Actually

This law is not a bad idea. The misuse of cookies for invading privacy would be clearly stopped by this law, limiting their use to legitimate purposes - such as keeping track of the items one has ordered on a web site, as you give as an example.

However, a reasonable exception ought to be made for those cookies which do not threaten privacy, for example, because they only persist during a single session at a web site.

Phase Change

It's true that water could remove a lot of heat from a chip if the heat from the chip were enough to boil it to steam. But that's because of the latent heat from the phase change, and requires that the chip run hot enough to boil water. One wants the chip to run cooler than that to perform well.

Ice, being a solid, doesn't do convection well, so it, while also capable of carrying a lot of heat away by melting, is not really a good alternative.

I would think that the best way to maintain a chip at a specific, desired temperature is to use copious amounts of a working fluid just slightly below that temperature. So a system which brings large amounts of rapidly flowing chilled water very close to the chip, and then cooling the water which the chip had warmed elsewhere would seem to be best.

Why Blame Facebook

Maybe Facebook ought to have a paragraph like this in their Terms of Service:

This free service exists for the purpose of making money, so we reserve the right to deny service to anyone who makes us look bad, whether by promoting controversy or for any other reason.

That would pretty much eliminate the question of whether promoters of racial hatred have any freedom of speech right to hide behind. If they buy their own servers, then the legality of their actions would be the question.

PeopleSoft

The Oracle takeover of PeopleSoft doesn't inspire confdence. But whatever your attitude towards Oracle and Larry Ellison might be, all platforms other than x86 - PowerPC, SPARC, Intel's own Itanium - face a very difficult future in competition with the enormous economies of scale that the x86 is blessed with.

At the very low end, where it is hard for a full-fledged x86 processor to compete, although the Atom is now making inroads, things are different, at least for the moment.

I wish there were other choices besides x86, but for a choice to exist, those behind it will have to be very realistic.

Why Japan?

Why do American movies always happen in America? Why do the Daleks always attack London if they come to Earth? Why do Ghidra and Mothra and Rodan and Godzilla always attack Tokyo?

Obviously, because whoever makes a movie and TV show in a particular country is most concerned about it being interesting to the people who live there, with foreign sales being gravy if they're lucky and the movie does well at home in the first place. It would be nice if a higher level of realism could be reached, but this would require a medium with less pressing financial concerns... say, comic books instead of movies.

The Point?

Yes, if you're not competent, you won't get anywhere. So there's no point for someone incompetent to pretend he is something he isn't. But if the number of spaces in an academic program is limited, so that not everyone who is competent is admitted, but only the best, then, of course there will be cheating, and cheaters will gain from it.

The solution is to build more universities, so that everyone can get a university education who is competent enough to make use of one; and then reform our economy, so that the types of jobs available match more closely with the kinds of jobs people want - as long as they actually could do them competently.

Right now, we have fierce competition for jobs because some jobs are in short supply, so instead of going to every competent applicant, they go only to the very best.

Of course you can't have an army with more generals than privates, so the solution is to have the UK economy grow to many times its present size, and allowing immigration.

Basic physics

The surface of the Sun is at a temperature of 6,000 degrees. So it is glowing hot. Earth is much cooler. So the Sun radiates heat into space as light and short-wave infrared radiation, and Earth radiates heat into space as much longer-wave infrared radiation. Carbon dioxide absorbs, and is warmed by, the latter to a much greater extent than the former. The proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is much higher than it used to be.

That should be enough to tell us that the world will get warmer and warmer, until it reaches what would be an equilibrium temperature under the new conditions. That it may not yet have reached temperatures that are unprecedented since 1850 or 1200 is not the point. The proportion of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is still rising due to present energy practises.

It isn't an extremist Green position at all to say that the only safe choice is to get carbon dioxide levels down to their natural value, prior to any appreciable, noticeable, or detectable effect due to human activity. That is the circumstance under which we could rely on the Earth to behave normally, according to nature.

If, someday, the threat of an ice age does come along, it will be a good thing then if we haven't used up the fossil fuels, since then global warming would be useful. Right now, for all we know, global warming might upset the Gulf Stream, and trigger an ice age.

Incentives?

It is expected that schools will do a good job teaching all the normal subjects, and at the end of the year, students will be tested on every subject they have taken, in order to determine if they will be admitted to the next grade. "Teaching to the test" is only a problem if, for some reason, the schools are unable to teach everything they should be teaching.

In any case, how can a teachers union boycott tests? If a teacher refuses to do his or her job, union or no union, that teacher would be expected to be sacked. If enough teachers belonging to the union are no longer employed, and new ones are hired, then presumably a new union would get certified. A voluntary association of teachers for the purpose of negotiating wages and working conditions is just that; it doesn't run the schools - the government and the school boards does that.

More Science, Less Politics is Good

Science, not politics, will tell us what is most likely to happen at any given level of continued carbon emissions. Yes, deciding how much it is worth to us to avoid global warming is a political decision. But the danger that, because the costs of doing something to avoid global warming are unpleasant, we will refuse to hear the evidence is something that is very real - as we all should know from experience.

In my opinion, we need to do more to short-circuit the political debate, not less. Instead of people having to make an unpleasant choice between becoming much poorer here, or causing flooding and starvation in the Third World, the government should be announcing a jobs stimulus program of building nuclear power plants right and left so as to cause the shutdown of all the forms of energy production that release carbon.

This way, everyone wins, except the fringe environmentalists who don't like nice, clean, safe nuclear power. Obviously, that lot just wants to weaken our industrial base so that the Russians or somebody can march in and take over. So the right kinds of politics can solve everyone's problems.

Wrong Q

Now pay attention? It actually took me a few seconds to realize that, since this was a British site, the reference was to one Mr. Bond.... as opposed to Captain Jean-Luc Picard... du vaisseau spatiale Enterprise.

Spell Checker

Someone already pointed out that it's probably a typo for destination that a spell checker turned into destruction. It isn't often that such results are obtained, but that is a security risk with spell checkers.

Externalities

Why do we allow factories to have smokestacks? Because industrialized countries, in addition to allowing rich men to make money, can manufacture tanks and airplanes. Nuclear power can produce as much energy as we want, while most renewable options take up so much land for the energy they give, a renewable future also means one where we use much less energy, and therefore have to do without heavy industry. This isn't an option in the dangerous world we live in.

More Prior Art

Even in IE 7 running on XP, I noticed in Internet Options that I had "Play sounds in webpages" unchecked. Of course, that isn't quite the same as a volume control, and Vista's idea of managing applications individually is a very good one.

Just one problem

Since the poor vastly outnumber the rich, if they were to stop taxing the poor, they would have to increase taxes on the rich to such an extent, they would all flee the country and take their capital with them.

I admit that there's also the middle class to tax. Raise the basic personal exemption to where you're proposing, though, to tax the middle class about the same as they are now, the marginal tax rate would have to go up quite high; and I assume it's not supposed to go down again when it reaches the rich.

Difficult

It seems to me that if IBM wants to be able to spend the money to design advanced microprocessor chips that are at the leading edge of technology, then they need to be able to sell a lot of those chips after they design them.

To me, that means they should be joining ranks with AMD and VIA, selling processor power in the form people most want to buy, x86 compatible chips. And then cut expenses for their other product lines by making what is essentially the same chip available in x86, PowerPC, and z/Architecture flavors, so that only instruction decoding needs to be designed again for each one.

And, of course, the only reasonable position to be in with respect to a new Intel product like Nehalem is to have released something that knocks the socks off it before it's released. If you aren't serious about playing the game, what are you doing here?

Another note

Not only was a special tool required to open the manhole covers, but one news story I read about this noted that there was a labor dispute brewing at the time this happened. This would supply an obvious motive for someone with access to the appropriate tool.

Distinctions

I think your original article performed a useful service. While I think it's entirely reasonable to want to cut down on foreign immigration to Europe, particularly during difficult economic times, and particularly when security questions are raised by some of the sources of immigration, that is quite different from supporting any kind of discrimination against European citizens of whatever origin. If those behind Pirate Bay see nothing wrong with having a collaborator who has crossed that line (if indeed he has) that's an issue.

Mistake

Perhaps the problem was that they had forgotten that Serenity was also the name of the movie version of the popular TV series Firefly. And the theme of that show could suggest that it is a disguised Western set in the post-Civil War period, creating political controversy.

Another note

If I remember correctly, what costs $120 is support for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, not a license to install and use the software on your computer. Also, while SLED 10, at least, offered KDE as an option during install, for whatever reason, despite there being more KDE apps than GNOME ones, I have read somewhere that GNOME is more popular - with other commercial distros like Red Hat as well - in commercial environments, for whatever reason.

If Agfa/Monotype is making some freeware replacement for True Type available in Linux, the fact that it isn't under a GNU-type license doesn't dismay me; hinted vector fonts are an important feature lacking in Linux - and the feature that made Windows 3.1 usable where Windows 3.0 wasn't.

Of course, we have every reason to mistrust Microsoft's intentions, but the original news about what Microsoft was offering to Linux distro makers - a license to use disputed technology, in return for including actually working interoperability with certain parts of Windows - seemed generous enough when I read of it. Understandably, they don't want their de facto standards getting fragmented.

Poll Results

Ah, yes. If I believe that it is justified for a man to use force against his wife because he has discovered she is heading out to blow herself up on the London Underground, taking dozens of passengers with her, this clearly means I am tolerant of wife-beating. This sort of tactic needs to be recognized for what it is, and your article does a service in that regard.

At Least It Wasn't Easy

Apparently heavy manhole covers do not provide enough protection for such critical infrastructure.

And cables were cut in four different locations, which could mean that the network did contain a degree of redundancy.

While Internet service is mostly used for casual purposes, telephone and emergency communications need to be better protected, and it should be possible to achieve this at relatively modest expense given the lower-bandwidth nature of the links. I trust the relevant authorities will treat this as a wake-up call, and act swiftly to ensure it cannot happen again.

Because next time, it could really be terrorists.

I'm not surprised

If one looks at newsreaders - what we call anchorpersons on this side of the Atlantic - one will find the same thing. Men are not judged by their looks nearly as much as women are. An older man, or one with a bit of extra weight, might simply be thought of as mature and wise, but when women put on weight, or show their age, the impression others - to some extent, even women as well as men - have is exclusively negative.

A study that confirms the obvious might be a waste of time, but I wouldn't suspect it of finding the wrong answer.

Efficiency in Solar Power

The only time the efficiency of photo-voltaics matters... is if you're trying to generate an awful lot of energy with them, and therefore they're competing with land you could use for growing food.

This may not have been the case in the past, but if one intends in the future to make an appreciable dent in the carbon footprint with solar power, it will matter.

Discovering the Obvious

Maths courses are demanding, and there are people out there who would have trouble getting a passing grade in them. Maybe we could teach mathematics in a way that explained things more clearly to help improve this situation.

But that people who have trouble with math avoid subjects that require it is about as much a surprise as the fact that people who have trouble learning to play a musical instrument avoid that type of career, or those who aren't athletic don't pursue a career as a football player.

Or is the discovery supposed to be that math is "scary" out of all proportion to how hard it really is? If that's what they think they've discovered, apparently competence in maths is not enough to guarantee your research results will always be valid.

Pity

It's a pity Sun is short of money; they could have bought Silicon Graphics.

I think that investors are going to be aware that Sun's current plight is not due to horribly incompetent management, but instead to the combination of facing stiff competition... and the small matter of the stock market crash.

Except for Intel, Microsoft, and possibly IBM, nobody else in the IT business looks like a terribly safe investment either, though, so investors taking the mitigating circumstances into account may not do Sun any good.

Why hasn't this been rendered moot?

Surely if the British electorate made it clear to both the Conservatives and the Labor party that no party that did not include in its electoral platform a promise to abolish television license fees (and thus require the BBC to support itself largely through television commercials, just like private TV broadcasters, but perhaps with some small additional measure of government funding derived from general revenues reflecting the additional services the BBC provides) would stand a chance of being elected... that would solve the problem.

Of course, there are other pressing political issues of the day which, in a two-party system (as opposed to one where the electorate could choose from nearly any combination of policies) make it difficult for the electorate to address forcefully things viewed merely as petty annoyances.

Regrettable

Since many Americans do not trust their court system, feeling that it is capable of turning Osama bin Laden loose to strike again if the arresting officer failed to read him his rights in Arabic, I am not shocked that the Bush Administration felt that something like Guantanamo was the only responsible option available.

What should be done, of course, is to sit down and amend the Constitution so that the rights of the accused are protected - even in cases of terrorism - but they're protected with a dash of common sense, so that the rights of victims of crime are not thrown overboard. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen, though.

A disaster

This is indeed silly. It may be that a 320 x 240 webcam would provide inadequate resolution for the purpose at hand, but clearly a small difference like that should not be an issue. The law should simply be amended as necessary to avoid waste of taxpayer pounds.

Elements

Yes, one would indeed think that if a national government were spying on peoples' computers, they would use techniques much more sophisticated than those used by hackers. One would expect, for example, a spy to slip a hardware bug into the Dalai Lama's keyboard - or his router.

However, it does not seem too strange to me that among all the infections of computers caused by run-of-the-mill malware, a government might be foolish enough to try using the large pool of infected machines as a tool to place another infection in specifically targeted machines. If China is indeed using this technique, as the report would seem to indicate, it is foolish because, as the report shows, it is all too easy to get caught.

Technology

The technology isn't the problem. After all, using "just-in-time" compilation technology, Intel was able to develop a software solution for executing x86 code on an Itanium that was faster than the hardware ability to execute x86 code that the chips included. And there's the similar approach Apple took to executing PowerPC code on Intel Macs. So relatively efficient software simulation is now well-established enough that we don't need to doubt that this is possible.

Oh, dear...

I am not a number, I am Henri Poincaré!

Threats, unlike obscenity

Obscenity law raises many concerns about individual freedom. But making threats of violence, on the other hand, is not something that is viewed as a basic right, so it's unfortunate that apparently only this avenue has been chosen for legal action.

Jurisdiction

Since this advertisement is not for the purpose of selling a commercial product, or soliciting donations, but is to encourage a healthier lifestyle, for an advertising council to be able to regulate it seems to be an intrusion into freedom of speech.

Next they'll ban advertisements for books written by people who claim to have been taken aboard flying saucers.

Unfortunately

Since Apple did not make an effort to make the original Macintosh at all affordable, back when the Amiga and the Atari ST were competing with it, it's not surprising that people ended up flocking to PC clones instead, and saw Microsoft, with Windows 3.1, as the heroic champion of the ordinary person.

Microsoft's image has taken a beating since then, but Apple isn't making much of an effort to pick up the slack. Otherwise, it would be possible to buy a Mac Mini with a Core 2 Quad processor in it, with a modest price difference not much above the price difference of the processors.

It's a pity, really; the Mac has a visibility and an availability of third-party software that, while it's behind that of Windows, is still far ahead of that of Linux. They could win, if they wanted to play. Instead, Microsoft is being given the time to fix the slowness of Vista with Windows 7, another missed opportunity for Apple.

Who they should have bought

Back when Apple was still using PowerPC chips... they should have bought the Macintosh. That is, of course, on the assumption they could and would keep it alive, but perhaps Steve Jobs, without IBM's resources, is actually better suited to that.

Surprising

I am surprised that as many as 80 workers would expose themselves to prosecution for serious crimes. I realize that French political culture may possibly be sufficiently different from that elsewhere that there may not be outraged calls from one end of France to the other to lock the lot up and throw away the key, but, how can France be that different when Sarkozy was able to get elected?

We Already Know the Way

Abundant and clean energy, but not necessarily cheap, can be provided by nuclear power, so that we can continue to survive at a high technical level as would be required to be able to afford to pay for the research needed for either solar power satellites or controlled thermonuclear fusion (or, preferably, both).

But this wouldn't "break the back of the energy monopolies" the way warm and fuzzy technologies like windmills and geothermal and tidal power would.

We're just lucky that Thorium 232 can be turned into Uranium 233, and Uranium 238 can be turned into Plutonium 239, as easily by neutrons from Uranium 233 and Plutonium 239 fission as by neutrons from Uranium 235 fission, so that the delay in moving to utilize common nuclear fuel resources instead of only scarce ones will not lead to disastrous waste.

Replicate?

It's true that with Microsoft making Windows 7 more efficient than Vista, and with low-power chips becoming more powerful, the rationale for using Linux on a netbook is weakening. But a netbook is still a laptop computer, just a smaller and lighter one, and what people want to run on personal computers, laptop or otherwise, are mainstream applications.

Thus, treating this as a "what if?" scenario is misleading. The netbook is really a part of a market Microsoft has already won. What could have been prevented is Windows CE on handhelds becoming dominant, because Windows CE doesn't run Windows (3.1/98/XP) applications. But trying to stop Microsoft here, under the illusion that one has an isolated market segment to do battle in, is a recipe for failure.

Despite All This

However I might feel about the policies of the Chinese government, I don't recall anyone ever complaining that they required Tibetans to convert their names to Chinese characters; and, as well, GB18030 includes the Yi Syllabary and Radicals also found in Unicode, so people who aren't Chinese do apparently have the options of recording their names in their own scripts.

It's not just the Chinese

Oh, I see someone else has already noted that the checksum in an ISBN number can sometimes be an X. Just as the usual casting out nines checksum only has nine possible values, its natural complement, to protect against two digits being swapped, needs eleven values to work.

Cyborg

In the TV pilot for the series The Six Million Dollar Man, and I believe in Martin Caidin's original novel Cyborg on which it was based, instead of Steve Austin being able to see with his artificial eye - that being considered a bit too far-out for a techno-thriller as opposed to far-future science fiction - his artificial eye merely contained a miniature camera.

What a name

I like the code name for the new release. I suppose, between pirated copies of Windows, and Red Flag Linux, they don't sell a lot of Macs in China anyways, so at least one major company isn't worried about offending the government there. (The Snow Leopard is a Tibetan national symbol.)

The Real Definition of a Planet

When did Ceres stop being a planet? When it was discovered that there were at least dozens of other asteroids out there, several of which were larger than the smallest of the first four asteroids to be discovered.

Similarly, matters came to a head over Pluto when Eris was discovered.

So the definition of a planet basically is - an object that directly orbits the Sun, and which is bigger than any object which belongs to a class of objects with a large number of members, so that it can be considered one of the major, big, and significant objects in the Solar System.

Since that has to do with subjectivity - and with the practical concern of not having lots of working astronomers waste time scanning the Kuiper Belt with large telescopes in order to be acclaimed as the next Herschel - they had to put a dynamical veneer on it with this orbit clearing business.

If Illinois feels like it has to protect the laurels of a native son, that really isn't the same thing as declaring pi equal to 3 1/5 (and the square root of two equal to 1 3/7) or pretending that evolution didn't happen, because Pluto's status was never really about science.

Summary

He may only be accused of a child pornography offence, but clearly he has violated his bail conditions. Perhaps by announcing that he is radioactive, it is hoped that he will turn himself in, rather than being Tasered by police who wouln't want to spend too long physically restraining him.

Time fo Worry

It's time to worry before you invest any time, effort, or money into something which might have to be abandoned in the future because of a patent infringement issue, not when someone actually comes knocking on your door.

Whatever

Obviously, if there is little demand for the Itanium architecture, Intel can't devote much in the way of resources to it, which leads to little reason to demand it.

The benefit of Itanium is presumably that it in some way allows chips to be produced that are bigger and more powerful than x86 chips. That's a very valuable benefit, but obviously it can't be realized if they're a generation behind.

Intel needs to do something.

I still feel that bringing Itanium goodness to the x86 world in some fashion - thus, making x86 chips more powerful, and letting the x86 subsidize the Itanium market with its volumes - is the way to go.

BASIC/Mage

Of course, MS-DOS looked a lot like CP/M. But then, CP/M looked a lot like OS/8 (from DEC), which few people realized. The old PIP command for COPY came from Peripheral Interchange Program. Of course, OS/8 had 6.2 filenames instead of 8.3.

Maybe HP and Xerox should get together and produce the next great operating system. But Apple successfully sued Xerox at one time in the past (while Xerox was unsuccessful in suing Apple), so it isn't as simple as that.

Filesystems

The problem isn't that Microsoft shouldn't have the right to defend its intellectual property.

However, people installing Linux in a second partition should be able to access files - with their long names - in their Windows partition, because not being able to do so would be anticompetitive.

So the solution is clear. Require Microsoft to cease and desist selling copies of Windows that don't allow you to choose to use a non-proprietary filesystem instead of FAT32 or NTFS. Since there are non-proprietary filesystems that allow equivalent functionality, this would not impose undue hardship on Microsoft.

Obvious Destination

I presume these films are intended to be used as educational material by planetariums, which have the equipment to present them to the public as part of their educational function.

The Chinese Solution

I did a bit of Googling. What happens in China is this: the normal Skype client will not function in China (presumably the ISPs block it), and a modified Skype client which is, as they say, compliant with local laws and regulations, must be downloaded from the company, TOM, that is Skype's business partner in China.

That would presumably be a bit far for any European government to go.

It was back in early October, 2008 that this was in the news; the excitement of the stock market crash may have driven it out of everyone's mind.