Let's be honest: Documentation of open source programs is generally TERRIBLE. Anything unusual you want to do usually requires a week of experimentation.
Absolutely agree, 100%. But it's worth adding that documentation of closed source programs is generally TERRIBLE too. I bet we all have some horror stories!
Either all these former Scientologists are in some kind of multi-decade conspiracy to slander CoS OR the CoS really has been doing horrible things since its founding.
A. On that argument, I assume you believe the blood libel against the Jews? After all when lots of people say bad things against a target of hate, it must be true, mustn't it?
B. Even if they have been doing lots of horrible things (which seems to be the case), that isn't proof that they've done this particular horrible thing. Lots of folks here seem to think it is.
And confusing "Charged with" with "Found guilty of". I'm no fan of the CoS, but we don't know yet whether David Miscavige is a nutjob too (and who knows, maybe never will).
So what you're saying is that we should allow them to continue pirating, taking hostages and killing innocent people because they might starve to death? Do me a favour and grow a pair.
Do me a favour and read what I actually wrote. I say enough dumb-ass things without needing you to invent new dumb-ass things for me to have said.
Then I guess they'll die doing nasty dangerous things instead. And this way they won't have victimized innocent people.
I'm not sure who is "innocent" in this business.,quote>Don't be so patronizing. There are lots of hungry and jobless people all over the world. Only a tiny fraction of them are pirates. Why do you feel that Somalians are so backwards as to be unable to improve their own lot in life without becoming parasites and criminals?
Because people shoot them if they try? Comparing the situation of the poor in a country with a strong government with that of the poor in a country in the middle of a civil war just doesn't work. (Chinese pirates, who seem to have dropped out of headlines, are a different matter).
The problem has been that the international community has labored under a collective guilt complex about Africa.
No, I don't think the problem is a guilt complex. The problem is people turning to crime in a situation of grinding poverty. That would be the same whether the international community felt guilty over Africa or not.
Who says they should surrender their lives? I'm saying that unless you look honestly at the root causes and deal with them then any action taken will be short-term and ineffective. If you get squatters in your holiday home then kick them out. But if you keep getting squatters in your holiday home then maybe (push for local government to) start looking at whether there is a problem with homelessness in the area and start looking at the adequacy of the homeless shelters.
I don't put all the blame on the Western greedy fat cat. The long-term civil war in Somalia and resulting collapse in the rule of law is probably the biggest factor. Although there are pirates from other countries there's pretty much always a problem with the rule of law.
My point is that making the punishment for transgression nasty doesn't help if the punishment for non-transgression is just as nasty and more certain. Sure, once they're dead they'll stop transgressing but they can reproduce and I thik you'll find it's like squirrels in the garden. As fast as you kill them more move in because you've left a niche. Meanwhile far more ships' crew members are getting killed because the pirates know that if they're caught they're dead anyway so they might as well go down fighting.
Until rule-of-law can get established in Somalia and similar trouble spots, I don't think upping the stakes will do any good, because nothing is a deterrent to people who are already truly desperate. But rule of law won't get established by "insisting" that the government establish it, we need to find ways of cooperating to help that government do it.
Pirates are lazy cowards; they're in it for the money. Make it not only unprofitable but also NASTY dangerous, and they'll find other lines of work.
And what ther lines of work are they going to find in Somalia? The pirates are mainly ex-fishermen, but the fishing grounds have been destroyed by overfishing by foreign factory ships and by foreign dumping of toxic waste. It's a subsistence area, so there's no other work. Are you going to let them move to your country to find work? If not then they have a choice of crime or starve, and you're never going to make it "nasty dangerous" enough to put off the person who would starve to death otherwise. As for stories of pirates making a fortune out of piracy -- well, you can bet they're not the ones at sea risking their necks; they're the ones on land with a nice chain of plausible deniability to dissociate them from what's happening at sea.
I think international governments should force countries to enforce piracy laws.
You are assuming there is a government in place that would be able to enforce the laws. There's a civil war going on in Somalia. I'm sure the government would love to enforce control over the whole country, but it can't, and no amount of posturing by "international governments" is going to change that. And if you think the "international governments" should march in and take over -- well, if the west invaded yet another Arab state I think that piracy would be the least of our worries.
Err, the massive propellers that most cargo ships use make trying to foul one useless?
But pirates don't just go after large cargo ships. They go after leisure craft too, and this weapon looks as if it would be effective against them. Always the way with weapons, isn't it? You buy one and the bad guys buy one too.
What I'd honestly like to understand is what the cultural differences are, and if anyone knows -WHY- they exist
As I understand it, it's because US Law is based on English Common Law, whereas German law is heavily influenced by Napoleonic law (which was in force there until about a hundred years ago). Napoleonic law leans significantly in favour of the government against the private individual compared to English Common Law. So the differences are (at least in part) down to the outcome of the Napoleonic wars.
That's like saying you cannot model a bouncing ball because you are unable to model all the subatomic particles involved.
No it isn't -- the behaviour of a bouncing ball is regular and well understood. Even if you take human minds out of it, the economy is quite likely a chaotic system, and once you put human minds in then you get some very strange feedback loops and particularly unpredictable behaviour. You can get so far with averaging behaviour, but human behaviour has a lot of potential tipping points where it will cease to be (on average) the same as it was before. You don't need to go down to the subatomic level to explain the behaviour of a bouncing ball. Good luck getting a rigorous physics-like model of human behaviour without going to that level.
Not unless you model all the subatomic particles in all the humans making decisions, along with all those in their environment. It was exactly that sort of model -- the Phillips curve, to be precise -- that led economists to believe that inflation and recession were mutually exclusive. They're not, as we discovered in the 1960s.
And for a physicist, he doesn't seem to be approaching the subject very scientifically, either. He has found a correlation, and on that basis concludes that it's an unvarying constant? Whatever happened to hypothesis forming and testing? Whatever happened to the principle that it isn't science unless there is a model describing why cause and effect are related? Yes, I know physicists sometimes have to cope without those things -- gravitation is a classic example -- but then they recognise that there's a hole in their science and work hard to fix it. The correlation that Garrett has found has nothing like the scientific confidence of gravitation. He's found a correlation? Well, what is the mechanism that causes that correlation, and which bits of it can be changed? Only if none of them can possibly be changed is it a "physical constant", and if it can be changed if "the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day" then clearly it can be changed. Surely, either it is a "simple physical constant" or it isn't?
The discovery of the correlation looks like interesting work. Unfortunately, it probably won't turn out to be useful work because it's too wrapped up in hysteria and by identifying the correlation coefficient as a "physical constant" Garrett has rejected the very thing that needs to be studied -- how we change it.
It isn't meant to stop them using it for those purposes. It's there to cover Microsoft's and Apple's asses -- they don't get sued if the biological weapon hits the wrong target.
Anybody working in an international environment learns to do it PDQ. Here in the UK we use commas as thousands separators, but I can't remember when I last did that: I do enough business with continental Europe that I use spaces instinctively.
In all those cases the person ended up dead. I'm not sure that death by taser is a significant improvement over death by gunshot.
My point is that a taser should not be considered a non-lethal weapon -- merely lower lethality than a gun. Calling it "non-lethal" can lead to tasers being used more casually than they should and not being given the respect they deserve.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I left out grep because there typically wasn't a great Windows equivalent.
WinGrep isn't bad (though not free in either sense).
On my Windows machine, if I insert a blank CD in the drive it pops up a dialog asking me whether I want to burn files to it.
Let's be honest: Documentation of open source programs is generally TERRIBLE. Anything unusual you want to do usually requires a week of experimentation.
Absolutely agree, 100%. But it's worth adding that documentation of closed source programs is generally TERRIBLE too. I bet we all have some horror stories!
Luckily, BBC News is run on the British TV Licence and can't - by power of it's charter - put adverts or start charging for anything.
Only true if you're accessing it from the UK. They can -- and do -- add advertising if you're browsing from the rest of the world.
Either all these former Scientologists are in some kind of multi-decade conspiracy to slander CoS OR the CoS really has been doing horrible things since its founding.
A. On that argument, I assume you believe the blood libel against the Jews? After all when lots of people say bad things against a target of hate, it must be true, mustn't it?
B. Even if they have been doing lots of horrible things (which seems to be the case), that isn't proof that they've done this particular horrible thing. Lots of folks here seem to think it is.
And confusing "Charged with" with "Found guilty of". I'm no fan of the CoS, but we don't know yet whether David Miscavige is a nutjob too (and who knows, maybe never will).
So what you're saying is that we should allow them to continue pirating, taking hostages and killing innocent people because they might starve to death? Do me a favour and grow a pair.
Do me a favour and read what I actually wrote. I say enough dumb-ass things without needing you to invent new dumb-ass things for me to have said.
Then I guess they'll die doing nasty dangerous things instead. And this way they won't have victimized innocent people.
I'm not sure who is "innocent" in this business.,quote>Don't be so patronizing. There are lots of hungry and jobless people all over the world. Only a tiny fraction of them are pirates. Why do you feel that Somalians are so backwards as to be unable to improve their own lot in life without becoming parasites and criminals?
Because people shoot them if they try? Comparing the situation of the poor in a country with a strong government with that of the poor in a country in the middle of a civil war just doesn't work. (Chinese pirates, who seem to have dropped out of headlines, are a different matter).
The problem has been that the international community has labored under a collective guilt complex about Africa.
No, I don't think the problem is a guilt complex. The problem is people turning to crime in a situation of grinding poverty. That would be the same whether the international community felt guilty over Africa or not.
Who says they should surrender their lives? I'm saying that unless you look honestly at the root causes and deal with them then any action taken will be short-term and ineffective. If you get squatters in your holiday home then kick them out. But if you keep getting squatters in your holiday home then maybe (push for local government to) start looking at whether there is a problem with homelessness in the area and start looking at the adequacy of the homeless shelters.
I don't put all the blame on the Western greedy fat cat. The long-term civil war in Somalia and resulting collapse in the rule of law is probably the biggest factor. Although there are pirates from other countries there's pretty much always a problem with the rule of law.
My point is that making the punishment for transgression nasty doesn't help if the punishment for non-transgression is just as nasty and more certain. Sure, once they're dead they'll stop transgressing but they can reproduce and I thik you'll find it's like squirrels in the garden. As fast as you kill them more move in because you've left a niche. Meanwhile far more ships' crew members are getting killed because the pirates know that if they're caught they're dead anyway so they might as well go down fighting.
Until rule-of-law can get established in Somalia and similar trouble spots, I don't think upping the stakes will do any good, because nothing is a deterrent to people who are already truly desperate. But rule of law won't get established by "insisting" that the government establish it, we need to find ways of cooperating to help that government do it.
Only pirates can carry deadly weapons (legally).
Actually, I don't think the pirates can legally carry deadly weapons...
Pirates are lazy cowards; they're in it for the money. Make it not only unprofitable but also NASTY dangerous, and they'll find other lines of work.
And what ther lines of work are they going to find in Somalia? The pirates are mainly ex-fishermen, but the fishing grounds have been destroyed by overfishing by foreign factory ships and by foreign dumping of toxic waste. It's a subsistence area, so there's no other work. Are you going to let them move to your country to find work? If not then they have a choice of crime or starve, and you're never going to make it "nasty dangerous" enough to put off the person who would starve to death otherwise. As for stories of pirates making a fortune out of piracy -- well, you can bet they're not the ones at sea risking their necks; they're the ones on land with a nice chain of plausible deniability to dissociate them from what's happening at sea.
I think international governments should force countries to enforce piracy laws.
You are assuming there is a government in place that would be able to enforce the laws. There's a civil war going on in Somalia. I'm sure the government would love to enforce control over the whole country, but it can't, and no amount of posturing by "international governments" is going to change that. And if you think the "international governments" should march in and take over -- well, if the west invaded yet another Arab state I think that piracy would be the least of our worries.
Did anybody dispute that the pirates were acting illegally?
Err, the massive propellers that most cargo ships use make trying to foul one useless?
But pirates don't just go after large cargo ships. They go after leisure craft too, and this weapon looks as if it would be effective against them. Always the way with weapons, isn't it? You buy one and the bad guys buy one too.
nor can I see anyone selling the boats to the pirates.
Really? If they have the money I'm damn sure they'd find somebody who wouldn't ask what the boat would be used for.
What I'd honestly like to understand is what the cultural differences are, and if anyone knows -WHY- they exist
As I understand it, it's because US Law is based on English Common Law, whereas German law is heavily influenced by Napoleonic law (which was in force there until about a hundred years ago). Napoleonic law leans significantly in favour of the government against the private individual compared to English Common Law. So the differences are (at least in part) down to the outcome of the Napoleonic wars.
That's like saying you cannot model a bouncing ball because you are unable to model all the subatomic particles involved.
No it isn't -- the behaviour of a bouncing ball is regular and well understood. Even if you take human minds out of it, the economy is quite likely a chaotic system, and once you put human minds in then you get some very strange feedback loops and particularly unpredictable behaviour. You can get so far with averaging behaviour, but human behaviour has a lot of potential tipping points where it will cease to be (on average) the same as it was before. You don't need to go down to the subatomic level to explain the behaviour of a bouncing ball. Good luck getting a rigorous physics-like model of human behaviour without going to that level.
Not unless you model all the subatomic particles in all the humans making decisions, along with all those in their environment. It was exactly that sort of model -- the Phillips curve, to be precise -- that led economists to believe that inflation and recession were mutually exclusive. They're not, as we discovered in the 1960s.
And for a physicist, he doesn't seem to be approaching the subject very scientifically, either. He has found a correlation, and on that basis concludes that it's an unvarying constant? Whatever happened to hypothesis forming and testing? Whatever happened to the principle that it isn't science unless there is a model describing why cause and effect are related? Yes, I know physicists sometimes have to cope without those things -- gravitation is a classic example -- but then they recognise that there's a hole in their science and work hard to fix it. The correlation that Garrett has found has nothing like the scientific confidence of gravitation. He's found a correlation? Well, what is the mechanism that causes that correlation, and which bits of it can be changed? Only if none of them can possibly be changed is it a "physical constant", and if it can be changed if "the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day" then clearly it can be changed. Surely, either it is a "simple physical constant" or it isn't?
The discovery of the correlation looks like interesting work. Unfortunately, it probably won't turn out to be useful work because it's too wrapped up in hysteria and by identifying the correlation coefficient as a "physical constant" Garrett has rejected the very thing that needs to be studied -- how we change it.
It isn't meant to stop them using it for those purposes. It's there to cover Microsoft's and Apple's asses -- they don't get sued if the biological weapon hits the wrong target.
the trick is to have in-corruptible policemen with perfect judgement.
Yeah, good luck with that.
(115.00 Euro using American punctuation, 115,00 using continental European punctuation - which seems fair since we're counting Euros)
Fixed that for ya! (UK is in Europe, but we use commas as thousands separators, full stops -- what you might call periods -- as radix points).
Yes and so do Canadian schools.
Anybody working in an international environment learns to do it PDQ. Here in the UK we use commas as thousands separators, but I can't remember when I last did that: I do enough business with continental Europe that I use spaces instinctively.
In all those cases the person ended up dead. I'm not sure that death by taser is a significant improvement over death by gunshot.
My point is that a taser should not be considered a non-lethal weapon -- merely lower lethality than a gun. Calling it "non-lethal" can lead to tasers being used more casually than they should and not being given the respect they deserve.