Really? You are hoping for famine that could cause billions of innocent people to starve just to teach us a lesson? Seriously? Reminds me of the Ursula Leguin book. Where the main character has dreams which change reality (retroactively) and his therapist decides to use him to play god.. at one point he "solves" the over-population problem through a plague that killed most of humanity 10 years earlier...
So it's bad when ISPs do this, but OK when Google does it? yes, google gives me a service for free in exchange to serving me ads. If i don't like it i can use another search engine.
My ISP gets money each month from me and they better not screw me up.
Has anybody else noticed that Catholicism is quickly becoming the more "accepting/open-minded" branch of Christianity, especially compared to "mainstream Christianity" in the US? Discuss.
Current Pope aside (who, from what I can tell, isn't even well-liked by most Catholics), the Catholic church has more or less apologized for most of its past crimes, and John Paul II even made a case for evolution. Likewise, the Church has definitely placed a huge emphasis on charitable works, and focused very little on evangelism (which, is effectively very much in line with the text of the New Testament). If you're talking of the catholic church you can't exactly put aside the pope. The catholic church has absolved galileo in 1992 (that's timely justice!), but judging by Ratzinger's declaration on the issue (which was the main reason of this protest) that might not have happened if he was already pope. He also caused a setbak in dialogue with other christion churches by claiming that they are the only church (the other ones are "sects").Also, this pope has been to at least one creationism convention that I know of (although the issue isn't nearly as big here as in the US). I'm not sure from where you take it that they focus on charity rather than evangelism.
In my view the church is one of the few institutions on earth which thinks in centuries, rather than quarterly reports. So evangelism and demographics are it's main concerns in winning the war for the souls of men (which probably has something to do with the no-condoms-even-in-places-where-one-third-of-the-population-has-aids policy).
Personally, I'm a bit upset at these scientists for protesting a speech from the Pope, which is -- dare I say -- rather dogmatic of them. No scientist should be afraid of ideas, even if they contradict his own. They were not protesting a speech by the pope. The pope does speeches all the time and they are all over the media here in italy already. They were protesting that he was invited to give a lecture at their university in the ceremony for the beginning of the academic year (with no debate to follow of course).
This is extremely misunderstood. Gallileo was told not to teach his theories as fact until they could be proven, and to not contradict the church in theological matters, not matters of science.
One also forgets that the Church was Gallileo's employer (he taught at a Catholic university.) None of this is true. He was working for the Medici in Florence as a scientist, giving them glory by such things as naming the satellites of Jupiter after them. He also taught at the university of florence, which wasn't any more catholic than any other university in italy at the time.
He was threatened with torture and being burned alive if he did not publicly state that he was wrong, which wasn't an empty threat since natural philosopher Giordano Bruno had been burned in 1600 (a nice round 2000 years after Socrates' death). The church didn't consider that his theories could ever be proven, as they contradicted the bible (and aristoteles) in such theological matters as the sun rotating around the earth (and the earth being the center of the universe) and celestial bodies being perfect spheres attached to the 7 or so rotating crystal spheres that make up the heaven. Now why would a scientist want to stick his nose in this kind of theological stuff?? Also, he was kept a prisoner in his house in arcetri until his death (and he was in luck, since he had actually been sentenced to prison).
If you want to get a modern interpretation of why this pissed off the church so much, read Bertold Brecht's life of galileo. Great book.
I mean, would you accept the availability of low-cost stolen car stereos and GPS-devices as a valid argument for why the electronics manufacturers should lower their prices? The comparison is meaningless. If i buy a car stereo and you steal it, there is still only one car stereo around (and i'll probably end up buying another one). If i buy a cd and rip it and it gets on the internet, thousands of people can download it.
So car stereo manufacturers are not competing with stolen goods, while the music industry is competing with bittorrent and emule whether they like it or not.
I read someplace a year or so ago that the fleet average in europe is currently 13 kilometers per litre, while it is 7 km/l in the US. (currently meaning a year or 2 ago, when i read this)
Converted to MPG, that means 30.7 in europe versus 16.5 in the US. So setting a 35mpg standard by 2020 just mean they're giving the country 12 years to reach current first world standards.
Apple implements DRM when they have to and removes it when they can, this is because their goal is to sell hardware. and you think that having a chunk of your music collection wrapped nicely in iTunes DRM doesn't help them sell you your next ipod?
Now, most of the food in Spain except for the ham, seafood and churros is bordering on objectively disgusting, but everyone I saw over there is very thin. if this conclusion after a few weeks in spain is moderated 5 informative, we really have to worry about how informed americans are about the rest of the world. I mean, it is a perfectly reasonable post, but +5 informative??
(not to mention the fact that you can let go of a mouse, and it stays in the same place....unlike a wacom tablet, or this thing) just lift the pen away from a wacom tablet and the cursor stays in it's place. Same here, close your hand so the reflecting tape isn't pointed at the tv, and you "turn it off" (the software could easily leave the cursor where it is)
You could argue that people should travel to see the world but when you have a nation that is large and varied as a majority of Europe, what's the need? please! The main point of "seeing the world" is IMHO getting to know different people and understanding the limits and prejudices of our own culture (all of us have our own cultural prejudices in some form or another). In terms of natural landscape, you can probably say that the US are about as varied as the whole of europe, but if you start looking at cities, culture, languages, history, cooking, music, and many other things, the US is so culturally homogeneous it barely compares to some european countries (like the UK, or spain, which even have local languages).
And if your answer to this is that the us are varied because of immigration, I say that after a few generations immigrants in the us are mostly integrated by becoming culturally american. This is the consequence of the model of integration that america has chosen for itself: you are integrated by becoming culturally american. Which may be ok, integration is a tough problem. Here in europe, France has been doing the same, while the UK have a different model which preserves differences a lot more. As to first-generation immigrants, we have quite a few here in europe too.
I think this is the core of the issue. People who buy an iPhone for 400$ and activate it with AT&T with a 2 year contract are buying a phone for more than 800 dollars, because the phone plan they are buying is overpriced by at least the 18 dollars per month AT&T gives to apple (unless AT&T is doing this out of unselfish apple fandom).
This is an absolutely textbook way of getting rid of competition - buy it and either assimilate their product into your own or simply close it down. when they buy company X, which is the sponsor of open source project Y, and close it...
the developers which were fired get toghether again and open company Z which continues to develop and support project Y, from the last GPL-released version.
I should not be allowed to fake kernel Y, but there should be nothing to prevent me from installing an alternative signed kernel Y1. Excuse me but how exactly do I get my linux kernel i compiled myself signed? Oh yes I pay a tax to some organization and wait to see if they give me permission in a few months... I don't want hardware that requires anyone's permission but my own to run what I want.
It should be the access control on resource A which says "I do not like the (Z)(Y1)(X) chain you use, in order to access me you need (Z)(Y)(X) or (Z)(Y2)(X)". If you want me to access resource A only on hardware Z with system Y1 and software X, give me an appropriate locked down system YOU own with the decryption keys for A. Don't try to make the rest of the computing world pay for the costs of your security. And if you are talking about DRM for media, forget it, it is not here to stay.
here is nothing wrong with hardware assisted security if the owner controls all the keys and nothing can touch the trusted hardware without the owner specifically installing it (i.e. logging in as root/administrator and changing things).
Trusted Computing is only bad if the owner of the hardware does not have control over the software on the machine, the hardware keys etc. Exactly.
And in the example mentioned in the summary...
offering a locked-down environment offers several advantages to system administrators with possibly troublesome users. ...the system adminstrator (in fact the company he works for) is the owner of the system and has every right to restrict the user's use of the computer, but wants to have full freedom of how he himself configures those systems.
The current "trusted" computing solutions would restrict the administrator too, because the system trusts some key-issuing authority instead of it's legitimate owner.
From your Wikipedia link:
ASLR is enabled by default in Linux since 2.6.20 Since that release was made on 2007-02-05, you could more accurately say that "Linux, of course, has been doing it for months". Actually i remember it was enabled by default in ubuntu breezy (because i had to figure out how to turn it off to get consistent results while debugging).. that was 5.10 so it was released october 2005=2 years ago to the day.
And on the opposite side of the coin, what could have been so incredibly bad about offering the phone unlocked with a SIM card slot
that they, -who pride themselves in public for being so 'open'- did not see that as a viable option? if they were open, they would sell OS X for people to install on their computers (or allow dell to do it for them).
Apple is much more closed than microsoft, because microsoft at least has embraced the OPEN pc platform.
I recently bought a dell laptop for 850 with 3 year warranty. A macbook (not even pro) with the same stuff (ram, hard disk,warranty etc) would have cost slightly more than twice as much: 1770 euros.
Corporations, like governments, are amoral by definition. Sorry but you got your definitions wrong. Corporations are amoral by definition, because their declared goal is to produce profit for the stockholders, which, in a world of limited responsability (where stockholders do not go to jail if the company they own murders someone) means basing all decisions on an economic cost/benefit analysis, which is intrinsically amoral. Managers who do not work along those lines are soon out of their jobs.
Governments, on the other hand, are by definition representative of the people of NAME YOUR COUNTRY and should therefore work in their best interests. That they usually don't is a separate problem..
If before filing for a patent, you release prior art for it in any pubic way (such as a scientific publication, or a product) you shoot yourself in the foot. It still counts as prior art even though you yourself are the author.
Yes, but on my laptop, I would gladly get a solid state disk of 64 or even 32 GB, and then supplement it with an external 500GB harddisk, which i won't normally carry around. It's true that the price per GB is a lot higher, but do I really need
This way: -my laptop will be lighter -my battery will last longer, because solid state uses less power -my laptop will last longer because i am less likely to break the hard disk (ever tried dropping a hard disk while it is spinning? or even when it isn't actually.. I broke my ipod that way twice and then decided that --for me-- spinning hard disks are not portable.)
will my laptop also be faster? maybe, but i don't really care that much.
also, my laptop will be more silent, with no spinning disk. Of course there are fans, but with some sacrifices in the performance area it would be possible to build a laptop with NO MOVING PARTS . Totally silent. How cool is that? ( In fact, The XO does that already, but is a bit too underpowered for most people)
This is an honest question: why do kids need laptops? Is there some fundamental problem in teaching today that can only be solved with computers? It is a honest question and I will answer it as such. No, computers are not necessary for education. But children need access to knowledge. A laptop with wireless connectivity is only the cheapest way to do this in places where text books are too expensive for most people, there isn't much in the way of public libraries, and no one has computers let alone the internet at home. If they have textbooks loaded on the laptop, and can access the internet at school over wireless, they have access to knowledge.
Then they also can do fancy little physics experiments (i saw a XO tutorial on learning about gravitation using the built-in camera as a measurement instrument. Can't find the link but it seemed great), learn to program and be a geek, whatever, but the main thing is access to knowledge.
A friend of mine had an account with a provider called Fastweb, where he had a really fast connection but payed for traffic outside the fastweb network (which went through a nat i think, he had a local 10. something IP address).
He used file sharing software inside the network, and got very fast downloads (for content which is popular enough in italy).
Of course this is a rather rudimentary implementation but certainly one might be willing to configure his P2P file transfer client to only download from a certain network, if their provider does not offer real unlimited transfers at a reasonable rate. Of course it's only useful if the provider does not count local transfers to your bandwidth limit.
A university professor who does not do research is nothing more than a better paid high school professor. You learn to do science from scientists, a professor who does not himself do research has little to teach that could not be more efficiently learned from books.
All over the world, as far as I know, the good universities are the ones where people do top research. Colleges where no research gets done are a second choice for a reason.
Used to be 17 in the US until the GATT treaty - now they're 20 years. I was thinking the same thing though - some of these patents must be expired or getting pretty close to it.
Currently, US patents last 20 years from the date the patent application is submittefd. Previously, they lasted 17 years from the date the patent was GRANTED. Since it was bureaucratically possible for the applicants to delay the process for years, and patents were NOT DISCLOSED until granted, companies had secret, 10 year old applications for now totally established technologies they could pull out of the hat. Same thing happened with the Microsoft FAT filesystem patent.
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Current Pope aside (who, from what I can tell, isn't even well-liked by most Catholics), the Catholic church has more or less apologized for most of its past crimes, and John Paul II even made a case for evolution. Likewise, the Church has definitely placed a huge emphasis on charitable works, and focused very little on evangelism (which, is effectively very much in line with the text of the New Testament). If you're talking of the catholic church you can't exactly put aside the pope. The catholic church has absolved galileo in 1992 (that's timely justice!), but judging by Ratzinger's declaration on the issue (which was the main reason of this protest) that might not have happened if he was already pope. He also caused a setbak in dialogue with other christion churches by claiming that they are the only church (the other ones are "sects")
In my view the church is one of the few institutions on earth which thinks in centuries, rather than quarterly reports. So evangelism and demographics are it's main concerns in winning the war for the souls of men (which probably has something to do with the no-condoms-even-in-places-where-one-third-of-the-population-has-aids policy). Personally, I'm a bit upset at these scientists for protesting a speech from the Pope, which is -- dare I say -- rather dogmatic of them. No scientist should be afraid of ideas, even if they contradict his own. They were not protesting a speech by the pope. The pope does speeches all the time and they are all over the media here in italy already. They were protesting that he was invited to give a lecture at their university in the ceremony for the beginning of the academic year (with no debate to follow of course).
He was threatened with torture and being burned alive if he did not publicly state that he was wrong, which wasn't an empty threat since natural philosopher Giordano Bruno had been burned in 1600 (a nice round 2000 years after Socrates' death). The church didn't consider that his theories could ever be proven, as they contradicted the bible (and aristoteles) in such theological matters as the sun rotating around the earth (and the earth being the center of the universe) and celestial bodies being perfect spheres attached to the 7 or so rotating crystal spheres that make up the heaven. Now why would a scientist want to stick his nose in this kind of theological stuff?? Also, he was kept a prisoner in his house in arcetri until his death (and he was in luck, since he had actually been sentenced to prison).
If you want to get a modern interpretation of why this pissed off the church so much, read Bertold Brecht's life of galileo. Great book.
i know the answer. No it doesn't.
I own a copy of dragon 9 but having to reboot into windows to use it makes it too much of a hassle. Wine doesn't seem to handle it either.
It actually works quite well, although mileage may vary depending on the sound quality you get from your microphone, soundcard setup.
I mean, would you accept the availability of low-cost stolen car stereos and GPS-devices as a valid argument for why the electronics manufacturers should lower their prices? The comparison is meaningless. If i buy a car stereo and you steal it, there is still only one car stereo around (and i'll probably end up buying another one). If i buy a cd and rip it and it gets on the internet, thousands of people can download it.
So car stereo manufacturers are not competing with stolen goods, while the music industry is competing with bittorrent and emule whether they like it or not.
I read someplace a year or so ago that the fleet average in europe is currently 13 kilometers per litre, while it is 7 km/l in the US. (currently meaning a year or 2 ago, when i read this)
Converted to MPG, that means 30.7 in europe versus 16.5 in the US. So setting a 35mpg standard by 2020 just mean they're giving the country 12 years to reach current first world standards.
And if your answer to this is that the us are varied because of immigration, I say that after a few generations immigrants in the us are mostly integrated by becoming culturally american. This is the consequence of the model of integration that america has chosen for itself: you are integrated by becoming culturally american. Which may be ok, integration is a tough problem. Here in europe, France has been doing the same, while the UK have a different model which preserves differences a lot more. As to first-generation immigrants, we have quite a few here in europe too.
..could be the headline.
I think this is the core of the issue. People who buy an iPhone for 400$ and activate it with AT&T with a 2 year contract are buying a phone for more than 800 dollars, because the phone plan they are buying is overpriced by at least the 18 dollars per month AT&T gives to apple (unless AT&T is doing this out of unselfish apple fandom).
the developers which were fired get toghether again and open company Z which continues to develop and support project Y, from the last GPL-released version.
And in the example mentioned in the summary... offering a locked-down environment offers several advantages to system administrators with possibly troublesome users. ...the system adminstrator (in fact the company he works for) is the owner of the system and has every right to restrict the user's use of the computer, but wants to have full freedom of how he himself configures those systems.
The current "trusted" computing solutions would restrict the administrator too, because the system trusts some key-issuing authority instead of it's legitimate owner.
Apple is much more closed than microsoft, because microsoft at least has embraced the OPEN pc platform.
I recently bought a dell laptop for 850 with 3 year warranty. A macbook (not even pro) with the same stuff (ram, hard disk,warranty etc) would have cost slightly more than twice as much: 1770 euros.
Governments, on the other hand, are by definition representative of the people of NAME YOUR COUNTRY and should therefore work in their best interests. That they usually don't is a separate problem..
If before filing for a patent, you release prior art for it in any pubic way (such as a scientific publication, or a product) you shoot yourself in the foot. It still counts as prior art even though you yourself are the author.
Yes, but on my laptop, I would gladly get a solid state disk of 64 or even 32 GB, and then supplement it with an external 500GB harddisk, which i won't normally carry around. It's true that the price per GB is a lot higher, but do I really need
This way:
-my laptop will be lighter
-my battery will last longer, because solid state uses less power
-my laptop will last longer because i am less likely to break the hard disk (ever tried dropping a hard disk while it is spinning? or even when it isn't actually.. I broke my ipod that way twice and then decided that --for me-- spinning hard disks are not portable.)
will my laptop also be faster? maybe, but i don't really care that much.
also, my laptop will be more silent, with no spinning disk. Of course there are fans, but with some sacrifices in the performance area it would be possible to build a laptop with NO MOVING PARTS . Totally silent. How cool is that? ( In fact, The XO does that already, but is a bit too underpowered for most people)
Then they also can do fancy little physics experiments (i saw a XO tutorial on learning about gravitation using the built-in camera as a measurement instrument. Can't find the link but it seemed great), learn to program and be a geek, whatever, but the main thing is access to knowledge.
A friend of mine had an account with a provider called Fastweb, where he had a really fast connection but payed for traffic outside the fastweb network (which went through a nat i think, he had a local 10. something IP address).
He used file sharing software inside the network, and got very fast downloads (for content which is popular enough in italy).
Of course this is a rather rudimentary implementation but certainly one might be willing to configure his P2P file transfer client to only download from a certain network, if their provider does not offer real unlimited transfers at a reasonable rate. Of course it's only useful if the provider does not count local transfers to your bandwidth limit.
A university professor who does not do research is nothing more than a better paid high school professor. You learn to do science from scientists, a professor who does not himself do research has little to teach that could not be more efficiently learned from books.
All over the world, as far as I know, the good universities are the ones where people do top research. Colleges where no research gets done are a second choice for a reason.