a lot easier. Many of the available libraries complement the standard C++ library very nicely. No matter what parent post says, it's also fairly well accepted, to the point that it is not a long shot to expect a random competent C++ code to be able to work with it.
Personally, I'm pretty much treating it as an extended standard library these days.
Now, to be completely clear - I feel overselling bandwidth is wrong. I feel the proper response to issues like this on the larger network is guaranteed access to the full amount of bandwidth sold at all times.
I disagree completely. Overselling is a very sensible tactic, and in fact about the only thing that allows you to get flatrate lines as cheap as they are are. Of course, it's a matter of degree, and many telcos are overdoing it, but on the other hand, a strict no-overselling policy would, in practice, lead to upstream capacities on part of the ISP that are used at maybe 20 percent at best - at peak times.
Besides, an ISP doesn't have just one big fat line to "The Internet"; they are part of the internet, and they have a number of connections to a number of other networks, with vastly different capacities. (And usually at least on Tier-1 or Tier-2 upstream provider that connects them to all those networks they cannot or don't want to connect to directly.) If you wanted to take this no-overselling rule literally, you'd have to prepare for some extremely unlikely scenarios, like for example, every single one of your 20 million customers wanting to download something from some obscure location in Madagascar at full speed, at the same time.
They are not prepared for this sort of thing for the same reason that traditional telcos aren't prepared for something like every single person in Chicago calling someone in NYC at the same time: That sort of thing doesn't happen.
Standing up in a physical meeting and showing your face and possibly your name while saying this has a much higher chance of actually swaying or supporting anybody's opinions than an anonymous post on slashdot could, regardless of how true or untrue it is.
The AC post on slashdot will probably be dismissed as just a troll, probably even by those who actually believe this.
The speed of an electron is pretty darn slow (on the order of inches per hour, IIRC)
How do Cathode Ray Tube monitors work then? I was under the impression that they're firing a constant stream of electrons from the back to the front. I don't think these vacuum tubes are filled so densely with electrons that this could possibly work in the tiny-game-of-billiards kind of way...
I suppose you're referring to the tables on the page "Comparison of DNSSEC and DNSCurve". Well, I was referring to the big navigation bar on the top of every of those pages.
The most famous example of an operating system that wrote its own TCP/IP stack from scratch would be Linux, but it is not the only one. You're not going to argue that Linux doesn't count because it is irrelevant these days, are you?
But just compare the average seek times of a normal drive from ten years ago with that of a normal disk now.
If I recall correctly, ten years ago, average seek times for IDE drives were in the range from 10 to 12 milliseconds or about 5 ms for the expensive SCSI drives, while today it ranges from 8 to 10 ms or around 4 ms for SCSI drives. There is some improvement, sure, but it's nowhere near dramatic as the increases in storage capacity or data throughput.
The only realistic way to do it safely is to use a convoy with military protection.
Not only will that kill all potential savings from going nuclear, the military ships will have to stay behind as soon as the convoy enters high the sea territory of some other country.
To say that we are running out of oil is far, far, far from reality.
True, but saying we will run out of affordable oil is not. Guess why the untapped oil resources you were talking about are untapped - extracting oil from there would have been too expensive, and, at least until now, the extracted oil would have had no chances at being competitive in the market.
Anyway, the main reason oil prices are quite that high these days is the extreme economic growth of countries like India and China. Looking at those, they are both huge and still have lots and lots of room for growth. Peak oil or not, the problem will not go away, it will get much worse. If the US-American industry won't react and adapt, there will be a huge crash sometime in the future.
Well, gcj produces native machine code, so it's scope is obviously a bit different. The resulting binaries are not very much faster than Java Bytecode, but at least they require a lot less memory.
Also, who ever said the FOSS community can't have two or more different solutions to the same problem?
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these commuters will have a cellphone with them, so as long as the state can get the cellphone provider to cooperate (and they probably can if they want to), tracking bicycles or even pedestrians is not at all a problem.
Are you talking about some kind racing club?
Anyone know how to make djbdns DNSSEC aware? (Yes, I know that djb himself is opposed to DNSSEC and is trying to push DNSCURVE instead...)
I disagree whole-heartedly. I've been using Boost for a number of years, and although it's been a bit hard to get into at times, and although I've barely scratched the surface of the available libraries, it has made my life a lot easier. Many of the available libraries complement the standard C++ library very nicely. No matter what parent post says, it's also fairly well accepted, to the point that it is not a long shot to expect a random competent C++ code to be able to work with it.
Personally, I'm pretty much treating it as an extended standard library these days.
Please explain why you think this is a joke. Wikileaks IS accepting Bitcoin donations, and it is working quite well, too.
They DO accept bitcoin. See: http://www.wikileaks.org/Donate.html
(note : I am joking - I don't really want the faithful to die of radiation damage. I'm not Dawkins, ffs.)
I think your implications about what Dawkins wants to happen to believers are wrong and slanderous, and I think you owe the man an apology.
I disagree completely. Overselling is a very sensible tactic, and in fact about the only thing that allows you to get flatrate lines as cheap as they are are. Of course, it's a matter of degree, and many telcos are overdoing it, but on the other hand, a strict no-overselling policy would, in practice, lead to upstream capacities on part of the ISP that are used at maybe 20 percent at best - at peak times.
Besides, an ISP doesn't have just one big fat line to "The Internet"; they are part of the internet, and they have a number of connections to a number of other networks, with vastly different capacities. (And usually at least on Tier-1 or Tier-2 upstream provider that connects them to all those networks they cannot or don't want to connect to directly.) If you wanted to take this no-overselling rule literally, you'd have to prepare for some extremely unlikely scenarios, like for example, every single one of your 20 million customers wanting to download something from some obscure location in Madagascar at full speed, at the same time.
They are not prepared for this sort of thing for the same reason that traditional telcos aren't prepared for something like every single person in Chicago calling someone in NYC at the same time: That sort of thing doesn't happen.
The $500 PC discussed in the summary only has 512 megabytes of RAM.
What?! 500 USD for a PC with just 512 MB of RAM? Is this a joke?
I think you are missing the key difference:
Standing up in a physical meeting and showing your face and possibly your name while saying this has a much higher chance of actually swaying or supporting anybody's opinions than an anonymous post on slashdot could, regardless of how true or untrue it is.
The AC post on slashdot will probably be dismissed as just a troll, probably even by those who actually believe this.
The speed of an electron is pretty darn slow (on the order of inches per hour, IIRC)
How do Cathode Ray Tube monitors work then? I was under the impression that they're firing a constant stream of electrons from the back to the front. I don't think these vacuum tubes are filled so densely with electrons that this could possibly work in the tiny-game-of-billiards kind of way...
I suppose you're referring to the tables on the page "Comparison of DNSSEC and DNSCurve". Well, I was referring to the big navigation bar on the top of every of those pages.
... And he's using them where they are not supposed to be used.
<table> is only for tabular data.
The most famous example of an operating system that wrote its own TCP/IP stack from scratch would be Linux, but it is not the only one. You're not going to argue that Linux doesn't count because it is irrelevant these days, are you?
I prefer pdflatex.
Theoretically, yes.
But just compare the average seek times of a normal drive from ten years ago with that of a normal disk now. If I recall correctly, ten years ago, average seek times for IDE drives were in the range from 10 to 12 milliseconds or about 5 ms for the expensive SCSI drives, while today it ranges from 8 to 10 ms or around 4 ms for SCSI drives. There is some improvement, sure, but it's nowhere near dramatic as the increases in storage capacity or data throughput.
See: http://xkcd.com/394/
As far as I know, the great firewall of China works by sending RST-packets to both ends of an unwanted connection as soon as one is detected.
Not only will that kill all potential savings from going nuclear, the military ships will have to stay behind as soon as the convoy enters high the sea territory of some other country.
Not bloody likely to ever happen.
True, but saying we will run out of affordable oil is not. Guess why the untapped oil resources you were talking about are untapped - extracting oil from there would have been too expensive, and, at least until now, the extracted oil would have had no chances at being competitive in the market.
Anyway, the main reason oil prices are quite that high these days is the extreme economic growth of countries like India and China. Looking at those, they are both huge and still have lots and lots of room for growth. Peak oil or not, the problem will not go away, it will get much worse. If the US-American industry won't react and adapt, there will be a huge crash sometime in the future.
True, but then again, distances to travel are usually much shorter in Europe, since it's much more densely populated.
64 bit browser?
I thought Solaris userspace (on sparc) was always 32 bit?
Well, gcj produces native machine code, so it's scope is obviously a bit different. The resulting binaries are not very much faster than Java Bytecode, but at least they require a lot less memory.
Also, who ever said the FOSS community can't have two or more different solutions to the same problem?
I have a few ultrasparc machines running linux. There is no working implementation of Java available for them, so I have to without it.
(I could install solaris on them, but I just like linux better.)
Who said flash is that much more resource heavy on the server side?