To be fair, there also seems to be a failure of due process when ISPs and payment processors are pressured into cutting off wikileaks, without wikileaks having been found guilty of any crime. The anonymous guys presumably want to balance things up a little. Whether they're doing it the right way is open to question, but nobody else seems to be sticking up for wikileaks.
This proposal would prevent the passengers from using their phones as well, not just the driver. So even if you accept that any use by the driver is unacceptable, this proposal is still stupid. But unbiased research doesn't support that 4x increased risk from what I've seen.
So why not call for cars to be banned? Just because some dumbasses misuse phones doesn't mean everybody should be prevented form using them, any more than the fact some drivers are terminally incompetent should mean that all cars ought to be banned. It's ridiculous. By all means increase the penalties for people caught misusing phones in a vehicle, that would make some sense.
Having an ecosystem of different file sharing software and protocols is valuable insofar as it makes it harder to prevent all file sharing. Assuming you don't want to shut down all file sharing of course. The authorities tend to focus on whatever are the protocols du jour (at the moment bittorrent and rapidshare-type file lockers), but meanwhile you have all sorts of protocols from the past like gnutella, dc++, edonkey etc still happily working away mostly under the radar. I'd guess if you're sharing stuff you'd be less likely to land an enforcement notice if you're using a more obscure protocol. Maybe you might escape notice of deep packet inspection systems and so avoid throttling by your ISP, if they have implemented that.
Just guessing, but in any case it seems sensible not to just assume that bittorrent is the apotheosis of file-sharing, and that nothing else will ever be useful.
From where I sit, digital radio is a solution looking for a problem. In the UK, the BBC spent vast amounts of license fee payer's money (i.e. my money) investing in new DAB (the digital radio standard approved over here) stations. Then when it found no one was listening to DAB, and private stations were bailing out, rather than give it up, they spent more vast quantities advertising the f@*k out of DAB to try and boost take-up. And yet still I can count the number of people I personally know who own DAB radios on the finger of... well, one finger, actually. It's four times as expensive to run a DAB station as an FM station, the coverage is worse, receivers are expensive, and the benefits are minimal. From what I can tell, both IBOC and DRM may suffer mny of the same issues as DAB, although maybe the US market for radio is different enough that it will work out differently.
Okay, so this is a way late reply which nobody will therefore read. However I'll just point out for the record that "fuel efficiency" and "fuel economy" are not the same thing. The former relates to the percentage of energy in the fuel that is converted to motive power, while the latter is about the distance travelled per volume of fuel.
I thought there was a requirement for something to be non-obvious for it to be patentable; I really don't see anything that isn't obvious in that application. But I'm fairly clueless about US patent law, so I'm probably wrong.
Not being frivolous, but as far as I can tell, the users were new to reading ebooks, but presumably not so with paper books. If you were to turn the study round, and test people who were familiar with ebooks but not with paper, you might get a very different result, especially on the general satisfaction. On the rare occasions when I read a paper book these days, I find it very irritating that I can't flip pages one-handed, larger books are actually hard to hold one-handed, I have to remember to place a bookmark and be careful not to lose it, because the damn thing doesn't automatically open back up to the last page I read, etc etc. Of course paper-book people are so used to these limitations, they don't actually notice them.
Another Nokia option to consider - I have the Nokia XpressMusic 5530, while it doesn't have the SIP client, Skype runs great on it, and it's actually a great little budget touchscreen phone. No 3G or GPS (that's why it's cheap), but Google maps works with cell-tower location pretty well, and the screen is just about big enough for usable web browsing. Battery life sucks with wifi on continuously though.
Yes, I'm a long term Firefox fan, and it's still my primary browser on most machines, but I was blown away by how much faster Chrome was on my netbook, and now there's adblock for Chrome, Firefox doesn't get a look in on that machine. And that is Firefox with only 2 or 3 add-ons to enhance small-screen use, not the 20 plus add-ons I use on the desktop. Resuming from sleep, Chrome is ready as soon as the wi-fi has reconnected, whereas Firefox seems to take maybe 30-40 seconds before I can use it, and sometimes goes into off-line mode, so I have to hit the menu to put it back in on-line mode before I can do anything. So "seems faster" is not good enough, I want "is faster" before I'd go back to Firefox on the netbook.
I always wondered what the "Neural Lace" implants in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels were made of; perhaps the fabric implication of the word "lace" is about more than structure after all.
"I wonder what it would take now, to do what he did."
To design a pointy tube with wings? Especially one that was a death trap (nicknamed the "Flying Coffin"), that Lockheed had to pay massive illegal bribes to get anyone to buy? I'm guessing there are harder things to do.
When the crunch comes, and the number of available options has shrunk down to very few, then we collectively are quite good at making difficult decisions and doing what needs to be done. Look at the process of various allied countries coming together to fight the Nazis in WWII for example. Many did not want to, but eventually when the choice became a) fight the Nazis or b) let Hitler become a major world player, they came on board and threw everything they had into the effort.
The trouble with global warming is that it may not come down to such an obvious crunch, or if it does it may be too late to deal with the problem. And the solutions also aren't that clear in terms of degree. Should we go for an extra half degree temperature rise limit, at great expense, or is a 2 degree limit enough? What share of the burden should be borne by developing versus developed economies. There aren't simple, clear-cut answers to these things, so it is perfectly understandable that there's going to be a lot of wrangling.
However if a large asteroid was on the way and about to wipe our species off the face of the earth, that is pretty damn clear-cut. It's also the kind of situation where not everyone has to agree - for example NATO and Russia say could decide to act unilaterally, unlike global warming, where consensus really is needed. The countries with the greatest capability to protect themselves aren't going to sit around waiting for e.g. the UN to reach a decision if it is severely threatening their very existence, and time is of the essence. I have a lot of faith that that is exactly the kind of situation where we would be able to come together and act decisively.
'Scuse the slow reply, didn't expect any serious comments. The image captioned "Mandelbrot Crust" was the one that stood out. One would look at something with simple curved lines, like a pattern on a carpet, and it would spring into 3D, with seemingly infinite fractal detail the closer you looked, and sort of glowing in the "deep" parts, as if lit from below, with all the detail moving as if made from lots of little constantly rotating parts. "Mandelbrot Crust" sort of took on that kind of motion when I looked at it.
I should point out that the comment about that putting me of drugs for life was somewhat flippant, I did a pretty average share of experimentation at university (a good few years ago now), and I did not really enjoy psychedelics; it wasn't actually any particular experience that put me off, I just didn't like having my mind messed with like that.
Weird, I definitely saw that thing after taking acid once, in fact I floated though it for quite a while. It may look all pretty on your screen, but that shit put me off drugs for life, man.
FTA: Each road train could include up to eight separate vehicles. [...] The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train.
This sounds like a major obstacle to me. One professional, presumably paid, driver to every eight vehicles sounds expensive and pretty impractical. What are they going to do, have you queue up somewhere waiting for one of these lead drivers to come along? I think that's taking the whole "train" analogy too far, one of the reasons I like driving is that I don't have to wait for a damn train. For this kind of thing to really work, I'd have thought the ideal would be not to have a lead driver at all, but to form ad-hoc trains. I.e. vehicles interrogate each other to find out if they're going on the same route, and automatically join the "train". I'd assume that cars with this sort of technology would be speed limited, at least while leading a train, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Mr Robinson speculated that those joining a platoon or road train may one day pay for the privilege of someone else effectively driving them closer to their destination.
And a further kicker. As far as I'm concerned, these road trains would be a very diminished driving experience. I expect to pay less in return for helping the environment and reducing road congestion, not more. Give me a reduction in my road tax or something in return for participating, and I might be interested.
I find it hard to believe that these guys actually thought they would get away with this in the long term. Claiming that their psycho-acoustic simulations are anything other than copies seems incredibly unlikely to fly. They may have thought it was sufficiently legally muddy that they could get away with it for long enough to make a bunch of cash before a judge stomped on them, but I'm thinking the whole thing might have been to generate publicity for the company. If so, they've certainly succeeded, made the national news here in the UK at least.
Be strong - chuck the damn thing in the trash now. I know it's tempting. We've all been there. But, unless your nerdiness borders on psychopathy, any sense of achievement you derive from resurrecting that relic will be short lived, and soon replaced by the realisation that you just wasted a heap of time on something utterly pointless. While you might get a little pleasure from the process of getting it up and running, actually using such a pathetic piece of crap once you're done, when people are giving away machines orders of magnitude more powerful, would be utterly perverse. Don't do it.
If you RTA (yes I know, not likely), you'll see that they acknowledge this issue, their intent is to use this for robust cargo only (rocket fuel is given as an example, not e.g. satellites or humans). They also state that ablative heatshields would be necessary to survive atmospheric transit, so wouldn't be a fully reusable vehicle either. Sounds like one for the back burner, as it isn't solving the current launch capability issues.
I'm also a fastmail subscriber. Can't fault reliability and features of it, although aesthetically speaking, there is room for improvement with the web interface. The only real issue I have with fastmail is the mailbox size (600MB for my service level) - when I signed up, I was only regularly using one machine to read my email on, so it wasn't an issue to get my mail via POP3, and use my local mail storage when I wanted to search old messages. Now I have four or five devices I regularly read my email on, so the Google Mail 8GB of storage is starting to look attractive, I can have all my mail searchable from any machine. My current fastmail quote isn't nearly large enough for that, and it ain't cheap to upgrade to gmail levels of storage.
So you mean that rather than being a liar, he might just be ignorant and incompetent? It's the job of politicians to get their facts straight when formulating the laws of the land. Our politicians are always complaining that people don't trust them any more, and that young people are disillusioned with politics. Well perhaps if we could trust what they fecking said, then that wouldn't be the case. It doesn't matter one jot whether this guy flat out lied, or whether he somehow conveniently got his facts wrong, it's just yet another event to knock the credibility of politicians back into the gutter.
In the eyes of the law, and therefore the taxman, they are indeed a religion.
Only in some countries, several countries are sensible enough to refuse the scientologists recognition as an official religion. Have a look at this article, and the linked documents. As far as us Brits are concerned, note the findings of the Charity Comission in refusing charitable status to the scientologists; "Scientology is not a religion for the purposes of English charity law."
We don't pay premiums because we're stupid. We pay premiums because we're lazy.
There, fixed that for you;).
Ok, that was glib, but you do seem to have been too lazy to read the article, so perhaps you deserve it. To quote TFA, "Even including the surrounding costsâ"such as electricity, bandwidth, space rental, and IT administratorsâ(TM) salariesâ"Backblaze spends one-tenth of the price in comparison to using Amazon S3, Dell Servers, NetApp Filers, or an EMC SAN.". So that aren't ignoring the costs of IT staff administering this stuff as you imply, they're telling you the costs including the admin costs at their datacentre.
Slashdot Mirror
With ChromeOS, us First Post trolls will always win!
To be fair, there also seems to be a failure of due process when ISPs and payment processors are pressured into cutting off wikileaks, without wikileaks having been found guilty of any crime. The anonymous guys presumably want to balance things up a little. Whether they're doing it the right way is open to question, but nobody else seems to be sticking up for wikileaks.
This proposal would prevent the passengers from using their phones as well, not just the driver. So even if you accept that any use by the driver is unacceptable, this proposal is still stupid. But unbiased research doesn't support that 4x increased risk from what I've seen.
So why not call for cars to be banned? Just because some dumbasses misuse phones doesn't mean everybody should be prevented form using them, any more than the fact some drivers are terminally incompetent should mean that all cars ought to be banned. It's ridiculous. By all means increase the penalties for people caught misusing phones in a vehicle, that would make some sense.
Having an ecosystem of different file sharing software and protocols is valuable insofar as it makes it harder to prevent all file sharing. Assuming you don't want to shut down all file sharing of course. The authorities tend to focus on whatever are the protocols du jour (at the moment bittorrent and rapidshare-type file lockers), but meanwhile you have all sorts of protocols from the past like gnutella, dc++, edonkey etc still happily working away mostly under the radar. I'd guess if you're sharing stuff you'd be less likely to land an enforcement notice if you're using a more obscure protocol. Maybe you might escape notice of deep packet inspection systems and so avoid throttling by your ISP, if they have implemented that.
Just guessing, but in any case it seems sensible not to just assume that bittorrent is the apotheosis of file-sharing, and that nothing else will ever be useful.
From where I sit, digital radio is a solution looking for a problem. In the UK, the BBC spent vast amounts of license fee payer's money (i.e. my money) investing in new DAB (the digital radio standard approved over here) stations. Then when it found no one was listening to DAB, and private stations were bailing out, rather than give it up, they spent more vast quantities advertising the f@*k out of DAB to try and boost take-up. And yet still I can count the number of people I personally know who own DAB radios on the finger of ... well, one finger, actually. It's four times as expensive to run a DAB station as an FM station, the coverage is worse, receivers are expensive, and the benefits are minimal. From what I can tell, both IBOC and DRM may suffer mny of the same issues as DAB, although maybe the US market for radio is different enough that it will work out differently.
Okay, so this is a way late reply which nobody will therefore read. However I'll just point out for the record that "fuel efficiency" and "fuel economy" are not the same thing. The former relates to the percentage of energy in the fuel that is converted to motive power, while the latter is about the distance travelled per volume of fuel.
I thought there was a requirement for something to be non-obvious for it to be patentable; I really don't see anything that isn't obvious in that application. But I'm fairly clueless about US patent law, so I'm probably wrong.
Not being frivolous, but as far as I can tell, the users were new to reading ebooks, but presumably not so with paper books. If you were to turn the study round, and test people who were familiar with ebooks but not with paper, you might get a very different result, especially on the general satisfaction. On the rare occasions when I read a paper book these days, I find it very irritating that I can't flip pages one-handed, larger books are actually hard to hold one-handed, I have to remember to place a bookmark and be careful not to lose it, because the damn thing doesn't automatically open back up to the last page I read, etc etc. Of course paper-book people are so used to these limitations, they don't actually notice them.
Another Nokia option to consider - I have the Nokia XpressMusic 5530, while it doesn't have the SIP client, Skype runs great on it, and it's actually a great little budget touchscreen phone. No 3G or GPS (that's why it's cheap), but Google maps works with cell-tower location pretty well, and the screen is just about big enough for usable web browsing. Battery life sucks with wifi on continuously though.
Yes, I'm a long term Firefox fan, and it's still my primary browser on most machines, but I was blown away by how much faster Chrome was on my netbook, and now there's adblock for Chrome, Firefox doesn't get a look in on that machine. And that is Firefox with only 2 or 3 add-ons to enhance small-screen use, not the 20 plus add-ons I use on the desktop. Resuming from sleep, Chrome is ready as soon as the wi-fi has reconnected, whereas Firefox seems to take maybe 30-40 seconds before I can use it, and sometimes goes into off-line mode, so I have to hit the menu to put it back in on-line mode before I can do anything. So "seems faster" is not good enough, I want "is faster" before I'd go back to Firefox on the netbook.
I always wondered what the "Neural Lace" implants in Iain M. Banks' Culture novels were made of; perhaps the fabric implication of the word "lace" is about more than structure after all.
"I wonder what it would take now, to do what he did."
To design a pointy tube with wings? Especially one that was a death trap (nicknamed the "Flying Coffin"), that Lockheed had to pay massive illegal bribes to get anyone to buy? I'm guessing there are harder things to do.
When the crunch comes, and the number of available options has shrunk down to very few, then we collectively are quite good at making difficult decisions and doing what needs to be done. Look at the process of various allied countries coming together to fight the Nazis in WWII for example. Many did not want to, but eventually when the choice became a) fight the Nazis or b) let Hitler become a major world player, they came on board and threw everything they had into the effort.
The trouble with global warming is that it may not come down to such an obvious crunch, or if it does it may be too late to deal with the problem. And the solutions also aren't that clear in terms of degree. Should we go for an extra half degree temperature rise limit, at great expense, or is a 2 degree limit enough? What share of the burden should be borne by developing versus developed economies. There aren't simple, clear-cut answers to these things, so it is perfectly understandable that there's going to be a lot of wrangling.
However if a large asteroid was on the way and about to wipe our species off the face of the earth, that is pretty damn clear-cut. It's also the kind of situation where not everyone has to agree - for example NATO and Russia say could decide to act unilaterally, unlike global warming, where consensus really is needed. The countries with the greatest capability to protect themselves aren't going to sit around waiting for e.g. the UN to reach a decision if it is severely threatening their very existence, and time is of the essence. I have a lot of faith that that is exactly the kind of situation where we would be able to come together and act decisively.
'Scuse the slow reply, didn't expect any serious comments. The image captioned "Mandelbrot Crust" was the one that stood out. One would look at something with simple curved lines, like a pattern on a carpet, and it would spring into 3D, with seemingly infinite fractal detail the closer you looked, and sort of glowing in the "deep" parts, as if lit from below, with all the detail moving as if made from lots of little constantly rotating parts. "Mandelbrot Crust" sort of took on that kind of motion when I looked at it.
I should point out that the comment about that putting me of drugs for life was somewhat flippant, I did a pretty average share of experimentation at university (a good few years ago now), and I did not really enjoy psychedelics; it wasn't actually any particular experience that put me off, I just didn't like having my mind messed with like that.
Weird, I definitely saw that thing after taking acid once, in fact I floated though it for quite a while. It may look all pretty on your screen, but that shit put me off drugs for life, man.
FTA: Each road train could include up to eight separate vehicles. [...] The lead vehicle would be handled by a professional driver who would monitor the status of the road train.
This sounds like a major obstacle to me. One professional, presumably paid, driver to every eight vehicles sounds expensive and pretty impractical. What are they going to do, have you queue up somewhere waiting for one of these lead drivers to come along? I think that's taking the whole "train" analogy too far, one of the reasons I like driving is that I don't have to wait for a damn train. For this kind of thing to really work, I'd have thought the ideal would be not to have a lead driver at all, but to form ad-hoc trains. I.e. vehicles interrogate each other to find out if they're going on the same route, and automatically join the "train". I'd assume that cars with this sort of technology would be speed limited, at least while leading a train, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Mr Robinson speculated that those joining a platoon or road train may one day pay for the privilege of someone else effectively driving them closer to their destination.
And a further kicker. As far as I'm concerned, these road trains would be a very diminished driving experience. I expect to pay less in return for helping the environment and reducing road congestion, not more. Give me a reduction in my road tax or something in return for participating, and I might be interested.
I find it hard to believe that these guys actually thought they would get away with this in the long term. Claiming that their psycho-acoustic simulations are anything other than copies seems incredibly unlikely to fly. They may have thought it was sufficiently legally muddy that they could get away with it for long enough to make a bunch of cash before a judge stomped on them, but I'm thinking the whole thing might have been to generate publicity for the company. If so, they've certainly succeeded, made the national news here in the UK at least.
Be strong - chuck the damn thing in the trash now. I know it's tempting. We've all been there. But, unless your nerdiness borders on psychopathy, any sense of achievement you derive from resurrecting that relic will be short lived, and soon replaced by the realisation that you just wasted a heap of time on something utterly pointless. While you might get a little pleasure from the process of getting it up and running, actually using such a pathetic piece of crap once you're done, when people are giving away machines orders of magnitude more powerful, would be utterly perverse. Don't do it.
If you RTA (yes I know, not likely), you'll see that they acknowledge this issue, their intent is to use this for robust cargo only (rocket fuel is given as an example, not e.g. satellites or humans). They also state that ablative heatshields would be necessary to survive atmospheric transit, so wouldn't be a fully reusable vehicle either. Sounds like one for the back burner, as it isn't solving the current launch capability issues.
I'm also a fastmail subscriber. Can't fault reliability and features of it, although aesthetically speaking, there is room for improvement with the web interface. The only real issue I have with fastmail is the mailbox size (600MB for my service level) - when I signed up, I was only regularly using one machine to read my email on, so it wasn't an issue to get my mail via POP3, and use my local mail storage when I wanted to search old messages. Now I have four or five devices I regularly read my email on, so the Google Mail 8GB of storage is starting to look attractive, I can have all my mail searchable from any machine. My current fastmail quote isn't nearly large enough for that, and it ain't cheap to upgrade to gmail levels of storage.
Or perhaps he was simply misinformed or mistaken.
So you mean that rather than being a liar, he might just be ignorant and incompetent? It's the job of politicians to get their facts straight when formulating the laws of the land. Our politicians are always complaining that people don't trust them any more, and that young people are disillusioned with politics. Well perhaps if we could trust what they fecking said, then that wouldn't be the case. It doesn't matter one jot whether this guy flat out lied, or whether he somehow conveniently got his facts wrong, it's just yet another event to knock the credibility of politicians back into the gutter.
Maybe I spend too much time on the wrong kind of websites, but I don't even want to know what that game is about!
In the eyes of the law, and therefore the taxman, they are indeed a religion.
Only in some countries, several countries are sensible enough to refuse the scientologists recognition as an official religion. Have a look at this article, and the linked documents. As far as us Brits are concerned, note the findings of the Charity Comission in refusing charitable status to the scientologists; "Scientology is not a religion for the purposes of English charity law."
We don't pay premiums because we're stupid. We pay premiums because we're lazy.
There, fixed that for you ;).
Ok, that was glib, but you do seem to have been too lazy to read the article, so perhaps you deserve it. To quote TFA, "Even including the surrounding costsâ"such as electricity, bandwidth, space rental, and IT administratorsâ(TM) salariesâ"Backblaze spends one-tenth of the price in comparison to using Amazon S3, Dell Servers, NetApp Filers, or an EMC SAN.". So that aren't ignoring the costs of IT staff administering this stuff as you imply, they're telling you the costs including the admin costs at their datacentre.