And here's a somewhat related question: Is there good freeware or GPL'd OCR software usable on windows? I have a few dozen pages, scanned in as high-res PNGs, that I need to convert. Snag: It has some Kanji characters sprinkled throughout.
Unfortunately no. The free OCR packages are not up to the task yet. I think you can still get a trial download of ABBY Finereader though.
Failing that if you can find a local service that caters to blind or low vision people, many do scanning for their group and/or community members. You may be able to work out a trade for service or something like that. Depending on what OCR package they use and the plugins etc they have and the skill of the person operating it though, you may be out of luck for the Kanji though. I've never tried it myself and I'm not sure how many of the standard packages recognize it out of the box.
The wikipedia link is a little incorrect. In many cases a swap partition can be more efficient than a swap file at least in Linux. For one, there's an extra overhead involved in dealing with files because of the OS filesystem layer. Perhaps there's a raw file option with a swapfile, but I'm not aware of it. In most cases (i.e., desktop and moderate server use) there's probably not a lot of difference and swapfiles are ostensibly easier to use. With LVMs it doesn't really matter.
Andrew Morton disagrees with you. I'm not sure how the filesystem overhead is avoided, but presumably it is. And that link is cited right in the Wikipedia article, so unless you want to analyze the issue at a deeper level than Andrew has, I think you've got to concede this one.
OCR software that is fully functional for a blind individual costs another $1000! Unfortunately, this is another absent product category under OS X and Gnome.
Actually OmniPage is $150 and is fully accessible (well at least version 15 was) and many people say it is more accurate than Kurzweil for OCR. The other consumer OCR apps are supposed to be decent accuracy, but I don't know about their accessibility. Readiris has a Mac version and supposedly it works with Voiceover, but I don't know. Photoshop has OCR, but nothing like the dedicated OCR apps, and as you mentioned, not especially accessible.
Hopefully they [Gnome vs. KDE] are similar.
I do not quite grok the reasons for the differences, I think they are architectural, but there are at least three decent screen readers for Gnome, but none for KDE.
Yeah actually I looked into this and it seems KDE is way behind in accessibility. I had never checked since I use Gnome. Oh well, no reason to duplicate all that effort I suppose. It seems Sun has poured a lot of effort and cash apparently into making Gnome accessible. Some people give them grief, but that is an effort they aren't going to get a lot of accolades for but it is hard work and valuable nonetheless. Of course it takes a community as well.
It is interesting and there is actually a fair amount of it out there. Google for computer games for the blind or similar and you'll find a fair amount. Some are audio games designed for blind people and some are adaptations of sighted games so that they are accessible such as AudioQuake which runs on Linux.
Here's an older article from Wired about games for the blind.
Microsoft does do a good job with accessibility, especially Office, but there is no good to be had in overstating their effort.
They may do that on Windows, and others have confirmed they do, but Microsoft Office is completely inaccessible on the Mac with VoiceOver. Luckily you can open Word docs in Textedit which is accessible or I presume you could open the files with Openoffice. I haven't tested that. And in the spirit of not overstating, since Voiceover isn't as full featured as the expensive Windows only software that is available (and nothing like it is available for Mac that I am aware of) most fully blind people do use JAWS or WindowEyes because they have to. At that point, because of the things a screen reader allows you to do, $1000 isn't a big deal. It's more like getting a computer costs that much more than it would have and then you can scan and read books, mail, magazines, etc.
On the Linux front, more good news is the the Gnome accessibility efforts get a boost from the fact that the accessibility API is very useful for automated testing, so Gnome's accessibility is pretty good and getting better. I don't know anything about KDE's efforts. Hopefully they are similar. The real problem for the accessibility stack on Linux now is the lack of a good OCR solution. gocr is fairly low quality, tesseract is supposedly higher quality and google is working on improving it and integrating it into OCRopus, but it's still nowhere near what you can get on Windows unfortunately. OCRopus looks promising though.
Clearly you have not actually used the built in screen reader in Windows. (Not that you said you had.) Here's a quote:
Narrator, the screen reader built into Windows XP and Vista, is so crude that even Microsoft admits that it is not suitable for daily use.
So the actual alternatives that are usable (JAWS and WindowEyes) do cost about a thousand dollars each. And no VoiceOver, the one that comes built in to OSX, can't compete entirely with those, but it is usable. You can interact with the entire operating system, browse the web etc. It's just as someone else said, a little clunky. It doesn't have the advanced features the other screen readers have. What is nice is that you can sit down at any Mac with updated OSX and hit command-F5 and Voiceover will turn on.
While we're on it, the Gnome screen reader Orca has made big strides recently and is rather usable now for browsing the internet with Firefox 3. It has many of the advanced features the expensive Windows software has, but it's not perfectly stable yet.
Emphasis on the bit. Of course they're just claiming that it's going to have multi-touch throughout anyway. Most likely it will be half assed and even if it isn't that would still make Windows 7 a far cry from the features that were promised to be in Vista/Longhorn years ago. So yes, basically it's Windows ME all over again.
This is really off topic now, but the AGPL was written in order to deal with the realities of moving to software as a service. So that provision which you have highlighted is the equivalent restriction to the GPL not allowing you to distribute binary versions without distributing source code. That is an additional restriction designed to ensure user freedom, the same as the provision in the AGPL. Otherwise people could run free software on a publicly accessible server, modify the heck out of it, but since they are not distributing it, they don't have to release the source code. The user then loses the freedom to analyze that source code and know what is going on with it, even though that program running on the server may be a very important program to them. So just like the restricted freedom that the GPL carries in order to protect future freedom for others, that is what the AGPL is doing, and the FSF considers that necessary. I'm sure they'd be all ears if you have a more elegant solution.
Say what you want about the origins of the problem but there is no doubt whatsoever that regulation of securities (via the SEC) has been totally and 100% completely absent during all of this.
Two things, it is demonstrably false that there was no securities regulation going on during all of this. The SEC has been doing plenty of things and the NASD (a self regulating body that handles securities regulation in addition to the SEC) in particular has been very busy wasting everyone's time collecting record fines (and wasting the money on really stupid things) for things that don't matter while ignoring those that do. That's the real problem in securities regulation.
But where you've really missed the mark and what many people don't realize is that mortgages aren't regulated as securities at the consumer level. So securities regulation was largely out of the picture here. Yes there is some regulation from RESPA etc, but in comparison to the regulation hurdles in order to do retail securities business, mortgages are nearly unregulated. There were huge numbers of unprofessional, untrained, and unethical mortgage brokers chucking mortgages with the maximum fees all too happy to not tell people it was only good for two years. And a large portion of this huge mess is from the subprime mortgages. I'm certainly not exempting the people that were all to happy to get themselves into houses they couldn't afford and didn't ask questions about their mortgage from blame though. It goes both ways.
Regulation only helps if it is smart regulation. From what I have seen in the industry, the regulators don't know anything about the finance industry or the products they are regulating. As long as that is going on, you can't have successful regulation.
Now, mortgages can be securitized when bundled, etc, but that part of the equation isn't where the failures have been. Despite other misinformed posts here, that part actually helps consumers and the markets to spread risk and price it appropriately.
I can't remember the details, but didn't Fermilab or some outfit on this side of the pond screw up when they produced one or two of the large magnets needed for the LHC about a year back?
Wikipedia to the rescue, it was Fermilab and KEK[1]
More details here
Not to knock too hard on Fermilab, they do a lot of great work, it's just too funny that they screwed up on an important part for a rival's project. Uh, yeah, we, uh, can't believe we did that.
You mean like the power circuit that you are already connected to? That single point of failure has long ago been handled. Where the costs can be justified, run more than one power circuit, backup generators and UPS, etc. That's no different.
I'm personally more interested in the wasteful DC to AC and back conversion when considering small scale solar. Why in the world is the default option to run a wasteful inverter just to plug an AC to DC converter in to that? Almost everything I looked at for portable solar to power a laptop or netbook worked like that. A lot of netbooks could be run on a 10W solar panel with battery backup, or more reliably of course with more solar capacity.
Yeah because it's not like photovoltaics are the single technology with the most vapor and broken promises next to cold fusion and perpetual motion machines.
That said, it would take very little away from this kid's abilities even if his technique couldn't be commercialized directly. To even be able to run and understand the models that predict this is way beyond what most people can do, much less 12 year olds. With a little luck it will advance the state of the art, and with a lot, it will be a breakthrough. Just don't hold your breath on the latter.
Speaking to the GP, yeah this is kind of the point of what MS is doing here. Best buy is carrying Apple machines because people want them. They are selling very well, particularly the laptops which carry a higher margin than most Windows laptops and certainly PCs. So now MS realizes they need to hire an army of their own more highly trained sales people to steer people away from buying Apple. This is because they are realizing that if given the choice, more and more people are choosing something other than Windows and they need to do something about it.
Well this article is a response to Gutmann's Usenix paper where apparently everyone got the idea that STM could be used in a cleanroom to get data off a drive that has been overwritten. The response is written by someone at the National Bureau of Economic Research so who knows what qualifies them to write about this, but if you read it he does seem to have done his homework. He claims that Gutmann's paper isn't true and it's evidence doesn't pan out. I'm not really qualified to tell and I'm not sure how much drive technology which you mention changes the issue from 1996 when Gutmann wrote his paper.
In any case this Bureau of economic research guy claims no one can do EFM recovery so that's his opinion on the title question above. And you and the GP post both make good points that this is certainly extreme paranoid level even if someone could do that type of recovery. You'd have to have some awfully important data to protect. So even though the contest is indeed a farce as others have pointed out, they do make a good point that dd'ing zeros is good enough for anything but extremely important data.
Or something different. In an interview I can't find now, Mark Shuttelworth referred to customizing the interface in a few different ways for interested hardware partners that he didn't mention at the time, one of which was apparently Dell. I don't recall that he mentioned it was based on the netbook remix stuff or not.
WTF? I'm looking right at the screen right now and the 16gb SSD 1gb RAM XP Option is $449 and that is exactly the same price as what I get when I select the Linux option and add the larger SSD and extra RAM to match. Other people above reported the $20 price difference, but I didn't realize we were seeing different prices.
The other thing that would be nice is a larger batter for those prices. And any idea on the power draw for a netbook like this? I'd really like to run a truly portable solar powered system, but I'm not sure what all would be involved.
Not sure how you got that. If you take the linux option and add the same 8GB larger "hard drive" then it is slightly cheaper than the second option that has Windows with the same specs. If you add the 16gb drive and 1GB memory to it, then it is the same price as the third option that has windows and the same specs.
Funny that the build your own doesn't allow you to select the OS. It would feel so good to select one of the Windows configurations and be able upgrade to Ubuntu. But with any luck once Ubuntu isn't a pre-order, you'll be able to.
Entitlement indeed, it's a serious problem. People seem to forget that the concept of retirement for anyone but a select few is a very recent phenomenon. For most people it used to be that your family would take you in after you stopped working in your old age if you were still living, but now that is much less common. And when pensions first became more widespread the expected lifespans after starting to recieve a pension was very short, ten years or so. Fast forward to today and someone wants to retire at 65 or earlier, they have a large number of years of life expectancy ahead of them. Of course a pension isn't going to be enough. Furthermore few pensions are adaquately indexed to inflation (most are not at all in the US) so the purchasing power drops in half every 15 years or so even given moderate inflation. So anyone that is expecting a pension to be enough is deluded, and hopefully no one ever told them it would be enough.
Well it's worse than that of course, and the security holes have been known about for a long time. I actually missed the memo on rfid chips even being put in credit cards (wtf is stupid enough to do that? The security holes are well known) so I typed rfid credit card into google. Almost every one of the top links talks about the vulnerabilities thankfully, and one academic paper pdf is one of the links.
It actually explains why they got popular, since they are contactless and therefore can fail less than swiping cards. It also noted it was the fastest adopted payment technology. Pretty scary, but makes it no surprise why they want to try to quash this. But as far as your lawsuit goes, they can go way before this incident to the cc companies knowing this stuff is totally insecure. That paper is from 2006 and it was known before that. But the best that could be hoped for is a class action lawsuit win where the lawyers get millions and some people get a tiny free visa coupon, just like all class action lawsuits. But since they can hide behind trying to make them secure, that probably won't even happen.
It depends on how you count them of course. If mutual intelligibility were the only criteria Hindi's numbers would be much higher, up to about twice the number of native English and Spanish speakers. Numbers are hard to come by but you'd include lots of speakers of what are considered separate languages like Panjabi but where mutual intelligability is very high. They are considered separate languages for historical and literature related reasons. Chinese languages are the opposite. In many areas they are considered the same language for cultural homogineity reasons but they are mutually unintelligible.
But, as I pointed out, arguing that the local offering should be favored just because "that keeps the money local" is foolishness.
Well that's not entirely true either. There are a lot of good reasons to spend locally. For most physical goods buying locally reduces pollution due to transportation. Buying locally also does keep more of the money local, which for a government entity spending the people's money should be something they are interested in. In effect by keeping the money local and allowing local people to earn that money (and get taxed on it) it lowers the net cost of the purchase for the government unit. Further it helps keep local expertise around.
The epia's are good, but they are more expensive and use much more power. This one says under 13 watts while the BeagleBoard claims about 2 watts. Even with more memory 2 watts won't be as much as the epia and the epia is probably quoted without the memory anyway.
Someone else linked to this kodak stuff as some that is rated for 100+ years.
But I'm really surprised that no one mentioned data redundancy. Use something like dvdisaster to create a huge amount of extra redundancy data. That way even if there is some bit rot, your chances of recovery go up.
Even with that I agree with the commercial pressed cds since they should last longer than any cdr media. I assume there is special pressed media for archival as well. As others have said I would worry too much, 25 years isn't that long, and cds and dvds are so widespread that you're likely to be able to find a reader for that long at least. But if you're paranoid, try a few of the methods until you run out of funds. Multiple gold cdrs with lots of redundancy is probably your cheapest option, then go from there.
I don't like the misuse of literally either, but in this case, it's pretty accurate. The water is pumped out of the aquifer into irrigation equipment, then pumped out to the plants which then basically pump it through as they grow. The sugars that are made are processed with more water pumped from the aquifer and them pumped into the gas tank. Given the absurd inefficiencies of corn ethanol everyone should be outraged that it qualifies for any "green" subsidies. Yep, we're all paying for that. Even the corn ethanol industry themselves only claim about a 35% energy return, or for every gallon of fossil fuel inputs about 1.35 gallons of ethanol are produced, ignoring energy density differences.
I am also staunchly fiscally conservative. There are few if any things the government does efficiently or well. One of them is revenue collection, the IRS is one of the leanest federal programs there is. However, infrastructure is one thing that free markets generally fail to do properly partly due to the free rider problem of why should I bother to pay for it if someone else will, and partly just that separate agents acting for their own good rarely work together in large groups, and stop as soon as it is no longer in their private interest.
So in short, while there are few things the federal government should be doing, infrastructure like the power grid and the interstate highway system are one of the few exceptions. Yes, they'll bungle that too, but if the best people are put in charge with oversight, then the waste is probably less then if private entities try to do it.
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And here's a somewhat related question: Is there good freeware or GPL'd OCR software usable on windows? I have a few dozen pages, scanned in as high-res PNGs, that I need to convert. Snag: It has some Kanji characters sprinkled throughout.
Unfortunately no. The free OCR packages are not up to the task yet. I think you can still get a trial download of ABBY Finereader though.
Failing that if you can find a local service that caters to blind or low vision people, many do scanning for their group and/or community members. You may be able to work out a trade for service or something like that. Depending on what OCR package they use and the plugins etc they have and the skill of the person operating it though, you may be out of luck for the Kanji though. I've never tried it myself and I'm not sure how many of the standard packages recognize it out of the box.
The wikipedia link is a little incorrect. In many cases a swap partition can be more efficient than a swap file at least in Linux. For one, there's an extra overhead involved in dealing with files because of the OS filesystem layer. Perhaps there's a raw file option with a swapfile, but I'm not aware of it. In most cases (i.e., desktop and moderate server use) there's probably not a lot of difference and swapfiles are ostensibly easier to use. With LVMs it doesn't really matter.
Andrew Morton disagrees with you. I'm not sure how the filesystem overhead is avoided, but presumably it is. And that link is cited right in the Wikipedia article, so unless you want to analyze the issue at a deeper level than Andrew has, I think you've got to concede this one.
OCR software that is fully functional for a blind individual costs another $1000! Unfortunately, this is another absent product category under OS X and Gnome.
Actually OmniPage is $150 and is fully accessible (well at least version 15 was) and many people say it is more accurate than Kurzweil for OCR. The other consumer OCR apps are supposed to be decent accuracy, but I don't know about their accessibility. Readiris has a Mac version and supposedly it works with Voiceover, but I don't know. Photoshop has OCR, but nothing like the dedicated OCR apps, and as you mentioned, not especially accessible.
Hopefully they [Gnome vs. KDE] are similar.
I do not quite grok the reasons for the differences, I think they are architectural, but there are at least three decent screen readers for Gnome, but none for KDE.
Yeah actually I looked into this and it seems KDE is way behind in accessibility. I had never checked since I use Gnome. Oh well, no reason to duplicate all that effort I suppose. It seems Sun has poured a lot of effort and cash apparently into making Gnome accessible. Some people give them grief, but that is an effort they aren't going to get a lot of accolades for but it is hard work and valuable nonetheless. Of course it takes a community as well.
Here's an older article from Wired about games for the blind.
Microsoft does do a good job with accessibility, especially Office, but there is no good to be had in overstating their effort.
They may do that on Windows, and others have confirmed they do, but Microsoft Office is completely inaccessible on the Mac with VoiceOver. Luckily you can open Word docs in Textedit which is accessible or I presume you could open the files with Openoffice. I haven't tested that. And in the spirit of not overstating, since Voiceover isn't as full featured as the expensive Windows only software that is available (and nothing like it is available for Mac that I am aware of) most fully blind people do use JAWS or WindowEyes because they have to. At that point, because of the things a screen reader allows you to do, $1000 isn't a big deal. It's more like getting a computer costs that much more than it would have and then you can scan and read books, mail, magazines, etc.
On the Linux front, more good news is the the Gnome accessibility efforts get a boost from the fact that the accessibility API is very useful for automated testing, so Gnome's accessibility is pretty good and getting better. I don't know anything about KDE's efforts. Hopefully they are similar. The real problem for the accessibility stack on Linux now is the lack of a good OCR solution. gocr is fairly low quality, tesseract is supposedly higher quality and google is working on improving it and integrating it into OCRopus, but it's still nowhere near what you can get on Windows unfortunately. OCRopus looks promising though.
Narrator, the screen reader built into Windows XP and Vista, is so crude that even Microsoft admits that it is not suitable for daily use.
So the actual alternatives that are usable (JAWS and WindowEyes) do cost about a thousand dollars each. And no VoiceOver, the one that comes built in to OSX, can't compete entirely with those, but it is usable. You can interact with the entire operating system, browse the web etc. It's just as someone else said, a little clunky. It doesn't have the advanced features the other screen readers have. What is nice is that you can sit down at any Mac with updated OSX and hit command-F5 and Voiceover will turn on.
While we're on it, the Gnome screen reader Orca has made big strides recently and is rather usable now for browsing the internet with Firefox 3. It has many of the advanced features the expensive Windows software has, but it's not perfectly stable yet.
Emphasis on the bit. Of course they're just claiming that it's going to have multi-touch throughout anyway. Most likely it will be half assed and even if it isn't that would still make Windows 7 a far cry from the features that were promised to be in Vista/Longhorn years ago. So yes, basically it's Windows ME all over again.
This is really off topic now, but the AGPL was written in order to deal with the realities of moving to software as a service. So that provision which you have highlighted is the equivalent restriction to the GPL not allowing you to distribute binary versions without distributing source code. That is an additional restriction designed to ensure user freedom, the same as the provision in the AGPL. Otherwise people could run free software on a publicly accessible server, modify the heck out of it, but since they are not distributing it, they don't have to release the source code. The user then loses the freedom to analyze that source code and know what is going on with it, even though that program running on the server may be a very important program to them. So just like the restricted freedom that the GPL carries in order to protect future freedom for others, that is what the AGPL is doing, and the FSF considers that necessary. I'm sure they'd be all ears if you have a more elegant solution.
Say what you want about the origins of the problem but there is no doubt whatsoever that regulation of securities (via the SEC) has been totally and 100% completely absent during all of this.
Two things, it is demonstrably false that there was no securities regulation going on during all of this. The SEC has been doing plenty of things and the NASD (a self regulating body that handles securities regulation in addition to the SEC) in particular has been very busy wasting everyone's time collecting record fines (and wasting the money on really stupid things) for things that don't matter while ignoring those that do. That's the real problem in securities regulation.
But where you've really missed the mark and what many people don't realize is that mortgages aren't regulated as securities at the consumer level. So securities regulation was largely out of the picture here. Yes there is some regulation from RESPA etc, but in comparison to the regulation hurdles in order to do retail securities business, mortgages are nearly unregulated. There were huge numbers of unprofessional, untrained, and unethical mortgage brokers chucking mortgages with the maximum fees all too happy to not tell people it was only good for two years. And a large portion of this huge mess is from the subprime mortgages. I'm certainly not exempting the people that were all to happy to get themselves into houses they couldn't afford and didn't ask questions about their mortgage from blame though. It goes both ways.
Regulation only helps if it is smart regulation. From what I have seen in the industry, the regulators don't know anything about the finance industry or the products they are regulating. As long as that is going on, you can't have successful regulation.
Now, mortgages can be securitized when bundled, etc, but that part of the equation isn't where the failures have been. Despite other misinformed posts here, that part actually helps consumers and the markets to spread risk and price it appropriately.
I can't remember the details, but didn't Fermilab or some outfit on this side of the pond screw up when they produced one or two of the large magnets needed for the LHC about a year back? Wikipedia to the rescue, it was Fermilab and KEK[1] More details here
Not to knock too hard on Fermilab, they do a lot of great work, it's just too funny that they screwed up on an important part for a rival's project. Uh, yeah, we, uh, can't believe we did that.
4 words "Single point of failure"
You mean like the power circuit that you are already connected to? That single point of failure has long ago been handled. Where the costs can be justified, run more than one power circuit, backup generators and UPS, etc. That's no different.
I'm personally more interested in the wasteful DC to AC and back conversion when considering small scale solar. Why in the world is the default option to run a wasteful inverter just to plug an AC to DC converter in to that? Almost everything I looked at for portable solar to power a laptop or netbook worked like that. A lot of netbooks could be run on a 10W solar panel with battery backup, or more reliably of course with more solar capacity.
Yeah because it's not like photovoltaics are the single technology with the most vapor and broken promises next to cold fusion and perpetual motion machines.
That said, it would take very little away from this kid's abilities even if his technique couldn't be commercialized directly. To even be able to run and understand the models that predict this is way beyond what most people can do, much less 12 year olds. With a little luck it will advance the state of the art, and with a lot, it will be a breakthrough. Just don't hold your breath on the latter.
Speaking to the GP, yeah this is kind of the point of what MS is doing here. Best buy is carrying Apple machines because people want them. They are selling very well, particularly the laptops which carry a higher margin than most Windows laptops and certainly PCs. So now MS realizes they need to hire an army of their own more highly trained sales people to steer people away from buying Apple. This is because they are realizing that if given the choice, more and more people are choosing something other than Windows and they need to do something about it.
Well this article is a response to Gutmann's Usenix paper where apparently everyone got the idea that STM could be used in a cleanroom to get data off a drive that has been overwritten. The response is written by someone at the National Bureau of Economic Research so who knows what qualifies them to write about this, but if you read it he does seem to have done his homework. He claims that Gutmann's paper isn't true and it's evidence doesn't pan out. I'm not really qualified to tell and I'm not sure how much drive technology which you mention changes the issue from 1996 when Gutmann wrote his paper.
In any case this Bureau of economic research guy claims no one can do EFM recovery so that's his opinion on the title question above. And you and the GP post both make good points that this is certainly extreme paranoid level even if someone could do that type of recovery. You'd have to have some awfully important data to protect. So even though the contest is indeed a farce as others have pointed out, they do make a good point that dd'ing zeros is good enough for anything but extremely important data.
Or something different. In an interview I can't find now, Mark Shuttelworth referred to customizing the interface in a few different ways for interested hardware partners that he didn't mention at the time, one of which was apparently Dell. I don't recall that he mentioned it was based on the netbook remix stuff or not.
WTF? I'm looking right at the screen right now and the 16gb SSD 1gb RAM XP Option is $449 and that is exactly the same price as what I get when I select the Linux option and add the larger SSD and extra RAM to match. Other people above reported the $20 price difference, but I didn't realize we were seeing different prices.
The other thing that would be nice is a larger batter for those prices. And any idea on the power draw for a netbook like this? I'd really like to run a truly portable solar powered system, but I'm not sure what all would be involved.
Not sure how you got that. If you take the linux option and add the same 8GB larger "hard drive" then it is slightly cheaper than the second option that has Windows with the same specs. If you add the 16gb drive and 1GB memory to it, then it is the same price as the third option that has windows and the same specs.
Funny that the build your own doesn't allow you to select the OS. It would feel so good to select one of the Windows configurations and be able upgrade to Ubuntu. But with any luck once Ubuntu isn't a pre-order, you'll be able to.
Entitlement indeed, it's a serious problem. People seem to forget that the concept of retirement for anyone but a select few is a very recent phenomenon. For most people it used to be that your family would take you in after you stopped working in your old age if you were still living, but now that is much less common. And when pensions first became more widespread the expected lifespans after starting to recieve a pension was very short, ten years or so. Fast forward to today and someone wants to retire at 65 or earlier, they have a large number of years of life expectancy ahead of them. Of course a pension isn't going to be enough. Furthermore few pensions are adaquately indexed to inflation (most are not at all in the US) so the purchasing power drops in half every 15 years or so even given moderate inflation. So anyone that is expecting a pension to be enough is deluded, and hopefully no one ever told them it would be enough.
Well it's worse than that of course, and the security holes have been known about for a long time. I actually missed the memo on rfid chips even being put in credit cards (wtf is stupid enough to do that? The security holes are well known) so I typed rfid credit card into google. Almost every one of the top links talks about the vulnerabilities thankfully, and one academic paper pdf is one of the links.
It actually explains why they got popular, since they are contactless and therefore can fail less than swiping cards. It also noted it was the fastest adopted payment technology. Pretty scary, but makes it no surprise why they want to try to quash this. But as far as your lawsuit goes, they can go way before this incident to the cc companies knowing this stuff is totally insecure. That paper is from 2006 and it was known before that. But the best that could be hoped for is a class action lawsuit win where the lawyers get millions and some people get a tiny free visa coupon, just like all class action lawsuits. But since they can hide behind trying to make them secure, that probably won't even happen.
It depends on how you count them of course. If mutual intelligibility were the only criteria Hindi's numbers would be much higher, up to about twice the number of native English and Spanish speakers. Numbers are hard to come by but you'd include lots of speakers of what are considered separate languages like Panjabi but where mutual intelligability is very high. They are considered separate languages for historical and literature related reasons. Chinese languages are the opposite. In many areas they are considered the same language for cultural homogineity reasons but they are mutually unintelligible.
But, as I pointed out, arguing that the local offering should be favored just because "that keeps the money local" is foolishness.
Well that's not entirely true either. There are a lot of good reasons to spend locally. For most physical goods buying locally reduces pollution due to transportation. Buying locally also does keep more of the money local, which for a government entity spending the people's money should be something they are interested in. In effect by keeping the money local and allowing local people to earn that money (and get taxed on it) it lowers the net cost of the purchase for the government unit. Further it helps keep local expertise around.
The epia's are good, but they are more expensive and use much more power. This one says under 13 watts while the BeagleBoard claims about 2 watts. Even with more memory 2 watts won't be as much as the epia and the epia is probably quoted without the memory anyway.
Someone else linked to this kodak stuff as some that is rated for 100+ years.
But I'm really surprised that no one mentioned data redundancy. Use something like dvdisaster to create a huge amount of extra redundancy data. That way even if there is some bit rot, your chances of recovery go up.
Even with that I agree with the commercial pressed cds since they should last longer than any cdr media. I assume there is special pressed media for archival as well. As others have said I would worry too much, 25 years isn't that long, and cds and dvds are so widespread that you're likely to be able to find a reader for that long at least. But if you're paranoid, try a few of the methods until you run out of funds. Multiple gold cdrs with lots of redundancy is probably your cheapest option, then go from there.
I don't like the misuse of literally either, but in this case, it's pretty accurate. The water is pumped out of the aquifer into irrigation equipment, then pumped out to the plants which then basically pump it through as they grow. The sugars that are made are processed with more water pumped from the aquifer and them pumped into the gas tank. Given the absurd inefficiencies of corn ethanol everyone should be outraged that it qualifies for any "green" subsidies. Yep, we're all paying for that. Even the corn ethanol industry themselves only claim about a 35% energy return, or for every gallon of fossil fuel inputs about 1.35 gallons of ethanol are produced, ignoring energy density differences.
I am also staunchly fiscally conservative. There are few if any things the government does efficiently or well. One of them is revenue collection, the IRS is one of the leanest federal programs there is. However, infrastructure is one thing that free markets generally fail to do properly partly due to the free rider problem of why should I bother to pay for it if someone else will, and partly just that separate agents acting for their own good rarely work together in large groups, and stop as soon as it is no longer in their private interest.
So in short, while there are few things the federal government should be doing, infrastructure like the power grid and the interstate highway system are one of the few exceptions. Yes, they'll bungle that too, but if the best people are put in charge with oversight, then the waste is probably less then if private entities try to do it.