Parameter expansion is the procedure to get the value from the referenced entity, like expanding a variable to print its value. On expansion time you can do very nasty things with the parameter or its value. These things are described here.

This specification describes how DNS SRV records, DNS TXT records, and well-known URIs can be used together or separately to locate CalDAV (Calendaring Extensions to Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)) or CardDAV (vCard Extensions to WebDAV) services.

This page is the authorative specification of the config file that the Mozilla ISPDB and config services at ISPs return.

It is XML, with a clearly defined format, to be stable and usable by other mail clients, too. Update Aug 2010: In fact, Evolution and KMail and Kontact now use it, too.

Please do not submit or serve any configurations without SSL! There's no reason in 2010 why users still need to read mail entirely unprotected.
If you are an ISP and think the server load is too high, try adding an SSL accelerator. They are cheap and widely used. In fact, even most freemail (!) providers these days support SSL, so if users pay you money for ISP service, that's all the more reason to give them proper service. But first simply try to enable software SSL - small servers may be fine with SSL and without any additional installations.

Thunderbird 3.1 and later (and 3.0 to some degree) includes mail account autoconfiguration functionality. The goal of autoconfiguration is to make it very easy for users to configure the connection of Thunderbird to their email servers. In many cases, people should be able to download and install Thunderbird, enter their real name, email address and password in the Account Setup Wizard and have a fully functioning mail client and get and send their mail as securely as possible.

The constant recombination of worn-out elements. Companies that make useless products to help other companies make useless products that help other companies make useless products. There are start-ups that spend tens of thousands on names and branding before they even come up with a product or see if anyone might want it. This is called innovation, but what it actually represents is a culture that piles up the garbled detritus of the old in lieu of creating anything new, and a morbid economic order drowning in its own surplus liquidity and willing to invest in any bubble that comes along….

Neal Stephenson – legendary author of speculative fiction – on Elon Musk and geek culture, the NSA revelations of Edward Snowden, how negative cultural narratives are killing big science – and the upbringing that made him the writer he is.

When I ask people to picture a coder, they usually imagine someone like Mark Zuckerberg: a hoodied college dropout who builds an app in a feverish 72-hour programming jag—with the goal of getting insanely rich and, as they say, “changing the world.”

But this Silicon Valley stereotype isn’t even geographically accurate. The Valley employs only 8 percent of the nation’s coders. All the other millions? They’re more like Devon, a programmer I met who helps maintain a ­security-software service in Portland, Oregon. He isn’t going to get fabulously rich, but his job is stable and rewarding: It’s 40 hours a week, well paid, and intellectually challenging. “My dad was a blue-­collar guy,” he tells me—and in many ways, Devon is too.

Aptik is a open source package that simplify backup and restore of PPAs, Applications and Packages after a fresh installation or upgradation of Debian based Ubuntu, Linux Mint and other Ubuntu derivatives.

"Reine Glasfaseranschlüsse bis direkt zu allen Bürgern und Unternehmen sind schon bald so wichtig wie ein Wasser- oder Stromanschluss", meint der Präsident des Bundesverband Breitbandkommunikation (Breko), Norbert Westfal.

... um den Weg in die Gigabit-Gesellschaft zu bereiten und den Digitalisierungsbedarf etwa rund um die nächste Mobilfunkgeneration 5G zu decken. Diese brauche als Fundament ein schnelles Festnetz, auch wenn die konkreten Leistungsparameter und Verfügbarkeitszeiten noch offen seien.

Let me first clarify what we mean by AI and robotics:

Firstly, we have industrial robots installed on factory floors, carrying out repetitive tasks such as pick and place or transporting goods autonomously. They are programmed to achieve very specific tasks in very constrained environments and usually work behind fences with no human contact.

Increasingly, so-called collaborative robots are deployed on the shop floor which can work in close proximity of humans and do not need a security cage any longer.

A second category consists of professional service robots used outside traditional manufacturing. Typical examples include surgical robots in hospitals or milking robots on farms.

Consumer robots form the third category: they can be used for private purposes, typically at home, like vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers etc.

Finally, there are the purely software-based AI agents. Such systems are used, for example, to help doctors improve their diagnosis or in recommendation systems on shopping websites.

AI-based software, in conjunction with sophisticated sensors and connectivity, is also increasingly used to make all kinds of devices and objects around us intelligent. The most notable example in this context is probably the self-driving car.

While many of these robots and AI systems are impressive and have progressed a lot recently, they are still very far from exhibiting intelligent, human-like behaviour or are indistinguishable from a human. In other words: they don't pass the Turing test yet. This futuristic vision would need a debate at a different level, including asking very profound ethical questions.

I wanted to write a story about how technology can be used in times of disaster to let us work together,” Doctorow explains. “The Internet has given us a lot of high-profile flame wars and trolling and such, but the Internet is primarily used by most of us to be kind to other people, strangers and loved ones alike. Writing a story about how we might consciously craft technology to give society a graceful failure mode where we use it as connective tissue to tie together our collective rebuilding seems to me to be a way to counter the kind of weaponized narrative about humanity’s fundamental evilness that carried the last presidential election.

Die Richtlinie könnte daher neben den durch Sperren verursachten Problemen wie "Overblocking" auch zu einem erheblichen Einschüchterungseffekt auf zivilgesellschaftlichen Protest im Netz führen. Zugleich eröffne sie Optionen, "um unliebsame Kritik und politische Widersacher zu kriminalisieren und zum Schweigen zu bringen". Die Initiative European Digital Rights (EDRi) sieht große Missbrauchsgefahren durch vage Formulierungen.

However, displacement due to automation isn’t just limited to transportation, it will sweep across a number of industries, and Musk argues that the government must introduce a UBI program in order to compensate for this. “I don’t think we’re going to have a choice,” he said. “I think it’s going to be necessary. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better.”

As an artist, David Bowie has spent a lifetime blurring the lines between performer and stage persona: after all, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was famously advertised with the slogan “David Bowie is Ziggy Stardust”—while, in smaller type, the words “Ziggy Stardust is David Bowie” ran across the bottom of the ad.

This confusion between creator and creation is something Bowie has played upon from the very beginning—and then there’s the fact that, over the last couple decades, he himself has become the direct inspiration for various fictional characters, from the Lucifer of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to The Venture Bros. shapeshifting leader of The Guild of Calamitous Intent. So let’s take a look at a few of Bowie’s more interesting incarnations, both as an actor and as a character, the dreamer and the dream

Andreessen Horowitz VC Peter Levine believes that the increased computing power of Internet of Things devices, combined with ever-increasingly accurate machine learning technologies, will largely replace the infrastructure as a service public cloud market with intelligent edge computing.

The purpose of this NASA Technical Standard is to set forth requirements for interconnecting cable and harness assemblies that connect electrical, electronic or electromechanical components.

Seit mehr als einem Jahr befindet sich Frankreich im Ausnahmezustand – und eine Verlängerung bis Sommer 2017 ist so gut wie beschlossen. Der Notstand setzt Rechtsstaatlichkeit teilweise außer Kraft: Hausdurchsuchungen ohne richterliche Anordnung, Hausarreste und Demonstrationsverbote sind möglich. Bürgerrechtler fürchten den permanenten Notstand.

The long, cold season of tech investing may have ended up looking less like Siberia and more like a mild winter. Raney says that’s all the more reason to stay optimistic about tech. “It’s not like people felt there wasn’t going to be value created in Silicon Valley,” he says. Ultimately, people still do believe in the value of innovation, Raney says. It may just be that this is the dawn of a newly realistic approach—which doesn’t seem like half-bad way of looking at the future.

Im Kampf um unsere Privatsphäre wird die Reform der ePrivacy-Richtlinie im 2017 das wichtigste Schlachtfeld. Ein geleakter Entwurf zeigt: Die EU-Kommission macht zwar gute Vorschläge zur besseren Kontrolle von Web-Tracking – grundsätzlich dürfen uns Unternehmen und Staaten aber weiter analysieren.