1. The players that are sold in countries where the contract is valid do not play all regions "out of the box?". They must be modified by a dealer or someone else skilled in such things.
But the article (and, I think, Builder) was referring to players that _are_ all-region out of the box. This would seem to me to be in breach of contract whatever country they are bought in.
Presumably the player manufacturers that are doing this think they have enough weight to stave off any action on this by Big DVD Daddy, or that the increased revenue from selling multi-region players will make up for any difficulties they might encounter.
1. The contract that DVD player manufacturers have with the Big DVD Guys, which I understand explicitly states that their players must not play DVDs from the wrong regions. 2. The laws which there may be in the US, which theoretically may prevent one from chipping one's own DVD player, on the grounds that doing so would circumvent the copyright protection. I would be interested in what would happen if this ever went to court, since in no way does a region-defeating chip help you copy the DVD (although if the chip got rid of macrovision also, there might be a point).
Surely the first item applies equally to DVD players sold in any country?
I have seen lots of UK stores selling chipped players (we have one, it came with a year's guarantee from the shop for both the player and the chip), but not selling players that come with multiple regions out of the box.
I'm also interested to know if people in the US put up with region-1-only DVD players when nobody else does, just because of this curious piece of legislation. Or is it just because nearly all films that US people might want to watch are out in Region 1 anyway?
A Christian orginization has every right to fire one if its employees for partaking in strongly objectionable material with company resources
Do they? If they have expressly permitted the use of resources for personal purposes, do they have the right to fire when the particular personal purposes don't suit them?
If he was doing something illegal, I could understand. If he was doing things in public, like
soliciting sex in the company car
and thereby tarnishing their image, I could see the point. But just because the people in a Christian organisation have a clearer common morality than an IT organisation, do they have the right to foist all aspects of that morality on what their employees do in private, and more importantly, do they have the right to spy on those employees without telling them, in order to make sure their morals are up to scratch?
...my employer has every right to watch what I'm doing at work (like this post), whether by a physical boss with eyes or with an electronic monitoring system
When you say "right" I assume you mean "legal right", which is all too different from "moral right"... I can't comment on the legal side of it, but there are certainly moral issues.
1. Is it reasonable to give me a computer for my home, tell me that I can use it for personal things as long they don't "clash with its educational mission", and then snoop on that personal use without informing me that they are doing so? Are they entitled, for example, to read my private correspondence with my doctor, or my diary, or anything at all just in order to check that it doesn't Clash with the Mission?
2. I'd interpret "clashing with its educational mission" to mean actively interfering with the department's activities or doing something which would affect the man's ability to do his job. Not "clashing with the morals of the employer". Surely if you can be sacked for your morals, you should be told before you sign the contract. Perhaps he was. I wouldn't want a job like that!
!! You are assuming that the only reason that anyone ever does anything is because they want more money. Thus by your reasoning, people will always do a shoddy job unless they have a cash incentive to do better.
I can think of several reasons why it might not be in the interest of a for-profit business to provide the best service: 1. They obtain their customers by sinking cash in advertising, and knowing that the average customer will not bother to change ISP unless their existing one inconveniences them severely. They find that the small number of customers gained by having excellent service rather than mediocre-but-not-too-annoying service is not worth the money that the upgrade would cost. 2. They are the only ISP around, or the only ISP providing some particular service. Again, it is now in their interest to provide the service that costs them the least, regardless of quality.
Most ISP's operate on some variant of Principle 1.
I can also think of several reasons why the not-for-profit ISP might still want to provide a decent service. 1. They are running the service because they use it themselves. Therefore it is in their interest for it to work well. 2. They are doing it for the geekish joy of setting it all up beautifully and getting the best out of their kit. 3. They are doing it to gain a reputation within the local community, or the geek community, or to have something impressive to put on a CV. Are they going to want to muck it up and look like idiots?
a) One company gaining some personal information about myself securely and confidentially in order that they can provide me with better service. Isolated nasty incidents may certainly occur, but I can't see any reason for a widespread unavoidable problem.
b) Some nosy people gaining personal information about myself that I chose to disseminate in plain text
c) The government having the right to collect such plain text information, require myself and other people to give up such information if they have it, and use that information as evidence against me in a court case
d) The government having the right to collect encrypted information about me in the same way and to demand of me the encryption key so that they can read it and use it in evidence against me.
There is _no reason_ why a) should pose any privacy problem whatever. At least in the UK, the Data Protection Act makes it illegal for the company to spread my data about, and I have the power to choose to use the company whose data integrity I trust.
b) does not have to be a problem since I can choose to encrypt my personal communications with people to whatever extent I like.
c) the same as b)
d) is the the only terrible problem that I see, and that is not an inevitable cause of the Encroaching Digital Age, but merely a stinky piece of UK legislation.
I see that there is great threat to the privacy of all people who don't care about the issues, or don't understand them. But each individual has the power to sort this out for themselves.
To anyone who _isn't_ in the US that might be a benefit: so long as non-US markets prefer non-US news, your big three news providers will hopefully maintain their virtual monopoly only in the US. As soon as they begin to target their international reporting properly to international people, they are likely to end up being a global monopoly, which sounds much worse!
While in some cases, such as Lotus Notes, the default is to rise to the top of the window stack and bang a modal window up to get your input everytime there is new mail...
In Outlook, it pops up something like "You have new mail. Would you like to read it now?". If you happen to type Y or Enter before you notice the message, you can unintentionally do all sorts of interesting things. Once I sent email with half a sentence in it to someone I had never met (he was on a mailing list I was subscribed to, and I replied to his mail).
Nevertheless, the way to cure this problem is to nuke stupid programs that do that. Not to have some idiot "clever" program that guesses when I might be trying to do some work.!!!
That's wierd, these people found pretty much the opposite. A reasonably designed radiation shield between antenna and head can be quite effective, except that the phone boosts the signal in order to get through and fries your brain anyway. They tested hands-free kits and found that the cable between the phone and your ear antenna-s the radiation straight up into your head _more_ effectively than just holding the phone by your ear.
Why would anyone want to try to run Linux on a mobile phone? What exactly do you gain over all the other long-standing and well respected things like EPOCH?
some reasons I can think of:
1. Porting existing code to EPOC is a major nasty. It supports C++ and Java only, with C added on (I think) _over_ the C++ libraries, which are themselves fairly unusual.
2. $5 or $10 has to be paid to Symbian per EPOC-running unit sold. Not the case for linux-based things.
3. I have no _idea_ what hoops must be jumped through to get EPOC ported to a new platform or to be allowed the source to do a port. I bet they are flaming ones though.
4. Of course, vendor lock-in. Using EPOC, you are relying on Symbian to release new versions, not go under, not sell out to Microsoft, etc.
I don't know anything about other OS's specifically designed for small devices, but I guess the problems are similar. A Linux-based solution would solve at least _some_ of the problems. This particular Linux-based solution sounds like it won't be solving 3 and 4 for us.
How exactly is OS style development going to work on an OS for a burglar alarm - I mean these devices aren't readily available for playing around with.
It would help those of us working for companies that write burglar alarm (or whatever) software!
If you choose not to work overtime, there is nothing the company can do about it. If they try to get rid of you because of it... it's time for a lawsuit, that you will easily win.
There's plenty they can do. They can pass you over for promotion, give you crap pay rises, and always give you the dog-ends of work that nobody else wants. They (your colleagues on the late-running project, not just your boss) can also make it abundantly clear that you are not pulling your weight, and you are letting everyone else down. Supposing you were on a such a project. Would you honestly go home every day at 5 if everyone in your team was working their backsides off to get the code out?
I don't know who you mean by "we". I don't have a consitutional right to anything (Not living in your neck of the woods). Nevertheless I hope you'd agree I still have rights?
Do we really need a way for people to pass around child pornography without having a way to find out who they are (so we can stop them)?
In a word: Yes. We do. For the simple reason that there _is no way_ for any of us to exert our simple right to anonymity without having a way to pass round child porn too.
This is one of those circumstances where people will have to choose between a greater evil and a lesser evil. At risk of making myself very unpopular, I would suggest the evils that can come from denial of freedom of speech could be an awful lot worse than the evils coming from the hampering of one of the ways the police use to track down a class of particularly unpleasant criminals.
Put it this way: would you like every tiny piece of data about yourself in big government database, even though this would clearly help to catch many criminals, probably including some child pornographers? Supposing you didn't mind this. Now would you make it compulsory for _everyone_ to be in this database? That's what you're asking.
Supposing the goverment could identify the profile of a child pornographer with 90% accuracy from this data. So they imprison all the people with these characteristics. This is another way the government could reduce child porn, but few would argue that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks.
Using only one finger must get pretty tiring after awhile. Why limit yourself to just one finger when the majority of people have quite a few more fingers available?
One obvious application is keyboards on touchscreens. These are usually used with one finger, and they could easily be small enough to be only practical with a pointing device, rather than for touch typing. You could probably fit one of those things on a largish mobile phone screen.
I'm sure I saw an interview on TV of a man who parachuted from a lot lot more than 105,000 feet. He went up in a balloon, and whatever was in that balloon he went up as high as it was possible to go before the balloon stopped being lighter than the surrounding stuff. I don't know the exact height but I remember him saying how it was incredibly calm up there, and you couldn't tell you were falling, for several minutes until he hit enough atmosphere for it to feel like wind. They showed pictures from that height and the earth was by no means filling the field of view.
"You contradict yourselves" what?? Who do? That's like when the Martians come to visit, and see some KKK people saying "Black people are scum" and some black people saying "KKK people are scum", and saying "You humans! You flat out contradict yourselves! How hypocritical". I didn't notice the guy beating up on any nuclear industry. Did you?
You are taking a bunch of people with different opinions, deciding to call them all by a certain name, and then complaining that all the people with that name don't think the same. Big surprise there!
Please could you also point us to some evidence to back up your assertion about the radiation? I'd be interested to see. Are you arguing that solar flares are dangerous, or that nuclear plants aren't?? I'm assuming the former, since a pro-nuclear argument would be a bit off-topic. Should I be staying inside in my lead suit then?;)
Right now, there are three primary groups using Linux:
1. ISP's and other businesses that need rock solid networking and file serving. 2.College students, because there's some benefit to using Linux if you're a comp sci major, and also because it's free (either "free as in beer" because students are generally cash short, or "free as in freedom" because it's easier to be idealistic when you're a student). High school students are included here, too, though maybe to a lesser degree. 3. Geeks who fixate on which operating system they use. This overlaps somewhat with the previous item.
I'm curious. Are you suggesting that all the students using Linux, when they finish their degrees and get jobs, will immediately purchase and install Windows now that they can afford it? Or that running Linux for three years will turn you into a fanatical geek?
I used Linux when I was a student. I didn't use it because it was free, since I had no scruples at all about using Windows without paying for it. I used it because I enjoyed coding, and Linux made it easier for me to do that than Windows. I needed to write reports, and I could do them better on Linux. I enjoyed messing about with computers, and Linux has a lot more stuff to mess about with.
Now I am working, and have become part of the demographic that game companies should be falling over themselves to sell to. I still use Linux at home, for exactly the same reason. I code in my spare time, and I find it easier to code on Linux than Windows. Which is not surprising, since Linux was designed for coding with and Windows was not.
I find it very hard to believe that there's not a lot of people like me out there earning large sums of money, running Linux, and willing to pay for the privilege of not having to reboot to play games. We are not all mad fanatics. Are we?
Face it, trying to do anything useful via one or two square inches of screen real estate is sheer misery.
Ah but soon enough we'll have phones with more than one or two square inches. According to my T3, Ericsson are bringing out a new one shortly where the whole front of the phone is LCD, mostly covered when not in use by a flipping bit with the numbers on. You could get a good read of a decent WAP/HTML web page on it.
A rubberized, ruggedized, waterproof cell phone.
Too late, Ericsson already have one of those. I think some of the other manufacturers do too?
It seems to me that the guy is saying that in order for a war to be moral enough people on your side have to be killed.
Maybe not. But isn't the point rather that when you are capable of fighting a war where your side are not killed, and don't sit in muddy trenches, it's far too easy to forget that the reality on the other side is of a different nature than the little pictures on a console that indicate that the missile hit the target.
In WW1 everyone in the country knew that it was grim because their friends and relatives were out there being shot at, and writing back about how horrible it was. I'm not for a moment saying that that was a good idea, just that it meant that the masses _and_ the people with their fingers on the buttons always remembered that it wasn't just a game of Civilisation or something, that civilians were being shot to bits.
For some reason I think the public would be a lot quicker to say "End the war" if two of their countrymen were killed in combat than if reports say that a school in some country you've barely heard of might have been accidentally flattened.
Though declining to provide details of his paper because it is under review, Dr. Wang said: "Our light pulses can indeed be made to travel faster than c. This is a special property of light itself, which is different from a familiar object like a brick," since light is a wave with no mass.
If light has no mass, why does it go down black holes? I suppose it must have no mass, otherwise it would not be able to go at the speed of light:( But I am still confused about the black holes. How can gravity act on things with no mass? But it must, otherwise the holes would not be black. Is the speed of light in fact fractionally below the speed it would be possible to attain with particles having less mass, or no mass? What did I miss?
It will come as no surprise to me if the whole concept of an "internet appliance" is picked to bits here. And why not? They're annoying little buggers - underpowered and not useful for anything really. Except internet access. Oops! We already have that.
_We_ have that, since we already bought or built PC's on which to practice the stuff we do to earn our living. My grandma, however, doesn't. She should not have to buy 600 quid's worth of equipment just to surf the web, when that equipment will be horrendously over-spec'd for the job. Why should she have a giant beige box when she could have a small flat portable thing for much cheaper? Why should she have to learn to navigate an OS (any OS) designed for ultimate flexibility when she doesn't need all that stuff, just an internet connection, email, the web and so forth?
I am looking forward to the day when only programmers have big beige boxes, anyone who doesn't need to program gets a variety of specialised appliances.
To some extent, this already happened: You probably have a watch, an alarm clock and maybe a calculator. Your computer can tell the time, sound alarms and add up. Why did you buy those things then? Probably for one or more of these reasons:
1. They are more portable 2. They use less power: you accept having your watch running all day but you might not want to have your computer running all day. 3. Less clicks to the result.
It would save me a lot of trips to fix my parents' computer if they had a web pad, a play station and a letter writing gizmo. The web pad could do the letter writing without too much hassle. This is all they use their computer for. Why on earth should they care about desktops and icons and shortcuts and start menus and double clicking and control panels and file systems in tree structures? This whole infrastructure is there to support stuff they will never use.
That really depends on what you consider an IDE to be. A decent text editor should have syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, bracket matching and so forth. I use vim. I suppose this is not an IDE. If I mapped one key press to "make" and one to "./myprog", it would still not be an IDE. OK, so is it an IDE if I do all that, and put a tree view of my classes down the left, and provide a GUI interface onto GDB?
I can only see your point if you include in your definition of "IDE" the code-writing wizards that write GUIs for you, or the ones that make MFC code. Yep, at this point you are losing your control over what you write, and your understanding of how it works and how to fix it if it doesn't. But in any IDE you have the choice to forgo wizard-land and write proper code. I use Visual Studio at work (because I have to), but I write all my code by hand, since I'm not writing GUI code or MFC. I don't see that this is any different from using vim and make, in the control and understanding respect. It's just a crappier text editor with a graphical debugger and an automatic dependency figuring out thingy which is just an alternative to make.
I suppose if you learnt a language using Visual Studio and then started to use vim+make you would have to learn how to use vim and make. But this is just the same as the problems I had learning Visual Studio from a vim+make background.
Re:Why wasn't it controlled before?
on
At The Crossroads
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· Score: 1
Intellectual Property law isn't unjust, isn't wrong. Why shouldn't a musician be able to make money off of any copy of their work? They chose to take their musical talents and make a living of it. Why should every piece of software have open source? For the most part humans don't give up stuff for free. This is a many thousand year old tradition
That would make more sense if laws existed in some sort of vacuum where there was just Right and Wrong and that was it. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Two Right things can conflict. Sometimes Wrong things can't be legislated against (Speech inciting racial hatred?). Sometimes unjust laws have to be made to combat an even greater injustice. You may well argue that there is in fact no Right and no Wrong, only things that people currently like and things that they don't like.
There is no God-given right to make money from what we do. It is just the way society has grown up. You might argue that everyone has a right to enough food. However, your argument is absolutely useless to someone whose child just starved to death in Ethiopia. There is simply no way to get enough food in time to save all the people who will die. The concepts of rights are not always useful in the real world.
The issue here is not "But the artists have a right to money". It is "The artists need money, otherwise we won't have music. Can we provide them with it?". And the answer is, not through the traditional channels. Not any more. Not without providing extensively invasive legislation, or at least legislation to allow extensively invasive contracts. There is simply no way to make it work without causing more problems than it solves.
And just because something's a thousand year old tradition means nothing. There was a thousand year old tradition that you could make a living hoeing turnips for a farmer. So should we ban automatic turnip harversters so that lots of people can go and hoe turnips? Things change. It might not be nice for everybody when it does, but there isn't a lot you can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
But the article (and, I think, Builder) was referring to players that _are_ all-region out of the box. This would seem to me to be in breach of contract whatever country they are bought in.
Presumably the player manufacturers that are doing this think they have enough weight to stave off any action on this by Big DVD Daddy, or that the increased revenue from selling multi-region players will make up for any difficulties they might encounter.
1. The contract that DVD player manufacturers have with the Big DVD Guys, which I understand explicitly states that their players must not play DVDs from the wrong regions.
2. The laws which there may be in the US, which theoretically may prevent one from chipping one's own DVD player, on the grounds that doing so would circumvent the copyright protection. I would be interested in what would happen if this ever went to court, since in no way does a region-defeating chip help you copy the DVD (although if the chip got rid of macrovision also, there might be a point).
Surely the first item applies equally to DVD players sold in any country?
I have seen lots of UK stores selling chipped players (we have one, it came with a year's guarantee from the shop for both the player and the chip), but not selling players that come with multiple regions out of the box.
I'm also interested to know if people in the US put up with region-1-only DVD players when nobody else does, just because of this curious piece of legislation. Or is it just because nearly all films that US people might want to watch are out in Region 1 anyway?
Do they? If they have expressly permitted the use of resources for personal purposes, do they have the right to fire when the particular personal purposes don't suit them?
If he was doing something illegal, I could understand. If he was doing things in public, like
soliciting sex in the company car
and thereby tarnishing their image, I could see the point. But just because the people in a Christian organisation have a clearer common morality than an IT organisation, do they have the right to foist all aspects of that morality on what their employees do in private, and more importantly, do they have the right to spy on those employees without telling them, in order to make sure their morals are up to scratch?
When you say "right" I assume you mean "legal right", which is all too different from "moral right"... I can't comment on the legal side of it, but there are certainly moral issues.
1. Is it reasonable to give me a computer for my home, tell me that I can use it for personal things as long they don't "clash with its educational mission", and then snoop on that personal use without informing me that they are doing so? Are they entitled, for example, to read my private correspondence with my doctor, or my diary, or anything at all just in order to check that it doesn't Clash with the Mission?
2. I'd interpret "clashing with its educational mission" to mean actively interfering with the department's activities or doing something which would affect the man's ability to do his job. Not "clashing with the morals of the employer". Surely if you can be sacked for your morals, you should be told before you sign the contract. Perhaps he was. I wouldn't want a job like that!
I can think of several reasons why it might not be in the interest of a for-profit business to provide the best service:
1. They obtain their customers by sinking cash in advertising, and knowing that the average customer will not bother to change ISP unless their existing one inconveniences them severely. They find that the small number of customers gained by having excellent service rather than mediocre-but-not-too-annoying service is not worth the money that the upgrade would cost.
2. They are the only ISP around, or the only ISP providing some particular service. Again, it is now in their interest to provide the service that costs them the least, regardless of quality.
Most ISP's operate on some variant of Principle 1.
I can also think of several reasons why the not-for-profit ISP might still want to provide a decent service.
1. They are running the service because they use it themselves. Therefore it is in their interest for it to work well.
2. They are doing it for the geekish joy of setting it all up beautifully and getting the best out of their kit.
3. They are doing it to gain a reputation within the local community, or the geek community, or to have something impressive to put on a CV. Are they going to want to muck it up and look like idiots?
a) One company gaining some personal information about myself securely and confidentially in order that they can provide me with better service. Isolated nasty incidents may certainly occur, but I can't see any reason for a widespread unavoidable problem.
b) Some nosy people gaining personal information about myself that I chose to disseminate in plain text
c) The government having the right to collect such plain text information, require myself and other people to give up such information if they have it, and use that information as evidence against me in a court case
d) The government having the right to collect encrypted information about me in the same way and to demand of me the encryption key so that they can read it and use it in evidence against me.
There is _no reason_ why a) should pose any privacy problem whatever. At least in the UK, the Data Protection Act makes it illegal for the company to spread my data about, and I have the power to choose to use the company whose data integrity I trust.
b) does not have to be a problem since I can choose to encrypt my personal communications with people to whatever extent I like.
c) the same as b)
d) is the the only terrible problem that I see, and that is not an inevitable cause of the Encroaching Digital Age, but merely a stinky piece of UK legislation.
I see that there is great threat to the privacy of all people who don't care about the issues, or don't understand them. But each individual has the power to sort this out for themselves.
To anyone who _isn't_ in the US that might be a benefit: so long as non-US markets prefer non-US news, your big three news providers will hopefully maintain their virtual monopoly only in the US. As soon as they begin to target their international reporting properly to international people, they are likely to end up being a global monopoly, which sounds much worse!
In Outlook, it pops up something like "You have new mail. Would you like to read it now?". If you happen to type Y or Enter before you notice the message, you can unintentionally do all sorts of interesting things. Once I sent email with half a sentence in it to someone I had never met (he was on a mailing list I was subscribed to, and I replied to his mail).
Nevertheless, the way to cure this problem is to nuke stupid programs that do that. Not to have some idiot "clever" program that guesses when I might be trying to do some work.!!!
Usually they are OK with html. You can get a latex2html converter from http://cbl.leeds .ac.uk/nikos/tex2html/doc/latex2html/latex2html.ht ml.
That's wierd, these people found pretty much the opposite. A reasonably designed radiation shield between antenna and head can be quite effective, except that the phone boosts the signal in order to get through and fries your brain anyway. They tested hands-free kits and found that the cable between the phone and your ear antenna-s the radiation straight up into your head _more_ effectively than just holding the phone by your ear.
some reasons I can think of:
1. Porting existing code to EPOC is a major nasty. It supports C++ and Java only, with C added on (I think) _over_ the C++ libraries, which are themselves fairly unusual.
2. $5 or $10 has to be paid to Symbian per EPOC-running unit sold. Not the case for linux-based things.
3. I have no _idea_ what hoops must be jumped through to get EPOC ported to a new platform or to be allowed the source to do a port. I bet they are flaming ones though.
4. Of course, vendor lock-in. Using EPOC, you are relying on Symbian to release new versions, not go under, not sell out to Microsoft, etc.
I don't know anything about other OS's specifically designed for small devices, but I guess the problems are similar. A Linux-based solution would solve at least _some_ of the problems. This particular Linux-based solution sounds like it won't be solving 3 and 4 for us.
How exactly is OS style development going to work on an OS for a burglar alarm - I mean these devices aren't readily available for playing around with.
It would help those of us working for companies that write burglar alarm (or whatever) software!
There's plenty they can do. They can pass you over for promotion, give you crap pay rises, and always give you the dog-ends of work that nobody else wants. They (your colleagues on the late-running project, not just your boss) can also make it abundantly clear that you are not pulling your weight, and you are letting everyone else down. Supposing you were on a such a project. Would you honestly go home every day at 5 if everyone in your team was working their backsides off to get the code out?
I don't know who you mean by "we". I don't have a consitutional right to anything (Not living in your neck of the woods). Nevertheless I hope you'd agree I still have rights?
In a word: Yes. We do. For the simple reason that there _is no way_ for any of us to exert our simple right to anonymity without having a way to pass round child porn too.
This is one of those circumstances where people will have to choose between a greater evil and a lesser evil. At risk of making myself very unpopular, I would suggest the evils that can come from denial of freedom of speech could be an awful lot worse than the evils coming from the hampering of one of the ways the police use to track down a class of particularly unpleasant criminals.
Put it this way: would you like every tiny piece of data about yourself in big government database, even though this would clearly help to catch many criminals, probably including some child pornographers? Supposing you didn't mind this. Now would you make it compulsory for _everyone_ to be in this database? That's what you're asking.
Supposing the goverment could identify the profile of a child pornographer with 90% accuracy from this data. So they imprison all the people with these characteristics. This is another way the government could reduce child porn, but few would argue that the benefits outweighed the drawbacks.
One obvious application is keyboards on touchscreens. These are usually used with one finger, and they could easily be small enough to be only practical with a pointing device, rather than for touch typing. You could probably fit one of those things on a largish mobile phone screen.
I'm sure I saw an interview on TV of a man who parachuted from a lot lot more than 105,000 feet. He went up in a balloon, and whatever was in that balloon he went up as high as it was possible to go before the balloon stopped being lighter than the surrounding stuff. I don't know the exact height but I remember him saying how it was incredibly calm up there, and you couldn't tell you were falling, for several minutes until he hit enough atmosphere for it to feel like wind. They showed pictures from that height and the earth was by no means filling the field of view.
"You contradict yourselves" what?? Who do? That's like when the Martians come to visit, and see some KKK people saying "Black people are scum" and some black people saying "KKK people are scum", and saying "You humans! You flat out contradict yourselves! How hypocritical". I didn't notice the guy beating up on any nuclear industry. Did you?
;)
You are taking a bunch of people with different opinions, deciding to call them all by a certain name, and then complaining that all the people with that name don't think the same. Big surprise there!
Please could you also point us to some evidence to back up your assertion about the radiation? I'd be interested to see. Are you arguing that solar flares are dangerous, or that nuclear plants aren't?? I'm assuming the former, since a pro-nuclear argument would be a bit off-topic. Should I be staying inside in my lead suit then?
In vim, you can do
.html or .txt.
:set linebreak
Then you can do gj and gk to move up and down on the lines as you see, not by the linebreaks.
You can of course map j and k to gj and gk in all files ending in
I think this satisifes all your conditions?
1. ISP's and other businesses that need rock solid networking and file serving. .College students, because there's some benefit to using Linux if you're a comp sci major, and also because it's free (either "free as in beer" because students are generally cash short, or "free as in freedom" because it's easier to be idealistic when you're a student). High school students are included here, too, though maybe to a lesser degree.
2
3. Geeks who fixate on which operating system they use. This overlaps somewhat with the previous item.
I'm curious. Are you suggesting that all the students using Linux, when they finish their degrees and get jobs, will immediately purchase and install Windows now that they can afford it? Or that running Linux for three years will turn you into a fanatical geek?
I used Linux when I was a student. I didn't use it because it was free, since I had no scruples at all about using Windows without paying for it. I used it because I enjoyed coding, and Linux made it easier for me to do that than Windows. I needed to write reports, and I could do them better on Linux. I enjoyed messing about with computers, and Linux has a lot more stuff to mess about with.
Now I am working, and have become part of the demographic that game companies should be falling over themselves to sell to. I still use Linux at home, for exactly the same reason. I code in my spare time, and I find it easier to code on Linux than Windows. Which is not surprising, since Linux was designed for coding with and Windows was not.
I find it very hard to believe that there's not a lot of people like me out there earning large sums of money, running Linux, and willing to pay for the privilege of not having to reboot to play games. We are not all mad fanatics. Are we?
Ah but soon enough we'll have phones with more than one or two square inches. According to my T3, Ericsson are bringing out a new one shortly where the whole front of the phone is LCD, mostly covered when not in use by a flipping bit with the numbers on. You could get a good read of a decent WAP/HTML web page on it.
A rubberized, ruggedized, waterproof cell phone.
Too late, Ericsson already have one of those. I think some of the other manufacturers do too?
Maybe not. But isn't the point rather that when you are capable of fighting a war where your side are not killed, and don't sit in muddy trenches, it's far too easy to forget that the reality on the other side is of a different nature than the little pictures on a console that indicate that the missile hit the target.
In WW1 everyone in the country knew that it was grim because their friends and relatives were out there being shot at, and writing back about how horrible it was. I'm not for a moment saying that that was a good idea, just that it meant that the masses _and_ the people with their fingers on the buttons always remembered that it wasn't just a game of Civilisation or something, that civilians were being shot to bits.
For some reason I think the public would be a lot quicker to say "End the war" if two of their countrymen were killed in combat than if reports say that a school in some country you've barely heard of might have been accidentally flattened.
If light has no mass, why does it go down black holes? I suppose it must have no mass, otherwise it would not be able to go at the speed of light :( But I am still confused about the black holes. How can gravity act on things with no mass? But it must, otherwise the holes would not be black. Is the speed of light in fact fractionally below the speed it would be possible to attain with particles having less mass, or no mass? What did I miss?
_We_ have that, since we already bought or built PC's on which to practice the stuff we do to earn our living. My grandma, however, doesn't. She should not have to buy 600 quid's worth of equipment just to surf the web, when that equipment will be horrendously over-spec'd for the job. Why should she have a giant beige box when she could have a small flat portable thing for much cheaper? Why should she have to learn to navigate an OS (any OS) designed for ultimate flexibility when she doesn't need all that stuff, just an internet connection, email, the web and so forth?
I am looking forward to the day when only programmers have big beige boxes, anyone who doesn't need to program gets a variety of specialised appliances.
To some extent, this already happened: You probably have a watch, an alarm clock and maybe a calculator. Your computer can tell the time, sound alarms and add up. Why did you buy those things then? Probably for one or more of these reasons:
1. They are more portable
2. They use less power: you accept having your watch running all day but you might not want to have your computer running all day.
3. Less clicks to the result.
It would save me a lot of trips to fix my parents' computer if they had a web pad, a play station and a letter writing gizmo. The web pad could do the letter writing without too much hassle. This is all they use their computer for. Why on earth should they care about desktops and icons and shortcuts and start menus and double clicking and control panels and file systems in tree structures? This whole infrastructure is there to support stuff they will never use.
I can only see your point if you include in your definition of "IDE" the code-writing wizards that write GUIs for you, or the ones that make MFC code. Yep, at this point you are losing your control over what you write, and your understanding of how it works and how to fix it if it doesn't. But in any IDE you have the choice to forgo wizard-land and write proper code. I use Visual Studio at work (because I have to), but I write all my code by hand, since I'm not writing GUI code or MFC. I don't see that this is any different from using vim and make, in the control and understanding respect. It's just a crappier text editor with a graphical debugger and an automatic dependency figuring out thingy which is just an alternative to make.
I suppose if you learnt a language using Visual Studio and then started to use vim+make you would have to learn how to use vim and make. But this is just the same as the problems I had learning Visual Studio from a vim+make background.
That would make more sense if laws existed in some sort of vacuum where there was just Right and Wrong and that was it. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world. Two Right things can conflict. Sometimes Wrong things can't be legislated against (Speech inciting racial hatred?). Sometimes unjust laws have to be made to combat an even greater injustice. You may well argue that there is in fact no Right and no Wrong, only things that people currently like and things that they don't like.
There is no God-given right to make money from what we do. It is just the way society has grown up. You might argue that everyone has a right to enough food. However, your argument is absolutely useless to someone whose child just starved to death in Ethiopia. There is simply no way to get enough food in time to save all the people who will die. The concepts of rights are not always useful in the real world.
The issue here is not "But the artists have a right to money". It is "The artists need money, otherwise we won't have music. Can we provide them with it?". And the answer is, not through the traditional channels. Not any more. Not without providing extensively invasive legislation, or at least legislation to allow extensively invasive contracts. There is simply no way to make it work without causing more problems than it solves.
And just because something's a thousand year old tradition means nothing. There was a thousand year old tradition that you could make a living hoeing turnips for a farmer. So should we ban automatic turnip harversters so that lots of people can go and hoe turnips? Things change. It might not be nice for everybody when it does, but there isn't a lot you can do about it.