Hmmmmm.....the invasion of Canada vote!!!! Prepare thyself, Oh Canada!!
This is what concerns me. On face value the idea sounds like a huge step forward for democracy and people who don't really think things through or aren't particularly educated will vote for it.
I have seen loads of clips - and yes American/.ers, I know how easy it is to selectively edit these things - that show interviews with "average Americans on the street" saying that Buddhists are terrorists who should be nuked when asked what they think of Buddhists. I know that this is not true for all Americans, but I also know a large percentage of Americans know less about the world outside their local area than any other Western country. I have grave fears for these people being able to directly vote on anything that a nuclear armed super power might do.
Sometimes I feel pissed off about the traditional two party thing we have here in Australia too, but there is something to be said for a system with checks and balances, separation of powers, the rule of law and non-elected bureaucrats keeping things orderly. It's frustrating but relatively benign and this idea of letting anyone vote directly on decisions threatens all of these things.
1) Are elevators really that complicated they need an entire opertaing system?
I worked in a building where the software running the lifts sucked. I dreamed of being able to write code to make it so that a trip from the lobby to level 20 could never ever take 7 minutes again. Having a reasonably powerful general purpose computing platform to co-ordinate lifts is a simple way to improve these systems. It has the potential to make the building more efficient in terms of transport times and power consumption, especially in taller buildings. Of course one would assume that mechanical safety systems have priority over anything the server says.
Not saying Windows - even CE - is the best choice by any means, just saying.
Try it yourself: stick two leads from a 9V battery into water in a jar and watch bubbles of oxygen and hydrogen arise from the two leads. Now place a flame over the top of the jar.
No, on second thought, don't do that unless you're in a lab with a flame cabinet and are experienced with lab techniques. But still.
No, no. please do try this experiment. Just make sure you have someone video the whole thing and upload the it to youtube.
I run Linux at home on all the general purpose computers and my non-tech wife loves it. She finds Windows and OSX confusing and difficult, but the Gnome desktop on Ubuntu is great, once the colour scheme is seen to of course.
She even recommends it to others, but the way she recommends it doesn't sound like a typical geek recommendation. It's all about how easy it is to use and how easy it is to find what you're looking for. Her recommendation even got my mum wanting to try it out and now my mum is hooked, commenting on how clean and simple the desktop is and how applications are grouped in the menu based on function rather than company. Mum teaches English to overseas students and is now recommending OpenOffice and Linux to students who are having trouble affording MS stuff.
Trouble is, with Linux getting so friendly and easy for the unwashed masses, we geeks who love it when nothing quite works are getting limited for choice - there used to be a whole raft of distros that were impossible to get working nicely, now there is only Gentoo. There is XP, as TA suggests, but that has the unfortunate legacy of being patched and maintained for so long and being a mainstream commercial OS, so it really does work too well and is actually pretty easy to keep secure. I'm advocating that geeks switch to Haiku or GNU/HURD. That way we can spend weeks getting a native OS just to boot and not be tainted with the use of a OS for the masses.
Imagine that you wanted to start your car making business... and then you find out, that unless you are able to build a Ferrari, you'll fail: the market is filled with crude and unsafe (but extremely cheap) Chineese cars, which you can't compete with on price.
That is the situation where GPL leads us to. Inability for small companies to profit from mplayer code means that only large companies like Microsoft or Apple will be able to sell closed source video players.
That's it.../. is over. Here we have a car analogy in a flame war about software licenses which mentions Apple, Microsoft and media players.
NOTICE: This software product (together with it's accompanying documentation, the "product") is the property of ALLIED REAL SOFTWARE ENTERPRISES (ARSE). The product is made available to you, the reader, subject to the following license agreement ("LICENSE"). Please read this license carefully before doing anything else. No future copy of this license will be available to you in any form as it will be unnecessary.
By reading or understanding this license agreement, you agree to be bound by it in perpetuity.
1. Ownership ARSE owns you. You will do what you are told by ARSE or appointed officers of ARSE without question. End of Story.
2. Grant of license and scope of use. 2.1 Grant of License. You are permitted to read this agreement once. You are not permitted to re-read this agreement in case you attempt to over-analyse the terms of this agreement, contrary to the terms of this agreement. You are reminded that by reading this agreement, you agree with it. That's why it's called an agreement, sucker.
2.2 Other conditions. Thou shalt not over-analyse the fucking wording of the contract! You have already agreed! Shut the fuck up. Get me my dinner.
I'd put most of Terry Pratchett's work in the Fantasy category rather than sci-fi, although the sci-fi he has written is pretty good. I really enjoyed the Douglas Adams books as a kid, although I was lazy so I preferred listening to tapes of the Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy radio play.
Whichever the preference, humour is generally a good way to keep it interesting, at least it was for me as a kid.
Bush invaded because he claimed the threat was bad enough to warrant action.
Bullshit, Bullshit and Bullshit. Blix did say that the Iraqis didn't have a working nuclear program, but that they would start up again if inspections ceased. Yellow cake on scuds would do fuck all, probably a short term increase in repository problems in people who inhaled the dust and some very, very mild heavy metal poisoning. Bush invaded because of Iraqi oil and the behaviour of the US under Bush has done more harm to international peace than Saddam could ever have hoped for in his wildest dreams. Yep, we need a mechanism to deal with people like Saddam, but more importantly, we need a mechanism to deal with people like Bush.
Sure, he came up with an excuse and a lot of people bought it, but it's pretty clear that the whole invasion was armed robbery. The previous Australian defence minister, now leader of the opposition, even said so publicly before he was gagged by one of Bush's partners in crime, then Prime Minister Howard.
So many people all around the world knew at the time what it was about and yet people still maintain this line that he did it for the reasons that he stated publicly. He is responsible for the deaths of many thousands of civilians, women and children, all to supply oil for American SUVs and profits for companies he and his friends own stakes in. He is a common criminal in an uncommon position. What would a Texan get in Texas for shooting one child in an armed robbery?
On a related note, why is it okay for a country to have nuclear weapons, pursue new nuclear weapons and resist international calls for disarmament when that country is the only one in the world that has ever used nuclear weapons aggressively and has a commander in chief with no regard for international law, let alone the constitutional law of his own country? Why is that okay, but Iraq or now Iran wanting nukes is not?
Yeah, I know the knee jerk emotive response that these countries are "evil", but any honest assessment of international affairs for the last 100 years will show that there is one country that consistently invades other countries or topples governments when they don't tow the line. There is one country that consistently points the finger at anyone else for criminal or terrorist activity when it is funding or committing terrorist acts itself. I am not at all surprised that Iran wants nukes given the threats it faces from Isreal and the US.
The thing that concerns me about this nuclear fuel is that now it has moved to Canada, it could find it's way into a new generation of US weapons and now that GWB looks like getting off without being gassed, electrocuted or otherwise put down, a precedent has been set making the White House even more attractive to psychopathic criminals. I kind of wish the yellow cake had been left in Iraq.
That's the crux of the problem with gun laws in general. Criminals, by definition aren't interested in following the law, therefore, the stringent gun laws only hamper law abiding citizens.
There's a strong counter argument to that. If guns are heavily restricted, a criminal is less likely to feel the need for a gun when committing a crime. The more available guns are, the more likely a criminal might need one to defend themselves when trying to commit a crime.
Places with stronger anti gun laws have lower gun related crime in general. Not everywhere, we all know the Swiss are wierd, but it does hold true for most jurisdictions. I think the right to bear arms is classic security theater.
500 years from now, just think how out of touch the elderly will be!
I saw a survey of doctors that reported that the doctors thought that the average life expectancy a hundred years from now would be only about a hundred years. That means those doctors thought aging wouldn't be cured for more than 200 years!
Can you actually imagine out of touch elderly people who are fit enough to actually implement their old fashioned, crotchety notions? The fact that the life expectancy will still be one hundred years will have more to do with homicide than old age.
Actually, all silliness aside, that raises an interesting point. If aging is no longer a killer and supposing people aren't automatically neutered, would the fact that human life is devalued make homicide less of a crime?
I have a feeling they're going to discover something that they really wouldn't want to know. Like Chocolate is 99% the same genetically as poop
Or even worse, they'll discover that if they remove the gene responsible for creating caffeine from cacao, they'll end up with carob. Personally, I'm hoping for the poop scenario.
You forgot to one:
-Install it inside VirtualBox on Linux. It's much easier to manage that way and the performance is about the same on VBox 1.6.x as native, at least subjectively on my hardware.
You seem to have a short term view. Wait another 12 - 18 months when Linux is on every STB/media device from Asia, when Linux is on all the tablets, etc and people are really noticing that Linux is cheaper and better than windows out of the box. That's when the true benefits of Bill's silence will be realised. That's when everybody wins.
Interestingly enough, Gates could have really improved his image during his tenure at Microsoft if he let emails like that "leak" out prior to stepping down.
Maybe, but then again he still had to work there and keep the company working effectively. If this stuff had leaked out to everyone in the company, who knows what it would have done for morale? Keeping this kind of stuff in the family is often the best thing to do for the family.
Vista's better than the playskool stressfest that was XP.
Absolute hogwash. I bought a vista notebook, which now has Hardy on it, and it was slow to do anything. Not only is IO slow, but the way they have laid things out in the UI is slow too. The number of clicks it takes to do any system configuration stuff is painful. Combine that with digital restriction management and the whole experience sucks.
If I was interested in running windows, I would prefer XP. Even better would be 2000, if they had bothered to maintain it and provide updates. Vista is an absolute joke which I found unusable and given that I was only ever exposed to ME for about half an hour, I think it's the worst OS since Windows 1.0. Vista is more of a playskool stressfest - it looks all plasticy and colourful, but it's made entirely of big, bloated clunky pieces that, while they may choke the hardware, won't choke the silly little kiddies that play with them and it is unusable for the task it looks like it should perform. It's so playskool.
The way the whole SCO thing played out was really good for Linux.
If SCO had been shut up earlier, their loss would not have been as convincing. To me, the fact that so many people from non technical backgrounds backed SCO so strongly and lost so hard not only makes Linux in particular look stronger, but it also will make others less confident about similar actions against large open source projects. Combine that with the fact that most small open source projects stay under the radar until they get large, the whole situation has helped consolidate FOSS and provide reasonable protection from spurious claims.
Not saying it wasn't painful for a lot of people, wars generally are, just saying that it was probably worth taking the hard road for a larger and more emphatic victory.
Not that any of this is specifically Sun's doing. According to you, Sun's great sin was silence. If I was the great dictator of Sun through that time, I would have done the same, especially if I wanted SCO to lose. Anyone with real knowledge of the case and the code knew that it would be difficult for SCO to win. For Sun to remain silent instead of weighing in has reinforced the validity of the victory and the respectability of Sun, who is now open sourcing everything. Win win win
I actually feel they did FOSS a great service, perhaps unintentional, but certainly a blessing in disguise.
Arguably*, one the biggest obstacles to adoption of Malbolge as a programming language is the lack of a decent IDE, and the biggest obstacle to developing a decent IDE is the lack of appropriate hardware to run one on.
Just saying.
*need some kind of disclaimer on a statement like this
Create a reverse Google bomb - Index every link to say 'george bush' from Google, read each page into memory hash the words, assigning value by count amongst all the pages, and then post the top ten words on GW that are not 'the' 'a' 'was' etc.
Create a google bomb for every word that is not 'the' 'a' 'was' etc.
Try and get the top ten results for everything point to pages with this embedded.
Hit trend with a $30M fine if they are found to have made a patent claim that turned out to be obviously bogus.
Yeah, that'd fix the patent system.
So if I come up with something in my shed at home, apply for a patent and succeed, then "Big $ Patent Trolls R Us" find some prior art in their extensive portfolio, they could sue me into oblivion, tear down my workshop, spit in my breakfast cereal and have me locked up for failure to pay punitive damages. I would of course feel that to be entirely justified because I had the arrogance to get a patent approved for something which on closer inspection turned out to be covered elsewhere.
Yes, massive punitive damages would would ensure that the patent system does what it is intended to do: Stand as a massive risk and impediment for innovators attempting to glean income from their inventions while allowing established companies to wield an even bigger club to crush competition. F'n Brillant
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This is what concerns me. On face value the idea sounds like a huge step forward for democracy and people who don't really think things through or aren't particularly educated will vote for it.
I have seen loads of clips - and yes American /.ers, I know how easy it is to selectively edit these things - that show interviews with "average Americans on the street" saying that Buddhists are terrorists who should be nuked when asked what they think of Buddhists. I know that this is not true for all Americans, but I also know a large percentage of Americans know less about the world outside their local area than any other Western country. I have grave fears for these people being able to directly vote on anything that a nuclear armed super power might do.
Sometimes I feel pissed off about the traditional two party thing we have here in Australia too, but there is something to be said for a system with checks and balances, separation of powers, the rule of law and non-elected bureaucrats keeping things orderly. It's frustrating but relatively benign and this idea of letting anyone vote directly on decisions threatens all of these things.
I worked in a building where the software running the lifts sucked. I dreamed of being able to write code to make it so that a trip from the lobby to level 20 could never ever take 7 minutes again. Having a reasonably powerful general purpose computing platform to co-ordinate lifts is a simple way to improve these systems. It has the potential to make the building more efficient in terms of transport times and power consumption, especially in taller buildings. Of course one would assume that mechanical safety systems have priority over anything the server says.
Not saying Windows - even CE - is the best choice by any means, just saying.
No, no. please do try this experiment. Just make sure you have someone video the whole thing and upload the it to youtube.
I run Linux at home on all the general purpose computers and my non-tech wife loves it. She finds Windows and OSX confusing and difficult, but the Gnome desktop on Ubuntu is great, once the colour scheme is seen to of course.
She even recommends it to others, but the way she recommends it doesn't sound like a typical geek recommendation. It's all about how easy it is to use and how easy it is to find what you're looking for. Her recommendation even got my mum wanting to try it out and now my mum is hooked, commenting on how clean and simple the desktop is and how applications are grouped in the menu based on function rather than company. Mum teaches English to overseas students and is now recommending OpenOffice and Linux to students who are having trouble affording MS stuff.
Trouble is, with Linux getting so friendly and easy for the unwashed masses, we geeks who love it when nothing quite works are getting limited for choice - there used to be a whole raft of distros that were impossible to get working nicely, now there is only Gentoo. There is XP, as TA suggests, but that has the unfortunate legacy of being patched and maintained for so long and being a mainstream commercial OS, so it really does work too well and is actually pretty easy to keep secure. I'm advocating that geeks switch to Haiku or GNU/HURD. That way we can spend weeks getting a native OS just to boot and not be tainted with the use of a OS for the masses.
That's it... /. is over. Here we have a car analogy in a flame war about software licenses which mentions Apple, Microsoft and media players.
Now what is there to live for?
NOTICE: This software product (together with it's accompanying documentation, the "product") is the property of ALLIED REAL SOFTWARE ENTERPRISES (ARSE). The product is made available to you, the reader, subject to the following license agreement ("LICENSE"). Please read this license carefully before doing anything else. No future copy of this license will be available to you in any form as it will be unnecessary.
By reading or understanding this license agreement, you agree to be bound by it in perpetuity.
1. Ownership
ARSE owns you. You will do what you are told by ARSE or appointed officers of ARSE without question. End of Story.
2. Grant of license and scope of use.
2.1 Grant of License.
You are permitted to read this agreement once. You are not permitted to re-read this agreement in case you attempt to over-analyse the terms of this agreement, contrary to the terms of this agreement. You are reminded that by reading this agreement, you agree with it. That's why it's called an agreement, sucker.
2.2 Other conditions.
Thou shalt not over-analyse the fucking wording of the contract! You have already agreed! Shut the fuck up. Get me my dinner.
3. Exceptions.
Yeah, sorry. To clarify - I read the books when at home. I listened to the tapes on long drives. Reading in a car always made me feel sick anyway.
I'd put most of Terry Pratchett's work in the Fantasy category rather than sci-fi, although the sci-fi he has written is pretty good. I really enjoyed the Douglas Adams books as a kid, although I was lazy so I preferred listening to tapes of the Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy radio play.
Whichever the preference, humour is generally a good way to keep it interesting, at least it was for me as a kid.
Bullshit, Bullshit and Bullshit. Blix did say that the Iraqis didn't have a working nuclear program, but that they would start up again if inspections ceased. Yellow cake on scuds would do fuck all, probably a short term increase in repository problems in people who inhaled the dust and some very, very mild heavy metal poisoning. Bush invaded because of Iraqi oil and the behaviour of the US under Bush has done more harm to international peace than Saddam could ever have hoped for in his wildest dreams. Yep, we need a mechanism to deal with people like Saddam, but more importantly, we need a mechanism to deal with people like Bush.
Sure, he came up with an excuse and a lot of people bought it, but it's pretty clear that the whole invasion was armed robbery. The previous Australian defence minister, now leader of the opposition, even said so publicly before he was gagged by one of Bush's partners in crime, then Prime Minister Howard.
So many people all around the world knew at the time what it was about and yet people still maintain this line that he did it for the reasons that he stated publicly. He is responsible for the deaths of many thousands of civilians, women and children, all to supply oil for American SUVs and profits for companies he and his friends own stakes in. He is a common criminal in an uncommon position. What would a Texan get in Texas for shooting one child in an armed robbery?
On a related note, why is it okay for a country to have nuclear weapons, pursue new nuclear weapons and resist international calls for disarmament when that country is the only one in the world that has ever used nuclear weapons aggressively and has a commander in chief with no regard for international law, let alone the constitutional law of his own country? Why is that okay, but Iraq or now Iran wanting nukes is not?
Yeah, I know the knee jerk emotive response that these countries are "evil", but any honest assessment of international affairs for the last 100 years will show that there is one country that consistently invades other countries or topples governments when they don't tow the line. There is one country that consistently points the finger at anyone else for criminal or terrorist activity when it is funding or committing terrorist acts itself. I am not at all surprised that Iran wants nukes given the threats it faces from Isreal and the US.
The thing that concerns me about this nuclear fuel is that now it has moved to Canada, it could find it's way into a new generation of US weapons and now that GWB looks like getting off without being gassed, electrocuted or otherwise put down, a precedent has been set making the White House even more attractive to psychopathic criminals. I kind of wish the yellow cake had been left in Iraq.
There's a strong counter argument to that. If guns are heavily restricted, a criminal is less likely to feel the need for a gun when committing a crime. The more available guns are, the more likely a criminal might need one to defend themselves when trying to commit a crime.
Places with stronger anti gun laws have lower gun related crime in general. Not everywhere, we all know the Swiss are wierd, but it does hold true for most jurisdictions. I think the right to bear arms is classic security theater.
Can you actually imagine out of touch elderly people who are fit enough to actually implement their old fashioned, crotchety notions? The fact that the life expectancy will still be one hundred years will have more to do with homicide than old age.
Actually, all silliness aside, that raises an interesting point. If aging is no longer a killer and supposing people aren't automatically neutered, would the fact that human life is devalued make homicide less of a crime?
iPods are goggles.
Nice troll AC.
So hang on, let me get this straight. You're saying your gramps was a jerk and you're a smart arse?
Or even worse, they'll discover that if they remove the gene responsible for creating caffeine from cacao, they'll end up with carob. Personally, I'm hoping for the poop scenario.
Even better...
3. Have agricultural scientists develop edible brussel sprouts.
You forgot to one:
-Install it inside VirtualBox on Linux. It's much easier to manage that way and the performance is about the same on VBox 1.6.x as native, at least subjectively on my hardware.
You seem to have a short term view. Wait another 12 - 18 months when Linux is on every STB/media device from Asia, when Linux is on all the tablets, etc and people are really noticing that Linux is cheaper and better than windows out of the box. That's when the true benefits of Bill's silence will be realised. That's when everybody wins.
Maybe, but then again he still had to work there and keep the company working effectively. If this stuff had leaked out to everyone in the company, who knows what it would have done for morale? Keeping this kind of stuff in the family is often the best thing to do for the family.
Absolute hogwash. I bought a vista notebook, which now has Hardy on it, and it was slow to do anything. Not only is IO slow, but the way they have laid things out in the UI is slow too. The number of clicks it takes to do any system configuration stuff is painful. Combine that with digital restriction management and the whole experience sucks.
If I was interested in running windows, I would prefer XP. Even better would be 2000, if they had bothered to maintain it and provide updates. Vista is an absolute joke which I found unusable and given that I was only ever exposed to ME for about half an hour, I think it's the worst OS since Windows 1.0. Vista is more of a playskool stressfest - it looks all plasticy and colourful, but it's made entirely of big, bloated clunky pieces that, while they may choke the hardware, won't choke the silly little kiddies that play with them and it is unusable for the task it looks like it should perform. It's so playskool.
The way the whole SCO thing played out was really good for Linux.
If SCO had been shut up earlier, their loss would not have been as convincing. To me, the fact that so many people from non technical backgrounds backed SCO so strongly and lost so hard not only makes Linux in particular look stronger, but it also will make others less confident about similar actions against large open source projects. Combine that with the fact that most small open source projects stay under the radar until they get large, the whole situation has helped consolidate FOSS and provide reasonable protection from spurious claims.
Not saying it wasn't painful for a lot of people, wars generally are, just saying that it was probably worth taking the hard road for a larger and more emphatic victory.
Not that any of this is specifically Sun's doing. According to you, Sun's great sin was silence. If I was the great dictator of Sun through that time, I would have done the same, especially if I wanted SCO to lose. Anyone with real knowledge of the case and the code knew that it would be difficult for SCO to win. For Sun to remain silent instead of weighing in has reinforced the validity of the victory and the respectability of Sun, who is now open sourcing everything. Win win win
I actually feel they did FOSS a great service, perhaps unintentional, but certainly a blessing in disguise.
Arguably*, one the biggest obstacles to adoption of Malbolge as a programming language is the lack of a decent IDE, and the biggest obstacle to developing a decent IDE is the lack of appropriate hardware to run one on.
Just saying.
*need some kind of disclaimer on a statement like this
Create a google bomb for every word that is not 'the' 'a' 'was' etc.
Try and get the top ten results for everything point to pages with this embedded.
Yeah, that'd fix the patent system.
So if I come up with something in my shed at home, apply for a patent and succeed, then "Big $ Patent Trolls R Us" find some prior art in their extensive portfolio, they could sue me into oblivion, tear down my workshop, spit in my breakfast cereal and have me locked up for failure to pay punitive damages. I would of course feel that to be entirely justified because I had the arrogance to get a patent approved for something which on closer inspection turned out to be covered elsewhere.
Yes, massive punitive damages would would ensure that the patent system does what it is intended to do: Stand as a massive risk and impediment for innovators attempting to glean income from their inventions while allowing established companies to wield an even bigger club to crush competition. F'n Brillant
It also effects spellig