RIAA and the prosecution: "Ministerstyre" (roughly speaking illegal manipulation of MPs ) Denial of service attacks Illegal search and confiscation of private property Bribing police investigators
TPB: Assistance to commit copyright infringement ( which probably isn't even illegal in Sweden ).
One does not exclude the other, but i have to wonder if energy conservation is not going to be more cost-effective for most people. In hot climates switching from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs (I'm finally starting to see them on the shelves now ) will save you a bunch of electricity in lighting and air condition. In colder climate's heat-pumps ( earth or air based ) can be a good investment.
Not saying wind turbines don't work, but unless you are already using energy efficient electronics and lighting, alternative means of heating, have state of the art insulation, there are probably better ways to save money/energy.
The problem is not unique to the patent system. What is needed is stricter laws that heavily penalize abuse of the court system. It shouldn't matter if it is the RIAA consistently dropping their cases after discovery, SCO claiming copyright infringement without a case, some silly patent about connecting voip to a phone line, or any other number of equally retarded claims. If it can be shown with a reasonable level of evidence that your lawsuit has clandestine motives and that you are effectively abusing the court system in order to make life difficult for somebody else, then you and your lawyer should be heavily penalized.
Simply put the courts isn't some sea-side casino where you go fishing when you can't come up with anything better to do, and if you treat it as such you deserve a decent slap so you don't do it again.
* Waste that is toxic for hundreds of thousands of years
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity. Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
* The profit motive leading to corners being cut and safety being a casualty
Argument by fear. In the entire history of civilian nuclear power in the US there has been one major accident which didn't kill anyone, this is far better than virtually every other industry in the country. If you were to apply the same irrational argument to other parts of the infrastructure society would grind to a halt.
* NIMBY (not in my back yard)
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one.
* Security - these plants are prime targets for terrorism
Not really, the plants are well guarded and the containment structures are designed to survive a direct hit by a large airliner. An attack that would be a danger to a nuclear power plant would likely cause much more damage if directed towards an urban area or other piece of infrastructure ( such as a train station or airport ). Furthermore if terrorist attacks are an issue then a few nuclear power plants are relatively easy to guard and difficult to attack. It is also unlikely a terrorist organization that had the ability to launch a sufficiently fierce attack would pick a nuclear power plant as a target since there are far more vulnerable sites available.
If you store the power as heat you are limited by the Carnot efficiency, and you will inevitably lose energy as heat dissipates to the surroundings. As a consequence this can at best be used for daily fluctuations and not for seasonal variations.
Hydrogen can last longer, but here you are limited by the efficiency of hydrogen production and the subsequent use of it in a fuel cell. At present the most efficient way to produce Hydrogen from water is using thermo-chemical hydrogen production or high temperature electrolysis, which will give you around 50% efficiency in practice. Fuel cells have similar efficiencies, meaning that storing energy as hydrogen costs you some 75% of the energy. Or put in other words, if you are going to rely on energy storage then you must multiply any cost estimate by at least a factor of 4, and that doesn't even take into consideration the cost of building and operating the storage system itself. You also have to factor in converting the energy to AC for transportation across the grid ( or hydrogen transportation if you prefer having the fuel cells at the point of consumption ). This would be somewhat reduced if you could generate electricity at the point of use, but then restrict yourself to using solar energy in the more sunny climates, and this prevents the tech from being the "silver bullet" the article talks about.
Don't get me wrong, solar is worth researching, but describing it as a complete solution to our energy production the way the article does is wishful thinking at best.
I guess it depends on where you want to use it. If you use your computer outdoors a lot glossy will probably have annoying reflections, but this really isn't an issue indoors ( at least not for me ), and I prefer glossy. Can't quite put my finger on why, but the picture seems to look better on glossy screens ( assuming no nuisance reflections).
Carbon dioxide ( or dry-ice ) is bellow 195K at standard pressure, so this material wouldn't even need liquid nitrogen for cooling. If this can be made to scale it would without doubt give countless of applications.
There is no contradiction in teaching children maths and not telling them they suck at it when it goes wrong. In particular, I firmly believe that with the exception of some very specific learning impairments EVERYBODY can learn how to do the most basic algebra. Perhaps not everybody will be equally good at it, and perhaps some people will need more support than others, but teaching somebody how to solve a problem like (3/4) + (5/6) is not something that requires a great deal of talent or understanding. The reason some kids ( and even adults ) have trouble with these things is not that they suck at maths, it's that their PREVIOUS education was insufficient, that nobody explained it to them properly, or that nobody made sure they did their homework. Yes, some people may have very special conditions that make algebraic manipulations possible, but for the vast majority of cases the explanation for learning difficulties is a combination of a)Incompetent/inexperienced teachers b)Lack of experience c) lack of motivation / effort.
To pick an analogy, my spelling and grammar is horrid. At least in Swedish ( and I'm Swedish ). The reason is not that I'm bad at languages, or that the education was of the wrong form, or that our society was this or that. I simply never bothered to learn it, and I was never required to since I was never made to do it. From what I have seen going through several different education systems in three different countries, I have very little belief in a number of more "popular" explanations. The simple answer is that in many countries teaching budgets have been slashed, expectations of teachers and students have diminished, and rather than fixing the problem by allocating more resources, increasing requirements, and ceasing to fuck it up with reforms that can at best be described as snakeoil, politicians have pushed through bullshit policies in order to further their own political ideology ( you know the drill, the left wants to abolish grades and evaluation because it is apparently "unfair", the right thinks discipline and competition is the answer to everything ).
Seriously, todays children are not THAT different from children born 70 years ago. A chalk, blackboard, and lots of practice will still work. Computer games with a balanced content of male/female pronouns put in a liberal,conservative mismash of different examples of why maths is "cool" will not. Its not the kids that are the problem, it's the idiots that believe the same mathematical theorems that have been true ever since they were discovered need to be taught in an ever changing circus of farcical folk-dances and party games.
*Draws a coordinate system using the GREEN crayon*
I'm doing some research on Compton scattering over at Sweden's synchrotron radiation facility, and the sinister bastards have put a coffee machine that doesn't charge you in the cafeteria (presumably the cost of the coffee is countered by increased staff productivity ). I don't know how many times at 2pm I suddenly realize that perhaps 4 cups of coffee in as many hours is not going to be good for me in the long run. They should work to find a way for our dosimeters keep track of our caffeine levels, because I imagine the sweet black nectar is far more dangerous than the x-rays.
The main thing I imagine will be difficult to do with these ultra portables is to get a good screen and keyboard. Sound will not be a major issue because you will probably want to use headphones when you are on the move anyway ( as to avoid annoying your surroundings and block out external noise ), but typing on a ultra small keyboard can be frustrating, and a lot of people have trouble reading on a small screen, especially outdoors in strong sunlight.
My guess is that these devices will eventually do away with the touch pad in order to increase space available for the keyboard and perhaps use a tablet-pen or touch screen instead. Reflexive display technology would probably be necessary to make the screen more readable outdoors. Another interesting possibility could be to turn every key on the keyboard in a touch pad, allowing you to use the keyboard itself as a touch pad by sliding your fingers gently over it, without applying enough pressure to push the keys.
Eh? Red Hat is far from the only commercial success of Linux. Just have a look at Canonical and Ubuntu, they got Linux pre-installed on systems for consumer desktop use and they are making quite a bit of money from it.
Well, technically we have already mined enough uranium that if we would just quit this retarded scheme where we use 1% of it and then throw it away we'd be set for centuries. Uranium mining continues because it is presently cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel, not out of necessity. Take my home country, Sweden, as an example. Over the lifetime of the present generation of nuclear reactors ( 60 years ) we will have built up some 12.000 metric tonnes of spent fuel rods. 96% of that spent fuel is still Uranium and actinides, which if recovered and fissioned would release enough energy to keep the reactors running for a millennium and a half. Of course, this is before we take into consideration that for each unit of enriched uranium fuel there will be several units of depleted uranium ( which can also be fissioned in fast reactors ) thus extending the resource further. Simply put, existing technology could supply our present energy demand for thousands of years without any mining. You would have to construct a waste repository, which over a few thousand years would accumulate the enormous amount of waste equal to about the amount of milk we consume in a single month.
Now, obviously this is a quantity which is far larger than what we could possibly figure out a way to safely store given 40 - 50 centuries of scientific development, so instead our energy plan is based on the idea that if we subsidize wind power for sufficiently long, they can indefinitely continue to increase in efficiency at the same rate as they have done historically (never mind that pesky theorem of fluid dynamics which sets a theoretical limit at about twice of present achievements )./rant
What is "best" will clearly depend upon what criteria you consider. Are you talking about a combination that is teh least likely to lead to damage to the eyes, the combination which causes least pain while reading, or the combination that is most comfortable? Does psychological factors count? Is your userbase young, old, mixed? I would imagine the answer could differ depending on these cases.
The only thing I can tell for certain is that the claim that looking at black on white text on a screen is like starring into a light bulb is complete nonsense, and it is very easily confirmed that the two are nowhere near the same by simply looking into a light bulb ( thou it is probably best to limit such experiments in order not to damage your eyes ). While your pupils can somewhat adjust for the incoming light, starring into a light bulb at short distance will almost certainly overwhelm your eyes with light, while looking at the computer screen does not.
The fact that a computer screen emits light does not in itself mean it will be "brighter" than a paper. It can as an example be very difficult to read some LCD screens outdoors because the relatively faint light they emit is completely drowned by bright sunlight reflected off it's surface. Now, while it may or may not be true that it is "not good" to have all light coming from only one place in front of you (which would appears to suggest having a lit computer screen in a dark room is bad ), this could be easily avoided by simply adjusting the surrounding illumination and screen brightness, and I find it very doubtful that there is much a web designer can do to optimise his webpage for every single situation since users will change the brightness and contrast of their monitors.
As a pure guess, I would imagine that weather your color scheme is familiar, if your font is large enough, and the reader's "taste" has a much greater impact than most physiological effects, and thus I would recommend a black on white color scheme with a clear simple font of sufficient size. Most people find it acceptable, and there is as far as I know little evidence that it should be troublesome.
I think you misunderstood what is illegal and not. My interpretation of the findings were:
Using GMail to send somebody data about yourself: legal Using GMail to send somebody somebody ELSES personal data: possibly illegal
Essentially what it means is that if you run a company within Europe which deals with data that can be used to personally identify people, then it may be illegal to send that data through a GMail account. Now I guess this could have much more severe implications than one may first realize. As an example, if you operate a mailing list then every time you use it you are providing every mail server it touches with information about who is on your mailing list. Thus if somebody living inside the EU signs up to your mailing list using an account on a server outside the EU, then a very extreme interpretation of the findings could potentially make it illegal for your mailing list to send them e-mails.
I very much doubt the law will end up in such an extreme case, but given how clueless lawmakers are with respect to new technology, there could easily be some not so thought through decisions made here...
I think the main difference is the system by which people come to power.
In most European countries ( and in effect the EU itself ) there is a plethora of political parties that are likely to come into power. With so many competing parties there is a large chance at least one of your competitors will point out your shady behavior, and it is thus easier to try to outdo them in positive ways rather than malicious ones.
In contrast, in the US the entire electoral system more or less favors a two party system, where the winner takes it all. In such a system you gain a lot by attacking a single enemy. If you're a democrat all you need to do is to break things for the republicans, and vice versa. Such tactics don't work if you have 5-6 potential candidates because if you try to fuck over 4 of your opponents you run the risk that they will conspire against you. The american system is very easily corrupted since once you have influence with the two main parties there is little to stop you, while gaining control of a 6-7 party parliament without anybody crying foul is more tricky.
Simply put, in the EU political parties compete for power, in the US there is more of a cartel or monopoly. You can also notice these trends if you look at individual EU countries. Britain has more of a one party system, and consequentially their politics are a lot more "american" than many other European ones.
It is also rather possible that the EU is merely better because it is relatively new at the moment, and that with time it will become corrupted as third parties learn to manipulate it. Time will tell...
The catch is that Linux computers are less likely to be compromised because of better design, larger diversity in systems AND a smaller market share. It's not one or the other. It's not as if large market share is teh only reason windows machines are compromised. Furthermore, because there is a large diversity among free software distributions, you just wouldn't get everybody on one platform was windows to go away. You still have OSX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, a few hundred different Linux distributions, Solaris etc... No matter how large the "less targeted system" effect is, you simply won't get the same horrible situation as you have today.
I choose to use google mail despite the privacy implications. In this case people are FORCED to have their connections sent through third party servers and profiled.
There's a big difference between profiling people based on adds on participating sites and scanning every connection to ANY site. Google doesn't see what Wikipedia pages I am editing, this system could.
The only way you could compare this to Google would be if every site you could connect to was using Google adds, and they were all written as to not render if you used add block. Actually, it is worse than that seeing that this actually interferes with sites that don't benefit from the scheme. It is more as if the search results in google would link to modified pages of the destination, each containing a google add , which was then used with a tracking cookie ( assuming there was no other way to get to webpages other than google's search ).
No, really, google doesn't even come close to this...
1)Find a bathtub or similar container 2)Place a number of random objects into the container 3)Fill container with soapy water to half-cower the objects in question 4)start stirring the water.
Even if you manage to render that realistically your supercomputer is going to completely choke trying to work out 3D fluid dynamics with surface tension in real time. For extra fun you can throw in some hydrocarbons with a melting point in the vicinity of room temperature, thus forcing the simulation to take into consideration temperature dependent viscosity as well. If you want to really push it you add a pigment that goes transparent above a given temperature and then focus a strong lamp at one end of the container, thus causing the rendering algorithm to have take into consideration how the liquid's color will change with a non-fixed temperature. The temperature variations are of course dependent upon how light scatters in the rather complicated system. In addition, since the heating of the fluid will depend upon how light interacts with the system, the physics of the fluid now depends on the rendering, and the rendering obviously depends on the physics. So all in all you have a system composed of two fluids with different thermal and electromagnetic properties, different densities and viscosity. The density, temperature, color and electromagnetic properties of the fluids vary with time and position and depend on one another as well as on how light propagates through the entire system.
That is actually quite interesting. If this does indeed happen, it would spell bad news for Microsoft. Once people get used to the idea that they can do most of the things they need to with a $200 laptop, they will not want to buy the expensive versions again. As a side effect consoles for gaming will become more popular, and Microsoft will see their profit margin take a hit since they can no longer charge $200 per system.
Simply put, when the cost of hardware drops the impact of a windows license as a percentage of the system increases. If the only way to get XP is to buy a cheap computer, then Microsoft are effectively teaching people to use cheaper hardware, which in turn will hurt them since more people will start to feel the impact of the windows license. Their only recourse will be to reduce their profit margin.
Except it isn't news. Remember this phrase from the now infamous Halloween documents ? "OEM's will merely have to threaten Linux adoption to push for lower licensing prices".
The better floss software becomes, the less Microsoft can charge for their products, and the more they have to work to try to convince people they windows. They have known this for a decade at least and they are not only scared of it, they are so desperate that they will users measure that put them at risk of harsh legal retribution from the courts in order to stop it. The EU fine they paid recently should be seen as part of what they are paying in order to try to keep their monopoly. One way to view it is that these fines are only "cost of business" for Microsoft. By the same argument, they are willing to spend hundreds of millions in order to try to fight of alternatives.
B) The ISO followed procedure, it was the member organisations. Or rather, members of the boards of some of the member organizations.
C)Anybody who wants open standards ought to care about the ISO as we are currently in a "Fix ISO or Microsoft wins" situation. When something is broken attempting to fix it is usually worth trying before giving up and throwing it away.
Slashdot Mirror
It uses flash for the menu ... nuff said.
Isn't all that is needed to just make a html embedded client for freenet ? Java applet perhaps...
Good luck censoring one of those.
Apparently the big media's puppet organisation, "Antipiratbyrån", in Sweden has done the same.
For those who understand Swedish:
http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/artikel_1149973.svd
In all this mess lets have a look at the scores:
RIAA and the prosecution:
"Ministerstyre" (roughly speaking illegal manipulation of MPs )
Denial of service attacks
Illegal search and confiscation of private property
Bribing police investigators
TPB:
Assistance to commit copyright infringement ( which probably isn't even illegal in Sweden ).
Nice one.
Seeing that you could quite arguably claim that TCP is a "peer to peer" network he may need some storage space...
One does not exclude the other, but i have to wonder if energy conservation is not going to be more cost-effective for most people. In hot climates switching from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs (I'm finally starting to see them on the shelves now ) will save you a bunch of electricity in lighting and air condition. In colder climate's heat-pumps ( earth or air based ) can be a good investment.
Not saying wind turbines don't work, but unless you are already using energy efficient electronics and lighting, alternative means of heating, have state of the art insulation, there are probably better ways to save money/energy.
The problem is not unique to the patent system. What is needed is stricter laws that heavily penalize abuse of the court system. It shouldn't matter if it is the RIAA consistently dropping their cases after discovery, SCO claiming copyright infringement without a case, some silly patent about connecting voip to a phone line, or any other number of equally retarded claims. If it can be shown with a reasonable level of evidence that your lawsuit has clandestine motives and that you are effectively abusing the court system in order to make life difficult for somebody else, then you and your lawyer should be heavily penalized.
Simply put the courts isn't some sea-side casino where you go fishing when you can't come up with anything better to do, and if you treat it as such you deserve a decent slap so you don't do it again.
If you reprocess it and burn the actinides it is 300 years for uranium ore levels of radioactivity. Besides, many chemicals we tolerate in other energy systems ( such as photovoltaics ) are toxic indefinitely ( Lithium, Arsenide, Gallium ). If you can tolerate photovoltaics or the molten salts used in solar thermal plants, then nuclear waste is not a problem.
Argument by fear. In the entire history of civilian nuclear power in the US there has been one major accident which didn't kill anyone, this is far better than virtually every other industry in the country. If you were to apply the same irrational argument to other parts of the infrastructure society would grind to a halt.
This is a problem with all energy generation and not specific to nuclear. It applies just as well to windmills and solar as it does to nuclear plants. Furthermore this is a legislative problem, not a technical one.
Not really, the plants are well guarded and the containment structures are designed to survive a direct hit by a large airliner. An attack that would be a danger to a nuclear power plant would likely cause much more damage if directed towards an urban area or other piece of infrastructure ( such as a train station or airport ). Furthermore if terrorist attacks are an issue then a few nuclear power plants are relatively easy to guard and difficult to attack. It is also unlikely a terrorist organization that had the ability to launch a sufficiently fierce attack would pick a nuclear power plant as a target since there are far more vulnerable sites available.
If you store the power as heat you are limited by the Carnot efficiency, and you will inevitably lose energy as heat dissipates to the surroundings. As a consequence this can at best be used for daily fluctuations and not for seasonal variations.
Hydrogen can last longer, but here you are limited by the efficiency of hydrogen production and the subsequent use of it in a fuel cell. At present the most efficient way to produce Hydrogen from water is using thermo-chemical hydrogen production or high temperature electrolysis, which will give you around 50% efficiency in practice. Fuel cells have similar efficiencies, meaning that storing energy as hydrogen costs you some 75% of the energy. Or put in other words, if you are going to rely on energy storage then you must multiply any cost estimate by at least a factor of 4, and that doesn't even take into consideration the cost of building and operating the storage system itself. You also have to factor in converting the energy to AC for transportation across the grid ( or hydrogen transportation if you prefer having the fuel cells at the point of consumption ). This would be somewhat reduced if you could generate electricity at the point of use, but then restrict yourself to using solar energy in the more sunny climates, and this prevents the tech from being the "silver bullet" the article talks about.
Don't get me wrong, solar is worth researching, but describing it as a complete solution to our energy production the way the article does is wishful thinking at best.
I guess it depends on where you want to use it. If you use your computer outdoors a lot glossy will probably have annoying reflections, but this really isn't an issue indoors ( at least not for me ), and I prefer glossy. Can't quite put my finger on why, but the picture seems to look better on glossy screens ( assuming no nuisance reflections).
Carbon dioxide ( or dry-ice ) is bellow 195K at standard pressure, so this material wouldn't even need liquid nitrogen for cooling. If this can be made to scale it would without doubt give countless of applications.
There is no contradiction in teaching children maths and not telling them they suck at it when it goes wrong. In particular, I firmly believe that with the exception of some very specific learning impairments EVERYBODY can learn how to do the most basic algebra. Perhaps not everybody will be equally good at it, and perhaps some people will need more support than others, but teaching somebody how to solve a problem like (3/4) + (5/6) is not something that requires a great deal of talent or understanding. The reason some kids ( and even adults ) have trouble with these things is not that they suck at maths, it's that their PREVIOUS education was insufficient, that nobody explained it to them properly, or that nobody made sure they did their homework. Yes, some people may have very special conditions that make algebraic manipulations possible, but for the vast majority of cases the explanation for learning difficulties is a combination of a)Incompetent/inexperienced teachers b)Lack of experience c) lack of motivation / effort.
To pick an analogy, my spelling and grammar is horrid. At least in Swedish ( and I'm Swedish ). The reason is not that I'm bad at languages, or that the education was of the wrong form, or that our society was this or that. I simply never bothered to learn it, and I was never required to since I was never made to do it. From what I have seen going through several different education systems in three different countries, I have very little belief in a number of more "popular" explanations. The simple answer is that in many countries teaching budgets have been slashed, expectations of teachers and students have diminished, and rather than fixing the problem by allocating more resources, increasing requirements, and ceasing to fuck it up with reforms that can at best be described as snakeoil, politicians have pushed through bullshit policies in order to further their own political ideology ( you know the drill, the left wants to abolish grades and evaluation because it is apparently "unfair", the right thinks discipline and competition is the answer to everything ).
Seriously, todays children are not THAT different from children born 70 years ago. A chalk, blackboard, and lots of practice will still work. Computer games with a balanced content of male/female pronouns put in a liberal,conservative mismash of different examples of why maths is "cool" will not. Its not the kids that are the problem, it's the idiots that believe the same mathematical theorems that have been true ever since they were discovered need to be taught in an ever changing circus of farcical folk-dances and party games.
*Draws a coordinate system using the GREEN crayon*
I'm doing some research on Compton scattering over at Sweden's synchrotron radiation facility, and the sinister bastards have put a coffee machine that doesn't charge you in the cafeteria (presumably the cost of the coffee is countered by increased staff productivity ). I don't know how many times at 2pm I suddenly realize that perhaps 4 cups of coffee in as many hours is not going to be good for me in the long run. They should work to find a way for our dosimeters keep track of our caffeine levels, because I imagine the sweet black nectar is far more dangerous than the x-rays.
The main thing I imagine will be difficult to do with these ultra portables is to get a good screen and keyboard. Sound will not be a major issue because you will probably want to use headphones when you are on the move anyway ( as to avoid annoying your surroundings and block out external noise ), but typing on a ultra small keyboard can be frustrating, and a lot of people have trouble reading on a small screen, especially outdoors in strong sunlight.
My guess is that these devices will eventually do away with the touch pad in order to increase space available for the keyboard and perhaps use a tablet-pen or touch screen instead. Reflexive display technology would probably be necessary to make the screen more readable outdoors. Another interesting possibility could be to turn every key on the keyboard in a touch pad, allowing you to use the keyboard itself as a touch pad by sliding your fingers gently over it, without applying enough pressure to push the keys.
Eh? Red Hat is far from the only commercial success of Linux. Just have a look at Canonical and Ubuntu, they got Linux pre-installed on systems for consumer desktop use and they are making quite a bit of money from it.
Well, technically we have already mined enough uranium that if we would just quit this retarded scheme where we use 1% of it and then throw it away we'd be set for centuries. Uranium mining continues because it is presently cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel, not out of necessity. Take my home country, Sweden, as an example. Over the lifetime of the present generation of nuclear reactors ( 60 years ) we will have built up some 12.000 metric tonnes of spent fuel rods. 96% of that spent fuel is still Uranium and actinides, which if recovered and fissioned would release enough energy to keep the reactors running for a millennium and a half. Of course, this is before we take into consideration that for each unit of enriched uranium fuel there will be several units of depleted uranium ( which can also be fissioned in fast reactors ) thus extending the resource further. Simply put, existing technology could supply our present energy demand for thousands of years without any mining. You would have to construct a waste repository, which over a few thousand years would accumulate the enormous amount of waste equal to about the amount of milk we consume in a single month.
/rant
Now, obviously this is a quantity which is far larger than what we could possibly figure out a way to safely store given 40 - 50 centuries of scientific development, so instead our energy plan is based on the idea that if we subsidize wind power for sufficiently long, they can indefinitely continue to increase in efficiency at the same rate as they have done historically (never mind that pesky theorem of fluid dynamics which sets a theoretical limit at about twice of present achievements ).
What is "best" will clearly depend upon what criteria you consider. Are you talking about a combination that is teh least likely to lead to damage to the eyes, the combination which causes least pain while reading, or the combination that is most comfortable? Does psychological factors count? Is your userbase young, old, mixed? I would imagine the answer could differ depending on these cases.
The only thing I can tell for certain is that the claim that looking at black on white text on a screen is like starring into a light bulb is complete nonsense, and it is very easily confirmed that the two are nowhere near the same by simply looking into a light bulb ( thou it is probably best to limit such experiments in order not to damage your eyes ). While your pupils can somewhat adjust for the incoming light, starring into a light bulb at short distance will almost certainly overwhelm your eyes with light, while looking at the computer screen does not.
The fact that a computer screen emits light does not in itself mean it will be "brighter" than a paper. It can as an example be very difficult to read some LCD screens outdoors because the relatively faint light they emit is completely drowned by bright sunlight reflected off it's surface. Now, while it may or may not be true that it is "not good" to have all light coming from only one place in front of you (which would appears to suggest having a lit computer screen in a dark room is bad ), this could be easily avoided by simply adjusting the surrounding illumination and screen brightness, and I find it very doubtful that there is much a web designer can do to optimise his webpage for every single situation since users will change the brightness and contrast of their monitors.
As a pure guess, I would imagine that weather your color scheme is familiar, if your font is large enough, and the reader's "taste" has a much greater impact than most physiological effects, and thus I would recommend a black on white color scheme with a clear simple font of sufficient size. Most people find it acceptable, and there is as far as I know little evidence that it should be troublesome.
I think you misunderstood what is illegal and not. My interpretation of the findings were:
Using GMail to send somebody data about yourself: legal
Using GMail to send somebody somebody ELSES personal data: possibly illegal
Essentially what it means is that if you run a company within Europe which deals with data that can be used to personally identify people, then it may be illegal to send that data through a GMail account. Now I guess this could have much more severe implications than one may first realize. As an example, if you operate a mailing list then every time you use it you are providing every mail server it touches with information about who is on your mailing list. Thus if somebody living inside the EU signs up to your mailing list using an account on a server outside the EU, then a very extreme interpretation of the findings could potentially make it illegal for your mailing list to send them e-mails.
I very much doubt the law will end up in such an extreme case, but given how clueless lawmakers are with respect to new technology, there could easily be some not so thought through decisions made here...
I think the main difference is the system by which people come to power.
In most European countries ( and in effect the EU itself ) there is a plethora of political parties that are likely to come into power. With so many competing parties there is a large chance at least one of your competitors will point out your shady behavior, and it is thus easier to try to outdo them in positive ways rather than malicious ones.
In contrast, in the US the entire electoral system more or less favors a two party system, where the winner takes it all. In such a system you gain a lot by attacking a single enemy. If you're a democrat all you need to do is to break things for the republicans, and vice versa. Such tactics don't work if you have 5-6 potential candidates because if you try to fuck over 4 of your opponents you run the risk that they will conspire against you. The american system is very easily corrupted since once you have influence with the two main parties there is little to stop you, while gaining control of a 6-7 party parliament without anybody crying foul is more tricky.
Simply put, in the EU political parties compete for power, in the US there is more of a cartel or monopoly. You can also notice these trends if you look at individual EU countries. Britain has more of a one party system, and consequentially their politics are a lot more "american" than many other European ones.
It is also rather possible that the EU is merely better because it is relatively new at the moment, and that with time it will become corrupted as third parties learn to manipulate it. Time will tell...
The catch is that Linux computers are less likely to be compromised because of better design, larger diversity in systems AND a smaller market share. It's not one or the other. It's not as if large market share is teh only reason windows machines are compromised. Furthermore, because there is a large diversity among free software distributions, you just wouldn't get everybody on one platform was windows to go away. You still have OSX, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, a few hundred different Linux distributions, Solaris etc... No matter how large the "less targeted system" effect is, you simply won't get the same horrible situation as you have today.
I choose to use google mail despite the privacy implications. In this case people are FORCED to have their connections sent through third party servers and profiled.
There's a big difference between profiling people based on adds on participating sites and scanning every connection to ANY site. Google doesn't see what Wikipedia pages I am editing, this system could.
The only way you could compare this to Google would be if every site you could connect to was using Google adds, and they were all written as to not render if you used add block. Actually, it is worse than that seeing that this actually interferes with sites that don't benefit from the scheme. It is more as if the search results in google would link to modified pages of the destination, each containing a google add , which was then used with a tracking cookie ( assuming there was no other way to get to webpages other than google's search ).
No, really, google doesn't even come close to this...
1)Find a bathtub or similar container
2)Place a number of random objects into the container
3)Fill container with soapy water to half-cower the objects in question
4)start stirring the water.
Even if you manage to render that realistically your supercomputer is going to completely choke trying to work out 3D fluid dynamics with surface tension in real time. For extra fun you can throw in some hydrocarbons with a melting point in the vicinity of room temperature, thus forcing the simulation to take into consideration temperature dependent viscosity as well. If you want to really push it you add a pigment that goes transparent above a given temperature and then focus a strong lamp at one end of the container, thus causing the rendering algorithm to have take into consideration how the liquid's color will change with a non-fixed temperature. The temperature variations are of course dependent upon how light scatters in the rather complicated system. In addition, since the heating of the fluid will depend upon how light interacts with the system, the physics of the fluid now depends on the rendering, and the rendering obviously depends on the physics. So all in all you have a system composed of two fluids with different thermal and electromagnetic properties, different densities and viscosity. The density, temperature, color and electromagnetic properties of the fluids vary with time and position and depend on one another as well as on how light propagates through the entire system.
In summary, good fucking luck.
That is actually quite interesting. If this does indeed happen, it would spell bad news for Microsoft. Once people get used to the idea that they can do most of the things they need to with a $200 laptop, they will not want to buy the expensive versions again. As a side effect consoles for gaming will become more popular, and Microsoft will see their profit margin take a hit since they can no longer charge $200 per system.
Simply put, when the cost of hardware drops the impact of a windows license as a percentage of the system increases. If the only way to get XP is to buy a cheap computer, then Microsoft are effectively teaching people to use cheaper hardware, which in turn will hurt them since more people will start to feel the impact of the windows license. Their only recourse will be to reduce their profit margin.
Sweet!
Except it isn't news. Remember this phrase from the now infamous Halloween documents ? "OEM's will merely have to threaten Linux adoption to push for lower licensing prices".
The better floss software becomes, the less Microsoft can charge for their products, and the more they have to work to try to convince people they windows. They have known this for a decade at least and they are not only scared of it, they are so desperate that they will users measure that put them at risk of harsh legal retribution from the courts in order to stop it. The EU fine they paid recently should be seen as part of what they are paying in order to try to keep their monopoly. One way to view it is that these fines are only "cost of business" for Microsoft. By the same argument, they are willing to spend hundreds of millions in order to try to fight of alternatives.
It's the cosmic rays I tell you, the cosmic rays!!!!
A) The standard hasn't passed just yet
B) The ISO followed procedure, it was the member organisations. Or rather, members of the boards of some of the member organizations.
C)Anybody who wants open standards ought to care about the ISO as we are currently in a "Fix ISO or Microsoft wins" situation. When something is broken attempting to fix it is usually worth trying before giving up and throwing it away.