No, this is merely pointing out that the other big manufacturers of shovels have versions which work, but also have sequins on them, and they outsell this brand by so many to one it's not even funny.
Some people might not care about market share, but to the extent we want big companies tosupport linux, we need them tosupport the office suites we use. For that we need market share, and for that we need a compelling product.
In part yes, it's got the same underlying base anyway, so it's akin to saying that there is something "funny"about wanting a bedroom in a color you like- hey, all room do basicaly the same thing, right?
If I'm going to spend thousands of hours looking at it, you bet I want it to look good.this is what open source software designers need to understand if they want to compete in todays market
What I like about it is the more modern UI. The tabbed look it has is a metaphor I think a lot of people would get. I also think that the subtle blue colour works well compared to the dated grey-brown that we have in Libre office. The icons also have a nicer look to them, though I don't know if this is just an effect of the generally higher level of polish.
But don't think that these are trivial things. They matter both for how many people will use it, but also for productivity. It's important to have something which works visually too.
While I think this is good news, I wanted to say, generally, that I think IBM Lotus symphony is far better than other OO.org variants. I'm quite amazed that people don't really seem to consider it. If you've not tried it, you really should. It was also recently donated to the Apache foundation. But the most important think, I think is that it's actually the first office suite I've used in a long time that feels like it offers a compelling alternative to MA office, not only that it is as good where it masters, but that it is actually better in some regards.
I wish they'd get it out as the default in big distros, actually.
To be fair, the corpus is much more rounded for the 1800-2000 English cloud, which is what they use in the science article.
Now, I'm not saying that all the data is perfect, I've found some issues - but if you actually look at the additionall materials for the science article they talk a fair bit about how theye made sure the data were good. And they spent a lot of time looking into it. I personality it. Data doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Don't get me wrong, I like libraries. I use them fairly frequently too, actually. But the single biggest factor for me about a library is the number and quality of books. Wi-Fi is nice, though I have mobile internet with me most of the time anyway. Plasma screens usually just relay simple info that could be covered by a sign.
I don't want to disparage technology - but it's much less important than the books (and good chairs...).
I don't know, but I would just say congratulations on getting audio to work at all on fedora. I'm still on Fedora 10, but whilst sound used to work perfectly in Fedora Core 5 it seemed to just stop working sometime around fedora 9 and hasn't worked properly since.
Interestingly the only solutions to my audio problems I read from people online were hacks like "change the sound up and down in alsa and it might start to work...". It's hardly a ringing endorsement of the audio on Linux. The first priority should be to make audio work on all systems that physically have the capacity for it before worrying about the more esoteric configuration options.
Reference-wise I'd say it might be worth having a look in the front of "Coins of England" (i.e. the standard catalogue) by Spink, the last copy I bought did have some fairly good advice about how to spot fakes, but ultimately I think that experience is really the best guide. I know I have seen some on ebay that I was sure were fake just from looking at a picture of because you have a general idea of what actual silver looks like (it turns out I was right and someone, inadvertently I think, got some negative feedback). The other info you have on ebay of course is you know the sort of things that the person whose selling it usually sells and so you can to some extent rely on them; if they have over 1000 coin sales and 100% positive feedback I think you can afford to be fairly trusting.
That's not to say that I'd hold myself up as an expert, it takes many years really to have a really good hit rate on well made fakes and I think that on a pretty decent fake my chances of getting it for sure would be about 50% - not bad but not great. Of course on the really well made fake my chance of knowing definitively would be about 0%... I suppose this is the reason that they spent about 6 months analysing the Coenwolf I gold penny before it went on auction; it can be just that hard to tell even for experts with all the devices you could ask for to aid in the investigation. And if they struggled to say definitively you can bet that we would have no idea.
With regards to archaeological findings it's important to remember that there are really two types of "fakes". The new ones which come up on ebay, not worth anything really, don't tell us anything useful about any time other than our own (but you're probably a lot less interested in that anyway). The old ones which were made at the time are more interesting even though they are often of worse quality (I've got a Henry VIII coin made of lead which, obviously, has been rubbed pretty badly) but are far more historically interesting because it tell us more about the people who were around. A large quantity of old fakes would be a really interesting finding which would be pretty important because it may be evidence of large scale forging in the past which may tell us more about law and order in the time period.
"Hard to explain" may make the findings more interesting, remember though that coins could have been dropped and pushed a little way into the ground and so might seem like they are in slightly odd places (but obviously a Henry III penny shouldn't be under a roman floor). If you suspect that the metal dectorists might be actively lying to you then I guess it makes the problem more difficult. I think that if they are bringing in things like gold anglo-saxon pennies then you'd need to contact real experts anyway - but given how rare they are I might be suspicious at first. If they are bringing in slightly poor looking (i.e. "about fine") Henry III pennies then I'd say they have no reason to lie about it - they're not worth that much (I bought one for £5) so I think it'd probably be easier just to get a real job.
Still, if they are posing a lot of challenges for your analysis then you might still want to get them checked out. If you took them to a local coin dealer in person and explained the situation (i.e. that you're part of a historical society and aren't in it for the money) they might be willing to help you out for free just to give you a general overview of what's real and what's fake. Failing that appraisers will do it thoroughly but at a cost (Spink in london will tell you everything you could ever want to know about a coin and give it a professional grade - this will increase the value but comes at a cost).
as someone who owns a Roman coin I've looked into this (I've only got the one because my collection is primarily of hammered English silver coins). Silver which has been out of the ground and moulded for 2000 years or so takes on some certain characteristics which set it apart as being old, so you do actually need old coins to pull off convincing fakes. How they make money on it is in melting down (or at least heating up) the coins and then remoulding them into more expensive (i.e. rarer) coins. The roman coin I've got was a little over £20 (from a reputable dealer) because it is of an unpopular Emperor and was found with a lot of others - if you can re-hammer a £20 coin into a £200 coin you can see where the profit comes from
What really bothers me about all this though is less the ripping people off (which is annoying, but so far I don't think I've been got - hint: buying only relatively inexpensive coins and insisting on knowing providence on more expensive ones helps) but more that these people are destroying the world's history to turn some quick money now (for the same reason I don't support irresponsible metal detector users - you need to report any important find!)
What I would try and convince the people of who you are working with is that security is a continuum running from almost totally secure to almost completely insecure (to the extent that there is such a thing), so in reality pretty much no OS will be completely secure. What is interesting, I think, is that usability is inversely related to security. If you imagine that an OS which wouldn't allow you to write to the disk and wouldn't allow you on the internet you can imagine that when security is that high you'll get almost no usability.
with that in mind I would advocate trading a lot of usability for security - you could have an encrypted disk and run a terminal with something like nano and lynx installed - this would be pretty damn secure especially if you were running it on fairly secure hardware (did Intel ever fix the security issue that theo de raat was talking about in the Core 2s?) with something like OpenBSD as the core. This, I think would allow you (after some modifications) to allow pretty robust security. A downside though is that I'm pretty sure you might be compelled to run in English as I'm not sure how good the language support is for this sort of thing (with no GUI I can't imagine it would be great). Even so, I think if your data security is important (and lets face it, in this situation it probably is) then the trade-off might be worth while.
Of course, perhaps the more gaping hole in security is the user themselves, who could always reveal all the information they had to anyone... XKCD said it better - http://xkcd.com/538/
My note taking system is based on standard word-processing which creates three copies.
I write the notes straight into, say, Word (its just what we have at the uni), then print them and then copy them into Jabref. This does probably create more copies than I need but I don't really need the space on my USB drive and I get free printing, so it's not too bad for me but it would work just as well with fewer copies.
I do keep the PDFs but I don't really go back to them after I've read through them. In terms of how I note I do something along the lines of putting the title of the article and the author and year at the top and then do something like:
(p.155)
"item 1 shares the largest pairwise coefficient with item 7"
Or I would do:
(pp.155-7)
Notes the importance of item 7 on item 1...
This allows me to go back to the notes and then get usable quotes which I can use directly, or cite in the usual way (which is what you'd have to do in the second example anyway). This does create a lot of notes, but they don't really get unmanageable and because you've read the article it makes it a lot easier to go back through notes you've made.
Moreover in Jabref it searches through the whole lot, so it's really easy to search through it etc. (using regex no less). I'd definitely recommend this way of doing things to anyone who is hoping to stay in academia because it builds up a great library which is easily searchable and it shows you what you've read (as well as being easy to use with LaTeX). It would be better if I'd know about this at the start of my BA.
I agree. I'm in the first year of my PhD and I've been making an effort to build an extensive bibtex database because it provides everything I need in terms of references and notes. What I do is read a paper, make pretty extensive notes on it and then put them in the abstract section of Jabref so that when you use the search function for terms it searches through all the relevant text in the article for what you work on. I've also tried to put down some keywords which are related just to make sure that they're linked with the article. Then if I want to know everything I've ever read on, say, political corruption it's just a search away.
If you wanted to add papers you've not digitized your notes for then you could put in the references and just a few quick keywords. Papers you don't have you can search through google scholar to find them. It works OK.
I've also been impressed with Papers for OSX, but Jabref can move systems really easily and is GPL.
but sometimes people who aren't programmers have good ideas which ought to be implemented but which don't occur to people working in the industry.
For example, why don't we have a root/user distinction on email? you could set it up so the user account could read the mail but not reply or delete it and the root account had full "regular" control - then if you wanted to view mail using an unsecured computer that would be fine; even if someone did steal your password they could at best be an annoyance to you (so long as you don't have loads of passwords stored there). It would make it so much easier to check email whilst you were staying with family who think an unsecured copy of XP is "good enough".
Or why can't we have some sort of news source linking system which can automatically pull stories which were posted after the one you are looking at and place links to them so that you get a better idea of the time-line of progression.
I'm sure the first would be easy to implement into a mail system... the second might be easy but I have no idea how you would do that. Anyway, the point is, if we keep on having the ideas someone who can implement them might do and everyone benefits. If nothing else it might provide prior art to stop some corporate hacks from patenting is
I kind of wish that the first set of emails had a date on it. I tried typing "help with the internet" into Google and got just a plain boring list of people who offer various level of tech support as well as some ISP's tech support sites.
Also, why is the comment box here crap - has/. designed this page to be terrible; the rest of/. works fine...
One thing I have often though about when considering longevity is the importance of perpetually "curing" aging. For example, if you did get us 1000 years we could reasonably expect to be able to get more life out of us with technology 1000 years more advanced than we have now, so we can keep continually extending the "mortal coil" and so long as it moves even slightly faster than we do we'll be safe for ever.
But what I really want to know is, how important do you think the next 100 years will be in this effort? Do you take the view that if we can still be here in 100 years we stand a really good chance of getting the 1000 years (I assume, for example, Moore's law would help)? Or do you anticipate that every step will have roughly the same difficulty.
Weren't these things meant to be cheep light netbooks? I got an email from ebuyer just the other day offering a laptop which isn't too much thicker/heavier than these (although it is slightly on both counts) with a core duo processor, 1GB of RAM, 120GB HD and a DVD +/- RW drive... all for £279.
This means they want me to pay a lot MORE to get worse specs, not great battery life, an older OS which won't be supported by 3rd parties for very much longer... I know it's slightly smaller; but really, it's just too expensive.
I really would second that. But you should ring up and (whilst trying to, as much as possible, avoid being condescending) talk the nice guy at the police through what he will have to do stage by stage to get the people who've robbed you.
Basically saying "I have this data which can be varified in these ways, which will give you reasonable suspicion that these people are thieves. If you ring up the number and say you are with the police they will give you their physical address, which you can then make a quick warrant application for permission to go in, and then you have the criminals"... of course, as someone else mentioned, if you can get the FBI involved it would be better for you - probably.
You're right, I think it was the A4 or A5 or something... I remember it making me really annoyed at the time - there just shouldn't be over 20,000 patentable things in or on a car. It really is insane that anyone could ever conceive that there could be.
My current ad of hate is the Gillete Fusion which advertises that they have 20 patents pending on it, over and above their standard razor. Really, what in the hell is unique or inventive about it. It's a standard razor which offers very little over and above other standard razors, but this time with a blade on the back to act like a cut-throat razor... all of which have existed for well over 20 years. Indeed, using a strait blade for shaving is at very least 2500 years old, but almost certainly far more than that...
I really don't see the media and lay people being concerned about this as a bad thing like you seem to. I'm certainly concerned about it, they might have some empirical reasons for assuming that what they are doing is safe, this may even be bourn out by the current theoretical paradigm, but we have been wrong in the past about these things and when the consequences are so serious it is worth taking time to fully assess why people are concerned and seeing what can be done to reduce those feelings. If the world is destroyed a simple "I'm sorry" won't cut it. When I do research which could potentially have a negative imapact upon the people involved I have to be able to show to an ethics board, which includes people from outside my discipline, that what I'm doing will do no harm; is it so mug to ask that those undertaking this research ought to do the same?
why seth, that's easy. All you need to do is give millions dollars to the president and his party, as well as a little to those in congress, then tell them that your continuing support is conditional upon them stopping this at all costs. Really, how's democracy ever going to work if people don't understand such basic elements of the democratic process!
A lot of people have already pointed out that it smplu isn't the case that this can now happen because the bill is no where near becoming a law, and is highly unlikely to ever do so. But even if this bill does become law it would still be wrong to say that people could be held for 42 days without charge, because all this bill seeks to do is create a structure for a detention of that length to happen rather than to provide the authority for it to actually happen. In order to use this power there would need to be extensive consultation with independent judges and votes in parliament, and it can only be suggested in extreme emergencies any way.
If any thing the main problem with this bill is that it will alienate a lot of people from the national.community (which is already pretty shakey) for no real benefit because whenever these powers could be used the pm could have used the civil contingencies act and declared a state of emergency under existing powers. So really we already can hold people for 42 days, as can pretty much any country in the world, if a state of emergency and/or martial law is declared
I agree completely, whilst china may be backing some already good hackers who will be even better with more powerful resources there is no excuse for this happening at all. That is to say the actual blame should lie primarily with the electricity companies. They could have prevented this, they should have, and it was entirely predictable that someone would want to take the power grid offline; terrorists, bored hackers, foreign governments, etc. Companies who have had their servers hacked probably deserve a little more sympathy, but I doubt much more... I'd be willing to bet most had security well under par - security is everyone's responsibility!
I'm not sure if your from the uk or not, but I think you've really hit the nail on the head with your comment concerning a desperate need of some politicians to raise their popularity. Brown is incredibly unpopular, his government has lost every vote they have every been subjected to and have shown the worst results labour have seen at least since 1983 where they were arguing for real socialism in the country. This means that he really needs popularist policies and the easiest way to do this is introduce laws like this that appear to only hurt those who everyone already hates. It is a similar rationale which is behind their new push for "British jobs for British workers", as well as other anti-immigrat rhetoric.
What really worries me about this is that I'm hoping to have children within the next two years by which time this law could easily have come in. Now peadophiles will be looking to abuse real children rather than just looking at simulated images... But I guess the government needs a good headline - so I can't really expect them to care about real children
I've had horrid experiences with customer support with some companies concerning my laptop whose HD was dying (and then dead).
I rang the company I bought it from and all they could say was "re-install windows" (I don't have the windows CD any more), eventually I got passed on to the manufacturer's customer support which was over a terrible line to India. This meant trying to explain to a woman who knew literally nothing about computers that you can't put windows into safe mode when:
1) windows isn't in the machine
2)IT WON'T GET TO THE BOOT LOADER
Even if windows was on fault no. 2 would have stopped anything happening.
I sent it off and they tried to charge me over £100 to simply stick in another 40GB HD (This was last summer... I could have done it for £20). I rang the company I had a warrenty with and they said "oh, they're probably just trying it on..." - It was the worst service I've ever received. ever.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this is merely pointing out that the other big manufacturers of shovels have versions which work, but also have sequins on them, and they outsell this brand by so many to one it's not even funny.
Some people might not care about market share, but to the extent we want big companies tosupport linux, we need them tosupport the office suites we use. For that we need market share, and for that we need a compelling product.
In part yes, it's got the same underlying base anyway, so it's akin to saying that there is something "funny"about wanting a bedroom in a color you like- hey, all room do basicaly the same thing, right?
If I'm going to spend thousands of hours looking at it, you bet I want it to look good.this is what open source software designers need to understand if they want to compete in todays market
What I like about it is the more modern UI. The tabbed look it has is a metaphor I think a lot of people would get. I also think that the subtle blue colour works well compared to the dated grey-brown that we have in Libre office. The icons also have a nicer look to them, though I don't know if this is just an effect of the generally higher level of polish.
But don't think that these are trivial things. They matter both for how many people will use it, but also for productivity. It's important to have something which works visually too.
While I think this is good news, I wanted to say, generally, that I think IBM Lotus symphony is far better than other OO.org variants. I'm quite amazed that people don't really seem to consider it. If you've not tried it, you really should. It was also recently donated to the Apache foundation. But the most important think, I think is that it's actually the first office suite I've used in a long time that feels like it offers a compelling alternative to MA office, not only that it is as good where it masters, but that it is actually better in some regards.
I wish they'd get it out as the default in big distros, actually.
To be fair, the corpus is much more rounded for the 1800-2000 English cloud, which is what they use in the science article.
Now, I'm not saying that all the data is perfect, I've found some issues - but if you actually look at the additionall materials for the science article they talk a fair bit about how theye made sure the data were good. And they spent a lot of time looking into it. I personality it. Data doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Don't get me wrong, I like libraries. I use them fairly frequently too, actually. But the single biggest factor for me about a library is the number and quality of books. Wi-Fi is nice, though I have mobile internet with me most of the time anyway. Plasma screens usually just relay simple info that could be covered by a sign.
I don't want to disparage technology - but it's much less important than the books (and good chairs...).
Is it now time to get off your lawn?
I don't know, but I would just say congratulations on getting audio to work at all on fedora. I'm still on Fedora 10, but whilst sound used to work perfectly in Fedora Core 5 it seemed to just stop working sometime around fedora 9 and hasn't worked properly since.
Interestingly the only solutions to my audio problems I read from people online were hacks like "change the sound up and down in alsa and it might start to work...". It's hardly a ringing endorsement of the audio on Linux. The first priority should be to make audio work on all systems that physically have the capacity for it before worrying about the more esoteric configuration options.
Reference-wise I'd say it might be worth having a look in the front of "Coins of England" (i.e. the standard catalogue) by Spink, the last copy I bought did have some fairly good advice about how to spot fakes, but ultimately I think that experience is really the best guide. I know I have seen some on ebay that I was sure were fake just from looking at a picture of because you have a general idea of what actual silver looks like (it turns out I was right and someone, inadvertently I think, got some negative feedback). The other info you have on ebay of course is you know the sort of things that the person whose selling it usually sells and so you can to some extent rely on them; if they have over 1000 coin sales and 100% positive feedback I think you can afford to be fairly trusting.
That's not to say that I'd hold myself up as an expert, it takes many years really to have a really good hit rate on well made fakes and I think that on a pretty decent fake my chances of getting it for sure would be about 50% - not bad but not great. Of course on the really well made fake my chance of knowing definitively would be about 0%... I suppose this is the reason that they spent about 6 months analysing the Coenwolf I gold penny before it went on auction; it can be just that hard to tell even for experts with all the devices you could ask for to aid in the investigation. And if they struggled to say definitively you can bet that we would have no idea.
With regards to archaeological findings it's important to remember that there are really two types of "fakes". The new ones which come up on ebay, not worth anything really, don't tell us anything useful about any time other than our own (but you're probably a lot less interested in that anyway). The old ones which were made at the time are more interesting even though they are often of worse quality (I've got a Henry VIII coin made of lead which, obviously, has been rubbed pretty badly) but are far more historically interesting because it tell us more about the people who were around. A large quantity of old fakes would be a really interesting finding which would be pretty important because it may be evidence of large scale forging in the past which may tell us more about law and order in the time period.
"Hard to explain" may make the findings more interesting, remember though that coins could have been dropped and pushed a little way into the ground and so might seem like they are in slightly odd places (but obviously a Henry III penny shouldn't be under a roman floor). If you suspect that the metal dectorists might be actively lying to you then I guess it makes the problem more difficult. I think that if they are bringing in things like gold anglo-saxon pennies then you'd need to contact real experts anyway - but given how rare they are I might be suspicious at first. If they are bringing in slightly poor looking (i.e. "about fine") Henry III pennies then I'd say they have no reason to lie about it - they're not worth that much (I bought one for £5) so I think it'd probably be easier just to get a real job.
Still, if they are posing a lot of challenges for your analysis then you might still want to get them checked out. If you took them to a local coin dealer in person and explained the situation (i.e. that you're part of a historical society and aren't in it for the money) they might be willing to help you out for free just to give you a general overview of what's real and what's fake. Failing that appraisers will do it thoroughly but at a cost (Spink in london will tell you everything you could ever want to know about a coin and give it a professional grade - this will increase the value but comes at a cost).
as someone who owns a Roman coin I've looked into this (I've only got the one because my collection is primarily of hammered English silver coins). Silver which has been out of the ground and moulded for 2000 years or so takes on some certain characteristics which set it apart as being old, so you do actually need old coins to pull off convincing fakes. How they make money on it is in melting down (or at least heating up) the coins and then remoulding them into more expensive (i.e. rarer) coins. The roman coin I've got was a little over £20 (from a reputable dealer) because it is of an unpopular Emperor and was found with a lot of others - if you can re-hammer a £20 coin into a £200 coin you can see where the profit comes from
What really bothers me about all this though is less the ripping people off (which is annoying, but so far I don't think I've been got - hint: buying only relatively inexpensive coins and insisting on knowing providence on more expensive ones helps) but more that these people are destroying the world's history to turn some quick money now (for the same reason I don't support irresponsible metal detector users - you need to report any important find!)
What I would try and convince the people of who you are working with is that security is a continuum running from almost totally secure to almost completely insecure (to the extent that there is such a thing), so in reality pretty much no OS will be completely secure. What is interesting, I think, is that usability is inversely related to security. If you imagine that an OS which wouldn't allow you to write to the disk and wouldn't allow you on the internet you can imagine that when security is that high you'll get almost no usability.
with that in mind I would advocate trading a lot of usability for security - you could have an encrypted disk and run a terminal with something like nano and lynx installed - this would be pretty damn secure especially if you were running it on fairly secure hardware (did Intel ever fix the security issue that theo de raat was talking about in the Core 2s?) with something like OpenBSD as the core. This, I think would allow you (after some modifications) to allow pretty robust security. A downside though is that I'm pretty sure you might be compelled to run in English as I'm not sure how good the language support is for this sort of thing (with no GUI I can't imagine it would be great). Even so, I think if your data security is important (and lets face it, in this situation it probably is) then the trade-off might be worth while.
Of course, perhaps the more gaping hole in security is the user themselves, who could always reveal all the information they had to anyone... XKCD said it better - http://xkcd.com/538/
My note taking system is based on standard word-processing which creates three copies.
I write the notes straight into, say, Word (its just what we have at the uni), then print them and then copy them into Jabref. This does probably create more copies than I need but I don't really need the space on my USB drive and I get free printing, so it's not too bad for me but it would work just as well with fewer copies.
I do keep the PDFs but I don't really go back to them after I've read through them. In terms of how I note I do something along the lines of putting the title of the article and the author and year at the top and then do something like:
(p.155)
"item 1 shares the largest pairwise coefficient with item 7"
Or I would do:
(pp.155-7)
Notes the importance of item 7 on item 1...
This allows me to go back to the notes and then get usable quotes which I can use directly, or cite in the usual way (which is what you'd have to do in the second example anyway). This does create a lot of notes, but they don't really get unmanageable and because you've read the article it makes it a lot easier to go back through notes you've made.
Moreover in Jabref it searches through the whole lot, so it's really easy to search through it etc. (using regex no less). I'd definitely recommend this way of doing things to anyone who is hoping to stay in academia because it builds up a great library which is easily searchable and it shows you what you've read (as well as being easy to use with LaTeX). It would be better if I'd know about this at the start of my BA.
I agree. I'm in the first year of my PhD and I've been making an effort to build an extensive bibtex database because it provides everything I need in terms of references and notes. What I do is read a paper, make pretty extensive notes on it and then put them in the abstract section of Jabref so that when you use the search function for terms it searches through all the relevant text in the article for what you work on. I've also tried to put down some keywords which are related just to make sure that they're linked with the article. Then if I want to know everything I've ever read on, say, political corruption it's just a search away.
If you wanted to add papers you've not digitized your notes for then you could put in the references and just a few quick keywords. Papers you don't have you can search through google scholar to find them. It works OK.
I've also been impressed with Papers for OSX, but Jabref can move systems really easily and is GPL.
but sometimes people who aren't programmers have good ideas which ought to be implemented but which don't occur to people working in the industry.
For example, why don't we have a root/user distinction on email? you could set it up so the user account could read the mail but not reply or delete it and the root account had full "regular" control - then if you wanted to view mail using an unsecured computer that would be fine; even if someone did steal your password they could at best be an annoyance to you (so long as you don't have loads of passwords stored there). It would make it so much easier to check email whilst you were staying with family who think an unsecured copy of XP is "good enough".
Or why can't we have some sort of news source linking system which can automatically pull stories which were posted after the one you are looking at and place links to them so that you get a better idea of the time-line of progression.
I'm sure the first would be easy to implement into a mail system... the second might be easy but I have no idea how you would do that. Anyway, the point is, if we keep on having the ideas someone who can implement them might do and everyone benefits. If nothing else it might provide prior art to stop some corporate hacks from patenting is
Brendan Eich may claim it to be dead, but I'd really rather wait for Netcraft to confirm it before actually basing any decisions on this news...
I kind of wish that the first set of emails had a date on it. I tried typing "help with the internet" into Google and got just a plain boring list of people who offer various level of tech support as well as some ISP's tech support sites.
/. designed this page to be terrible; the rest of /. works fine...
Also, why is the comment box here crap - has
One thing I have often though about when considering longevity is the importance of perpetually "curing" aging. For example, if you did get us 1000 years we could reasonably expect to be able to get more life out of us with technology 1000 years more advanced than we have now, so we can keep continually extending the "mortal coil" and so long as it moves even slightly faster than we do we'll be safe for ever.
But what I really want to know is, how important do you think the next 100 years will be in this effort? Do you take the view that if we can still be here in 100 years we stand a really good chance of getting the 1000 years (I assume, for example, Moore's law would help)? Or do you anticipate that every step will have roughly the same difficulty.
Weren't these things meant to be cheep light netbooks? I got an email from ebuyer just the other day offering a laptop which isn't too much thicker/heavier than these (although it is slightly on both counts) with a core duo processor, 1GB of RAM, 120GB HD and a DVD +/- RW drive... all for £279.
This means they want me to pay a lot MORE to get worse specs, not great battery life, an older OS which won't be supported by 3rd parties for very much longer... I know it's slightly smaller; but really, it's just too expensive.
I really would second that. But you should ring up and (whilst trying to, as much as possible, avoid being condescending) talk the nice guy at the police through what he will have to do stage by stage to get the people who've robbed you.
Basically saying "I have this data which can be varified in these ways, which will give you reasonable suspicion that these people are thieves. If you ring up the number and say you are with the police they will give you their physical address, which you can then make a quick warrant application for permission to go in, and then you have the criminals"... of course, as someone else mentioned, if you can get the FBI involved it would be better for you - probably.
You're right, I think it was the A4 or A5 or something... I remember it making me really annoyed at the time - there just shouldn't be over 20,000 patentable things in or on a car. It really is insane that anyone could ever conceive that there could be.
My current ad of hate is the Gillete Fusion which advertises that they have 20 patents pending on it, over and above their standard razor. Really, what in the hell is unique or inventive about it. It's a standard razor which offers very little over and above other standard razors, but this time with a blade on the back to act like a cut-throat razor... all of which have existed for well over 20 years. Indeed, using a strait blade for shaving is at very least 2500 years old, but almost certainly far more than that...
I really don't see the media and lay people being concerned about this as a bad thing like you seem to. I'm certainly concerned about it, they might have some empirical reasons for assuming that what they are doing is safe, this may even be bourn out by the current theoretical paradigm, but we have been wrong in the past about these things and when the consequences are so serious it is worth taking time to fully assess why people are concerned and seeing what can be done to reduce those feelings. If the world is destroyed a simple "I'm sorry" won't cut it. When I do research which could potentially have a negative imapact upon the people involved I have to be able to show to an ethics board, which includes people from outside my discipline, that what I'm doing will do no harm; is it so mug to ask that those undertaking this research ought to do the same?
why seth, that's easy. All you need to do is give millions dollars to the president and his party, as well as a little to those in congress, then tell them that your continuing support is conditional upon them stopping this at all costs. Really, how's democracy ever going to work if people don't understand such basic elements of the democratic process!
A lot of people have already pointed out that it smplu isn't the case that this can now happen because the bill is no where near becoming a law, and is highly unlikely to ever do so. But even if this bill does become law it would still be wrong to say that people could be held for 42 days without charge, because all this bill seeks to do is create a structure for a detention of that length to happen rather than to provide the authority for it to actually happen. In order to use this power there would need to be extensive consultation with independent judges and votes in parliament, and it can only be suggested in extreme emergencies any way.
If any thing the main problem with this bill is that it will alienate a lot of people from the national.community (which is already pretty shakey) for no real benefit because whenever these powers could be used the pm could have used the civil contingencies act and declared a state of emergency under existing powers. So really we already can hold people for 42 days, as can pretty much any country in the world, if a state of emergency and/or martial law is declared
I agree completely, whilst china may be backing some already good hackers who will be even better with more powerful resources there is no excuse for this happening at all. That is to say the actual blame should lie primarily with the electricity companies. They could have prevented this, they should have, and it was entirely predictable that someone would want to take the power grid offline; terrorists, bored hackers, foreign governments, etc. Companies who have had their servers hacked probably deserve a little more sympathy, but I doubt much more... I'd be willing to bet most had security well under par - security is everyone's responsibility!
I'm not sure if your from the uk or not, but I think you've really hit the nail on the head with your comment concerning a desperate need of some politicians to raise their popularity. Brown is incredibly unpopular, his government has lost every vote they have every been subjected to and have shown the worst results labour have seen at least since 1983 where they were arguing for real socialism in the country. This means that he really needs popularist policies and the easiest way to do this is introduce laws like this that appear to only hurt those who everyone already hates. It is a similar rationale which is behind their new push for "British jobs for British workers", as well as other anti-immigrat rhetoric.
What really worries me about this is that I'm hoping to have children within the next two years by which time this law could easily have come in. Now peadophiles will be looking to abuse real children rather than just looking at simulated images... But I guess the government needs a good headline - so I can't really expect them to care about real children
It's sad but true.
I've had horrid experiences with customer support with some companies concerning my laptop whose HD was dying (and then dead).
I rang the company I bought it from and all they could say was "re-install windows" (I don't have the windows CD any more), eventually I got passed on to the manufacturer's customer support which was over a terrible line to India. This meant trying to explain to a woman who knew literally nothing about computers that you can't put windows into safe mode when:
1) windows isn't in the machine
2)IT WON'T GET TO THE BOOT LOADER
Even if windows was on fault no. 2 would have stopped anything happening.
I sent it off and they tried to charge me over £100 to simply stick in another 40GB HD (This was last summer... I could have done it for £20). I rang the company I had a warrenty with and they said "oh, they're probably just trying it on..." - It was the worst service I've ever received. ever.