Yes, I feel so locked in, what with my choices of Ubuntu, or Ubuntu Gnome, or Kubuntu, or Lubuntu, or Xubuntu, or any of the many derivatives of Ubuntu that's out there. And it's all just an "sudo apt-get install" away from appearing on my machine.
Unfortunately, you lose security support when you do this.
The concept that "Free software" (as in copyleft) is more free than more permissive licenses (BSD, MIT, etc. just to name two) is contradictory from step 1.
The FSF considers permissive license to be free software. They do not consider copyleft licenses to be "more free" than permissive licenses. Please stop spreading false propaganda.
And let's not hyperbolically describe this as "holding the users hostage," okay? Users are free to leave the course whenever they want
Not if the forced study participation occurs halfway through the course when users have already invested significant ressources. As long as the annoyance being asked for is less than than the total amount of work invested, people will stay in whether they like it or not, making this approach highly unethical (unless it's clearly communicated before peple enroll).
Is there anything that they won't use the 'think of the children' line on?
Sure, when dealing with pedophiles in the intelligence services.
99.9% of what intelligence agencies do doesn't directly affect "risks to human life". It's spying to get basic information that allows you to know when to launch an operation that actually does influence those risks. You don't find out that some Arab Sheik is a threat to the US unless you're spying on Arab Sheiks. Since Arab Sheiks are hardly the only threat (the Taliban, for example, aren't Arab), the US has to be able to spy on anyone if it thinks something fishy's going on.
But that's not what is happening right now. The US are spying on everyone, no matter whether there is something fishy going on, there might be something fishy going on, or there is nothing fishy going on. Do you seriously believe that there is any realistic chance that any of the NATO allies is going to launch war or state-supported terrorist attacks against the US in the forseeable future? Do you seriously believe that everyone using Google or Facebook is up to something fishy?
I see you put the word "virtual" in parenthesis, perhaps hoping we wouldn't notice it, or if we did, think it really isn't relevant.
From a legal point of view, it is mostly irrelevant and this is not limited to the US or even common law jurisdictions. Factual impossibility is not a valid defense when charged with the attempt of a crime.
This is actually why the Snowden as traitor thing will simply never go away. No matter what. He could bring George Washington back to life to vouch for him, and nobody who serves the US Government (especially the military) would believe that shit. Some previous leaks advanced the Constitution by stopping mass surveillance. This leak is an attack on the entire practice of spying, and since combat troops find spy-data really useful in their jobs (particularly the bits of their jobs that involve not being killed), Sbnowden will never be able to live this down.
Would you care to explain this point? As far as I can tell, neither Snowden nor the journalists he has cooperated with have stated anywhere that they want to abolish intelligence practices completely. Nor have they done anything that endangered ongoing operations with imminant risk for human life.
Science and AAAS (of which I'm presently ashamed to be a member) should be blasted for publishing this tripe. It needs to be retracted, immediately. If they want to have the slightest shred of credibility here, they should at least conduct scientifically rigorous stings.
I also doubt that they adhered to their own guidelines for Human research studies:
Informed consent must be obtained for studies on humans after the nature and possible consequences of the studies were explained. All research on humans must have IRB approval.
... the story only shows that German media outlets are not familiar with US entry regulations. He says that he was denied a visa last year, which automatically disqualifies him from the visa waiver program. This is just a garden-variety ESTA issue, and most likely has nothing to do with his stance of the NSA surveillance.
Any reasonably smart Nokia employee would also have seen the writing on the wall and left the sinking ship.
Given the fact that Nokia's revenue used to be more than 10% of Finland's GDP, it might not have been so easy for a large number of Nokia's engineers to move to different jobs at about the same time
Why go with Maemo when they could have just used Android itself? It would have been much faster to market.
Err, Nokia already had Maemo/Meego devices on the shelves. The decision to withhold their flagship device, the N9, from all major markets came directly from Elop.
Also, if Maemo ran Android apps, then nobody would have developed natively for Maemo. They would have developed for Android and their apps would have been available to a much larger market.
Ah, the good old OS/2 argument. I'm not convinced that it holds here. Technically speaking, Android is inferior to Meego as the latter provides a full-blown POSIX environment, for which many software packages and libraries are already available. Take LibreOffice, for instance. No usable Android port in sight, but packages for Maemo/Meego have been available for a long time. And it would have been a *huge* selling point for Nokia's devices if the had come with a full-blown office suite.
Sure, you can put God at the big bang, but as a great man once said: I have no need for that hypothesis.
Quoting an early 19th century scientist has about the same merits as quoting from a few thousand years old book, given the scientific revolutions that took place within the last 200 years.
The first cause argument is flawed in the sense that you explain something, by invoking something else (God) that has no first cause and apparently is exempt from causality. So, for all intents and purposes, you can just scratch that "extra" assumption. Ergo: whatever caused the big bang, was there already (and given that time even didn't exist, talking about "before" is truly a stretch already).
Well, if something was already there, where did this something come from?
Interestingly, I found the zero-energy universe to be an superbly elegant explanation: Lawrence Krauss: A Universe From Nothing [youtube.com].
From the viewpoint of science, his multiverse stuff is indistinguishable from intelligent design.
There have been reports on 58 different remote code execution vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 10 in 2013 alone. I would hardly call that "taped together quite well".
I'm neither a physicist nor a computer scientist, but if you can "hone [your] skills" using the simulator, why isn't it sufficient to have a fast enough simulation of a quantum system using a classical computer, and solve your problems on the simulator?
The reason is scalability. Even with the best currently existing methods, the computational complexity of simulating quantum systems on classical computers grows exponentially with the number of qubits. Quantum computers, being quantum systems themselves, do not have this exponential scaling. With just two qubits, the exponential penalty for classical simulation is rather small (and the classical simulation will be much faster), so the only reason why you would want to build an actual experiment is to make proof-of-principle tests of the technology. With a few tens of qubits, the exponential growth becomes relevant, and classical simulation becomes impractical. Right now, the world record for the full simulation of quantum systems on classical computers is 42 qubits, and the world record for quantum computing stands at 14 qubits. So, while the real experiments still have some way to go before they catch up with what we can do with classical computers, it's not crazy to think that this will happen within the next decade.
"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc
