We could grow hemp to make paper and cardboard instead of destroying rain forests, but no, that'd be too difficult.
Amazing thing is, most paper is made from trees we farm. That is right, you can grow trees just like you grow carrots and they can be farmed for paper.
We could introduce a host of new technologies into the automotive industry that would increase the mileage of automobiles by up to 50%, such as GEET's and better engines with fewer moving parts, but then what would happen to the ass hats making money off of the patents?
Well the automotive industry has. Gas mileage is good advertising and they know what sells.
We could build a bunch of nuclear reactors to fuel energy-distribution technologies that would revolutionize the world for a fraction of the cost of the Iraq War.
People ph3ar the nukes. We didn't go in Iraq for oil, otherwise we would have invaded Saudi Arabia or Kuwait instead, as they have more oil.
We could introduce Organics recycling into urban neighborhoods, cutting the amount of garbage going into dumps by over half.
Why bother. All the trash that the USA would produce in 1,000 years (and this doesn't even account for decomposition) could be contained in a 300 foot area the size of long island. We are not running out of space to put garbage, that is a myth invented by the media as a result of a garbage ship that wasn't allowed to dump garbage in one landfill. Also, when we are done with landfills, we can drain the methane out of them (produces energy) and then cover them with topsoil and use them as a park or golf course. Garbage crisis, my ass.
We could stop poisoning ourselves with floride, mercury, lead, aluminum and arsenic.
We aren't poisoning ourself. Otherwise we would be dieing in droves now wouldn't we. We have a lot of government oversight and have very clean air, clean water, and clean living conditions. Pretty much no chemicals are harmful in trace amounts which are inevitable, it is just having too much. Take DDT, it is rather harmless in reasonable quantities, the problem was people used massive amounts of it. If used in sane quantities it could help solve malaria problems (there's a real problem for you) in Africa, but people have the OMG CHEMICALS! OH NOZ! additude.
The entire pharmaceutical industry could decide to stop fucking everyone over and make the secrets of real whole health known. Simple cures for cancer, diabetics, and other diseases are well known to naturopaths.
The reason they create drugs is to make money off of them. There is no incentive to research new drugs or find new cures to diseases if they were to just give those secrets away. Why spend money on R&D just to give it away? You do not want the drug companies to stop researching new drugs because it is abundantly clear the government is not as good at it as they are considering the government only finds about 1/5 of all the drugs discovered in a year. The rest are discovered by drug companies. As for naturopathic medicine, it would be nice, if only it worked. Unfortunitly this is the real world.
The problem is money; we have a banking system which is designed to propagate a predatory cutthroat society.
Your right, we should instead redistribute all the wealth, like North Korea, we could go communist. Capitolism works best. If you ph3r big brother, you want laissez-faire.
The flip side of that is that as commodity beigeboxes, Dell and Gateway do great in the corporate world, which is a space Apple has yet to penetrate to any large degree, because the customer doesn't fit their product space.
Well, Apple is too expensive, companies take cheap PCs and run them for years and years.
So then the proper title should be "Can Apple take Dell or Gateway on the Desktop". With the release of bootcamp, Apple's competing against Dell and Gateway in the Premium consumer hardware space (which Dell/Gateway suck at anyway) so it's no wonder Apple's winning.
Well Apple will have more than Dell and Gateway. HP, Lenovo, Toshiba, Sony, and others have that market too. It is among the most competative markets in the world.
My TI-84 Plus Silver Edition has 128 KB, but it will only let you use 24 KB (as of the current OS version which is 2.41, also the TI-83 Plus Silver Edition also had 128 KB but only let you use 24 as of OS 1.19). The TI-84 has a 15MHZ (it can run at either 6 or 15) Zilog 80 CPU, 1.5 MB of Flash, and the 128 KB ram of which 24 can be used (some of the flash and ram is used by the OS). There are plenty of apps that work just fine on that. I have a total of more than 50 Games, several applications, a few programs I wrote in BASIC, Mirage (a shell), and a lot of other stuff. There is a text editor, spreadsheet, basic interprater, and several math and science tools. There is even a 3-D graphing app I installed. It can run a DOOM clone too. I am amazed at how it can do all this on such poor specs, and yet a modern laptop with hundreds of times that space may run slowly because code on it is so much bigger. Imagine if MS had just basically kept improving uppon Win2K (adding stuff like USB 2.0, firewire, Blu-Ray/HD-DVD, and such) and never upping the requirements beyond 64 MB. Hell, the once bloated Windows 95 which really didn't run all that well unless you had 16 MB of RAM and a Pentium could be used for embedded work now. I think that they are working on a just in time emulator for the Palm Pilot (PalmOS seems to only use around 4 MB) that will emulate an x86 that can run Windows 95 from an SD card. Former bloatware running on an emulator running on an embedded OS. How powerful things are.
Instead of a ban, let's create an economic pressure.
There already is, florecents are cheaper to operate as is, they are far cheaper in the long run. I would say it is easiest just to either use public TV, schools, or other means of communication to the masses that government has to inform people of that. No need to try to force it upon people.
One can only hope that my own government in the USA will someday have nothing to fear from the People as well.
Well, the founding fathers certainly knew something when they wrote the second amendment. It is probably the most important right of all of them. Most dictatorships have banned guns. If I remember right, Hitler, Musolini, the USSR, North Korea, Iran, Saddam Hussein, and Darfur had rather strict gun control for the general public. Not sure if that is true, but I think those were the most notable ones. I also think if I remember right, the whole reason Switzerland was not invaded by Germany during WWII was because Switzerland had very lax gun control and provided all citizens with rifles when they thought they would be invaded. This detered Germany.
Did Nintendo handicap themselves with this, especially as games (at least currently) can't be played directly from the SD Card slot?
Well from what I understand much of these "channels" actually are just web apps so they use very little of the Wii's flash. If it is impossible to save games to the SD slot, then perhaps they could save Wii software to the SD slot and make it runnable.
but take the context put linux and gpl on one end, and you will realize that a court could rule that since no one is placed in a financial disadvantage people can abuse the gpl.
If someone is violating the GPL, the judge could rule that there is no financial harm, but require the defendant to stop violating. That is fine with me.
Everybody has been in such a rush to get OSS adopted by the world at large that we're losing sight of what made it so great to begin with... A community effort, for fun, to hack, to be free. Not so we could be taken advantage of. This is what I have feared for years and it looks like the "movement" is getting hijacked.
Well it is silly to think that this is some magical revolution. This is software, not revolution. Software may have an idiology, but at the end of the day, it needs to be practical. If it is practical for these buisnesses, then that is good. I use Linux because it works, not because it is FOSS.
That's what GPLv3 intends to fix. If TiVo wants to use new versions of the GNU userland after the move to GPLv3, TiVo is going to need to quit with the lockout chip business model.
Or they will just continue to use the old versions or replace it with BSD code. What is it in a Tivo that requires updating? It can function as a DVR in the same way for eternety without any updates. It doesn't need security as it isnt online. It doesn't need any features other than recording TV. What does it need the new userland for?
I don't want access to proprietary software and codecs. I run Linux to use free software.
Really? I run Linux because it is practical. I have no problems with proprietary and just use linux because it works better than anything else. It's software, not a revolution.
I can totally see why Microsoft sees VMs as a threat. They give you the Windows apps you're forced to use due to Microsoft lock-in, but they let you get your work done on a good, modern, reliable OS.
Errm, MS could care less whether or not you use Windows, they only want you to buy it.
If you advocate that the government should stand back and allow business to do as they please, and the 'guiding hand' of the economy will keep it on track, people think you lean to the right.(*)
In America the most 'guiding hand' minded party is actually the 3rd party libertarians.
And what kind of a government would leave a thing such as THE WORLD WIDE WEB in the hands of business'?
Well, here's an interesting little thought:
I am thinking of two nations, one has web access regulated by the government, the other has it entirely managed by the free economy. Which would you prefer and can you guess which nations I am thinking of?
Give up? Well the regulated internet country I was thinking of was China. China doesn't exaclly have net neutrality, as China's government (rather than companies) tends to decide to "protect" it's citizens from the internet. As for the free market nation it was Hong Kong I was thinking of. Hong Kong puts essentially no restrictions on buisnesses and tends to let them do anything they want. They have a far more "neutral internet" than China.
If you don't see this as a reasonable threat to our internet in the states (or at least that is where I live so that is what my example will be), then look at radio. Radio (other than the FCC making sure that everyone doesnt try to use the same frequency) is essentially driven by the free market. Recently the Dems proposed a bill to mandate talk radio provide "equal" discussions. (and somehow I presume the government funded, ultra-liberal National Public Radio would be immune to this). Talk radio is the one area that conservatives have dominance over in the states. TV news is largly liberal as of the 5 major stations 4 (MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and CNBC)are liberal, while only one (Fox) is conservative. Most newspapers are liberal here. It sounds like the liberals are wanting to stomp out the one remaining source of conservative speech. Does that remind you of how China stomps out "antirevolutionary ideas". It sounds like it is better to trust free markets than to trust governments. At least buisnesses cannot force you to do anything as if you dislike their practices you can always buy from someone else.
But it sure the hell does mean they're financially motivated.
And so are the reports that say global warming is a problem. Those scientist know damn well if they that there is a problem, they will be given money to investigate and look for answers, if they say there is no problem, they wont get money to investigate a nonissue. Both are about as nontrustworthy in my opinion.
Maybe someone who actually has firsthand knowledge of what is really needed as opposed to someone who probably never had to go hungry a day in her life.
Well, perhaps she does have a tad bit more knowledge that you. See, OLPC isn't really aimed at selling to the starving nations, instead it is more or less aimed at nations that are capable of feeding themselves, but not capable of buying books and the like for their schools. Not everyone in Africa is startving or dieing of AIDS you know, those are just the ones you hear about. In fact, I believe there are a few American school districts (particularly poor districts that cannot afford computers to teach. I know a few districts in America decided to buy standard laptops instead of books, and I wouldn't be suprised to see well off school districts desire to purchase OLPC laptops too, though it is debatable whether an e-book can replace a textbook.
People think OLPC is taking atvantage of starving people, but it really is aimed at those that have the basics but not anything else.
That said, my money's on virtualization. We'll probably all be running multiple OS's simultaneously before Windows loses 5% marketshare.
Virtualization, Multi-booting, and live CDs are probably the best ways to show someone linux. These all let them run Linux on a PC without messing with stuff. Other stuff that works well include putting linux on devices (such as an Xbox or PS3) or an old PC. A lot of people have 5-10 year old PCs (or Macs) lying around. Mix in Linux with a few simple upgrades (such as an ethernet card, more RAM, or a bigger disk or something else an old PC may need) and you have a PC that for less than $30 is working fine again and can type word documents or check e-mail. The only thing you really should avoid is trying to persuade users to directly switch to linux on their main desktop. Linux could easily bring a retired old Windows 98 or 95 box back to life.
It also is a good idea to show them how to use popular Linux apps such as Gaim, Gimp, Open Office, FIrefox, Thunderbird, Abiword, VLC, and Gnumeric which all have Windows ports. This reduces their reliance on stuff like Office, MSN Messenger, Photoshop, Outlook, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and the like or other software that does not have Linux ports.
If a friend does decide to switch convince them to multiboot. Use a distro such as Ubuntu, Xandros, or Linspire that is easy to use. Make sure you set up problem hardware for them. Set up their Nvidia or ATI graphics cards for them. Set up their WiFi cards with drivers or NDIS Wrapper. If they use dial up, set up their modem and dial up account. Set up their e-mail software. Install MP3 codecs, Real Player, Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, Quick Time Codecs, Windows Media Codecs, libdvdcss, MPEG support, and a noncrippled Xine and MPlayer. Don't let idiology get in the way of what is practical, as it is indeed just software not a revolution. Make sure things work. Finally set up anything your friend might need that works on Wine.
Since the North Pole is not land, it is just floating ice and since unlike most materials, water is actually bigger as a solid than as a liquid (hence freezing waterbottles causes them to burst), it is hard to imagine the oceans rising. Even when you count the Greenland glacier (which very well might turn into lakes rather than all dump in the ocean though some will) and the South Pole (same situation as with Greenland), it is hard to see mass flooding. Heck if the North pole stays melted then perhaps it will help with trade as the US, Canada, and Mexico will have a quick trade route to Russia and parts of Asia through where the Artic Ice used to be in the way.
But then this does raise one issue, where will we tell children where Santa lives?
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No, but one chimp used a stick to scratch his hind end, it was later used as a weapon, a weapon of ass destruction.
Well, here's an interesting little thought:
I am thinking of two nations, one has web access regulated by the government, the other has it entirely managed by the free economy. Which would you prefer and can you guess which nations I am thinking of?
Give up? Well the regulated internet country I was thinking of was China. China doesn't exaclly have net neutrality, as China's government (rather than companies) tends to decide to "protect" it's citizens from the internet. As for the free market nation it was Hong Kong I was thinking of. Hong Kong puts essentially no restrictions on buisnesses and tends to let them do anything they want. They have a far more "neutral internet" than China.
If you don't see this as a reasonable threat to our internet in the states (or at least that is where I live so that is what my example will be), then look at radio. Radio (other than the FCC making sure that everyone doesnt try to use the same frequency) is essentially driven by the free market. Recently the Dems proposed a bill to mandate talk radio provide "equal" discussions. (and somehow I presume the government funded, ultra-liberal National Public Radio would be immune to this). Talk radio is the one area that conservatives have dominance over in the states. TV news is largly liberal as of the 5 major stations 4 (MSNBC, CNN, CBS, and CNBC)are liberal, while only one (Fox) is conservative. Most newspapers are liberal here. It sounds like the liberals are wanting to stomp out the one remaining source of conservative speech. Does that remind you of how China stomps out "antirevolutionary ideas". It sounds like it is better to trust free markets than to trust governments. At least buisnesses cannot force you to do anything as if you dislike their practices you can always buy from someone else.
People think OLPC is taking atvantage of starving people, but it really is aimed at those that have the basics but not anything else.
It also is a good idea to show them how to use popular Linux apps such as Gaim, Gimp, Open Office, FIrefox, Thunderbird, Abiword, VLC, and Gnumeric which all have Windows ports. This reduces their reliance on stuff like Office, MSN Messenger, Photoshop, Outlook, Windows Media Player, Quicktime, and the like or other software that does not have Linux ports.
If a friend does decide to switch convince them to multiboot. Use a distro such as Ubuntu, Xandros, or Linspire that is easy to use. Make sure you set up problem hardware for them. Set up their Nvidia or ATI graphics cards for them. Set up their WiFi cards with drivers or NDIS Wrapper. If they use dial up, set up their modem and dial up account. Set up their e-mail software. Install MP3 codecs, Real Player, Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, Quick Time Codecs, Windows Media Codecs, libdvdcss, MPEG support, and a noncrippled Xine and MPlayer. Don't let idiology get in the way of what is practical, as it is indeed just software not a revolution. Make sure things work. Finally set up anything your friend might need that works on Wine.
This is slashdot, all things are only allowed to be blamed on a combination of Microsoft and President Bush!
Since the North Pole is not land, it is just floating ice and since unlike most materials, water is actually bigger as a solid than as a liquid (hence freezing waterbottles causes them to burst), it is hard to imagine the oceans rising. Even when you count the Greenland glacier (which very well might turn into lakes rather than all dump in the ocean though some will) and the South Pole (same situation as with Greenland), it is hard to see mass flooding. Heck if the North pole stays melted then perhaps it will help with trade as the US, Canada, and Mexico will have a quick trade route to Russia and parts of Asia through where the Artic Ice used to be in the way.
But then this does raise one issue, where will we tell children where Santa lives?