I've always found the US criticism of UN corruption to be quite amusing considering the amount of blatant corruption going on within its own borders, by the very politicians who criticise the UN.
Ah yes, I forgot about that self-sufficency you have going, what with only importing twice as much as you export and the US government owing $16.3 trillion to foreign lenders. You're living in a dream-world, and at some point you, and the entire US (I know there are many exceptions, many of them on slashdot) will have to wake up and realize that they are in fact as much a part of the world, and dependent on it, as any other "first-world" (though I use that term lightly in this case) nation.
If the US can't play nice, then the obvious answer is to exclude them from all trade agreements until they learn to abide by the rules they agreed to when they first entered into the agreement. And this applies to all countries, not just the US.
I really wouldn't say GNOME has gotten better than KDE, it's all about personal preference. Personally, I used KDE with Slackware when I started using Linux in 2000, switched to GNOME when I installed Ubuntu 6.06 in 2006, and recently switched back to KDE a few months ago when I installed (K)Ubuntu 8.04. GNOME is a great desktop, so is KDE, but they're great i completely different ways. GNOME is pretty slick and prefers to limit options (some might say they're limiting them too much) in order to increase ease of use, while KDE tends to prioritize options over ease of use. Either way I'm quite comfortable using either of the two desktops, you can still run Amarok in GNOME and you can still run GIMP in KDE.
Is it going to have 3G (just UMTS, 384kbps) or "3.5G" (HSPA, 3.6Mbps or 7.2Mbps depending on the area)? They really should go for HSPA support, UMTS is old news, it's been common functionality in phones for years now.
True. Then I suppose you'll have to resort to writing the machine code by hand. It's a long and arduous task, but it can be done. Of course even if you manage to do that, then you'll have to have some way of confirming that the operating system hasn't been compromised. So we'll skip the operating system and just write directly to hardware (making the above task more difficult). Then of course there's no way of knowing that the hardware hasn't been compromised.
So maybe just skip the whole thing and at most have a computer print a human readable ballot for you indicating the choices you made. Then count the ballot in the old-fashioned way, manually, ballot by ballot, under close supervision of observers.
Easy, get a hash of an executable know to be compiled correctly and compare it to the hash of the executable in the machine. Although as long as ballots are counted by machines, even if they are open source, without a manual count also being done under controlled circumstances (ie observers from all involved parties as well as neutral observers) I wouldn't trust the results.
The Big Bang is the most prevalent theory for that. As to how the Big Bang was created, we don't know yet, and may never know. And we accept that we don't know, unlike religious people who feel the need to plug in the gaps in knowledege (and sometimes replace knowledge) with a mystical being called "god".
Yeah but that's his personal opinion, and not based on objective scientific facts. And his policies would restrict the rights of people who disagree with his extremist religious dogma.
I don't know where you get the idea that Libertarians, or libertarians, want to restrict rights. Libertarians stand firmly for rights. So long as people don't harm others they should be able to do whatever they want.
Falcon I wasn't referring to Libertarians in general, I was referring to Ron Paul, who obviously didn't get the Libertarian memo on not restricting rights.
From Wikipedia:
In 2005 and 2007, Paul introduced the Sanctity of Life Act, which would remove federal court jurisdiction over abortion cases arising from state laws and effectively negate Roe v. Wade as binding legal precedent. Also, for the purposes of statutory construction over the jurisdictional limitation imposed, the bill declares that "human life shall be deemed to exist from conception." Paul has also introduced a Constitutional amendment with similar intent. Such laws would permit states to declare abortion to be murder and to outlaw new fetal stem cell research and some contraception and fertility treatments. Also in 2005 and 2007, Paul introduced the We the People Act, which would forbid all federal courts from hearing cases on abortion, same-sex marriage, sexual practices, and government display of religious symbols, texts, and images. The Act would make federal court decisions on those subjects nonbinding as precedent in state courts, and would forbid federal courts from spending money to enforce their judgments. ....
Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life," "an unshakable foe of abortion" ...
He has voted against federal funding of joint adoption by unmarried couples (including same-sex adoption);
That's why I said "European socialist like me". You may think there is a world of difference between the two, but the only difference I see is disagreement on military spending. Both would like to eliminate any semblance of a functional social safety net and both are extremist Christians who want to restrict peoples rights based on their own narrow-minded view of the world.
I like Kucinich, but know he is terribly unlikely to win the primaries let alone the general election. Well no, if everyone betrays their own ideals in order to vote for the perceived most popular candidate, no decent candidates will ever win.
I haven't been following the US elections very closely thus far, but Kucinich is the only one of the bunch that seems to be a decent guy with not too outlandish views.
(Ron Paul may be a decent guy, according to some at least, but to a European socialist like me, he's just as much a right wing religious whack job as Bush)
Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to be certain when it comes to something as important as who will be president for the next four years.
This is why I don't understand how Americans can accept having their votes automatically counted by machines (no matter if the process is electronic on the voter side or not). I might accept a preliminary count by machine, provided there are guarantees that not a single ballot would be damaged in the process. But any official election results should always be hand counted under the supervision of both neutral observers as well as all parties involved.
There are also other irregularities in the 2000 election (2004 as well but that's another matter), such as the scrubbing of election rolls of "convicts" (as much as I think the idea of robbing convicts of the right to vote is abhorrent) that weren't actually convicts in Florida. What I can't understand is why the US government (or media for that matter) doesn't want to investigate these matters.
Perhaps your magic Dutch SIM card would work everywhere in NZ, but I've seen personally that a GSM phone from the US doesn't. That's because the US uses non-standard frequencies for their GSM network. If you want your phone to work in New Zealand, you'll have to buy a quad-band phone that can operate on both standard bands as well as both US bands. (The US is doing the same with UMTS and HSDPA, choosing non-standard frequencies)
The reason for this experiment not being launched has nothing to do with the dangers of spaceflight. It's been bumped because of Bush's manned space flight bullshit. After all, why focus on real science when sending people to Mars is much more exciting to the average Joe, and has no risk of endangering his precious backwater world-view further.
Yeah that was a pretty dumb statement. The funny thing is that he actually did try to put XP on it, almost immediately, and failed. So a colleague of his installed Ubuntu on it since he couldn't find any way to restore the original operating system. http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10006278o-2000331777b,00.htm
Damn you guys in Slovenia have it hard, and our neighbors to the south have it even harder. I can get (and have) 100/100Mbps fiber to the apartment for around 30 Euros, and can choose between eight different ISP's to deliver internet service over the fiber.
If you do a complete install, just be sure to pick manual partitioning and you should be fine. Just be sure not to mark the option to format your home partition;)
Why do they always involve some type of machine to do the counting in the US? Is there a shortage of volunteers to do the counting? I would never trust a system like that. At the very least, the machine-counted vote should be confirmed later (but before the election is officially confirmed) by a manual count, no matter if there is a dispute or not.
In Sweden, the ballots are counted by volunteers in the precincts on election night under the supervision of observers from the parties and interested citizens (anyone can observe the counting), and the vote is later confirmed when it's counted by the counties, again under the supervision of observers. The latter process takes several days (it starts on the day after the election) but counting in the precincts is usually done by the end of the day.
FON has nothing to do with BT, it's a separate service that anyone can sign up for. It's pretty popular, I have two FON access points within range of my apartment, and I've used it once when my broadband was down. They charge 10 Euros for five 1 hour passes if you don't have a FON router. (if you have one, it's free)
Hey, I can put Windows on a machine, and watch a movie after it is installed. Can't do that with Linux, now, can you?
Unless the movie you speak of is in WMV format or similar you're out of luck in Windows, you have to hunt down codecs on the internet for most popular video formats. DVD decryption doesn't come with Windows either.
On pretty much any Linux distribution, Free codecs such as OGG and Theora are enabled out of the box, and Ubuntu will prompt you to install the correct codec for your video from the repositories if you try playing a file with an unsupported codec, far easier than downloading and installing codecs from some random website, which you are forced to do in Windows.
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I've always found the US criticism of UN corruption to be quite amusing considering the amount of blatant corruption going on within its own borders, by the very politicians who criticise the UN.
Ah yes, I forgot about that self-sufficency you have going, what with only importing twice as much as you export and the US government owing $16.3 trillion to foreign lenders.
You're living in a dream-world, and at some point you, and the entire US (I know there are many exceptions, many of them on slashdot) will have to wake up and realize that they are in fact as much a part of the world, and dependent on it, as any other "first-world" (though I use that term lightly in this case) nation.
If the US can't play nice, then the obvious answer is to exclude them from all trade agreements until they learn to abide by the rules they agreed to when they first entered into the agreement.
And this applies to all countries, not just the US.
I really wouldn't say GNOME has gotten better than KDE, it's all about personal preference.
Personally, I used KDE with Slackware when I started using Linux in 2000, switched to GNOME when I installed Ubuntu 6.06 in 2006, and recently switched back to KDE a few months ago when I installed (K)Ubuntu 8.04.
GNOME is a great desktop, so is KDE, but they're great i completely different ways. GNOME is pretty slick and prefers to limit options (some might say they're limiting them too much) in order to increase ease of use, while KDE tends to prioritize options over ease of use.
Either way I'm quite comfortable using either of the two desktops, you can still run Amarok in GNOME and you can still run GIMP in KDE.
His books are what got me into reading sci-fi.
Truly one of the greatest Sci-Fi writers of all time.
Rest In Peace Arthur C. Clarke.
Is it going to have 3G (just UMTS, 384kbps) or "3.5G" (HSPA, 3.6Mbps or 7.2Mbps depending on the area)?
They really should go for HSPA support, UMTS is old news, it's been common functionality in phones for years now.
True. Then I suppose you'll have to resort to writing the machine code by hand. It's a long and arduous task, but it can be done.
Of course even if you manage to do that, then you'll have to have some way of confirming that the operating system hasn't been compromised. So we'll skip the operating system and just write directly to hardware (making the above task more difficult).
Then of course there's no way of knowing that the hardware hasn't been compromised.
So maybe just skip the whole thing and at most have a computer print a human readable ballot for you indicating the choices you made. Then count the ballot in the old-fashioned way, manually, ballot by ballot, under close supervision of observers.
Easy, get a hash of an executable know to be compiled correctly and compare it to the hash of the executable in the machine.
Although as long as ballots are counted by machines, even if they are open source, without a manual count also being done under controlled circumstances (ie observers from all involved parties as well as neutral observers) I wouldn't trust the results.
The Big Bang is the most prevalent theory for that. As to how the Big Bang was created, we don't know yet, and may never know.
And we accept that we don't know, unlike religious people who feel the need to plug in the gaps in knowledege (and sometimes replace knowledge) with a mystical being called "god".
Yeah but that's his personal opinion, and not based on objective scientific facts. And his policies would restrict the rights of people who disagree with his extremist religious dogma.
From Wikipedia: In 2005 and 2007, Paul introduced the Sanctity of Life Act, which would remove federal court jurisdiction over abortion cases arising from state laws and effectively negate Roe v. Wade as binding legal precedent. Also, for the purposes of statutory construction over the jurisdictional limitation imposed, the bill declares that "human life shall be deemed to exist from conception." Paul has also introduced a Constitutional amendment with similar intent. Such laws would permit states to declare abortion to be murder and to outlaw new fetal stem cell research and some contraception and fertility treatments. Also in 2005 and 2007, Paul introduced the We the People Act, which would forbid all federal courts from hearing cases on abortion, same-sex marriage, sexual practices, and government display of religious symbols, texts, and images. The Act would make federal court decisions on those subjects nonbinding as precedent in state courts, and would forbid federal courts from spending money to enforce their judgments.
Paul calls himself "strongly pro-life," "an unshakable foe of abortion"
He has voted against federal funding of joint adoption by unmarried couples (including same-sex adoption);
That's why I said "European socialist like me". You may think there is a world of difference between the two, but the only difference I see is disagreement on military spending. Both would like to eliminate any semblance of a functional social safety net and both are extremist Christians who want to restrict peoples rights based on their own narrow-minded view of the world.
I haven't been following the US elections very closely thus far, but Kucinich is the only one of the bunch that seems to be a decent guy with not too outlandish views.
(Ron Paul may be a decent guy, according to some at least, but to a European socialist like me, he's just as much a right wing religious whack job as Bush)
Unlikely perhaps, but not impossible. I don't know about you, but I'd prefer to be certain when it comes to something as important as who will be president for the next four years.
This is why I don't understand how Americans can accept having their votes automatically counted by machines (no matter if the process is electronic on the voter side or not). I might accept a preliminary count by machine, provided there are guarantees that not a single ballot would be damaged in the process. But any official election results should always be hand counted under the supervision of both neutral observers as well as all parties involved.
There are also other irregularities in the 2000 election (2004 as well but that's another matter), such as the scrubbing of election rolls of "convicts" (as much as I think the idea of robbing convicts of the right to vote is abhorrent) that weren't actually convicts in Florida. What I can't understand is why the US government (or media for that matter) doesn't want to investigate these matters.
Already done. Evince and KPDF are both great pdf readers. Okular seems pretty nice too.
The reason for this experiment not being launched has nothing to do with the dangers of spaceflight. It's been bumped because of Bush's manned space flight bullshit.
After all, why focus on real science when sending people to Mars is much more exciting to the average Joe, and has no risk of endangering his precious backwater world-view further.
Yeah that was a pretty dumb statement. The funny thing is that he actually did try to put XP on it, almost immediately, and failed. So a colleague of his installed Ubuntu on it since he couldn't find any way to restore the original operating system.
http://community.zdnet.co.uk/blog/0,1000000567,10006278o-2000331777b,00.htm
Damn you guys in Slovenia have it hard, and our neighbors to the south have it even harder. I can get (and have) 100/100Mbps fiber to the apartment for around 30 Euros, and can choose between eight different ISP's to deliver internet service over the fiber.
No, it downloads the packages from the server you usually download updates from.
If you do a complete install, just be sure to pick manual partitioning and you should be fine. Just be sure not to mark the option to format your home partition ;)
That's what the observers are for, stopping that kind of corruption from happening.
Why do they always involve some type of machine to do the counting in the US? Is there a shortage of volunteers to do the counting?
I would never trust a system like that. At the very least, the machine-counted vote should be confirmed later (but before the election is officially confirmed) by a manual count, no matter if there is a dispute or not.
In Sweden, the ballots are counted by volunteers in the precincts on election night under the supervision of observers from the parties and interested citizens (anyone can observe the counting), and the vote is later confirmed when it's counted by the counties, again under the supervision of observers.
The latter process takes several days (it starts on the day after the election) but counting in the precincts is usually done by the end of the day.
FON has nothing to do with BT, it's a separate service that anyone can sign up for. It's pretty popular, I have two FON access points within range of my apartment, and I've used it once when my broadband was down. They charge 10 Euros for five 1 hour passes if you don't have a FON router. (if you have one, it's free)
Hey, I can put Windows on a machine, and watch a movie after it is installed. Can't do that with Linux, now, can you?
Unless the movie you speak of is in WMV format or similar you're out of luck in Windows, you have to hunt down codecs on the internet for most popular video formats. DVD decryption doesn't come with Windows either.
On pretty much any Linux distribution, Free codecs such as OGG and Theora are enabled out of the box, and Ubuntu will prompt you to install the correct codec for your video from the repositories if you try playing a file with an unsupported codec, far easier than downloading and installing codecs from some random website, which you are forced to do in Windows.