This is the executive order I believe was referred to. It's pretty hairy stuff. It's got a daisy-chain clause that says, "if you bought lunch for someone who we're using this order to freeze assets/property of, we can freeze yours too." But one better, "if you're purported to have bought lunch..."
And really, it's just indicative of the general approach the Bush Regime takes towards these matters: "No procedure, just do whatever you think now, and later we'll get congress to say it was okay."
[...] all property and interests in property of the following persons, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons, are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in: any person determined by the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, [...]
That's the part that says it's purely discretion of the Exec. Branch Secs to freeze the property...
[...]there need be no prior notice of a listing or determination made pursuant to section 1(a) of this order.
For those who think that we are detrimental to the universe, I suggest that the only logical thing to do is to kill yourself. Now. For the good of the universe. Quit reading; do it now. Thank you.
Obviously you are not as much of a logician as you'd like to believe.
IF humans are detrimental to the universe AND the universe is good THEN kill yourself?
How about:
IF humans are detrimental AND universe is good THEN kill as many humans as possible.
Point is, anyone that thinks humanity is bad for the universe or the planet, etc. need not be so deluded to believe their very existence in and of itself is a problem. They could believe, for example, that humans are only dangerous because of their acquisition of nuclear armaments or because of their population size and growth rate. In neither of these example cases would it follow that their removal of themselves from the pool is a solution. Genocide might be.
But that's all just silly. As numerous other posts point out, the Universe (and planet) don't care. If the human race overtaxes the systems it needs to survive then they will die like yeast fermenting a brew of alcohol. Their own karma (ie, the consequences of their actions) will be their undoing. No suicide or genocide needed.
So thanks for trying to convince people to kill themselves. Must be part of your whole "humans are a benefit" philosophy eh?
At what point to we question the system of transportation as a whole? A completely sober person with no distractions can still cause an accident. That coupled with the fact that the modern lifestyle demands people do things like not get enough sleep, be on their phones constantly, not stay home when sick (and therefore be at the wheel drowsy), etc. makes for a completely idiotic system of transport.
Studies have shown driving fatigued is a major problem too: One of many articles you can find on google.
Do we ban people not sleeping enough?
Granted, most people on the road are good enough drivers that we don't constantly have complete chaos on the roads. But cars are not inherently safe, efficient, or anything really that great.
The fact that we are so enamored with them is as sick as mine and others' addictions to cigarettes.
When I see articles about drunk driving accidents or drunk drivers (heh: Paris, Lindsay, Bush, Cheney, etc.) my first reaction isn't "that person is a stain," but "I've never seen a major study about what percentage of people who drove regularly for any period of their lives and are not teetotalers drove drunk at least once."
I'm guessing that it's at least in the high 60% range, but that's a completely blind guess. There's never been a study. Nobody knows.
They mean from just a set of images (ie, no meta data or other 'context' as you wondered) they can identify similar images to the image to patch and then find good fits in those images. It's probably not that difficult to do, but the approach is the reason for that.
You just set up some sort of heuristic mechanism to ascertain common elements in picture A and then scan through the set for matches ranking by number of hits.
It's a lot like a radix trie in that it relies on partially similar nodes/pictures to work. A radix trie with completely heterogeneous leaves wouldn't work.
So one way of using their algorithm would be to start with the set of images and build a tree/trie that would reveal 'close neighbors' and then select one, select a region, and patch it from a close neighbor.
You could have a timelapse scene of a horizon and the tree/trie (whichever structure was more reasonable) would build such that shots taken in relative chronological proximity in a single day would likely be close neighbors while daybreak and nightfall wouldn't be.
It would be interesting to see if the algorithm would pair a sunrise and sunset provided the context was the same.
That's the real irony of this. A (not 'the') red cross is basically an international symbol of first aid. Last I checked you can't hold a trademark on diluted marks. I can't go out and trademark (and assume no one holds a trademark on) a mortar & pestle. Same goes for the three balls for pawn shops or the barber's pole.
Just for the record they released that driver last week too... but they had a bug that caused the beta test watermark to be stuck on the screen if you used several of the common installation methods. To those of us who follow their drivers patiently hoping for ones that will work, it was a candid moment where you say to yourself, "this is a sick joke. AMD must be outsourcing their driver development to Microsoft."
Not to deride their efforts, but it gets frustrating when month after month crawls by and they offer very little in the way of better drivers. And then they can't even be bothered to have VM setups so they can run through the various installs before uploading to make sure there's not something crazy like a watermark about to be imposed on their customers.
Grab it (somehow) from someone else's precompiled form
Compile it yourself
The former is obviously easier of the two. The latter requires that you get the data somehow and then combine it into a usable format.
The former is easiest with the existing solution (data direct from zap2it), but is feasible through other mechanisms (most notably programs that download some flavor of HTML and then parse to get the useful data).
The latter would require either:
Individuals that use the data to copy or write or scan it somehow
Stations or cable providers to send the data to a central source
The first is feasible, but there's a strong question of how much effort it would take and how reliable it would be. The latter would merely require the stations to replicate an existing behavior, but it would take contacting them and getting them to agree to do so (difficult depending on what sort of contract if any they have with zap2it and so forth).
The main benefit of the latter would be if a simple format were designed (or possibly already exists?) that would allow for listings to be easily distributed across the internet.
Such a format would provide precise station information (who provides it, where, what frequencies geographically, and if it's a 'local affiliate' then it could have a depends->(inter)national station and only list its differences.
If such a system/format were deployed and became used it would effectively put the companies that currently gather/compile the data out of business. It would also mean that the differences in regional datasets could be largely nullified and that any market could have good data.
To recap: the best solution is the hardest solution. It is a suite of software for both pushing and pulling the data and its main hurdle would be gaining acceptance/use by the stations. The worst solution is basically the existing one. URL-scraping is a little bit worse, but not sufficiently worse to be distinguishable from the data direct solution.
I think the intention of that suggestion is that the candidates wouldn't be able to weasel out of giving an answer to questions as they always do. Always. In the recent CNN debates Wolf Blitzer said it was a rule that the candidates stay on topic of the question presented to them, and he'd often follow up and reiterate the question when they strayed, but most of the time they'd still never answer it.
I agree that if they were forced to answer questions they'd simply not debate, but then maybe we'd see some candidates that recognized the exposure they got and their ability to point at the ones that didn't was valuable. We're supposed to have competition for public offices and when even one candidate shows they have integrity and consistency of their positions the rest have the choice of exiting the market or changing to be competitive.
I'm doing nothing of the sort. I'm defending the practice of a new President to wipe the job roster and fill it. I think there are cases to be made against it, but ultimately it is the prerogative of the President to decide which, if any, of the old employees should remain in their positions, move positions, etc.
And I think that's fine. I think that fluidity is an important trait of our economy and that we should seek to make it easier for people to secure while moving from business to business, from hat to hat, from project to project. Should a President evaluate existing workers before firing them? Certainly. Is it their discretion who stays and goes? Yep. Should the public hold these decisions to scrutiny? Without a doubt.
Is there a substantive difference between wiping the roster at the beginning and suddenly deciding to change the line mid-game? Yes. Is it the President's right to do so? Without a doubt. Ought it be held up to scrutiny? Most certainly. And, the kicker, if it was done for political reasons in the middle of his administration, is that condemnable? It is.
Do I care about Bill Clinton? No. Do I believe he made mistakes? Yes. Was he as bad as Bush? Debatable. There was lower spending, a balanced budget. Those are traits one should expect (based purely on rhetoric and not at all on past performance) from a Republican Presidency. Aside from Tax Cuts the Reagan and Bush Presidencies look a lot more like what the Republicans claim the Democrats do. Record deficits with record spending.
Stop kidding yourselves. Just because I have a problem with Bush doesn't mean I'm a Clintonite. That's not only absurd, it's the same bent rhetoric the President himself uses when he says "If you're not with me, you're with the enemy." In this case the enemy being Clinton rather than Bin Laden. I stand not with Clinton, Bin Laden, or Bush, thank you very much. And it's truly intellectually dishonest to claim I do.
Here is a 2004 article detailing a German invention designed to reprimand men for lifting the toilet seat.
According to this list of prostate health suggestions sitting to piss helps to completely empty the bladder.
And here is an example of a 'no pissing while standing' sign.
Of course the issue cuts both ways with the P-Mate, and other techniques to enable women to evacuate while standing.
While I'll agree that society (including US) has tendencies to over-obsessing about bodily functions I don't think they are any worse than suggesting that it's wrong for a man to piss whilst seated. Next thing you'll tell me is that I'm wrong to be disgusted when I see other guys leave a restroom without washing their hands (or just doing the quick, no-soap rinse).
I'm not some fanatic about germs, but personal hygiene is important. As far as sitting to piss, I generally stand. I'll sit if I feel like it.
The man substantial difference in the firings of attorneys was when it occurred. It is traditional (even if idiotic) for new Presidents to fire lots of people from such jobs upon taking office and filling those positions with people who have assisted in their election efforts. It is not typical to, in the middle of their term, decide some people aren't aligned with their political views and terminate their employment on that basis.
The issue of forcing us into debt is couched in the fact of cutting taxes while raising spending to miraculous levels. It is completely irresponsible to do so and creates more debt for our nation than has ever been created before. Against our will.
Cutting programs? Ha! More like building giant monolithic bureaucracy that dooms our intelligence agencies to ignorance. Any sound investor can tell you diversifying your investments is very important. Hard to do that when they're all in one basket.
Illegally imprisoning people without charge has occurred in the past, but not in the recent past on such a scale as we see today. Whatever the past may say, it was wrong then and it is wrong today to do so.
And that's where I find the biggest problem with your questions. Two wrongs have never, ever, ever made a right. Just because others have done the same thing does not justify it. It is wrong to place a wiretap or otherwise eavesdrop without the oversight of the courts. It is wrong to take someone into custody and question them without either granting them immunity from prosecution (in which case they are free and merely detained for their protection, isolated from prisoners) or charging them with a crime (in which case they have the right to a trial, legal representation, to confront their accusers and evidence against them before a jury).
If we have such a big problem in this country with doing things by the book, according to the letter of the law, then we might as well hang up our hats. There is no such thing as asymmetric justice and liberty. It's either, as the Pledge says, "with liberty and justice for all" or it's "without liberty or justice for any."
As for the democracy issue, it's hard to say when a nation stops being a democracy just as it's hard to say when a grocery store stops becoming commerce. If I'm wildly misinformed and ignorant of the products in the grocery store (their contents, uses, costs, externalities) when does my decision to buy them stop being reasonable? Obviously there is some point at which it does. If everyone in the nation voted on randomness would it still be democracy? That is an interesting question which would take some time and thought to answer.
No doubt you've posted because A) you believe what you say or B) you don't believe anything you say. If it's the former then you ought to stick to defending the decisions rather than those that make them. And not by saying "it's been done like this before." If it's the latter I applaud you for use of Socratic Irony.
I agree entirely. Depending on the software having generalized cores only makes sense for so long before you're not getting enough parallel code to make it worth it. The obvious solution is to view the chip-space as real estate for some general transistors, some cache, some specialized transistors, and whatever other novel and precious can be squeezed in there. That's up to and including running a portion of the cores overclocked in bursts that would, if sustained, be damaging and then switch off to another set of the cores rapidly (a la crop rotation).
It's much more an affront to their worldview to think that god didn't just snap its fingers and suddenly modern-day humans with their SUVs appeared. They have a need to believe that everything was planned and that their golf game will improve because it's their destiny.
It's largely based in the concept (the terminology escapes me at the moment, possibly investment trap?) whereby you bought a lemon of a car. You poured $1,000 into that car in the first year and it was still a lemon so you poured $1,000 into it each year for the next five. Suddenly you're in your 7th year with it and it needs another $1,250 of work done on it. You feel committed due to the money you've already put into it, even though your best interest is to accept your poor decision of the past and move on.
If you find out some integral part of your belief system is flawed and yet you've spent the past 30 years committed to it, making decisions based on it then you're far less likely to change. There are some known examples of this including the Millerites[1] who believed the end of the world was imminent and then when the day came and went selected a new date. Even after the new date came to pass without consequence the followers did not disperse entirely. Scientologists[2] fit that bill as well, believing in the power of the e-meter and pay for pray as they climb the stairway to heaven.
This is why closing your mind and solidifying in a belief is a bad thing. It keeps you from being able to adapt when something like Global Warming occurs. You're dragging your feet to make the changes you need to and then when it's too late you're screwed.
Ideally we'll start doing that (as funny as it is). Video and audio should be chunkable (and formats need to be developed to do that (or do they already exist?)) Presentations like EPIC should be 'chapter' indexed and easily paused and skipped through.
We're heading to a world of alternative views. Why should I have to right click->properties as opposed to right click->context menu? The interface is different, but the information contained in both is identical. The development and design of the future needs to take that into account and automate it. We need algorithms to create GUIs rather than hard-coding it all.
In other words, information needs to be more malleable.
Yes. QWTF. The TF Trailer. 2forts. Spazball. Hunted. The original Canalzone is still one of the greatest maps ever. The >V server. Phat Dragon.
Hell, I bought Quake2 and Half-life 1 primarily because they were supposed to make TF2 for them. That was what, 1998? And TF2 is due out in a vastly different form (finally) this Fall.
It wasn't just TF and the TF team (though they did a lot, including the Birthday easter egg that would turn all grenades into presents on the TF birthday every year), but user-created content spawns a community that in turn creates more user-created content. Numerous CS maps, CS:S maps, RTCW:ET maps, any game you can map for.
Selling someone a product is fine, but selling them a product they can make their own is ten times better. Cars, Slashdot sigs, case mods, cell phones, mozilla chrome and addons, and so on. Trent Reznor has started releasing tracks to be hacked by the community, yet the RIAA/MPAA/MSM are still too dumb to recognize their customers are full of great content. That they can make a hell of a lot more money inside the club dancing with them than outside of the club yelling at them to pay.
As I posted on digg when this story was there, all this really shows is that the establishment still fears the dissent of the people. And, therefore, that we can still reform our government and change things for the better via simple dissent. We don't need a revolution or violence. All we need is to keep talking.
To save another lengthy point-by-point defense I'll simply say it: it's the code, stupid.
Linux isn't anything except the code. Open source and free software, they are the code. The code and the license(s).
They can't be crushed and won't just break. The code is there along with the rights to it. That's what linux/gnu/etc. is.
Is it open is it secure is it a commune is it pro- is it a myth? It's the fact that you don't get it: it's the code, stupid. That's the what and why. The who is anyone. The when is any time.
Yes there's a community and yes it fights. Yes there are redundant projects and good code and bad code. But at the end of the day, it's the code. Anyone with any familiarity with what free and open source software is can tell you that.
Linus said it recently with the Gnome dispute: a feature he wanted didn't exist and after inquiring he found himself in a silly dispute about that. He answered with code.
Agree and disagree. There are certainly ways that the majority of computing tasks can avoid a CLI, and yet a CLI is very powerful to have. If you're using an application extensively you probably want to be able to learn a command line for it. You're better off if you do. On the other hand, if you're a casual user of a program you are better off with some form of GUI.
Now here's where the breakdown lies: some applications are CLI-only and many are clunky-GUI + CLI. This is a horrible design flaw. All applications should be CLI-only EXCEPT applications that exclusively provide a GUI for a CLI-app. In other words, if written properly any application should be functional on the command line (okay, probably some exceptions which I'll simply acknowledge and ignore). Therefore, GUI-ing an app should be less stringent task and one that allows for multiple GUIs for the same app with various targets in mind _without_ trying to pack a novice/expert/etc. set of options and aspects under a single roof.
Why do I make that claim? One important but oft-ignored design tenet is to divide and conquer. As much as rationally possible things should be broken into units of work and reused. If I'm writing a calculator I want one function for each basic operation, I want one module to handle input from other input modules, etc. You can complain all you want "KISS" but when you've written a monolithic calculator program and we both want to change the system in some way, you're busy trying to declunk the monster and rewrite massive parts while I can just exchange the head or tail or a few guts (depending on the change) and I'm done.
This sort of thing is coming... we're probably about 20 years away from a sane computing environment, but it'll happen. Until then you'll just have to make due and weigh what's important to you as the burden of what system you use and accept its faults.
This is running with DRI? Are you trying to use xv or opengl for the card side of video playing? Will it play regular videos and just not DVD? Etc.
It could be something as simple as forcing your player of choice to use openGL or disable xv in the xorg.conf, etc.
If your video card works in linux otherwise you've pretty much narrowed the problem down to a more specific set of possibilities. You should be able to continue to knock them off until you can definitively say "this is a bug" or "this is configured wrong"
Check the unofficial bugzilla too. You may consider adding your issue to it if the plausible fixes dry up.
If you want a more accurate count couldn't they create a dummy package ('fedora-stats-meta-#.#.#' where # represents the version info) and update it with a new version, and count that specific package? Possibly need a faulty depends clause on a critical package to 'force' installation, or otherwise leave it opt-in with some sort of visible request that people install it.
Even then it'll only give a number of downloads, which differs from number of people and number of installs. Some people have a number of installs of whatever distro they run and will no doubt run one box as a repository cache for their others.
Couldn't they just use the power of electricity to get a rapid measure? Well, relatively rapid.
Something like: fix one end of circuit below waterline. Fix other end on some floating piece that will, when waterline drops, be magnetized to other end, complete circuit. Note that the floating has to be wide enough and buoyant enough that the magnetism can't cheat it (can't flip over or pull itself under).
Fill two drains, one with the small amount of oil at the top. Have a timer started on each, which auto-kills when the circuit is created.
(I don't know if this is actually a good idea/would work, but it seems "plausible," at least by MB standards.)
My solution was a little different. I think they should go with versioning the articles rather than restricting the editorship. Really, there's nothing wrong with letting a billion people edit the articles, just with the noise control involved. So, for example, once they reach the 1.0 mark on a cannon of articles those articles would be viewable at a 1.0 threshold if the reader wishes. That would ensure a fairly accurate, static copy of the information. Of course, viewing the diff to the most recent would still be very easy. Idea is, you can look at things from a slightly dated, but known-good (as in a release version) or you can browse wikipedia at 'nightly' or 'development' level:o)
Slashdot Mirror
This is the executive order I believe was referred to. It's pretty hairy stuff. It's got a daisy-chain clause that says, "if you bought lunch for someone who we're using this order to freeze assets/property of, we can freeze yours too." But one better, "if you're purported to have bought lunch..."
And really, it's just indicative of the general approach the Bush Regime takes towards these matters: "No procedure, just do whatever you think now, and later we'll get congress to say it was okay."
That's the part that says it's purely discretion of the Exec. Branch Secs to freeze the property...
That's the part that says it's secret.
The video is on YouTube...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtiGd58J0bY
Obviously you are not as much of a logician as you'd like to believe.
IF humans are detrimental to the universe AND the universe is good
THEN kill yourself?
How about:
IF humans are detrimental AND universe is good
THEN kill as many humans as possible.
Point is, anyone that thinks humanity is bad for the universe or the planet, etc. need not be so deluded to believe their very existence in and of itself is a problem. They could believe, for example, that humans are only dangerous because of their acquisition of nuclear armaments or because of their population size and growth rate. In neither of these example cases would it follow that their removal of themselves from the pool is a solution. Genocide might be.
But that's all just silly. As numerous other posts point out, the Universe (and planet) don't care. If the human race overtaxes the systems it needs to survive then they will die like yeast fermenting a brew of alcohol. Their own karma (ie, the consequences of their actions) will be their undoing. No suicide or genocide needed.
So thanks for trying to convince people to kill themselves. Must be part of your whole "humans are a benefit" philosophy eh?
At what point to we question the system of transportation as a whole? A completely sober person with no distractions can still cause an accident. That coupled with the fact that the modern lifestyle demands people do things like not get enough sleep, be on their phones constantly, not stay home when sick (and therefore be at the wheel drowsy), etc. makes for a completely idiotic system of transport.
Studies have shown driving fatigued is a major problem too: One of many articles you can find on google.
Do we ban people not sleeping enough?
Granted, most people on the road are good enough drivers that we don't constantly have complete chaos on the roads. But cars are not inherently safe, efficient, or anything really that great.
The fact that we are so enamored with them is as sick as mine and others' addictions to cigarettes.
When I see articles about drunk driving accidents or drunk drivers (heh: Paris, Lindsay, Bush, Cheney, etc.) my first reaction isn't "that person is a stain," but "I've never seen a major study about what percentage of people who drove regularly for any period of their lives and are not teetotalers drove drunk at least once."
I'm guessing that it's at least in the high 60% range, but that's a completely blind guess. There's never been a study. Nobody knows.
They mean from just a set of images (ie, no meta data or other 'context' as you wondered) they can identify similar images to the image to patch and then find good fits in those images. It's probably not that difficult to do, but the approach is the reason for that.
You just set up some sort of heuristic mechanism to ascertain common elements in picture A and then scan through the set for matches ranking by number of hits.
It's a lot like a radix trie in that it relies on partially similar nodes/pictures to work. A radix trie with completely heterogeneous leaves wouldn't work.
So one way of using their algorithm would be to start with the set of images and build a tree/trie that would reveal 'close neighbors' and then select one, select a region, and patch it from a close neighbor.
You could have a timelapse scene of a horizon and the tree/trie (whichever structure was more reasonable) would build such that shots taken in relative chronological proximity in a single day would likely be close neighbors while daybreak and nightfall wouldn't be.
It would be interesting to see if the algorithm would pair a sunrise and sunset provided the context was the same.
That's the real irony of this. A (not 'the') red cross is basically an international symbol of first aid. Last I checked you can't hold a trademark on diluted marks. I can't go out and trademark (and assume no one holds a trademark on) a mortar & pestle. Same goes for the three balls for pawn shops or the barber's pole.
Three balls;
Barber's Pole;
Mortar and Pestle;
Red Cross (also has 'red crescent' and 'red crystal');
International Symbol of Accessibility
Know any more?
Just for the record they released that driver last week too... but they had a bug that caused the beta test watermark to be stuck on the screen if you used several of the common installation methods. To those of us who follow their drivers patiently hoping for ones that will work, it was a candid moment where you say to yourself, "this is a sick joke. AMD must be outsourcing their driver development to Microsoft."
Not to deride their efforts, but it gets frustrating when month after month crawls by and they offer very little in the way of better drivers. And then they can't even be bothered to have VM setups so they can run through the various installs before uploading to make sure there's not something crazy like a watermark about to be imposed on their customers.
The former is obviously easier of the two. The latter requires that you get the data somehow and then combine it into a usable format.
The former is easiest with the existing solution (data direct from zap2it), but is feasible through other mechanisms (most notably programs that download some flavor of HTML and then parse to get the useful data).
The latter would require either:
The first is feasible, but there's a strong question of how much effort it would take and how reliable it would be.
The latter would merely require the stations to replicate an existing behavior, but it would take contacting them and getting them to agree to do so (difficult depending on what sort of contract if any they have with zap2it and so forth).
The main benefit of the latter would be if a simple format were designed (or possibly already exists?) that would allow for listings to be easily distributed across the internet.
Such a format would provide precise station information (who provides it, where, what frequencies geographically, and if it's a 'local affiliate' then it could have a depends->(inter)national station and only list its differences.
If such a system/format were deployed and became used it would effectively put the companies that currently gather/compile the data out of business. It would also mean that the differences in regional datasets could be largely nullified and that any market could have good data.
To recap: the best solution is the hardest solution. It is a suite of software for both pushing and pulling the data and its main hurdle would be gaining acceptance/use by the stations. The worst solution is basically the existing one. URL-scraping is a little bit worse, but not sufficiently worse to be distinguishable from the data direct solution.
I think the intention of that suggestion is that the candidates wouldn't be able to weasel out of giving an answer to questions as they always do. Always. In the recent CNN debates Wolf Blitzer said it was a rule that the candidates stay on topic of the question presented to them, and he'd often follow up and reiterate the question when they strayed, but most of the time they'd still never answer it.
I agree that if they were forced to answer questions they'd simply not debate, but then maybe we'd see some candidates that recognized the exposure they got and their ability to point at the ones that didn't was valuable. We're supposed to have competition for public offices and when even one candidate shows they have integrity and consistency of their positions the rest have the choice of exiting the market or changing to be competitive.
I'm doing nothing of the sort. I'm defending the practice of a new President to wipe the job roster and fill it. I think there are cases to be made against it, but ultimately it is the prerogative of the President to decide which, if any, of the old employees should remain in their positions, move positions, etc.
And I think that's fine. I think that fluidity is an important trait of our economy and that we should seek to make it easier for people to secure while moving from business to business, from hat to hat, from project to project. Should a President evaluate existing workers before firing them? Certainly. Is it their discretion who stays and goes? Yep. Should the public hold these decisions to scrutiny? Without a doubt.
Is there a substantive difference between wiping the roster at the beginning and suddenly deciding to change the line mid-game? Yes. Is it the President's right to do so? Without a doubt. Ought it be held up to scrutiny? Most certainly. And, the kicker, if it was done for political reasons in the middle of his administration, is that condemnable? It is.
Do I care about Bill Clinton? No. Do I believe he made mistakes? Yes. Was he as bad as Bush? Debatable. There was lower spending, a balanced budget. Those are traits one should expect (based purely on rhetoric and not at all on past performance) from a Republican Presidency. Aside from Tax Cuts the Reagan and Bush Presidencies look a lot more like what the Republicans claim the Democrats do. Record deficits with record spending.
Stop kidding yourselves. Just because I have a problem with Bush doesn't mean I'm a Clintonite. That's not only absurd, it's the same bent rhetoric the President himself uses when he says "If you're not with me, you're with the enemy." In this case the enemy being Clinton rather than Bin Laden. I stand not with Clinton, Bin Laden, or Bush, thank you very much. And it's truly intellectually dishonest to claim I do.
Here is a 2004 article detailing a German invention designed to reprimand men for lifting the toilet seat.
According to this list of prostate health suggestions sitting to piss helps to completely empty the bladder.
And here is an example of a 'no pissing while standing' sign.
Of course the issue cuts both ways with the P-Mate, and other techniques to enable women to evacuate while standing.
While I'll agree that society (including US) has tendencies to over-obsessing about bodily functions I don't think they are any worse than suggesting that it's wrong for a man to piss whilst seated. Next thing you'll tell me is that I'm wrong to be disgusted when I see other guys leave a restroom without washing their hands (or just doing the quick, no-soap rinse).
I'm not some fanatic about germs, but personal hygiene is important. As far as sitting to piss, I generally stand. I'll sit if I feel like it.
The man substantial difference in the firings of attorneys was when it occurred. It is traditional (even if idiotic) for new Presidents to fire lots of people from such jobs upon taking office and filling those positions with people who have assisted in their election efforts. It is not typical to, in the middle of their term, decide some people aren't aligned with their political views and terminate their employment on that basis.
The issue of forcing us into debt is couched in the fact of cutting taxes while raising spending to miraculous levels. It is completely irresponsible to do so and creates more debt for our nation than has ever been created before. Against our will.
Cutting programs? Ha! More like building giant monolithic bureaucracy that dooms our intelligence agencies to ignorance. Any sound investor can tell you diversifying your investments is very important. Hard to do that when they're all in one basket.
Illegally imprisoning people without charge has occurred in the past, but not in the recent past on such a scale as we see today. Whatever the past may say, it was wrong then and it is wrong today to do so.
And that's where I find the biggest problem with your questions. Two wrongs have never, ever, ever made a right. Just because others have done the same thing does not justify it. It is wrong to place a wiretap or otherwise eavesdrop without the oversight of the courts. It is wrong to take someone into custody and question them without either granting them immunity from prosecution (in which case they are free and merely detained for their protection, isolated from prisoners) or charging them with a crime (in which case they have the right to a trial, legal representation, to confront their accusers and evidence against them before a jury).
If we have such a big problem in this country with doing things by the book, according to the letter of the law, then we might as well hang up our hats. There is no such thing as asymmetric justice and liberty. It's either, as the Pledge says, "with liberty and justice for all" or it's "without liberty or justice for any."
As for the democracy issue, it's hard to say when a nation stops being a democracy just as it's hard to say when a grocery store stops becoming commerce. If I'm wildly misinformed and ignorant of the products in the grocery store (their contents, uses, costs, externalities) when does my decision to buy them stop being reasonable? Obviously there is some point at which it does. If everyone in the nation voted on randomness would it still be democracy? That is an interesting question which would take some time and thought to answer.
No doubt you've posted because A) you believe what you say or B) you don't believe anything you say. If it's the former then you ought to stick to defending the decisions rather than those that make them. And not by saying "it's been done like this before." If it's the latter I applaud you for use of Socratic Irony.
whatever other specialized core you envision
I agree entirely. Depending on the software having generalized cores only makes sense for so long before you're not getting enough parallel code to make it worth it. The obvious solution is to view the chip-space as real estate for some general transistors, some cache, some specialized transistors, and whatever other novel and precious can be squeezed in there. That's up to and including running a portion of the cores overclocked in bursts that would, if sustained, be damaging and then switch off to another set of the cores rapidly (a la crop rotation).
I suggest you do some googling for 'alloparental care' and verify that many species do adopt orphans. You fail at being unbiased.
It's much more an affront to their worldview to think that god didn't just snap its fingers and suddenly modern-day humans with their SUVs appeared. They have a need to believe that everything was planned and that their golf game will improve because it's their destiny.
r sy_and_criticism
It's largely based in the concept (the terminology escapes me at the moment, possibly investment trap?) whereby you bought a lemon of a car. You poured $1,000 into that car in the first year and it was still a lemon so you poured $1,000 into it each year for the next five. Suddenly you're in your 7th year with it and it needs another $1,250 of work done on it. You feel committed due to the money you've already put into it, even though your best interest is to accept your poor decision of the past and move on.
If you find out some integral part of your belief system is flawed and yet you've spent the past 30 years committed to it, making decisions based on it then you're far less likely to change. There are some known examples of this including the Millerites[1] who believed the end of the world was imminent and then when the day came and went selected a new date. Even after the new date came to pass without consequence the followers did not disperse entirely. Scientologists[2] fit that bill as well, believing in the power of the e-meter and pay for pray as they climb the stairway to heaven.
This is why closing your mind and solidifying in a belief is a bad thing. It keeps you from being able to adapt when something like Global Warming occurs. You're dragging your feet to make the changes you need to and then when it's too late you're screwed.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerites#Origins
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology#Controve
Ideally we'll start doing that (as funny as it is). Video and audio should be chunkable (and formats need to be developed to do that (or do they already exist?)) Presentations like EPIC should be 'chapter' indexed and easily paused and skipped through.
We're heading to a world of alternative views. Why should I have to right click->properties as opposed to right click->context menu? The interface is different, but the information contained in both is identical. The development and design of the future needs to take that into account and automate it. We need algorithms to create GUIs rather than hard-coding it all.
In other words, information needs to be more malleable.
I'm still waiting for speech recognition to come to our elevators so I don't have to touch the dirty buttons.
Also so I can pretend I'm on the Enterprise.
Yes. QWTF. The TF Trailer. 2forts. Spazball. Hunted. The original Canalzone is still one of the greatest maps ever. The >V server. Phat Dragon.
Hell, I bought Quake2 and Half-life 1 primarily because they were supposed to make TF2 for them. That was what, 1998? And TF2 is due out in a vastly different form (finally) this Fall.
It wasn't just TF and the TF team (though they did a lot, including the Birthday easter egg that would turn all grenades into presents on the TF birthday every year), but user-created content spawns a community that in turn creates more user-created content. Numerous CS maps, CS:S maps, RTCW:ET maps, any game you can map for.
Selling someone a product is fine, but selling them a product they can make their own is ten times better. Cars, Slashdot sigs, case mods, cell phones, mozilla chrome and addons, and so on. Trent Reznor has started releasing tracks to be hacked by the community, yet the RIAA/MPAA/MSM are still too dumb to recognize their customers are full of great content. That they can make a hell of a lot more money inside the club dancing with them than outside of the club yelling at them to pay.
As I posted on digg when this story was there, all this really shows is that the establishment still fears the dissent of the people. And, therefore, that we can still reform our government and change things for the better via simple dissent. We don't need a revolution or violence. All we need is to keep talking.
FWIW I only skimmed the "article."
To save another lengthy point-by-point defense I'll simply say it: it's the code, stupid.
Linux isn't anything except the code. Open source and free software, they are the code. The code and the license(s).
They can't be crushed and won't just break. The code is there along with the rights to it. That's what linux/gnu/etc. is.
Is it open is it secure is it a commune is it pro- is it a myth? It's the fact that you don't get it: it's the code, stupid. That's the what and why. The who is anyone. The when is any time.
Yes there's a community and yes it fights. Yes there are redundant projects and good code and bad code. But at the end of the day, it's the code. Anyone with any familiarity with what free and open source software is can tell you that.
Linus said it recently with the Gnome dispute: a feature he wanted didn't exist and after inquiring he found himself in a silly dispute about that. He answered with code.
codex ipsa loquitur, stupid.
Agree and disagree. There are certainly ways that the majority of computing tasks can avoid a CLI, and yet a CLI is very powerful to have. If you're using an application extensively you probably want to be able to learn a command line for it. You're better off if you do. On the other hand, if you're a casual user of a program you are better off with some form of GUI.
Now here's where the breakdown lies: some applications are CLI-only and many are clunky-GUI + CLI. This is a horrible design flaw. All applications should be CLI-only EXCEPT applications that exclusively provide a GUI for a CLI-app. In other words, if written properly any application should be functional on the command line (okay, probably some exceptions which I'll simply acknowledge and ignore). Therefore, GUI-ing an app should be less stringent task and one that allows for multiple GUIs for the same app with various targets in mind _without_ trying to pack a novice/expert/etc. set of options and aspects under a single roof.
Why do I make that claim? One important but oft-ignored design tenet is to divide and conquer. As much as rationally possible things should be broken into units of work and reused. If I'm writing a calculator I want one function for each basic operation, I want one module to handle input from other input modules, etc. You can complain all you want "KISS" but when you've written a monolithic calculator program and we both want to change the system in some way, you're busy trying to declunk the monster and rewrite massive parts while I can just exchange the head or tail or a few guts (depending on the change) and I'm done.
This sort of thing is coming... we're probably about 20 years away from a sane computing environment, but it'll happen. Until then you'll just have to make due and weigh what's important to you as the burden of what system you use and accept its faults.
This is running with DRI? Are you trying to use xv or opengl for the card side of video playing? Will it play regular videos and just not DVD? Etc.
It could be something as simple as forcing your player of choice to use openGL or disable xv in the xorg.conf, etc.
If your video card works in linux otherwise you've pretty much narrowed the problem down to a more specific set of possibilities. You should be able to continue to knock them off until you can definitively say "this is a bug" or "this is configured wrong"
Check the unofficial bugzilla too. You may consider adding your issue to it if the plausible fixes dry up.
If you want a more accurate count couldn't they create a dummy package ('fedora-stats-meta-#.#.#' where # represents the version info) and update it with a new version, and count that specific package? Possibly need a faulty depends clause on a critical package to 'force' installation, or otherwise leave it opt-in with some sort of visible request that people install it.
Even then it'll only give a number of downloads, which differs from number of people and number of installs. Some people have a number of installs of whatever distro they run and will no doubt run one box as a repository cache for their others.
Couldn't they just use the power of electricity to get a rapid measure? Well, relatively rapid.
Something like: fix one end of circuit below waterline. Fix other end on some floating piece that will, when waterline drops, be magnetized to other end, complete circuit. Note that the floating has to be wide enough and buoyant enough that the magnetism can't cheat it (can't flip over or pull itself under).
Fill two drains, one with the small amount of oil at the top. Have a timer started on each, which auto-kills when the circuit is created.
(I don't know if this is actually a good idea/would work, but it seems "plausible," at least by MB standards.)
(And yes, I know you were kidding)
My solution was a little different. I think they should go with versioning the articles rather than restricting the editorship. Really, there's nothing wrong with letting a billion people edit the articles, just with the noise control involved. So, for example, once they reach the 1.0 mark on a cannon of articles those articles would be viewable at a 1.0 threshold if the reader wishes. That would ensure a fairly accurate, static copy of the information. Of course, viewing the diff to the most recent would still be very easy. Idea is, you can look at things from a slightly dated, but known-good (as in a release version) or you can browse wikipedia at 'nightly' or 'development' level :o)