Comment Re:Ken Ham issues statement (Score 1) 74
How do you think these dating methods came to be devised and then trusted by the scientific community?
Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You 361
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup write that everyone assumes that cable companies have all the market power, and so of course a bigger cable company means disaster. But content owners may be the real heavyweights here: It was Netflix that withheld high-quality streaming from Time Warner Cable customers last year, not vice versa and it was ESPN that first proposed to subsidize its mobile viewers' data usage last year. 'We need to move away from the fear-mongering and exaggerations about threats to the Internet as well as simplistic assumptions about how Internet traffic moves. The real problems online are far more complex and less scary. And it's not about net neutrality, but about net capacity.' The debate is really about who pays for — and who profits from — the increasingly elaborate infrastructure required to make the Internet do something it was never designed to do in the first place: stream high-speed video. 'While many were quick to assume that broadband providers were throttling Netflix traffic, the explanation could be far simpler: The company simply lacked the capacity to handle the "Super HD" video quality it began offering last year.' A two-sided market means broadband providers would have an incentive to help because they would receive revenue from two major sources: content providers (through sponsorship or ads), and consumers (through subscription fees). 'Unfortunately, this kind of market innovation is viewed as controversial or even harmful to consumers by some policy and Internet advocates. But these concerns are premature, unfounded, and arise mostly from status quo bias: Carriers and providers haven't priced like this before, so of course change will create some kind of harm,' conclude Szoka and Skorup. 'Bottom line: The FCC should stop trying to ban prioritization outright and focus only on actual abuses of market power.'"
Comment Maybe they could delay them more? (Score 1) 204
Say, forever? MATE with Xorg is much more suitable than either Gnome or Wayland.
Comment Re:I'm sorry I'm an idiot (Score 1) 204
It is in fact an intended replacement for X11. It'd be hard to talk about the differences in much detail if you're not particularly technical.
Comment All the cyberlibertarian rage... wrong questions.. (Score 3, Insightful) 374
So, what does compliance involve? That's the first question we should be asking.
If your local libertarian hot dog stand guy rages at you about maybe being shut down because the health department is on his back, instead of saying "fuck guvment", maybe you should figure out if it's something as simple as them having hygiene standards for how he cooks, and some small fee for a license. I mean, maybe there is something unreasonable or crazy, and there are some industries that corrupt government and do rent-seeking in order to limit competition, but these details matter.
Kim Dotcom Just Launched His New Music Service With His Own Album 69
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Dotcom today released his debut album Good Times, which consists of 17 pretty terrible EDM tracks produced by the Mega mogul himself. According to a press release, 'The music celebrates Kim's ever-present philosophy of inspiring people to feel good, have fun and live life to the fullest. Kim was inspired by the Trance and Dance tracks he listened to during his high-speed driving times on the German Autobahn.' It's anything but subtle, as you might guess from an album advertised on the back of a 100-strong fleet of buses. In an interview with Wired at the end of the year Dotcom admitted he sounded 'like crap, obviously,' but added, 'Fortunately there's a thing called Auto-Tune so they make it sound OK.'"
Senator Dianne Feinstein: NSA Metadata Program Here To Stay 510
cold fjord writes "The Hill reports, 'Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) predicted Sunday that lawmakers who favored shutting down the bulk collection of telephone metadata would not be successful in their efforts as Congress weighs potential reforms to the nation's controversial intelligence programs. "I don't believe so," Feinstein said during an appearance on NBC's Meet the Press (video). "The president has very clearly said that he wants to keep the capability So I think we would agree with him. I know a dominant majority of the — everybody, virtually, except two or three, on the Senate Intelligence Committee would agree with that." ... "A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan. New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights."'"
Comment Re:So this is the thing killing portability (Score 1) 341
Then we should turn away from GNOME3. Because they're taking compatibility lightly. Because they're wrongheaded. We should make sure that no distros ship GNOME3 or systemd as default. Sure, they're not serfs, they're just people promoting an inferiour solution that damages Unix.
Comment So this is the thing killing portability (Score 3, Insightful) 341
The corruption of GNOME and other opensource projects by tying it specifically to Linux comes with this; it represents giving up on being cross-platform, giving up on the BSDs and other Unices, and giving up on openness. No thanks.
Comment Good start, now.... (Score 3, Insightful) 90
Good start, now go do some formal study and get a degree. There's too great a risk, with self-taught people, for them to only expose themselves to the ideas that are appealing to them. Academic fields recognise this; you're not going to be ready to contribute to the cutting edge unless you put your ideas in the field up for reshaping by people who know more than you do, and that's a good thing.
Comment Re:It's only a proposed contract... (Score 2) 90
If we think we might object to provisions we wouldn't like in the final contract, we'd better start objecting now. The end effect of such protests can only be positive for us, particularly because we often lack a direct input into terms and in the end are left with a thumbs-up-or-down; making a fuss early gives us some of the only kind of leverage we really can get.
Comment Emissions (Score 1) 329
If they contribute the least to global emissions now, their development should take the form where they remain contributing little to global emissions. Hopefully more advanced nations will be able to reduce their dependency on coal in the meantime.
Comment Ubuntu is suffering the same problems as GNOME (Score 2) 631
In the last few years, Ubuntu and GNOME stepped beyond the useful compromise Unix made between suitability for technical people and suitability for average people, and leaned towards the latter with generally no good reason. Sure, Ubuntu was pushing for an alternative to the X Window System, but so were the Wayland folk, supported by GNOME. The GNOME folk have been toying with the idea of making systemd a requirement for GNOME, making GNOME infeasible on other platforms.... because apparently your window manager should have a dependency on your init scripts? GNOME has removed all the options that make it usable in GNOME3, while at the same time embracing unreasonable defaults and suggesting the community write extensions to make it usable again? And so on.
I suppose if we want everyone eventually running KDE on FreeBSD, we're well on our way there.
Comment Re:"Almost" is an interesting word (Score 1) 214
Imperfect doesn't mean worthless. If someone were to create a treatment that would cure almost all the people suffering from deafness, that'd be pretty great. Doesn't mean we should stop caring about the rest, of course.
Comment Disallow apps that can't be scripted? (Score 2) 207
Sorry to be the pedant, but that "disallow apps that can't be scripted" line seems kneejerk and fairly stupid. Scriptability is not a yes/no thing, it's a measure for how good an API is. If you just want apps that are minimally scripted, I'm sure you could make a platform where every app accepts a hello() message, and does a popup with that, but that doesn't get you close to being able to do neat things.
I suspect what we'd really like is more choice in programming languages on the phone and a cleaner split between UI and API.
I wonder how many people would write apps for such a device for free. I might, and the opensource community might too, but is that enough?
