Has anyone ever done something to your car or your property while you were sleeping? Didn't you want to know who the bastard was that did it? See, it's CHEAP enough now to set up camera spying and expense was the only real reason it hasn't been done before.
It's easy to set up a camera in your car to protect it from vandalism and nail the perpetrators. Maybe you have a camera at the door, so you can see who's on your stoop, ringing your doorbell. Where does it stop? Cameras in your bedroom or bathroom? I don't think that protecting you property and protecting your privacy are naturallt equivalent, even though they are both legal issues.
It's an admirable thought, really. I suspect that if he, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, and a few other multi-billionaire types threw their weight into it, they'd have the water and electricity problems licked inside of 5 years, at which point they would have created a whole new crop of potential consumers.
Sleep... sleep... sounds familiar, but can't remember he last time I had any. I remember it was good though...
Seriously, I think it's a great discovery but for those of us who do not get the requisite amount of REM every night, I wonder if that would have an effect on these results?
During the hearing, science committee member Bart Gordon expressed concern over human spaceflight "cannibalising" other NASA missions in this way. But Griffin pointed out that science had grown from 24% to 32% of NASA's overall budget over the last 15 years, carving its extra funding from the human spaceflight programme: "When that was happening, no one complained, though human spaceflight was suffering." That prompted Gordon to interrupt, emphasising: "No one complained."
And this would be invaluable in a) reviving NASA's flagging image and b) allowing the private sector to take a more active role in spaceflight. The private groups are right now trying to make their living off of space tourism and the like, but I think that's the wrong tack. Science and exploration are what drives public opinion - remember when the first pictures of Jupiter came back from the Voyager probes? Small space companies would be well to consider trying to develop non-military launch vehicles to enable scientific expeditions to be launched cheaply and efficiently, with an eye toward adopting that technology toward getting people into space. After all, space toursist will have to have someplace to go, which means space stations, which won't be built by cargo hauled in space planes, but by good old-fashioned expendable boosters.
From Bloomberg UK: Previous studies have shown that people with high levels of education are less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. The new study shows that the brains of more educated people can tolerate changes for longer periods of time, meaning signs of decreased mental agility typical of Alzheimer's disease appear later. When those signs do appear, the disease progresses faster than it does in less educated patients.
So the results of this one study don't mean much. If all previous research shows the opposite, then either a) this study is flawed and the conclusions inaccurate or b) this study uses new methodology, breaks new ground, and has discovered a new series of conditions for Alzheimer's propogation. The results won't be conclusive until more studies of this same type are produced verifying these results.
"Many lawful evil characters use society and its laws for selfish advantages, exploiting the letter of the law over its spirit whenever it best suits their interests."
Now, tell me that's not Microsoft all over.
Why stop at Microsoft? Why not Halliburton, Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Pfizer, or any other large corporation. Each company seeks a competitive advantage over its rivals. They will circumvent laws where they can if it means gaining the upper hand. They care little for the plight of the citizens around them, unless it threatens their livelihood (boycott), and even then they pay it lip service until the law puts the hammer to them, and even that is not enough, as they drag legal proceedings out over decades.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo - they are all competing for a share of the Chinese market. One company cannot afford to be seen bucking the Chinese government, because the others will not follow suit, simply leaving the offending company to hang while they exploit its downfall. All is fair in love, war, and apparently, Internet commerce.
From PC Magazine: The only fly in the ointment will be the strategic difficulty of breaking the news to the fanatical users. Most were not initially pleased by the switch to Intel's architecture, and this will make them crazy.
Luckily, Apple has a master showman, Steve Jobs. He'll announce that now everything can run on a Mac. He'll say that the switch to Windows gives Apple the best of both worlds. He'll say this is not your daddy's Windows. He'll cajole and cajole, and still hear a few boos. But those will be the last boos he'll hear, for then the Mac will be mainstream. We will welcome the once-isolated Apple mavens, finally.
The idea is actually plausible; whether there's a shred of truth to it, only Bill Gates and Steve Jobs know. It would not surprise me that there would be some collusion between the two of them, given their long history and the twists and turns the PC industry has undergone.
It's unlikely, but even if true, I think that's a case for Jobs having lost his mind. He won't be able to convince Mac users that this is a good thing and this would lead to a revolt the likes of which has never been seen. Apple would plunge into an abyss while Apple users would covet their old boxes and find new and interesting ways to keep them running and upgrade them. If that were to occur, then the Apple phenomenon would indeed take on a cult-like status, and Steve Jobs would be a pariah.
(a) First, our business commitment to satisfy the interests of users, and by doing so to build a leading company in a highly competitive industry; and
(b) Second, our policy conviction that expanding access to information to anyone who wants it will make our world a better, more informed, and freer place.
Some governments impose restrictions that make our mission difficult to achieve, and this is what we have encountered in China. In such a situation, we have to add to the balance a third fundamental commitment:
(c) Be responsive to local conditions.
Google's main problem is trying to juggle those three things, and it appears they have too many balls in the air. We posit that the Internet is free, yet restricting access to it and content on it is not impossible and occurs every day, not just in China. The Internet contains a lot of sound, fundamental information, a great deal that is personal, and plenty of farcical and disquieting ideas that would be better should they not see the light of day.
It comes down to self-censorship. If I don't like something, I don't search for information on it. How many of these "anti-porn" crusaders are spending literally hundreds of hours scouring the Web looking for this stuff? If it offends them so, why would they go looking for it? As to whether I should be looking for it, that's my decision, not theirs. This is the same debate that took place in the early days of radio and then television: what is approrpiate and what isn't. In those cases, arbitrary guidelines were created by cobbled-together groups to try and impose order, but now these technologies have expanded to such a degree that Howard Stern can get around the FCC by going to satellite radio and cable TV does not of necessity hold to the same standards as broadcast networks.
The Web is too big to control: the infrastructure is too cumbersome, the amount of redundancy too high, the number of methods of extracting data from it too numerous. Google is doing what it needs to do as a business, but in the end, even they cannot stop the flood of information, nor can the Chinese government. They are not necessarily doing "evil", but nor are they doing "good." It will be interesting to see what finally happens.
MySQL Chief Executive Marten Mickos confirmed the acquisition attempt in an interview at the Open Source Business Conference here but wouldn't provide details such as when the approach was made or how much money Oracle offered.
He did, however, say why he turned down Oracle's offer: the desire to keep his company's independence. "We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL," Mickos said.
Oracle didn't immediately comment on the acquisition offer.
Oracle has become bloated and greedy (not unlike another large software company I could mention) and as their product continues to be mired in expensive add-ons and upgrades that not many IT departments have use for, they are seeing MySQL as the herald of their doom. MySQL is a lean, mean RDBMS that is slowly becoming the darling of programmers (how many PHP/MySQL books are there?) and Oracle is dominating the large-scale market but can't seem to make in-roads in the smaller markets. On the one hand, they covet MySQL's success; on the other, they see MySQL as a competitor to be squashed.
Larry Ellison better watch his back - the open source community may decide to start truly gunning for him.
Among the manufacturers Amazon has mentioned as likely partners for a subsidized hardware offering is Samsung Electronics Co., whose flair for stylish design is raising hopes among music executives that the initiative could create a strong alternative to iPod. A representative at Samsung's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, couldn't be reached for comment.
Samsung makes excellent products. I own a Samsung laser printer and microwave, and used to have one of their cell phones till my wife got me a Motorola upgrade for Christams two years ago. Their products are pretty reliable and robust, and if thay can create a decent MP3 player for Amazon, it should give the iPod a run for its money, though I suspect Apple's lead will shrink but never disappear unless they make some crucial marketing mistake.
Update: It appears that there is some debate about the classification of this application, and as it does require user activation, it appears to fall into the Trojan classification, rather than self-propogating through any particular vulnerability in OS X.
Sounds like Mac users will need better protection.
I preface this by saying not all kids are juvenile delinquents, but how can anyone reasonably expect to teach them copyright law? And what makes you think if you did, it would alter one thing? Schools try to teach kids civic responsibility, such as the importance of voting, but I don't see a lot of young people flocking to the polls. Kids will do what they want, and only those who respect the rights of others will get this. This is not a solution, it is a continuance of the problem.
No, it wouldn't. It's in a geostationary orbit, so it's moving at the same speed the earth's surface is. There wouldn't be any relative velocity, so no drag.
The station yes, but the remaining tether, assuming it is trailing down into the atmosphere, would create drag, in the same way as when you stick your hand out of a moving car's window. Atmospheric resistance to the tether, while minute, would add up depending on how much of the tether was in the atmosphere. It's the same reason why ISS needs a boost occasionally to stay in orbit; collisions with solar wind particles and even small bits of space debris have an effect on the station's momentum.
I assume the way this works is that the end goes so far out that the inertia of the Earth spinning keeps the rope taut... but if a small part of that 62k mile ribbon breaks... the thing gets shot into space.
Wrong. The non-Earth end would be in orbit and if the tether parted, the section in orbit would continue to orbit. The downside would be that the end of the tether attached to the orbital station would set up a drag in the Earth's atmosphere and would eventually cause the station to begin a slow spiral to the ground. However it would not be sudden and given it would have to spiral down from 62,000 miles, there would be plenty of time to recover and string a new tether.
You said the largest tube gadget in 1943 was the Nova Chord electronic organ. What did ENIAC use?
ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them. We decided that our tube filaments would last a lot longer if we kept them below their proper voltage. Not too high or too low. A lot of the circuits were off the shelf, but I invented a lot of the circuits as well. Registers were a new idea. So were integrator circuits.
And you thought your PC or laptop got hot! I suspect the voltage adjustment helped keep the heat down, but even 1 tube gets pretty hot after an hour or so. Marshmallow roast anyone?
But having one person wield that kind of power in an economy is anathema, and makes all economic models suspect. Do you now have to add a "Greenspan" factor to your equations? And more importantly, if you do, is this factor transferable, so that the "Greenspan" factor now becomes the "Bernacke" factor and has the same relative weight. No one person (or nation for that matter) should wield that kind of power, lest it create conditions where the misuse or abuse of that power would cause the dominoes of the world economy to topple.
Possibly because "traditional Wall Street research" involves reading tea leaves and throwing down chicken bones while watching Alan Greenspan do a rain dance to the gods in hopes that our economy will pick up.
And despite plaudits and accolades from government and business, Greenspan was no "genius" in the classic sense. He made mistakes early on (ask George Bush the First!) and eventually found a technique (the now famous "Raise/Lower Interest Rates a Quarter Point Shuffle") that seemed to work most of the time. Well, it may have worked most of the time; it worked in the beginning, and eventually people began to see him as a "prophet," to where his just saying something could make the markets dance.
Ultimately this system will be abused and become worthless, probably right after its greatest success, so that it will perpetuate itself and eventually become a market influence, even though it will have no practical value at that point.
Why don't they just use one of the hundreds of backdoors that everyone else uses? Seems to me M$ are already complying with this request several times over.
Better yet, why don't they just hire hackers and phishers to help them. These folks get onto people's hard drives all the time to scoop up data with key loggers or spyware.
But he probably did the right thing going the professional route and only saying the job didn't fit his interests.
But that's not what he said. To quote:
"The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft's Linux Lab. Although I believe that the concept behind Microsoft's Linux Lab is a good one, I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating," he said.
Transaltion: they wouldn't give me the resources and the free reign to do something useful. They were pretty much tapping him for his Linux knowledge and hoping to turn that into some kind of Linux-killer. Took him long enough but he finally figured it out.
Has been around since ever... it is still present in the western world, although less 'obvious' than in China. Give China a rest about that!
And that is not the issue. The issue is that censorship should not exist in China, the United States, or anywhere else. There's no reason for it. People are capable of self-censoring, it's just that some aren't very good at doing it. In the end, it's the responsibility of the individual -- if you don't like a TV show, don't watch it; if you don't like pornography, don't look at it; if you don't like the ideas of a particular church, don't listen to them. Just because you don't like something is no reason you have to keep me from it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to set up a camera in your car to protect it from vandalism and nail the perpetrators. Maybe you have a camera at the door, so you can see who's on your stoop, ringing your doorbell. Where does it stop? Cameras in your bedroom or bathroom? I don't think that protecting you property and protecting your privacy are naturallt equivalent, even though they are both legal issues.
It's an admirable thought, really. I suspect that if he, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Richard Branson, and a few other multi-billionaire types threw their weight into it, they'd have the water and electricity problems licked inside of 5 years, at which point they would have created a whole new crop of potential consumers.
Sleep... sleep... sounds familiar, but can't remember he last time I had any. I remember it was good though...
Seriously, I think it's a great discovery but for those of us who do not get the requisite amount of REM every night, I wonder if that would have an effect on these results?
"Touché," Griffin responded. "I'm complaining now."
And this would be invaluable in a) reviving NASA's flagging image and b) allowing the private sector to take a more active role in spaceflight. The private groups are right now trying to make their living off of space tourism and the like, but I think that's the wrong tack. Science and exploration are what drives public opinion - remember when the first pictures of Jupiter came back from the Voyager probes? Small space companies would be well to consider trying to develop non-military launch vehicles to enable scientific expeditions to be launched cheaply and efficiently, with an eye toward adopting that technology toward getting people into space. After all, space toursist will have to have someplace to go, which means space stations, which won't be built by cargo hauled in space planes, but by good old-fashioned expendable boosters.
Faux pas; I didn't parse out the meaning of the sentence properly. I retract my statement.
Dick Cheney
From Bloomberg UK: Previous studies have shown that people with high levels of education are less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. The new study shows that the brains of more educated people can tolerate changes for longer periods of time, meaning signs of decreased mental agility typical of Alzheimer's disease appear later. When those signs do appear, the disease progresses faster than it does in less educated patients.
So the results of this one study don't mean much. If all previous research shows the opposite, then either a) this study is flawed and the conclusions inaccurate or b) this study uses new methodology, breaks new ground, and has discovered a new series of conditions for Alzheimer's propogation. The results won't be conclusive until more studies of this same type are produced verifying these results.
Now, tell me that's not Microsoft all over.
Why stop at Microsoft? Why not Halliburton, Enron, Exxon-Mobil, Pfizer, or any other large corporation. Each company seeks a competitive advantage over its rivals. They will circumvent laws where they can if it means gaining the upper hand. They care little for the plight of the citizens around them, unless it threatens their livelihood (boycott), and even then they pay it lip service until the law puts the hammer to them, and even that is not enough, as they drag legal proceedings out over decades.
Microsoft, Google, Yahoo - they are all competing for a share of the Chinese market. One company cannot afford to be seen bucking the Chinese government, because the others will not follow suit, simply leaving the offending company to hang while they exploit its downfall. All is fair in love, war, and apparently, Internet commerce.
From PC Magazine: The only fly in the ointment will be the strategic difficulty of breaking the news to the fanatical users. Most were not initially pleased by the switch to Intel's architecture, and this will make them crazy.
Luckily, Apple has a master showman, Steve Jobs. He'll announce that now everything can run on a Mac. He'll say that the switch to Windows gives Apple the best of both worlds. He'll say this is not your daddy's Windows. He'll cajole and cajole, and still hear a few boos. But those will be the last boos he'll hear, for then the Mac will be mainstream. We will welcome the once-isolated Apple mavens, finally.
The idea is actually plausible; whether there's a shred of truth to it, only Bill Gates and Steve Jobs know. It would not surprise me that there would be some collusion between the two of them, given their long history and the twists and turns the PC industry has undergone.
It's unlikely, but even if true, I think that's a case for Jobs having lost his mind. He won't be able to convince Mac users that this is a good thing and this would lead to a revolt the likes of which has never been seen. Apple would plunge into an abyss while Apple users would covet their old boxes and find new and interesting ways to keep them running and upgrade them. If that were to occur, then the Apple phenomenon would indeed take on a cult-like status, and Steve Jobs would be a pariah.
(b) Second, our policy conviction that expanding access to information to anyone who wants it will make our world a better, more informed, and freer place.
Some governments impose restrictions that make our mission difficult to achieve, and this is what we have encountered in China. In such a situation, we have to add to the balance a third fundamental commitment:
(c) Be responsive to local conditions.
Google's main problem is trying to juggle those three things, and it appears they have too many balls in the air. We posit that the Internet is free, yet restricting access to it and content on it is not impossible and occurs every day, not just in China. The Internet contains a lot of sound, fundamental information, a great deal that is personal, and plenty of farcical and disquieting ideas that would be better should they not see the light of day.
It comes down to self-censorship. If I don't like something, I don't search for information on it. How many of these "anti-porn" crusaders are spending literally hundreds of hours scouring the Web looking for this stuff? If it offends them so, why would they go looking for it? As to whether I should be looking for it, that's my decision, not theirs. This is the same debate that took place in the early days of radio and then television: what is approrpiate and what isn't. In those cases, arbitrary guidelines were created by cobbled-together groups to try and impose order, but now these technologies have expanded to such a degree that Howard Stern can get around the FCC by going to satellite radio and cable TV does not of necessity hold to the same standards as broadcast networks.
The Web is too big to control: the infrastructure is too cumbersome, the amount of redundancy too high, the number of methods of extracting data from it too numerous. Google is doing what it needs to do as a business, but in the end, even they cannot stop the flood of information, nor can the Chinese government. They are not necessarily doing "evil", but nor are they doing "good." It will be interesting to see what finally happens.
He did, however, say why he turned down Oracle's offer: the desire to keep his company's independence. "We will be part of a larger company, but it will be called MySQL," Mickos said.
Oracle didn't immediately comment on the acquisition offer.
Oracle has become bloated and greedy (not unlike another large software company I could mention) and as their product continues to be mired in expensive add-ons and upgrades that not many IT departments have use for, they are seeing MySQL as the herald of their doom. MySQL is a lean, mean RDBMS that is slowly becoming the darling of programmers (how many PHP/MySQL books are there?) and Oracle is dominating the large-scale market but can't seem to make in-roads in the smaller markets. On the one hand, they covet MySQL's success; on the other, they see MySQL as a competitor to be squashed.
Larry Ellison better watch his back - the open source community may decide to start truly gunning for him.
Samsung makes excellent products. I own a Samsung laser printer and microwave, and used to have one of their cell phones till my wife got me a Motorola upgrade for Christams two years ago. Their products are pretty reliable and robust, and if thay can create a decent MP3 player for Amazon, it should give the iPod a run for its money, though I suspect Apple's lead will shrink but never disappear unless they make some crucial marketing mistake.
As we say in Joisy, if a member of the RIAA board becomes, shall we say, "damaged", replacements are available at a reasonable cost...
Sounds like Mac users will need better protection.
I preface this by saying not all kids are juvenile delinquents, but how can anyone reasonably expect to teach them copyright law? And what makes you think if you did, it would alter one thing? Schools try to teach kids civic responsibility, such as the importance of voting, but I don't see a lot of young people flocking to the polls. Kids will do what they want, and only those who respect the rights of others will get this. This is not a solution, it is a continuance of the problem.
The station yes, but the remaining tether, assuming it is trailing down into the atmosphere, would create drag, in the same way as when you stick your hand out of a moving car's window. Atmospheric resistance to the tether, while minute, would add up depending on how much of the tether was in the atmosphere. It's the same reason why ISS needs a boost occasionally to stay in orbit; collisions with solar wind particles and even small bits of space debris have an effect on the station's momentum.
Wrong. The non-Earth end would be in orbit and if the tether parted, the section in orbit would continue to orbit. The downside would be that the end of the tether attached to the orbital station would set up a drag in the Earth's atmosphere and would eventually cause the station to begin a slow spiral to the ground. However it would not be sudden and given it would have to spiral down from 62,000 miles, there would be plenty of time to recover and string a new tether.
I am Locutous of Borg...
Thundercats, HOOOOOOOOO!!!
ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them. We decided that our tube filaments would last a lot longer if we kept them below their proper voltage. Not too high or too low. A lot of the circuits were off the shelf, but I invented a lot of the circuits as well. Registers were a new idea. So were integrator circuits.
And you thought your PC or laptop got hot! I suspect the voltage adjustment helped keep the heat down, but even 1 tube gets pretty hot after an hour or so. Marshmallow roast anyone?
But having one person wield that kind of power in an economy is anathema, and makes all economic models suspect. Do you now have to add a "Greenspan" factor to your equations? And more importantly, if you do, is this factor transferable, so that the "Greenspan" factor now becomes the "Bernacke" factor and has the same relative weight. No one person (or nation for that matter) should wield that kind of power, lest it create conditions where the misuse or abuse of that power would cause the dominoes of the world economy to topple.
And despite plaudits and accolades from government and business, Greenspan was no "genius" in the classic sense. He made mistakes early on (ask George Bush the First!) and eventually found a technique (the now famous "Raise/Lower Interest Rates a Quarter Point Shuffle") that seemed to work most of the time. Well, it may have worked most of the time; it worked in the beginning, and eventually people began to see him as a "prophet," to where his just saying something could make the markets dance.
Ultimately this system will be abused and become worthless, probably right after its greatest success, so that it will perpetuate itself and eventually become a market influence, even though it will have no practical value at that point.
Better yet, why don't they just hire hackers and phishers to help them. These folks get onto people's hard drives all the time to scoop up data with key loggers or spyware.
But that's not what he said. To quote:
"The reason I decided to leave had to do with my specific experiences working in Microsoft's Linux Lab. Although I believe that the concept behind Microsoft's Linux Lab is a good one, I wasn't able to work at my full level of technical ability and I found this frustrating," he said.Transaltion: they wouldn't give me the resources and the free reign to do something useful. They were pretty much tapping him for his Linux knowledge and hoping to turn that into some kind of Linux-killer. Took him long enough but he finally figured it out.
And that is not the issue. The issue is that censorship should not exist in China, the United States, or anywhere else. There's no reason for it. People are capable of self-censoring, it's just that some aren't very good at doing it. In the end, it's the responsibility of the individual -- if you don't like a TV show, don't watch it; if you don't like pornography, don't look at it; if you don't like the ideas of a particular church, don't listen to them. Just because you don't like something is no reason you have to keep me from it.