A couple people I know took a history of the animation of Walt Disney class at the University of Minnesota. If I recall correctly, I heard them talking about a bit in the textbook which discusses that Walt did have to tone down Mickey and Minnie because they were drawn as filth. They smoked, drank, and were generally not aimed at children. Maybe Mickey's just come to be symbolically what he started as.
As for Eisner stepping down, that would be wonderful news. After the bit with ousting Roy Disney, who is apparently going to start up a new shop, Disney the company may have put itself between a rock and a hard place. Disney themselves haven't done much in the name of decent "traditional" animation films for quite some time, save Lilo & Stitch. They've also been killing their legacy with crappy sequels. And even their legacy is largely ideas stolen from others.
On the 3D computer graphics front there's Pixar as the power player, now firmly established as the talent behind the Disney/Pixar efforts. Dreamworks has demonstrated solid CG distribution with Shrek and Shrek 2. Now Disney Co. thinks it can become the new player, make a sequel to a hit (which they always mess up), and displace the actual talent in the field? Dream on.
My advice to Disney: Get a writer or two. Come up with a halfway interesting and unique story of your own for once. Make it something that will capture an audience on the merits of a story. Pixar has shown us all that CG lets us get closer to characters of our imaginations, and to use the CG to back the story, rather than just for pretty effects.
It figures that the first CG style film Disney will do without Pixar ends in the number 3.
Tuition seems to keep going up, but every university employee I know of gets discounts for themselves and their family members, and that includes people who are maintaining computer networks and a variety of non-teachers.
Grade schools and high schools seem to be finding people whose spouse has a moderately decent income a lot of the time. At least most of the teachers I ever got to know were in this situation. It's often a good job for a parent since the hours match those of their kids and they get summers off too.
I think if we were to spend more on education, it should be on textbooks, teaching supplies, and maybe some training courses for the teachers. Heck, I bet that hiring a secretary or some useful administrative staff would be immensely helpful. Instead it seems the first thing a school spends money on if they get a large sum is a new gym. Not that physical education is unimportant (never thought I'd say that when I was a kid), but there's an amazing number of things one can do outside or even in an old gym.
Ever hear the joke "What do you call a med student who got all C's?" Yeah, that's right, Doctor. Ever wonder why so many people recommend getting a second opinion if your doctor breaks bad news to you? Oh yeah, they just might have misdiagnosed you. If you think there are no dumb people that are doctors think again.
That said, the number of doctors who aren't so bright is going to be lower due to the hell that they go through to become a doctor. It isn't a short undergrad four years and you're out deal. It does take at least some level of effort to get through it, even if afterwards there's a reversion to laziness. Complete and utter morons can't get through it.
I would apply the same argument to every other profession, and state rather simply that some morons are going to make it through to a high paying job where they are nothing but detrimental regardless. What really needs to happen is to ensure that the training actually tries to stop these people, and that there's quick and efficient removal should they be allowed through.
Current cycles of tenure, classes that don't weed out poor teachers, and the impossibility of actually measuring a teacher's performance don't allow that. Sure, low pay is a bad way to ensure quality, but without some fundamental changes, high pay isn't going to ensure quality either.
While you'd attract some brighter people, you'd attract a whole slew of people that were just after some quick cash. They'd teach to the standardized tests, be quicker than current teachers to keep out realistic measures of their performance, and generally be a nuisance.
What happened during the dot-com boom of the 90's when there was so much cash sitting around the tech industry it wasn't funny? Morons, dimwits, and people that couldn't code themselves out of a wet cardboard box came running as fast as they could. Many, many students enrolled in CS classes for a quick dollar despite the fact they were incapable of learning a single programming language. They'd lie and cheat their way to graduation, barely pulling C's, and then promptly sucker somebody into hiring them. They're probably clueless managers now sucking in a salary they'll never deserve.
While I think that perhaps a little more than starting out at about $20k is a worthwhile idea, jacking the salaries isn't going to draw only good teachers. I'm not sure the net effect of seeding morons into the people who get degrees in teaching is, just in order to try to get people in industry with no teaching experience, but I doubt it's as rosy as you're painting it to be. I've been fortunate enough to have some teachers who really love teaching, despite the pay. I think the best teachers will teach as long as they're making enough between them and their spouse to get by.
Anyway, the way interviews seem to go it's likely the effect of grossly inflated salaries would be something along the lines of, "Well, you have 15 years relevent chemistry experience at MegaChemCorp, but you've never taught before. We're going to award the job to this other guy with a teaching degree that's never seen the real world." Gotta preserve the old status quo of who got you into the easy position, right?
I think my favorite part about Capsella was that it was all so very modular. Every piece could be replaced by any other piece, and it was all about configuration rather than putting every little gear on an axle like Lego and Erector sets generally were. It was very fast to redesign something to work in another way. There was no frustration of things being slightly out of place. It was great.
I think they just know their customers really well. They're the people who do believe that AOL is the "internet". They're the people who need things spelled out for them in really simple terms. They are not the tech-elite that would really make use of broadband.
AOL is famous for their little "You've got mail" noise. They're well known for AIM, which has an impressive userbase for something that seems to be lagging behind other protocols.
They have (or had, I've never subscribed personally) AOL keywords so people don't have to search the web to get information, you just dumped in a sanctioned term and up popped info. There weren't these.com,.net,.org,.biz,.info, and everything else for the tech illiterate to become accustomed to.
So what did AOL always offer? Mail, messenger, some info, and eventually a stepping stone to a larger world. I don't think the average AOL user has much need for broadband. I think once you're ready for broadband you're probably ready to let go of AOL's hand.
AOL is good for beginners and as you said, widely available access. As that larger world they offer a stepping stone to becomes more media rich they'll lose more customers because it's unaccessable on 56k. But at that point, AOL offering broadband for their core services is overkill too. There's no value to broadband through AOL unless you're using that outside world. But if you're heavily using the outside world, there's little value to AOL. On the other hand, those who don't care about the web at large may be just fine with AOL dialup.
I think Capsella (if that's the right spelling) were pretty amusing given the number of things that could be done with simple reconfiguration.
Also interesting and undermentioned is Erector sets. They aren't as easy to configre as Capsella, but certainly give you more freedom to do what you want. I got some good milage out of those as a kid.
Lego is already mentioned a billion times, but I'd recommend the old school bricks as opposed to the recent specialty bricks that aren't nearly as configurable.
Tinker Toys and Construx were good fun, though I haven't seen either around recently. I also haven't really looked.
If you have aspiring artists consider some honest to god nice drawing pencils, some high quality paper, and a good eraser. There's about an endless number of things one can draw.
Board games are up on my list too. Consider a nice chess set if there isn't one around the house. That's a game that's stood the test of time.
Hey, that's cool. I didn't see the Groklaw article at the time of posting, though the editors leaving it in would have been nice.
Looking at it again, it shouldn't have been so ambiguous, as 1995 refers to a year and 1,995 refers to a quantity. It seems, however, that nobody in technical fields bothers with marking every three digits anymore. If I had to hazard a guess it's because we write or type so many large numbers it just gets in the way.
Ah well, feel no responsibility for it if you were quoting.
You know, it seems to me that they could put the soundbite in the headline and put the actual content in the body of the article. I know that journal papers I read do this to some varying extent.
Maybe the day is so busy that people can only read the headlines before going about their business. Frankly though, I would hope there would be a way to create a boring yet accurate article that supports and expounds upon the soundbite. Maybe journalists could get more involved in the topic as the article is written, so Joe Public can peel back through layers of comprehension and choose their level of ignorance. Maybe that's asking too much.
Honestly, I've given up on newspapers to tell me anything apart from a quick rundown of what some interesting topics are. If I want more information on those topics I try to find an informed source. Maybe what we really need is a smaller newspaper that glances a topical view at subjects instead of having a bulk of text purporting to be an authority when it is in reality just a long topical view. It'd be quick, efficient, and people would be just as informed.
Yeah, apparently it does happen. I just love when I mess up my own grammar when I'm correcting somebody else's. I must have previewed my post after writing something like, "I've spoken English primarily my whole life," and decided I didn't like it. A quick edit later and the sentence was less ambiguous but included an error. At least it's an easy to glaze over error, as dropping two letters is all it takes for one's brain to ignore it.
Of course, your reply is a perfect example of why they pay me wads of cash instead of the editors.
What I want to know about tidal flow, and have been wondering for a while, is what is its effect on the oceans?
Granted, the oceans are absolutely mind-bogglingly massive. But, would enough tidal power stations possibly have an effect on them? Could we slowly lower the temperature of the oceans by transforming some of their kinetic energy into electricity? That could, however, be a good thing if the globe is warming. Could we significantly weaken some smaller currents, which may have a profound effect on the whole system?
I'm not saying we shouldn't try out tidal power, at least on a small trial scale. Personally I think it's a brilliantly simple idea that uses areas we currently don't make that much use of, making it win-win.
No, it shows that the submitter's and editor's English isn't as good as they'd like to think it is. What they said was:
1995 minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors
But what they meant was:
Minutes from the corporate kit of a 1995 meeting of the Board of Directors
Or even:
Minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors held in 1995
There's no reason for the editors to leave such ambiguity in the summary when they could easily have avoided it. I've spoken English as my primarily language my whole life and seeing it as 1,995 minutes opposed to minutes from a meeting in 1995 was how I parsed it first as well. Also reference all the jokes high up in the list about a 33 hour meeting.
Great.... and I just bought a 200GB Seagate hard drive. Stupid Moore's Law...
You are aware, I hope, that Moore's Law only states that the number of transistors that will fit in a given space will double, right? Since neither hard drives nor optical media are using transistors as the storage medium, I fail to see the point of that post.
Oh, wait, I see it now. There's a link that you hope people will click so you get your kickback. How nice of you to spam us.
To preface, I don't like spam but don't think 9 years fits the crime. At any rate, I hope you aren't posting from work. I'd hate to see you fired and then sued for misuse of resources. Slashdotters deserve a solid punishment, IMHO.
They waste people's time, one of the most precious things people have. Maybe just a few seconds per mail, but multiplied by millions (at least, maybe hundreds of millions).
You'd be wasting your employer's time, since most people aren't paid to sit on Slashdot. All told Slashdotters cost their companies millions in lost productivity.
They waste network bandwidth, most of which is paid by others. Server capacity is wasted with spam-filtering. Admins, developers & home users have to waste time on writing/deploying anti-spam software.
You'd be wasting network bandwidth that your company pays for, something finite that coworkers need too. A company admin might have to waste time figuring out how to keep employees off of certain websites like Slashdot. Additional hardware may be required to be administered.
They make e-mail, a very useful internet resource, a lot less useful, and I view that as a form of vandalism.
You'd be making the WWW, a very useful internet resource, a lot less useful to your company by diluting the ratio of relevent work information gained vs. time spent on the net. Companies may then stop allowing web access. I view that as a sort of treason.
Much of their work is done by breaking into other people's computers (zombie networks), which in itself is illegal in many places. Not to speak of other uses (DDoS attacks etc.) spammers may have for zombie networks they control.
While you may not be breaking into other machines to post here, you may be perpetuating a DDoS known as the Slashdot Effect.
Users don't want spam, there are laws against this, and even in the face of all this, spammers continue with their business on a massive scale. So sorry, but they deserve every punishment they get.
Corporate admins don't want Slashdot. There are rules against this, and even in the face of this, employees continue with their posting on a massive scale. So sorry, but Slashdotters deserve every punishment they get.
I think the original post meant actual per application support for varying sound levels. So you can say Winamp plays at 75%, GAIM plays at 15%, System Messages at 20%, etc. Then when you're playing Winamp all is good, you shuffle over to GAIM and Winamp doesn't change volume. You message somebody via GAIM and the GAIM created noise is reduced to 15% of max base volume, blended seamlessly with Winamp so that the GAIM noise sounds 1/5 as loud (15/75) as Winamp and you aren't hideously annoyed.
It sounds like your driver has a whole system volume per active application support.
I want the full deal. Drivers should be able to tell which application is passing them a sound event and adjust the volume on the fly while blending the sound streams together. Any half decent sound card should be able to blend at least a few audio streams, so why not do it?
First, no faithless voter has ever been held to such laws. If it does nothing to change the outcome of the election it doesn't matter too much anyway.
Second, if it does change the outcome of the election, the faithless voter is a presidential pardon away from absolution of their crime. What president wouldn't save the skin of somebody that saved theirs?
Of course, if we want things to get ugly we can just imagine trying to tell the voters that the electoral college just did its job by voting for the party it felt was best to lead. Afterall, we only elected electoral college memebers yesterday. Those members are free to do as they choose.
I was under the impression that part of the joy of the Patriot Act was that you wouldn't know how your life was touched by it. Or you'd find out about it after it was too late to be posting to slashdot about how you've been touched by it.
He's planning on rioting if the candidate he supports isn't elected in an undisputed manner tomorrow. If he doesn't have up to the minute results he may miss out on knowing when to begin. If he doesn't know when to start rioting he'll miss out on all the good looting going on.
Seriously, do you have any idea how fast the good stuff gets looted?
From the summary excerpt given to us: There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules -- language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.
That implies to me at least that when our brains our young and more malleable, we start wiring in what sets of noises are allowed to form words. It also seems we're learning grammar to some extent while we're young too.
The categories of languages differ wildly from one another in which sounds can be linked together as well as word order and structure. It seems that once our brains are set to classify a certain set of these noises they don't let new ones in as easily.
I've also been told that when learning new languages, after you learn the third language to proficiency you can pick up more languages without issue. Maybe we just need to learn a new method of learning a language after our first language is burnt into us.
Also interesting is that children who have parents of two different nationalities can generally learn the two languages quite easily if one parent speaks only one language and the other parent the other. The seperation of who is speaking it helps keep the child from mixing the two languages together. I think that observation supports that we initially have a blank slate on which to accumulate what sounds are proper and can form language. Which languages make up the two don't seem to matter, and fluency is much easier for them. There also seem to be fewer problems with things like Engrish when a child is taught both languages properly from the start.
Sorry chum, the whole point of democracy is that everybody is equal and all get the opportunity to vote; just because you think your "well researched" vote is somehow better than the next guy's doesn't make it so. Quite frankly, your attitude smacks of arrogance - try and understand the intent of a democratic system and that the elitism you're displaying is almost the exact opposite of what democracy is about.
Say what?! In regards to the US, if that's truly the case then please explain the electoral college. It couldn't have been put in place by elitists who felt that the mob could be pandered to and that a simple democratic majority could be used against the country, could it?
When I go and vote tomorrow I will be casting my vote for 10 electors which will then cast their votes for president. The batch of electors so voted for are chosen by the party which I will vote for. I'm reasonably certain that the state I reside in has no penalty for so-called faithless voters. That's not to mention that no faithless voter has ever been brought to court.
While there is a very good chance that those 10 votes for president will be cast for the candidate of my choosing should I be in the majority in my state, there is no guarantee. The original poster hit the nail on the head. This country was designed to have the ability to keep a mob of uninformed dolts from wrecking it. It doesn't mean the EC will up and rebel against the popular vote. However, if one candidate was running on the platform of nuking the whole world and managed to take the popular vote, I would hope the EC would step in and give the election to the other guy.
So no, everybody isn't equal. Each of the 538 EC members are equal in their ability to elect the next president. Each of the rest of us is equal in that we can vote for those electors, insofar as each of us is equal in that we could bring a few dozen children into the world if we so desired and tried really hard. That doesn't necessitate that we all should do so without any responsibility or forethought.
Bah, look at the past however many Redskins games immediately before a US Presidential election. Now look at the incumbant's performance in the past elections. Plot them against each other.
You'll find yourself with a high correlation between Redskins winning and the incumbant winning along with the opposite.
Correlation does not necessitate causation. We know these events to be coincidental. If they were not we would have to assume the Redskin's performance somehow causes the outcome of our election.
So no, I don't mean that coincidence is not correlation. Among the set of coincidental data I think you'll find that it necessitates some degree of correlation. Otherwise that data wouldn't coincide very well, would it?
It is somewhat humorous, sure, and I chuckled at it when I saw it on Fark.
Here on slashdot, though, we get a story titled Does Redsckins Loss Presage A Kerry Win?. Of course it doesn't. If it does happen it's entirely coincidental. On a site like Fark it's amusing. On a site like Slashdot I would hope that it's roughly equivelent to titling the story Do you know how correlation works? or something similar.
I'm aware this whole politics section is new to Slashdot, but this is a tad rediculous.
Okay, this is Slashdot, where I continually hope that people would understand that correlation does not mean causation.
Of course, I'm continually let down. What in the heck kind of superstition makes this worthy of being posted to Slashdot in the first place? Are we trying to ignite flamewars? Are there too many mod points being used in technically sound articles and we need to draw some away? Seriously.
Gentoo is a pleasure to work with. Absent from installing massive packages that aren't installed in some incarnation already I have no issues with it. Big builds can be relegated to the background in a desktop environment and I haven't noticed a big hit to moderate desktop usage while doing so. It's when you want to install a new package that's huge that causes a problem. Huge packages with a prior version installed let you use the older version while you're compiling away. I'm surprised by the number of people who speak of it like it's a huge issue. I mean, I can wait half an hour longer to use the newest, shiniest version of an app while I'm using a version that I've been using for the last X months.
On the topic of servers, it can be done if you're smart about it. Gentoo allows for installation from binaries, really it does. It just so happens that you have to download the source, compile it to a binary, and then point portage at the binary to install from.
Given that, if you're running a smart development and production server setup that are exactly the same, maybe sans some insecure stuff on the production environment machine, you can compile for your given target to binary on the development machine, test your packages for stability and overall goodness, and then migrate the binaries over to production, install, and be happy. It doesn't have to be built from scratch on the server.
On the otherhand, if you're dumb about it and don't do something like that, you're just screwed. You end up having a bunch of mess around on your production machine, driving up the processor and RAM usage anytime you want to upgrade something even slightly, and it's just generally a mess. Even then, Gentoo is a bit bleeding edge in many package instances, which may not make it the best server platform without semi-intensive testing on the admin's part. It's really just a tad easier to install something like Debian stable and not worry so much about it.
Dismissing Gentoo out of hand because there are some clueless people that are vocal about it is pretty stupid and close minded.
Yes, $600 million may be an accurate value for what it would cost to develop Linux from scratch, but how often do people buy software at the price it took to build.
I could purchase a copy of windows for $200 even though it cost a couple of billions to develop. So although this figure is interesting, it really doesn't mean anything -and thats assuming the licensing issues could be overcome.
Sure, and you can get a copy of Linux for free. That isn't the point. You'll never get a copy of Window's source for anything reasonable, especially not with a license to change that source and redistribute binaries without that source with no strings but the purchase price.
They don't want to buy just binaries under a BSD license, that'd do nothing for them. They want the ability to make changes to Linux and distribute binaries and profit from those changes, without giving those changes back. Just a tad different than your purchasing a license to use Windows.
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As for Eisner stepping down, that would be wonderful news. After the bit with ousting Roy Disney, who is apparently going to start up a new shop, Disney the company may have put itself between a rock and a hard place. Disney themselves haven't done much in the name of decent "traditional" animation films for quite some time, save Lilo & Stitch. They've also been killing their legacy with crappy sequels. And even their legacy is largely ideas stolen from others.
On the 3D computer graphics front there's Pixar as the power player, now firmly established as the talent behind the Disney/Pixar efforts. Dreamworks has demonstrated solid CG distribution with Shrek and Shrek 2. Now Disney Co. thinks it can become the new player, make a sequel to a hit (which they always mess up), and displace the actual talent in the field? Dream on.
My advice to Disney: Get a writer or two. Come up with a halfway interesting and unique story of your own for once. Make it something that will capture an audience on the merits of a story. Pixar has shown us all that CG lets us get closer to characters of our imaginations, and to use the CG to back the story, rather than just for pretty effects.
It figures that the first CG style film Disney will do without Pixar ends in the number 3.
Grade schools and high schools seem to be finding people whose spouse has a moderately decent income a lot of the time. At least most of the teachers I ever got to know were in this situation. It's often a good job for a parent since the hours match those of their kids and they get summers off too.
I think if we were to spend more on education, it should be on textbooks, teaching supplies, and maybe some training courses for the teachers. Heck, I bet that hiring a secretary or some useful administrative staff would be immensely helpful. Instead it seems the first thing a school spends money on if they get a large sum is a new gym. Not that physical education is unimportant (never thought I'd say that when I was a kid), but there's an amazing number of things one can do outside or even in an old gym.
That said, the number of doctors who aren't so bright is going to be lower due to the hell that they go through to become a doctor. It isn't a short undergrad four years and you're out deal. It does take at least some level of effort to get through it, even if afterwards there's a reversion to laziness. Complete and utter morons can't get through it.
I would apply the same argument to every other profession, and state rather simply that some morons are going to make it through to a high paying job where they are nothing but detrimental regardless. What really needs to happen is to ensure that the training actually tries to stop these people, and that there's quick and efficient removal should they be allowed through.
Current cycles of tenure, classes that don't weed out poor teachers, and the impossibility of actually measuring a teacher's performance don't allow that. Sure, low pay is a bad way to ensure quality, but without some fundamental changes, high pay isn't going to ensure quality either.
What happened during the dot-com boom of the 90's when there was so much cash sitting around the tech industry it wasn't funny? Morons, dimwits, and people that couldn't code themselves out of a wet cardboard box came running as fast as they could. Many, many students enrolled in CS classes for a quick dollar despite the fact they were incapable of learning a single programming language. They'd lie and cheat their way to graduation, barely pulling C's, and then promptly sucker somebody into hiring them. They're probably clueless managers now sucking in a salary they'll never deserve.
While I think that perhaps a little more than starting out at about $20k is a worthwhile idea, jacking the salaries isn't going to draw only good teachers. I'm not sure the net effect of seeding morons into the people who get degrees in teaching is, just in order to try to get people in industry with no teaching experience, but I doubt it's as rosy as you're painting it to be. I've been fortunate enough to have some teachers who really love teaching, despite the pay. I think the best teachers will teach as long as they're making enough between them and their spouse to get by.
Anyway, the way interviews seem to go it's likely the effect of grossly inflated salaries would be something along the lines of, "Well, you have 15 years relevent chemistry experience at MegaChemCorp, but you've never taught before. We're going to award the job to this other guy with a teaching degree that's never seen the real world." Gotta preserve the old status quo of who got you into the easy position, right?
I think my favorite part about Capsella was that it was all so very modular. Every piece could be replaced by any other piece, and it was all about configuration rather than putting every little gear on an axle like Lego and Erector sets generally were. It was very fast to redesign something to work in another way. There was no frustration of things being slightly out of place. It was great.
AOL is famous for their little "You've got mail" noise. They're well known for AIM, which has an impressive userbase for something that seems to be lagging behind other protocols.
They have (or had, I've never subscribed personally) AOL keywords so people don't have to search the web to get information, you just dumped in a sanctioned term and up popped info. There weren't these .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, and everything else for the tech illiterate to become accustomed to.
So what did AOL always offer? Mail, messenger, some info, and eventually a stepping stone to a larger world. I don't think the average AOL user has much need for broadband. I think once you're ready for broadband you're probably ready to let go of AOL's hand.
AOL is good for beginners and as you said, widely available access. As that larger world they offer a stepping stone to becomes more media rich they'll lose more customers because it's unaccessable on 56k. But at that point, AOL offering broadband for their core services is overkill too. There's no value to broadband through AOL unless you're using that outside world. But if you're heavily using the outside world, there's little value to AOL. On the other hand, those who don't care about the web at large may be just fine with AOL dialup.
Also interesting and undermentioned is Erector sets. They aren't as easy to configre as Capsella, but certainly give you more freedom to do what you want. I got some good milage out of those as a kid.
Lego is already mentioned a billion times, but I'd recommend the old school bricks as opposed to the recent specialty bricks that aren't nearly as configurable.
Tinker Toys and Construx were good fun, though I haven't seen either around recently. I also haven't really looked.
If you have aspiring artists consider some honest to god nice drawing pencils, some high quality paper, and a good eraser. There's about an endless number of things one can draw.
Board games are up on my list too. Consider a nice chess set if there isn't one around the house. That's a game that's stood the test of time.
Looking at it again, it shouldn't have been so ambiguous, as 1995 refers to a year and 1,995 refers to a quantity. It seems, however, that nobody in technical fields bothers with marking every three digits anymore. If I had to hazard a guess it's because we write or type so many large numbers it just gets in the way.
Ah well, feel no responsibility for it if you were quoting.
Maybe the day is so busy that people can only read the headlines before going about their business. Frankly though, I would hope there would be a way to create a boring yet accurate article that supports and expounds upon the soundbite. Maybe journalists could get more involved in the topic as the article is written, so Joe Public can peel back through layers of comprehension and choose their level of ignorance. Maybe that's asking too much.
Honestly, I've given up on newspapers to tell me anything apart from a quick rundown of what some interesting topics are. If I want more information on those topics I try to find an informed source. Maybe what we really need is a smaller newspaper that glances a topical view at subjects instead of having a bulk of text purporting to be an authority when it is in reality just a long topical view. It'd be quick, efficient, and people would be just as informed.
Of course, your reply is a perfect example of why they pay me wads of cash instead of the editors.
Granted, the oceans are absolutely mind-bogglingly massive. But, would enough tidal power stations possibly have an effect on them? Could we slowly lower the temperature of the oceans by transforming some of their kinetic energy into electricity? That could, however, be a good thing if the globe is warming. Could we significantly weaken some smaller currents, which may have a profound effect on the whole system?
I'm not saying we shouldn't try out tidal power, at least on a small trial scale. Personally I think it's a brilliantly simple idea that uses areas we currently don't make that much use of, making it win-win.
1995 minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors
But what they meant was:
Minutes from the corporate kit of a 1995 meeting of the Board of Directors
Or even:
Minutes from the corporate kit of a meeting of the Board of Directors held in 1995
There's no reason for the editors to leave such ambiguity in the summary when they could easily have avoided it. I've spoken English as my primarily language my whole life and seeing it as 1,995 minutes opposed to minutes from a meeting in 1995 was how I parsed it first as well. Also reference all the jokes high up in the list about a 33 hour meeting.
You are aware, I hope, that Moore's Law only states that the number of transistors that will fit in a given space will double, right? Since neither hard drives nor optical media are using transistors as the storage medium, I fail to see the point of that post.
Oh, wait, I see it now. There's a link that you hope people will click so you get your kickback. How nice of you to spam us.
They waste people's time, one of the most precious things people have. Maybe just a few seconds per mail, but multiplied by millions (at least, maybe hundreds of millions).
You'd be wasting your employer's time, since most people aren't paid to sit on Slashdot. All told Slashdotters cost their companies millions in lost productivity.
They waste network bandwidth, most of which is paid by others. Server capacity is wasted with spam-filtering. Admins, developers & home users have to waste time on writing/deploying anti-spam software.
You'd be wasting network bandwidth that your company pays for, something finite that coworkers need too. A company admin might have to waste time figuring out how to keep employees off of certain websites like Slashdot. Additional hardware may be required to be administered.
They make e-mail, a very useful internet resource, a lot less useful, and I view that as a form of vandalism.
You'd be making the WWW, a very useful internet resource, a lot less useful to your company by diluting the ratio of relevent work information gained vs. time spent on the net. Companies may then stop allowing web access. I view that as a sort of treason.
Much of their work is done by breaking into other people's computers (zombie networks), which in itself is illegal in many places. Not to speak of other uses (DDoS attacks etc.) spammers may have for zombie networks they control.
While you may not be breaking into other machines to post here, you may be perpetuating a DDoS known as the Slashdot Effect.
Users don't want spam, there are laws against this, and even in the face of all this, spammers continue with their business on a massive scale. So sorry, but they deserve every punishment they get.
Corporate admins don't want Slashdot. There are rules against this, and even in the face of this, employees continue with their posting on a massive scale. So sorry, but Slashdotters deserve every punishment they get.
Shoe isn't so comfortable on the other foot...
It sounds like your driver has a whole system volume per active application support.
I want the full deal. Drivers should be able to tell which application is passing them a sound event and adjust the volume on the fly while blending the sound streams together. Any half decent sound card should be able to blend at least a few audio streams, so why not do it?
Second, if it does change the outcome of the election, the faithless voter is a presidential pardon away from absolution of their crime. What president wouldn't save the skin of somebody that saved theirs?
Of course, if we want things to get ugly we can just imagine trying to tell the voters that the electoral college just did its job by voting for the party it felt was best to lead. Afterall, we only elected electoral college memebers yesterday. Those members are free to do as they choose.
I was under the impression that part of the joy of the Patriot Act was that you wouldn't know how your life was touched by it. Or you'd find out about it after it was too late to be posting to slashdot about how you've been touched by it.
Seriously, do you have any idea how fast the good stuff gets looted?
That implies to me at least that when our brains our young and more malleable, we start wiring in what sets of noises are allowed to form words. It also seems we're learning grammar to some extent while we're young too.
The categories of languages differ wildly from one another in which sounds can be linked together as well as word order and structure. It seems that once our brains are set to classify a certain set of these noises they don't let new ones in as easily.
I've also been told that when learning new languages, after you learn the third language to proficiency you can pick up more languages without issue. Maybe we just need to learn a new method of learning a language after our first language is burnt into us.
Also interesting is that children who have parents of two different nationalities can generally learn the two languages quite easily if one parent speaks only one language and the other parent the other. The seperation of who is speaking it helps keep the child from mixing the two languages together. I think that observation supports that we initially have a blank slate on which to accumulate what sounds are proper and can form language. Which languages make up the two don't seem to matter, and fluency is much easier for them. There also seem to be fewer problems with things like Engrish when a child is taught both languages properly from the start.
Say what?! In regards to the US, if that's truly the case then please explain the electoral college. It couldn't have been put in place by elitists who felt that the mob could be pandered to and that a simple democratic majority could be used against the country, could it?
When I go and vote tomorrow I will be casting my vote for 10 electors which will then cast their votes for president. The batch of electors so voted for are chosen by the party which I will vote for. I'm reasonably certain that the state I reside in has no penalty for so-called faithless voters. That's not to mention that no faithless voter has ever been brought to court.
While there is a very good chance that those 10 votes for president will be cast for the candidate of my choosing should I be in the majority in my state, there is no guarantee. The original poster hit the nail on the head. This country was designed to have the ability to keep a mob of uninformed dolts from wrecking it. It doesn't mean the EC will up and rebel against the popular vote. However, if one candidate was running on the platform of nuking the whole world and managed to take the popular vote, I would hope the EC would step in and give the election to the other guy.
So no, everybody isn't equal. Each of the 538 EC members are equal in their ability to elect the next president. Each of the rest of us is equal in that we can vote for those electors, insofar as each of us is equal in that we could bring a few dozen children into the world if we so desired and tried really hard. That doesn't necessitate that we all should do so without any responsibility or forethought.
You'll find yourself with a high correlation between Redskins winning and the incumbant winning along with the opposite.
Correlation does not necessitate causation. We know these events to be coincidental. If they were not we would have to assume the Redskin's performance somehow causes the outcome of our election.
So no, I don't mean that coincidence is not correlation. Among the set of coincidental data I think you'll find that it necessitates some degree of correlation. Otherwise that data wouldn't coincide very well, would it?
Here on slashdot, though, we get a story titled Does Redsckins Loss Presage A Kerry Win?. Of course it doesn't. If it does happen it's entirely coincidental. On a site like Fark it's amusing. On a site like Slashdot I would hope that it's roughly equivelent to titling the story Do you know how correlation works? or something similar.
I'm aware this whole politics section is new to Slashdot, but this is a tad rediculous.
Of course, I'm continually let down. What in the heck kind of superstition makes this worthy of being posted to Slashdot in the first place? Are we trying to ignite flamewars? Are there too many mod points being used in technically sound articles and we need to draw some away? Seriously.
On the topic of servers, it can be done if you're smart about it. Gentoo allows for installation from binaries, really it does. It just so happens that you have to download the source, compile it to a binary, and then point portage at the binary to install from.
Given that, if you're running a smart development and production server setup that are exactly the same, maybe sans some insecure stuff on the production environment machine, you can compile for your given target to binary on the development machine, test your packages for stability and overall goodness, and then migrate the binaries over to production, install, and be happy. It doesn't have to be built from scratch on the server.
On the otherhand, if you're dumb about it and don't do something like that, you're just screwed. You end up having a bunch of mess around on your production machine, driving up the processor and RAM usage anytime you want to upgrade something even slightly, and it's just generally a mess. Even then, Gentoo is a bit bleeding edge in many package instances, which may not make it the best server platform without semi-intensive testing on the admin's part. It's really just a tad easier to install something like Debian stable and not worry so much about it.
Dismissing Gentoo out of hand because there are some clueless people that are vocal about it is pretty stupid and close minded.
I could purchase a copy of windows for $200 even though it cost a couple of billions to develop. So although this figure is interesting, it really doesn't mean anything -and thats assuming the licensing issues could be overcome.
Sure, and you can get a copy of Linux for free. That isn't the point. You'll never get a copy of Window's source for anything reasonable, especially not with a license to change that source and redistribute binaries without that source with no strings but the purchase price.
They don't want to buy just binaries under a BSD license, that'd do nothing for them. They want the ability to make changes to Linux and distribute binaries and profit from those changes, without giving those changes back. Just a tad different than your purchasing a license to use Windows.