Unfortunately, lorry drivers can't turn their vehicles round very easily.
If the road starts off at a decent size then gets smaller and smaller, by the time the lorry driver realises, they may not have any other option than to carry on, reverse 5 miles back along the road, or call out a crane to lift their lorry up and turn it around - which would you do?
There do need to be signs whilst the lorry driver can do something about it.
Also, I've seen devices which can detect high vehicles (a light beam across the road, set on poles) to flash up warnings to lorry drivers where there are notorious low bridges (there was one just outside Aylesbury when I lived there, on the A61 if I remember correctly). That sort of thing could be used here as well.
If it was done properly, I don't think it would be a problem except for the people who just want to power-play. As long as this was publicised beforehand.
Eg, if one week it was announced that banks would lend you up to the value of your property at 0% interest. What's the problem with that, and it would be an interesting economics experiment. Or, if someone discovered a new gold-field, or goblins started up a new 'uber-sword' factory so the market got flooded with those or whatever.
It's not a zombie at all! A zombie is a re-animated corpse. The cockroach doesn't die and then come back to 'life' (undead-ness), it just loses the power to exert its will.
The word 'zombie' is just used to get you to read the article.
Also, many spammers use bot networks to send out the spam. (Hopefully) over time those will decrease in size as people get more security aware (or their old PCs get too slow (guess why) and they buy new PCs - which seem to all come with some AV software on them nowadays - it might be cr*p AV software, but it's better than none). That would make it harder to do the bulk mailing as they may have to buy some of their own servers/bandwidth to use.
The other things which are needed are for domain registrars to stop domain tasting, and for people like googlepages and gmail to stop allowing people to sign up for free and then use their services as dropboxes or throwaway websites to redirect to spammers' sites..
Yahoo, Google and others who do this are a BIG help to spammers. I just wish they'd learn! If they charged $5-$10 for an email address/website FOR LIFE (with suitable CC security), it would stop the spammers from using their services dead in their tracks, whilst still not being much more expensive than their free services now.
"Toxic levels of carbon dioxide: at levels above 5%, concentration CO2 is directly toxic. [At lower levels we may be seeing effects of a reduction in the relative amount of oxygen rather than direct toxicity of CO2.]"
If you have about 5% CO2 in a room, even if the rest is pure oxygen, you will die, or at least black out with death following soon after.
Google for 'CO2 narcosis' or 'CO2 toxicity' if you don't believe me.
Nuclear is only expensive because it's the only energy source that has to pay to clean up the mess it leaves behind.
Coal just chucks out millions of tons of CO2 a year as well as sulphates, nitrates, radioactive radon gas (far more than a nuclear power station), heavy metals etc and lets the environment sort it out. If you covered the cost of cleaning that up, then coal is MUCH more expensive than nuclear.
One comparison I saw said, that if you gave all the CO2 gas that a coal power station chucks out in a *day* to people, it would kill 1 million people. If you fed the radioactive waste from an equivalent nuclear plant to people, it would "only" kill 100,000 people. So, the waste from a coal plant is at least 10 times more toxic than that from a nuclear plant. The difference is that the coal plant waste is hard to handle properly, so it's just dumped into the environment where it has global effects. The nuclear waste is much easier to handle properly, and can be safely contained and only has very localised (if any) effects.
Maybe "electricity" demand is high on hot summer afternoons. The problem is that we're not talking about electricity - we're talking about *energy*. At the moment a large proportion of energy usage is for heating - it just happens to come from gas/oil/coal directly rather be delivered as electricity. That will change at some point in the future.
A lot of energy is needed on cold winter nights - there's no sun then.
Energy storage is vitally important for most renewable energy sources. Geothermal, biomass & nuclear are the only ones which can supply energy on demand (hydro and high altitude wind are good as well, but not quite as reliable). Others all need buffering using energy storage or other energy production methods such as coal.
Energy storage methods need to be researched more, if we had a decent way to store large amounts of energy, existing renewable energy production methods would be SO much more useful. Water pumping is the only way we have at the moment, and that's not deployed anywhere near enough for various reasons (suitability of locations and cost being the main ones).
"For OEMs, ISVs, and VARs who distribute MySQL with their products, and do not license and distribute their source code under the GPL, MySQL provides a flexible OEM Commercial License"
See. If we distribute MySQL with our software, we need a commercial licence unless we distribute our source code under the GPL.
Also, if you link with the MySQL client libraries - those also use GPL, so you have to distribute the source code to your product. See http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/faq.html, the section titled "Previously, the MySQL client libraries were licensed under the LGPL (the Lesser General Public License) and now they use the GPL (the General Public License)."
So, it's pretty hard (ie impossible) to use MySQL without either getting a commercial licence or releasing your own source code under the GPL (or other FOSS licence - using their FOSS licence exception)
If you are doing otherwise, watch out!
If you are selling a scripted solution (PHP,Python etc) and require the user to download and install MySQL themselves, you're probably OK, but if you are linking with their client libraries directly and/or distributing MySQL with your own software, you will fall foul of their licencing.
So - that's why we use PostgreSQL or SQLite (depending on requirements) instead. Licencing is MUCH easier.
The market DOES decide. It decides which products to use based on their licences.
If we need a library/component/whatever for our commercial software, we either look for commercial libraries or BSD/Apache/etc licenced libraries. We won't use GPL, it's just too much hassle. (eg for databases we use SQLite (Public Domain) or PostgreSQL (BSD), not MySQL (GPL)). The cost isn't necessarily the problem, as we'll happily use commercial libraries if their licence conditions are suitable, but licences to use GPL software in commercial products are often hideously expensive and/or badly managed.
It is the author's right to use GPL if they want to - as long as they realise what they are doing. I'm not convinced that all do, and suspect that some just think that the GPL is an 'open source licence' (which it is) without realising the differences between that and BSD/Apache etc.
So, the "market" will decide whether to use a BSD/Apache licenced component or a GPL's component. If BSD licenced products are available which are as good as/better than GPL licenced products, the GPL products will often 'lose out' as people looking for components to use will tend to use the simpler licenced products. However, there are many good GPL products which don't have equivalent BSD licenced products, and enough people wanting to use them either in other open source products, or standalone, so GPL still lives.
GPL is really the result of a 'philosophy' - 'we think all software should be open source, so if we write anything that you want to use, we'll force you to be open source, or otherwise pay through the teeth', rather than just a wish to make their own software open source (which BSD/Apache style licences would cover with a lot less hassle). As long as you realise that, it all makes sense.
> I also find it amusing how the votes tend to congregate somewhere in the 3rd quartile a bit above average(e.g. 7 on a 1-10 scale) rather than 5.5 where it would be if people ranked things more fairly
I'm not sure about that. People will tend to watch films they think/hope they will like. So, the ones where they think 'that'll be absolute poop' they won't bother watching, so, hopefully, won't bother rating.
So, people should rate fewer films as 'poop' than as 'great', because they select only the 'hopefully good' films to review.
If you forced people to go to see and review all films, even the ones where you have to drag them screaming through the door, then the average rating would almost certainly decrease considerably.
I've got two PCs (a desktop and a laptop) which I've bought since Vista came out, and had Vista Ultimate installed on. I'm happy with them. I have a couple of other PCs from before that which have XP on. I'm happy with them.
IMHO there's nothing that wrong with Vista, but it's not so great I'd upgrade to it from an XP PC.
As a business owner as well, there's no way I'd upgrade existing XP PCs to Vista, but I wouldn't sulk if I could only buy new PCs with Vista on.
The only problems I've had with Vista have been badly written third party programs which require administrator rights to run. I'd have thought that it would be a GOOD idea to have problems with these.
How many Linux users would complain at Linux if they had problems because some user programs (eg games etc) required root access to run? Not many, I'd expect, they'd complain at the program publishers instead. So, when Microsoft tighten up their OS and cause problems with badly written programs, why do people complain at Microsoft?
The reason the bookstore is doing well, but the CD store isn't, isn't because of piracy. It's because people want to read books (not just stories, but stories in books), but they want to listen to music, just not music on CDs. They'll buy their music from iTunes, Napster, etc because they can then listen to it on the move, on their 'portable music device'.
The only reason for anyone under 40 to buy a CD now is so they can rip it and put it onto their portable music device... Since record companies are trying hard to stop this, it means that less people will buy CDs. Anyone who does rip a CD is made to feel like a music pirate anyway - so they may as well go the whole hog and download it off the Internet - if you're a pirate for buying a CD and ripping it, why not be a pirate by downloading it, and save yourself a fortune at the same time.
Most people do NOT want to pirate music, but if that's the easiest way to get hold of the music to use as they want, that's what they'll use. If it cost £0.50 to buy a music track and was easy to do, and they could use it as they wanted (eg on all their music players) that's what most people would do - especially if they knew that £0.40 went to the artist/composer, rather than £0.01 to them, and the rest to the record label.
The problem with any 'how much piracy is around' surveys today is that they are looking at the situation today, when it's really hard to get a useful downloaded music track legitimately, and it's even harder to find a decent CD. So, people almost HAVE to pirate music to get what they want. Fix that, and there'd be less piracy.
I've just bought a 'silent' WHS PC for £370 (in the UK), so I can't see them being much more than $500 in the US.
WHS is *really* easy to set up - especially if you buy a PC built for it. WHS has Windows client backup software built in (that, and file sharing/streaming are the main points of it AFAICS). It can also do 'file replication'. So, if you have two disks (eg one internal and one USB), you can tell it to replicate the data from one to the other, so if one dies, the other is still there.
It's not RAID, so there'll be a lag between files being written and them being replicated, but in a home environment, who cares about that? Not being RAID has the advantage that the disks don't have to be the same size and can be USB drives (you could have a 500GB disk internally and replicate some of your files to 2 160GB USB drives. AFAICS the 'replicated' drives would have the data accessible if you unplug them and plug them into another PC, so you're not restricted by the availability of identical RAID controllers if the WHS server goes belly up itself.
WHS is the way I'd go - I know it's not cool on Slashdot to go for Windows solutions, but in this case, I think it's a clear winner, unless the original poster is already a Linux guru.
If that means what it sounds like it means - then it would be safe to stand in the beam? Or, at least that's what they're trying to imply.
The power of sunlight hitting the earth is about 1.4kW/m2, so for 5GW from the sun you'd need an antenna 60m x 60 But, in that case, how big is the antenna for '1/6th noon sunlight intensity' to be equivalent to 5-10 GW... I've read the sunlight power hitting the Earth is about 1.4kW/m2 - so for 5 GW from the sun you'd need a dish with a diameter of 66m. But, if the beam is only 1/6th the power of the sun, you'd need a 165m diameter dish.
This sounds reasonably doable to me.
I'm not sure if 2.4GHz (UHF) radiation is more dangerous than visible light radiation, but if the light was coming straight down, you'd be hit by less than 20W of radiation if you were standing in the beam, so I doubt it would be immediately fatal. Long term effects would be debateable, but a 2G cell phone mast transmits at 20-100W.
So, whilst you wouldn't want to stand in the beam, it doesn't sound like a feasible weapon to me... If the receiving station was in a desert, (and planes were kept clear) then it sounds safe enough to me.
OTOH, if it's beaming down the energy at 2.4GHz, I wouldn't want to be setting up a WiFi network next door...
As someone who has to support email users quite a lot, I'd second that, for pure email, Outlook Express is generally better than Outlook. Outlook comes across as an Exchange client, with some Internet email support, and there are cases where it's blatantly obvious that the developers haven't read (or at least, understood) the Internet mail standards. In many cases when it seems they have understood them, they've implemented it badly. Outlook Express is far more standards compliant and is just generally more robust.
(Eg Outlook 2007 sends an 'AUTH' command to POP3 servers as the first thing it does - for no obvious reason, other than someone at MS obviously thought it was a good idea???? (See Technet forums)
> That is not true for the majority of the world's languages. There are no dictionaries, no grammars, hell most of them probably don't even have a way to write them down because they lack an alphabet or other written system
Exactly - hence my comment that 'historical documents won't be lost' from many languages which may disappear finally disappearing - there are no such documents for many languages.
Stories etc being lost IS more of an issue, but they could just as easily be lost by a village elder dying prematurely or a disease wiping out half a village. They could easily survive a language disappearing by being translated (possibly within a community) to another language. Their loss is not directly tied to the loss of a language. Eg you can find lots of histories/stories around in the UK from 'dead' languages - Latin, ancient Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, as well as languages which bear little resemblance now to when the stories were first created (Chaucer, probably ancient Scandinavian myths)
If languages are being lost due to governments suppressing them, then that's a 'bad thing' - but many languages will be lost just because people don't want to use them any more. Should people be forced to learn a language? Is it the right of anyone to be able to force someone to spend valuable education time learning something they don't see as worthwhile? If a tribe in the Andes whose language is dying out has children who only know Spanish, and they have a few hours education a week which is all they can fit in amongst all the other things they need to do to survive. Is it best to teach them health, farming, basic numeracy and literacy or spend half that time teaching them their dying language?
I'm not sure about the 'historical documents that will no longer be readable' comment..
People nowadays may not be able to read Latin as the Romans did, but it is still readable.
Also, many of the languages which will be lost probably have no written form, so there will be no 'documents' which cannot be translated. There may be stories/myths/histories which are known in the spoken form, which may be lost - but that is a coincidental loss due to the loss of a language, not a direct result - the stories could easily be kept in a different language, and could also be lost despite the language surviving, and should really be written down to avoid losing them - which isn't possible without some form of translation if there isn't a written form to the language.
As another thought - English is still a living language - but Chaucer's English isn't.. As one document I've read put it, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jefferson and Dubyu Bush all speak English; Shakespeare would probably have been able to converse with Chaucer and Jefferson (with some difficulty), but Jefferson (and certainly Bush) would need to have an interpreter to speak to Chaucer - even though it's the "same" language. So, does this mean that Chaucer's English is a dead language, or just a language that has evolved into something else?
If we say that it's a language which has evolved into something else, does this mean that other languages which 'die' by 'merging' have evolved or died out? If a language from the Andes becomes 'Spanish with some extra words' has it died out or evolved?
You could easily claim you'd lost the bit of paper
If you've paid money into your bank, and they haven't credited your account, how do you prove the bank's wrong?
If the system is lying, then paper votes are just as bad. How do you know someone didn't take your paper out of the box after you put it in there? How do you know the ballot box you put the paper into was a REAL ballot box? How do you know that the person counting the votes is honest? If several people check them, how do you know that all of them aren't colluding?
At some point you have to trust. If the system can show you the right data, it must have the right data, so someone doing an audit could find it. Just like with paper voting - except better - because a lost ballot box would be noticeable.
You need voter anonymity. You don't need vote untraceability.
You could, for instance, have a bit of paper or something with a hidden, machine & human readable random, unique code on it that no one knows. The voter puts this in the voting machine which reveals the code, and reads it. The voter votes, their vote gets printed on the paper, and the voter takes the bit of paper with them. The voter can keep that bit of paper, and, if they want, type the code in on a website later and it'll tell them how their vote was registered.
OK, someone else could enter their code - but since there's no way of knowing who placed that vote (except to the person holding the bit of paper) the information of how that code voted is useless.
Now, you have accountability, and anonymity. It's not that high tech, and it should be possible to do in a relatively user friendly way.
(Internet voting is far harder, but I don't think you even could consider doing that in a verifiably anonymous way - a similar method to the above could be used, with the code being sent to you beforehand, but there's no way for the voter to know that someone else doesn't know which code was sent to whom. In the voting booth, there could be a bucket of bits of paper that the voter chooses from, so it is totally unpredictable which number a certain voter will use).
Same here. I have two PCs (a homebuilt desktop and a Dell laptop) both with Vista Ultimate on, and I haven't had any real problems.
Both are new PCs. The desktop is pretty powerful, as it was really built for playing Supreme Commander... So, the desktop has a 'User Experience' score of 5.9 (5 was supposedly the maximum possible when Vista was released) and the laptop has 3.5 (mostly due to the onboard graphics card).
The only problem I did have was the annoying UAC during installation of Vista & drivers on the desktop. As the parent says, I actually turned off UAC on the desktop because it was so ****** annoying whilst installing drivers. I suppose I should turn it back on again, but I can't be bothered... Maybe if a fresh install of Vista had UAC turned off by default and then after a few days of no fresh drivers being installed it turn it on for you it would be better!
I haven't come across any programs I expected to work which didn't, and several I didn't expect to work, did. XP drivers seem to work fine for some of my older hardware. It's not that slow - but then the hardware is up to it. I suspect if I did find it slow, I could turn off all the fancy GUI stuff that I don't want (Vista will, by default, turn these off if the 'User Experience Score' is low - if you turn them back on in that case, you deserve what you get). XP was slow when that first came out as well.
I've been a bit worried by the 'DRM' stuff which is mentioned, but so far it hasn't stopped me doing anything I've wanted to do. OK, I'm not a raging pirate, but I have been known to backup CDs/DVDs and can still do this without problems.
And - in Vista, the 'Start' button has gone - so no more pressing "start" to stop the PC. See, Microsoft DO listen to the critics;-)
OTOH, Denmark *ONLY* gets 20% of its electricity from windmills. The rest is generated in 'traditional' methods, which can be ramped up to cover any fluctuations. Denmark is different from most countries, because it's mostly coastal, where wind is generally predictable.
In the UK there's a law allowing small generators to sell their electricity back to the electricty grid. The big power generation companies don't like this - not because it's competition, but because they HAVE to buy the electricity, and then throw away all the power that they are generating using traditional methods. They CAN'T significantly reduce their own generation because they have to handle fluctuations.
In the west we expect 100% reliable power sources. Wind (especially) is not good enough for this. It takes a long time (hours or more) to run up a traditional power generator. You can't guarantee how much electricity is going to be generated by a wind farm. If you expect it to produce 50MW, but the wind drops slightly so it only produces 49MW (or the wind increases, so it produces 0MW)- where's that other 1MW going to come from? The answer is that a coal/oil/gas/nuclear station has to be ready to take the slack within seconds. That means it's got to be generating power and throwing it away, so that it can cover the shortfall in time.
Having several wind farms/solar farms in different locations helps - but then you have issues with power loss due to transportation, and it still doesn't solve the problem totally. Wind/solar/tidal etc can only work as a small percentage of power generation, because there will be times when shortfalls need to be covered.
If we were willing to accept brown-outs & black-outs when the wind/solar wasn't generating enough, whilst traditional methods were powered up to cover the shortfall, it wouldn't be as big a problem, but we're not (at the moment), so predictable generation methods have to be there, ready to take the slack (and thus be throwing away power).
The problem with many 'renewable' sources of energy is that they're not predictable. Solar produces no energy at night and less in cloudy conditions. Wind/tidal etc don't produce energy all the time either.
Nuclear, oil, gas, coal, biomass, geothermal, (and hydro to a large degree) can be "switched on and off" at will, so are far more useful. If you have a large proportion of energy produced by wind or other unpredictable sources, you need to have other generation methods running 'on standby' for when the wind dies down. This is a big waste of energy.
If we could come up with a reasonable way of storing energy, then wind/solar etc would become far more useful, but at the moment, apart from water pumping (which is only practical in limited situations) there is no way to store energy at the megawatt-hour scale.
The alternative to this is for people to be less reliant on energy, so they can have it during the day or when the wind is blowing, but won't scream blue murder if their aircon turns off on a still night.
IMV, Nuclear is the way we have to go, unless we can work out energy storage and/or make biomass generation more efficient and acceptable (large swathes of land being put aside for fuel growth)
> - car insurance + car tax (yes, you read that right) + maintenance per vehicle costs me ~2,995 USD per year; I have two cars, which comes to about ~$6,000 USD per year!
You're either very young, have an expensive car, or live in an expensive country (or all three).
My BMW 3 series costs around £500 per year to insure, so that's around USD 1500 per year for insurance and tax, and that's not a cheap to insure car.
> - food costs me around ~$1,711 USD / month (I don't go to eat out at all)
How many people is that for??? What do you eat?
We eat relatively luxuriously, and I'd estimate we spend around £100-£120 per week for a typical week for our family of 4 (OK, we have two small children, not teenagers, but they still eat like gannets). So that's around half of what you're spending. We're in the Uk.
> - MANDATORY medical insurance costs me ~$700 USD per month!
Which European country has mandatory medical insurance that costs that much?
I thought the UK was supposed to be an expensive part of Europe, but wherever you are is far more expensive!
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, lorry drivers can't turn their vehicles round very easily.
If the road starts off at a decent size then gets smaller and smaller, by the time the lorry driver realises, they may not have any other option than to carry on, reverse 5 miles back along the road, or call out a crane to lift their lorry up and turn it around - which would you do?
There do need to be signs whilst the lorry driver can do something about it.
Also, I've seen devices which can detect high vehicles (a light beam across the road, set on poles) to flash up warnings to lorry drivers where there are notorious low bridges (there was one just outside Aylesbury when I lived there, on the A61 if I remember correctly). That sort of thing could be used here as well.
If it was done properly, I don't think it would be a problem except for the people who just want to power-play. As long as this was publicised beforehand. Eg, if one week it was announced that banks would lend you up to the value of your property at 0% interest. What's the problem with that, and it would be an interesting economics experiment. Or, if someone discovered a new gold-field, or goblins started up a new 'uber-sword' factory so the market got flooded with those or whatever.
It's not a zombie at all! A zombie is a re-animated corpse. The cockroach doesn't die and then come back to 'life' (undead-ness), it just loses the power to exert its will.
The word 'zombie' is just used to get you to read the article.
Also, many spammers use bot networks to send out the spam. (Hopefully) over time those will decrease in size as people get more security aware (or their old PCs get too slow (guess why) and they buy new PCs - which seem to all come with some AV software on them nowadays - it might be cr*p AV software, but it's better than none). That would make it harder to do the bulk mailing as they may have to buy some of their own servers/bandwidth to use.
The other things which are needed are for domain registrars to stop domain tasting, and for people like googlepages and gmail to stop allowing people to sign up for free and then use their services as dropboxes or throwaway websites to redirect to spammers' sites..
Yahoo, Google and others who do this are a BIG help to spammers. I just wish they'd learn! If they charged $5-$10 for an email address/website FOR LIFE (with suitable CC security), it would stop the spammers from using their services dead in their tracks, whilst still not being much more expensive than their free services now.
No, CO2 is toxic - it's not just the lack of oxygen.
If you put people in a sealed room, they will die from CO2 poisoning before they die of oxygen depletion.
See http://www.inspect-ny.com/hazmat/CO2gashaz.htm
"Toxic levels of carbon dioxide: at levels above 5%, concentration CO2 is directly toxic. [At lower levels we may be seeing effects of a reduction in the relative amount of oxygen rather than direct toxicity of CO2.]"
If you have about 5% CO2 in a room, even if the rest is pure oxygen, you will die, or at least black out with death following soon after.
Google for 'CO2 narcosis' or 'CO2 toxicity' if you don't believe me.
Nuclear is only expensive because it's the only energy source that has to pay to clean up the mess it leaves behind.
Coal just chucks out millions of tons of CO2 a year as well as sulphates, nitrates, radioactive radon gas (far more than a nuclear power station), heavy metals etc and lets the environment sort it out. If you covered the cost of cleaning that up, then coal is MUCH more expensive than nuclear.
One comparison I saw said, that if you gave all the CO2 gas that a coal power station chucks out in a *day* to people, it would kill 1 million people. If you fed the radioactive waste from an equivalent nuclear plant to people, it would "only" kill 100,000 people. So, the waste from a coal plant is at least 10 times more toxic than that from a nuclear plant. The difference is that the coal plant waste is hard to handle properly, so it's just dumped into the environment where it has global effects. The nuclear waste is much easier to handle properly, and can be safely contained and only has very localised (if any) effects.
Maybe "electricity" demand is high on hot summer afternoons. The problem is that we're not talking about electricity - we're talking about *energy*. At the moment a large proportion of energy usage is for heating - it just happens to come from gas/oil/coal directly rather be delivered as electricity. That will change at some point in the future.
A lot of energy is needed on cold winter nights - there's no sun then.
Energy storage is vitally important for most renewable energy sources. Geothermal, biomass & nuclear are the only ones which can supply energy on demand (hydro and high altitude wind are good as well, but not quite as reliable). Others all need buffering using energy storage or other energy production methods such as coal.
Energy storage methods need to be researched more, if we had a decent way to store large amounts of energy, existing renewable energy production methods would be SO much more useful. Water pumping is the only way we have at the moment, and that's not deployed anywhere near enough for various reasons (suitability of locations and cost being the main ones).
Erm, I suggest you go away and read it, right back at you :)
http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/
"For OEMs, ISVs, and VARs who distribute MySQL with their products, and do not license and distribute their source code under the GPL, MySQL provides a flexible OEM Commercial License"
See. If we distribute MySQL with our software, we need a commercial licence unless we distribute our source code under the GPL.
Also, if you link with the MySQL client libraries - those also use GPL, so you have to distribute the source code to your product. See http://www.mysql.com/company/legal/licensing/faq.html, the section titled "Previously, the MySQL client libraries were licensed under the LGPL (the Lesser General Public License) and now they use the GPL (the General Public License)."
So, it's pretty hard (ie impossible) to use MySQL without either getting a commercial licence or releasing your own source code under the GPL (or other FOSS licence - using their FOSS licence exception)
If you are doing otherwise, watch out!
If you are selling a scripted solution (PHP,Python etc) and require the user to download and install MySQL themselves, you're probably OK, but if you are linking with their client libraries directly and/or distributing MySQL with your own software, you will fall foul of their licencing.
So - that's why we use PostgreSQL or SQLite (depending on requirements) instead. Licencing is MUCH easier.
The market DOES decide. It decides which products to use based on their licences.
If we need a library/component/whatever for our commercial software, we either look for commercial libraries or BSD/Apache/etc licenced libraries. We won't use GPL, it's just too much hassle. (eg for databases we use SQLite (Public Domain) or PostgreSQL (BSD), not MySQL (GPL)). The cost isn't necessarily the problem, as we'll happily use commercial libraries if their licence conditions are suitable, but licences to use GPL software in commercial products are often hideously expensive and/or badly managed.
It is the author's right to use GPL if they want to - as long as they realise what they are doing. I'm not convinced that all do, and suspect that some just think that the GPL is an 'open source licence' (which it is) without realising the differences between that and BSD/Apache etc.
So, the "market" will decide whether to use a BSD/Apache licenced component or a GPL's component. If BSD licenced products are available which are as good as/better than GPL licenced products, the GPL products will often 'lose out' as people looking for components to use will tend to use the simpler licenced products. However, there are many good GPL products which don't have equivalent BSD licenced products, and enough people wanting to use them either in other open source products, or standalone, so GPL still lives.
GPL is really the result of a 'philosophy' - 'we think all software should be open source, so if we write anything that you want to use, we'll force you to be open source, or otherwise pay through the teeth', rather than just a wish to make their own software open source (which BSD/Apache style licences would cover with a lot less hassle). As long as you realise that, it all makes sense.
> I also find it amusing how the votes tend to congregate somewhere in the 3rd quartile a bit above average(e.g. 7 on a 1-10 scale) rather than 5.5 where it would be if people ranked things more fairly
I'm not sure about that. People will tend to watch films they think/hope they will like. So, the ones where they think 'that'll be absolute poop' they won't bother watching, so, hopefully, won't bother rating.
So, people should rate fewer films as 'poop' than as 'great', because they select only the 'hopefully good' films to review.
If you forced people to go to see and review all films, even the ones where you have to drag them screaming through the door, then the average rating would almost certainly decrease considerably.
I've got two PCs (a desktop and a laptop) which I've bought since Vista came out, and had Vista Ultimate installed on. I'm happy with them. I have a couple of other PCs from before that which have XP on. I'm happy with them.
IMHO there's nothing that wrong with Vista, but it's not so great I'd upgrade to it from an XP PC.
As a business owner as well, there's no way I'd upgrade existing XP PCs to Vista, but I wouldn't sulk if I could only buy new PCs with Vista on.
The only problems I've had with Vista have been badly written third party programs which require administrator rights to run. I'd have thought that it would be a GOOD idea to have problems with these.
How many Linux users would complain at Linux if they had problems because some user programs (eg games etc) required root access to run? Not many, I'd expect, they'd complain at the program publishers instead. So, when Microsoft tighten up their OS and cause problems with badly written programs, why do people complain at Microsoft?
No. Guy Fawkes failed.
That's our 'Drat, better luck next time' day...
Here's a hint...
What's July 4th?
Why should the UK have reason to give thanks because of it?
As a UKer, sounds like a good idea to me...
The reason the bookstore is doing well, but the CD store isn't, isn't because of piracy. It's because people want to read books (not just stories, but stories in books), but they want to listen to music, just not music on CDs. They'll buy their music from iTunes, Napster, etc because they can then listen to it on the move, on their 'portable music device'.
The only reason for anyone under 40 to buy a CD now is so they can rip it and put it onto their portable music device... Since record companies are trying hard to stop this, it means that less people will buy CDs. Anyone who does rip a CD is made to feel like a music pirate anyway - so they may as well go the whole hog and download it off the Internet - if you're a pirate for buying a CD and ripping it, why not be a pirate by downloading it, and save yourself a fortune at the same time.
Most people do NOT want to pirate music, but if that's the easiest way to get hold of the music to use as they want, that's what they'll use. If it cost £0.50 to buy a music track and was easy to do, and they could use it as they wanted (eg on all their music players) that's what most people would do - especially if they knew that £0.40 went to the artist/composer, rather than £0.01 to them, and the rest to the record label.
The problem with any 'how much piracy is around' surveys today is that they are looking at the situation today, when it's really hard to get a useful downloaded music track legitimately, and it's even harder to find a decent CD. So, people almost HAVE to pirate music to get what they want. Fix that, and there'd be less piracy.
I've just bought a 'silent' WHS PC for £370 (in the UK), so I can't see them being much more than $500 in the US.
WHS is *really* easy to set up - especially if you buy a PC built for it. WHS has Windows client backup software built in (that, and file sharing/streaming are the main points of it AFAICS). It can also do 'file replication'. So, if you have two disks (eg one internal and one USB), you can tell it to replicate the data from one to the other, so if one dies, the other is still there.
It's not RAID, so there'll be a lag between files being written and them being replicated, but in a home environment, who cares about that? Not being RAID has the advantage that the disks don't have to be the same size and can be USB drives (you could have a 500GB disk internally and replicate some of your files to 2 160GB USB drives. AFAICS the 'replicated' drives would have the data accessible if you unplug them and plug them into another PC, so you're not restricted by the availability of identical RAID controllers if the WHS server goes belly up itself.
WHS is the way I'd go - I know it's not cool on Slashdot to go for Windows solutions, but in this case, I think it's a clear winner, unless the original poster is already a Linux guru.
"Intensities of 1/6th noon sunlight"
If that means what it sounds like it means - then it would be safe to stand in the beam? Or, at least that's what they're trying to imply.
The power of sunlight hitting the earth is about 1.4kW/m2, so for 5GW from the sun you'd need an antenna 60m x 60
But, in that case, how big is the antenna for '1/6th noon sunlight intensity' to be equivalent to 5-10 GW... I've read the sunlight power hitting the Earth is about 1.4kW/m2 - so for 5 GW from the sun you'd need a dish with a diameter of 66m. But, if the beam is only 1/6th the power of the sun, you'd need a 165m diameter dish.
This sounds reasonably doable to me.
I'm not sure if 2.4GHz (UHF) radiation is more dangerous than visible light radiation, but if the light was coming straight down, you'd be hit by less than 20W of radiation if you were standing in the beam, so I doubt it would be immediately fatal. Long term effects would be debateable, but a 2G cell phone mast transmits at 20-100W.
So, whilst you wouldn't want to stand in the beam, it doesn't sound like a feasible weapon to me... If the receiving station was in a desert, (and planes were kept clear) then it sounds safe enough to me.
OTOH, if it's beaming down the energy at 2.4GHz, I wouldn't want to be setting up a WiFi network next door...
(Eg Outlook 2007 sends an 'AUTH' command to POP3 servers as the first thing it does - for no obvious reason, other than someone at MS obviously thought it was a good idea???? (See Technet forums)
> That is not true for the majority of the world's languages. There are no dictionaries, no grammars, hell most of them probably don't even have a way to write them down because they lack an alphabet or other written system
Exactly - hence my comment that 'historical documents won't be lost' from many languages which may disappear finally disappearing - there are no such documents for many languages.
Stories etc being lost IS more of an issue, but they could just as easily be lost by a village elder dying prematurely or a disease wiping out half a village. They could easily survive a language disappearing by being translated (possibly within a community) to another language. Their loss is not directly tied to the loss of a language. Eg you can find lots of histories/stories around in the UK from 'dead' languages - Latin, ancient Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, as well as languages which bear little resemblance now to when the stories were first created (Chaucer, probably ancient Scandinavian myths)
If languages are being lost due to governments suppressing them, then that's a 'bad thing' - but many languages will be lost just because people don't want to use them any more. Should people be forced to learn a language? Is it the right of anyone to be able to force someone to spend valuable education time learning something they don't see as worthwhile? If a tribe in the Andes whose language is dying out has children who only know Spanish, and they have a few hours education a week which is all they can fit in amongst all the other things they need to do to survive. Is it best to teach them health, farming, basic numeracy and literacy or spend half that time teaching them their dying language?
I'm not sure about the 'historical documents that will no longer be readable' comment..
People nowadays may not be able to read Latin as the Romans did, but it is still readable.
Also, many of the languages which will be lost probably have no written form, so there will be no 'documents' which cannot be translated. There may be stories/myths/histories which are known in the spoken form, which may be lost - but that is a coincidental loss due to the loss of a language, not a direct result - the stories could easily be kept in a different language, and could also be lost despite the language surviving, and should really be written down to avoid losing them - which isn't possible without some form of translation if there isn't a written form to the language.
As another thought - English is still a living language - but Chaucer's English isn't.. As one document I've read put it, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jefferson and Dubyu Bush all speak English; Shakespeare would probably have been able to converse with Chaucer and Jefferson (with some difficulty), but Jefferson (and certainly Bush) would need to have an interpreter to speak to Chaucer - even though it's the "same" language. So, does this mean that Chaucer's English is a dead language, or just a language that has evolved into something else?
If we say that it's a language which has evolved into something else, does this mean that other languages which 'die' by 'merging' have evolved or died out? If a language from the Andes becomes 'Spanish with some extra words' has it died out or evolved?
You could easily claim you'd lost the bit of paper
If you've paid money into your bank, and they haven't credited your account, how do you prove the bank's wrong?
If the system is lying, then paper votes are just as bad. How do you know someone didn't take your paper out of the box after you put it in there? How do you know the ballot box you put the paper into was a REAL ballot box? How do you know that the person counting the votes is honest? If several people check them, how do you know that all of them aren't colluding?
At some point you have to trust. If the system can show you the right data, it must have the right data, so someone doing an audit could find it. Just like with paper voting - except better - because a lost ballot box would be noticeable.
You need voter anonymity. You don't need vote untraceability.
You could, for instance, have a bit of paper or something with a hidden, machine & human readable random, unique code on it that no one knows. The voter puts this in the voting machine which reveals the code, and reads it. The voter votes, their vote gets printed on the paper, and the voter takes the bit of paper with them.
The voter can keep that bit of paper, and, if they want, type the code in on a website later and it'll tell them how their vote was registered.
OK, someone else could enter their code - but since there's no way of knowing who placed that vote (except to the person holding the bit of paper) the information of how that code voted is useless.
Now, you have accountability, and anonymity. It's not that high tech, and it should be possible to do in a relatively user friendly way.
(Internet voting is far harder, but I don't think you even could consider doing that in a verifiably anonymous way - a similar method to the above could be used, with the code being sent to you beforehand, but there's no way for the voter to know that someone else doesn't know which code was sent to whom. In the voting booth, there could be a bucket of bits of paper that the voter chooses from, so it is totally unpredictable which number a certain voter will use).
Same here. I have two PCs (a homebuilt desktop and a Dell laptop) both with Vista Ultimate on, and I haven't had any real problems.
;-)
Both are new PCs. The desktop is pretty powerful, as it was really built for playing Supreme Commander... So, the desktop has a 'User Experience' score of 5.9 (5 was supposedly the maximum possible when Vista was released) and the laptop has 3.5 (mostly due to the onboard graphics card).
The only problem I did have was the annoying UAC during installation of Vista & drivers on the desktop. As the parent says, I actually turned off UAC on the desktop because it was so ****** annoying whilst installing drivers. I suppose I should turn it back on again, but I can't be bothered... Maybe if a fresh install of Vista had UAC turned off by default and then after a few days of no fresh drivers being installed it turn it on for you it would be better!
I haven't come across any programs I expected to work which didn't, and several I didn't expect to work, did. XP drivers seem to work fine for some of my older hardware. It's not that slow - but then the hardware is up to it. I suspect if I did find it slow, I could turn off all the fancy GUI stuff that I don't want (Vista will, by default, turn these off if the 'User Experience Score' is low - if you turn them back on in that case, you deserve what you get).
XP was slow when that first came out as well.
I've been a bit worried by the 'DRM' stuff which is mentioned, but so far it hasn't stopped me doing anything I've wanted to do. OK, I'm not a raging pirate, but I have been known to backup CDs/DVDs and can still do this without problems.
And - in Vista, the 'Start' button has gone - so no more pressing "start" to stop the PC. See, Microsoft DO listen to the critics
OTOH, Denmark *ONLY* gets 20% of its electricity from windmills. The rest is generated in 'traditional' methods, which can be ramped up to cover any fluctuations. Denmark is different from most countries, because it's mostly coastal, where wind is generally predictable.
In the UK there's a law allowing small generators to sell their electricity back to the electricty grid. The big power generation companies don't like this - not because it's competition, but because they HAVE to buy the electricity, and then throw away all the power that they are generating using traditional methods. They CAN'T significantly reduce their own generation because they have to handle fluctuations.
In the west we expect 100% reliable power sources. Wind (especially) is not good enough for this. It takes a long time (hours or more) to run up a traditional power generator. You can't guarantee how much electricity is going to be generated by a wind farm. If you expect it to produce 50MW, but the wind drops slightly so it only produces 49MW (or the wind increases, so it produces 0MW)- where's that other 1MW going to come from? The answer is that a coal/oil/gas/nuclear station has to be ready to take the slack within seconds. That means it's got to be generating power and throwing it away, so that it can cover the shortfall in time.
Having several wind farms/solar farms in different locations helps - but then you have issues with power loss due to transportation, and it still doesn't solve the problem totally. Wind/solar/tidal etc can only work as a small percentage of power generation, because there will be times when shortfalls need to be covered.
If we were willing to accept brown-outs & black-outs when the wind/solar wasn't generating enough, whilst traditional methods were powered up to cover the shortfall, it wouldn't be as big a problem, but we're not (at the moment), so predictable generation methods have to be there, ready to take the slack (and thus be throwing away power).
The problem with many 'renewable' sources of energy is that they're not predictable. Solar produces no energy at night and less in cloudy conditions. Wind/tidal etc don't produce energy all the time either.
Nuclear, oil, gas, coal, biomass, geothermal, (and hydro to a large degree) can be "switched on and off" at will, so are far more useful. If you have a large proportion of energy produced by wind or other unpredictable sources, you need to have other generation methods running 'on standby' for when the wind dies down. This is a big waste of energy.
If we could come up with a reasonable way of storing energy, then wind/solar etc would become far more useful, but at the moment, apart from water pumping (which is only practical in limited situations) there is no way to store energy at the megawatt-hour scale.
The alternative to this is for people to be less reliant on energy, so they can have it during the day or when the wind is blowing, but won't scream blue murder if their aircon turns off on a still night.
IMV, Nuclear is the way we have to go, unless we can work out energy storage and/or make biomass generation more efficient and acceptable (large swathes of land being put aside for fuel growth)
Which country are you in?
> - car insurance + car tax (yes, you read that right) + maintenance per vehicle costs me ~2,995 USD per year; I have two cars, which comes to about ~$6,000 USD per year!
You're either very young, have an expensive car, or live in an expensive country (or all three).
My BMW 3 series costs around £500 per year to insure, so that's around USD 1500 per year for insurance and tax, and that's not a cheap to insure car.
> - food costs me around ~$1,711 USD / month (I don't go to eat out at all)
How many people is that for??? What do you eat?
We eat relatively luxuriously, and I'd estimate we spend around £100-£120 per week for a typical week for our family of 4 (OK, we have two small children, not teenagers, but they still eat like gannets). So that's around half of what you're spending. We're in the Uk.
> - MANDATORY medical insurance costs me ~$700 USD per month!
Which European country has mandatory medical insurance that costs that much?
I thought the UK was supposed to be an expensive part of Europe, but wherever you are is far more expensive!