What's the point of such a sentence? He'd get out when he is 65 years old, without money, without home and obviously without work. The first rational thing he'd do is to jump off of a bridge. Why then did you, a taxpayer, housed and fed him for most of his life? You should either give him a reasonable sentence (not more than 5-10 years, allowing rehabilitation) or instant death.
I'd rather watch no ads, and ask the web site to compete for my money with their materials. But as it stands now, with NoScript and AdBlock Plus I see no ads whatsoever, and pages load very fast. I'd sooner avoid a site than watch an ad.
But to summarize, the project was offered for bids in 2006, and none of the bidders could meet the specifications. Then European space agency came along and offered to work together on something else (KK Soyuz and ATV) and that was technically achievable. So the Klipper project got postponed until 2010-2015, and the resources reassigned to the ESA work. We don't have technology yet to build Klipper with planned capabilities and for planned cost (reusability strikes again, probably.)
There is no intrinsic reason why a democracy must fail sooner than any other form of government.
I think I can easily offer you such a reason. It is called motivation. Take two opposing examples - democratic Athens and tyrannical Iraq (under Saddam.) What drives the rulers (the collective ruler in Athens' case) to rule?
I think it can be universally postulated that people are lazy, and won't do things that do not seem to be necessary. If we take this issue and think of our examples, a Greek voter is only minimally interested in details of state; those details are often complex and politics is something that simply can't be done collectively. The voter in a democracy just does not have enough motivation to vote one way or another. On the other hand, the tyrant holds all the reins of power and intimately knows every important issue. He has only one vote, but this vote often means life or death to him, and the tyrant considers the implications very carefully. The tyrant usually optimizes his own goals, but often they coincide with the public goals. For example, in Saddam's Iraq all religious crazies (or criminals in general) had a good chance to be imprisoned or worse; the society was stable and safe for most of the people (and very unsafe for the political opposition.) So in terms of motivation the dictator is far more motivated than all the democratic voters combined; exceptions are known, as I mentioned, only during times of great social instability, when motivation of the population increases sharply. When millions of angry people go to the streets and demand something usually they get what they demand. (or they get killed, which is also possible.) On this scale of things modern Pakistan is more democratic than the USA because there are Pakistanis who are ready to die for the democracy; some do. But do we have such people in the USA?
It is also important to understand the value of voter's education in a democracy. If the voters are uneducated and vote randomly then they are irrelevant. Think of this as the year 2000 vote which elected Bush - the entire country voted as white noise and effectively averaged itself out; so one carefully selected locale decided the fate of the whole election.
In terms of education, a dictator also outperforms the mass of voters. He himself, or as a close circle of advisers, is a concentrated knowledge of issues. Often these issues are secret, or minimally known. This is common when diplomacy is involved. For example, Musharraf disclosed recently a plain and simple ultimatum given to him by the USA - bend over or be bombed. This is something that he could not publicize, and his motives at that time were unclear - until now. So the dictator has an advantage here as well.
I don't imply here that a dictatorial form of government is my ideal, I only indicate important factors that determine stability of various forms of control. I can also opine that socialism is even less stable than a democracy, for example, that's why in the USSR it devolved into a dictatorship of one party, of one collective tyrant. Most stable societies in history, however, were monarchies or semi-monarchies, where the same power group controlled the country even if the nominal head of the government was changing periodically. They were collective kings, called "king makers" at that time, more influential than the king himself (cardinal Richelieu vs. king Louis XIII.)
And the desire and hope for a perfect democracy, even if thwarted, can also raise us up to a more representative society...
I wish there was a way to instill this "desire and hope for a perfect democracy" into the brains of stupid voters. But you see, I do not find any reason to believe that humans naturally wish for a democracy. Psychologists researched many motivations, and they can enumerate by now probably every single desire a human can have - money, power, sex, food, etc. but a desire for democracy is just not there. I think it can be logically concluded that democracy is one of the w
The problem we have is that the people on average don't care.
I think this is exactly the reason why democracy just can not exist as a stable state; it can be seen briefly in popular revolts, for example, but after things settle down people abandon their duty to the state. There are very few countries in the world that can be even called democratic, for a certain, watered down meaning of democracy.
Most countries are ruled by people who came to power because of who they are themselves or who they know. If a country has a good ruler (previously known as King) the country is in luck. If a stupid King settles on the throne - bad news. And the more industrialized and advanced the country is, the less active the population becomes, and thus the country becomes less and less democratic, and elections hardly mean anything.
200 years ago if you were arrested (and not hanged, or shot right away) you'd be eventually released, and you could continue to live your normal life (modulo the unpleasanness of the experience.)
In the modern society an arrest may be more than that. You could be charged with a random offense just to justify your arrest; we probably all do a dozen of those offenses before breakfast, so many laws are on the books that it's not humanly possible to know them all.
An arrest record, not even mentioning a conviction, is a massive dark stain on your reputation. And you can not (at this time) point at British soldiers and earn karma; quite opposite, you instantly lose all the value, at least in the eyes of HR. Your career may be destroyed, and that means your family too. If things turn out really bad you can join the society of homeless.
So it would be unwise to treat an arrest today as a picnic. 200 years ago you would be risking your teeth, or your neck. But if you survive you'd be OK. Today an arrest may make you into a non-person, a member of the lowest caste that there is in the society. Besides, the society as a whole usually does not look at lawbreakers as heroes, and the media does not present them in the best possible light either. Remember the guy who was asking Kerry some inconvenient question and got tasered? The media described him as a troublemaker, and the police accused him in inciting a riot. The country meekly accepted all that and joked that maybe the guy should have been shot instead. Hardly encouraging to future challengers, just as intended.
And how many of us, geeks, have serial numbers of all home electronics recorded, and all other valuables photographed, and certified by a notary public for insurance purposes in case of such house fire or burglary? This is highly recommended, and you can read about it in many boring insurance brochures. Do we read them, though? I think only insurance people, seeing clients' disasters every day, really understand why this is important, and why house alarms are a good idea too. The rest of the people just presume that such bad things will never happen to them. And if I do not have a serial number of my PS3 recorded and stored in a bank, then I have no right to blame an artist for an omission in his handling of his computer.
Yes, it does - I put myself into this filmmaker's shoes. He may be not reading the computer magazines or web sites that geeks read. He might have seen DVDs and thought "I need a few when I start sending my movie for review." He might have seen SuperDuper somewhere and thought it is a CD duplication software (that's what the name suggests.) I can come up with a bunch of excuses on his behalf, and in fact many of them would be reasonable for a non-geek type.
But do you know what Quicken does? It prompts you to do backups, and guides you all the way. You have to actually go out of your way, intentionally decline a default choice, to skip the backups. Quicken offers backups over the Internet (to Quicken's own servers), then to a removable media, and then to any other location. Backups default to once per 3 days (I think) and they are time-tagged, and it is trivial to restore a database from any backup (one click, and it does not destroy your current data either.) This is the smart way to do it. Why a consumer-oriented computer can't do the same?
Better to look at the generic case. Move deletes the source when the target filesystem (!) reports success. mv has no way to double-check, and the target can be remote. If you do not like lazy write then disable it.
This does not match the folder / filing cabinet metaphor. When a secretary receives a folder "Jim" with new Jim's papers she will not toss the old folder that is also called "Jim". I seriously doubt that we even have a real life situation when an old folder is trashed upon arrival of a new one. I can definitely understand now why Macs are not that popular. Destruction of data is not a good selling point, even if it appears logical. It should do the right thing, not necessarily the logical thing, especially because people are not always logical (they are not robots.) People make mistakes, and the computer should account for that instead of rudely saying "Well, you should have known, it's logical after all."
This may be a traditional choice for a Mac, but it is a stupid choice. The OS should err on the side of caution and merge folders, not that it is difficult in any case. MS was right to not do rm -rf on a single, ambiguous button click. Protecting user's files is very important, or else (as someone did) your product might become a target on a rifle range.
I can understand him. He seems to be an artist (filmmaker) and not a computer scientist. He bought a Mac because it was advertised as "it just works". There was no user-friendly backup mechanism before Time Machine, as I understand, and large external USB or Firewire drives were rare (I have two 570 GB drives today.) Total loss of data is something that geeks know about, but your typical artist wouldn't even think about as a possibility! Ok, he failed to back up, however his computer failed him by making the data irrecoverable.
As other people mentioned, if a modern luxury computer offers "Move" then it better do it, and do it right.
But to answer your question directly, copy-verify-delete is a dangerous thing in itself. You have hundreds of files to move, and you carefully selected what you want. Now you can do cut and paste (or move) and finish the task right here. Or you can drag the files as a copy... and what then? How do you run a quick cmp or diff on two selections? You need to be very familiar with tools (not standard ones either) to do this. While doing all that you need to keep your selections, or else you will delete not what you copied. And all this manual labor is needed only to avoid a bug in the OS which has sole purpose in life to copy and move your files around!
A properly functioning move is therefore preferable to the manual sequence if move is what you ultimately want.
I presume as you bumped the notebook the accelerometer decided to park the drive to protect it, and this caused it to become offline. This is a very usual situation with portable equipment, and losing data is indeed unwelcome.
and the whole thing crashes. If you do not have a support conract with the company who wrote foodrv.o and uses it for some, unknown to you, reason what you are going to do? And if a manager comes and blames me for this, I'd tell him something.
but $9000 isn't really a lot of money, however weird it is to carry it around with you.
Most people don't run a business. Those who do, however, understand very well that $9K is nothing if even a tiny business can easily burn through $100K/yr. It would be indeed a reasonable pocket money; an airplane ticket to Russia would cost about $2,500 probably, and he planned to fly there. We can debate why he wasn't using his credit cards and bank accounts, but when you are travelling hard, cold cash usually works better. Besides, it is not unreasonable to assume that he was planning to skip some of Russian payroll taxes.
He doesn't speak the language
Many, if not most, Russian programmers can speak English - it's pretty much required in the trade. A translator might be useful when the discussion shifts from technical subjects to financial matters.
a hotshot doctor from a rich family
I wouldn't bet on that. Doctors were dime a dozen in the old USSR, and this was just the time when things got worse in the medical professions. Chances are she has a diploma, but that's about it; she would not be allowed to practice in the USA without jumping through many hoops and basically retraining for the local realities. That's probably why she did not work as a doctor - whe was not eligible.
A week ago I scratched my hand somewhere, and noticed it only an hour later (the blood already stopped and dried.) There are probably a few places where traces of that blood can be found. Someone's blood in her own house and/or cars is hardly unusual.
Slashdot Mirror
Red LED takes 10 mA, green LED 20-30 mA. So in your scenario a red LED will work for 5-6 minutes!
What's the point of such a sentence? He'd get out when he is 65 years old, without money, without home and obviously without work. The first rational thing he'd do is to jump off of a bridge. Why then did you, a taxpayer, housed and fed him for most of his life? You should either give him a reasonable sentence (not more than 5-10 years, allowing rehabilitation) or instant death.
Unfortunately, ancient Greeks had nothing against corrupting the bodies of youths.
I'd rather watch no ads, and ask the web site to compete for my money with their materials. But as it stands now, with NoScript and AdBlock Plus I see no ads whatsoever, and pages load very fast. I'd sooner avoid a site than watch an ad.
But to summarize, the project was offered for bids in 2006, and none of the bidders could meet the specifications. Then European space agency came along and offered to work together on something else (KK Soyuz and ATV) and that was technically achievable. So the Klipper project got postponed until 2010-2015, and the resources reassigned to the ESA work. We don't have technology yet to build Klipper with planned capabilities and for planned cost (reusability strikes again, probably.)
A psychic predicts the gender of the child for $100. If wrong, your money back. ;-)
Green, not yellow. But otherwise everything is developing by the book. Don't ask which book, though.
I think I can easily offer you such a reason. It is called motivation. Take two opposing examples - democratic Athens and tyrannical Iraq (under Saddam.) What drives the rulers (the collective ruler in Athens' case) to rule?
I think it can be universally postulated that people are lazy, and won't do things that do not seem to be necessary. If we take this issue and think of our examples, a Greek voter is only minimally interested in details of state; those details are often complex and politics is something that simply can't be done collectively. The voter in a democracy just does not have enough motivation to vote one way or another. On the other hand, the tyrant holds all the reins of power and intimately knows every important issue. He has only one vote, but this vote often means life or death to him, and the tyrant considers the implications very carefully. The tyrant usually optimizes his own goals, but often they coincide with the public goals. For example, in Saddam's Iraq all religious crazies (or criminals in general) had a good chance to be imprisoned or worse; the society was stable and safe for most of the people (and very unsafe for the political opposition.) So in terms of motivation the dictator is far more motivated than all the democratic voters combined; exceptions are known, as I mentioned, only during times of great social instability, when motivation of the population increases sharply. When millions of angry people go to the streets and demand something usually they get what they demand. (or they get killed, which is also possible.) On this scale of things modern Pakistan is more democratic than the USA because there are Pakistanis who are ready to die for the democracy; some do. But do we have such people in the USA?
It is also important to understand the value of voter's education in a democracy. If the voters are uneducated and vote randomly then they are irrelevant. Think of this as the year 2000 vote which elected Bush - the entire country voted as white noise and effectively averaged itself out; so one carefully selected locale decided the fate of the whole election.
In terms of education, a dictator also outperforms the mass of voters. He himself, or as a close circle of advisers, is a concentrated knowledge of issues. Often these issues are secret, or minimally known. This is common when diplomacy is involved. For example, Musharraf disclosed recently a plain and simple ultimatum given to him by the USA - bend over or be bombed. This is something that he could not publicize, and his motives at that time were unclear - until now. So the dictator has an advantage here as well.
I don't imply here that a dictatorial form of government is my ideal, I only indicate important factors that determine stability of various forms of control. I can also opine that socialism is even less stable than a democracy, for example, that's why in the USSR it devolved into a dictatorship of one party, of one collective tyrant. Most stable societies in history, however, were monarchies or semi-monarchies, where the same power group controlled the country even if the nominal head of the government was changing periodically. They were collective kings, called "king makers" at that time, more influential than the king himself (cardinal Richelieu vs. king Louis XIII.)
And the desire and hope for a perfect democracy, even if thwarted, can also raise us up to a more representative society...
I wish there was a way to instill this "desire and hope for a perfect democracy" into the brains of stupid voters. But you see, I do not find any reason to believe that humans naturally wish for a democracy. Psychologists researched many motivations, and they can enumerate by now probably every single desire a human can have - money, power, sex, food, etc. but a desire for democracy is just not there. I think it can be logically concluded that democracy is one of the w
Isn't it amazing that convicted criminals have more freedom inside their prison walls than the innocent children have within their school walls?
I think this is exactly the reason why democracy just can not exist as a stable state; it can be seen briefly in popular revolts, for example, but after things settle down people abandon their duty to the state. There are very few countries in the world that can be even called democratic, for a certain, watered down meaning of democracy.
Most countries are ruled by people who came to power because of who they are themselves or who they know. If a country has a good ruler (previously known as King) the country is in luck. If a stupid King settles on the throne - bad news. And the more industrialized and advanced the country is, the less active the population becomes, and thus the country becomes less and less democratic, and elections hardly mean anything.
In the modern society an arrest may be more than that. You could be charged with a random offense just to justify your arrest; we probably all do a dozen of those offenses before breakfast, so many laws are on the books that it's not humanly possible to know them all.
An arrest record, not even mentioning a conviction, is a massive dark stain on your reputation. And you can not (at this time) point at British soldiers and earn karma; quite opposite, you instantly lose all the value, at least in the eyes of HR. Your career may be destroyed, and that means your family too. If things turn out really bad you can join the society of homeless.
So it would be unwise to treat an arrest today as a picnic. 200 years ago you would be risking your teeth, or your neck. But if you survive you'd be OK. Today an arrest may make you into a non-person, a member of the lowest caste that there is in the society. Besides, the society as a whole usually does not look at lawbreakers as heroes, and the media does not present them in the best possible light either. Remember the guy who was asking Kerry some inconvenient question and got tasered? The media described him as a troublemaker, and the police accused him in inciting a riot. The country meekly accepted all that and joked that maybe the guy should have been shot instead. Hardly encouraging to future challengers, just as intended.
And how many of us, geeks, have serial numbers of all home electronics recorded, and all other valuables photographed, and certified by a notary public for insurance purposes in case of such house fire or burglary? This is highly recommended, and you can read about it in many boring insurance brochures. Do we read them, though? I think only insurance people, seeing clients' disasters every day, really understand why this is important, and why house alarms are a good idea too. The rest of the people just presume that such bad things will never happen to them. And if I do not have a serial number of my PS3 recorded and stored in a bank, then I have no right to blame an artist for an omission in his handling of his computer.
Yes, it does - I put myself into this filmmaker's shoes. He may be not reading the computer magazines or web sites that geeks read. He might have seen DVDs and thought "I need a few when I start sending my movie for review." He might have seen SuperDuper somewhere and thought it is a CD duplication software (that's what the name suggests.) I can come up with a bunch of excuses on his behalf, and in fact many of them would be reasonable for a non-geek type.
But do you know what Quicken does? It prompts you to do backups, and guides you all the way. You have to actually go out of your way, intentionally decline a default choice, to skip the backups. Quicken offers backups over the Internet (to Quicken's own servers), then to a removable media, and then to any other location. Backups default to once per 3 days (I think) and they are time-tagged, and it is trivial to restore a database from any backup (one click, and it does not destroy your current data either.) This is the smart way to do it. Why a consumer-oriented computer can't do the same?
Better to look at the generic case. Move deletes the source when the target filesystem (!) reports success. mv has no way to double-check, and the target can be remote. If you do not like lazy write then disable it.
This does not match the folder / filing cabinet metaphor. When a secretary receives a folder "Jim" with new Jim's papers she will not toss the old folder that is also called "Jim". I seriously doubt that we even have a real life situation when an old folder is trashed upon arrival of a new one. I can definitely understand now why Macs are not that popular. Destruction of data is not a good selling point, even if it appears logical. It should do the right thing, not necessarily the logical thing, especially because people are not always logical (they are not robots.) People make mistakes, and the computer should account for that instead of rudely saying "Well, you should have known, it's logical after all."
This may be a traditional choice for a Mac, but it is a stupid choice. The OS should err on the side of caution and merge folders, not that it is difficult in any case. MS was right to not do rm -rf on a single, ambiguous button click. Protecting user's files is very important, or else (as someone did) your product might become a target on a rifle range.
Someone already mentioned that the bug is not in copy or delete functions of the kernel - it is in the Finder GUI that is not open source.
I can understand him. He seems to be an artist (filmmaker) and not a computer scientist. He bought a Mac because it was advertised as "it just works". There was no user-friendly backup mechanism before Time Machine, as I understand, and large external USB or Firewire drives were rare (I have two 570 GB drives today.) Total loss of data is something that geeks know about, but your typical artist wouldn't even think about as a possibility! Ok, he failed to back up, however his computer failed him by making the data irrecoverable.
But to answer your question directly, copy-verify-delete is a dangerous thing in itself. You have hundreds of files to move, and you carefully selected what you want. Now you can do cut and paste (or move) and finish the task right here. Or you can drag the files as a copy... and what then? How do you run a quick cmp or diff on two selections? You need to be very familiar with tools (not standard ones either) to do this. While doing all that you need to keep your selections, or else you will delete not what you copied. And all this manual labor is needed only to avoid a bug in the OS which has sole purpose in life to copy and move your files around!
A properly functioning move is therefore preferable to the manual sequence if move is what you ultimately want.
I presume as you bumped the notebook the accelerometer decided to park the drive to protect it, and this caused it to become offline. This is a very usual situation with portable equipment, and losing data is indeed unwelcome.
Apple charges good money for Leopard, so let them fix it.
00:00:00 foodrv *** ERROR 123, ABORTING EXECUTION ***
and the whole thing crashes. If you do not have a support conract with the company who wrote foodrv.o and uses it for some, unknown to you, reason what you are going to do? And if a manager comes and blames me for this, I'd tell him something.
Leaving servers aside, companies buy Windows because it works, and costs reasonably, and runs all the software. What other reasons did you expect?
Most people don't run a business. Those who do, however, understand very well that $9K is nothing if even a tiny business can easily burn through $100K/yr. It would be indeed a reasonable pocket money; an airplane ticket to Russia would cost about $2,500 probably, and he planned to fly there. We can debate why he wasn't using his credit cards and bank accounts, but when you are travelling hard, cold cash usually works better. Besides, it is not unreasonable to assume that he was planning to skip some of Russian payroll taxes.
He doesn't speak the language
Many, if not most, Russian programmers can speak English - it's pretty much required in the trade. A translator might be useful when the discussion shifts from technical subjects to financial matters.
a hotshot doctor from a rich family
I wouldn't bet on that. Doctors were dime a dozen in the old USSR, and this was just the time when things got worse in the medical professions. Chances are she has a diploma, but that's about it; she would not be allowed to practice in the USA without jumping through many hoops and basically retraining for the local realities. That's probably why she did not work as a doctor - whe was not eligible.
A week ago I scratched my hand somewhere, and noticed it only an hour later (the blood already stopped and dried.) There are probably a few places where traces of that blood can be found. Someone's blood in her own house and/or cars is hardly unusual.