To add my voice to what others are saying, we didn't lose Vietnam due to inferior combat capabilities, we lost due to lack of will. America killed more of their soldiers than we even sent, and we had far more people to send. The fundamental problem was simply that they were willing to fight to the bitter end, and we weren't. If Vietnam had been doing something that truly required a military response (I'm not quite sure what, because there aren't really any neighboring states for them to invade that we cared about, and they didn't have any minorities to put in camps), then we could have beaten them.
I dunno if we actually have any allies left though, except Great Britian
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as you'll no doubt remember, was the counterpart (and counterbalance) to the Russian Warsaw Pact. Since capitalist democracies have a bit more staying power than communist dictatorships, NATO still exists. While they might not support us in every singe military engagement, chances are that when push comes to shove the member nations will honor their treaty obligations to support us.
Who are they, you may ask? There are 19 NATO members (including the US of A), and they are: Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S.A.
In addition, there are 46 EAPC members, which are nations that are friendly towards NATO, though they may or may not be obligated to support us militarily. These countries are the 19 NATO members, plus: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the Republic of Macedonia, Tadjikista, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Now, many of these countries may not have significant militaries, but my point is, we have more allies than you might think. The road to economic power runs through the West, and so most of the former Soviet Union nations are doing all they can to cozy up to America and Western Europe.
Just nobody's watching them. HDTV signals have been broadcasting for a couple years now, actually. In theory, in a couple more years, we'll stop broadcasting analog, but given the fact that prices on the sets haven't dropped, that may not be happening.
convince my why they shouldn't be taken any more seriously than, say, economic indicators that point to a recession on the horizon. Just why should I care about the CPI or the trade deficit or the number of new housing starts in a quarter? What relevance could these possibly have?
First of all, don't pay attention to economic indicators. Anyone who's ever looked at the Fed's predictions for the growth rate of the economy plotted against the actual growth rate knows that the Federal Reseve can predict pretty accurately out one quarter (by doing little more than continuing the line that goes through the last two quarters), but is miserable at predicting beyond that. People have been predicting the US economy would slow since about '94, but it's continued to go through the roof through about last year.
As for the CPI or the trade deficit, those statistics tell you what IS going on. That's useful information, because it elevates the question of "how's the economy doing?" from the level of "I don't have enough money" to something approaching intelligent discourse. Not always, as most people are economic morons, but sometimes. Likewise, world temperature statistics tell us that although the USA had record high temperatures last year, the world as a whole had a slight temperature decline. That elevates the level of discourse from "it's too damn hot here" to "is this year just random noise, or is global warming BS after all?"
Third, global temperature depends on where you measure temperature
This is absolutely true. Furthermore, many of the rural weather stations in the world have been shut down over the last century, to be replaced by urban ones. Surprise surprise, evidence of increasing temperatures!
This project should help MySQL
on
MySQL FS
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· Score: 3
The licensing issues are, for many people, the MOST important. Just because this won't be very good at first doesn't mean it won't improve, and most likely the more popular this project gets, the more work will get done on MySQL.
Take the linux kernel. Would the kernel be anywhere near where it is today if people hadn't gotten others interested by writing intriguing, linux-only apps? Probably not. Perhaps one day MySQL will evolve to the point where this will be useful, perhaps due to developers attracted by this project.
Okay, we can argue all we want about what the US should or should not have control over, but there's one thing you need to understand: the US was not "given".us. The US created the original TLD's, as well as most of the original infrastructure for ARPAnet.
Yes, perhaps you are correct that America should now give up control of the non nation specific TLDs, but how would decisions get made then? The UN is not exactly a model of efficiency (and even the UN has a small security council that wields most of the effective power).
This is EXACTLY what America does, just think of each state as an individual country. America, as a whole, has plenty of power. California, by itself, does not. Stupid, dumbass regulators imposed a price freeze on how much power companies can sell electricity for, which is significantly below what they would have to pay to buy out of state electricity. As a result, California is out of power. The COUNTRY is not, just as Europe will probably never run out of power, but California is, because precisely as you said, from time to time we have to buy electricity from neighboring states.
As you've no doubt noticed, systems sell for a fairly consistent price over their whole lifetime. So, while maybe each console goes for a $20 or $30 loss right now (or maybe not; consoles are not ALWAYS sold for a loss, only if the company believes that this is necessary to be competitive), in a year their production costs may only be a half of what they are today. Hence, they'll turn a profit over the majority of the life of the console.
If they reset your preferences, and THEN told you, isn't this a violation of their privacy policy? Presumably they did this because they had a really big customer looking to buy their email list, and so they reset everyone's preferences, sold the list, and then let people switch back. So can't Ebay get caught in a class action suit for contract violation?
I think what the original poster was trying to say was that even though Rambus was garanteed by Intel that it would be the standard, due to bad technology it's still floundering. The whole lawsuit patent issue is a seperate matter.
Not that it really matters, but I just thought I'd let you know that the date was chosen because 1948 was the year he wrote it (it was then published in 1949), so it was completely arbitrary. 1984 really was meant as a warning, rather than a prediction anyway.
Sure, tri-state is digital, and very cool, but 3 bits per spot does not mean it's tri-state. Tri-state would presumably mean it's got black, white, and grey values. 3 bits means it would need 2^3, or 8 different values.
A couple posters above have missed the point of the parent. He's not saying that linux lacks these things, and should add them. What he's saying is that a basic intro manual should explain to the user what the Linux equivalents of these things are.
I think that the packaged documentation for most distros generally does a good job of this, and are one of the most important arguments for buying a packaged distro, instead of downloading it (remember, free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer). These basic manuals generally do a less good job of making you fundamentally understand how Linux works. You'll learn linuxconf, but you won't really learn shell scripts.
Luckily, that's what howtos are for. Linux is not easy, I won't deny that, but with a basic user's manual, and if necessary a look at the howtos and man pages, it should take no longer to build up Linux proficiency than it took the user to build up Windows proficiency.
Linux has Linus. Linus is great a holding an open source project together. He's brought us the penguin, the goal of taking over the world, and the sound clip "I am Linux Torvalds and I pronounce Linux as Linux." He has a certain "Internet charisma" if you will (he may also have the more traditional type, but I've never met him, so I couldn't say). This, more than any other single factor, is why Linux has suceeded where Mozilla, HURD, and so many others have staggered.
So what happens if you open source BeOS depends almost entirely on how good the guy who leads GPL BeOS. I'm not trying to say that Linus is the only one who's done any work on Linux (indeed, as many of you will hasten to point out, most of "Linux" doesn't even have anything to do with the kernel), but he has been responsible in a large part for keeping people interested in the OS, and getting them to help out. It's just like a business. You've got crappy management, it doesn't really matter how good your product is.
I think what most people are saying is not that this is some horrible disaster, but undeniably, competition is good. Even if 3dfx makes an inferior product, merely by existing they force everyone else to work to keep ahead of them.
On top of that, as others have pointed out, 3dfx is much better about open drivers than Nvidia. It's the same reason most of us want Netscape to triumph over MS, because mozilla is open source, and IE will go open source sometime around when Hell freezes over.
Yes, this is the natural result of 3dfx not doing a good job. Yes, there are some other graphics card makers out there. However, there aren't a lot of them, and Nvidia may be able to use their market position to drive up the price of cards, which is obviously bad for all of us. What do you expect people to say? "Hooray, now I won't be as confused by all the choices next time I buy a video card?" This may not be horrible, but there's really nothing good about it either.
This is NOT the same Supreme Court that ruled in Roe vs. Wade. Same institution, sure, but different justices.
Now that said, I think the Supreme Court would still rule in favor of DeCSS, because you tend not to have the same kinds of "conservatives" and "liberals" in law that you have in politics. In law, the "conservatives" tend to support a stricter interpretation of the Constitutuion, more along the lines of libertarians really than Republicans. Not that they are Libertarians, not by any means, but they are more libertarian than they are bible thumping fundamentalists. The current Supreme Court has consistently ruled to limit federal power, even in benign cases like when they struck down a federal domestic abuse law, not because it was a bad law, but because they saw nothing in the Constitution that permitted Congress to pass such a law.
So, what I'm trying to say is, this is not the same Supreme Court that ruled in Roe vs. Wade (and I bet if Roe vs. Wade came up today, and there were no precedent, they would not have found a "constitutional abortion right," because as I said, the current SC tends to interpret things more literally than they did then), but they still come down heavily on the pro-free speech side of things.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always been under the impression that shortwave radiation (such as gamma rays) exposes film, ruining pictures. If there was enough radiation to kill three people in the time it took to take the picture and get out, I would think it would have ruined the film too, if film really is damaged by that kind of radiation.
How are nuclear submarines the stupidest ideas in history? You want something to stay underwater, all other power sources require air or sunlight, it strikes me as perfectly logical that you'd use nuclear power. And nuclear hand grenades? Who built those? I honestly doubt such a thing exists. Even if you could find someone willing to use them, they would still be less useful tactically than a shoulder launched missile.
I'm inclined to believe that Zoller may like to talk up his own importance a little bit, and stretches the truth a little to do so. Why would he refuse to talk to you if you're a member of the press? There's no kind of security clearance that you can tell anyone except news people about. That'd be stupid, because the story would still get out, just through second hand sources.
I guess as long as lots of people haven't seen it before, I can't fault the guy too much for reposting it, but this HAS been up before, and the fact that the comment ID is 9 obviously shows this guy's been waiting for an opportunity to put it up. So stop falling all over yourselves trying to praise him already.
They'll get no more than 4 years out of the patent, so I'm not overly worried. Assume the lawsuit and appeals take at least a year, and the patent was granted in '89, almost 12 years ago. Patents last 17 years, which while ridiculously long, doesn't leave them much time at this point.
Worst case scenario, ISPs start charging an extra $5 a month for service for four years, and at the end of that time BT is a total outcast in the telecom community. Stupid? Yes. Annoying? Yes. A catastrophe? No.
Besides, as others have said, they probably won't win.
Yes, that's the point. It's moronic. But, in the Matrix, somehow the robots were using humans to produce energy in the absence of sunlight. Of course, without sunlight, there's no photosyntesis, and hence no plants, which is the basis of the food chain. He was joking.
If it's got a licensing agreement, it's got a copyright. If it's got a copyright, SOMEONE owns it. BSD "licensed" software is the only type that might get around this, because its licensing agreement only says that it's in the public domain, making no restrictions on use whatsoever.
If no one owns the copyright, then it's no longer covered by the GPL, and people are free to incorporate it into whatever commercial products they like. And companies can still sue whoever distributes it, as with DeCSS.
I think that, if for no other reason than because they prevent price fixing agreements from being legally binding (by making the agreements themselves illegal), anti-monopoly laws do good.
There are a couple markets in which unrestricted monopolies might be better than what we have now (I might even argue that MS is one of them, but this is neither the time nor the place), but there's a lot more markets with a small number of suppliers that would LOVE to fix prices. The airline industry is a perfect example. If United, Delta, American, and Southwest got together, they could all double their prices and make a ton, at the great expense of the consumer. They STILL fix prices as it is, but at least if one of them doesn't do what he's supposed to, the other airlines can't sue.
Because he wasn't talking about nature, he was talking about technology. And that is astounding. Prior to computers, I can't think of a single technology that has exhibited exponential growth, can you? Perhaps destructive yeild of nuclear weapons, though I don't know enough about that to say for certain. Output from power plants? Maybe, but that's probably more a factor of increased demand than increased technology, they're just building 'em bigger. Anybody got counter examples?
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To add my voice to what others are saying, we didn't lose Vietnam due to inferior combat capabilities, we lost due to lack of will. America killed more of their soldiers than we even sent, and we had far more people to send. The fundamental problem was simply that they were willing to fight to the bitter end, and we weren't. If Vietnam had been doing something that truly required a military response (I'm not quite sure what, because there aren't really any neighboring states for them to invade that we cared about, and they didn't have any minorities to put in camps), then we could have beaten them.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, as you'll no doubt remember, was the counterpart (and counterbalance) to the Russian Warsaw Pact. Since capitalist democracies have a bit more staying power than communist dictatorships, NATO still exists. While they might not support us in every singe military engagement, chances are that when push comes to shove the member nations will honor their treaty obligations to support us.
Who are they, you may ask? There are 19 NATO members (including the US of A), and they are: Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, the U.K., and the U.S.A.
In addition, there are 46 EAPC members, which are nations that are friendly towards NATO, though they may or may not be obligated to support us militarily. These countries are the 19 NATO members, plus: Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kyrghyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the Republic of Macedonia, Tadjikista, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.
Now, many of these countries may not have significant militaries, but my point is, we have more allies than you might think. The road to economic power runs through the West, and so most of the former Soviet Union nations are doing all they can to cozy up to America and Western Europe.
Anyway, hope that clears things up a little
Just nobody's watching them. HDTV signals have been broadcasting for a couple years now, actually. In theory, in a couple more years, we'll stop broadcasting analog, but given the fact that prices on the sets haven't dropped, that may not be happening.
First of all, don't pay attention to economic indicators. Anyone who's ever looked at the Fed's predictions for the growth rate of the economy plotted against the actual growth rate knows that the Federal Reseve can predict pretty accurately out one quarter (by doing little more than continuing the line that goes through the last two quarters), but is miserable at predicting beyond that. People have been predicting the US economy would slow since about '94, but it's continued to go through the roof through about last year.
As for the CPI or the trade deficit, those statistics tell you what IS going on. That's useful information, because it elevates the question of "how's the economy doing?" from the level of "I don't have enough money" to something approaching intelligent discourse. Not always, as most people are economic morons, but sometimes. Likewise, world temperature statistics tell us that although the USA had record high temperatures last year, the world as a whole had a slight temperature decline. That elevates the level of discourse from "it's too damn hot here" to "is this year just random noise, or is global warming BS after all?"
This is absolutely true. Furthermore, many of the rural weather stations in the world have been shut down over the last century, to be replaced by urban ones. Surprise surprise, evidence of increasing temperatures!
Take the linux kernel. Would the kernel be anywhere near where it is today if people hadn't gotten others interested by writing intriguing, linux-only apps? Probably not. Perhaps one day MySQL will evolve to the point where this will be useful, perhaps due to developers attracted by this project.
Yes, perhaps you are correct that America should now give up control of the non nation specific TLDs, but how would decisions get made then? The UN is not exactly a model of efficiency (and even the UN has a small security council that wields most of the effective power).
This is EXACTLY what America does, just think of each state as an individual country. America, as a whole, has plenty of power. California, by itself, does not. Stupid, dumbass regulators imposed a price freeze on how much power companies can sell electricity for, which is significantly below what they would have to pay to buy out of state electricity. As a result, California is out of power. The COUNTRY is not, just as Europe will probably never run out of power, but California is, because precisely as you said, from time to time we have to buy electricity from neighboring states.
As you've no doubt noticed, systems sell for a fairly consistent price over their whole lifetime. So, while maybe each console goes for a $20 or $30 loss right now (or maybe not; consoles are not ALWAYS sold for a loss, only if the company believes that this is necessary to be competitive), in a year their production costs may only be a half of what they are today. Hence, they'll turn a profit over the majority of the life of the console.
If they reset your preferences, and THEN told you, isn't this a violation of their privacy policy? Presumably they did this because they had a really big customer looking to buy their email list, and so they reset everyone's preferences, sold the list, and then let people switch back. So can't Ebay get caught in a class action suit for contract violation?
Great, now audiophiles will insist on buying transistor-based speakers, because "they sound better, really!"
I think what the original poster was trying to say was that even though Rambus was garanteed by Intel that it would be the standard, due to bad technology it's still floundering. The whole lawsuit patent issue is a seperate matter.
Not that it really matters, but I just thought I'd let you know that the date was chosen because 1948 was the year he wrote it (it was then published in 1949), so it was completely arbitrary. 1984 really was meant as a warning, rather than a prediction anyway.
Sure, tri-state is digital, and very cool, but 3 bits per spot does not mean it's tri-state. Tri-state would presumably mean it's got black, white, and grey values. 3 bits means it would need 2^3, or 8 different values.
I think that the packaged documentation for most distros generally does a good job of this, and are one of the most important arguments for buying a packaged distro, instead of downloading it (remember, free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer). These basic manuals generally do a less good job of making you fundamentally understand how Linux works. You'll learn linuxconf, but you won't really learn shell scripts.
Luckily, that's what howtos are for. Linux is not easy, I won't deny that, but with a basic user's manual, and if necessary a look at the howtos and man pages, it should take no longer to build up Linux proficiency than it took the user to build up Windows proficiency.
So what happens if you open source BeOS depends almost entirely on how good the guy who leads GPL BeOS. I'm not trying to say that Linus is the only one who's done any work on Linux (indeed, as many of you will hasten to point out, most of "Linux" doesn't even have anything to do with the kernel), but he has been responsible in a large part for keeping people interested in the OS, and getting them to help out. It's just like a business. You've got crappy management, it doesn't really matter how good your product is.
On top of that, as others have pointed out, 3dfx is much better about open drivers than Nvidia. It's the same reason most of us want Netscape to triumph over MS, because mozilla is open source, and IE will go open source sometime around when Hell freezes over.
Yes, this is the natural result of 3dfx not doing a good job. Yes, there are some other graphics card makers out there. However, there aren't a lot of them, and Nvidia may be able to use their market position to drive up the price of cards, which is obviously bad for all of us. What do you expect people to say? "Hooray, now I won't be as confused by all the choices next time I buy a video card?" This may not be horrible, but there's really nothing good about it either.
Now that said, I think the Supreme Court would still rule in favor of DeCSS, because you tend not to have the same kinds of "conservatives" and "liberals" in law that you have in politics. In law, the "conservatives" tend to support a stricter interpretation of the Constitutuion, more along the lines of libertarians really than Republicans. Not that they are Libertarians, not by any means, but they are more libertarian than they are bible thumping fundamentalists. The current Supreme Court has consistently ruled to limit federal power, even in benign cases like when they struck down a federal domestic abuse law, not because it was a bad law, but because they saw nothing in the Constitution that permitted Congress to pass such a law.
So, what I'm trying to say is, this is not the same Supreme Court that ruled in Roe vs. Wade (and I bet if Roe vs. Wade came up today, and there were no precedent, they would not have found a "constitutional abortion right," because as I said, the current SC tends to interpret things more literally than they did then), but they still come down heavily on the pro-free speech side of things.
How are nuclear submarines the stupidest ideas in history? You want something to stay underwater, all other power sources require air or sunlight, it strikes me as perfectly logical that you'd use nuclear power. And nuclear hand grenades? Who built those? I honestly doubt such a thing exists. Even if you could find someone willing to use them, they would still be less useful tactically than a shoulder launched missile.
I'm inclined to believe that Zoller may like to talk up his own importance a little bit, and stretches the truth a little to do so. Why would he refuse to talk to you if you're a member of the press? There's no kind of security clearance that you can tell anyone except news people about. That'd be stupid, because the story would still get out, just through second hand sources.
I guess as long as lots of people haven't seen it before, I can't fault the guy too much for reposting it, but this HAS been up before, and the fact that the comment ID is 9 obviously shows this guy's been waiting for an opportunity to put it up. So stop falling all over yourselves trying to praise him already.
Worst case scenario, ISPs start charging an extra $5 a month for service for four years, and at the end of that time BT is a total outcast in the telecom community. Stupid? Yes. Annoying? Yes. A catastrophe? No.
Besides, as others have said, they probably won't win.
Yes, that's the point. It's moronic. But, in the Matrix, somehow the robots were using humans to produce energy in the absence of sunlight. Of course, without sunlight, there's no photosyntesis, and hence no plants, which is the basis of the food chain. He was joking.
If no one owns the copyright, then it's no longer covered by the GPL, and people are free to incorporate it into whatever commercial products they like. And companies can still sue whoever distributes it, as with DeCSS.
There are a couple markets in which unrestricted monopolies might be better than what we have now (I might even argue that MS is one of them, but this is neither the time nor the place), but there's a lot more markets with a small number of suppliers that would LOVE to fix prices. The airline industry is a perfect example. If United, Delta, American, and Southwest got together, they could all double their prices and make a ton, at the great expense of the consumer. They STILL fix prices as it is, but at least if one of them doesn't do what he's supposed to, the other airlines can't sue.
Because he wasn't talking about nature, he was talking about technology. And that is astounding. Prior to computers, I can't think of a single technology that has exhibited exponential growth, can you? Perhaps destructive yeild of nuclear weapons, though I don't know enough about that to say for certain. Output from power plants? Maybe, but that's probably more a factor of increased demand than increased technology, they're just building 'em bigger. Anybody got counter examples?