I understand this equipment well without resorting to any manuals. My clock is correct on the VCR, I can easily record shows with it, I have no trouble using my surround reciever, nor my DVD player or TV.
Don't get me wrong, there are remotes that surely are better than others, and I understand that many people want one instead of three+ remotes when they watch TV, but how easy can you make it without making it so easy to do certain tasks that those are the only ones you can do?
Besides, it can be a good thing to use your brain now and then;)
How come they don't punish people to the full extent of the law (is it possible to punish someone with a 1/4 of the law?) every time they download copyrighted movies, reglardless of what movie it is?
The movie industry needs to get its shit together.
If your company (and thus your management) does not have any detailed plans on what that needs to be done and how long it should take (max 20h blocks, preferable smaller), you are in for serious trouble. Failing to identify all neccessary tasks and planning them will surely make your project late, and most likely fail.
Pulling an all nighter the day before release to squash that last bug won't affect quality, but to constantly work more than 40h/weeks will affect you as a person. Your personal life will suffer greatly, you will get tense, you and your co-workers will start to go on each others nerves, you will most likely sleep bad and get a constant feeling that you are behind. The stress level will go up and affect you in so many way that a team of researchers would be neccessary to explain all the effects.
So, seriously, are you still caring that much about code quality? The quality of your life is in the drain after many weeks of constantly getting pushed around. And yes, the quality of the code is by now quite bad, quarrels and accusations are more common, no steps neccessary to keep up the quality are done, like reviews, proper testing and inspections, the only thing you have in your head is "how can I do this as quickly as possible so I can get out of this hell hole". Sell your stock, sell it now.
If you are interested in more about software engineering and reasons why your management is doing so horrible feel free to check out my webpage and send me an email. I have read a few good books (which I can't remember the titles of right now so you really do have to email;)) and I have experience working, both the good and the bad.
And as my last words, maybe it is time for you and the most talented people in your company to start your own business if possible. There are many reasons why it might not be possible, but if it is, it is a very good experience. You won't have to deal with incompetent management that doesn't know anything about how software development works.
But do remember that you can't start acting like them yourself, you are a software engineer, and most likely not the best person to do everything in a company. Hire people that are good at economics and a good president and all that. Remember that everybody in a company has to be competent at doing their job and that you have to listen to each other. See what happens when management is not listening to you...
(These things does not neccessary apply to personal projects, as you have an inner glow and will to finish the project, and you are most likely not sharing the code base with another 50 people. Just wanted to say that too;))
It is the worst Linux distro that I have ever had my hands on (I don't get impressed by installations or weak admin tools to doesn't fix the underlying mess), and they have a history of really major fuck ups, for example the gcc 2.96.x stupidity. I will never trust red hat on a production machine ever.
I long for a stable server distro for linux, completely free from X and non related software. A pure, secure, highly supported, well managed, and tested distribution. One were every API shipped is correctly and fully documented, where all the horrible bugs are removed, where each package is tested and fixed and is done in time for each release.
Heck, if it was me, I would take a serious look at *BSD instead of linux when running servers, but since linux and *BSD are different on some accounts, it can be a bugger to make it work on both platforms, and it takes too much time unfortunatly. It would have been a different sitution if it had been my own hobby project.
Another thing about Red Hat, there are an alarming number of releases from large corporations (drivers for instance) that favors Red Hat. Why oh why can't there be a single package file format so that the same package works for any distribution? The first one who says "freedom of choice"... Yeah, tons of freedom if you choose to have '\0' or '\n' as a delimiter. Get real.
That money could in turn be invested in a new company with a better chance of turning in a profit. There are tons of inventions and ideas out there that need investment that by far outshines trying to make money on the internet or with software nobody is willing to pay for anyway.
What the world needs is a new boom, like the.COM one, just this time in companies that got a clue what the hell they do.
is sponsored by company X (for example after the intro), run the whole thing, don't get interrupted, hey I like that company who helped give me this nice TV series, and I see their name at the beginning every time, but they don't bug me.
I try to activly avoid products that have annoying commercials, I hope you do to.
First of all, how about contacting SGI asking if the Linux project can get it in writing that they can use these techniques (they might even get code from SGI). No point in bashing SGI before this point. In fact, being unnice will diminish the chances. Besides, SGI has given away software to linux (etc) before.
Second of all, it would be a good idea to make a point of software patents making it harder to stay competitive in a very hard to survive in market. Putting it into terms that are not dripping with radical ideology, but in terms of stifling the progress and the market, reducing innovation and profit.
If the dub is anything like Mononoke Hime...
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
The English dub for Mononoke Hime was incredibly bad, it was a true pain hearing just a few minutes of it. I don't mind English at all, and I enjoy movies in English, but that dub was complete crap. I can understand why the audience failed, because let's face it, it sucked.
That said, I liked the dub of GITS and found it to be pretty good (but it lacked the much better sound effects in the japanese soundtrack). I will probably buy the movie if it is released with the japanese soundtrack.
I hope that Disney and Ghibli can co-produce the language tracks next time (might need to make certain small changes in the movie depending on language, which is only natural) so that the japanese and english tracks are laid down side by side, and it contains the exact same sounds (minus voices). That would make it a lot better, and some people might even do both langauge tracks (ever seen the dub of Das Boot? Most of the people dubbed themselves into English).
And while I am in 'this is upsetting me' mode I should mention that I hope that the japanese DTS track is included instead of the inferior DD track. If you like anime with a serious tone I can recommend Jin-Roh which was great, and had a beautiful and strong score, which was thankfully in glorious DTS (you also get the music on a CD in the spec. ed. and the music is real good).
To make matters worse, the best genes are not propagated as it would be in a genetic algorithm, they tend to join cults or trailorparks and produce offspring at an alarming rate...
Although what you say do make sense more or less I would like to know which University that you do work at and what you guys have done. Everything that one does, does not need to be cutting edge. Not much of a point in learning how to speak, walk, or drive a car.
These guys probably had a lot of fun doing what they did, and I assume they are not up to MIT standards (not many are). Don't blame them for whatever a reporter might blurb out.
There isn't much of a problem, really. If it works real bad, it will be abandoned in the end, one way or another. The Soviet Union was based on communism (a nice idea at least), turned out to be some twisted form of it with corrupted leaders and massive spying (with Vodka), and in the end broke down and is now recovering.
The whole DRM thing is based on a nice thought "don't rip off other peoples works". I.e. if you publish your music under a license I need to pay you a fee to own it. But it has gone overboard, for many reasons, and is starting to become a big problem for those who buy their music. I wouldn't be too terribly happy about not being able to take a CD over to a friend, the car, or with me on a holiday. Neither would I be terribly happy about getting spied upon.
Part of this is certain companies having bad visions (and trying to "resuce" their old ways of revenue instead of comming up with new ones), but the other part is that a lot of people don't mind stealing software and entertainment (music/movies). If you sit with a bunch of movies and mp3s on your harddisk that you did not pay for, consider that.
Hopefully this whole thing will go defunct in the end (I won't rip with WMA to begin with, I prefer ogg at the moment, but only because of the sound quality) and give rise to a new and better way of sharing and making a profit.
One huge motherload of a law, in the US and EU, that states that whatever I do on my spare time, is my own business.
Maybe it is time for the companies to treat their employees better so that any ideas that they might have get appriciated properly and they get their just award. I wouldn't go through the trouble of setting up a company of my own if I could make very good money from staying where I am and help my company with good ideas.
This is what a goverment should do, protect the little people. The goverment works for the people. But this is unfortunatly long forgotten...
The net is filled with ads, what did you expect from AOL? Of course netscape won't feature something that works against what their owners see as their business. Netscape didn't start mozilla for the sake of freedom or removal of annoyance, they did it because they want to own the only browser on the market, and be able to push whatever they want into it. They are not battling IE for your sake after all.
I think there is a better chance that Konqi will get and keep features such as this, and it is not a big piece of bloat either.
Except for a few exceptions, such as vizualisating an object for the viewer, there is little or no point in having a 3d interface. And all the 3D that I've seen on the web has been dog slow, with horrible plug-ins for equally horrible browsers.
I would rather see a successor to HTML that is leaner and more in line for what the web wants to be. It is no longer documents with some links, but some form of presentations with links.
I used to have a ton of virtual desktops when I used Linux. I was wondering how I could ever live without them! I am now mainly using XP (and NT. 2k before that) and I find the taskbar and alt-tab to be just as easy to use and just as fast and virtual desktops. I have developed some kind of system where I remember what stuff I just used (alt-tab) and then I go to the taskbar for the stuff that I still have running but haven't used for a while.
This is not "USE XP!", I am quite sure you can get it to work like this in KDE for example. I am just saying give MacOS X own system a chance for a while and stop thinking in terms of virtual desktops, you might end up liking it (or end up switching OS).
The biggest reason I used virtual desktops was the 10+ xterms I had to have up all the time. I obviously don't have many xterms in Windows. Does you guys who use MacOS X use a lot of terminals? I'm just curious about how much of the BSD part of MacOS X is used by people.
I could say the same thing about MacOS (X), Windows, Linux, BSD;)
NeXTStep was a seriously spiffy and technically advanced OS that never really made it, but that spiffiness appeals to geeks. I admire NeXTStep, but I understand that a certain Steve Jobs killed it off (MacOS X is based on it though, let's see if Mr. Jobs kills that one as well).
But porting APIs to *nix won't really make it into NeXTStep...
Stating that they are supporting a 64-bit CPU should mean that all the code that makes up RedHat properly compiles on this particular 64-bit CPU (i.e. is 64-bit pure) and that the compiler handles the CPU properly. Since we are dealing with open source, all the distributions could put together a 64-bit version easily by simply upgrading to the latest 64-bit friendly source and doing a build.
What I am wondering about is how much of the code is not 64-bit pure, and who will take care of making it 64-bit pure in time for Hammer to be released. It is a real problem after all.
Everybody and their cat will support the Hammer when it finally arrives, linux, windows, (MacOS X?), bsd, (solaris??).
And about 16GB of memory. Either you put 4GB DDR333 SIMMs in your four slots, or you have a mobo with a lot of SIMM slots. Having a larger address range is great, but I wouldn't want it if I don't get more memory as well;) Let's hope the memory prices can fall a little again.
Put the XP CD in, boot. fix the partitions, start it, let the stuff run until it says "I'll reboot your computer now", make sure it doesn't boot the CD this time, w8, enter name, w8, enter timezone/language etc, w8, enter IP(etc) or choose dhcp. w8, log in.
What is the problem? I can't run the redhat install for you since I haven't installed redhat for a very long time (and I won't do it again unless someone pays me for it), but I am quite sure it is very much similar. Heck, the Gentoo manual install isn't even tricky if you read the instructions. Heck, it is even REAL easy.
Comparing install proceedures doesn't say much at all (even less if the OS is pre-installed). I don't know about you, but the time I spend installing OSes is wastly much less than the time I spend using computers. Comparing everyday usage in an objective way would have been much more interesting for sure.
The CGI Yoda was about a million times better than the actor who played Anakin Skywalker, and Frank Oz voice will always be a big part of Yoda.
You can in fact switch the doll to the CGI, but could you ever get away with changing Yoda's voice? I know how CGI works, more or less, and I can guess what kind of progress there will be (speak about farms of R300s and NV30s that renders the ass of CPU only based renderfarms). But what about voices?
I can't remember hearing any computer generated voices that would fool me. Anyone who has any examples to prove me wrong?
And how about words that doesn't even exist in the target language? How about three of them in the same sentence? Would you like to insert a few sentences of explaination, including a few paragraphs of cultural references?
The only translation softwares that I have seen has either been very faulty (babelfish) or very simple (ordering tickets). Every time I have spoken with a linguist they have given me reason after reason why it would be very hard, if not impossible, to translate from very different languages (English->Swedish is probably possible, even though you would sound like a complete moron after a while, but Japanese->English would be much harder).
I think that the science and research is important, but I will retain a healthy sceptisism towards any "perfect" systems popping up anytime soon.
Take our little company for instance. We have a five license deal from Microsoft, but we are not using all. What if we want a laptop, should we pay for Windows XP Home (which btw is complete crap, only the pro version is usable)? We have a license for a fulling working OS from Microsoft, yet we do have to pay for some complete crap that will be thrown away before a singly byte of it is executed.
This is a rip off for sure. The whole "then don't buy it" is complete bollocks after all, and I think the slashdot crew is agreeing. And I am not a Microsoft hater even.
This is what Microsoft should be prosecuted for, instead of some moaning from Netrape and Sun (Java is completely wrong for Windows, live with it. Linux as well is better off with mono instead).
Would you accept an expensive insurance to go along with your car? Or only be able to tank at a certain gas station?
Give them a working.gov address, might not do anything good in the scheme of things, but maybe, just maybe, they will get tons of spam and start to reconsider their stand on letting spam be legal.
And, american spammers, I don't give a shit about your laws on spam when you send me an email to my _swedish_ address. Come on people, there is something wrong here...
Slashdot Mirror
Could it be a certain professor from a certain brilliant TV show that no longer IS on TV. Hmm, the irony, the irony...
But seriously, TV must be one of the most influencial inventions in ages. It opened up to a whole lot of things, good and bad.
I understand this equipment well without resorting to any manuals. My clock is correct on the VCR, I can easily record shows with it, I have no trouble using my surround reciever, nor my DVD player or TV.
;)
Don't get me wrong, there are remotes that surely are better than others, and I understand that many people want one instead of three+ remotes when they watch TV, but how easy can you make it without making it so easy to do certain tasks that those are the only ones you can do?
Besides, it can be a good thing to use your brain now and then
How come they don't punish people to the full extent of the law (is it possible to punish someone with a 1/4 of the law?) every time they download copyrighted movies, reglardless of what movie it is?
The movie industry needs to get its shit together.
If your company (and thus your management) does not have any detailed plans on what that needs to be done and how long it should take (max 20h blocks, preferable smaller), you are in for serious trouble. Failing to identify all neccessary tasks and planning them will surely make your project late, and most likely fail.
Pulling an all nighter the day before release to squash that last bug won't affect quality, but to constantly work more than 40h/weeks will affect you as a person. Your personal life will suffer greatly, you will get tense, you and your co-workers will start to go on each others nerves, you will most likely sleep bad and get a constant feeling that you are behind. The stress level will go up and affect you in so many way that a team of researchers would be neccessary to explain all the effects.
So, seriously, are you still caring that much about code quality? The quality of your life is in the drain after many weeks of constantly getting pushed around. And yes, the quality of the code is by now quite bad, quarrels and accusations are more common, no steps neccessary to keep up the quality are done, like reviews, proper testing and inspections, the only thing you have in your head is "how can I do this as quickly as possible so I can get out of this hell hole". Sell your stock, sell it now.
If you are interested in more about software engineering and reasons why your management is doing so horrible feel free to check out my webpage and send me an email. I have read a few good books (which I can't remember the titles of right now so you really do have to email;)) and I have experience working, both the good and the bad.
And as my last words, maybe it is time for you and the most talented people in your company to start your own business if possible. There are many reasons why it might not be possible, but if it is, it is a very good experience. You won't have to deal with incompetent management that doesn't know anything about how software development works.
But do remember that you can't start acting like them yourself, you are a software engineer, and most likely not the best person to do everything in a company. Hire people that are good at economics and a good president and all that. Remember that everybody in a company has to be competent at doing their job and that you have to listen to each other. See what happens when management is not listening to you...
(These things does not neccessary apply to personal projects, as you have an inner glow and will to finish the project, and you are most likely not sharing the code base with another 50 people. Just wanted to say that too;))
It is the worst Linux distro that I have ever had my hands on (I don't get impressed by installations or weak admin tools to doesn't fix the underlying mess), and they have a history of really major fuck ups, for example the gcc 2.96.x stupidity. I will never trust red hat on a production machine ever.
I long for a stable server distro for linux, completely free from X and non related software. A pure, secure, highly supported, well managed, and tested distribution. One were every API shipped is correctly and fully documented, where all the horrible bugs are removed, where each package is tested and fixed and is done in time for each release.
Heck, if it was me, I would take a serious look at *BSD instead of linux when running servers, but since linux and *BSD are different on some accounts, it can be a bugger to make it work on both platforms, and it takes too much time unfortunatly. It would have been a different sitution if it had been my own hobby project.
Another thing about Red Hat, there are an alarming number of releases from large corporations (drivers for instance) that favors Red Hat. Why oh why can't there be a single package file format so that the same package works for any distribution? The first one who says "freedom of choice"... Yeah, tons of freedom if you choose to have '\0' or '\n' as a delimiter. Get real.
That money could in turn be invested in a new company with a better chance of turning in a profit. There are tons of inventions and ideas out there that need investment that by far outshines trying to make money on the internet or with software nobody is willing to pay for anyway.
.COM one, just this time in companies that got a clue what the hell they do.
What the world needs is a new boom, like the
is sponsored by company X (for example after the intro), run the whole thing, don't get interrupted, hey I like that company who helped give me this nice TV series, and I see their name at the beginning every time, but they don't bug me.
I try to activly avoid products that have annoying commercials, I hope you do to.
First of all, how about contacting SGI asking if the Linux project can get it in writing that they can use these techniques (they might even get code from SGI). No point in bashing SGI before this point. In fact, being unnice will diminish the chances. Besides, SGI has given away software to linux (etc) before.
Second of all, it would be a good idea to make a point of software patents making it harder to stay competitive in a very hard to survive in market. Putting it into terms that are not dripping with radical ideology, but in terms of stifling the progress and the market, reducing innovation and profit.
The English dub for Mononoke Hime was incredibly bad, it was a true pain hearing just a few minutes of it. I don't mind English at all, and I enjoy movies in English, but that dub was complete crap. I can understand why the audience failed, because let's face it, it sucked.
That said, I liked the dub of GITS and found it to be pretty good (but it lacked the much better sound effects in the japanese soundtrack). I will probably buy the movie if it is released with the japanese soundtrack.
I hope that Disney and Ghibli can co-produce the language tracks next time (might need to make certain small changes in the movie depending on language, which is only natural) so that the japanese and english tracks are laid down side by side, and it contains the exact same sounds (minus voices). That would make it a lot better, and some people might even do both langauge tracks (ever seen the dub of Das Boot? Most of the people dubbed themselves into English).
And while I am in 'this is upsetting me' mode I should mention that I hope that the japanese DTS track is included instead of the inferior DD track. If you like anime with a serious tone I can recommend Jin-Roh which was great, and had a beautiful and strong score, which was thankfully in glorious DTS (you also get the music on a CD in the spec. ed. and the music is real good).
To make matters worse, the best genes are not propagated as it would be in a genetic algorithm, they tend to join cults or trailorparks and produce offspring at an alarming rate...
Although what you say do make sense more or less I would like to know which University that you do work at and what you guys have done. Everything that one does, does not need to be cutting edge. Not much of a point in learning how to speak, walk, or drive a car.
These guys probably had a lot of fun doing what they did, and I assume they are not up to MIT standards (not many are). Don't blame them for whatever a reporter might blurb out.
There isn't much of a problem, really. If it works real bad, it will be abandoned in the end, one way or another. The Soviet Union was based on communism (a nice idea at least), turned out to be some twisted form of it with corrupted leaders and massive spying (with Vodka), and in the end broke down and is now recovering.
The whole DRM thing is based on a nice thought "don't rip off other peoples works". I.e. if you publish your music under a license I need to pay you a fee to own it. But it has gone overboard, for many reasons, and is starting to become a big problem for those who buy their music. I wouldn't be too terribly happy about not being able to take a CD over to a friend, the car, or with me on a holiday. Neither would I be terribly happy about getting spied upon.
Part of this is certain companies having bad visions (and trying to "resuce" their old ways of revenue instead of comming up with new ones), but the other part is that a lot of people don't mind stealing software and entertainment (music/movies). If you sit with a bunch of movies and mp3s on your harddisk that you did not pay for, consider that.
Hopefully this whole thing will go defunct in the end (I won't rip with WMA to begin with, I prefer ogg at the moment, but only because of the sound quality) and give rise to a new and better way of sharing and making a profit.
We better destroy all records of those movies quickly then!!!
And even if the primates doesn't gain control, I am still winning, because I don't like the movies;)
One huge motherload of a law, in the US and EU, that states that whatever I do on my spare time, is my own business.
Maybe it is time for the companies to treat their employees better so that any ideas that they might have get appriciated properly and they get their just award. I wouldn't go through the trouble of setting up a company of my own if I could make very good money from staying where I am and help my company with good ideas.
This is what a goverment should do, protect the little people. The goverment works for the people. But this is unfortunatly long forgotten...
The net is filled with ads, what did you expect from AOL? Of course netscape won't feature something that works against what their owners see as their business. Netscape didn't start mozilla for the sake of freedom or removal of annoyance, they did it because they want to own the only browser on the market, and be able to push whatever they want into it. They are not battling IE for your sake after all.
I think there is a better chance that Konqi will get and keep features such as this, and it is not a big piece of bloat either.
Except for a few exceptions, such as vizualisating an object for the viewer, there is little or no point in having a 3d interface. And all the 3D that I've seen on the web has been dog slow, with horrible plug-ins for equally horrible browsers.
I would rather see a successor to HTML that is leaner and more in line for what the web wants to be. It is no longer documents with some links, but some form of presentations with links.
Can you say "merger"?;) It is a possibility after all.
I used to have a ton of virtual desktops when I used Linux. I was wondering how I could ever live without them! I am now mainly using XP (and NT. 2k before that) and I find the taskbar and alt-tab to be just as easy to use and just as fast and virtual desktops. I have developed some kind of system where I remember what stuff I just used (alt-tab) and then I go to the taskbar for the stuff that I still have running but haven't used for a while.
This is not "USE XP!", I am quite sure you can get it to work like this in KDE for example. I am just saying give MacOS X own system a chance for a while and stop thinking in terms of virtual desktops, you might end up liking it (or end up switching OS).
The biggest reason I used virtual desktops was the 10+ xterms I had to have up all the time. I obviously don't have many xterms in Windows. Does you guys who use MacOS X use a lot of terminals? I'm just curious about how much of the BSD part of MacOS X is used by people.
I could say the same thing about MacOS (X), Windows, Linux, BSD ;)
NeXTStep was a seriously spiffy and technically advanced OS that never really made it, but that spiffiness appeals to geeks. I admire NeXTStep, but I understand that a certain Steve Jobs killed it off (MacOS X is based on it though, let's see if Mr. Jobs kills that one as well).
But porting APIs to *nix won't really make it into NeXTStep...
Stating that they are supporting a 64-bit CPU should mean that all the code that makes up RedHat properly compiles on this particular 64-bit CPU (i.e. is 64-bit pure) and that the compiler handles the CPU properly. Since we are dealing with open source, all the distributions could put together a 64-bit version easily by simply upgrading to the latest 64-bit friendly source and doing a build.
What I am wondering about is how much of the code is not 64-bit pure, and who will take care of making it 64-bit pure in time for Hammer to be released. It is a real problem after all.
Everybody and their cat will support the Hammer when it finally arrives, linux, windows, (MacOS X?), bsd, (solaris??).
And about 16GB of memory. Either you put 4GB DDR333 SIMMs in your four slots, or you have a mobo with a lot of SIMM slots. Having a larger address range is great, but I wouldn't want it if I don't get more memory as well;) Let's hope the memory prices can fall a little again.
Put the XP CD in, boot. fix the partitions, start it, let the stuff run until it says "I'll reboot your computer now", make sure it doesn't boot the CD this time, w8, enter name, w8, enter timezone/language etc, w8, enter IP(etc) or choose dhcp. w8, log in.
What is the problem? I can't run the redhat install for you since I haven't installed redhat for a very long time (and I won't do it again unless someone pays me for it), but I am quite sure it is very much similar. Heck, the Gentoo manual install isn't even tricky if you read the instructions. Heck, it is even REAL easy.
Comparing install proceedures doesn't say much at all (even less if the OS is pre-installed). I don't know about you, but the time I spend installing OSes is wastly much less than the time I spend using computers. Comparing everyday usage in an objective way would have been much more interesting for sure.
The CGI Yoda was about a million times better than the actor who played Anakin Skywalker, and Frank Oz voice will always be a big part of Yoda.
You can in fact switch the doll to the CGI, but could you ever get away with changing Yoda's voice? I know how CGI works, more or less, and I can guess what kind of progress there will be (speak about farms of R300s and NV30s that renders the ass of CPU only based renderfarms). But what about voices?
I can't remember hearing any computer generated voices that would fool me. Anyone who has any examples to prove me wrong?
And how about words that doesn't even exist in the target language? How about three of them in the same sentence? Would you like to insert a few sentences of explaination, including a few paragraphs of cultural references?
The only translation softwares that I have seen has either been very faulty (babelfish) or very simple (ordering tickets). Every time I have spoken with a linguist they have given me reason after reason why it would be very hard, if not impossible, to translate from very different languages (English->Swedish is probably possible, even though you would sound like a complete moron after a while, but Japanese->English would be much harder).
I think that the science and research is important, but I will retain a healthy sceptisism towards any "perfect" systems popping up anytime soon.
Take our little company for instance. We have a five license deal from Microsoft, but we are not using all. What if we want a laptop, should we pay for Windows XP Home (which btw is complete crap, only the pro version is usable)? We have a license for a fulling working OS from Microsoft, yet we do have to pay for some complete crap that will be thrown away before a singly byte of it is executed.
This is a rip off for sure. The whole "then don't buy it" is complete bollocks after all, and I think the slashdot crew is agreeing. And I am not a Microsoft hater even.
This is what Microsoft should be prosecuted for, instead of some moaning from Netrape and Sun (Java is completely wrong for Windows, live with it. Linux as well is better off with mono instead).
Would you accept an expensive insurance to go along with your car? Or only be able to tank at a certain gas station?
Give them a working .gov address, might not do anything good in the scheme of things, but maybe, just maybe, they will get tons of spam and start to reconsider their stand on letting spam be legal.
And, american spammers, I don't give a shit about your laws on spam when you send me an email to my _swedish_ address. Come on people, there is something wrong here...