Storing personal search histories on search engines had brief notoriety about five years ago, with numerous papers published about that time. It took Amazon three years to file a patent on other people's published idea? Boy, they are slow.
He is obviously rather different from your usual autistic person. That means that it may be hard to draw conclusions from what he does about other autists. It's quite possible, for example, that his synaesthesia is not caused by his autism, but simply another manifestation of some underlying organic disease.
Likewise, the fact that he sees shapes when doing math doesn't mean that the shapes are responsible for doing the math, they may simply be cross-talk.
As for his social skills, it's also hard to know whether that's organic or learned; I mean, if you see the world completely differently from everybody else, it's not exactly surprising that the behavior of everybody else may be a bit counterintuitive to you.
Altogether, an interesting case that should remind us how much variety in intelligence and thought there is even among human beings. Just wait until we meet aliens.
With all the outdoor sports (windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing) in the area, sports-minded geeks should be flocking to apply for a job at the new facility
As a supporter of open source, the author accepts to open source the QEMU Accelerator Technology provided a company invests enough money to support the project and to recompense the author from the potential loss of revenue. Interested companies can look at the roadmap and make suggestions to the author.
What matters isn't really the potential loss of revenue, but the expected loss of revenue, i.e., large amount of money multiplied by the low probability of actually succeeding.
I'm sure the accelerator is skillfully written, but I think chances of turning QEMU+Accelerator into something commercially successful are next to nil. Why? Foremost because the market already has VirtualPC and VMware in it, created and maintained by big companies with deep pockets, lots of lawyers, and large patent portfolios. Oh, and then there are coLinux, Xen, and UML that he would be competing with as well.
To compete, he'd have to get startup funding, a management team, developers, support, and, worst of all, sales people: a lot of work, a lot of money, and next to impossible if you don't either get a lot of buzz or know the right people. Then he'd have to develop a product; a product isn't just a working piece of code, it's documentation, training, tutorials, travel, presentations. People don't expect that from FOSS, but they do expect it as soon as they pay a couple of bucks for something. Even if he does all that, the most likely outcome is still that the startup fails. But even if it succeeded, he would probably only end up with a small slice of a moderately successful company (competition and all that), and only after spending several years of his life doing things he probably doesn't enjoy.
I think people underestimate how hard it is to commercialize something, even something that is really good and novel (his software may be really good, but it isn't novel).
I think his best bet would be release it under a dual license (GPL/commercial) right away, while people are paying attention, and build a consulting business and commercial licensing around it. He won't become an instant billionaire that way, but if he has a worthwhile product, it can be a steady source of good money doing mostly what he enjoys. If he sits on the software too long waiting for a sugar daddy, it will be less and less likely that he will be able to get anything out of it.
Oh, and in case you are wondering whether my argument is disingenuous and I just want to get a free virtual machine, it isn't: I already have VirtualPC and VMware, and I actually prefer the various user mode Linux solutions at this point.
Chris Landsea contradicts public statements by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
As far as I can tell, nobody in his letter does Landsea say that he believes that human activity does not cause global warming; he simply believes that the IPCC is being influenced by a political agenda.
Other cranks maintain that global climate change existed in the middle ages,
Global climate change did exist in the Middle Ages. Global climate change due to causes other than human activity exists now. That's not a crank opinion, it's a mainstream opinion. But the fact that global climate change due to natural causes exists all the time doesn't mean that the human contribution that clearly exists right now is harmless or can be ignored.
By analogy, when you have heart disease, your age and genetics are, of course, a contributing factor. But if you are overweight and smoke, your doctor is still going to tell you to go on a diet and stop smoking because it's the only sensible thing to do.
These analyses are based on detailed models of the atmosphere, and those most certainly take into account the different contributions of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. So, scientists can very much distinguish which gases are primarily responsible for causing global warming.
If cow farts were responsible for global warming, Kyoto would be a treaty on cow farts. Furthermore, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere, that would be really swell. Likewise, if deforestation were responsible for global warming, all the more reason to stop deforestation.
Unfortunatly for everybody concerned, it's easy to tell that cow farts are not the primary cause of global warming, CO2 is. CO2 has a long atmospheric half life, which means that we will have to live with the consequences of our stupidity for centuries.
In fact, what climate models really show is that other human activity (e.g., particulate emissions) has so far probably masked the full extent of global warming, so that things may actually already be further advanced than they appear based on our actual climate measurements. (And, in case you are wondering, we can't continue activities contributing to this masking effect because it has been killing huge numbers of people already.)
In some insane idea of "balance", people in the US seem to believe that there are "two sides" to every debate, in perpetuity. Wake up, guys: there are no "two sides" to this story anymore. The question has been settled scientifically. It's been settled for years actually, but this makes it even more clear: Human activity is a significant cause of global warming.
Furthermore, even if there were debate on that point still possible, just the fact that human activity may contribute to global warming is enough to make significant policy changes: when you are facing the possibility of widespread death, you can't afford to act only when you are completely certain about the causes, you eliminate all reasonably likely causes and factors that you can control.
Americans are like a chain smoking, obese man who has been diagnosed with heart disease and told to exercise and go on a diet, and who keeps saying "but there is still a possibility my heart disease is all caused some obscure disease and completely unrelated to smoking and diet".
You're right: applying multiple columns across a schema is not hard. however, swapping around and adding in dimensions isn't what you'd call common (have you seen that before?)
Unless I miss some functionality in the "mSpace model", it seems to me lots of software already has something pretty close. You get most of the functionality when you combine reorderable columns with lexicographic sort (you need a few more display hacks to get context at every level, but that's available in many interfaces through other means). People use that in spreadsheets all the time, explicitly or implicitly. It's a common thing to do in database queries and interfaces as well. In fact, you don't even need reorderable columns--just being able to sort columns one after another with a stable sort gives you a similar result.
As opposed to easy, it's also effective. so why aren't more sites doing this?
I think first of all, that's only a feature a small fraction of users are going to figure out how to use. Furthermore, there is no standard HTML widget implementing anything like it. That has two consequences. First, it makes it a lot of work coding it in DHTML, and for only a small user community, that's not worth it. Second, there is no standard interface that people can get to know and get trained on.
Also, I think that simpler, more common mechanisms just cover most of the cases people encounter: one or more fixed orders/hierarchies, keyword search, and sort-by functions. Very few datasets have, at the same time, such breadth, depth, size, and flexibility that those mechanisms aren't enough.
if you look at the report or the papers at the main site, http://mspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk, you'll see where that "hard part" is happeneing, in terms of coding, rdf and related.
I'm not convinced you are actually addressing the "hard part", but that's probably a long debate.
Spain includes several nations. I think Italy might. Germany used to (before the rise of the nation-state) but probably doesn't these days.
Well, yes, after the common usages of the term "nation" defined in the dictionary, there is eventually one for culturally and linguistically distinct groups within a larger country, and these countries of culturally and linguistically distinct groups in them.
However, that definition is not value neutral. Basque separatists and Lega Norte members might refer to their regions as "nations". If you use that definition, you are making a statement about your own politics and the politics of your region. And that's what I don't like about your statement: the political attitudes you express with it. I don't think you are doing Wales a favor by representing it that way, but that's your problem, not mine. It reinforces the impression that the UK, unfortunately, has a much longer way to go to shed vestiges of nationalism than other members of the EU.
How does that make any sense in your anti-culture/nationality world view?
I like diverse cultures, I just dislike nationalism.
Displaying information in a iTunes-like fashion is the easy part. OK, so they have a nice demo for a few domains, but there have been lots of those kinds of semantic browsers before, for all sorts of domains. The hard part is actually getting the consistent semantic markup for all that information out there and to come up with browsing paradigms that work more generally, instead of having to hand-code something for each domain.
Basically, all these people have done is done a nice demo using modern DHTML, but they have not done any of the hard work.
Simple. Great Britain is an island and ex-country which includes the nations of Wales, England and Scotland. The United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) includes those and Northern Ireland.
That's a bit of terminology that the UK chose domestically to appease the egos of the Welsh and Scotts. But just because the UK redefines words to suit its internal political needs doesn't mean the rest of the world has to buy into that. Some people in the UK may harbor delusions that the UK is "three nations", "a kingdom", "a world power", and has "large overseas possessions", but thinking that doesn't make it so.
For practical purposes and using international terminology, the UK today is just a mid-size nation with a single international presence, one of a bunch of mid-size modern democracies. Its internal subdivisions are no more important internationally than those of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, or the US.
The word, "nation" is not mentioned on the linked page.
It's called the United Nations, not the "United Countries".
No Texas is a state (but probably not a nation) within the country of the US. Wales is a principality and a nation
If the UK chooses to call Wales a "principality and a nation" to pacify certain political elements within its domestic political system, that's its own business. But when you assert to an international audience that Wales is a "nation", you are claiming a certain international status for Wales that goes beyond that of subdivisions of other nations. That's going to meet with resistance, because there is no reason why your political subdivision (with, what, 3 million people?) should have any more recognition or rights internationally than mine just because you arbitrarily decided to call your little snippet of the UK a "nation".
Face it, Wales is just an administrative subdivision of the UK, functionally and socially not much different from a state inside other nations. Anything else you believe is your personal delusions of grandeur.
Then I have to explain to them that Wales is a nation
We can fairly easily determine what a nation is by looking at international bodies like the UN. And there, the Welsh are not represented by themselves, they are represented through the UK. No matter what illusions of independence you want to harbor, Wales is no more a "nation" than Texas is.
There is a current technology frontier of power/performance tradeoffs. If you buy chips from that frontier, then for parallelizable problems, over a wide range of tradeoffs (namely, where the curve is convex), you are better off with more low powered chips. If you buy chips below the technology frontier (either because they are poorly designed or because they are obsolete), your parallel super computer ain't going to be so super.
No, it's not. Microsoft, like every other business in America, lobbies the government. Just like I lobby the government every time I write my Congressman a letter. It's called "representative democracy."
When you lobby Congress, it's a representative democracy.
When a business, which is not a human being or citizen but a legal construct, lobbies Congress, it is something altogether different.
But I would prefer if decisions by our parliament would be binding to our government.
Well, again, I don't know the Danish system, but your parliament probably has that power: they can restrict your government from negotiating, voting, and/or otherwise engage in conduct that would oblige Denmark to implement software patents. The details of how to do this within your constitution (or basic law or whatever it is called) may be legally tricky, but there almost certainly would be a way.
A lot of politics works that way: if everybody agrees, things go easily. If people disagree, the person/group willing to make the greatest sacrifices in some combination of time and money wins. Apparently, this issue isn't big enough for your parliament to raise a stink over. I think they are underestimating the importance and you probably do, too, but that's how life is: imperfect.
In the US at least the Congress has to approve going to war.
Almost all wars the US has fought have been unapproved by Congress. Congress likes it that way: when things go wrong, as they often do, they aren't on record as having voted for it.
Generally, the relationship between compute power and power consumption for a single chip is super-linear. So, for well-parallelizable problems, using more chips that are individually less powerful helps you with overall power consumption.
You're confusing two issues: how your national government is brought into power and how that reflects on the European Commission.
You have a system by which you get a government and, for better or for worse, that government represents you. One of the things that government does is represent your interests in international bodies, including the EU. If you aren't happy with the way you get your government, that's a national problem. You could guillotine your queen and have a revolution, for example. However, most people do actually consider Denmark a democracy. Furthermore, I suspect your government would actually be free to ask the people and hold a referendum on its Commissioners.
If your government isn't acting the way your parliament wants it to, it sounds like your parliament has the option of dissolving it (I don't know how Danish government works), but apparently it doesn't care enough about this issue to take that step. That's not unusual, and it's by design: democracy does not mean that the majority, or even the majority of representatives, gets their will on every issue. It's similar in the US, where the Senate and the House are two separate bodies that control each other, and the executive branch has a lot of separate powers, and they aren't all always consistent with each other.
Historically, the Commission makes sense; giving lots of power to the European Parliament overnight would have been insane since people had no idea of how the politics would work out, while the Commission grew out of the mechanisms all member states were already using for interacting. Again, I don't like many of the decisions the Commission has been making, and it sounds like it's time to give more power to the European Parliament. But the fact that things are the way they are isn't the result of some insane European bureaucracy or anti-democratic movement, it's the prudent and natural way to achieve what the European Union is trying to achieve. European Parliament could easily have turned out to be a bunch of anti-democratic hoodlums and kooks, in which case we'd all be grateful that we didn't hand over power over our lives to them.
The European parliament is a fairly untested body as such bodies go (the first direct elections were held in 1979) and it's not clear that voters pay much attention to its election (voter turnout is generally low). Therefore, it was prudent not to transfer too much power to it right away.
The Commission itself is unelected, but it is composed of representatives from democratically elected member governments. That's no different from when a group of foreign ministers get together and hammer out agreements that then get ratified by the national governments. You don't scream bloody murder because your foreign minister represents you internationally, you kind of expect it.
Having said that, I think that the European Parliament is proving itself, while the Commission is demonstrating that it is out of touch, on many issues. So, maybe it is time to shift more power to the parliament. But I understand why things haven't started out that way.
If Microsoft is getting so worried that people might be running their applications under Wine, then Wine must be getting pretty good. It's been a while that I have checked it out--I'll install the latest version and play around with it.
It happens quite frequently that the web cam that's taking the pictures is itself stolen. That's the main point of including off-site transmission of images from a web cam.
Note that off-site FTP may not be as safe (because the thief may be able to recover the FTP password from the webcam and delete the images), but off-site E-mail should be.
Given the way this thing works, it has to sit somewhere in the middle of the room. That is not a good place for a display or TV; it is an even worse place for a transparent piece of glass (because you are going to run into it and knock it over).
Slashdot Mirror
Storing personal search histories on search engines had brief notoriety about five years ago, with numerous papers published about that time. It took Amazon three years to file a patent on other people's published idea? Boy, they are slow.
He is obviously rather different from your usual autistic person. That means that it may be hard to draw conclusions from what he does about other autists. It's quite possible, for example, that his synaesthesia is not caused by his autism, but simply another manifestation of some underlying organic disease.
Likewise, the fact that he sees shapes when doing math doesn't mean that the shapes are responsible for doing the math, they may simply be cross-talk.
As for his social skills, it's also hard to know whether that's organic or learned; I mean, if you see the world completely differently from everybody else, it's not exactly surprising that the behavior of everybody else may be a bit counterintuitive to you.
Altogether, an interesting case that should remind us how much variety in intelligence and thought there is even among human beings. Just wait until we meet aliens.
The magnetar's radiation scrambled the servers and that caused the duplication. No, really.
With all the outdoor sports (windsurfing, hiking, mountain biking, skiing) in the area, sports-minded geeks should be flocking to apply for a job at the new facility
;-)
All two of them
The author writes:
As a supporter of open source, the author accepts to open source the QEMU Accelerator Technology provided a company invests enough money to support the project and to recompense the author from the potential loss of revenue. Interested companies can look at the roadmap and make suggestions to the author.
What matters isn't really the potential loss of revenue, but the expected loss of revenue, i.e., large amount of money multiplied by the low probability of actually succeeding.
I'm sure the accelerator is skillfully written, but I think chances of turning QEMU+Accelerator into something commercially successful are next to nil. Why? Foremost because the market already has VirtualPC and VMware in it, created and maintained by big companies with deep pockets, lots of lawyers, and large patent portfolios. Oh, and then there are coLinux, Xen, and UML that he would be competing with as well.
To compete, he'd have to get startup funding, a management team, developers, support, and, worst of all, sales people: a lot of work, a lot of money, and next to impossible if you don't either get a lot of buzz or know the right people. Then he'd have to develop a product; a product isn't just a working piece of code, it's documentation, training, tutorials, travel, presentations. People don't expect that from FOSS, but they do expect it as soon as they pay a couple of bucks for something. Even if he does all that, the most likely outcome is still that the startup fails. But even if it succeeded, he would probably only end up with a small slice of a moderately successful company (competition and all that), and only after spending several years of his life doing things he probably doesn't enjoy.
I think people underestimate how hard it is to commercialize something, even something that is really good and novel (his software may be really good, but it isn't novel).
I think his best bet would be release it under a dual license (GPL/commercial) right away, while people are paying attention, and build a consulting business and commercial licensing around it. He won't become an instant billionaire that way, but if he has a worthwhile product, it can be a steady source of good money doing mostly what he enjoys. If he sits on the software too long waiting for a sugar daddy, it will be less and less likely that he will be able to get anything out of it.
Oh, and in case you are wondering whether my argument is disingenuous and I just want to get a free virtual machine, it isn't: I already have VirtualPC and VMware, and I actually prefer the various user mode Linux solutions at this point.
Luma is still too complex for day-to-day needs (well, then so is LDAP, but the UI should really simplify that).
Chris Landsea contradicts public statements by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
As far as I can tell, nobody in his letter does Landsea say that he believes that human activity does not cause global warming; he simply believes that the IPCC is being influenced by a political agenda.
Other cranks maintain that global climate change existed in the middle ages,
Global climate change did exist in the Middle Ages. Global climate change due to causes other than human activity exists now. That's not a crank opinion, it's a mainstream opinion. But the fact that global climate change due to natural causes exists all the time doesn't mean that the human contribution that clearly exists right now is harmless or can be ignored.
By analogy, when you have heart disease, your age and genetics are, of course, a contributing factor. But if you are overweight and smoke, your doctor is still going to tell you to go on a diet and stop smoking because it's the only sensible thing to do.
These analyses are based on detailed models of the atmosphere, and those most certainly take into account the different contributions of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. So, scientists can very much distinguish which gases are primarily responsible for causing global warming.
If cow farts were responsible for global warming, Kyoto would be a treaty on cow farts. Furthermore, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere, that would be really swell. Likewise, if deforestation were responsible for global warming, all the more reason to stop deforestation.
Unfortunatly for everybody concerned, it's easy to tell that cow farts are not the primary cause of global warming, CO2 is. CO2 has a long atmospheric half life, which means that we will have to live with the consequences of our stupidity for centuries.
In fact, what climate models really show is that other human activity (e.g., particulate emissions) has so far probably masked the full extent of global warming, so that things may actually already be further advanced than they appear based on our actual climate measurements. (And, in case you are wondering, we can't continue activities contributing to this masking effect because it has been killing huge numbers of people already.)
In some insane idea of "balance", people in the US seem to believe that there are "two sides" to every debate, in perpetuity. Wake up, guys: there are no "two sides" to this story anymore. The question has been settled scientifically. It's been settled for years actually, but this makes it even more clear: Human activity is a significant cause of global warming.
Furthermore, even if there were debate on that point still possible, just the fact that human activity may contribute to global warming is enough to make significant policy changes: when you are facing the possibility of widespread death, you can't afford to act only when you are completely certain about the causes, you eliminate all reasonably likely causes and factors that you can control.
Americans are like a chain smoking, obese man who has been diagnosed with heart disease and told to exercise and go on a diet, and who keeps saying "but there is still a possibility my heart disease is all caused some obscure disease and completely unrelated to smoking and diet".
You're right: applying multiple columns across a schema is not hard. however, swapping around and adding in dimensions isn't what you'd call common (have you seen that before?)
Unless I miss some functionality in the "mSpace model", it seems to me lots of software already has something pretty close. You get most of the functionality when you combine reorderable columns with lexicographic sort (you need a few more display hacks to get context at every level, but that's available in many interfaces through other means). People use that in spreadsheets all the time, explicitly or implicitly. It's a common thing to do in database queries and interfaces as well. In fact, you don't even need reorderable columns--just being able to sort columns one after another with a stable sort gives you a similar result.
As opposed to easy, it's also effective. so why aren't more sites doing this?
I think first of all, that's only a feature a small fraction of users are going to figure out how to use. Furthermore, there is no standard HTML widget implementing anything like it. That has two consequences. First, it makes it a lot of work coding it in DHTML, and for only a small user community, that's not worth it. Second, there is no standard interface that people can get to know and get trained on.
Also, I think that simpler, more common mechanisms just cover most of the cases people encounter: one or more fixed orders/hierarchies, keyword search, and sort-by functions. Very few datasets have, at the same time, such breadth, depth, size, and flexibility that those mechanisms aren't enough.
if you look at the report or the papers at the main site, http://mspace.ecs.soton.ac.uk, you'll see where that "hard part" is happeneing, in terms of coding, rdf and related.
I'm not convinced you are actually addressing the "hard part", but that's probably a long debate.
Spain includes several nations. I think Italy might. Germany used to (before the rise of the nation-state) but probably doesn't these days.
Well, yes, after the common usages of the term "nation" defined in the dictionary, there is eventually one for culturally and linguistically distinct groups within a larger country, and these countries of culturally and linguistically distinct groups in them.
However, that definition is not value neutral. Basque separatists and Lega Norte members might refer to their regions as "nations". If you use that definition, you are making a statement about your own politics and the politics of your region. And that's what I don't like about your statement: the political attitudes you express with it. I don't think you are doing Wales a favor by representing it that way, but that's your problem, not mine. It reinforces the impression that the UK, unfortunately, has a much longer way to go to shed vestiges of nationalism than other members of the EU.
How does that make any sense in your anti-culture/nationality world view?
I like diverse cultures, I just dislike nationalism.
Displaying information in a iTunes-like fashion is the easy part. OK, so they have a nice demo for a few domains, but there have been lots of those kinds of semantic browsers before, for all sorts of domains. The hard part is actually getting the consistent semantic markup for all that information out there and to come up with browsing paradigms that work more generally, instead of having to hand-code something for each domain.
Basically, all these people have done is done a nice demo using modern DHTML, but they have not done any of the hard work.
Simple. Great Britain is an island and ex-country which includes the nations of Wales, England and Scotland. The United Kingdom (of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) includes those and Northern Ireland.
That's a bit of terminology that the UK chose domestically to appease the egos of the Welsh and Scotts. But just because the UK redefines words to suit its internal political needs doesn't mean the rest of the world has to buy into that. Some people in the UK may harbor delusions that the UK is "three nations", "a kingdom", "a world power", and has "large overseas possessions", but thinking that doesn't make it so.
For practical purposes and using international terminology, the UK today is just a mid-size nation with a single international presence, one of a bunch of mid-size modern democracies. Its internal subdivisions are no more important internationally than those of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, or the US.
The word, "nation" is not mentioned on the linked page.
It's called the United Nations, not the "United Countries".
No Texas is a state (but probably not a nation) within the country of the US. Wales is a principality and a nation
If the UK chooses to call Wales a "principality and a nation" to pacify certain political elements within its domestic political system, that's its own business. But when you assert to an international audience that Wales is a "nation", you are claiming a certain international status for Wales that goes beyond that of subdivisions of other nations. That's going to meet with resistance, because there is no reason why your political subdivision (with, what, 3 million people?) should have any more recognition or rights internationally than mine just because you arbitrarily decided to call your little snippet of the UK a "nation".
Face it, Wales is just an administrative subdivision of the UK, functionally and socially not much different from a state inside other nations. Anything else you believe is your personal delusions of grandeur.
Then I have to explain to them that Wales is a nation
We can fairly easily determine what a nation is by looking at international bodies like the UN. And there, the Welsh are not represented by themselves, they are represented through the UK. No matter what illusions of independence you want to harbor, Wales is no more a "nation" than Texas is.
There is a current technology frontier of power/performance tradeoffs. If you buy chips from that frontier, then for parallelizable problems, over a wide range of tradeoffs (namely, where the curve is convex), you are better off with more low powered chips. If you buy chips below the technology frontier (either because they are poorly designed or because they are obsolete), your parallel super computer ain't going to be so super.
But it's only one factor in the equation.
There are actually two equations:
total-perf = #proc * perf-per-proc
total-power = #proc * power-per-proc
You get to choose different (perf-per-proc,power-per-proc) pairs.
Go work it out yourself; you can do it.
Bzzt.
That must have been the sound of a thought misfiring in your head.
No, it's not. Microsoft, like every other business in America, lobbies the government. Just like I lobby the government every time I write my Congressman a letter. It's called "representative democracy."
When you lobby Congress, it's a representative democracy.
When a business, which is not a human being or citizen but a legal construct, lobbies Congress, it is something altogether different.
Yes, viruses designed by idiots for computer systems with security evidently designed by morons. How fitting.
But I would prefer if decisions by our parliament would be binding to our government.
Well, again, I don't know the Danish system, but your parliament probably has that power: they can restrict your government from negotiating, voting, and/or otherwise engage in conduct that would oblige Denmark to implement software patents. The details of how to do this within your constitution (or basic law or whatever it is called) may be legally tricky, but there almost certainly would be a way.
A lot of politics works that way: if everybody agrees, things go easily. If people disagree, the person/group willing to make the greatest sacrifices in some combination of time and money wins. Apparently, this issue isn't big enough for your parliament to raise a stink over. I think they are underestimating the importance and you probably do, too, but that's how life is: imperfect.
In the US at least the Congress has to approve going to war.
Almost all wars the US has fought have been unapproved by Congress. Congress likes it that way: when things go wrong, as they often do, they aren't on record as having voted for it.
Generally, the relationship between compute power and power consumption for a single chip is super-linear. So, for well-parallelizable problems, using more chips that are individually less powerful helps you with overall power consumption.
You're confusing two issues: how your national government is brought into power and how that reflects on the European Commission.
You have a system by which you get a government and, for better or for worse, that government represents you. One of the things that government does is represent your interests in international bodies, including the EU. If you aren't happy with the way you get your government, that's a national problem. You could guillotine your queen and have a revolution, for example. However, most people do actually consider Denmark a democracy. Furthermore, I suspect your government would actually be free to ask the people and hold a referendum on its Commissioners.
If your government isn't acting the way your parliament wants it to, it sounds like your parliament has the option of dissolving it (I don't know how Danish government works), but apparently it doesn't care enough about this issue to take that step. That's not unusual, and it's by design: democracy does not mean that the majority, or even the majority of representatives, gets their will on every issue. It's similar in the US, where the Senate and the House are two separate bodies that control each other, and the executive branch has a lot of separate powers, and they aren't all always consistent with each other.
Historically, the Commission makes sense; giving lots of power to the European Parliament overnight would have been insane since people had no idea of how the politics would work out, while the Commission grew out of the mechanisms all member states were already using for interacting. Again, I don't like many of the decisions the Commission has been making, and it sounds like it's time to give more power to the European Parliament. But the fact that things are the way they are isn't the result of some insane European bureaucracy or anti-democratic movement, it's the prudent and natural way to achieve what the European Union is trying to achieve. European Parliament could easily have turned out to be a bunch of anti-democratic hoodlums and kooks, in which case we'd all be grateful that we didn't hand over power over our lives to them.
The European parliament is a fairly untested body as such bodies go (the first direct elections were held in 1979) and it's not clear that voters pay much attention to its election (voter turnout is generally low). Therefore, it was prudent not to transfer too much power to it right away.
The Commission itself is unelected, but it is composed of representatives from democratically elected member governments. That's no different from when a group of foreign ministers get together and hammer out agreements that then get ratified by the national governments. You don't scream bloody murder because your foreign minister represents you internationally, you kind of expect it.
Having said that, I think that the European Parliament is proving itself, while the Commission is demonstrating that it is out of touch, on many issues. So, maybe it is time to shift more power to the parliament. But I understand why things haven't started out that way.
If Microsoft is getting so worried that people might be running their applications under Wine, then Wine must be getting pretty good. It's been a while that I have checked it out--I'll install the latest version and play around with it.
It happens quite frequently that the web cam that's taking the pictures is itself stolen. That's the main point of including off-site transmission of images from a web cam.
Note that off-site FTP may not be as safe (because the thief may be able to recover the FTP password from the webcam and delete the images), but off-site E-mail should be.
Given the way this thing works, it has to sit somewhere in the middle of the room. That is not a good place for a display or TV; it is an even worse place for a transparent piece of glass (because you are going to run into it and knock it over).