There is a +1 bonus if your karma is high enough, so your posts start out with a score of two instead of one. From reading some threads recently, I gather that that's changed, and now you can set how you will see that bonus in your preferences.
If you want it to be the way it was before, go to the user comments page, and set
Karma Bonus (modifier assigned to posts where the user has good karma)
to be +1. Or set it to -6 if you never want to see posts from people with lots of karma.
Here's what I'd like to know, in my limited knowledge of languages: What languages out there are truly modular? Are there any languages that encompass basic logic principles and which are then able to be augmented by blackboxed modules? So, if you had a language that needed string concatenation, you could whip up a string concatenation module that would then become part of the language.
Lisp.
Now, I'm walking a semantic line here, because you can presumably do all that by writing header files, includes, classes, etc. that contain new logic within the structure of the language. But what I mean is a language that by its nature is abstracted and modular, even to the point where the syntax of, say, control structures could be modified in a module?
Lisp.
I guess the root question I'm asking is: Are there any truly novel languages out there,
Lisp.
or are they all just variations on a common theme, with shared shortcomings and much duplication of effort?
How do the Christian fundies explain away the Neanderthals? Last time I checked, according to these fanatics, anything that wasn't written in the King James Bible, either never happened or never existed.
You don't have to be smart to go to heaven. God wants folks with enough faith in Him to volunteer to go there. Any deficiencies other than lack of faith, such as education or IQ, He can remedy when you get there.
I am a Christian fundamentalist. The foundation of my faith is that God sent Christ, his son and God incarnate, to pay the price for our sins. Yours too, by the way. Because of that, any of us who want to spend eternity with God can do so. Trivia about exactly how God made us won't change that.
I do believe that the Bible is the word of God, and is True with a capital T. That doesn't mean you can't misinterpret it. The Bible is a How-to for salvation, and there aren't any details in there about anything else.
I think that Genesis is a creation story for the easily satisfied, not God's How-to for creation. Genesis tells us that God made the world, and God made us. Those are the important points, and they are True. The details about how just aren't there.
Psalms (somewhere, can't remember right off) tells us that the sky and the mountains tell of God's creation. That's the story the geologists and astronomers are reading, and that's where God wrote down the details he left out of Genesis. When the ignorant make fun of that, ask them if being wrong would mean that Christ didn't die for them. If they say ``no'', ask them why they are fussing about trivia.
I'm running Woody on an old Dell Latitude 475XP: a 75MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM and a 3GB hard drive.
It is slow, but Blackbox or Icewm are practical to use on it. I can run Blackbox and an Xterm and one of Dillo or Abiword or about anything but OpenOffice or Mozilla or Emacs. Emacs is quite snappy without X, though.
Apt-get upgrade is slow; it takes it quite a while to thrash its way through building the package lists. But, it does the job, and I have a throughly up-to-date ancient machine.
If I could find some 72pin EDO SODIMMs to upgrade the memory, it would be a really adequate little box. It's only the disk thrashing that really slows it down. As long as it doesn't go into swap, it's surprisingly responsive.
Third, India cannot afford lots of imports from the US, Korea or Japan.
Think about what you just said: You said that we in the US, Korea and Japan can't import from India. Why? Because if they don't import from us, we'll never get the Indian currency we need to buy their stuff! Trade has to flow both ways, in the long term.
They need to be self-sufficient...
Again, think about what you're saying. If this were sensible, then any country could enrich itself by closing its borders. More than that, your family could enrich itself by not trading with others! Taking it to the ultimate absurdity, you would be better off if you had no intercourse (trade, that is!) with the other members of your family.
Perhaps you meant that India needs to protect infant industries, so that it can become competitive in things like steel and auto production. Why would that be good? Assuming that it is good, why do you think that such protection would produce the desired effect?
Think about the US steel industry: they have been more or less protected for decades, and it has kept them from becoming competitive with the world market. Protection from Japanese imports certainly didn't encourage the US auto industry to adapt to the Japanese standards of quality and value, and it certainly did keep the cost of cars in the US higher than it otherwise would have been.
That leads us to an obvious conclusion: a closed economy is a luxury in which only a large and rich country can afford to indulge. Cutting yourself off from the rest of the world impoverishes your citizens, and that is exactly why India has remained so desperately poor for so many years after the British stopped exploiting them: they have maintained a closed economy.
The US became large and rich by trading with the rest of the world. We managed to avoid sinking too deeply into mercantilism and protectionism, and so our industries were forced to develop to the point that they could sell overseas, and our people were able to buy the inexpensive goods which flowed back here in return. This enabled the US-ians to live better, devote more resources to future development (such as education for their children), and to attract immigration by able people from other areas, where conditions were worse for the average worker. As long as India maintains a closed economy, they're closing themselves off from taking this path which made the US rich.
Your message's title "IT doesn't replace education" is indeed very striking, considering that the government of Malaysia - a fifth-rate country, mind you - is on the path of REPLACING education with IT.
Specifically, the Prime Minister of Malaysia has commented on several accounts that,
"The teachers are mere facilitators. The main point
is the computers, where the students learn from. The
teachers just _help_ out if any problem arises."
Dunno what will happen to the children in fifth rate countries such as Malaysia.
Well, if that pronouncement is taken seriously by all concerned, I'd say they're screwed. Fortunately for those kids, it probably won't be. The bad teachers won't (hopefully) get much worse, and the good ones will keep on doing what they've always done.
besides; US has already backed out / backstabbed taiwan on the PRC thing.
Can anyone name an ally that the US hasn't betrayed, in the period since WWII? I don't think NATO counts in this one, since we needed them about as badly as they needed us. But every ``little guy'' that depended on us, every little revolutionary front that was trying to unseat a totalitarian government, every small country that tried to align itself with the US, seems to have been dropped in the crapper at the first opportunity to appease the enemy. Some examples (other than Taiwan) would be the Hungarian revolutionaries in the 50's and South Vietnam, which we made dependent, damaged, then abandoned.
If there are exceptions, they would be the fascist dictatorships which we have encouraged until they were overthrown by their own people. This usually gave a great boost to communism (in South America and Southeast Asia) or to radical Islam (in what once was Persia). I think that the US has done more to advance the cause of communism than the Soviet Union and China together.
... they (PRC) don't even call *themselves* communists!
How's that old saying go? Something like: ``A communist is a socialist with a gun.'', I think. Communism is a Bad Word, socialism is a Good Word, but names don't change facts.
It seems to me that any small ally of the US has been either been delivered up to its enemies, or driven to them. I think it says a lot about Taiwan's devotion to freedom, or its caution, or something good, that they have been able to outlive our betrayal. It started when Nixon recognized China, so maybe it was the gradual nature of the betrayal that gave them a chance to hang on.
This sounds a lot like a thermax demonstration I witnessed. Liquid iron spattered the front several rows of the lecture hall. Then the people in the front rows spattered all over the rest of us as they tried to get away. No-one was hurt, though it took a little while to be sure, and there were a lot of holes in clothing. Fortunately, there weren't any smoke detectors in the building, and the sprinklers didn't go off.
I didn't sit near the front of a class until grad school.
I wasn't trying to pick on you; I just wanted to make sure that we didn't have a bunch of slashdotters (slashdaughters?) going away thinking that was how the Eskimos did it.
Your partner suggestion is a good one. Ice blocks would be heavy, and the partner might need to lift them off you, and then call for a medivac. This wouldn't be a problem with snow blocks.
Igloos were strong, and warm. People could live in them indefinitely, though I gather most folks in the old days had dugout houses (with whale ribs for rafters) at their winter places. The igloos were temporary shelters, for travel or emergency.
I wasn't aware that the aboriginal peoples had used igloos anywhere outside the Arctic. I think that you were saying that the aborigines had used them elsewhere, and I'd certainly like to hear details.
I suppose that you could build an igloo anywhere the wind can drift the snow for hundreds of miles, and the weather is cold enough, long enough, that the idea of water as a structural material could take hold. The great plains area might have gotten the right sort of snow, but did the cold last long enough to justify devloping the skills? Remember, the snow gets packed by a succession of blizzards, and then you get to build the igloo. Blizzards followed by thaws give ice, which doesn't make good igloos.
Letting the police enter any home at will would, no doubt, find some evidence that would help solve crimes, but most people think there should be some limits on police powers.
Right on both counts.
Allowing the government to attach tracking devices to all citizens would prevent a few crimes, too, I think. Should we all go downtown to get our implants tomorrow?
I don't think that anyone sane would object to that idea, if we could trust our government not to abuse those implants. I don't think that anyone sane would trust this government, or any other. You don't have to be part of the tin-foil hat brigade to agree with Lord Acton [1].
If the government wants more powers to observe us, they should begin by earning our trust. Consistantly not abusing the powers we have already given them, and consistantly punishing those who do abuse those powers, would be a great start.
[1] Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. -- Lord Acton
An igloo made of ice wouldn't be a good idea at all. Hardpacked snow has enough air trapped in it to make good insulation. You can easily bring the temperature inside an igloo or snowcave up above freezing. That melts the inner surface and forms a thin layer of ice, which cements everything together and makes a strong structure.
You need to have snow which has been hardpacked by the wind. Up on the Bering and Arctic coasts there is plenty of that. If you live where there are trees, you will probably never be able to build one. You just won't get the right sort of snow. This is why the indians never used igloos; they lived inland, below the treeline. If you can shovel your snow, you can't build an igloo.
You cut the blocks from a circular area, making a pit in the snow. If you can't cut your snow with a saw and lift the blocks in one piece, you have the wrong sort of snow. Make the center deeper, so that there are ledges around the sides. Cut the entrance tunnel down low, so that the ledges are above the top of it. That way the tunnel is like a p-trap, which keeps the warm air inside.
I've lived in places where the locals used igloos many years ago (before my time), and I've seen igloos built by the old grandpas, to show the youngsters how it was done. I don't think that there are many people left who have ever built one. They were practical, temporary, travel shelters for folks on the Arctic coast. Someone who knows what he's doing can build a small igloo in an hour or so. Since the snow is fairly light, it can be done by one man.
It's my understanding that the Atkins diet is a high-protein, high-fat diet. The ultimate would be to live entirely on meat and fat; say, seal, whale and walrus meat. That's what the Eskimos did all around the Arctic coast. They still eat a lot of whale today.
Vilhjalmar Stefanson (Can't find any links!) wrote at least one book about his travels in the Alaskan and Canadian arctic. He mentioned several times that the Eskimos ate an all-meat, no-carbohydrate diet, with a very high fat content. He claimed that they maintained wonderful health on this diet, and attempted to prove it to doubters on his midwestern campus (he was an anthropology graduate student) by living on such a diet through a hot summer there while he finished his dissertation. He believed that the high-fat part was essential.
I'm running a Z-80 computer system (1 Mhz) and I was wondering if I should upgrade to the new Z-80B processor. They go 2.5 Mhz, and supposedly really scream. But is the extra speed worth the $4 that the new processor would cost? Thanks.
Typically, you had to go to a faster cpu, and put in a different capacitor (for the clock circuit). Generally, everything else worked fine at the higher clock speed.
I know people who did that. If you were using the machine for any serious programs, such as electric pencil or wordstar, it was certainly money well spent. ZPM was an even better deal, if you had a Z-80.
I agree that there are few Einsteins and Newtons in software development. There are few of them in the world, period. But my point was that in general, amateurs need not be inferior to mercenaries, in any field. I don't think that anyone would suggest that the Reverend Bayes was of Newton's caliber, or even Einstein's. But he made a significant contribution to his field, and he was definitely an amateur.
I think that your second paragraph pretty well restates what I was saying about the essential difference between for-profit and libre software. One is made to work for the user, the other to sell.
I think that what we are seeing is that no company wants to pay someone to deliver a useful product someday, even if it's free. But Apache and Linux show us that many companies are happy to use free and Libre software when it's ready NOW.
The ``it can't be good if it's free'' paradigm is partly real. I'm sure there are still a lot of people who can't conceive of a non-zero-sum game. This goes hand-in-hand with the ``who do we sue'' story. I'm sure that there are people who honestly believe that they have some meaningful legal recourse against Microsoft, et al.
I think that these are also used, much more commonly, as a coverup for a very different problem, which no-one wants to talk about: Libre software doesn't have salesmen with expense accounts to wine, dine and provide hookers and kickbacks to managers and purchasing agents.
I suspect that this is a far greater obstacle to open-source than any perceptions about quality. Just look at the rediculous deal between Oracle and the State of California. Do you think that there wasn't corruption involved there? Postgresql and Mysql weren't even in the running: they couldn't provide kickbacks, couldn't make mega-buck political contributions, simply because there wasn't going to be any money changing hands.
Companies want ``works'', ``no hassles'' and ``support contract with a reliable contractor''. Libre software can provide all three for many applications.
It isn't price fixing, it's price discrimination. Obviously the folks in the UK have more elastic demand than we do over here, so the enterprising monopolist (that's what copyright's all about, you know) sets a different price in the two markets to maximize his revenue.
British publishers make their textbooks available in India at 1/5th to 1/10th the price they charge in Britain, I'm told. It isn't charity, it's profit maximizimg behavior. If you are comfortable with chinese, you can get the chinese edition of many books for $2 to $5 US.
I've seen the comments which say that the site itself is redirecting us to mp3mediaworld. When I tried to go look, I got ``No web site is configured at this address''. When I try
$ host listen4ever.com listen4ever.com. has address 61.136.61.40 $lynx http://61.136.61.40/
I get the same thing. Looks as if he got slashdotted!
Or, if there is some way to convert AT/PS2 keyboards to USB, then I'd just get that customizer and the adapter... I don't even know if that's feasible, so I haven't been looking for the adapter.
It's feasible. All the mice I've bought recently have included a ps/2 --> USB adapter. A fancy new Microsoft Natural keyboard I tried at work came with such an adapter. All of these adapters, serial --> ps/2, ps/2 --> AT, ps/2 --> USB, seem to be simply two connectors with wires joining the appropriate pins.
By the way, I'm typing this on one of those wonderful IBM clicky-clacky keyboards. I have one for home, and bought another one with my own money for work, to replace that slimy Mickysoft Natural. The old Selectric keyboard was perhaps the zenith of keyboards, but the IBM Model M ain't bad.
Car batteries are designed to deliver about 3400 amps directly into the alternator of a car, only during the time that you turn the key.
Whoops, a couple of boo-boos here. That would be 300 to 400 amps into the starting motor. The glow plugs will have cold current of around 400 amps for a little 4-jug diesel, but that falls off to 40+ after a few seconds, as they warm up.
I agree with most of your information about starting and deep cycle batteries.
>before the libertarians mouth off, please not that this is private industry pushing hollings for this law.
Folks who are confused about what liberty is about often are confused by libertarianism, and the dogmatic Rand-ites don't seem to have helped. Go to your local library, and check out and read The Law, by Frederic Bastiat. The book is around 200 years old, and still as current as the day it was written.
Bastiat points out that this business of private interests misusing government power plunder others is nothing new. This is a big part of the reason that libertarians detest powerful government: it's not just the Hitlers and Maos who misuse government power, it's also the welfare junkies and the MPAAs and Ma Bell and the big tobacco companies and other recipients of corporate welfare and on and on and on...
It wasn't just Halifax; ports can be dangerous places. In 1947, there was a huge explosion when a freighter loaded with fertilizer blew up in Texas City, near Galveston. I knew about it because my father's ship left port hours before the explosion. His mother got a letter he posted from there just before the ship left, and she thought he was dead for several months, until she got a letter from the next port of call.
There are some pictures on this page. It seems that over 600 people died; or at least they recovered that many bodies. There may have been some who simply disappeared. There was a tidal wave which swept 150 feet inland (NOT 150 feet high, but that far away from the beach.). Since the ship was at the dock, it started fires in the town, and at a chemical plant near the docks. It set fire to another ship which was nearby. That ship blew up the next morning with even more force, and did even more damage. There are more pictures here and here, which give some idea of just how big ithe explosions were.
A story that claims to be reporting on the greatest tech disasters, in particular the lesser known ones, and it fails to mention Banqiao and Shimantan in 1975?
Since the original post mentioned this as if we should be familiar with it, here're the details: A big dam in China failed, in large part because the Communist ideologues over-ruled the hydrologists. Many thousands died, but of course that's all right because the houses of the Party cadre were built on high ground. Click on that link for the fine print.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want it to be the way it was before, go to the user comments page, and set
to be +1. Or set it to -6 if you never want to see posts from people with lots of karma.Lisp.
Now, I'm walking a semantic line here, because you can presumably do all that by writing header files, includes, classes, etc. that contain new logic within the structure of the language. But what I mean is a language that by its nature is abstracted and modular, even to the point where the syntax of, say, control structures could be modified in a module?
Lisp.
I guess the root question I'm asking is: Are there any truly novel languages out there,
Lisp.
or are they all just variations on a common theme, with shared shortcomings and much duplication of effort?
Everything else.
You don't have to be smart to go to heaven. God wants folks with enough faith in Him to volunteer to go there. Any deficiencies other than lack of faith, such as education or IQ, He can remedy when you get there.
I am a Christian fundamentalist. The foundation of my faith is that God sent Christ, his son and God incarnate, to pay the price for our sins. Yours too, by the way. Because of that, any of us who want to spend eternity with God can do so. Trivia about exactly how God made us won't change that.
I do believe that the Bible is the word of God, and is True with a capital T. That doesn't mean you can't misinterpret it. The Bible is a How-to for salvation, and there aren't any details in there about anything else.
I think that Genesis is a creation story for the easily satisfied, not God's How-to for creation. Genesis tells us that God made the world, and God made us. Those are the important points, and they are True. The details about how just aren't there.
Psalms (somewhere, can't remember right off) tells us that the sky and the mountains tell of God's creation. That's the story the geologists and astronomers are reading, and that's where God wrote down the details he left out of Genesis. When the ignorant make fun of that, ask them if being wrong would mean that Christ didn't die for them. If they say ``no'', ask them why they are fussing about trivia.
I'm running Woody on an old Dell Latitude 475XP: a 75MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM and a 3GB hard drive.
It is slow, but Blackbox or Icewm are practical to use on it. I can run Blackbox and an Xterm and one of Dillo or Abiword or about anything but OpenOffice or Mozilla or Emacs. Emacs is quite snappy without X, though.
Apt-get upgrade is slow; it takes it quite a while to thrash its way through building the package lists. But, it does the job, and I have a throughly up-to-date ancient machine.
If I could find some 72pin EDO SODIMMs to upgrade the memory, it would be a really adequate little box. It's only the disk thrashing that really slows it down. As long as it doesn't go into swap, it's surprisingly responsive.
Think about what you just said: You said that we in the US, Korea and Japan can't import from India. Why? Because if they don't import from us, we'll never get the Indian currency we need to buy their stuff! Trade has to flow both ways, in the long term.
They need to be self-sufficient ...
Again, think about what you're saying. If this were sensible, then any country could enrich itself by closing its borders. More than that, your family could enrich itself by not trading with others! Taking it to the ultimate absurdity, you would be better off if you had no intercourse (trade, that is!) with the other members of your family.
Perhaps you meant that India needs to protect infant industries, so that it can become competitive in things like steel and auto production. Why would that be good? Assuming that it is good, why do you think that such protection would produce the desired effect?
Think about the US steel industry: they have been more or less protected for decades, and it has kept them from becoming competitive with the world market. Protection from Japanese imports certainly didn't encourage the US auto industry to adapt to the Japanese standards of quality and value, and it certainly did keep the cost of cars in the US higher than it otherwise would have been.
That leads us to an obvious conclusion: a closed economy is a luxury in which only a large and rich country can afford to indulge. Cutting yourself off from the rest of the world impoverishes your citizens, and that is exactly why India has remained so desperately poor for so many years after the British stopped exploiting them: they have maintained a closed economy.
The US became large and rich by trading with the rest of the world. We managed to avoid sinking too deeply into mercantilism and protectionism, and so our industries were forced to develop to the point that they could sell overseas, and our people were able to buy the inexpensive goods which flowed back here in return. This enabled the US-ians to live better, devote more resources to future development (such as education for their children), and to attract immigration by able people from other areas, where conditions were worse for the average worker. As long as India maintains a closed economy, they're closing themselves off from taking this path which made the US rich.
Specifically, the Prime Minister of Malaysia has commented on several accounts that,
Dunno what will happen to the children in fifth rate countries such as Malaysia.
Well, if that pronouncement is taken seriously by all concerned, I'd say they're screwed. Fortunately for those kids, it probably won't be. The bad teachers won't (hopefully) get much worse, and the good ones will keep on doing what they've always done.
Can anyone name an ally that the US hasn't betrayed, in the period since WWII? I don't think NATO counts in this one, since we needed them about as badly as they needed us. But every ``little guy'' that depended on us, every little revolutionary front that was trying to unseat a totalitarian government, every small country that tried to align itself with the US, seems to have been dropped in the crapper at the first opportunity to appease the enemy. Some examples (other than Taiwan) would be the Hungarian revolutionaries in the 50's and South Vietnam, which we made dependent, damaged, then abandoned.
If there are exceptions, they would be the fascist dictatorships which we have encouraged until they were overthrown by their own people. This usually gave a great boost to communism (in South America and Southeast Asia) or to radical Islam (in what once was Persia). I think that the US has done more to advance the cause of communism than the Soviet Union and China together.
How's that old saying go? Something like: ``A communist is a socialist with a gun.'', I think. Communism is a Bad Word, socialism is a Good Word, but names don't change facts.
It seems to me that any small ally of the US has been either been delivered up to its enemies, or driven to them. I think it says a lot about Taiwan's devotion to freedom, or its caution, or something good, that they have been able to outlive our betrayal. It started when Nixon recognized China, so maybe it was the gradual nature of the betrayal that gave them a chance to hang on.
I didn't sit near the front of a class until grad school.
Your partner suggestion is a good one. Ice blocks would be heavy, and the partner might need to lift them off you, and then call for a medivac. This wouldn't be a problem with snow blocks.
Igloos were strong, and warm. People could live in them indefinitely, though I gather most folks in the old days had dugout houses (with whale ribs for rafters) at their winter places. The igloos were temporary shelters, for travel or emergency.
I wasn't aware that the aboriginal peoples had used igloos anywhere outside the Arctic. I think that you were saying that the aborigines had used them elsewhere, and I'd certainly like to hear details.
I suppose that you could build an igloo anywhere the wind can drift the snow for hundreds of miles, and the weather is cold enough, long enough, that the idea of water as a structural material could take hold. The great plains area might have gotten the right sort of snow, but did the cold last long enough to justify devloping the skills? Remember, the snow gets packed by a succession of blizzards, and then you get to build the igloo. Blizzards followed by thaws give ice, which doesn't make good igloos.
Right on both counts.
Allowing the government to attach tracking devices to all citizens would prevent a few crimes, too, I think. Should we all go downtown to get our implants tomorrow?
I don't think that anyone sane would object to that idea, if we could trust our government not to abuse those implants. I don't think that anyone sane would trust this government, or any other. You don't have to be part of the tin-foil hat brigade to agree with Lord Acton [1].
If the government wants more powers to observe us, they should begin by earning our trust. Consistantly not abusing the powers we have already given them, and consistantly punishing those who do abuse those powers, would be a great start.
[1] Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. -- Lord Acton
You need to have snow which has been hardpacked by the wind. Up on the Bering and Arctic coasts there is plenty of that. If you live where there are trees, you will probably never be able to build one. You just won't get the right sort of snow. This is why the indians never used igloos; they lived inland, below the treeline. If you can shovel your snow, you can't build an igloo.
You cut the blocks from a circular area, making a pit in the snow. If you can't cut your snow with a saw and lift the blocks in one piece, you have the wrong sort of snow. Make the center deeper, so that there are ledges around the sides. Cut the entrance tunnel down low, so that the ledges are above the top of it. That way the tunnel is like a p-trap, which keeps the warm air inside.
I've lived in places where the locals used igloos many years ago (before my time), and I've seen igloos built by the old grandpas, to show the youngsters how it was done. I don't think that there are many people left who have ever built one. They were practical, temporary, travel shelters for folks on the Arctic coast. Someone who knows what he's doing can build a small igloo in an hour or so. Since the snow is fairly light, it can be done by one man.
Vilhjalmar Stefanson (Can't find any links!) wrote at least one book about his travels in the Alaskan and Canadian arctic. He mentioned several times that the Eskimos ate an all-meat, no-carbohydrate diet, with a very high fat content. He claimed that they maintained wonderful health on this diet, and attempted to prove it to doubters on his midwestern campus (he was an anthropology graduate student) by living on such a diet through a hot summer there while he finished his dissertation. He believed that the high-fat part was essential.
Typically, you had to go to a faster cpu, and put in a different capacitor (for the clock circuit). Generally, everything else worked fine at the higher clock speed.
I know people who did that. If you were using the machine for any serious programs, such as electric pencil or wordstar, it was certainly money well spent. ZPM was an even better deal, if you had a Z-80.
I agree that there are few Einsteins and Newtons in software development. There are few of them in the world, period. But my point was that in general, amateurs need not be inferior to mercenaries, in any field. I don't think that anyone would suggest that the Reverend Bayes was of Newton's caliber, or even Einstein's. But he made a significant contribution to his field, and he was definitely an amateur.
I think that your second paragraph pretty well restates what I was saying about the essential difference between for-profit and libre software. One is made to work for the user, the other to sell.
I think that what we are seeing is that no company wants to pay someone to deliver a useful product someday, even if it's free. But Apache and Linux show us that many companies are happy to use free and Libre software when it's ready NOW.
The ``it can't be good if it's free'' paradigm is partly real. I'm sure there are still a lot of people who can't conceive of a non-zero-sum game. This goes hand-in-hand with the ``who do we sue'' story. I'm sure that there are people who honestly believe that they have some meaningful legal recourse against Microsoft, et al.
I think that these are also used, much more commonly, as a coverup for a very different problem, which no-one wants to talk about: Libre software doesn't have salesmen with expense accounts to wine, dine and provide hookers and kickbacks to managers and purchasing agents.
I suspect that this is a far greater obstacle to open-source than any perceptions about quality. Just look at the rediculous deal between Oracle and the State of California. Do you think that there wasn't corruption involved there? Postgresql and Mysql weren't even in the running: they couldn't provide kickbacks, couldn't make mega-buck political contributions, simply because there wasn't going to be any money changing hands.
Companies want ``works'', ``no hassles'' and ``support contract with a reliable contractor''. Libre software can provide all three for many applications.
British publishers make their textbooks available in India at 1/5th to 1/10th the price they charge in Britain, I'm told. It isn't charity, it's profit maximizimg behavior. If you are comfortable with chinese, you can get the chinese edition of many books for $2 to $5 US.
Netscape 7 is ADVERTISING ENRICHED! With new, IMPROVED popup windows!
$ host listen4ever.com
listen4ever.com. has address 61.136.61.40
$lynx http://61.136.61.40/
I get the same thing. Looks as if he got slashdotted!
a) new
b) 1-2 years
c) 3-4 years
d) 5-8 years
e) 8-10 years
f) >10 years
g) Keyboard? I use the Apple CowboyNeal Lightpen!
I'm typing this on an IBM model M. Made in USA, so you know it's old. The date on this one is 10-14-92, so it's (e), almost to (f).
If you were typing at the dos/DOS command line, you didn't care if the caps key was on. DOS was case iNSenSiTiVe.
It's feasible. All the mice I've bought recently have included a ps/2 --> USB adapter. A fancy new Microsoft Natural keyboard I tried at work came with such an adapter. All of these adapters, serial --> ps/2, ps/2 --> AT, ps/2 --> USB, seem to be simply two connectors with wires joining the appropriate pins.
By the way, I'm typing this on one of those wonderful IBM clicky-clacky keyboards. I have one for home, and bought another one with my own money for work, to replace that slimy Mickysoft Natural. The old Selectric keyboard was perhaps the zenith of keyboards, but the IBM Model M ain't bad.
Whoops, a couple of boo-boos here. That would be 300 to 400 amps into the starting motor. The glow plugs will have cold current of around 400 amps for a little 4-jug diesel, but that falls off to 40+ after a few seconds, as they warm up.
I agree with most of your information about starting and deep cycle batteries.
Folks who are confused about what liberty is about often are confused by libertarianism, and the dogmatic Rand-ites don't seem to have helped. Go to your local library, and check out and read The Law, by Frederic Bastiat. The book is around 200 years old, and still as current as the day it was written.
Bastiat points out that this business of private interests misusing government power plunder others is nothing new. This is a big part of the reason that libertarians detest powerful government: it's not just the Hitlers and Maos who misuse government power, it's also the welfare junkies and the MPAAs and Ma Bell and the big tobacco companies and other recipients of corporate welfare and on and on and on...
There are some pictures on this page. It seems that over 600 people died; or at least they recovered that many bodies. There may have been some who simply disappeared. There was a tidal wave which swept 150 feet inland (NOT 150 feet high, but that far away from the beach.). Since the ship was at the dock, it started fires in the town, and at a chemical plant near the docks. It set fire to another ship which was nearby. That ship blew up the next morning with even more force, and did even more damage. There are more pictures here and here, which give some idea of just how big ithe explosions were.
Since the original post mentioned this as if we should be familiar with it, here're the details: A big dam in China failed, in large part because the Communist ideologues over-ruled the hydrologists. Many thousands died, but of course that's all right because the houses of the Party cadre were built on high ground. Click on that link for the fine print.