I think he meant less recoverable rather than repairable. Which is true, you can't simply dump the disc and extract the fragments by hand if necessary if encrypted.
It seems wasteful to be spending taxpayers money on proprietary operating systems and expensive word processing applications when there are perfectly good free equivalents.
Phillip.
Re:Each major release is taking longer
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yikes I've always found Dolphin slow, crash-prone, and I hate the fact 1-click launches. For me its the weak point of KDE. Try ROX.
What can you get out of the phone directory other than a telephone number? And even then you can now get free phone numbers from virtual number providers and supply that to a telephone directory under any name you want.
Many of us are actually listed under telephone numbers that don't give our real names... it's called the name of your business. Some people have stage names. Others may be escaping from an abusive ex-husband or be involved in a controversial civil rights group.
Also: In real life we dress one way to go down to the butchers, and maybe have one manner of speaking, then cast a totally different image of ourselves in dressing up and the way we speak when we go to the opera. We maintain a consistent facade because we've portioned off our lives in certain ways. Having multiple identities online, including one or more 'fake', is just the way many project this real life idiosyncrasy into the virtual world.
One thing I've noticed in debates on G+ about anonymity is the straw dog always trotted out that unless G+ allows fake names, we'll never have whistleblowers and anonymous leaks
That's ridiculous. Whistleblowers and anonymous leaks would use anonymous services, for instance Wikileaks, not a service like Google that will comply to all nation state laws and supply your details on demand (fake name or otherwise) to the authorities.
A social networking site can only work when it gets a certain inertia. If you cut out a large portion of the population (and many of the women I know already have fake names on Facebook) then you are increasing the chances of it dying on the vine.
You will notice a trend, from trusted computing, to single-sign on services, to biometrics, that people often naturally see themselves as having several different public perception identities and a wariness about linking all their identities together hindering gathering an overwhelming adoption. I have different Facebook profiles for work, friends, and for family. I wouldn't consider OpenID as it seem hackers seem to slice into sites more easily than a hot knife through butter, so I have separate logins with details stored in a password database.
I now have G+ but I know many of my friends will want to keep their Facebook names, and most of them are fake. Are Google a services provider? Or a branch of the government? They should be concentrating on the bits and bytes, using the patterns to serve us ads and making themselves billions, rather than killing their new service for some bizarre policy they copied from Facebook.
Exactly. The example Moraelin gave of Kreuger is a Ponzi scheme because he borrowed money and passed it off as growth to new investors to sucker them in. Much as Maddof did.
"The real characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is basically that it's fiat currency without anyone actually guaranteeing its worth."
That's not a characteristic of a Ponzi scheme. No commodity has anybody guaranteeing its worth. The dollar and euro are up and down like a yoyo, the housing market crashes on a regular basis, people lose their shirts on gold, and even the so-called safest such as national bonds are not risk free as seen by the Greek default on its debt.
Bitcoin may be immature but it has nothing to do with a Ponzi scheme. As TheCarp says, it is simply a currency albeit a virtual one (then again the dollar and euro are practically virtual if you compare to the trillians moved electronically to the tiny amount of printed notes).
"Control Panel" is too industrial, would never have been used in the first place except for smooth transitioning of M$ users. "System settings" a bit geeky, and should really be used for system settings (boot and session config, background services, etc).
How about: * Computer settings * Computer set-up * Settings and preferences * Set-up and preferences
The KDE developer is right though. It would be ridiculous to cause naming conflicts for no real reason.
The town in which I live has 450,000 people, and we are spending $762,000,000 on a second line for the tramway. The same was spent on the first line completed a few years ago. So $1.5bn on a few electric trains that only serves a tiny fraction of the city. $1,400,000 was spent just on planting trees along the side of the first tram line, three times the budget of this tiny EV project. So no, $500k isn't much for a city.
Risky is not the same as questionable. The Japanese cities invested in the mag-lev bullet train. In this case it paid off. London invested in building a railway system underground. Now we can't imagine the city without it. I think it was questionable rather than risky as common sense tells us that is seriously underfunded.
However critics love a failure. Look how people crowed when the Segway failed to change transport as we know it (ok not a city investment but just an example). However we don't know yet if it was squandered. If any of the research done manages to lead to any EV patents then there is every chance they can make all that money back and more. If the plan was reasonable, and the intentions of the people working on it honorable, then it was a noble venture nonetheless.
Except your friend didn't. According to the web site you already need to have something to start with... an existing car. It's a nice little niche product but nothing like what Green Vehicles is trying to do.
It's unlikely you can build a prototype of a next gen electric car for $500k, but this was more like an electric motorbike with a roof. Try comparing the photo of the prototype BMW 'Clever' shown off 2006 running on natural gas, and the Green Vehicles from the summary. Similar concept, and BMW did this with the research support of Bath University being thrown at it. And it still failed achieve production. It was an epic and brave undertaking, but seriously underfunded.
This is the UK. The government requires ISPs to store all data of who has communicated with who and when. Should be possible to verify the emails. Anyway, the Met already has copies of the emails. They are being held in a warehouse in London by HCL Technologies, who say they are all intact and they have been co-operating with the police regarding access to the emails for the past 2 months.
How are those mutually exclusive? And if somebody that writes a good chunk of emacs and gcc isn't a geek I'm not quite sure what your definition is. Ungrateful git.
Not sure why you'd think it only affects android. The Patent 5,946,647 effectively says nobody can scan some text and when a pattern is detected offer options associated with that pattern in the display. First thing that springs to mind is that probably every email client in the world is in violation, as they scan the text and turn email addresses into links.
It's a pure software patent, and as such not valid in Europe.
I find it amusing all these stories about Columbus about to set sail for the New World. After all, we all know his ship is going to fall off the end the earth when he reaches the edge.
Are you serious?? "Man misuses company resources and gets fired" is a fault with bitcoin? Might as well say pens are an ill in society as it encourages people to steal them from the stationary cupboard.
Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it
Your argument defies reality. Every currency has the problem of what happens if people hoard currency. It's why we hear in the news reports about "consumer spending" all the time. The fact is much as we would all like to sit on a big pot of gold and hope it goes up in value the fact is we need goods and services to live. Plenty of people sold bitcoins at $1, at $2, at $5. They didn't 'lose' anything because it's now $14 or whatever. As for people knowing it will go up in the future, people said the same about house prices.
The fact that it's so volatile should be an indication
It's an indication that it's a small but growing market, where due to the low volume of trades single investors can still cause swings.
It's basically the stock market, except at least with stocks you hold a part of something tangible
But you don't. Due to different class shares and large institutions being preferential creditors, if a company goes bankrupt then as a private investor you end up holding a useless piece of paper. You are not totally wrong in that you could view bitcoin as yet another stock on the stock market. That is how some people treat it even though it's not the purpose of bitcoin.
Someone could come up with Bitcoin2.0 and see the value of the original Bitcoin vanish overnight
The source code is available. Why don't you try it?
In fact, once you get near the end of the mining, it'll be held completely by speculators.
I don't think you've actually thought that one through. See your previous sentence. Unless they think there will be a souvenir market for 'original' bitcoins on ebay.
Doesn't this describe every single business opportunity?
The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
But the idea isn't for the value of bitcoins to increase, the goal is to have something stable. The idea isn't to have investors, it is to have people that want to use it as a currency. And unlike a pyramid scheme you don't have to find new investors in order to make a profit, bitcoins can openly be traded on exchanges.
Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments
It will not burst as long as there are people that assign it some value. First of all it is clearly not a pyramid scheme. Secondly I can see where you are coming from but try looking at bitcoin as a currency rather than an investment vehicle.
He is definitely in love with Facebook and Microsoft, and hates Google (including Google+, Adsense, Chrome) and Open Source. Looking at the post history, there is a definite repetition of Google+ is supposed to be worse for privacy than Facebook despite providing no evidence. And he has the same tactic each time. "As much as I also hate Zuckerberg" in this post before complimenting Facebook, "I use Open Office daily" before explaining why he prefers M$ Word, "I use CentOS for servers" before dissing Open Source.
I don't think anybody really believes Facebook is better for privacy than Google so if he is a shill he is failing badly.
Exactly what I was thinking. I would go so far as to say if Anon can do it so easily, then countries well known for their espionage probably already have. The correspondence of those on the list should be assumed as compromised from the point the current email system was made live, obviously, but the email addresses could be used to hunt for potentially blackmail material (eg if they were silly enough to use their work email to register for gay porn, use a medical web site to look up HIV symptoms, etc).
I find it difficult to think of publishing the information as wrong, as anything valuable that could have been gleaned will have been flogged to death a long time ago. Is it an inconvenience? They need to get all 90,000 users to reset their passwords, but I'd expect they should have to do that on a regular basis anyway. Could somebody download the torrent and cause mischief? In the rather unlikely event the passwords weren't reset and somebody managed to use one of the email accounts, I can't see what more mischief they would do than Anon themselves when they had possession.
I can't see anything here other than the long-standing tradition of hackers exposing flaws to give impetus to fix lazy and slack computer security. The net result of this action will be US military email will become harder to access for foreign and domestic enemies. Probably not a bad overall result.
views, triggers, and stored procedures are usefull in conserving memory and optimizing performance with large tables if used properly
They are also what lock you into one particular RDBMS. Hence the whole "being tied to" alleged fiasco. I'm not saying they are a bad thing but they can prevent you from abstracting the code away from the database layer.
Probably the simplest solution is to use PHP and MySQL. As Facebook shows, it can scale up to hundreds of millions of users. There is no shortage of developers and they come as default on most hosting solution. If you outgrow PHP/MySQL then you will already be in a position to proposition investors.
There is no one-size fits all perhaps. My father used to tell me of this intersection (near Newbury if I remember correctly) where a busy feed road went onto a main road. The system was incredibly badly planned and in theory should have been permanently jammed, however it worked as every single alternate driver let somebody from the side road in (a bit like doing up a car zipper!). He used to say it would only work in England and its probably true.
In England if a traffic light breaks down you pretty much don't notice any difference. In France if a traffic lights breaks down everybody piles in and there is chaos in seconds. Horns deafen the surroundings and the police have to be called in. Germany has no speed limits and I feel quite comfortable driving 250-300km/h there as every driver is so courteous. Italy I push into small gaps into the traffic that would be discourteous back home but if you don't there then you will be waiting for ever.
One trick that Eastern Europe and Scandinavia are introducing is putting timers on traffic lights. It is FANTASTIC and should be introduced everywhere. You aren't stressed revving the engine waiting for green, you know exactly when it will turn. You don't slam on the brakes at the last minute when it turns orange/red as you can see when that will happen from a distance. Same calming effect for pedestrians as they wait to cross.
Roundabouts are ok for very low speed roads, 30mph or so, but the faster the road the more disruptive it is.
Slashdot Mirror
I think he meant less recoverable rather than repairable. Which is true, you can't simply dump the disc and extract the fragments by hand if necessary if encrypted.
Phillip.
It seems wasteful to be spending taxpayers money on proprietary operating systems and expensive word processing applications when there are perfectly good free equivalents.
Phillip.
Yikes I've always found Dolphin slow, crash-prone, and I hate the fact 1-click launches. For me its the weak point of KDE. Try ROX.
Phillip.
What can you get out of the phone directory other than a telephone number? And even then you can now get free phone numbers from virtual number providers and supply that to a telephone directory under any name you want.
Many of us are actually listed under telephone numbers that don't give our real names... it's called the name of your business. Some people have stage names. Others may be escaping from an abusive ex-husband or be involved in a controversial civil rights group.
Also: In real life we dress one way to go down to the butchers, and maybe have one manner of speaking, then cast a totally different image of ourselves in dressing up and the way we speak when we go to the opera. We maintain a consistent facade because we've portioned off our lives in certain ways. Having multiple identities online, including one or more 'fake', is just the way many project this real life idiosyncrasy into the virtual world.
Phillip.
One thing I've noticed in debates on G+ about anonymity is the straw dog always trotted out that unless G+ allows fake names, we'll never have whistleblowers and anonymous leaks
That's ridiculous. Whistleblowers and anonymous leaks would use anonymous services, for instance Wikileaks, not a service like Google that will comply to all nation state laws and supply your details on demand (fake name or otherwise) to the authorities.
A social networking site can only work when it gets a certain inertia. If you cut out a large portion of the population (and many of the women I know already have fake names on Facebook) then you are increasing the chances of it dying on the vine.
You will notice a trend, from trusted computing, to single-sign on services, to biometrics, that people often naturally see themselves as having several different public perception identities and a wariness about linking all their identities together hindering gathering an overwhelming adoption. I have different Facebook profiles for work, friends, and for family. I wouldn't consider OpenID as it seem hackers seem to slice into sites more easily than a hot knife through butter, so I have separate logins with details stored in a password database.
I now have G+ but I know many of my friends will want to keep their Facebook names, and most of them are fake. Are Google a services provider? Or a branch of the government? They should be concentrating on the bits and bytes, using the patterns to serve us ads and making themselves billions, rather than killing their new service for some bizarre policy they copied from Facebook.
Phillip.
Exactly. The example Moraelin gave of Kreuger is a Ponzi scheme because he borrowed money and passed it off as growth to new investors to sucker them in. Much as Maddof did.
"The real characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is basically that it's fiat currency without anyone actually guaranteeing its worth."
That's not a characteristic of a Ponzi scheme. No commodity has anybody guaranteeing its worth. The dollar and euro are up and down like a yoyo, the housing market crashes on a regular basis, people lose their shirts on gold, and even the so-called safest such as national bonds are not risk free as seen by the Greek default on its debt.
Bitcoin may be immature but it has nothing to do with a Ponzi scheme. As TheCarp says, it is simply a currency albeit a virtual one (then again the dollar and euro are practically virtual if you compare to the trillians moved electronically to the tiny amount of printed notes).
Phillip.
Works perfectly well for me. What's wrong with it?
Phillip.
"Control Panel" is too industrial, would never have been used in the first place except for smooth transitioning of M$ users. "System settings" a bit geeky, and should really be used for system settings (boot and session config, background services, etc).
How about:
* Computer settings
* Computer set-up
* Settings and preferences
* Set-up and preferences
The KDE developer is right though. It would be ridiculous to cause naming conflicts for no real reason.
Phillip.
The town in which I live has 450,000 people, and we are spending $762,000,000 on a second line for the tramway. The same was spent on the first line completed a few years ago. So $1.5bn on a few electric trains that only serves a tiny fraction of the city. $1,400,000 was spent just on planting trees along the side of the first tram line, three times the budget of this tiny EV project. So no, $500k isn't much for a city.
Phillip.
Risky is not the same as questionable. The Japanese cities invested in the mag-lev bullet train. In this case it paid off. London invested in building a railway system underground. Now we can't imagine the city without it. I think it was questionable rather than risky as common sense tells us that is seriously underfunded.
However critics love a failure. Look how people crowed when the Segway failed to change transport as we know it (ok not a city investment but just an example). However we don't know yet if it was squandered. If any of the research done manages to lead to any EV patents then there is every chance they can make all that money back and more. If the plan was reasonable, and the intentions of the people working on it honorable, then it was a noble venture nonetheless.
Phillip.
Except your friend didn't. According to the web site you already need to have something to start with... an existing car. It's a nice little niche product but nothing like what Green Vehicles is trying to do.
It's unlikely you can build a prototype of a next gen electric car for $500k, but this was more like an electric motorbike with a roof. Try comparing the photo of the prototype BMW 'Clever' shown off 2006 running on natural gas, and the Green Vehicles from the summary. Similar concept, and BMW did this with the research support of Bath University being thrown at it. And it still failed achieve production. It was an epic and brave undertaking, but seriously underfunded.
Phillip.
This is the UK. The government requires ISPs to store all data of who has communicated with who and when. Should be possible to verify the emails. Anyway, the Met already has copies of the emails. They are being held in a warehouse in London by HCL Technologies, who say they are all intact and they have been co-operating with the police regarding access to the emails for the past 2 months.
Phillip.
I think he meant agile, though 'facile' is actually French for 'easy'.
Phillip.
RMS isn't a geek. He's a fanatic.
How are those mutually exclusive? And if somebody that writes a good chunk of emacs and gcc isn't a geek I'm not quite sure what your definition is. Ungrateful git.
Phillip.
Not sure why you'd think it only affects android. The Patent 5,946,647 effectively says nobody can scan some text and when a pattern is detected offer options associated with that pattern in the display. First thing that springs to mind is that probably every email client in the world is in violation, as they scan the text and turn email addresses into links.
It's a pure software patent, and as such not valid in Europe.
Phillip.
I find it amusing all these stories about Columbus about to set sail for the New World. After all, we all know his ship is going to fall off the end the earth when he reaches the edge.
Phillip.
Are you serious?? "Man misuses company resources and gets fired" is a fault with bitcoin? Might as well say pens are an ill in society as it encourages people to steal them from the stationary cupboard.
Phillip.
Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it
Your argument defies reality. Every currency has the problem of what happens if people hoard currency. It's why we hear in the news reports about "consumer spending" all the time. The fact is much as we would all like to sit on a big pot of gold and hope it goes up in value the fact is we need goods and services to live. Plenty of people sold bitcoins at $1, at $2, at $5. They didn't 'lose' anything because it's now $14 or whatever. As for people knowing it will go up in the future, people said the same about house prices.
The fact that it's so volatile should be an indication
It's an indication that it's a small but growing market, where due to the low volume of trades single investors can still cause swings.
It's basically the stock market, except at least with stocks you hold a part of something tangible
But you don't. Due to different class shares and large institutions being preferential creditors, if a company goes bankrupt then as a private investor you end up holding a useless piece of paper. You are not totally wrong in that you could view bitcoin as yet another stock on the stock market. That is how some people treat it even though it's not the purpose of bitcoin.
Someone could come up with Bitcoin2.0 and see the value of the original Bitcoin vanish overnight
The source code is available. Why don't you try it?
In fact, once you get near the end of the mining, it'll be held completely by speculators.
I don't think you've actually thought that one through. See your previous sentence. Unless they think there will be a souvenir market for 'original' bitcoins on ebay.
Phillip.
It is designed for rewarding early investors
Doesn't this describe every single business opportunity?
The value of bitcoins can only increase as long as there is an influx of new investors who are willing to purchase them.
But the idea isn't for the value of bitcoins to increase, the goal is to have something stable. The idea isn't to have investors, it is to have people that want to use it as a currency. And unlike a pyramid scheme you don't have to find new investors in order to make a profit, bitcoins can openly be traded on exchanges.
Once it bursts, there will be little to no value to recover, because there are no real assets reflecting the investments
It will not burst as long as there are people that assign it some value. First of all it is clearly not a pyramid scheme. Secondly I can see where you are coming from but try looking at bitcoin as a currency rather than an investment vehicle.
Phillip.
He is definitely in love with Facebook and Microsoft, and hates Google (including Google+, Adsense, Chrome) and Open Source. Looking at the post history, there is a definite repetition of Google+ is supposed to be worse for privacy than Facebook despite providing no evidence. And he has the same tactic each time. "As much as I also hate Zuckerberg" in this post before complimenting Facebook, "I use Open Office daily" before explaining why he prefers M$ Word, "I use CentOS for servers" before dissing Open Source.
I don't think anybody really believes Facebook is better for privacy than Google so if he is a shill he is failing badly.
Phillip.
Exactly what I was thinking. I would go so far as to say if Anon can do it so easily, then countries well known for their espionage probably already have. The correspondence of those on the list should be assumed as compromised from the point the current email system was made live, obviously, but the email addresses could be used to hunt for potentially blackmail material (eg if they were silly enough to use their work email to register for gay porn, use a medical web site to look up HIV symptoms, etc).
I find it difficult to think of publishing the information as wrong, as anything valuable that could have been gleaned will have been flogged to death a long time ago. Is it an inconvenience? They need to get all 90,000 users to reset their passwords, but I'd expect they should have to do that on a regular basis anyway. Could somebody download the torrent and cause mischief? In the rather unlikely event the passwords weren't reset and somebody managed to use one of the email accounts, I can't see what more mischief they would do than Anon themselves when they had possession.
I can't see anything here other than the long-standing tradition of hackers exposing flaws to give impetus to fix lazy and slack computer security. The net result of this action will be US military email will become harder to access for foreign and domestic enemies. Probably not a bad overall result.
Phillip.
views, triggers, and stored procedures are usefull in conserving memory and optimizing performance with large tables if used properly
They are also what lock you into one particular RDBMS. Hence the whole "being tied to" alleged fiasco. I'm not saying they are a bad thing but they can prevent you from abstracting the code away from the database layer.
Phillip.
Probably the simplest solution is to use PHP and MySQL. As Facebook shows, it can scale up to hundreds of millions of users. There is no shortage of developers and they come as default on most hosting solution. If you outgrow PHP/MySQL then you will already be in a position to proposition investors.
Phillip.
Or you could not put your real information in?
Phillip.
There is no one-size fits all perhaps. My father used to tell me of this intersection (near Newbury if I remember correctly) where a busy feed road went onto a main road. The system was incredibly badly planned and in theory should have been permanently jammed, however it worked as every single alternate driver let somebody from the side road in (a bit like doing up a car zipper!). He used to say it would only work in England and its probably true.
In England if a traffic light breaks down you pretty much don't notice any difference. In France if a traffic lights breaks down everybody piles in and there is chaos in seconds. Horns deafen the surroundings and the police have to be called in. Germany has no speed limits and I feel quite comfortable driving 250-300km/h there as every driver is so courteous. Italy I push into small gaps into the traffic that would be discourteous back home but if you don't there then you will be waiting for ever.
One trick that Eastern Europe and Scandinavia are introducing is putting timers on traffic lights. It is FANTASTIC and should be introduced everywhere. You aren't stressed revving the engine waiting for green, you know exactly when it will turn. You don't slam on the brakes at the last minute when it turns orange/red as you can see when that will happen from a distance. Same calming effect for pedestrians as they wait to cross.
Roundabouts are ok for very low speed roads, 30mph or so, but the faster the road the more disruptive it is.
Phillip.