You're right, it's not free speech, it's not a step down the slippery slope, it's not to-may-to versus to-mah-to. It's children, some of them *babies*, being used for sexual purposes. From what I knew as of 2005, the problem was in BBS's, not in usenet, unless steganography is now widely being used to conceal photos within other photos?
ISP's? Hell, I went after an individual in Alabama in 1998 for CP. The local PD were clueless, the FBI (in Cincinatti, Cleveland, and Tuscaloosa) had gone home for the weekend, and the ISP, when they found out what was being hosted on their service, *wiped the server hard drive*, destroying the evidence.
Don't leave enforcement to ISP's. Start with the international payment services and credit card companies. Hold them liable for honoring charges to CP sites. Educate citizens that *viewing* CP is a felony. Standardize national laws regarding CP.
The Saifu looks like some kind of Klingon battle implement. It's even an appropriate color. The name might have some kind of nice meaning, but it sounds to me like Ginsu.
Speaking of knives, the notebook with the pull-out keyboard is clever, but how sturdy would it be, and why does it remind me of a high tech cutting board?
The dual screen notebook is a thick, clunky piece of over-engineering. It looks like a Toughbook, and I'd expect a 5.25 inch hard drive or two could fit in that case. It looks like it came from behind the Iron Curtain. There has to be a Soviet Russia joke in there somewhere.
The solar notebook is also quite thick. Didn't TFA say it was actually designed by someone who used to live in an Iron Curtain country? It has that Trabant look. It also looks like it might be pretty easy to throw through a window. Is it insurgency friendly?
The "car friendly" notebook. No. I can picture some idiot driving down the road checking their email and typing on their keyscreen. We have a hard enough time with cell phone drivers. Please, let's not throw another device at them.
If you want something that looks beautiful and is revolutionary, take something like the Mac Air clamshell, remove the hinge, toss the "body", and have a tablet the form and thickness of the Air's display. Make it watertight with an accessible but sealed polycarbonate shell. Make certain it has a multicore CPU, an OLED display surface, solid state storage, with a voice/gestural/touch interface *or* wireless keyboard and mouse for us Luddites. Recharge it on an inductive charging surface, and give it a snap-on easel for easy viewing.
Make certain it always knows "up" (the term escapes me at the moment, someone remind me.)
I'd buy one. I wouldn't purchase any of the other ones shown in this article.
Ya gotta love AMD's spirit. I was all AMD until Core2. Still, AMD has good stuff in the works, it's just whether or not they'll be able to sustain themselves until it comes to fruition. I think they will -- I seem to remember this same type of discussion right before Hammer came out.
Most of the space occupied by the atom is exactly that, space, nothing more. The electron cloud is a fuzzy region of probability, not a solid thing. The "side" of an atom must be defined by a force, not a particle?
When I finally filed a complaint with my state's attorney general the runaround ended (within a week) and I got a very prompt replacement, a written apology, and a substantial gift card. I'm upset though that my six months of $2500 television hell were only worth $200 compared to this lady's two months of $1100 PC hell being worth a $500 gift card.
Maybe I should sue Best Buy for their disciminatory ass-kissing policy...
I tried installing gOS on a machine with a 450 MHz P-III processor and 512 MB of RAM. Apart from the issues noted by the review's author, I also discovered that gOS does not have an easily available or apparent trash can. Newbies all too frequently delete important files. The idea of not having an intermediate step between click and *gone forever* is, to me, a significant shortcoming. In addition, with all of its eye candy and glitz, the UI is relative resource hog (compared to the UI's of other distros) and there's little payback in terms of usability.
I'd call this OS a pretty, if useless, attempt at an OS for everyone else. It falls far short of the mark.
As for the peecee, it seems OK, if underpowered. I'd give it a try with Win XP Home. I wouldn't want to use it for work, but for every day surfing it might do the job. On the other hand, the modem this machine ships with doesn't work? That's a very bad call from someone, Wal Mart's buyers?
My dream office starts at the breaker box. If they'll give you failover power generation, that's the ticket. Since it sounds like you're working for a smaller company, instead try to sell them on in-line voltage filtering and surge supression, with plenty of amperage. Imagine every outlet in your office having perfect current. You'll need outlets to offer that current. I suggest two strips of outlets, one at floor level and one at waist height, all around the room.
You'll need your own climate control panel for your office, and you'll need air purification for your equipment. I suggest a dedicated duct and vent running right from the climate plant, just for your space. A space under the door will allow air to move out of your room and help maintain a positive pressure environment. Ask for an easily-replaced filter cartridge system for your duct, and make certain you get a good supply of filters to do a monthly change as part of regular maintenance.
Give yourself room to string plenty of cables unobtrusively by either installing a sunken sub-floor with a static-proof grid flooring that can be easily removed, or have channels cut in the concrete slab with tiles that can be easily pulled. Either works well.
If you're not into pulling cables through walls, pre-cable as much as possible. Along with gigabit-capable copper consider having fiber pulled to each wall (room configurations change, plan for it) in each room, even if it will stay dark for the time being. The world is indeed moving towards wireless, but a wired backbone will continue to be the most secure, fastest option for the time being. If you don't mind pulling cables, consider having nice spacious conduit installed in the ceilings and walls. It'll make your future life much easier. Hell, ask for the conduit anyways. It'll make future calls to the electricians go quicker too.
Ask for secure storage space. A nice walk-in sized storage room with a decent shelving/binning system and a securely locked fireproof steel door will be a decent place to safeguard your spare server parts, your backup safe, and the high dollar IT pieces and parts you don't want every employee to be able to take home (hey, how about firewalls between your office and the rest of the building? This is a dream office, right?)
Speaking of fire, you might want to let these folks know that water and sensitive electronics are not a good mix. A nice electronics-friendly dry fire extinguishing system would be a good idea for your space.
Windows? Windows are optional. An interior window of shatter-proof glass might improve the view, and let in some outside light. An exterior window might be considered a security risk, but if you're on a higher floor, why not have a view of the great outdoors?
These are a few suggestions based on my experiences. Your mileage may vary.
I don't agree with idiot OP, it's always been in/.'s nature for the blurb to contain some conversation-stimulating point, but you're spot on regarding the invaluable experience we're gaining due to the ISS. Learning something totally new will always be trial and error. That's the nature of learning. Without these errors the procedures, techniques, and materials will not be in place thirty or fifty years from now when we've finally (hopefully) reached the point where we want to create permanent research colonies, or even settlements, on other worlds.
If today's risk-averse attitudes had been prevalent in the Europe of the mid 1400's today's Europeans might very well be speaking Quechua or Mandarin, living on reservations, and the "New World" would be Europe and Africa. As it is I look for the safety-conscious, risk-retarded US of A to roll over on its back and belly-up by the end of the century to some place like the Peoples' Republic of China. Today's US only has cojones when polls show the majority of its people are united behind some silly-assed, slick-packaged, simplistic concept.
Exactly. I've had the idea for a while that humanity is the Earth's attempt at creating spores of its biosphere (Humanity NT, NT = "Nice Try") From the perspective of a gene I believe our purpose as a species is not to spread our species, that's nothing but a human conceit -- our purpose as a species is to spread genes as terrestrial life, a functioning genome from which new species can emerge.
It's humbling to see ourselves as nothing more than fruiting bodies of an enormous slime mold.
We would be just as effective in this task by freezing a bolus of protozoa, bacteria, and algae spores and having a small probe disperse them across the atmospheres of non-biotic planets with compatible atmospheres, temperatures, and suns. Add water, atmosphere, and energy. Stir vigorously. Wait three billion years.
We've had BSA here in my small town several times. At least around here it's not uncommon for competitors to turn each other in for violations. In that kind of petty environment it's essential to keep all of your ducks in a row.
Depending on how large your company is, the odds increase that you will be audited for compliance some time in the future. Such an audit can cost thousands of dollars per violation per workstation.
When I carefully explain to my clients the potential costs of pirated software, even going so far as to explain the costs to them, and to me, of duplicated licenses, and why I positively refuse to knowingly install anything that is pirated, they are left with either two choices: install licensed software, install open source software, or find a new IT guy.
I cover my own ass. If they want to install illegal stuff, they can find someone else to do it. I will not be an accessory to a crime. Even if in my heart I believe it's not a crime, the law says different, and I am subject to the law.
Finally, if these people will knowingly insist on their employees doing illegal things, are they really the kind of employer you want? Others have said it, I concur, find a new employer ASAP.
You are correct that the virus was not officially "discovered" until the 1980's, but its effects were first noticed in the 1970's, and tests have determined it was active in the human population long before that.:) Giving the original poster the benefit of a doubt, perhaps they meant to state that the effects of HIV were first discovered in the 1970's?
Greed, a/k/a the "bottom line". The U.S. government won't touch it, remember government intervention = not truly a free market = socialism, and if that happens we're all going to rot in Godless-commie hell forever. Corporations are looking at their bottom line, and altruism isn't as profitable as the high fees you can charge when you're keeping expenditures at a minimum (upgrading infrustructure as slowly as possible, look at 3G) and discouraging competition (look at the opposition to loosening up telco restrictions, and look at the hoops cable companies have to jump through to get a local dial tone in most small towns.)
And as a bonus -- since there's a shortage of apartments (at least in Stockholm) you will end up living in a basement highly comparable to that of your parents, so you should feel at home right from the start!
This is the funniest thing I have read in here in a long time! Tak skal du ha! But you're right about your country. Sweden is a lovely place, full of lovely people.:)
Wow. I thought with the ozone layer, with such terrible CO2 levels, with global warming, all life was going to end soon.
What an arrogant people we are to believe that what has occured over the several thousand years that humans have recorded as history is how things have always been, and how things must always be. The climate has changed dramatically in the past, and life adapted and survived. It will change dramatically in the future, and life will adapt and survive. In spite of mankind's ability to screw stuff up, in the great scale of things our contribution to the planet's climate change will seem negligible when the next supervolcano erupts, the next orbit shift occurs, or the next great event we haven't yet observed (nearby stellar nova, interstellar dust cloud, asteroid/comet impact, outgassing of suboceanic greenhouse gases, the sun warming over the next billion years, etc.) happens.
Life adapts to change, quite well, whether we're worrying about it or not.
I'm not saying we don't need to pay attention to what we're doing (if we want to minimize changes, we need to lessen our impact on the environment), but the gloom and doom predictions are silliness. From past climate patterns, if we didn't have global warming right now we'd be heading back into a cycle of increased glaciation, eventually leading to an ice age. There is no static climate. Life would, and will adapt either way.
If anything, I would suggest once fair global emission controls are in place, rather than spending excess time wringing our hands worrying about something we cannot prevent, we take that energy and begin planning, today, for the changes that we know will happen.
Still, if we weren't worry about whether we were going to have rising ocean levels and palm trees in Ohio we'd be wringing our hands over ice sheets advancing down through the grain belt. Choose your doom.:)
They start with the copyright and IP laws, and move from there... I'm afraid North America's true bastion of freedom won't last much longer, but wait, didn't you have to go to foreign sites to read about the Liberals' money for associates scandal?:(
Um, maybe there's some little backwater republic hidden away on an island somewhere...:)
... kiddie pr0n sites free of inconvenient persecution. Is there no safe haven?!?!
Sorry, kiddie porn wins the huddled masses (stacked ten deep, 450 billion with a "B"?) of Europe, or North America, or anywhere -- no sympathies from me. Child pornography is *not* a victimless crime. Because people pay dollars, or euros, or yen, or pesos, it is produced, and the children being victimized in CP photographs do not participate voluntarily.
Freedom of speech is one thing, and I'd die for our right to criticize wrongdoings and hold unpopular opinions. On the other hand, the victimization of the innocent is to the expression of speech as the assassination of a leader is to negative commentary regarding the group he or she leads. Neither "expression" is condoned by humane societies.
Mod me up, mod me down. I don't give a flying fuck -- I have karma to burn. Some topics are open to intellectual debate -- messing up children for profit is not.
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Other than that, your post is accurate.
You're right, it's not free speech, it's not a step down the slippery slope, it's not to-may-to versus to-mah-to. It's children, some of them *babies*, being used for sexual purposes. From what I knew as of 2005, the problem was in BBS's, not in usenet, unless steganography is now widely being used to conceal photos within other photos?
ISP's? Hell, I went after an individual in Alabama in 1998 for CP. The local PD were clueless, the FBI (in Cincinatti, Cleveland, and Tuscaloosa) had gone home for the weekend, and the ISP, when they found out what was being hosted on their service, *wiped the server hard drive*, destroying the evidence.
Don't leave enforcement to ISP's. Start with the international payment services and credit card companies. Hold them liable for honoring charges to CP sites. Educate citizens that *viewing* CP is a felony. Standardize national laws regarding CP.
- The Saifu looks like some kind of Klingon battle implement. It's even an appropriate color. The name might have some kind of nice meaning, but it sounds to me like Ginsu.
- Speaking of knives, the notebook with the pull-out keyboard is clever, but how sturdy would it be, and why does it remind me of a high tech cutting board?
-
The dual screen notebook is a thick, clunky piece of over-engineering. It looks like a Toughbook, and I'd expect a 5.25 inch hard drive or two could fit in that case. It looks like it came from behind the Iron Curtain. There has to be a Soviet Russia joke in there somewhere.
-
The solar notebook is also quite thick. Didn't TFA say it was actually designed by someone who used to live in an Iron Curtain country? It has that Trabant look. It also looks like it might be pretty easy to throw through a window. Is it insurgency friendly?
-
The "car friendly" notebook. No. I can picture some idiot driving down the road checking their email and typing on their keyscreen. We have a hard enough time with cell phone drivers. Please, let's not throw another device at them.
If you want something that looks beautiful and is revolutionary, take something like the Mac Air clamshell, remove the hinge, toss the "body", and have a tablet the form and thickness of the Air's display. Make it watertight with an accessible but sealed polycarbonate shell. Make certain it has a multicore CPU, an OLED display surface, solid state storage, with a voice/gestural/touch interface *or* wireless keyboard and mouse for us Luddites. Recharge it on an inductive charging surface, and give it a snap-on easel for easy viewing.Make certain it always knows "up" (the term escapes me at the moment, someone remind me.)
I'd buy one. I wouldn't purchase any of the other ones shown in this article.
Gamera was great, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamera. :)
Ya gotta love AMD's spirit. I was all AMD until Core2. Still, AMD has good stuff in the works, it's just whether or not they'll be able to sustain themselves until it comes to fruition. I think they will -- I seem to remember this same type of discussion right before Hammer came out.
Most of the space occupied by the atom is exactly that, space, nothing more. The electron cloud is a fuzzy region of probability, not a solid thing. The "side" of an atom must be defined by a force, not a particle?
When I finally filed a complaint with my state's attorney general the runaround ended (within a week) and I got a very prompt replacement, a written apology, and a substantial gift card. I'm upset though that my six months of $2500 television hell were only worth $200 compared to this lady's two months of $1100 PC hell being worth a $500 gift card.
...
Maybe I should sue Best Buy for their disciminatory ass-kissing policy
I tried installing gOS on a machine with a 450 MHz P-III processor and 512 MB of RAM. Apart from the issues noted by the review's author, I also discovered that gOS does not have an easily available or apparent trash can. Newbies all too frequently delete important files. The idea of not having an intermediate step between click and *gone forever* is, to me, a significant shortcoming. In addition, with all of its eye candy and glitz, the UI is relative resource hog (compared to the UI's of other distros) and there's little payback in terms of usability.
I'd call this OS a pretty, if useless, attempt at an OS for everyone else. It falls far short of the mark.
As for the peecee, it seems OK, if underpowered. I'd give it a try with Win XP Home. I wouldn't want to use it for work, but for every day surfing it might do the job. On the other hand, the modem this machine ships with doesn't work? That's a very bad call from someone, Wal Mart's buyers?
-Joe
My dream office starts at the breaker box. If they'll give you failover power generation, that's the ticket. Since it sounds like you're working for a smaller company, instead try to sell them on in-line voltage filtering and surge supression, with plenty of amperage. Imagine every outlet in your office having perfect current. You'll need outlets to offer that current. I suggest two strips of outlets, one at floor level and one at waist height, all around the room.
You'll need your own climate control panel for your office, and you'll need air purification for your equipment. I suggest a dedicated duct and vent running right from the climate plant, just for your space. A space under the door will allow air to move out of your room and help maintain a positive pressure environment. Ask for an easily-replaced filter cartridge system for your duct, and make certain you get a good supply of filters to do a monthly change as part of regular maintenance.
Give yourself room to string plenty of cables unobtrusively by either installing a sunken sub-floor with a static-proof grid flooring that can be easily removed, or have channels cut in the concrete slab with tiles that can be easily pulled. Either works well.
If you're not into pulling cables through walls, pre-cable as much as possible. Along with gigabit-capable copper consider having fiber pulled to each wall (room configurations change, plan for it) in each room, even if it will stay dark for the time being. The world is indeed moving towards wireless, but a wired backbone will continue to be the most secure, fastest option for the time being. If you don't mind pulling cables, consider having nice spacious conduit installed in the ceilings and walls. It'll make your future life much easier. Hell, ask for the conduit anyways. It'll make future calls to the electricians go quicker too.
Ask for secure storage space. A nice walk-in sized storage room with a decent shelving/binning system and a securely locked fireproof steel door will be a decent place to safeguard your spare server parts, your backup safe, and the high dollar IT pieces and parts you don't want every employee to be able to take home (hey, how about firewalls between your office and the rest of the building? This is a dream office, right?)
Speaking of fire, you might want to let these folks know that water and sensitive electronics are not a good mix. A nice electronics-friendly dry fire extinguishing system would be a good idea for your space.
Windows? Windows are optional. An interior window of shatter-proof glass might improve the view, and let in some outside light. An exterior window might be considered a security risk, but if you're on a higher floor, why not have a view of the great outdoors?
These are a few suggestions based on my experiences. Your mileage may vary.
Joe G.
I don't agree with idiot OP, it's always been in /.'s nature for the blurb to contain some conversation-stimulating point, but you're spot on regarding the invaluable experience we're gaining due to the ISS. Learning something totally new will always be trial and error. That's the nature of learning. Without these errors the procedures, techniques, and materials will not be in place thirty or fifty years from now when we've finally (hopefully) reached the point where we want to create permanent research colonies, or even settlements, on other worlds.
If today's risk-averse attitudes had been prevalent in the Europe of the mid 1400's today's Europeans might very well be speaking Quechua or Mandarin, living on reservations, and the "New World" would be Europe and Africa. As it is I look for the safety-conscious, risk-retarded US of A to roll over on its back and belly-up by the end of the century to some place like the Peoples' Republic of China. Today's US only has cojones when polls show the majority of its people are united behind some silly-assed, slick-packaged, simplistic concept.
-Joe
It's nice to see it's alive and well somewhere. -Joe
Exactly. I've had the idea for a while that humanity is the Earth's attempt at creating spores of its biosphere (Humanity NT, NT = "Nice Try") From the perspective of a gene I believe our purpose as a species is not to spread our species, that's nothing but a human conceit -- our purpose as a species is to spread genes as terrestrial life, a functioning genome from which new species can emerge.
It's humbling to see ourselves as nothing more than fruiting bodies of an enormous slime mold.
We would be just as effective in this task by freezing a bolus of protozoa, bacteria, and algae spores and having a small probe disperse them across the atmospheres of non-biotic planets with compatible atmospheres, temperatures, and suns. Add water, atmosphere, and energy. Stir vigorously. Wait three billion years.
-Joe
I agree with the original poster 100%.
We've had BSA here in my small town several times. At least around here it's not uncommon for competitors to turn each other in for violations. In that kind of petty environment it's essential to keep all of your ducks in a row.
Depending on how large your company is, the odds increase that you will be audited for compliance some time in the future. Such an audit can cost thousands of dollars per violation per workstation.
When I carefully explain to my clients the potential costs of pirated software, even going so far as to explain the costs to them, and to me, of duplicated licenses, and why I positively refuse to knowingly install anything that is pirated, they are left with either two choices: install licensed software, install open source software, or find a new IT guy.
I cover my own ass. If they want to install illegal stuff, they can find someone else to do it. I will not be an accessory to a crime. Even if in my heart I believe it's not a crime, the law says different, and I am subject to the law.
Finally, if these people will knowingly insist on their employees doing illegal things, are they really the kind of employer you want? Others have said it, I concur, find a new employer ASAP.
-Joe
More on CIGS, a new article published yesterday. http://news.com.com/Silicon+vs.+CIGS+With+solar+en ergy,+the+issue+is+material/2100-1008_3-6121488.ht ml The CIGS technology seems to have caught on. Shell just dumped their silicon PV unit in favor of investing in CIGS. :)
The first known case of HIV was in 1959, determined posthumously by samples taken from an exhumed body. The virus is older than that, and like ebola is thought to have crossed over from an animal vector due to the ingestion of bush meat. In the late 1970's unusual symptoms began manifesting themselves in certain populations.
:) Giving the original poster the benefit of a doubt, perhaps they meant to state that the effects of HIV were first discovered in the 1970's?
You are correct that the virus was not officially "discovered" until the 1980's, but its effects were first noticed in the 1970's, and tests have determined it was active in the human population long before that.
Peace,
-Joe G.
Greed, a/k/a the "bottom line". The U.S. government won't touch it, remember government intervention = not truly a free market = socialism, and if that happens we're all going to rot in Godless-commie hell forever. Corporations are looking at their bottom line, and altruism isn't as profitable as the high fees you can charge when you're keeping expenditures at a minimum (upgrading infrustructure as slowly as possible, look at 3G) and discouraging competition (look at the opposition to loosening up telco restrictions, and look at the hoops cable companies have to jump through to get a local dial tone in most small towns.)
This is the funniest thing I have read in here in a long time! Tak skal du ha! But you're right about your country. Sweden is a lovely place, full of lovely people.
Wow. I thought with the ozone layer, with such terrible CO2 levels, with global warming, all life was going to end soon.
:)
What an arrogant people we are to believe that what has occured over the several thousand years that humans have recorded as history is how things have always been, and how things must always be. The climate has changed dramatically in the past, and life adapted and survived. It will change dramatically in the future, and life will adapt and survive. In spite of mankind's ability to screw stuff up, in the great scale of things our contribution to the planet's climate change will seem negligible when the next supervolcano erupts, the next orbit shift occurs, or the next great event we haven't yet observed (nearby stellar nova, interstellar dust cloud, asteroid/comet impact, outgassing of suboceanic greenhouse gases, the sun warming over the next billion years, etc.) happens.
Life adapts to change, quite well, whether we're worrying about it or not.
I'm not saying we don't need to pay attention to what we're doing (if we want to minimize changes, we need to lessen our impact on the environment), but the gloom and doom predictions are silliness. From past climate patterns, if we didn't have global warming right now we'd be heading back into a cycle of increased glaciation, eventually leading to an ice age. There is no static climate. Life would, and will adapt either way.
If anything, I would suggest once fair global emission controls are in place, rather than spending excess time wringing our hands worrying about something we cannot prevent, we take that energy and begin planning, today, for the changes that we know will happen.
Still, if we weren't worry about whether we were going to have rising ocean levels and palm trees in Ohio we'd be wringing our hands over ice sheets advancing down through the grain belt. Choose your doom.
-Joe
Like you, I learned to spell phonetically, but "masturbation" has no "e".
HERF gun. I'd bet these same police wouldn't have the faintest idea what one is ...
Warp engine designer: it's nice to see the time cube guy has a day job.
They start with the copyright and IP laws, and move from there ... I'm afraid North America's true bastion of freedom won't last much longer, but wait, didn't you have to go to foreign sites to read about the Liberals' money for associates scandal? :(
... :)
Um, maybe there's some little backwater republic hidden away on an island somewhere
-Joe
... kiddie pr0n sites free of inconvenient persecution. Is there no safe haven?!?!
Sorry, kiddie porn wins the huddled masses (stacked ten deep, 450 billion with a "B"?) of Europe, or North America, or anywhere -- no sympathies from me. Child pornography is *not* a victimless crime. Because people pay dollars, or euros, or yen, or pesos, it is produced, and the children being victimized in CP photographs do not participate voluntarily.
Freedom of speech is one thing, and I'd die for our right to criticize wrongdoings and hold unpopular opinions. On the other hand, the victimization of the innocent is to the expression of speech as the assassination of a leader is to negative commentary regarding the group he or she leads. Neither "expression" is condoned by humane societies.
Mod me up, mod me down. I don't give a flying fuck -- I have karma to burn. Some topics are open to intellectual debate -- messing up children for profit is not.
... looks like it was illustrated by an eight year old using a Disney paint program.
And we all know what happened to them.