Salami tactics, thin edge of the wedge, slippery slope, spearhead strategy... etc... Sure, if it stops here it may not be so bad. Problem is that history suggests it won't stop here.
Not to mention that SSL will kill it promptly. The algorithm would have to determine which data was "authorized" and not, while it is encrypted. Basically what you would be looking at is every node examining the encrypted traffic and then trying to guess through traffic analysis if the sender had permission to transfer the clear text, weather it was fair-use , if it was a parody etc... It is about as likely to succeed as trying to tell if a song is good or not by examining its md5sum.
If the screenshots are anything to judge by then Microsoft are changing user interfaces AGAIN ( and as usual it is a partial clone of Apple ). Wonder what will happen when people find that switching to Linux is an easier learning curve than upgrading windows...
The earliest known invention of a phonographic recording device was the phonautograph, invented by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville and patented on March 25, 1857.
All it takes is for ONE dedicated geek to build a phonograph, the copy then hits the internet and it's game over. Not even locking down the hardware will help because a single output wire operating at 50khz or above will be able to reproduce the sound. You would have to sniff every single port on the computer for a watermark, which just isn't going to happen.
The only way for DRM to work is through a big-brother society where all our activities are constantly monitored. DRM and privacy cannot exist together. The nature of sound is such that you can't stop people recording it without entering their homes and observing them in everything they do. How you generate the sound, through a record player or an advanced system of cryptographic "trusted" hardware, is irrelevant. The physical phenomena of sound has been well understood for more than 100 years, it can be recorded, copies can be made, life goes on.
It gets a little bit more elaborate for movies, but same thing applies. Theoretically I could make photographic film, use a rather simple assembly of lenses to project the screen onto them, record the movie at twice the desired frame-rate... Photography isn't very new by modern standards, it just takes one person to circumvent it, then it hits the net.
You sound very intelligent and I'm sure you're correct. But I couldn't help but think how much that sounds like the reasons why the Catholic Church conducted mass in Latin for so long, and why they were initially reluctant to have the Bible translated to English.
Nonsense, scientific experiments are supposed to be carried out in a reproducible way, meaning that if the guy who wrote a paper won't give you your data you should be able to just go do the experiment yourself. If the GP was arguing scientists shouldn't document their assumptions then you would have a point, but that was not what he was saying. The situation is more akin to everybody already having a bible, and somebody saying "There are more three letter words than four letter words in it" and then refusing to say how many there are of each. If you don't believe him you can just take your own bible, count the respective words and see if he is right. A situation which would be analogous with what you described would be if scientists said "we did this experiment which proves there are no gravitons, but we won't tell you how we did it.". This was not what the GP was suggesting. Any papers published from his lab would without doubt state his assumptions and describe the experiment, he just won't bother giving you all the "pm tube #5 triggered 300 times, pm tube #4 triggered 200 times... etc...".
I had a 20-something in my town use a calculator at a checkout line 2 weeks ago when I gave her $21.01 for a $6.06 charge. Unbelievable.
I have a degree in mathematics and quite frankly I would have used a calculator as well. Not because I couldn't do the maths in my head, but because I'd want to make sure to get it right. Besides, being able to do 4-digit arithmetic in your head is hardly the best metric for mathematical ability. As one PHD in maths told me when I was teasing him for getting his change wrong in the pub: "Why would I need to get that stuff right? It is only occasionally I come across numbers anyway."
When it comes to teaching people science. Well, if we are to continue to use a democratic system of governance it is in society's best interest that the voters are not completely ignorant about how the world works. I agree with your point about it being a bit futile thou. I've run into a physics students who claimed that a 1m^2 solar cell at 100% efficiency would exceed the power output of a nuclear power plant. There isn't a good way to describe how I felt when I heard that little gem.
It differs a lot from country to country. Ireland is one thing , Sweden quite another. I've met some creationists, but most of them are of the "God created the universe , Big Bang and the standard model takes it from there... " kind of creationists. We don't get many "young earth" creationists where I am , but I dunno what it is like in the rest of Europe.
I actually have to wonder why the drives were not designed to cope with this. When you write software you don't assume your data input is sane ( at least not if you want stability ), now I recognize that designing a drive you have a lot more ways that the input could be broken, and I wouldn't expect a drive to gracefully reject nitric acid, but assuming these disks are the same shape and size as normal disks, then I'd argue that the drive shouldn't be built in a way which causes it to break if there is something wrong with the disk. It doesn't excuse the vendor from breaking the disks in the first place, but I am a bit surprised that the drives would actually be damaged by it. Fail to read them, sure, but actual damage...
I moved out of the country before I could determine how it worked out, but some Norwegian companies tried a scheme under which you have two tiers of bandwidth. By default your connection uses the higher speed but if you exceed the quota it degrades to the lower speed until the end of the month. This works quite well since you will still have a fixed bill every month and you won't just lose your ability to use e-mail if you exceed the quota.
Of course, it is all about the marketing. You don't say "we degrade your connection if you exceed this quota", you say "In addition you get EXTRA HIGH SUPER SPEED for the first 20 gigabytes (ZOMG!!!! thousands of songs) each month". You then proceed to sell "top-up packs" at your website where users can pay for extra quota, and then offer an optional service by which quota... err... extra-bandwidth-top-up-packs.... will be added to your bill automatically.
Any internal short will allow a potentially more catastrophic reaction, since more current will be generated.
Not if the heat from that current is insufficient to cause further energy release. Thus the activation energy of the reaction is also important. Also, it is NOT the Lithium that is being oxidized/reduced during normal operation in a LiCoO2 cell, but the Co ions. The argument about energy density vs damage potential would be true if it was only the ions being reduced/oxidized present, and if their reaction with the atmosphere released negliable energy. However, you also have to take structural materials into consideration as well as the operating environment. If I would make a Li-ion battery with the same chemistry as before, but used metallic sodium alloyed with mercury for the casing, and operated the thing under water, then I think you would agree that the energy stored in the battery isn't necessarily the main problem?
When you discuss battery safety you need to consider not just the redox reaction, but other possible reactions that can occur between the electrolyte, andode/cathode, what happens if the battery leaks, how does the electrolyte react with air, how easily heat is dissipated through the material etc... There isn't any particular reason why you couldn't make a perfectly safe battery with very high energy density, and in fact, many developments of Li based batteries are substantially safer while simultaneously having higher power density. Li-polymer is one example. Nano Titanate is another.
As for butter, sure if you TRY to make an explosive out of it, you can get one, that doesn't stop our bodies from recovering the energy in a far more benign manner. If anything this just proves my point. The same energy storage system ( fat ) can have vastly different safety performance depending on HOW you oxidize it. Mix it with sodium nitrate and set it on fire in an oxygen rich atmosphere and you get a spectacular fire. If you instead use some organic enzymes to dissolve it in a salt solution and send it through an advanced cascade of reactions to produce ATP, then you would have difficulties to burn yourself with it if you tried.
Your numbers are a bit off. The Tesla roadster quotes a range of 356km on 54kWh.
If you use 1000 V , 4 parallel plugs, a 100A charging current, that gives you 66kWh in 10 minutes. 100A is doable with AWG 1 ( 7.35mm ), and most of the time you wouldn't be charging from empty anyway, so something like 6 minutes is more reasonable. Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.
Let's look at Nanosolar as an example. Their first plant, when at full capacity, will make them one of the biggest solar producers in the world (430 MW/year if I recall correctly). But this is just their first plant. Selling cells that are profitable at $1/W at nearly $5/W means they'll be profiting hand over fist, which means that investors will fight for the chance to throw money at them. How long do you think it'll take them to scale up with essentially unlimited venture capital? I'm betting not very long. They built their current facility with $100M raised just a year and a half ago, and they've already delivered their first product. Given that most of that money had to go toward simply commercializing their laboratory-scale process, what sort of capacity do you think they could pull off with, say, the next $1B in cash? Dozens of GW/year? And Nanosolar is just one CIGS manufacturer among many. And there's CdTe, too. Unmet demand begs for a market solution. It's inevitable that it's going to be filled.
First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve. Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc... Thirdly, it is the price under optimal conditions, with perfectly aligned cells. In any real applications they will only be optimally aligned for a small part of the day, unless you intend to use expensive devices to track solar motion. They are also relying on indium, an element which is thought to become scarce due to increasing demand, and of course, mass-deployment of indium based solar cells would certainly push the price up. Finally, even if they were able to start producing these at competitive costs and at a large rate, you still have the problem that you will have to increase solar photovoltaic output by a factor of 1000 just to reach 20% of current energy demand.
With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand, it seems likely that nations will turn to coal. This effectively implies you will either have to do carbon capture and storage or start building nuclear plants very soon unless you want to have your greenhouse gas emissions rocket due to massive deployments of coal plants. To think that solar will replace Coal, Oil, Gas AND nuclear within 30-40 years amidst the east rapidly increasing the energy intensity of their economies, is wishful thinking at best.
But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough. Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated. If you think the press release about what one heavily subsidized solar company "hopes to achieve" negates any of my arguments, then I'd say you are naive at best.
As for nano-antenna solar cells, again, you are talking several decades of development at the very least. They won't save us from the energy gap that is likely to occur within 20-30 years, and they only deal with the costs incurred by the cells themselves, they don't address the cost of storing and converting the energy.
Very briefly put, no. The explosive nature of lithium batteries has very little to do with the electric energy stored in them. If the electric energy stored in a battery was even remotely close to the amount of energy released by burning the chemicals they are composed of, then we would all be driving electric cars by now. In fact, more modern lithium batteries are less prone to explode because they have lower internal resistance, so they don't heat up as much when discharged. I keep seeing this fallacy about energy content vs explosive danger when people discuss batteries, but it is frankly nonsense. Many high-power explosives don't produce a whole lot of heat when they detonate, it is the rapid shock-wave that gives them their destructive power. Conversely, regular butter contains enough energy to drive your car on it, but it is quite tricky to ignite and hence fairly safe.
Anyway, poorly manufactured Lithium batteries are dangerous because they ignite easily. It has very little to do with their energy content.
For those too lazy to follow the link. World energy consumption: Oil: 37% Coal: 25% Gas: 23% Nuclear: 6% Biomass: 4% Hydro: 3% Solar heat: 0.5% Wind: 0.3% Geothermal: 0.2% Biofuels: 0.2% Photovoltaics: 0.02%
WORLDWIDE photovoltaic production is about 13GW. A single nuclear reactor or coal fired powerplant can produce 1-2 GW. Solar couldn't even power a tiny european country with populations of a few millions. Let alone China, India, the US, Russia etc... Even if you doubled worldwide solar cell output every five years, you would have to keep up such an exponential growth for 50 years just to replace 20% of our CURRENT energy demand. As China and India industrialize this will increase.
The most probable ways to reduce CO2 emissions from our energy generation are: -Carbon capture and storage -Expanding Nuclear power -Increased use of Gas in place of Coal ( gas contains a lot of hydrogen and hence emits less CO2 per kwH than does coal ).
Ironically these are all measures which are fiercely opposed by Greenpeace et al, who instead want us to hope that wind and solar will save the day. At present production wind, solar and solar heat taken together produce about 0.82% of worldwide energy. To avoid a 2 C increase in global average temperature we need substantial cuts in CO2 emissions before 2050. Does anybody SERIOUSLY believe that photovoltaic / wind is up to the job?
I mean for the love of god, electric cars are great in that they could let us use Nuclear power or plants equipped with carbon capture technology, but they will not be solar powered. Not within the foreseeable future at least.
I really don't know what to say.... Are you really suggesting that the Pirate Party is an influential and relevant political force? Based on that??
At the moment Sweden has 7 parties in parliament. 4 out of these are in a very narrow coalition government which won the last election by about 1%. The pirate party got 0.63%. The limit to get seats in parliament is 4%. They have more members than the green party , which HAS seats in parliament. If Sweden can prohibit public funding for research on nuclear power due to the demands by the Greens, then I can very well imagine that a party which has even more members can be politically influential.
That would be the murder of former prime minister Olof Palme, and if that EVER gets resolved then DAMN will there be paperwork involved... I'd expect at least a library of congress' worth given it has been more than 2 decades of investigation.
a) That check will fail horribly unless you're using C++ and overloading the "==" operator. b) If you are using C++ then why are you using printf rather than cout? c) printf can fail, you're not catching that.
Being Swedish I find your alcohol policy absolutely bizarre. Schools policing students about what they do in their spare time? If a teacher did that over here they would probably get into legal difficulties as a result of it... Heck, my physics department has a student run pub in the basement and one of my lecturers even gave the students some time to advertise it. Despite of this ( or maybe because of ) we have a lower rate of alcohol induced diseases and a lower alcohol related crime rate.
I'm guessing this is the consequence of some "traditional" political opinions, much like Sweden insisting on having a state monopoly on alcohol, despite it being quite clearly demonstrated that it does nothing to prevent minors from obtaining it ( which is pretty much the argument in favor ).
With Microsoft's patent FUD I'm guessing it is only a question of time until we get some SCO clone to file a patent lawsuit against the Linux kernel. Will be interesting to see Linus' response when that happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Salami tactics, thin edge of the wedge, slippery slope, spearhead strategy... etc... Sure, if it stops here it may not be so bad. Problem is that history suggests it won't stop here.
Not to mention that SSL will kill it promptly. The algorithm would have to determine which data was "authorized" and not, while it is encrypted. Basically what you would be looking at is every node examining the encrypted traffic and then trying to guess through traffic analysis if the sender had permission to transfer the clear text, weather it was fair-use , if it was a parody etc ... It is about as likely to succeed as trying to tell if a song is good or not by examining its md5sum.
If the screenshots are anything to judge by then Microsoft are changing user interfaces AGAIN ( and as usual it is a partial clone of Apple ). Wonder what will happen when people find that switching to Linux is an easier learning curve than upgrading windows...
All it takes is for ONE dedicated geek to build a phonograph, the copy then hits the internet and it's game over. Not even locking down the hardware will help because a single output wire operating at 50khz or above will be able to reproduce the sound. You would have to sniff every single port on the computer for a watermark, which just isn't going to happen.
The only way for DRM to work is through a big-brother society where all our activities are constantly monitored. DRM and privacy cannot exist together. The nature of sound is such that you can't stop people recording it without entering their homes and observing them in everything they do. How you generate the sound, through a record player or an advanced system of cryptographic "trusted" hardware, is irrelevant. The physical phenomena of sound has been well understood for more than 100 years, it can be recorded, copies can be made, life goes on.
It gets a little bit more elaborate for movies, but same thing applies. Theoretically I could make photographic film, use a rather simple assembly of lenses to project the screen onto them, record the movie at twice the desired frame-rate... Photography isn't very new by modern standards, it just takes one person to circumvent it, then it hits the net.
And we still are, these volcano's would be heating the ice from bellow, the icecaps are melting at the surface, forming water pools in the ice.
Nonsense, scientific experiments are supposed to be carried out in a reproducible way, meaning that if the guy who wrote a paper won't give you your data you should be able to just go do the experiment yourself. If the GP was arguing scientists shouldn't document their assumptions then you would have a point, but that was not what he was saying. The situation is more akin to everybody already having a bible, and somebody saying "There are more three letter words than four letter words in it" and then refusing to say how many there are of each. If you don't believe him you can just take your own bible, count the respective words and see if he is right. A situation which would be analogous with what you described would be if scientists said "we did this experiment which proves there are no gravitons, but we won't tell you how we did it.". This was not what the GP was suggesting. Any papers published from his lab would without doubt state his assumptions and describe the experiment, he just won't bother giving you all the "pm tube #5 triggered 300 times, pm tube #4 triggered 200 times
Sounds about right.
They have exhibits featuring humans living together with dinosaurs. Have a guess how accurate their description of the state of modern biology is.
I have a degree in mathematics and quite frankly I would have used a calculator as well. Not because I couldn't do the maths in my head, but because I'd want to make sure to get it right. Besides, being able to do 4-digit arithmetic in your head is hardly the best metric for mathematical ability. As one PHD in maths told me when I was teasing him for getting his change wrong in the pub: "Why would I need to get that stuff right? It is only occasionally I come across numbers anyway."
When it comes to teaching people science. Well, if we are to continue to use a democratic system of governance it is in society's best interest that the voters are not completely ignorant about how the world works. I agree with your point about it being a bit futile thou. I've run into a physics students who claimed that a 1m^2 solar cell at 100% efficiency would exceed the power output of a nuclear power plant. There isn't a good way to describe how I felt when I heard that little gem.
It differs a lot from country to country. Ireland is one thing , Sweden quite another. I've met some creationists, but most of them are of the "God created the universe , Big Bang and the standard model takes it from there... " kind of creationists. We don't get many "young earth" creationists where I am , but I dunno what it is like in the rest of Europe.
I actually have to wonder why the drives were not designed to cope with this. When you write software you don't assume your data input is sane ( at least not if you want stability ), now I recognize that designing a drive you have a lot more ways that the input could be broken, and I wouldn't expect a drive to gracefully reject nitric acid, but assuming these disks are the same shape and size as normal disks, then I'd argue that the drive shouldn't be built in a way which causes it to break if there is something wrong with the disk. It doesn't excuse the vendor from breaking the disks in the first place, but I am a bit surprised that the drives would actually be damaged by it. Fail to read them, sure, but actual damage...
I moved out of the country before I could determine how it worked out, but some Norwegian companies tried a scheme under which you have two tiers of bandwidth. By default your connection uses the higher speed but if you exceed the quota it degrades to the lower speed until the end of the month. This works quite well since you will still have a fixed bill every month and you won't just lose your ability to use e-mail if you exceed the quota.
.... will be added to your bill automatically.
Of course, it is all about the marketing. You don't say "we degrade your connection if you exceed this quota", you say "In addition you get EXTRA HIGH SUPER SPEED for the first 20 gigabytes (ZOMG!!!! thousands of songs) each month". You then proceed to sell "top-up packs" at your website where users can pay for extra quota, and then offer an optional service by which quota... err... extra-bandwidth-top-up-packs
Not if the heat from that current is insufficient to cause further energy release. Thus the activation energy of the reaction is also important. Also, it is NOT the Lithium that is being oxidized/reduced during normal operation in a LiCoO2 cell, but the Co ions. The argument about energy density vs damage potential would be true if it was only the ions being reduced/oxidized present, and if their reaction with the atmosphere released negliable energy. However, you also have to take structural materials into consideration as well as the operating environment. If I would make a Li-ion battery with the same chemistry as before, but used metallic sodium alloyed with mercury for the casing, and operated the thing under water, then I think you would agree that the energy stored in the battery isn't necessarily the main problem?
When you discuss battery safety you need to consider not just the redox reaction, but other possible reactions that can occur between the electrolyte, andode/cathode, what happens if the battery leaks, how does the electrolyte react with air, how easily heat is dissipated through the material etc
As for butter, sure if you TRY to make an explosive out of it, you can get one, that doesn't stop our bodies from recovering the energy in a far more benign manner. If anything this just proves my point. The same energy storage system ( fat ) can have vastly different safety performance depending on HOW you oxidize it. Mix it with sodium nitrate and set it on fire in an oxygen rich atmosphere and you get a spectacular fire. If you instead use some organic enzymes to dissolve it in a salt solution and send it through an advanced cascade of reactions to produce ATP, then you would have difficulties to burn yourself with it if you tried.
Your numbers are a bit off. The Tesla roadster quotes a range of 356km on 54kWh.
If you use 1000 V , 4 parallel plugs, a 100A charging current, that gives you 66kWh in 10 minutes. 100A is doable with AWG 1 ( 7.35mm ), and most of the time you wouldn't be charging from empty anyway, so something like 6 minutes is more reasonable. Of course, this is only necessary if you need to take a pit stop during a long journey, most people would probably just charge it at home over night.
First of all, Nanosolar HOPES to make the cells at $1/W, they are nowhere near that cheap yet, and this is the price their marketing department HOPES to achieve. Secondly, that is the price for the cells without factoring in energy storage devices, energy conversion systems, servicing etc
With most of nuclear reactors built in the west ending their licensing in about 2030 - 2040, Oil running low and gas prices rising due to low demand, it seems likely that nations will turn to coal. This effectively implies you will either have to do carbon capture and storage or start building nuclear plants very soon unless you want to have your greenhouse gas emissions rocket due to massive deployments of coal plants. To think that solar will replace Coal, Oil, Gas AND nuclear within 30-40 years amidst the east rapidly increasing the energy intensity of their economies, is wishful thinking at best.
But no, we're going to gamble on some hypothetical solar breakthrough. Despite the fact that no realistic way to overcome the problems with intermittent supply, that they don't produce energy at night, diffuse and limited output, as well as the high price, having been demonstrated. If you think the press release about what one heavily subsidized solar company "hopes to achieve" negates any of my arguments, then I'd say you are naive at best.
As for nano-antenna solar cells, again, you are talking several decades of development at the very least. They won't save us from the energy gap that is likely to occur within 20-30 years, and they only deal with the costs incurred by the cells themselves, they don't address the cost of storing and converting the energy.
Very briefly put, no. The explosive nature of lithium batteries has very little to do with the electric energy stored in them. If the electric energy stored in a battery was even remotely close to the amount of energy released by burning the chemicals they are composed of, then we would all be driving electric cars by now. In fact, more modern lithium batteries are less prone to explode because they have lower internal resistance, so they don't heat up as much when discharged. I keep seeing this fallacy about energy content vs explosive danger when people discuss batteries, but it is frankly nonsense. Many high-power explosives don't produce a whole lot of heat when they detonate, it is the rapid shock-wave that gives them their destructive power. Conversely, regular butter contains enough energy to drive your car on it, but it is quite tricky to ignite and hence fairly safe.
Anyway, poorly manufactured Lithium batteries are dangerous because they ignite easily. It has very little to do with their energy content.
No , please, stop right there. Here, let me put it into perspective for you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:World_energy_usage_width_chart.svg
For those too lazy to follow the link.
World energy consumption:
Oil: 37%
Coal: 25%
Gas: 23%
Nuclear: 6%
Biomass: 4%
Hydro: 3%
Solar heat: 0.5%
Wind: 0.3%
Geothermal: 0.2%
Biofuels: 0.2%
Photovoltaics: 0.02%
WORLDWIDE photovoltaic production is about 13GW. A single nuclear reactor or coal fired powerplant can produce 1-2 GW. Solar couldn't even power a tiny european country with populations of a few millions. Let alone China, India, the US, Russia etc
The most probable ways to reduce CO2 emissions from our energy generation are:
-Carbon capture and storage
-Expanding Nuclear power
-Increased use of Gas in place of Coal ( gas contains a lot of hydrogen and hence emits less CO2 per kwH than does coal ).
Ironically these are all measures which are fiercely opposed by Greenpeace et al, who instead want us to hope that wind and solar will save the day. At present production wind, solar and solar heat taken together produce about 0.82% of worldwide energy. To avoid a 2 C increase in global average temperature we need substantial cuts in CO2 emissions before 2050. Does anybody SERIOUSLY believe that photovoltaic / wind is up to the job?
I mean for the love of god, electric cars are great in that they could let us use Nuclear power or plants equipped with carbon capture technology, but they will not be solar powered. Not within the foreseeable future at least.
At the moment Sweden has 7 parties in parliament. 4 out of these are in a very narrow coalition government which won the last election by about 1%. The pirate party got 0.63%. The limit to get seats in parliament is 4%. They have more members than the green party , which HAS seats in parliament. If Sweden can prohibit public funding for research on nuclear power due to the demands by the Greens, then I can very well imagine that a party which has even more members can be politically influential.
That would be the murder of former prime minister Olof Palme, and if that EVER gets resolved then DAMN will there be paperwork involved... I'd expect at least a library of congress' worth given it has been more than 2 decades of investigation.
liquid nitrogen
... har har har).
It may not be the best taste on the planet, but it is definitely the coolest way to make ice-cream ( well, maybe except helium
a) That check will fail horribly unless you're using C++ and overloading the "==" operator.
b) If you are using C++ then why are you using printf rather than cout?
c) printf can fail, you're not catching that.
Being Swedish I find your alcohol policy absolutely bizarre. Schools policing students about what they do in their spare time? If a teacher did that over here they would probably get into legal difficulties as a result of it... Heck, my physics department has a student run pub in the basement and one of my lecturers even gave the students some time to advertise it. Despite of this ( or maybe because of ) we have a lower rate of alcohol induced diseases and a lower alcohol related crime rate.
I'm guessing this is the consequence of some "traditional" political opinions, much like Sweden insisting on having a state monopoly on alcohol, despite it being quite clearly demonstrated that it does nothing to prevent minors from obtaining it ( which is pretty much the argument in favor ).
On the other hand, it means you will be able to save money, battery life, weight etc... for your laptop by opting out of the optical drive.
You are planning to smuggle valuable information out from / into the country. Do you:
a)GPG encrypt it and scp it through TOR.
b)Store it all as plain text in your laptop's "my documents" folder that you try to clear customs with.
I know what I would choose...
With Microsoft's patent FUD I'm guessing it is only a question of time until we get some SCO clone to file a patent lawsuit against the Linux kernel. Will be interesting to see Linus' response when that happens.