UN Human Development Index: UK ranks 17th
Human Poverty Index: UK ranks 15th
Economic Freedom Index: UK ranks 10th
Privacy Index: UK ranks 5th (higher is worse)
All numbers courtesy of The Economist Intelligence Unit. They indicate the UK is nowhere near having one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Uh, besides the Privacy Index, it looks like the UK is solidly in the best 10% of countries in all those rankings (out of about 200 countries total). Perhaps you're unclear on what "one of the highest" means. Or maybe you consider the highest to be more like the best 5%, in which case they are, indeed, near.
Of course, the GP seems to think the UK has the highest standard of living in the world, in which case they're the confused one and your post is a sound rebuttal (though I actually had to google to find your source; if you're actually at the site you may as well paste the url in, just to be nice).
1. It looks like the latest version of Emacs is more than 3 times the size of this latest Opera snapshot, web server and everything! So, you know, Emacs is still worth complaining about. (I know, source code vs. compiled binary isn't fair, but I was just making a joke, and Emacs is still fat.)
2. Opera has always been a web suite, for longer than Firefox has even existed, and it's always come with an insane number of features out of the box, and yet it's also always been fast and nimble and light on memory. I think if anyone can keep these new features from acting as a ball and chain on your computer, Opera can.
3. Um... I forget number three. But you're supposed to do things in threes, so here you go.
No, they aren't. They're mad because "Puppet A" lost to "Puppet B". Both were put forth by the Muslim rulers who truly hold power in the country. This is, for all intents and purposes, a shell game run by the Ayatollahs.
I doubt that, simply because the election was so clearly and heavily rigged. I think part of the goal was to send a message to the opposition candidate and his followers, something like, "Yes, you can try all you want but we already control everything and there's really no point in fighting it." They weren't afraid to let a non-puppet candidate run, because they weren't going to count the votes anyway.
They won't be successful on their own, unless they have outside support or there is some tremendous economic calamity that motivates people. At best we'll have a Tianeman square event and in a few years after that everyone will keep buying from the dictators..
True, they won't be successful on their own, but they might not need a full invasion to swing things in their favor, maybe just some international support and visibility would be enough (I don't know how helpful that really is, but I'm just saying maybe).
I suspect this will be more consequential than the Tiananmen square protests, since it seems like the anger is widespread and possibly shared by a very large portion of the country (since the polls had the other guy winning by a large margin). Also, Iran's government doesn't seem to have quite the strangehold on information and "public opinion" that China's had/has, though they're trying for it.
For the most part, the historical record is pretty clear, once you have a dictatorship, you aren't going to "undictatorship". Just the natural order of things. From a stability of government perspective, democracy is better because it imposes rules about how regime change within the country should take place, but, there's never been a democracy that's been historically stable. The Atheniens cratered themselves. The Romans cratered themselves, and probably we'll crater ourselves. Meanwhile some asian style despot monarchy could have governments that last for a thousand years.
However, the past few centuries have really been unprecedented in the sheer number and success of revolutions, especially ones which result in some form of democracy. There are certainly exceptions and I'm not saying we'll stay that way for thousands of years, but it wouldn't be incredibly surprising if one more country leans in a democratic direction.
If the people of Iran want to get rid of their government, they can do it themselves.
Dude, pay attention, that's what they're doing. There's a huge difference between us invading Iraq to unseat Saddam and the Iranians standing up to overturn a massively corrupt election. The Iranian people are pissed, and this is their first step toward something less like a dictatorship.
Nobody is calling for substantial outside help (that I've heard of), like asking us to invade Iran to help a revolution. The "left" has nothing to do with this, and the western media seems not to care all that much about the situation. Even the guy who sent the Ask Slashdot only wanted advice on communicating with others!
Regardless of what happens, this whole shebang was started and led entirely by Iranians who are upset with their government, and they're not looking for some foreign power to send in the cavalry, which I have to respect.
'Course you can turn it off. You can even have it do the full-text index but not show any suggestions while typing addresses (it's searchable through an option in the menu).
It's probably a good idea, though, to keep the naughty browsing to a separate browser altogether (yay firefox!).
You missed my favorite Opera feature, which for some reason nobody ever mentions and I try to bring up whenever it's relevant: full-text history search in the address bar. It's like Firefox's awesome bar but actually awesome and incredibly useful (e.g. finding a recipe I looked at two weeks ago by typing a few ingredients).
The searching can slow things down a bit, so it's best on an excessively-built machine. On my desktop I took the extra step of putting the cache in a tmpfs partition (kinda like this) and set it to remember the max of 50000 pages, and it runs as smoothly as a baby's bottom (sorry, that simile turned out grosser than I intended).
More than that, Opera's address bar actually does a full-text search of all the pages in your history (you can choose how many pages to index so it doesn't monopolize resources, but since I've got the memory/cpu to spare I have it at the max of 50000). It looks like it also keeps all your bookmarks indexed, even if they're not in the last X pages visited, but I'm not positive.
That's probably my favorite feature, and I can't figure out why it's not hyped up at all. You can find a page you visited a few weeks ago based on the punchline of a joke!
I said "Food crops as energy sources was never a good idea" and then talked about a vastly more viable alternative.... i'm confused as to what you're trying to say.
The point is, no rational argument will convince the politicians (or whoever's making the decisions) that algae is a better choice, even though it clearly is and we all know it, because the motivation behind ethanol from corn is not to create a viable alternative energy source, but rather to rub the backs of all the corn farmers and the states whose economies depend on them, in the hopes of garnering more votes.
Wow, that was all one sentence. But anyway, you're entirely right about algae and we all agree with you, but as a practical matter it looks like it'll take a long long time before anyone in charge has the guts to bad-mouth corn ethanol.
Well, some number of us would certainly be happier if they shipped a linux version. They've always been about making the best product they can (and making scads of money in the meanwhile, of course), and it could be worth their while, though it's hard to estimate how many linux users would buy it.
That said, there's no point complaining, so I'm hoping to get it working in Wine, or else I'll throw a spare hard drive in my desktop and install Windows.
1. What makes you think they don't already have a backdoor into every copy of Windows shipped?
2. Maybe Microsoft is really just a patsy in this whole affair, and the government just fosters their monopoly so they'll continue churning out shitty, security-hole-ridden software. I mean, it can't be good to have incredibly rich, influential civilians in on this level of conspiracy, so maybe the NSA doesn't deal with them directly at all...
Well, that's enough for my daily dose of paranoia. To bed!
What does the NSA do, exactly? Yeah, they intercept international communications and develop systems to do this, but is that really all they do... really?
Hmm... Now that you mention it, I'm surprised I've not heard more conspiracy theories that the NSA is behind Conficker (or other worms, but Conficker seems the best bet since it's really well-designed and hasn't yet revealed its purpose) and that the government tends toward pro-Microsoft legislation so that there are more vulnerable, poorly-secured computers throughout the country/world for them to use to their advantage.
I'm not saying it's true, I'm just thinking that the NSA is doing a damn good job since no one has even thought to blame them yet.
It's like when you walk into a Tube station and see ten of the Met's finest standing there. In theory you ought to feel safer, but in practice you wonder what's happening that you don't know about.
See, I had this image of a bunch of guys dressed like the Three Tenors standing around in a subway, and couldn't figure out why that would make someone feel safe...
It's a form issue in my case which the shoe helps to correct. I'm guessing those people who run barefoot have really good form. Take away my shoes and put me on a flat area without any rocks, I figure I might be able to run a few miles before I'm forced to stop because of knee or hip pain. I'll keep my shoes, thankyouverymuch.
No joke... when a new runner starts to experience pain, the quickest remedy to buy new shoes.
Oh, I certainly agree, but I think the article brings up an interesting thought that while it's not necessarily the quickest, running with good form barefoot is better and healthier than wearing most any shoes you can buy. If you move to landing on the ball of your foot, rather than the heel, and depend on your calf for shock absorption, you handle the shock very easily and naturally (I noticed this during my short stint as a cross-country runner, but didn't really make it a habit for some reason.) and also ostensibly strengthen the relevant muscles, reducing pain in the long run (no pun intended).
So, basically: Shoes = easy, temporary fix. Using good form barefoot = long-term fix which addresses the cause of the problem.
Right, but it works out best for them because of the huge mass of people who don't actually understand the contest and will download more apps now because they think they'll get more chances to win. Apple isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, and a short DDoS on a single website of theirs in exchange for a boost in app downloads is an easy trade.
The counter is increasing at about 100 per second. At that rate it'll increase by 70,000,000 in around 8 days. Eight days is reasonable warning for a contest, I think.
Actually, the L4 and L5 points would move at the same rate as the moon, since they are the gravitationally stable points created by the moon and Earth (60 degrees ahead and behind the moon on its orbit). And last time I looked at the moon, it does move against the background stars.
This spacecraft is visiting the Sun-Earth Lagrangian points, not the Earth-Moon ones. The Sun-Earth L4 and L5 are just as far away as the sun, along the earth's orbit, so they'd appear to move just like the sun.
If I may add, the two points are also really far away. I thought they were somewere within the orbit of the moon, but they're actually just as far away as the sun. (This picture cleared things up nicely.) We could probably tell whether asteroids are there, but for the reasons you mentioned we couldn't find out anything more useful.
This would make a lot of sense for training Marines, but why a mass market game? They say they want to tell their stories, but that's what memoirs are for. Looks to me like they are out to make a buck.
They want to reach people like them: people who are growing up playing video games. Sure, a memoir would get the story out there, but few potential marines (a demographic which overlaps heavily with video-game-playing teenagers) are going to pick it up. The point isn't just to be heard, the point is to be heard by the people to whom it matters.
C is good for low-level kernel/embedded/high-performance stuff. If that's what you're into, head in that direction and learn C 'til you know it backward.
It sounds like you're going for general "employability", though, in which case either C++ or Java is good (I like C++, but I've never really done anything in Java). Regarding Fortran, for some reason I'm under the impression that it's mainly job security for the old-timers nowadays?
However, I really think you should pick what you want to do and then learn the skills necessary, rather than going the other direction.
Huh, happy numbers must be one of the most useless things ever. Their "origin" is that a British mathematician's (ostensibly young) daughter learned about them in school then told her father. First off, I can really tell he wasn't grasping at straws for things to publish. Also, that's a damn impressive school, learning about a bit of number theory before the mathematicians even conceive of it.
Slashdot Mirror
UN Human Development Index: UK ranks 17th Human Poverty Index: UK ranks 15th Economic Freedom Index: UK ranks 10th Privacy Index: UK ranks 5th (higher is worse)
All numbers courtesy of The Economist Intelligence Unit. They indicate the UK is nowhere near having one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Uh, besides the Privacy Index, it looks like the UK is solidly in the best 10% of countries in all those rankings (out of about 200 countries total). Perhaps you're unclear on what "one of the highest" means. Or maybe you consider the highest to be more like the best 5%, in which case they are, indeed, near.
Of course, the GP seems to think the UK has the highest standard of living in the world, in which case they're the confused one and your post is a sound rebuttal (though I actually had to google to find your source; if you're actually at the site you may as well paste the url in, just to be nice).
Let's see, three things:
1. It looks like the latest version of Emacs is more than 3 times the size of this latest Opera snapshot, web server and everything! So, you know, Emacs is still worth complaining about. (I know, source code vs. compiled binary isn't fair, but I was just making a joke, and Emacs is still fat.)
2. Opera has always been a web suite, for longer than Firefox has even existed, and it's always come with an insane number of features out of the box, and yet it's also always been fast and nimble and light on memory. I think if anyone can keep these new features from acting as a ball and chain on your computer, Opera can.
3. Um... I forget number three. But you're supposed to do things in threes, so here you go.
No, they aren't. They're mad because "Puppet A" lost to "Puppet B". Both were put forth by the Muslim rulers who truly hold power in the country. This is, for all intents and purposes, a shell game run by the Ayatollahs.
I doubt that, simply because the election was so clearly and heavily rigged. I think part of the goal was to send a message to the opposition candidate and his followers, something like, "Yes, you can try all you want but we already control everything and there's really no point in fighting it." They weren't afraid to let a non-puppet candidate run, because they weren't going to count the votes anyway.
They won't be successful on their own, unless they have outside support or there is some tremendous economic calamity that motivates people. At best we'll have a Tianeman square event and in a few years after that everyone will keep buying from the dictators..
True, they won't be successful on their own, but they might not need a full invasion to swing things in their favor, maybe just some international support and visibility would be enough (I don't know how helpful that really is, but I'm just saying maybe).
I suspect this will be more consequential than the Tiananmen square protests, since it seems like the anger is widespread and possibly shared by a very large portion of the country (since the polls had the other guy winning by a large margin). Also, Iran's government doesn't seem to have quite the strangehold on information and "public opinion" that China's had/has, though they're trying for it.
For the most part, the historical record is pretty clear, once you have a dictatorship, you aren't going to "undictatorship". Just the natural order of things. From a stability of government perspective, democracy is better because it imposes rules about how regime change within the country should take place, but, there's never been a democracy that's been historically stable. The Atheniens cratered themselves. The Romans cratered themselves, and probably we'll crater ourselves. Meanwhile some asian style despot monarchy could have governments that last for a thousand years.
However, the past few centuries have really been unprecedented in the sheer number and success of revolutions, especially ones which result in some form of democracy. There are certainly exceptions and I'm not saying we'll stay that way for thousands of years, but it wouldn't be incredibly surprising if one more country leans in a democratic direction.
"Even the guy who sent the Ask Slashdot only wanted advice on communicating with others."
Which is critically important if you are trying to organize a resistance movement.
Oh, certainly, I didn't mean to imply it was a silly request, just that it's a much smaller request than a full-scale invasion.
If the people of Iran want to get rid of their government, they can do it themselves.
Dude, pay attention, that's what they're doing. There's a huge difference between us invading Iraq to unseat Saddam and the Iranians standing up to overturn a massively corrupt election. The Iranian people are pissed, and this is their first step toward something less like a dictatorship.
Nobody is calling for substantial outside help (that I've heard of), like asking us to invade Iran to help a revolution. The "left" has nothing to do with this, and the western media seems not to care all that much about the situation. Even the guy who sent the Ask Slashdot only wanted advice on communicating with others!
Regardless of what happens, this whole shebang was started and led entirely by Iranians who are upset with their government, and they're not looking for some foreign power to send in the cavalry, which I have to respect.
'Course you can turn it off. You can even have it do the full-text index but not show any suggestions while typing addresses (it's searchable through an option in the menu).
It's probably a good idea, though, to keep the naughty browsing to a separate browser altogether (yay firefox!).
You missed my favorite Opera feature, which for some reason nobody ever mentions and I try to bring up whenever it's relevant: full-text history search in the address bar. It's like Firefox's awesome bar but actually awesome and incredibly useful (e.g. finding a recipe I looked at two weeks ago by typing a few ingredients).
The searching can slow things down a bit, so it's best on an excessively-built machine. On my desktop I took the extra step of putting the cache in a tmpfs partition (kinda like this) and set it to remember the max of 50000 pages, and it runs as smoothly as a baby's bottom (sorry, that simile turned out grosser than I intended).
More than that, Opera's address bar actually does a full-text search of all the pages in your history (you can choose how many pages to index so it doesn't monopolize resources, but since I've got the memory/cpu to spare I have it at the max of 50000). It looks like it also keeps all your bookmarks indexed, even if they're not in the last X pages visited, but I'm not positive.
That's probably my favorite feature, and I can't figure out why it's not hyped up at all. You can find a page you visited a few weeks ago based on the punchline of a joke!
so.. you're agreeing with me?
I said "Food crops as energy sources was never a good idea" and then talked about a vastly more viable alternative.... i'm confused as to what you're trying to say.
The point is, no rational argument will convince the politicians (or whoever's making the decisions) that algae is a better choice, even though it clearly is and we all know it, because the motivation behind ethanol from corn is not to create a viable alternative energy source, but rather to rub the backs of all the corn farmers and the states whose economies depend on them, in the hopes of garnering more votes.
Wow, that was all one sentence. But anyway, you're entirely right about algae and we all agree with you, but as a practical matter it looks like it'll take a long long time before anyone in charge has the guts to bad-mouth corn ethanol.
Well, some number of us would certainly be happier if they shipped a linux version. They've always been about making the best product they can (and making scads of money in the meanwhile, of course), and it could be worth their while, though it's hard to estimate how many linux users would buy it.
That said, there's no point complaining, so I'm hoping to get it working in Wine, or else I'll throw a spare hard drive in my desktop and install Windows.
Why even bother with entries? Just google for "best world bettering idea".
Hey, it worked! It only returned one result, so I know it must be true. So, google says the best world bettering idea is:
Re: (Score:2, Funny). by davester666 (731373). Why even bother with entries? Just google for "best world bettering idea". ...
Dude, you totally called it!
I have two separate responses:
1. What makes you think they don't already have a backdoor into every copy of Windows shipped?
2. Maybe Microsoft is really just a patsy in this whole affair, and the government just fosters their monopoly so they'll continue churning out shitty, security-hole-ridden software. I mean, it can't be good to have incredibly rich, influential civilians in on this level of conspiracy, so maybe the NSA doesn't deal with them directly at all...
Well, that's enough for my daily dose of paranoia. To bed!
What does the NSA do, exactly? Yeah, they intercept international communications and develop systems to do this, but is that really all they do... really?
Hmm... Now that you mention it, I'm surprised I've not heard more conspiracy theories that the NSA is behind Conficker (or other worms, but Conficker seems the best bet since it's really well-designed and hasn't yet revealed its purpose) and that the government tends toward pro-Microsoft legislation so that there are more vulnerable, poorly-secured computers throughout the country/world for them to use to their advantage.
I'm not saying it's true, I'm just thinking that the NSA is doing a damn good job since no one has even thought to blame them yet.
It's like when you walk into a Tube station and see ten of the Met's finest standing there. In theory you ought to feel safer, but in practice you wonder what's happening that you don't know about.
See, I had this image of a bunch of guys dressed like the Three Tenors standing around in a subway, and couldn't figure out why that would make someone feel safe...
I guess the Met makes more sense than the Met.
It's a form issue in my case which the shoe helps to correct. I'm guessing those people who run barefoot have really good form. Take away my shoes and put me on a flat area without any rocks, I figure I might be able to run a few miles before I'm forced to stop because of knee or hip pain. I'll keep my shoes, thankyouverymuch. No joke ... when a new runner starts to experience pain, the quickest remedy to buy new shoes.
Oh, I certainly agree, but I think the article brings up an interesting thought that while it's not necessarily the quickest, running with good form barefoot is better and healthier than wearing most any shoes you can buy. If you move to landing on the ball of your foot, rather than the heel, and depend on your calf for shock absorption, you handle the shock very easily and naturally (I noticed this during my short stint as a cross-country runner, but didn't really make it a habit for some reason.) and also ostensibly strengthen the relevant muscles, reducing pain in the long run (no pun intended).
So, basically:
Shoes = easy, temporary fix.
Using good form barefoot = long-term fix which addresses the cause of the problem.
Right, but it works out best for them because of the huge mass of people who don't actually understand the contest and will download more apps now because they think they'll get more chances to win. Apple isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, and a short DDoS on a single website of theirs in exchange for a boost in app downloads is an easy trade.
The counter is increasing at about 100 per second. At that rate it'll increase by 70,000,000 in around 8 days. Eight days is reasonable warning for a contest, I think.
Actually, the L4 and L5 points would move at the same rate as the moon, since they are the gravitationally stable points created by the moon and Earth (60 degrees ahead and behind the moon on its orbit). And last time I looked at the moon, it does move against the background stars.
This spacecraft is visiting the Sun-Earth Lagrangian points, not the Earth-Moon ones. The Sun-Earth L4 and L5 are just as far away as the sun, along the earth's orbit, so they'd appear to move just like the sun.
If I may add, the two points are also really far away. I thought they were somewere within the orbit of the moon, but they're actually just as far away as the sun. (This picture cleared things up nicely.) We could probably tell whether asteroids are there, but for the reasons you mentioned we couldn't find out anything more useful.
This would make a lot of sense for training Marines, but why a mass market game? They say they want to tell their stories, but that's what memoirs are for. Looks to me like they are out to make a buck.
They want to reach people like them: people who are growing up playing video games. Sure, a memoir would get the story out there, but few potential marines (a demographic which overlaps heavily with video-game-playing teenagers) are going to pick it up. The point isn't just to be heard, the point is to be heard by the people to whom it matters.
My argument is that we instead spend the money on bilge pumps so we can survive the leak.
Oh, I thought you were suggesting we learn to swim.
Clearly all this proves is that we really don't know that much about what's going on in the universe.
Did you ever think we did? We're pretty damn clueless.
I think we would all do well to remember what Socrates (approximately, probably) said: "The only thing I know is that I know nothing at all."
C is good for low-level kernel/embedded/high-performance stuff. If that's what you're into, head in that direction and learn C 'til you know it backward.
It sounds like you're going for general "employability", though, in which case either C++ or Java is good (I like C++, but I've never really done anything in Java). Regarding Fortran, for some reason I'm under the impression that it's mainly job security for the old-timers nowadays?
However, I really think you should pick what you want to do and then learn the skills necessary, rather than going the other direction.
Huh, happy numbers must be one of the most useless things ever. Their "origin" is that a British mathematician's (ostensibly young) daughter learned about them in school then told her father. First off, I can really tell he wasn't grasping at straws for things to publish. Also, that's a damn impressive school, learning about a bit of number theory before the mathematicians even conceive of it.