...I'm not sure about a weapon of mass destruction, but if you jam a C-sized rocket into a heavily modified Alpha and launch it sideways at a crowd by accident (that whole safety key issue is for wimps, after all), I think we've got a weapon of mass panic (WMP).
I'm not going to bother modding you up because I suspect you'd go right back down, but I just want to congratulate you on saying the first Soviet Russia joke I've read here that is actually correct (with the pun).
It's not like a bunch of neanderthals were sitting around a fire and then Bob Dylan popped out.
So you have an alternate explanation of how he got that way?:)
Re:What is BEHIND that money... that is the questi
on
The Future of Money
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· Score: 1
All fiat has a history of corruption and collapse (the american dollar and other world currencies are heading that way as well).
Could you explain that concept? Seriously? If the US had not gone to fiat money in the 70s, then the exchange rates on the market would probably have killed the economy entirely instead of simply causing a recession. There were too many dollars compared to how much gold we had in the Reserve, and the gold stock we had was draining fast. Our money supply simply could not grow at the rate that the economy was growing. Fiat money was the only logical solution, and we are hardly alone in that endeavor. The Euro is fiat, as were the Deutschmark and the franc before it. (Honestly don't remember whether the pound is still backed, but I do not think it is.) Japan, too, was a fiat currency, and not fixed to anything. All of those countries did fine.
The only times that fiat money has been a problem, in general, is in third-world countries, and fixing the currencies against the dollar (Argentina) or going to a dollar economy (Ecuador) doesn't seem to have helped them much anyway. Printing money with the purpose of "diluting" cash (raising the real rate of inflation) is not inherently evil, either; in fact, a large number of economists are currently arguing that the Japanese need to print a whole lot of money, intentionally generating inflation and therefore discouraging savings, in order to revitalize their economy and end their ten-year-long recession/depression. (I.e., if your savings start being worth less, then you will have an incentive to spend, which would probably help end Japan's deflation and revitalize the economy. The other thing that's killing them is subsidizing companies that really should be allowed to die, but that's another issue entirely.)
If you're that wrapped up about having your money backed, rent a space in a vault and convert all your money to gold. It's gone up recenty anyway in the uncertainties of the war, and likely will continue to do so until this situation has blown over, so it's probably a decent investment. No one's stopping you. But for the rest of the world, I think fiat courrency is fine.
Hoping you'll notice I replied 'cause you sure ain't gonna read a week-old discussion, but: I fail to see how the Talmudic discussion on animals born by caesarian section would apply here, on any level. As long as the animal has a cloven hoof and chews cud, it is a clean animal. We have two problems besides that, however: first, because the meat was never alive, does it count as carion? The only parallel I can think of for comparison would be a stillbirth, which is definitely NOT kosher (or wouldn't be in my house unless a rabbi argued really persuasively otherwise). Furthermore, even if we agree that it is not carion, we still have to deal with the method of killing: since the meat is not kosher unless a shochet cuts the throat cleanly and the blood is drained, but here we have no full animal to kill to get the meat, then even if we can agree that the meat was alive at once point, is it still not kosher? This issue is far more complicated than simply citing the Talmudic discussion on cessarian sections and I am not at all convinced that this meat could ever be kosher unless (and this is I suppose possible) we could manage to classify it as a manmade vegetable (which opens up another whole slew of problems). I think it would require a very lengthy discussion in a bet din to establish that.
Originally, Apple demonstrated a version of iTunes that had the ability provided by iCommune built-in, and Jobs promised it around the January timeframe. If Apple is still planning to include that functionality in iTunes 3.1/4.0, then this may actually simply have been to keep them from having to deal with a mix of iCommune and iTunes advertising the same services and a bunch of confused users about why sharing halfway-worked, but not completely. On the other hand, if they've quit this, then I agree with you entirely.
Apple had an easy ability to complain about iCommune before: it directly interfaced with iTunes using an SDK for which the developer had to agree to additional licensing restrictions (that said the SDK was to be used only to interface to MP3 players). So Apple could legitimately complain that the author of iCommune was breaking the rules under which Apple had provided that SDK and order him to quit producing it. This new version, however, either works by talking to iTunes via AppleScript--which requires no one to sign any SDK except the generic one for the developer tools; that's the whole nature of how AppleScript works--or else, accesses the MP3s directly (which is very easy; they're kept extremely organized automatically in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music as plain, unencrypted MP3 files, ready to share). Because neither of these violate any extra license agreement, Apple will not be able to stop iCommune this time.
The RIAA of course probably could and probably will, but that's a different issue entirely.
Your concern would make sense if the application were implementing the Rendezvous interface raw, but it's not, anymore than Mozilla implements its own TCP/IP stack. Jaguar provides a very nice set of classes to establish and manage Rendezvous services, and I'm sure that the new version of iCommune, just like the old version and like all Rendezvous-enabled apps, will make use of Apple's frameworks. So even if Apple completely overhauled their IETF-standard protocol (bloody unlikely) they'd have to also completely overhaul the Rendezvous portion of Cocoa and not document the changes in their SDK. I think that iCommune is safe.
Actually, that would pose a fascinating problem: if you could print out a steak, would it be a vegetarian dish? After all, no animal would have been harmed. I have also wondered what the implications would be with regard to those religions that require meat be killed a certain way (Islam, Judaism, many others also). Would a "printed" thigh count as animal from that perspective? Could it ever be acceptable then, even if you were printing a duplicate of clearly kosher beef?
I don't think we're there yet, by any means, but I certainly look forward to when the technology has progressed enough that such a discussion becomes relevant.
If you read the article, they imply--numerous times--that the issue with SCO is solely if you are using their libc on Linux in order to run legacy SCO applications. That should not be able to impact Linux in any real way, unless I am grossly misunderstanding something.
Your analogy doesn't work. If I leave my house with a door unlocked, then your entering and destroying (because, let's be honest, that's what a cracker as opposed to a hacker does) is still just as illegal as if I had locked the door. If you accidentally bump my house and it's so shoddily made that it falls over, that's not the same thing. That's more like the Slashdot Effect.
IBM can't do this because large chunks of OS/2's codebase are still copyrighted by Microsoft, if I understand correctly. However, that's always struck me as kind of a weak argument; I suspect that if IBM would be kind enough to just document in the code "The following function's source is removed, but it takes in this, puts out that, and should have the following bugs," then the community could probably get it working in a year or two.
Why Sauron's Ring Is So Powerful...Sometimes from the why-can't-I-rule-the-world dept.
Anonymous Dwarf writes "Finally the scoop on how Sauron "cheats" a little to up his power! Do RFCs mean nothing anymore? What's next, Riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! From the blog story: 'Apparently Sauron engineered all of the rings to be networked together for increased power. However, his own ring is more powerful because it skips the TCP/IP header when contacting other rings, allowing it to dominate their connections and effectively control all of them by occupying all open sockets." Yet another example of why we really need the Rings of Power to follow proper RFC standards.
Apple also keeps confusing the issues with their claims that MPEG4 is somehow based on QuickTime; there is some historical relationship, but they are different.
Last time I checked, they both share exactly the same container format. The difference is simply the default encoders they choose to use--and seeing as QuickTime can use the MPEG4 codecs, even that difference can be eliminated.
I admit I've never been in charge of a large corporation, but I've headed (relatively) large organizations, and from one of those (a newspaper) I did resign, and I honestly think it was the best option. Here's why:
Let's say, honestly, that the senior management really wasn't dedicated enough. Now, if you hired the guys and then retained them, then that's your fault, but a lot of times, people either were hired significantly before you arrived or don't report directly to you. Firing a large portion of the senior management can be extremely demoralizing in that case, especially if you have to leapfrog over your managers or bully them into doing it (because it implies they are incompetent). Even if you try to string it out, you have a problem, because if you respond to the problem fast enough, people will lose morale, whereas if you take too long, the problems that these people cause will simply get worse. So frequently you end up trying to compromise: you fire or at least shift around responsibility as far as you can and try to enliven things. A lot of times, if the manager is competent, that works, and things improve enough that you can wait for the next round (if needed; a lot of times, revitalizing management by removing the deadwood exposes some real gems that previously didn't shine). Sometimes, it really just does not, and you're stuck. Further, sometimes, the people, as in my case, are too thoroughly entrenched (kinship or friendship reasons, for example), and you really have only two options: resign, or ride the ship down. I chose to resign.
I'm not saying that he absolutely resigned because he was in exactly the same situation. He may not have been a competent manager, and certainly, I would never declare that either everyone went or I went even if that really was the situation, because it would needlessly embitter everyone in volved. But there are really legitimate reasons why even a very good CEO or president may resign other than his (or her) incompetency.
Since you have pointed that out, to save you time, I will assume the responsibility of counting the number of times "Get a Life" appears in the following threads.
I would point out that on Linux, the picoGUI server and shared library, together, take under half a meg (487 kB) at their maximum size. Sure, it's not 1/1000th of a byte, but I've not seen an X server do that in a loooooooong time.
Given that Jobs killed the Newton essentially because he hated Scully (for a detailed discussion, I strongly recommend either "The Mac Bathroom Reader" or "Apple Confidential"), I don't see Apple releasing a handheld soon unless it's so radically different from everything else that Jobs can claim with a clear conscience that it takes no inspiration from the Newton. That Ink made it in to OS X at all I find absolutely incredible.
Slashdot Mirror
...I'm not sure about a weapon of mass destruction, but if you jam a C-sized rocket into a heavily modified Alpha and launch it sideways at a crowd by accident (that whole safety key issue is for wimps, after all), I think we've got a weapon of mass panic (WMP).
Not that I'm speaking from experience.
I'm not going to bother modding you up because I suspect you'd go right back down, but I just want to congratulate you on saying the first Soviet Russia joke I've read here that is actually correct (with the pun).
The only times that fiat money has been a problem, in general, is in third-world countries, and fixing the currencies against the dollar (Argentina) or going to a dollar economy (Ecuador) doesn't seem to have helped them much anyway. Printing money with the purpose of "diluting" cash (raising the real rate of inflation) is not inherently evil, either; in fact, a large number of economists are currently arguing that the Japanese need to print a whole lot of money, intentionally generating inflation and therefore discouraging savings, in order to revitalize their economy and end their ten-year-long recession/depression. (I.e., if your savings start being worth less, then you will have an incentive to spend, which would probably help end Japan's deflation and revitalize the economy. The other thing that's killing them is subsidizing companies that really should be allowed to die, but that's another issue entirely.)
If you're that wrapped up about having your money backed, rent a space in a vault and convert all your money to gold. It's gone up recenty anyway in the uncertainties of the war, and likely will continue to do so until this situation has blown over, so it's probably a decent investment. No one's stopping you. But for the rest of the world, I think fiat courrency is fine.
Shoudln't that be,
"Apparently no english majors at play in the Slashdot world"?
This is going to be the end of the 112% class average in my computer science class, isn't it?
(The class average right now is honest-to-goodness 112%.)
Hoping you'll notice I replied 'cause you sure ain't gonna read a week-old discussion, but: I fail to see how the Talmudic discussion on animals born by caesarian section would apply here, on any level. As long as the animal has a cloven hoof and chews cud, it is a clean animal. We have two problems besides that, however: first, because the meat was never alive, does it count as carion? The only parallel I can think of for comparison would be a stillbirth, which is definitely NOT kosher (or wouldn't be in my house unless a rabbi argued really persuasively otherwise). Furthermore, even if we agree that it is not carion, we still have to deal with the method of killing: since the meat is not kosher unless a shochet cuts the throat cleanly and the blood is drained, but here we have no full animal to kill to get the meat, then even if we can agree that the meat was alive at once point, is it still not kosher? This issue is far more complicated than simply citing the Talmudic discussion on cessarian sections and I am not at all convinced that this meat could ever be kosher unless (and this is I suppose possible) we could manage to classify it as a manmade vegetable (which opens up another whole slew of problems). I think it would require a very lengthy discussion in a bet din to establish that.
:)
Comments, corrections, etc. more than welcome.
Originally, Apple demonstrated a version of iTunes that had the ability provided by iCommune built-in, and Jobs promised it around the January timeframe. If Apple is still planning to include that functionality in iTunes 3.1/4.0, then this may actually simply have been to keep them from having to deal with a mix of iCommune and iTunes advertising the same services and a bunch of confused users about why sharing halfway-worked, but not completely. On the other hand, if they've quit this, then I agree with you entirely.
Apple had an easy ability to complain about iCommune before: it directly interfaced with iTunes using an SDK for which the developer had to agree to additional licensing restrictions (that said the SDK was to be used only to interface to MP3 players). So Apple could legitimately complain that the author of iCommune was breaking the rules under which Apple had provided that SDK and order him to quit producing it. This new version, however, either works by talking to iTunes via AppleScript--which requires no one to sign any SDK except the generic one for the developer tools; that's the whole nature of how AppleScript works--or else, accesses the MP3s directly (which is very easy; they're kept extremely organized automatically in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music as plain, unencrypted MP3 files, ready to share). Because neither of these violate any extra license agreement, Apple will not be able to stop iCommune this time.
The RIAA of course probably could and probably will, but that's a different issue entirely.
Your concern would make sense if the application were implementing the Rendezvous interface raw, but it's not, anymore than Mozilla implements its own TCP/IP stack. Jaguar provides a very nice set of classes to establish and manage Rendezvous services, and I'm sure that the new version of iCommune, just like the old version and like all Rendezvous-enabled apps, will make use of Apple's frameworks. So even if Apple completely overhauled their IETF-standard protocol (bloody unlikely) they'd have to also completely overhaul the Rendezvous portion of Cocoa and not document the changes in their SDK. I think that iCommune is safe.
Actually, that would pose a fascinating problem: if you could print out a steak, would it be a vegetarian dish? After all, no animal would have been harmed. I have also wondered what the implications would be with regard to those religions that require meat be killed a certain way (Islam, Judaism, many others also). Would a "printed" thigh count as animal from that perspective? Could it ever be acceptable then, even if you were printing a duplicate of clearly kosher beef?
I don't think we're there yet, by any means, but I certainly look forward to when the technology has progressed enough that such a discussion becomes relevant.
If you read the article, they imply--numerous times--that the issue with SCO is solely if you are using their libc on Linux in order to run legacy SCO applications. That should not be able to impact Linux in any real way, unless I am grossly misunderstanding something.
Well, at least this explains how dupes happen...
Your analogy doesn't work. If I leave my house with a door unlocked, then your entering and destroying (because, let's be honest, that's what a cracker as opposed to a hacker does) is still just as illegal as if I had locked the door. If you accidentally bump my house and it's so shoddily made that it falls over, that's not the same thing. That's more like the Slashdot Effect.
IBM can't do this because large chunks of OS/2's codebase are still copyrighted by Microsoft, if I understand correctly. However, that's always struck me as kind of a weak argument; I suspect that if IBM would be kind enough to just document in the code "The following function's source is removed, but it takes in this, puts out that, and should have the following bugs," then the community could probably get it working in a year or two.
Why Sauron's Ring Is So Powerful...Sometimes
from the why-can't-I-rule-the-world dept.
Anonymous Dwarf writes "Finally the scoop on how Sauron "cheats" a little to up his power! Do RFCs mean nothing anymore? What's next, Riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! From the blog story: 'Apparently Sauron engineered all of the rings to be networked together for increased power. However, his own ring is more powerful because it skips the TCP/IP header when contacting other rings, allowing it to dominate their connections and effectively control all of them by occupying all open sockets." Yet another example of why we really need the Rings of Power to follow proper RFC standards.
Seeing as 11mx12m is a two-dimensional object, I'd say it simulates blackhole-level gravity just by getting into the machine...
I admit I've never been in charge of a large corporation, but I've headed (relatively) large organizations, and from one of those (a newspaper) I did resign, and I honestly think it was the best option. Here's why:
Let's say, honestly, that the senior management really wasn't dedicated enough. Now, if you hired the guys and then retained them, then that's your fault, but a lot of times, people either were hired significantly before you arrived or don't report directly to you. Firing a large portion of the senior management can be extremely demoralizing in that case, especially if you have to leapfrog over your managers or bully them into doing it (because it implies they are incompetent). Even if you try to string it out, you have a problem, because if you respond to the problem fast enough, people will lose morale, whereas if you take too long, the problems that these people cause will simply get worse. So frequently you end up trying to compromise: you fire or at least shift around responsibility as far as you can and try to enliven things. A lot of times, if the manager is competent, that works, and things improve enough that you can wait for the next round (if needed; a lot of times, revitalizing management by removing the deadwood exposes some real gems that previously didn't shine). Sometimes, it really just does not, and you're stuck. Further, sometimes, the people, as in my case, are too thoroughly entrenched (kinship or friendship reasons, for example), and you really have only two options: resign, or ride the ship down. I chose to resign.
I'm not saying that he absolutely resigned because he was in exactly the same situation. He may not have been a competent manager, and certainly, I would never declare that either everyone went or I went even if that really was the situation, because it would needlessly embitter everyone in volved. But there are really legitimate reasons why even a very good CEO or president may resign other than his (or her) incompetency.
Since you have pointed that out, to save you time, I will assume the responsibility of counting the number of times "Get a Life" appears in the following threads.
(It's a joke!)
I would point out that on Linux, the picoGUI server and shared library, together, take under half a meg (487 kB) at their maximum size. Sure, it's not 1/1000th of a byte, but I've not seen an X server do that in a loooooooong time.
Actually, while the FSF has not proposed that name, Microsoft proposed one very similar, although they spelled it incorrectly as "MAIM GNU."
Given that Jobs killed the Newton essentially because he hated Scully (for a detailed discussion, I strongly recommend either "The Mac Bathroom Reader" or "Apple Confidential"), I don't see Apple releasing a handheld soon unless it's so radically different from everything else that Jobs can claim with a clear conscience that it takes no inspiration from the Newton. That Ink made it in to OS X at all I find absolutely incredible.