I find the idea that minority people are so fundamentally different from white people that they can't be adequately represented by votes from other races both ridiculous and offensive.
The fact that people think like this is a symptom of the triumph of democracy over a republican form of government. Politics in this country is no more about the rule of law but is now all about deciding which special interest group gets how big a slice of the pie.
Unfortunately, arguing about who is getting their fair slice of pie in the context of political debate in a constitutional republic is asinine. We might as well argue about Anna Nicole Smith.
LISP is important not only because it's a great programming language, but because it's a concise method of expressing abstract syntax trees, which are at the heart of any decent compiler.
Take a look at Register Transfer Language, which gcc used to use as the intermediate target language. You'll notice a lot of parentheses...
I think the reason people disparage any programming language is that they don't understand it completely, because nearly every one has some unique idea or method of working that caused it to become popular. They're all fascinating to me.
Except for VBScript and Matlab. Those pretty much suck even if you know them completely.
KParts is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. KDE previously tried something like XPCOM, found it to be overkill and too complex for what they were doing, and came up with KParts instead, a much simpler, better solution. But it's not even close to doing what CORBA tries to do, (and that's a good thing).
Comparing XPCOM to KParts will give you an idea of the insanity of this proposal. Heck, just comparing the documentation for the two is evidence that the XUL desktop is a non-starter. From this page
When the KDE core-developers realised that Corba was becoming an unmanagable nightmare, they wrote in a few days a lightweight and efficient component technology to replace it: KPart. KPart is based on Shared Libraries. This makes the component appears directly as a C++ object. There is no need to wrap its features with an IDL language, everything is accessible without extra effort.
What I'm guessing is happening is some guys started working with XUL, thought it was pretty cool, and said, "Hey! We could make a WHOLE desktop environment out of this if we wanted to!" But just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. There's plenty of history here to back that up, too.
It's also possible that XPCOM itself is a hindrance to the Mozilla project. Have they realized the assumed benefits of using a component architecture? Not when I can only write for their platform in maybe four languages, if we're being generous.
It wasn't that long ago that CORBA and DCOM were new and exciting, people were running around talking about how you could assemble standard applications like word processors that pulled components from "all over the Internet." It never happened, because quite frankly, it's a stupid idea for desktop apps. Not everything needs to be a distributed application.
XPCOM came along at about this time, and I'm afraid it's still around more because it's a holdover from that era than because it's a good idea. There are benefits to using a component architecture, but the much simpler KParts, QT, or wxWidgets approaches have those same benefits, are much more usable.
It's great if you want to do things like, say, a custom web browser or write your own iTunes -- The kind of thing that you'd usually write as a web-based app but you need local file storage and maybe access to online content that cross-site scripting preventative rules would prevent you from accessing in a regular browser.
If you need to do more than that, it's quite a chore. You have to start writing your own XPCOM components, which you'll have to compile on each target platform separately. There goes your easy cross platform compatibility.
The documentation for XUL and XPCOM isn't very helpful or well organized, and that's putting it nicely.
Language support is thin. C++ and Javascript are pretty much your only choices, although Python support is coming soon, apparently.
The question is, if you were going to develop a desktop environment from scratch, would you start by writing XUL? Would you then extend that by embedding JavaScript? I don't think so. Both Gnome and KDE tried the whole component thing with CORBA and abandoned it for performance and complexity reasons. Cross-platform is nice, but Java, GTK+, QT, and even C# provide better cross platform benefits with greater support and language compatibility than the XUL suite of tools.
Not only that, but I'd wager a Java desktop environment would be a better performer than one based on XULRunner. Not to mention, it would support more languages through Jython, JNI, etc.
It's a shame, because XULrunner could be a great platform. I hope they focus more on documentation and supporting other languages than redundant pie-in-the-sky projects like this one.
Reading over the Dell forums and comments it seems like a bunch of spoiled, whining children over there. It's really not the best way to encourage someone to do you a favor.
The worst part are that the most vocal are the "I don't want to pay the Microsoft tax" portion. If these folks had their way, what Dell would provide is an entirely separate line of Linux PC's that may or may not run Windows.
That's not what I'd want, for a couple of reasons:
1) I use Windows and Linux, and I'd like to have a computer that will run both Linux and Windows.
2) There are not enough people interested in Linux-only machines for this to succeed financially, which would set the whole Linux on the desktop movement back another few years when we'll go through this again.
What Dell originally offered was to provide some sort of guarantee that hardware would work with Linux. This would be a huge step in the right direction, especially for laptops, but I'm afraid even that might not happen as everyone scrambles to be the most shrill proponent of their own favorite distro on the Dell message boards.
It's amateurish, it shows the "Linux community" is extremely fractured, and it shows Dell that catering to a bunch of whiners would probably be a financial disaster.
The problem with vehicles becoming lighter is a safety one. Roads are designed with a certain vehicle weight in mind, such that the incline of the road as it curves keeps the car from sliding off of it, even in slippery conditions.
I love the "grid" driving system though. Never having to drive on a highway again would be a treat.
And if I had to commute, I'd love to buy a small car. The problem is, I'm 6'2" with long legs, and I don't fit in any of them, because they all try to be a "family car" and cram in some ridiculously undersized back seat.
I have a car for the family already. Why does nobody make an inexpensive, two-seater, two-door commuter car that a normal sized person would be comfortable driving?
My wife had a Miata for a while, and I'd drive that whenever I could, even though I had to get out the shoehorn to fit myself in it. Make a slightly larger Miata for a similar price, and I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
but those would be some high power transmitters in both directions it seems - to get the distance you would need for this to work as a conventional wifi sort of link.
One of the details the article is light on is the organization of the system. It might not be using high powered transmission at all, but serve a much smaller area similar to cellular. Just because it uses the same frequency as TV doesn't mean they have to build their towers the same way. By virtue of the signal being digital, there is a bit more flexibility due to the inherent gains in digital communication.
Also, my first thought was that this would be used for the downlink only, and you'd use traditional dial-up for the uplink. This would be really beneficial to the people stuck with dial-up because they can't get cable or DSL.
The path a TCP connection takes doesn't have to be the same going forward or backward. It doesn't even have to be the same path between multiple packets.
Since most people don't use nearly as much upload bandwidth as download, a dial-up upload with a very fast over the air download would be sufficient for the vast majority of users.
Many people in the U.S. are still on dial-up. If Google offered them a way to dramatically increase the speed of web page loads for an extra $2 a month, they'd probably take that option over the much more expensive DSL or Cable services.
My problem is not with environmental regulation in general, but with the logic that we must do something immediately because the consequences "might" be catastrophic if we don't.
This isn't an argument, it's an absence of logic with an appeal to emotion.
Any rational decision should take into account the benefit versus the cost, as well as the risk involved of making things worse inadvertently. Advocating any and all action without any cost/benefit analysis is irresponsible.
Unfortunately this kind of rational analysis seems to be in short supply, which is why my eyes glaze over when I hear the words "climate change," because what usually follows is some vapid emotional appeal with plenty of whining and few viable alternative solutions offered.
The biggest question I have is, what's the goal here? Is it to save human lives? There are far more effective ways than driving an electric car to do that. Saying "millions may starve" doesn't really impress me when millions starve today already. Why not fix that problem, which definitely exists, rather than one that might not be a problem at all?
Christian fundamentalist: You should worship Jesus or you'll go to Hell.
Atheist: But I don't believe that to be true.
Christian fundamentalist: That doesn't matter. Hell is SO BAD that you should worship Jesus just in case. Better to be safe than sorry.
Atheist: I'll take my chances.
Christian fundamentalist: Well, I'll lobby the government to make you go to Church every Sunday, for your own good, because there so many of us that believe that Jesus is our savior, that it must be true.
But by that logic, airline ticket prices would inch up over time until nobody could afford to fly. This doesn't happen.
Competition doesn't just include competition among like businesses. Airlines aren't just competing with each other, they're competing with all of the other options you have when you spend your dollar (not spending it being an option too). At some point, you'll decide that buying an airline ticket just isn't worth the price, and you'll either go on vacation within driving distance or do something else entirely, or do nothing -- maybe fly at some later date when you expect the price will drop.
The sum total of all these individual decisions sets the price that airlines compete against. Otherwise, they could all raise prices to $4000 a seat and still fill their planes with passengers.
The real question here is whether the Internet is subject to similar market pressure.
The Internet is different because we have a situation similar to what would happen if the airlines were able to set a 35mph speed limit on the highway. They'd probably (shortsightedly) do so to increase their own business, but the end result would probably be a decrease in overall travel, as the market would adjust to the artificial scarcity. People would move closer to work, businesses would open up closer to suburbs, etc. -- all because there would be a huge economic incentive to not drive on the highway.
Not only that, but stifling basic infrastructure in such a manner would mean that our economy would have to overcome that inefficiency to compete with other nations that have a regulated net.
I don't have the answer, because I honestly don't know what would eventually happen if ISP's were given free reign. Maybe it would be a good thing, because if you paid a metered bandwidth service you'd be more conscious about how much you use. Maybe new VOIP technology would develop to overcome the limitations imposed by the ISPs.
It's all much to complex for there to be an easy answer.
I have always wondered why it is people choose to believe rather than not believe
Check out C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity." It presents a logical argument as to why someone would become a Christian.
The gist of it is this -- we all seem to have some innate sense of morality that transcends culture and societies. (The idea that actions can be right and wrong is pretty much ubiquitous, regardless of whether a particular act is socially acceptable.)
The idea is that this sense of morality must come from somewhere, or else you could ignore it without feeling any guilt or remorse. If you believe that there is some supernatural force instilling this in us, then you have a sound basis for acting according to a certain moral code.
If your conscience is merely something that society has taught you, then logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions. This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, which I think most people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive.
So, the reason some people would choose to believe in a god is that they'd prefer to live in a world with a moral absolute. Otherwise their decisions and actions are fairly meaningless beyond their own gratification.
But this leads to one of those basic questions -- is there a moral absolute or not? I guess I'll leave it to the college freshman in dorms late at night to decide that.
This article contains the most ridiculous apples and oranges comparisons and circular logic I've read in a while.
The first mistake is comparing the net income of Apple to Dell and HP as evidence that Apple only needs to sell a small percentage of computers to "win." I guess for some definition of winning that doesn't include percentage of computers sold, this could be true.
The article then compares Apple's net profit to HP and Dell's, (both of which are lower than Apple's) as evidence that Apple is the dominant player in the desktop computer market. This ignores the fact that much of Apple's profit comes from music sales which are unrelated to desktop computers.
Of course, with a lot of hand waving, you can say this:
A large chunk of Apple's profitability comes from the iPod and other consumer electronics. Those sales are increasingly directing consumers to the Mac, and will help float the company through downturns in PC sales.
But where's the evidence that the iPod drives people to purchase a Mac? The Mac market share hasn't grown substantially even as the iPod has dominated its market. According to this logic, Mac sales should have jumped substantially.
Then, in the next paragraph:
However, as Apple takes away PC sales, an increasing smaller number of Windows licenses are sold.
And where is the evidence for this? Even if Apple makes more money on each computer they sell, the data shows that they still sell about 5% of PC's. Profitability doesn't automatically translate to market share, even if you really want it to.
Sure, Apple can be more profitable than Dell, but it doesn't make a lick of difference as far as Microsoft is concerned, as long as Apple's market share hovers around 5%. No matter how razor thin HP and Dell's margins are, Windows is still shipped on almost every PC they sell.
You have to compare Microsoft's sales with Apple's, if you want to extract any reasonable conclusion.
This is about as insightful as saying "well, General Electric is more profitable than Dell and HP combined, so this spells the end of the Windows PC market."
Of course, another option is to learn the "fundamentals" and "theory" of data management, so that you can "understand" data management at a more "abstract" and "fundamental" level, instead of relying on "cookbooks" and "recipes" that you can copy mindlessly.
At which point you'd be horrified at the way MySQL "handles" data and how the query "optimizer" really deserves to have the quotes around it, so much so that you'll be begging to use a database that offers more than really fast SELECTS on a single table.
And my guess is that this is why this cookbook exists, to offer hackish solutions to problems that would be otherwise elegantly solved by features that MySQL is either missing or implements half-assed.
I apologize if I sound bitter, it's because I've been wrangling with MySQL for the past week, trying to get it run *slightly* complex queries faster than I could do them by writing the tables down on paper and doing them by hand. Long story short, the db screams now, but I had to implement in my application what should be handled by partial indices or views, which MyISAM (best you get on most web hosting) doesn't support. It's enough to piss of the Good Humor man.
MySQL does have its place, though, and that's if you have a data set with a single table (or few/no relationships between tables) and Berkeley DB doesn't offer flexible enough searches for your application.
I understand why you say that, but think about how much the cost of business is affected by the income tax, in a hidden way.
Note that proposals for a national sales tax are for a constitutional amendment that would eliminate all other forms of taxation. Most include a monthly tax refund that would cover the taxes you'd pay on necessities, that would be the same for everyone. Poor people who only spend on necessities wouldn't pay any tax at all.
Employers have to offer after-tax salaries that are high enough to attract workers. If nobody had to pay income tax, you'd immediately have that extra money available to you. Hidden costs would be eliminated. Prices would likely rise slightly, but the cost of doing business would be very much reduced, as employers wouldn't have to handle the income tax paperwork, which is a substantial cost now.
Think of it this way. The government would take out the same percentage of GDP as it does now, just in a more efficient way with less paperwork. Efficiency == wealth.
It's not quite that cut and dried, as income tax is easily evaded by rich people too. It's actually much easier for them...the poor don't have extra money to hire accountants and lawyers.
The assertion that rich people don't buy things with their money, and would therefore be exempt from the sales tax, strikes me as odd, too.
If anything, a national retail sales tax would tax a whole class of people who don't typically pay taxes on income -- criminals, people who have inherited most of their wealth, foreigners buying things in the U.S., etc.
Whether or not it would be good overall I don't know, but I wouldn't discount the idea out of hand. I think the national sales tax's greatest advantage would be to reduce the amount of special tax favors that can be bought with campaign contributions now, which is a major drawback to a graduated income tax with millions of special rules and exemptions.
It's quite funny to do your state income taxes and see the questions like, "Are you a disabled veteran farmer who owns waterfront property that helps the environment?" and realize that it's likely that some large contributor likely fits that exact description.
Or maybe our politicians have a soft spot for disabled veteran farmers with waterfront property, I dunno.
I think you might be missing the point slightly about open-source.
You release unfinished products not out of laziness or incompetence, but because that way others can work on them too.
You're seeing the development process, which is normally hidden from you, in action. Is it any surprise that the unfinished software isn't all that you'd hoped for?
"Release" means a different thing in the commercial world than in the open-source world.
Y'all do realize that The Jungle is a fictional story, written by a socialist as propaganda, right?
I mean, not to say that none of the things in that book were true, or that Sinclair didn't have a point, but so many people seem to read that book as if it were a detached historical account, which it's not.
Doesn't it tip anyone off when Jurgis just happens by the socialist political rally and everyone speaking has a halo around their head, that the book might not be completely objective?
Slashdot Mirror
Huh.
I find the idea that minority people are so fundamentally different from white people that they can't be adequately represented by votes from other races both ridiculous and offensive.
The fact that people think like this is a symptom of the triumph of democracy over a republican form of government. Politics in this country is no more about the rule of law but is now all about deciding which special interest group gets how big a slice of the pie.
Unfortunately, arguing about who is getting their fair slice of pie in the context of political debate in a constitutional republic is asinine. We might as well argue about Anna Nicole Smith.
Ever use GCC?
Then you've used the architecture of LISP.
LISP is important not only because it's a great programming language, but because it's a concise method of expressing abstract syntax trees, which are at the heart of any decent compiler.
Take a look at Register Transfer Language, which gcc used to use as the intermediate target language. You'll notice a lot of parentheses...
I think the reason people disparage any programming language is that they don't understand it completely, because nearly every one has some unique idea or method of working that caused it to become popular. They're all fascinating to me.
Except for VBScript and Matlab. Those pretty much suck even if you know them completely.
KParts is an excellent example of what I'm talking about. KDE previously tried something like XPCOM, found it to be overkill and too complex for what they were doing, and came up with KParts instead, a much simpler, better solution. But it's not even close to doing what CORBA tries to do, (and that's a good thing).
Comparing XPCOM to KParts will give you an idea of the insanity of this proposal. Heck, just comparing the documentation for the two is evidence that the XUL desktop is a non-starter. From this page
When the KDE core-developers realised that Corba was becoming an unmanagable nightmare, they wrote in a few days a lightweight and efficient component technology to replace it: KPart.
KPart is based on Shared Libraries. This makes the component appears directly as a C++ object. There is no need to wrap its features with an IDL language, everything is accessible without extra effort.
What I'm guessing is happening is some guys started working with XUL, thought it was pretty cool, and said, "Hey! We could make a WHOLE desktop environment out of this if we wanted to!" But just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea. There's plenty of history here to back that up, too.
It's also possible that XPCOM itself is a hindrance to the Mozilla project. Have they realized the assumed benefits of using a component architecture? Not when I can only write for their platform in maybe four languages, if we're being generous.
It wasn't that long ago that CORBA and DCOM were new and exciting, people were running around talking about how you could assemble standard applications like word processors that pulled components from "all over the Internet." It never happened, because quite frankly, it's a stupid idea for desktop apps. Not everything needs to be a distributed application.
XPCOM came along at about this time, and I'm afraid it's still around more because it's a holdover from that era than because it's a good idea. There are benefits to using a component architecture, but the much simpler KParts, QT, or wxWidgets approaches have those same benefits, are much more usable.
I've done a bit of stuff with XUL.
It's great if you want to do things like, say, a custom web browser or write your own iTunes -- The kind of thing that you'd usually write as a web-based app but you need local file storage and maybe access to online content that cross-site scripting preventative rules would prevent you from accessing in a regular browser.
If you need to do more than that, it's quite a chore. You have to start writing your own XPCOM components, which you'll have to compile on each target platform separately. There goes your easy cross platform compatibility.
The documentation for XUL and XPCOM isn't very helpful or well organized, and that's putting it nicely.
Language support is thin. C++ and Javascript are pretty much your only choices, although Python support is coming soon, apparently.
The question is, if you were going to develop a desktop environment from scratch, would you start by writing XUL? Would you then extend that by embedding JavaScript? I don't think so. Both Gnome and KDE tried the whole component thing with CORBA and abandoned it for performance and complexity reasons. Cross-platform is nice, but Java, GTK+, QT, and even C# provide better cross platform benefits with greater support and language compatibility than the XUL suite of tools.
Not only that, but I'd wager a Java desktop environment would be a better performer than one based on XULRunner. Not to mention, it would support more languages through Jython, JNI, etc.
It's a shame, because XULrunner could be a great platform. I hope they focus more on documentation and supporting other languages than redundant pie-in-the-sky projects like this one.
I think that's one reason their online documentation has always sucked.
Huh? If there's one thing Microsoft does right, it's extensive online documentation.
They need it because their API is a schizophrenic mess, but it's the best online documentation I've seen for closed source software, by far.
Reading over the Dell forums and comments it seems like a bunch of spoiled, whining children over there. It's really not the best way to encourage someone to do you a favor.
The worst part are that the most vocal are the "I don't want to pay the Microsoft tax" portion. If these folks had their way, what Dell would provide is an entirely separate line of Linux PC's that may or may not run Windows.
That's not what I'd want, for a couple of reasons:
1) I use Windows and Linux, and I'd like to have a computer that will run both Linux and Windows.
2) There are not enough people interested in Linux-only machines for this to succeed financially, which would set the whole Linux on the desktop movement back another few years when we'll go through this again.
What Dell originally offered was to provide some sort of guarantee that hardware would work with Linux. This would be a huge step in the right direction, especially for laptops, but I'm afraid even that might not happen as everyone scrambles to be the most shrill proponent of their own favorite distro on the Dell message boards.
It's amateurish, it shows the "Linux community" is extremely fractured, and it shows Dell that catering to a bunch of whiners would probably be a financial disaster.
We can do better than this, I think.
The problem with vehicles becoming lighter is a safety one. Roads are designed with a certain vehicle weight in mind, such that the incline of the road as it curves keeps the car from sliding off of it, even in slippery conditions.
I love the "grid" driving system though. Never having to drive on a highway again would be a treat.
And if I had to commute, I'd love to buy a small car. The problem is, I'm 6'2" with long legs, and I don't fit in any of them, because they all try to be a "family car" and cram in some ridiculously undersized back seat.
I have a car for the family already. Why does nobody make an inexpensive, two-seater, two-door commuter car that a normal sized person would be comfortable driving?
My wife had a Miata for a while, and I'd drive that whenever I could, even though I had to get out the shoehorn to fit myself in it. Make a slightly larger Miata for a similar price, and I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
but those would be some high power transmitters in both directions it seems - to get the distance you would need for this to work as a conventional wifi sort of link.
One of the details the article is light on is the organization of the system. It might not be using high powered transmission at all, but serve a much smaller area similar to cellular. Just because it uses the same frequency as TV doesn't mean they have to build their towers the same way. By virtue of the signal being digital, there is a bit more flexibility due to the inherent gains in digital communication.
Also, my first thought was that this would be used for the downlink only, and you'd use traditional dial-up for the uplink. This would be really beneficial to the people stuck with dial-up because they can't get cable or DSL.
The path a TCP connection takes doesn't have to be the same going forward or backward. It doesn't even have to be the same path between multiple packets.
Since most people don't use nearly as much upload bandwidth as download, a dial-up upload with a very fast over the air download would be sufficient for the vast majority of users.
Many people in the U.S. are still on dial-up. If Google offered them a way to dramatically increase the speed of web page loads for an extra $2 a month, they'd probably take that option over the much more expensive DSL or Cable services.
Pretty smart move.
My problem is not with environmental regulation in general, but with the logic that we must do something immediately because the consequences "might" be catastrophic if we don't.
This isn't an argument, it's an absence of logic with an appeal to emotion.
Any rational decision should take into account the benefit versus the cost, as well as the risk involved of making things worse inadvertently. Advocating any and all action without any cost/benefit analysis is irresponsible.
Unfortunately this kind of rational analysis seems to be in short supply, which is why my eyes glaze over when I hear the words "climate change," because what usually follows is some vapid emotional appeal with plenty of whining and few viable alternative solutions offered.
The biggest question I have is, what's the goal here? Is it to save human lives? There are far more effective ways than driving an electric car to do that. Saying "millions may starve" doesn't really impress me when millions starve today already. Why not fix that problem, which definitely exists, rather than one that might not be a problem at all?
Christian fundamentalist: You should worship Jesus or you'll go to Hell.
Atheist: But I don't believe that to be true.
Christian fundamentalist: That doesn't matter. Hell is SO BAD that you should worship Jesus just in case. Better to be safe than sorry.
Atheist: I'll take my chances.
Christian fundamentalist: Well, I'll lobby the government to make you go to Church every Sunday, for your own good, because there so many of us that believe that Jesus is our savior, that it must be true.
Notice anything familiar?
I don't understand the vitriol for the PS3 here on /.
It's the first home computer since the Commodore 64 that you can hook up to your TV and hack on.
There are even articles showing you how.
It's like I've come full circle.
But by that logic, airline ticket prices would inch up over time until nobody could afford to fly. This doesn't happen.
Competition doesn't just include competition among like businesses. Airlines aren't just competing with each other, they're competing with all of the other options you have when you spend your dollar (not spending it being an option too). At some point, you'll decide that buying an airline ticket just isn't worth the price, and you'll either go on vacation within driving distance or do something else entirely, or do nothing -- maybe fly at some later date when you expect the price will drop.
The sum total of all these individual decisions sets the price that airlines compete against. Otherwise, they could all raise prices to $4000 a seat and still fill their planes with passengers.
The real question here is whether the Internet is subject to similar market pressure.
The Internet is different because we have a situation similar to what would happen if the airlines were able to set a 35mph speed limit on the highway. They'd probably (shortsightedly) do so to increase their own business, but the end result would probably be a decrease in overall travel, as the market would adjust to the artificial scarcity. People would move closer to work, businesses would open up closer to suburbs, etc. -- all because there would be a huge economic incentive to not drive on the highway.
Not only that, but stifling basic infrastructure in such a manner would mean that our economy would have to overcome that inefficiency to compete with other nations that have a regulated net.
I don't have the answer, because I honestly don't know what would eventually happen if ISP's were given free reign. Maybe it would be a good thing, because if you paid a metered bandwidth service you'd be more conscious about how much you use. Maybe new VOIP technology would develop to overcome the limitations imposed by the ISPs.
It's all much to complex for there to be an easy answer.
If it bothers you, just don't buy the game.
Buy a cool, refreshing Coca-Cola instead.
Don't worry, the Transformers movie is coming out this summer.
I have always wondered why it is people choose to believe rather than not believe
Check out C.S. Lewis's "Mere Christianity." It presents a logical argument as to why someone would become a Christian.
The gist of it is this -- we all seem to have some innate sense of morality that transcends culture and societies. (The idea that actions can be right and wrong is pretty much ubiquitous, regardless of whether a particular act is socially acceptable.)
The idea is that this sense of morality must come from somewhere, or else you could ignore it without feeling any guilt or remorse. If you believe that there is some supernatural force instilling this in us, then you have a sound basis for acting according to a certain moral code.
If your conscience is merely something that society has taught you, then logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions. This tends to lead toward the moral relativity direction, which I think most people find uncomfortable and counter-intuitive.
So, the reason some people would choose to believe in a god is that they'd prefer to live in a world with a moral absolute. Otherwise their decisions and actions are fairly meaningless beyond their own gratification.
But this leads to one of those basic questions -- is there a moral absolute or not? I guess I'll leave it to the college freshman in dorms late at night to decide that.
This article contains the most ridiculous apples and oranges comparisons and circular logic I've read in a while.
The first mistake is comparing the net income of Apple to Dell and HP as evidence that Apple only needs to sell a small percentage of computers to "win." I guess for some definition of winning that doesn't include percentage of computers sold, this could be true.
The article then compares Apple's net profit to HP and Dell's, (both of which are lower than Apple's) as evidence that Apple is the dominant player in the desktop computer market. This ignores the fact that much of Apple's profit comes from music sales which are unrelated to desktop computers.
Of course, with a lot of hand waving, you can say this:
A large chunk of Apple's profitability comes from the iPod and other consumer electronics. Those sales are increasingly directing consumers to the Mac, and will help float the company through downturns in PC sales.
But where's the evidence that the iPod drives people to purchase a Mac? The Mac market share hasn't grown substantially even as the iPod has dominated its market. According to this logic, Mac sales should have jumped substantially.
Then, in the next paragraph:
However, as Apple takes away PC sales, an increasing smaller number of Windows licenses are sold.
And where is the evidence for this? Even if Apple makes more money on each computer they sell, the data shows that they still sell about 5% of PC's. Profitability doesn't automatically translate to market share, even if you really want it to.
Sure, Apple can be more profitable than Dell, but it doesn't make a lick of difference as far as Microsoft is concerned, as long as Apple's market share hovers around 5%. No matter how razor thin HP and Dell's margins are, Windows is still shipped on almost every PC they sell.
You have to compare Microsoft's sales with Apple's, if you want to extract any reasonable conclusion.
This is about as insightful as saying "well, General Electric is more profitable than Dell and HP combined, so this spells the end of the Windows PC market."
Of course, another option is to learn the "fundamentals" and "theory" of data management, so that you can "understand" data management at a more "abstract" and "fundamental" level, instead of relying on "cookbooks" and "recipes" that you can copy mindlessly.
At which point you'd be horrified at the way MySQL "handles" data and how the query "optimizer" really deserves to have the quotes around it, so much so that you'll be begging to use a database that offers more than really fast SELECTS on a single table.
And my guess is that this is why this cookbook exists, to offer hackish solutions to problems that would be otherwise elegantly solved by features that MySQL is either missing or implements half-assed.
I apologize if I sound bitter, it's because I've been wrangling with MySQL for the past week, trying to get it run *slightly* complex queries faster than I could do them by writing the tables down on paper and doing them by hand. Long story short, the db screams now, but I had to implement in my application what should be handled by partial indices or views, which MyISAM (best you get on most web hosting) doesn't support. It's enough to piss of the Good Humor man.
MySQL does have its place, though, and that's if you have a data set with a single table (or few/no relationships between tables) and Berkeley DB doesn't offer flexible enough searches for your application.
Oh yeah? Is that signed or unsigned 0xff?
:-)
Shakespeare's way ahead of you.
These things take time.
Compounding the problem is that Debian is also notoriously slow to update packages. You might have better luck with apt-get Pascal or apt-get COBOL.
I understand why you say that, but think about how much the cost of business is affected by the income tax, in a hidden way.
Note that proposals for a national sales tax are for a constitutional amendment that would eliminate all other forms of taxation. Most include a monthly tax refund that would cover the taxes you'd pay on necessities, that would be the same for everyone. Poor people who only spend on necessities wouldn't pay any tax at all.
Employers have to offer after-tax salaries that are high enough to attract workers. If nobody had to pay income tax, you'd immediately have that extra money available to you. Hidden costs would be eliminated. Prices would likely rise slightly, but the cost of doing business would be very much reduced, as employers wouldn't have to handle the income tax paperwork, which is a substantial cost now.
Think of it this way. The government would take out the same percentage of GDP as it does now, just in a more efficient way with less paperwork. Efficiency == wealth.
It's not quite that cut and dried, as income tax is easily evaded by rich people too. It's actually much easier for them...the poor don't have extra money to hire accountants and lawyers.
The assertion that rich people don't buy things with their money, and would therefore be exempt from the sales tax, strikes me as odd, too.
If anything, a national retail sales tax would tax a whole class of people who don't typically pay taxes on income -- criminals, people who have inherited most of their wealth, foreigners buying things in the U.S., etc.
Whether or not it would be good overall I don't know, but I wouldn't discount the idea out of hand. I think the national sales tax's greatest advantage would be to reduce the amount of special tax favors that can be bought with campaign contributions now, which is a major drawback to a graduated income tax with millions of special rules and exemptions.
It's quite funny to do your state income taxes and see the questions like, "Are you a disabled veteran farmer who owns waterfront property that helps the environment?" and realize that it's likely that some large contributor likely fits that exact description.
Or maybe our politicians have a soft spot for disabled veteran farmers with waterfront property, I dunno.
I think you might be missing the point slightly about open-source.
You release unfinished products not out of laziness or incompetence, but because that way others can work on them too.
You're seeing the development process, which is normally hidden from you, in action. Is it any surprise that the unfinished software isn't all that you'd hoped for?
"Release" means a different thing in the commercial world than in the open-source world.
Really, who cares? It's not as if everyone has the time to
Y'all do realize that The Jungle is a fictional story, written by a socialist as propaganda, right?
I mean, not to say that none of the things in that book were true, or that Sinclair didn't have a point, but so many people seem to read that book as if it were a detached historical account, which it's not.
Doesn't it tip anyone off when Jurgis just happens by the socialist political rally and everyone speaking has a halo around their head, that the book might not be completely objective?