Singapore is a prosperous society with a government (a parliamentary democracy) that is generally considered one of the least corrupt in the world. It is prosperous, modern, clean, and safe.
I have visited Singapore a few times, and my impression is that they have been far more successful at integrating different races, cultures, and ethnic groups into their society than the US. I don't like restrictions on free speech, and I doubt anything like that would make much of a difference here, but they are a different society, they have the right to self-determination, and whatever they are doing seems to be working for them.
So, keep that in mind before criticizing Singapore, and perhaps worry more about our domestic racial problems than restrictions on free speech in Singapore. If anything, we could learn something from Singapore.
A) It's got reasonably secure encryption -- unlike practically every other chat and VoIP client out there.
You cannot trust encryption in closed source software.
As decentralized as it is, it requires minimal resources -- it hits one IP in Denmark and it's on its way.
How is "one IP in Denmark" decentralized? Ohphone is better than that (IP-to-IP).
It has 40+ million users, of which 3 million are online at any given time, and the numbers are growing.
Yeah, and those 40+ million users are a couple of clicks away from installing the next great thing.
Controlling the #1 PC-to-PC VoIP client out there gives access to all kinds of non-obvious revenue streams, very few of which have anything to do with auctions.
I think it's going to be short-lived. Congrats to the Skype founders for getting out while the company was still worth something.
BBC speculates that eBay will use Skype to allow sellers and bidders to communicate via voice;
They can do that already, for free, using any of the IM and VoIP solutions that are out there. eBay didn't have to buy Skype for that. I suspect most sellers just don't want to be bothered, otherwise they'd list an IM address and phone number.
I'm not even sure why Skype is considered so valuable; the technology is commonplace, and VoIP-to-POTS gateways are offered by many companies. And between the Telcos and Microsoft, any competitor is going to be squashed.
They're lucky if they hit their target area within a few dozen miles; they are not going to be able to take down a shuttlecraft to the exact coordinates. Maybe in the 22nd century.
Where does the Macintosh OS fit in to your scheme of things? By all measurements it seems to have been built with user friendliness in mind, however it's also generally regarded as being pretty secure by design also.
People keep saying that, and you even say there are "measurements". If you use a term like "measurements", surely somebody measured OS X usability relative to other systems. Can you point to such published measurements?
I regularly get EDGE speeds here in the Bay Area. And people ar selling phones for listening to streaming audio, watching TV and video conferencing over the air, together with the unlimited data rate plans you need. So, I'm sorry if you have bad connectivity, but that's no reason for everybody to stay in the stone age.
Isn't the point behind this phone that it can play iTunes music store music, which others can't? If you really want a single device to carry around, than that would make it your only choice, wheel or no wheel.
The polarity of water is a, if not the (biochemists feel free to correct me, i'm synthetic org.), major factor in protein folding;
Proteins fold no matter what environment they are in, they simply fold differently in different environments. There is no reason to believe that folding in solvents other than water would be any worse for evolving life than folding in water.
the ability of water to dissolve ionic compounds is also vitally important, e.g. nerve function
Organisms on Titan may dispense with all those inconvenient ions and channels and instead just use efficient organic conductors, maybe even superconductors, an option that evolution didn't have in the hot, conductive, and corrosive environments where life evolved one earth.
a nonpolar organic solvent is a *lot* less likely, if not impossible, to support life.
There is no scientific basis for such statements. It's not even clear what "less likely" means
Roughly speaking, chemical process speeds are related exponentially to temperature.
Yes. What that means is that reactions that are "just right" on earth will be too slow on Titan. But there are almost certainly equivalent reactions that would be too fast at our temperatures but just right on Titan. They wouldn't even have to be radically different.
It's because people like her run around like headless chicken after an attack that the terrorists are winning: they are achieving their goal of creating terror. In reality, even if we did nothing to combat terrorism, your risk of dying from a terrorist attack is still lower than your risk of dying from that truly terrifying weapon of mass destruction, the automobile.
I'd rather take a chance of 1:100000 of being blown up by a terrorist than the near certainty of having "Dame" Eliza dig around in my personal life. Her call is particularly inappropriate because when the UK government killed that innocent Brazilian, they had all the information they needed, they just mishandled it and drew the wrong conclusions from it. We have no reason to believe that the same institutions would handle other personal information more responsibly; maybe they'll start shooting everybody who makes a suspicious phone call to an Islamic country, or maybe just any country with dark skinned people?
It's not even so much that I think the sky will fall if governments introduce those measures; I won't be affected, and neither will most other people. Who will be affected are minorities and people the government already doesn't like. But it's the mindset that produces such proposals that is so scary.
In fact, rather than defending against terrorism, the current US and UK governments are complicit in it: they create an atmosphere of fear and terror to justify eroding civil liberties, redirect funds towards their business buddies, and increase chances for reelection through "the national security issue". Don't get taken in by them; spread the word and elect a government next time that puts civil liberties and democracies first.
Of course, the UK is already at the end of the rope, given that these people already represent the supposedly "liberal" government. Looks like 1984 was just a couple of decades late.
until recently' and speaks of 'an order of magnitude more transcripts than genes', suggesting that more actual coding is done through RNA than DNA.
No, that's not what it suggests. The coding is still done (almost) exclusively through DNA; we know that because we can synthesize DNA (and DNA only) from scratch and have it work.
What they are talking about is that RNA isn't just a short-lived intermediate in the cell, but has many other functions. That's been known for several decades, although people are only now slowly waking up to how important and widespread those functions are.
As a rough analogy, you can think of DNA as the disk drive of a cell and RNA as its RAM. The disk drive contains all the information you need to boot, but RAM is where most of the action happens, and a lot of stuff on disk is copied into RAM, often several times.
As the article points out, this brings the question Pluto's "planet" status to the fore.
Not particularly; we still don't have any more data to decide Pluto's status.
The best definition of "planet" I have seen is a body that orbits a star and is large enough to have assumed and retained a nearly spherical shape under its own gravity. According to that, Pluto is probably a planet, but we won't know until we get closer.
Before you flame me for being a MS zealot, the Vista machine is next to my Slackware 10.1 box and my really old Pentium 166 that is installing SCO OpenServer 5.0.2
To render the screen in the GPU requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy medium, but you'll actually see benefit from more.
But semi-transparent accelerated windows are sooooo cool, and if they can't figure out how to do them any other way, that's just what you have to live with.
ESR's response somehow seems fitting for a company run by monkey boy and rain man.
Anyway, we have plenty of historical precedent for companies like Microsoft and it's pretty clear what's going to happen: the company is going to become afflicted with the usual big-company malaise, while its founders will be remembered as intellectual robber barons.
The claim was that Microsoft was copying Apple, and that's just wrong. All those features existed long before Apple started bundling them.
How about open source compatibility? You know, something like SSH, Apache, X11, xterm/bash/shell scripting, and so on?
Except, of course, that Apple hates X11 and that Apple keeps replacing parts of BSD UNIX with their own stuff (Netinfo, init, HFS+, etc.). As for the other stuff, there are three UNIX-like environments for Windows: one that ships from Microsoft (free, I believe), UWin, and Cygwin. Microsoft representatives have also announced the possibility of a Linux kernel interface, allowing arbitrary Linux executables to run on Windows.
How about Expose
small variation on existing window management tools; there were experimental X11 versions of this stuff in the 1980's, but they weren't shipped because of patents by HP
and Dashboard
Konfabulator rip-off
and a fast utility to find files? How about "Smart Folders" that store your searches (not as seemingly useless once you start using them).
various desktop search utilities for UNIX and Windows--has existed for years
How about Applescript/Automator?
Apple's rip-off of visual scripting and programming utilities
How about Rendezvous/Bonjour?
Apple's rip-off of a decade's worth of work in network-based PnP; was already implemented in Windows XP (but not as widely used) before Tiger even shipped
How about tabbed browsing?
Apple's rip-off of Firefox, which ripped it off from various research projects.
Sure you can download third party programs to get some of this stuff but many of these things are in modern operating systems out of the box.
So, you agree that Apple ripped off those features; their only contribution is to bundle them with the OS.
Let's call a spade a spade: when companies bundle this stuff into the OS, it's anti-competitive behavior. It's anti-competitive whether Microsoft does it or whether Apple does it.
M$ is just waiting until Mac OS X comes out on x86, then it'll be easier for them to copy things over to Windows OS X.
See above: since Apple didn't invent those features, Microsoft doesn't have to copy them from Apple--they just copy them from the same sources Apple copied them from.
"it's bad enough that microsoft takes 5 years to release beta software that's probably going to be 50% capable of mimicing os x."
Actually, even Windows XP is already 100% capable of "mimicking" Tiger: desktop search, graphical scripting, widgets, RSS, AV chat, etc., it's all there as add-ons, from multiple sources.
The only thing Apple is doing differently is that they are bundling all this stuff with their OS.
The iPod shuffle is a pretty lousy MP3 player and a pretty lousy USB storage device: it has no display and it keeps music and data files in separate areas.
You can get lots of USB MP3 players that let you play MP3 files from the file system and that have a display.
Slashdot Mirror
Singapore is a prosperous society with a government (a parliamentary democracy) that is generally considered one of the least corrupt in the world. It is prosperous, modern, clean, and safe.
I have visited Singapore a few times, and my impression is that they have been far more successful at integrating different races, cultures, and ethnic groups into their society than the US. I don't like restrictions on free speech, and I doubt anything like that would make much of a difference here, but they are a different society, they have the right to self-determination, and whatever they are doing seems to be working for them.
So, keep that in mind before criticizing Singapore, and perhaps worry more about our domestic racial problems than restrictions on free speech in Singapore. If anything, we could learn something from Singapore.
A) It's got reasonably secure encryption -- unlike practically every other chat and VoIP client out there.
You cannot trust encryption in closed source software.
As decentralized as it is, it requires minimal resources -- it hits one IP in Denmark and it's on its way.
How is "one IP in Denmark" decentralized? Ohphone is better than that (IP-to-IP).
It has 40+ million users, of which 3 million are online at any given time, and the numbers are growing.
Yeah, and those 40+ million users are a couple of clicks away from installing the next great thing.
Controlling the #1 PC-to-PC VoIP client out there gives access to all kinds of non-obvious revenue streams, very few of which have anything to do with auctions.
I think it's going to be short-lived. Congrats to the Skype founders for getting out while the company was still worth something.
There are various polishes for plastic surfaces; shop around.
You can also put a Palm screen protector on it. That's why I do for most of my shiny electronics (you can't see it at all).
I high-school intern
You Chinese too?
USB2 is plenty fast to handle a Nano and a disk drive even if they happen to be on the same hub.
Also, since you are convinced that FW is so great, just get a FW disk drive and the fact that Nano runs on USB2 won't affect you at all.
BBC speculates that eBay will use Skype to allow sellers and bidders to communicate via voice;
They can do that already, for free, using any of the IM and VoIP solutions that are out there. eBay didn't have to buy Skype for that. I suspect most sellers just don't want to be bothered, otherwise they'd list an IM address and phone number.
I'm not even sure why Skype is considered so valuable; the technology is commonplace, and VoIP-to-POTS gateways are offered by many companies. And between the Telcos and Microsoft, any competitor is going to be squashed.
They're lucky if they hit their target area within a few dozen miles; they are not going to be able to take down a shuttlecraft to the exact coordinates. Maybe in the 22nd century.
Where does the Macintosh OS fit in to your scheme of things? By all measurements it seems to have been built with user friendliness in mind, however it's also generally regarded as being pretty secure by design also.
People keep saying that, and you even say there are "measurements". If you use a term like "measurements", surely somebody measured OS X usability relative to other systems. Can you point to such published measurements?
I regularly get EDGE speeds here in the Bay Area. And people ar selling phones for listening to streaming audio, watching TV and video conferencing over the air, together with the unlimited data rate plans you need. So, I'm sorry if you have bad connectivity, but that's no reason for everybody to stay in the stone age.
Isn't the point behind this phone that it can play iTunes music store music, which others can't? If you really want a single device to carry around, than that would make it your only choice, wheel or no wheel.
as far as I know, there was never any "analyses" that life could not exist around hot vents on Earth
People had all sorts of crazy ideas where life couldn't exist. 70C used to be considered the limit, for example, even for simple organisms.
I don't think any well-recognized expert absolutely rejected it before the observations.
Well, your faith in "well-recognized experts" is charming but misplaced. Well-recognized experts used to think the earth was flat.
Yeah, the same kind of "analyses" that have concluded that things can't live near hot vents, in oil, or inside ice or rock.
Just to be on the safe side, everybody will buy the most expensive version they can afford. It's called "differential pricing".
The polarity of water is a, if not the (biochemists feel free to correct me, i'm synthetic org.), major factor in protein folding;
Proteins fold no matter what environment they are in, they simply fold differently in different environments. There is no reason to believe that folding in solvents other than water would be any worse for evolving life than folding in water.
the ability of water to dissolve ionic compounds is also vitally important, e.g. nerve function
Organisms on Titan may dispense with all those inconvenient ions and channels and instead just use efficient organic conductors, maybe even superconductors, an option that evolution didn't have in the hot, conductive, and corrosive environments where life evolved one earth.
a nonpolar organic solvent is a *lot* less likely, if not impossible, to support life.
There is no scientific basis for such statements. It's not even clear what "less likely" means
Roughly speaking, chemical process speeds are related exponentially to temperature.
Yes. What that means is that reactions that are "just right" on earth will be too slow on Titan. But there are almost certainly equivalent reactions that would be too fast at our temperatures but just right on Titan. They wouldn't even have to be radically different.
It's because people like her run around like headless chicken after an attack that the terrorists are winning: they are achieving their goal of creating terror. In reality, even if we did nothing to combat terrorism, your risk of dying from a terrorist attack is still lower than your risk of dying from that truly terrifying weapon of mass destruction, the automobile.
I'd rather take a chance of 1:100000 of being blown up by a terrorist than the near certainty of having "Dame" Eliza dig around in my personal life. Her call is particularly inappropriate because when the UK government killed that innocent Brazilian, they had all the information they needed, they just mishandled it and drew the wrong conclusions from it. We have no reason to believe that the same institutions would handle other personal information more responsibly; maybe they'll start shooting everybody who makes a suspicious phone call to an Islamic country, or maybe just any country with dark skinned people?
It's not even so much that I think the sky will fall if governments introduce those measures; I won't be affected, and neither will most other people. Who will be affected are minorities and people the government already doesn't like. But it's the mindset that produces such proposals that is so scary.
In fact, rather than defending against terrorism, the current US and UK governments are complicit in it: they create an atmosphere of fear and terror to justify eroding civil liberties, redirect funds towards their business buddies, and increase chances for reelection through "the national security issue". Don't get taken in by them; spread the word and elect a government next time that puts civil liberties and democracies first.
Of course, the UK is already at the end of the rope, given that these people already represent the supposedly "liberal" government. Looks like 1984 was just a couple of decades late.
until recently' and speaks of 'an order of magnitude more transcripts than genes', suggesting that more actual coding is done through RNA than DNA.
No, that's not what it suggests. The coding is still done (almost) exclusively through DNA; we know that because we can synthesize DNA (and DNA only) from scratch and have it work.
What they are talking about is that RNA isn't just a short-lived intermediate in the cell, but has many other functions. That's been known for several decades, although people are only now slowly waking up to how important and widespread those functions are.
As a rough analogy, you can think of DNA as the disk drive of a cell and RNA as its RAM. The disk drive contains all the information you need to boot, but RAM is where most of the action happens, and a lot of stuff on disk is copied into RAM, often several times.
As the article points out, this brings the question Pluto's "planet" status to the fore.
Not particularly; we still don't have any more data to decide Pluto's status.
The best definition of "planet" I have seen is a body that orbits a star and is large enough to have assumed and retained a nearly spherical shape under its own gravity. According to that, Pluto is probably a planet, but we won't know until we get closer.
Before you flame me for being a MS zealot, the Vista machine is next to my Slackware 10.1 box and my really old Pentium 166 that is installing SCO OpenServer 5.0.2
Obviously, you are an MS zealot.
To render the screen in the GPU requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy medium, but you'll actually see benefit from more.
But semi-transparent accelerated windows are sooooo cool, and if they can't figure out how to do them any other way, that's just what you have to live with.
Mars needs Women, not men.
What a pompous ass.
ESR's response somehow seems fitting for a company run by monkey boy and rain man.
Anyway, we have plenty of historical precedent for companies like Microsoft and it's pretty clear what's going to happen: the company is going to become afflicted with the usual big-company malaise, while its founders will be remembered as intellectual robber barons.
The claim was that Microsoft was copying Apple, and that's just wrong. All those features existed long before Apple started bundling them.
How about open source compatibility? You know, something like SSH, Apache, X11, xterm/bash/shell scripting, and so on?
Except, of course, that Apple hates X11 and that Apple keeps replacing parts of BSD UNIX with their own stuff (Netinfo, init, HFS+, etc.). As for the other stuff, there are three UNIX-like environments for Windows: one that ships from Microsoft (free, I believe), UWin, and Cygwin. Microsoft representatives have also announced the possibility of a Linux kernel interface, allowing arbitrary Linux executables to run on Windows.
How about Expose
small variation on existing window management tools; there were experimental X11 versions of this stuff in the 1980's, but they weren't shipped because of patents by HP
and Dashboard
Konfabulator rip-off
and a fast utility to find files? How about "Smart Folders" that store your searches (not as seemingly useless once you start using them).
various desktop search utilities for UNIX and Windows--has existed for years
How about Applescript/Automator?
Apple's rip-off of visual scripting and programming utilities
How about Rendezvous/Bonjour?
Apple's rip-off of a decade's worth of work in network-based PnP; was already implemented in Windows XP (but not as widely used) before Tiger even shipped
How about tabbed browsing?
Apple's rip-off of Firefox, which ripped it off from various research projects.
Sure you can download third party programs to get some of this stuff but many of these things are in modern operating systems out of the box.
So, you agree that Apple ripped off those features; their only contribution is to bundle them with the OS.
Let's call a spade a spade: when companies bundle this stuff into the OS, it's anti-competitive behavior. It's anti-competitive whether Microsoft does it or whether Apple does it.
M$ is just waiting until Mac OS X comes out on x86, then it'll be easier for them to copy things over to Windows OS X.
See above: since Apple didn't invent those features, Microsoft doesn't have to copy them from Apple--they just copy them from the same sources Apple copied them from.
"it's bad enough that microsoft takes 5 years to release beta software that's probably going to be 50% capable of mimicing os x."
Actually, even Windows XP is already 100% capable of "mimicking" Tiger: desktop search, graphical scripting, widgets, RSS, AV chat, etc., it's all there as add-ons, from multiple sources.
The only thing Apple is doing differently is that they are bundling all this stuff with their OS.
The iPod shuffle is a pretty lousy MP3 player and a pretty lousy USB storage device: it has no display and it keeps music and data files in separate areas.
You can get lots of USB MP3 players that let you play MP3 files from the file system and that have a display.