I just played around with my Hero and found that underneath is no Linux distribution I would like to have. As soon as you get root access you have a security issue at your hands. In other words I'm still trying to find something like a passwd or shadow file since su lets me get straight to root.
Conversely I keep hearing that the n900 one of my colleagues just got has a debian running underneath -sounds much better to me.
Also the file system has been reorganized into something that doesn't follow the Linux file system standard. I wouldn't mind if they had put android+htc stuff on top of an existing distribution I can recognize, but no they had to do it all differently.
I do find the android stuff nice though. It works straight out of the box together with eclipse and you can use you phone as a target without much effort. I really find this kind of welcoming to new developers.
Now I heard that i can install debian and maybe use it through chroot or something similar, I still wonder whether somebody couldn't come up with a firmware that has android running on top of debian.
> However they do care if they feel that it's twice as likely to get caught than before.
So will law abiding citizens have to become a little bit more criminal to understand this truth a bit better or will just telling them help?
Actually the occasional new law to all of a sudden criminalize people who were previously law abiding like drug laws or IP laws should have provided enough people with an opportunity to gain that insight by now.
I have some issues with your statement, but let me only comment on one line:
"Just look at how much we "thinned the herd" with WW I and WW II."
I generally despise of people who think that a war or another atrocity would solve economic or demographic problems. Since we take so much pride in our brains we should be able to find more civilized means to deal with such issues.
The world wars didn't thin the herd either, they took about 3%-10% of the involved populations (more like a decimation, you don't kill your whole unit as a punishment, eh?). For Germany the thinning of the herd had started with a drop of the birth rate around 1890 (from 5.5 children per woman). I suppose this came through Bismarck's introduction of the pension/insurance system, maybe reduced child mortality, and industrialization.
Regarding agriculture, an undertaking that is as necessary to a society as it has an ecological impact/dependency, European countries are encouraged to be largely independent from imports. So looking at just one country might be permissible. Currently not all farmland in Germany is in use (intermittently upset by the bio-fuel fad) and I guess that we could easily support an even larger number of people. Despite simpler technology in the begin of the last century the food supply was mainly in jeopardy because of wars. The wars have hindered reproduction (the statistics say so) but there was never a credible need to start a war because of lack of food nor did the wars have much of an impact on population size (yet causing much grief).
The future might pose some difficulties regarding oil prices and agriculture being dependent on oil (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery). There might also be a developmental gap between the availability of new technologies and an oil price increase which will make things difficult. I don't see a shift to a much more agricultural society however, since you will remain more efficient with large industrial farms even if you have to run your machinery with something else than diesel. Getting a hard limit on mechanized agriculture through the oil prize so that people can buy cheap unused land and work on it with animals and bare hands seems incredibly far fetched to me. I guess our diet might change back to a mid of the last century type however (meat only on Sundays).
Given the overall development of a doubling of the German population since 1870 I don't really feel like we are rushing to test any ecological limits. Contrary to popular belief we are also not keeping our population size in check through wars and other calamities.
The indirect effects of our actions like deforestation of rain forests and extinction of species seems to me the more dramatic issue than what happened recently on our own soil ecologically. Europe has been under cultivation for thousands of years, and especially Germany probably has seen more habitat destruction around the time peak wood had been reached. Maybe world war three would scale back globalization similar to WW2 but how can you be certain that people will find it easier then to leave the remaining rain forests alone. Also the associated armament production/rebuilding effort would probably cause more pollution than a normal economy.
I wonder why they didn't bother to check what Google had to offer as links for the mentioned searches, or why they didn't tell us. Surely they must have felt great to find out how smart they are, or do they want to give us something we can feel smart about.
Do the authors maybe even want to make us feel superior over the typical CNet journalist?
Also, why should we follow their eclectic mix of links? Maybe they were offered money for our eyeballs and didn't know how to get our attention other than through our intellectual vanity (darn safe bet).
Anyway, my mind boggles. Do you have any better ideas?
>Which is why the geek tends to lose more in the political arena then he wins.
There are many different ways to lose in politics. Overestimating the IQ/education of your voters
is one.
The arena you wanted to talk of is not one many people have a clue about and I would call it security arena.
He would be adequately prepared for politics as long as he doesn't believe in his own statements.
Quite honestly I wonder how much of a choice he had in joining the KGB school. If I had ever joined with the Stasi or the SED in eastern Germany my family would have looked down on it to say the least and I would have felt like I was deserting. However, I was spared the opportunity because I was too young. For a Russian the whole thing must have looked somewhat different though. They had a totalitarian society since 1917 so things may have looked more ambiguous to him. Also he would have worked for his country, I would have worked for Russia's puppets.
But I would guess that a KGB school would filter out people who weren't in line with the party. I'm really curious how they selected their students back then. Somebody should check whether he was KP member as well. Around Eastern Germany that was frequently required if you wanted to work on defence related research.
More food was produced per acre before the green revolution.
Because artificial fertilizers came before the green revolution which among other things attempted successfully to produce plant varieties that can use fertilizers more efficiently? Or did you just make that up?
Anyway, I would like to remind you that a citation is needed.
Otherwise I will have to conclude that you are full of shit.
So you want another study on top of the large number of studies already done. Fine - I question your motives though. It seems to be a smoke screen at best. I mean you could have looked it up yourself and presented your somewhat better founded ideas here instead of spreading FUD.
"Food, Energy, and Society", David Pimentel, Marcia Pimentel, Edition 3, illustrated, CRC Press, 2008, ISBN 1420046675, 9781420046670
Interestingly the second source presents a much lower number for the EROI than the first.
After all, all power conversion systems currently in use have a higher than 1 EROI, does this come as a surprise to you? Personally I count on the people who build power conversion facilities to have an interest in a properly filled wallet and the major energy storage medium being sold in some currency.
Oddly enough I remember my english teacher talking about 25 vowel sounds. I wonder how people come up with those numbers.
Since english is my second language I have to say that the way Americans pronounce the letters 'c' and 'z' if they spell them out, really is difficult for me to understand and reproduce. I just can't hear the difference. So while english has been easy on me some aspects are more demanding.
It's a way to start a space business in addition to the existing ones and increase competition. This is what I see as a typical behaviour of the US government.
The fact that you entered the space race with the soviet union doesn't mean that you have to copy her business model too.
Now pick one that takes you ~1000 years to reach some planet. The contestants will then develop spacecraft to travel this path for 1000 years and send them on their journey. Technically they could all arrive at the same time, so we have to add a little difficulty. The price goes to the descendant of the original contestant whose family has been involved with monitoring the probe throughout the whole travel time.
Why should he, the system is exchanging time for bandwidth. You put a snippet of a signal 10GHz wide into the device out comes a signal 1/27th the lenght at 270GHz. If you have an 27 element array of devices that are properly scheduled you can stitch the whole bunch of snippets together at the output just not in frequency but in time. Doesn't really make a difference, you could have used WDM if you just wanted to fill the bandwidth, but there might be other reasons for doing this.
Don't ask me to explain it, I'm still searching for an easier explanation. If you have any contemporary optics knowledge you should be able to figure it out.
Great! Back to square one. I go and get my OLPC now.
Remember OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, a hundred bucks Linux laptop. I wonder what happened to the give one get one programm this year. The thing that sparked this renewed interest in tiny laptops.
Now we have subnotebooks like we had before for almost but not quite the price of a Libretto or Sony Vaio.
Getting older the importance of Quebecs motto becomes ever more obvious to me so I'll make it my signature to remind me of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I just played around with my Hero and found that underneath is no Linux distribution I would like to have. As soon as you get root access you have a security issue at your hands. In other words I'm still trying to find something like a passwd or shadow file since su lets me get straight to root.
Conversely I keep hearing that the n900 one of my colleagues just got has a debian running underneath -sounds much better to me.
Also the file system has been reorganized into something that doesn't follow the Linux file system standard. I wouldn't mind if they had put android+htc stuff on top of an existing distribution I can recognize, but no they had to do it all differently.
I do find the android stuff nice though. It works straight out of the box together with eclipse and you can use you phone as a target without much effort. I really find this kind of welcoming to new developers.
Now I heard that i can install debian and maybe use it through chroot or something similar, I still wonder whether somebody couldn't come up with a firmware that has android running on top of debian.
Maybe it should be set up in Munich they should have some clue about installing Linux.
Now I remember that I just recently had to cleanup somebody's computer and didn't install Linux. Damn, I have become so complacent.
> However they do care if they feel that it's twice as likely to get caught than before.
So will law abiding citizens have to become a little bit more criminal to understand this truth a bit better or will just telling them help?
Actually the occasional new law to all of a sudden criminalize people who were previously law abiding like drug laws or IP laws should have
provided enough people with an opportunity to gain that insight by now.
The monolith is really a C64.
I have some issues with your statement, but let me only comment on one line:
"Just look at how much we "thinned the herd" with WW I and WW II."
I generally despise of people who think that a war or another atrocity would solve economic or demographic problems. Since we take so much pride in our brains we should be able to find more civilized means to deal with such issues.
The world wars didn't thin the herd either, they took about 3%-10% of the involved populations (more like a decimation, you don't kill your whole unit as a punishment, eh?). For Germany the thinning of the herd had started with a drop of the birth rate around 1890 (from 5.5 children per woman). I suppose this came through Bismarck's introduction of the pension/insurance system, maybe reduced child mortality, and industrialization.
Regarding agriculture, an undertaking that is as necessary to a society as it has an ecological impact/dependency, European countries are encouraged to be largely independent from imports. So looking at just one country might be permissible. Currently not all farmland in Germany is in use (intermittently upset by the bio-fuel fad) and I guess that we could easily support an even larger number of people. Despite simpler technology in the begin of the last century the food supply was mainly in jeopardy because of wars. The wars have hindered reproduction (the statistics say so) but there was never a credible need to start a war because of lack of food nor did the wars have much of an impact on population size (yet causing much grief).
The future might pose some difficulties regarding oil prices and agriculture being dependent on oil (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery). There might also be a developmental gap between the availability of new technologies and an oil price increase which will make things difficult. I don't see a shift to a much more agricultural society however, since you will remain more efficient with large industrial farms even if you have to run your machinery with something else than diesel.
Getting a hard limit on mechanized agriculture through the oil prize so that people can buy cheap unused land and work on it with animals and bare hands seems incredibly far fetched to me. I guess our diet might change back to a mid of the last century type however (meat only on Sundays).
Just for shits and grins, if we were to switch to Japanese agricultural methods of 1907 we could support about 150 million people. If you want to do your own haphazard calculations check here: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/frftc10.txt and here: http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/gm-germany/agr-agriculture&all=1
Given the overall development of a doubling of the German population since 1870 I don't really feel like we are rushing to test any ecological limits. Contrary to popular belief we are also not keeping our population size in check through wars and other calamities.
The indirect effects of our actions like deforestation of rain forests and extinction of species seems to me the more dramatic issue than what happened recently on our own soil ecologically. Europe has been under cultivation for thousands of years, and especially Germany probably has seen more habitat destruction around the time peak wood had been reached. Maybe world war three would scale back globalization similar to WW2 but how can you be certain that people will find it easier then to leave the remaining rain forests alone. Also the associated armament production/rebuilding effort would probably cause more pollution than a normal economy.
To remind you what life is all about - uh - son.
I wonder why they didn't bother to check what Google had to offer as links for the mentioned searches, or why they didn't tell us. Surely they must have felt great to find out how smart they are, or do they want to give us something we can feel smart about.
Do the authors maybe even want to make us feel superior over the typical CNet journalist?
Also, why should we follow their eclectic mix of links? Maybe they were offered money for our eyeballs and didn't know how to get our attention other than through our intellectual vanity (darn safe bet).
Anyway, my mind boggles. Do you have any better ideas?
Uh, thanks. My feindbild was getting a bit lopsided, what with all those european politicians asking for similar restrictions and all ...
I think that polish gentleman in the previous comment understood my first point better though.
Out of a gun, into the sun.
Bad depth perception?
Hmm, the "Slashdot Prison Experiment" I would call that.
>Which is why the geek tends to lose more in the political arena then he wins. There are many different ways to lose in politics. Overestimating the IQ/education of your voters is one. The arena you wanted to talk of is not one many people have a clue about and I would call it security arena. He would be adequately prepared for politics as long as he doesn't believe in his own statements.
Quite honestly I wonder how much of a choice he had in joining the KGB school. If I had ever joined with the Stasi or the SED in eastern Germany my family would have looked down on it to say the least and I would have felt like I was deserting. However, I was spared the opportunity because I was too young. For a Russian the whole thing must have looked somewhat different though. They had a totalitarian society since 1917 so things may have looked more ambiguous to him. Also he would have worked for his country, I would have worked for Russia's puppets.
But I would guess that a KGB school would filter out people who weren't in line with the party. I'm really curious how they selected their students back then.
Somebody should check whether he was KP member as well. Around Eastern Germany that was frequently required if you wanted to work on defence related research.
More food was produced per acre before the green revolution.
Because artificial fertilizers came before the green revolution which among other things attempted successfully to produce plant varieties that can use fertilizers more efficiently? Or did you just make that up?
Anyway, I would like to remind you that a citation is needed.
Otherwise I will have to conclude that you are full of shit.
So you want another study on top of the large number of studies already done. Fine - I question your motives though. It seems to be a smoke screen at best. I mean you could have looked it up yourself and presented your somewhat better founded ideas here instead of spreading FUD.
Regarding the EROI you could start here:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Energy_return_on_investment_(EROI)_for_wind_energy
and here:
"Food, Energy, and Society", David Pimentel, Marcia Pimentel, Edition 3, illustrated, CRC Press, 2008, ISBN 1420046675, 9781420046670
Interestingly the second source presents a much lower number for the EROI than the first.
After all, all power conversion systems currently in use have a higher than 1 EROI, does this come as a surprise to you? Personally I count on the people who build power conversion facilities to have an interest in a properly filled wallet and the major energy storage medium being sold in some currency.
There are not just 5 english vowel sounds though.
http://faculty.washington.edu/dillon/PhonResources/newstart.html
Oddly enough I remember my english teacher talking about 25 vowel sounds. I wonder how people come up with those numbers.
Since english is my second language I have to say that the way Americans pronounce the letters 'c' and 'z' if they spell them out, really is difficult for me to understand and reproduce. I just can't hear the difference. So while english has been easy on me some aspects are more demanding.
The times they are a-changin:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124385895294472035.html
It's a way to start a space business in addition to the existing ones and increase competition. This is what I see as a typical behaviour of the US government.
The fact that you entered the space race with the soviet union doesn't mean that you have to copy her business model too.
Yeah! Sounds like we are really getting desperate.
Personally I rather say its all a ripoff nowadays instead of being nickle and dimed since that somehow implies to me the ripperoffers need my help.
When I'm in the store and notice things like that I usually mumble something about inflation. I guess I'm way too kind.
This surely is going to teach me a math lesson. After 50 generations the whole world could be the family.
They need something like a millennial continuity contest.
Coincidentally I already have a plan. People have noticed that lowest consumption trajectories to the planets exist that take a long time to complete.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/07/215211&mode=thread&tid=160
Now pick one that takes you ~1000 years to reach some planet. The contestants will then develop spacecraft to travel this path for 1000 years and send them on their journey. Technically they could all arrive at the same time, so we have to add a little difficulty. The price goes to the descendant of the original contestant whose family has been involved with monitoring the probe throughout the whole travel time.
This is going to teach society a lesson.
There is a similar project here:
http://www.longnow.org/
Why should he, the system is exchanging time for bandwidth. You put a snippet of a signal 10GHz wide into the device out comes a signal 1/27th the lenght at 270GHz. If you have an 27 element array of devices that are properly scheduled you can stitch the whole bunch of snippets together at the output just not in frequency but in time. Doesn't really make a difference, you could have used WDM if you just wanted to fill the bandwidth, but there might be other reasons for doing this.
The following seems less complex.
http://nanophotonics.ece.cornell.edu/Publications/High-speed%20optical%20sampling%20using%20a%20silicon-chip%20temporal%20magnifier.pdf
So do they take a snippet of a waveform and stretch it so you can view it with a normal setup?
Seems like the inverse setup they mention in the article. This would ask for parallelization in some way to produce continuous output.
The following seems a little better:
http://nanophotonics.ece.cornell.edu/Publications/High-resolution%20spectroscopy%20using%20a%20frequency%20magnifier.pdf
Don't ask me to explain it, I'm still searching for an easier explanation. If you have any contemporary optics knowledge you should be able to figure it out.
Great! Back to square one. I go and get my OLPC now.
Remember OLPC, One Laptop Per Child, a hundred bucks Linux laptop. I wonder what happened to the give one get one programm this year. The thing that sparked this renewed interest in tiny laptops.
Now we have subnotebooks like we had before for almost but not quite the price of a Libretto or Sony Vaio.
Getting older the importance of Quebecs motto becomes ever more obvious to me so I'll make it my signature to remind me of it.