Have you researched the purity of iron in nickel-iron meteorites?
I know there wouldn't be much oxides, but I wonder how mixed the metals and carbons are. You might be able to achieve a usable metal just by melting it down and casting it, then moderating the temperature to forge it.
(I'm not a metallurgist, I'm just curious - I've often thought that we could do great things in space if we could get a bunch of steel up there.)
There's a big difference between something working in the lab and commercial production.
A company has to pick it up and develop it. It's a long shot because this sort of research often doesn't pay off.
That's one of the reasons the government gives grants to companies developing alternative energy - it softens the impact of the research cost and allows the companies to survive long enough to either start their own production or license their patents to the larger energy companies.
Like when Obama takes GM away from the shareholders (with no legal authority to do so) replaces the CEO (again without legal authority) and stuffs the company with BILLIONS of tax dollars that it has not and never will repay... (and "no" when they ran those "we re-payed our loan" ads months ago, they did not actually re-pay them... Obama loaned them new money to use to re-pay the earlier money which let them lie to the taxpayers without actually re-paying the taxpayers)
No, actually. That's not fascism. It's much closer to communism, actually, where the government takes control of industry.
Or when he puts the CEO of GE on his "jobs council" then directs so many tax shelters and government contracts their way that they make billions of dollars but pay not one single penny in taxes...
That's a bit closer, but still not quite there.
Or when he takes campaign money from "bundlers", then gives huge government grants and loans to new businesses started by those "bundlers" knowing full-well that the businesses are not viable, then when those businesses go bankrupt he has his prosecutors not go after those businesses to recover the money... Soylindra was one of these, but that was not the only one...
Not really either one there. The favors for campaign money would fall under "corruption" which happens under any government, and government grants are likewise universal (except, I suppose, under communism, where the government doesn't allow companies to form in the first place).
Or perhaps when he uses the power of government to make all citizens buy products he chooses from companies he selects (Obamacare and health insurance)
That would be a good example. It's not true, though. You have to buy health insurance, sure, but you can buy it from whoever you want.
Need I go on?
Yep. You completely failed to prove Obama is a fascist. Try again.
I suspect you're not aware that DPRK stands for "Democratic People's Replic of Korea". Ask a North Korean who he voted for in the last election.
Just because the name Nazi has "Socialist" in it doesn't mean the Nazi movement was in any way "socialist" as the term is used today. From Wikipedia:
Upon taking over the leadership, Hitler kept the term but defined "socialism" as meaning a commitment of an individual to a community. Hitler also claimed that unconditional equality of opportunity for all "racially sound" Aryan males was the essence of the "Socialism" of "National Socialism".
Equality of opportunity is pretty much what most of the west has today (theoretically, anyway) but was still being fought for in parts of post-WWI Europe where the aristocracy still held sway over business and government.
If you consider the nature of the times, pretty much any worker's party used the term "socialism". Mostly it was used as the idea of allowing labor unions to form and the right for workers to negotiate for benefits. Actual leftist ideals were very much frowned upon in Germany, and communists were persecuted.
Your question, "which would be more efficient," isn't the problem. Both options reduce CO2, although obviously option #2 would be better.
The question, "which is possible given the global political landscape," is much more pertinent. There has been a lot of effort put into reducing the amount of CO2 we produce. It has had less than optimal success. Option #1 is probably the only option of the two that has a fair chance of reducing CO2.
You could argue that it lets countries get a free pass to keep emitting CO2 - and you'd be right. But then again, the only realistic alternative is to suffer global warming while we watch the politicians all blame each other.
Depends on how this all applies under the Antarctic treaty, really.
Antarctica doesn't belong to anybody, and any disputes over it have to be handled by the UN and the international courts. The U.S. and China have a lot of sway in the UN and could likely throw a wrench in the works if they wanted.
Um, you do realize that when you type "Um", which is a filler word, into a form and post it, when you have all the time in the world to consider your post and edit it, the readers think you are an idiot, right?
"Um" is more than just a filler word. In context, it alters the emphasis of the sentence it is placed in.
For instance, read the sentence I quoted above, and then read it again without the initial "Um". The meaning is the same, but the tone is different. Including the "Um" makes it sound more sarcastic, which I'm sure is what you were intending.
Also, I missed the point where this firmly puts the carbon in the ground, and does not heat up the surrounding atmosphere enough to cause carbon release. Since this sounds to me like a giant bunch of heaters installed in a cold area, maybe you could show me what obvious detail I have overlooked? Because clearly this plan is well thought through and has no obvious but overlooked side effects?
You don't heat your house with a match. Yeah, Antarctica is the smallest continent, but it's still very big and very cold. The amount of heat needed to actually raise the ambient temperature there would require a lot more than what you're going to get out of a bunch of wind turbines.
Sure you're not thinking of a captive bolt pistol?
Pretty sure. That meat market got most of its animals locally, IIRC, and this isn't exactly pig country here. I doubt the farmer would have had one of those, but I'm sure he would have had access to a 12 gauge.
And no, nitrogen shouldn't cause hyperventilation as it allows CO2 exchange. Am I mistaken here?
You may be right - I hadn't thought about that. If it doesn't induce the panic reaction, then I retract what I said about it being barbaric.
The U.S. doen't have any colonies. It used to have one - Liberia - but that ship has sailed.
What everyone means by "Imperialistic" when applied to the U.S. is financial and diplomatic Imperialism. Think eastern europe during the cold war - the Soviets didn't directly run the governments there, but those countries knew better than to piss off the Russians.
There's some truth in that, although it's not as bad as people like Hugo Chavez make it out to be.
You can't shoot Red Cross or Red Crescent personnel. You can't shoot wounded prisoners that are in your control (flying over them in a helicopter doesn't count - you have to have them as a prisoner or have control of the battlefield). You can't shoot anyone outside the field of battle, or anyone who surrenders to you.
Basically, you can't shoot anyone who isn't an enemy combatant.
That's what the Geneva Convention says, and U.S. soldiers are taught these rules during training. I was taught them, even though I was just a network jockey in the Air Force.
The key point here is determining who is an enemy combatant. If you pull a weapon in a battlefield, you're automatically one. If you assist the enemy in any way (excepting Red Cross stuff, as above), you're one. If you put on an enemy uniform, you're one.
Now, I haven't read the news story all this is about, so I'm not going to comment on the particulars, but if it was indeed misidentification that was the issue, then it basically falls into the "shit happens" category. If the host country for those soldiers has beef about it, they can raise the issue with the UN to see if it qualifies as a war crime. I wouldn't hold my breath, though - evil shit happens in any war, not just those the Americans fight. The difference here is that the government has to at least pay lip service to public opinion, so if enough people get up in arms about it the government will take steps to prevent it from happening again.
Those steps won't totally prevent this sort of occurance, of course - shit happens. But maybe they'll make it less likely. It's the best you can hope for in war.
I don't see how the 50cal to the brain is barbaric. From the point of view of the person executed (i.e. the person whose opinion matters), it's painless and instantaneous. If done at close range, a bullet that large wouldn't require a second shot. Pigs used to be slaughtered that way - one of my earliest memories was seeing a pig head with a bullet hole in it at the meat market where my dad worked.
It is rather messy for the people watching, but really, isn't execution partly to dissuade people from committing similar crimes?
Your proposal, on the other hand, is barbaric, unless by "sedated" you mean "unconcious". Your body would start to hyperventilate and trigger a panic reaction that would last until you passed out. A better option would be carbon monoxide or some other gas which causes you to fall unconcious before you asphixiate.
I completely agree with the whole argument on mouse/keyboard thing. I remember when light pens were around (a miserable failure for general use) and we've all used touchscreen systems that were a pain in the ass compared to a mouse/keyboard setup. I don't have a problem with an interface that is mouse-heavy (I don't use keybindings in FVWM, for instance, relying solely on the mouse for window management), but it seems silly to me to try to make a computer interface resemble a touchscreen interface - they're completely different in the way you interact with them.
Now the off-topic part: My FVWM config isn't all that to look at. I use the old style MWM look, which I've always found appealing (but then again, I think QT is ugly and I like the look of Motif, and I've come to terms with having bad taste). I've used the same desktop background for over ten years.
My customizations have all been mouse and window behavior stuff for the most part. All the buttons (the default MWM-style one on the left and two on the right) do different things depending on what mouse button you click. For instance, rather than a close button on the right, you right-click the menu button on the left (I've always tended to the upper left for close since Windows 3.x, and it's annoying that some windows don't have it in newer Windows versions). You get window management functions by left clicking (move, resize, close, etc.). A right click on the title bar shades or unshades. On the right, the iconify button does pretty much just that, going to an iconbox above my FVWMButtons panel (set as 64x64 boxes running vertically on the lower right to get a bit of NeXT look). I rarely iconify anything, though, since shading is so much easier. The maximize button maximizes vertically for left click, with a full maximize on right click. I've set the maximum window size so that my FVWMButtons panel doesn't get covered on maximize, but it's not set to be always on top, so I can cover it if I want to. There's no autoraise - I like being able to type in one window that's underneath another window.
You can move the window by middle-clicking any border or just left clicking the titlebar. Resize is left-click on a border. Right clicking the border will either bring the window to the top or put it on the bottom. Moving the window never changes a window's position in the stack.
I use edge scrolling, which is a feature that's all but disappeared in other window managers. I also use a 3x3 workspace grid (workspaces and desktops behave differently in FVWM, and I find workspaces work better for me). There's a pager in the FVWMButtons panel. I've got a button that toggles scrolling on and off for when my 4 year old wants to play with google maps or watch trains on youtube.
I use xterm. For years I played with rxvt and eterm, playing with transparent backgrounds or pixmap backgrounds, but I don't really care about that these days. Xterm has unicode support and is easy to configure on the fly while still being loads faster than the "smart" terminals that come with GNOME and KDE. I don't need multiple sessions in one terminal (if I did, I'd use screen) and xterm has tons of configuration options in the.xresources file.
Most of my apps are GNOME or GTK+ apps, and for the most part they work just fine. They just use the default theme, since I don't really care what they look like. I still use a few old Athena programs (xcalc, xfontsel, xclock, etc.) and lament the fact they're going away (I like X resources. You can do amazing stuff with them. I had Netscape 4 (Motif-based) with pixmap backgrounds on the UI years before anyone tried theming Mozilla). I'd really like a nice Athena-based battery monitor I could swallow into FVWMButtons, but Linux keeps changing the interface for it and none of the old ones work anymore.
Wow. I couldn't stand using program manager under 95.
You're spot on about carrying over the settings, setting up.PIF files, etc. I never said the complaints about the change were rational - it was just different, and a lot of users didn't like having to change their workflow. Most of the people I heard complain about it were people who just didn't want to adapt.
From a personal standpoint, what I hated about it was how different it made fixing the machine when things went wrong. Windows 3.x and DOS were easy to diagnose and fix. Windows 95 wasn't. Our company had a line of computers where the video driver would make the printer stop working. The modem we shipped had no official support in 95, so we installed Win3x drivers on it instead, and they worked like crap (not really a 95 problem, but not uncommon either).
The change from 98 to 2000 and XP also had a lot of resistance, for a lot of the same reasons - especially from techs who had no NT experience (I did, fortunately, so I wasn't among these). Users complained about having to log in and deal with administrative vs. user accounts (granted, XP fixed most of that problem). It was a better system, but a lot of people just hate change.
I doubt it. GNOME was doing that way back in the day back when RedHat was still pushing the desktop. Sun had more to do with GNOME design back in the early days, since they're the bastards that provided the GNOME team with all that usability data that started this trend (Sun wanted to move away from CDE, since most development had moved to GTK and QT).
Back when GNOME first started, they were actually trying to offer more options than KDE and refused to set an official window manager. When they finally did, it was Sawmill (later Sawfish) which was supposedly really configurable to the three people that knew the Lisp variant it was themed in:) It wasn't until Sun stepped in and they started talking about using real-world usability research that they started pissing on the power users.
RedHat went along with it, but I'm pretty sure they weren't the instigator, even though they paid most of the full-time developers. I always had the impression (from the mailing lists at the time) that RedHat was pretty hands-off when it came to design decisions back then.
Yes, I've used KDE. I don't particularly care for it, but it's mostly a look and feel thing, not because of problems with the DE.
Both 3 and 4 are very customisable and you don't even need to edit files by hand to do it or, god forbid, edit the registry (a la GNOME).
That's pretty much irrelevant to me. I know how to edit the config files, so removing that requirement only removes capability for me. No window manager works the way I like it out of the box. Most can't without modifying the source code. FVWM has spoiled me.
I and other people have created KDE configs that look like Windows, GNOME 2 and my current one I have been using for over a year is basically my implementation of ideas behind Unity.
And my config is a bastardized combination of MWM (borders, titlebar, button design) and NeXT (AfterSTEP-like dock with slide-out drawers) with most of the window functions changed around (separate maximize full/maximize vertically depending if you left or right click on the maximize button, window size constrained on maximize to not cover my FVWMButtons, raise/lower on border right-click, middle mouse button move, etc.), 3x3 desktop grid, medium edge resistance for desktop flipping (nobody does this anymore! AAAARRRGGGHHHH!), and a bunch more. It took a long time to put together, but since FVWM doesn't change much I rarely have to edit it.
It's what I like; I won't use a window manager that can't pull that off.
Oh, and you can use non-KDE programs with KDE just fine.
And vice-versa, although I tend to stick to GNOME programs, mostly out of habit.
For GTK2 there's even a 3rd party (by RedHat, I believe) engine that uses liboxygen providing GTK2 applications with a native KDE4 look (and it's actually usable unlike previous attempts).
I hadn't heard about that. There have been pixmap-based GTK themes that emulated the look of QT, of course, way back in the day, but they only matched the default KDE theme - if you changed your theme settings, they wouldn't match it. If this setup can match the GTK theme to your KDE theme (and do it well), then that's impressive.
Microsoft's done it precisely twice. Ribbon, Metro.
Add the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 UI to the list as well. I know a lot of people here diss Windows 3.x, but at the time a lot of users hated 95 and wanted to go back.
(I was one of them, not because of the UI, but because 95 was a buggy piece of shit)
Oh, and Bob would have counted if they could have gotten the computer companies on their side. A few actually included it as the default interface.
While it's a lot more minor, I personally also include the blue candy look that XP defaulted to. I hated the default XP theme and always changed it to the classic theme on any machine I had to work on. Fortunately, by the time XP was widespread, I no longer worked with Windows:)
Meanwhile, open source?
The fuck is wrong with you people?
Lack of strong leadership, generally, although you also have to account for trends in UI design that evolve over time. Today, most people run GNOME or KDE. Back in the day, it wasn't like that at all - commercial users used CDE (unavailable for free software) or OpenLook (which never gained much traction on free software for some reason). The free UNIXes had a bunch of different window managers along with a bunch of different toolkits. Most of us thought OpenSTEP would take us away from Athena and Tk, but that never really happened. Window managers explored a bunch of different ideas, and Enlightenment was going to make the world a better place if only anyone could afford a machine that could run it.
KDE and GNOME came along and unified a bunch of stuff, but in doing so you lose choice and control over your desktop. GNOME especially has tried to remove options and configurability to try to appeal to some hypothetical end user who couldn't be trusted with sharp objects and tended to try to eat rocks. GNOME 3 is a logical extension of this philosophy.
Here's the kicker: you don't have to play. You can install your distro's GNOME and deal with it, or you can find something you like that's stable and stick with it. I use a highly customized FVWM setup that hasn't changed significantly since about 1998.
UNIX was designed as a development platform, and although the commercial UNIXes of the past strayed from that point, it's still pretty integral to the overall UNIX philosophy.
You mention a few tools for programmers for Windows and MacOS. There are thousands for UNIX developers, and the vast majority of them are completely free. Most of the popular languages today (Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, etc.) originaged there and have excellent support by the OS. OpenGL originated on UNIX. Utility programs are everywhere and fill just about every niche you can imagine. All the major (and most minor) databases support UNIX, with the obvious exceptions of MS SQL Server and MS Access. Apache is almost always run on UNIX, and it supports pretty much everything but ASP (which can be made to work if necessary). In fact, often the hardest part about programming on UNIX is just figuring out what you want to use from the plethora of tools available.
Documentation tends to be very complete for most UNIX APIs (especially on FreeBSD and OpenBSD, where the man pages are updated as a requirement for any change in the code). Example code is everywhere, since source code for most programs is available. Many common licenses (MIT and BSD, for example) permit you to use that code in your own with almost no restriction on you.
It's really a developer's paradise, with the caveat that the market for commercial UNIX software is small.
When my old laptop died I was considering buying a beefed up Thinkpad setup that would have run me about $3500. It would have spent 99% of its time in Linux.
I didn't because replacing the north foundation on my house and getting a new roof is a bit more important. I did spend ~$1300 on my current Thinkpad, which spends 99% of its time in Linux.
They way I figure it, Linux users probably care more about their hardware than the average PC or Mac user.
Um, no. You need to have that knee of yours checked out, because it's jerking a bit much.
Jesus used a lot of parables and metaphors, and often expressed concepts that took more than the one or two sentences that often get quoted. In the the text, it's generally obvious by context what was actually meant.
For instance, Jesus said that you should hate your mother and father (along with the rest of your family and even your own life). Sounds bad, right? Yeah, it's Luke 14:26.
Except, if you actually read around it, you find that he was telling a large crowd the sacrifices that are needed to be made to be a disciple. You had to give up your family and all your possessions. It wasn't necessary to do so to follow Jesus' teachings, but it was necessary if you wanted to physically follow him around and preach. The point he was conveying was that you shouldn't start following him if you weren't prepared to give up your old life.
Yeah, the bible gets misquoted and taken out of context a lot. Christians are as guilty of this (if not moreso) as their detractors. People tend to try to read their own beliefs into the words. So what? You just did the same with with my post above.
These days, yes, although I disabled automatic updates on my girlfriend's computer because it wanted to reboot the machine at night after certain updates, and her motherboard is flaky and doesn't reboot right sometimes.
That doesn't explain why it was slow for more than a decade.
I'm not complaining (anymore), since I no longer work with Windows machines except for a few family computers. I'm just curious as to what it's doing that makes it so slow.
Jesus was all about tearing families apart and seemed generally against marriages (although being sort of weaselly about it and saying that as much as it should be avoided, it wasn't outright a sin or anything)
I think most of that sentiment was attributed to Paul (or the forgeries in his name). Jesus did say a few things that, when taken out of context, can be thought of as anti-marriage or anti-family, but most of those were metaphors for other things. Peter and Andrew's family let the deciples stay with them on at least one or two occasions. Also, consider that the first miracle attributed to Jesus was to supply wine for a wedding.
Paul believed that the world would end in his lifetime or shortly after. The way he saw it, there wasn't any point in marrying or starting a family, because your children would never get to grow up. It was better to stay celibate and devote yourself to God (although, if you couldn't keep it in your pants, it was better to marry than to commit fornication).
Jesus never said anything about gays, AFAIK, but he was definitely anti-divorce. According to him, a woman could only ever be with one man - even if she divorced for reasons of infidelity (the only reason Jesus supported for divorce), she couldn't remarry without committing adultry. Men, of course, could remarry to their heart's content.
(Note: I'm no longer religious, but I grew up that way. I'm not arguing that any of this stuff is true or should be heeded - I'm just clearing up what the bible actually said.)
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Have you researched the purity of iron in nickel-iron meteorites?
I know there wouldn't be much oxides, but I wonder how mixed the metals and carbons are. You might be able to achieve a usable metal just by melting it down and casting it, then moderating the temperature to forge it.
(I'm not a metallurgist, I'm just curious - I've often thought that we could do great things in space if we could get a bunch of steel up there.)
There's a big difference between something working in the lab and commercial production.
A company has to pick it up and develop it. It's a long shot because this sort of research often doesn't pay off.
That's one of the reasons the government gives grants to companies developing alternative energy - it softens the impact of the research cost and allows the companies to survive long enough to either start their own production or license their patents to the larger energy companies.
Funny, where I'm from it's Oklahoma State University. I live about 40 miles from there.
When OU (University of Oklahoma) and OSU duke it out, don't get caught in Stillwater, OK wearing red and white. I made that mistake once :)
If you check okstate.edu, you'll see the orange and black logo that clearly has "OSU" on it.
(BTW - the cowboy mascot, Pistol Pete, is based on a real guy. He had an interesting life.)
Good point.
After we get those solar collectors built, we can stop shitting altogether! We won't need to produce sewage anymore.
Like when Obama takes GM away from the shareholders (with no legal authority to do so) replaces the CEO (again without legal authority) and stuffs the company with BILLIONS of tax dollars that it has not and never will repay... (and "no" when they ran those "we re-payed our loan" ads months ago, they did not actually re-pay them... Obama loaned them new money to use to re-pay the earlier money which let them lie to the taxpayers without actually re-paying the taxpayers)
No, actually. That's not fascism. It's much closer to communism, actually, where the government takes control of industry.
Or when he puts the CEO of GE on his "jobs council" then directs so many tax shelters and government contracts their way that they make billions of dollars but pay not one single penny in taxes...
That's a bit closer, but still not quite there.
Or when he takes campaign money from "bundlers", then gives huge government grants and loans to new businesses started by those "bundlers" knowing full-well that the businesses are not viable, then when those businesses go bankrupt he has his prosecutors not go after those businesses to recover the money... Soylindra was one of these, but that was not the only one...
Not really either one there. The favors for campaign money would fall under "corruption" which happens under any government, and government grants are likewise universal (except, I suppose, under communism, where the government doesn't allow companies to form in the first place).
Or perhaps when he uses the power of government to make all citizens buy products he chooses from companies he selects (Obamacare and health insurance)
That would be a good example. It's not true, though. You have to buy health insurance, sure, but you can buy it from whoever you want.
Need I go on?
Yep. You completely failed to prove Obama is a fascist. Try again.
I suspect you're not aware that DPRK stands for "Democratic People's Replic of Korea". Ask a North Korean who he voted for in the last election.
Just because the name Nazi has "Socialist" in it doesn't mean the Nazi movement was in any way "socialist" as the term is used today. From Wikipedia:
Upon taking over the leadership, Hitler kept the term but defined "socialism" as meaning a commitment of an individual to a community. Hitler also claimed that unconditional equality of opportunity for all "racially sound" Aryan males was the essence of the "Socialism" of "National Socialism".
Equality of opportunity is pretty much what most of the west has today (theoretically, anyway) but was still being fought for in parts of post-WWI Europe where the aristocracy still held sway over business and government.
If you consider the nature of the times, pretty much any worker's party used the term "socialism". Mostly it was used as the idea of allowing labor unions to form and the right for workers to negotiate for benefits. Actual leftist ideals were very much frowned upon in Germany, and communists were persecuted.
Your question, "which would be more efficient," isn't the problem. Both options reduce CO2, although obviously option #2 would be better.
The question, "which is possible given the global political landscape," is much more pertinent. There has been a lot of effort put into reducing the amount of CO2 we produce. It has had less than optimal success. Option #1 is probably the only option of the two that has a fair chance of reducing CO2.
You could argue that it lets countries get a free pass to keep emitting CO2 - and you'd be right. But then again, the only realistic alternative is to suffer global warming while we watch the politicians all blame each other.
Depends on how this all applies under the Antarctic treaty, really.
Antarctica doesn't belong to anybody, and any disputes over it have to be handled by the UN and the international courts. The U.S. and China have a lot of sway in the UN and could likely throw a wrench in the works if they wanted.
Um, you do realize that when you type "Um", which is a filler word, into a form and post it, when you have all the time in the world to consider your post and edit it, the readers think you are an idiot, right?
"Um" is more than just a filler word. In context, it alters the emphasis of the sentence it is placed in.
For instance, read the sentence I quoted above, and then read it again without the initial "Um". The meaning is the same, but the tone is different. Including the "Um" makes it sound more sarcastic, which I'm sure is what you were intending.
Also, I missed the point where this firmly puts the carbon in the ground, and does not heat up the surrounding atmosphere enough to cause carbon release. Since this sounds to me like a giant bunch of heaters installed in a cold area, maybe you could show me what obvious detail I have overlooked? Because clearly this plan is well thought through and has no obvious but overlooked side effects?
You don't heat your house with a match. Yeah, Antarctica is the smallest continent, but it's still very big and very cold. The amount of heat needed to actually raise the ambient temperature there would require a lot more than what you're going to get out of a bunch of wind turbines.
Sure you're not thinking of a captive bolt pistol?
Pretty sure. That meat market got most of its animals locally, IIRC, and this isn't exactly pig country here. I doubt the farmer would have had one of those, but I'm sure he would have had access to a 12 gauge.
And no, nitrogen shouldn't cause hyperventilation as it allows CO2 exchange. Am I mistaken here?
You may be right - I hadn't thought about that. If it doesn't induce the panic reaction, then I retract what I said about it being barbaric.
The U.S. doen't have any colonies. It used to have one - Liberia - but that ship has sailed.
What everyone means by "Imperialistic" when applied to the U.S. is financial and diplomatic Imperialism. Think eastern europe during the cold war - the Soviets didn't directly run the governments there, but those countries knew better than to piss off the Russians.
There's some truth in that, although it's not as bad as people like Hugo Chavez make it out to be.
You can't shoot Red Cross or Red Crescent personnel. You can't shoot wounded prisoners that are in your control (flying over them in a helicopter doesn't count - you have to have them as a prisoner or have control of the battlefield). You can't shoot anyone outside the field of battle, or anyone who surrenders to you.
Basically, you can't shoot anyone who isn't an enemy combatant.
That's what the Geneva Convention says, and U.S. soldiers are taught these rules during training. I was taught them, even though I was just a network jockey in the Air Force.
The key point here is determining who is an enemy combatant. If you pull a weapon in a battlefield, you're automatically one. If you assist the enemy in any way (excepting Red Cross stuff, as above), you're one. If you put on an enemy uniform, you're one.
Now, I haven't read the news story all this is about, so I'm not going to comment on the particulars, but if it was indeed misidentification that was the issue, then it basically falls into the "shit happens" category. If the host country for those soldiers has beef about it, they can raise the issue with the UN to see if it qualifies as a war crime. I wouldn't hold my breath, though - evil shit happens in any war, not just those the Americans fight. The difference here is that the government has to at least pay lip service to public opinion, so if enough people get up in arms about it the government will take steps to prevent it from happening again.
Those steps won't totally prevent this sort of occurance, of course - shit happens. But maybe they'll make it less likely. It's the best you can hope for in war.
(Not the AC)
I don't see how the 50cal to the brain is barbaric. From the point of view of the person executed (i.e. the person whose opinion matters), it's painless and instantaneous. If done at close range, a bullet that large wouldn't require a second shot. Pigs used to be slaughtered that way - one of my earliest memories was seeing a pig head with a bullet hole in it at the meat market where my dad worked.
It is rather messy for the people watching, but really, isn't execution partly to dissuade people from committing similar crimes?
Your proposal, on the other hand, is barbaric, unless by "sedated" you mean "unconcious". Your body would start to hyperventilate and trigger a panic reaction that would last until you passed out. A better option would be carbon monoxide or some other gas which causes you to fall unconcious before you asphixiate.
I completely agree with the whole argument on mouse/keyboard thing. I remember when light pens were around (a miserable failure for general use) and we've all used touchscreen systems that were a pain in the ass compared to a mouse/keyboard setup. I don't have a problem with an interface that is mouse-heavy (I don't use keybindings in FVWM, for instance, relying solely on the mouse for window management), but it seems silly to me to try to make a computer interface resemble a touchscreen interface - they're completely different in the way you interact with them.
Now the off-topic part: My FVWM config isn't all that to look at. I use the old style MWM look, which I've always found appealing (but then again, I think QT is ugly and I like the look of Motif, and I've come to terms with having bad taste). I've used the same desktop background for over ten years.
My customizations have all been mouse and window behavior stuff for the most part. All the buttons (the default MWM-style one on the left and two on the right) do different things depending on what mouse button you click. For instance, rather than a close button on the right, you right-click the menu button on the left (I've always tended to the upper left for close since Windows 3.x, and it's annoying that some windows don't have it in newer Windows versions). You get window management functions by left clicking (move, resize, close, etc.). A right click on the title bar shades or unshades. On the right, the iconify button does pretty much just that, going to an iconbox above my FVWMButtons panel (set as 64x64 boxes running vertically on the lower right to get a bit of NeXT look). I rarely iconify anything, though, since shading is so much easier. The maximize button maximizes vertically for left click, with a full maximize on right click. I've set the maximum window size so that my FVWMButtons panel doesn't get covered on maximize, but it's not set to be always on top, so I can cover it if I want to. There's no autoraise - I like being able to type in one window that's underneath another window.
You can move the window by middle-clicking any border or just left clicking the titlebar. Resize is left-click on a border. Right clicking the border will either bring the window to the top or put it on the bottom. Moving the window never changes a window's position in the stack.
I use edge scrolling, which is a feature that's all but disappeared in other window managers. I also use a 3x3 workspace grid (workspaces and desktops behave differently in FVWM, and I find workspaces work better for me). There's a pager in the FVWMButtons panel. I've got a button that toggles scrolling on and off for when my 4 year old wants to play with google maps or watch trains on youtube.
I use xterm. For years I played with rxvt and eterm, playing with transparent backgrounds or pixmap backgrounds, but I don't really care about that these days. Xterm has unicode support and is easy to configure on the fly while still being loads faster than the "smart" terminals that come with GNOME and KDE. I don't need multiple sessions in one terminal (if I did, I'd use screen) and xterm has tons of configuration options in the .xresources file.
Most of my apps are GNOME or GTK+ apps, and for the most part they work just fine. They just use the default theme, since I don't really care what they look like. I still use a few old Athena programs (xcalc, xfontsel, xclock, etc.) and lament the fact they're going away (I like X resources. You can do amazing stuff with them. I had Netscape 4 (Motif-based) with pixmap backgrounds on the UI years before anyone tried theming Mozilla). I'd really like a nice Athena-based battery monitor I could swallow into FVWMButtons, but Linux keeps changing the interface for it and none of the old ones work anymore.
OK, end of off-topic crap.
Wow. I couldn't stand using program manager under 95.
You're spot on about carrying over the settings, setting up .PIF files, etc. I never said the complaints about the change were rational - it was just different, and a lot of users didn't like having to change their workflow. Most of the people I heard complain about it were people who just didn't want to adapt.
From a personal standpoint, what I hated about it was how different it made fixing the machine when things went wrong. Windows 3.x and DOS were easy to diagnose and fix. Windows 95 wasn't. Our company had a line of computers where the video driver would make the printer stop working. The modem we shipped had no official support in 95, so we installed Win3x drivers on it instead, and they worked like crap (not really a 95 problem, but not uncommon either).
The change from 98 to 2000 and XP also had a lot of resistance, for a lot of the same reasons - especially from techs who had no NT experience (I did, fortunately, so I wasn't among these). Users complained about having to log in and deal with administrative vs. user accounts (granted, XP fixed most of that problem). It was a better system, but a lot of people just hate change.
I doubt it. GNOME was doing that way back in the day back when RedHat was still pushing the desktop. Sun had more to do with GNOME design back in the early days, since they're the bastards that provided the GNOME team with all that usability data that started this trend (Sun wanted to move away from CDE, since most development had moved to GTK and QT).
Back when GNOME first started, they were actually trying to offer more options than KDE and refused to set an official window manager. When they finally did, it was Sawmill (later Sawfish) which was supposedly really configurable to the three people that knew the Lisp variant it was themed in :) It wasn't until Sun stepped in and they started talking about using real-world usability research that they started pissing on the power users.
RedHat went along with it, but I'm pretty sure they weren't the instigator, even though they paid most of the full-time developers. I always had the impression (from the mailing lists at the time) that RedHat was pretty hands-off when it came to design decisions back then.
Have you actually used KDE?
Yes, I've used KDE. I don't particularly care for it, but it's mostly a look and feel thing, not because of problems with the DE.
Both 3 and 4 are very customisable and you don't even need to edit files by hand to do it or, god forbid, edit the registry (a la GNOME).
That's pretty much irrelevant to me. I know how to edit the config files, so removing that requirement only removes capability for me. No window manager works the way I like it out of the box. Most can't without modifying the source code. FVWM has spoiled me.
I and other people have created KDE configs that look like Windows, GNOME 2 and my current one I have been using for over a year is basically my implementation of ideas behind Unity.
And my config is a bastardized combination of MWM (borders, titlebar, button design) and NeXT (AfterSTEP-like dock with slide-out drawers) with most of the window functions changed around (separate maximize full/maximize vertically depending if you left or right click on the maximize button, window size constrained on maximize to not cover my FVWMButtons, raise/lower on border right-click, middle mouse button move, etc.), 3x3 desktop grid, medium edge resistance for desktop flipping (nobody does this anymore! AAAARRRGGGHHHH!), and a bunch more. It took a long time to put together, but since FVWM doesn't change much I rarely have to edit it.
It's what I like; I won't use a window manager that can't pull that off.
Oh, and you can use non-KDE programs with KDE just fine.
And vice-versa, although I tend to stick to GNOME programs, mostly out of habit.
For GTK2 there's even a 3rd party (by RedHat, I believe) engine that uses liboxygen providing GTK2 applications with a native KDE4 look (and it's actually usable unlike previous attempts).
I hadn't heard about that. There have been pixmap-based GTK themes that emulated the look of QT, of course, way back in the day, but they only matched the default KDE theme - if you changed your theme settings, they wouldn't match it. If this setup can match the GTK theme to your KDE theme (and do it well), then that's impressive.
There were quite a few - generally the type who used it for work and got used to the way Win 3.1 did things.
Of course, I was working support for a computer that had Windows 95 right after the release, so I got the brunt of complaints.
Microsoft's done it precisely twice. Ribbon, Metro.
Add the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 UI to the list as well. I know a lot of people here diss Windows 3.x, but at the time a lot of users hated 95 and wanted to go back.
(I was one of them, not because of the UI, but because 95 was a buggy piece of shit)
Oh, and Bob would have counted if they could have gotten the computer companies on their side. A few actually included it as the default interface.
While it's a lot more minor, I personally also include the blue candy look that XP defaulted to. I hated the default XP theme and always changed it to the classic theme on any machine I had to work on. Fortunately, by the time XP was widespread, I no longer worked with Windows :)
Meanwhile, open source?
The fuck is wrong with you people?
Lack of strong leadership, generally, although you also have to account for trends in UI design that evolve over time. Today, most people run GNOME or KDE. Back in the day, it wasn't like that at all - commercial users used CDE (unavailable for free software) or OpenLook (which never gained much traction on free software for some reason). The free UNIXes had a bunch of different window managers along with a bunch of different toolkits. Most of us thought OpenSTEP would take us away from Athena and Tk, but that never really happened. Window managers explored a bunch of different ideas, and Enlightenment was going to make the world a better place if only anyone could afford a machine that could run it.
KDE and GNOME came along and unified a bunch of stuff, but in doing so you lose choice and control over your desktop. GNOME especially has tried to remove options and configurability to try to appeal to some hypothetical end user who couldn't be trusted with sharp objects and tended to try to eat rocks. GNOME 3 is a logical extension of this philosophy.
Here's the kicker: you don't have to play. You can install your distro's GNOME and deal with it, or you can find something you like that's stable and stick with it. I use a highly customized FVWM setup that hasn't changed significantly since about 1998.
UNIX was designed as a development platform, and although the commercial UNIXes of the past strayed from that point, it's still pretty integral to the overall UNIX philosophy.
You mention a few tools for programmers for Windows and MacOS. There are thousands for UNIX developers, and the vast majority of them are completely free. Most of the popular languages today (Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, etc.) originaged there and have excellent support by the OS. OpenGL originated on UNIX. Utility programs are everywhere and fill just about every niche you can imagine. All the major (and most minor) databases support UNIX, with the obvious exceptions of MS SQL Server and MS Access. Apache is almost always run on UNIX, and it supports pretty much everything but ASP (which can be made to work if necessary). In fact, often the hardest part about programming on UNIX is just figuring out what you want to use from the plethora of tools available.
Documentation tends to be very complete for most UNIX APIs (especially on FreeBSD and OpenBSD, where the man pages are updated as a requirement for any change in the code). Example code is everywhere, since source code for most programs is available. Many common licenses (MIT and BSD, for example) permit you to use that code in your own with almost no restriction on you.
It's really a developer's paradise, with the caveat that the market for commercial UNIX software is small.
First you say:
It hasn't been "rolled into the cost of the hardware." Proof please.
Then you say:
The software is a giveaway to help sell the hardware, the area they actually make money.
So, you answered your own question?
It costs money to create and maintain OSX. The money comes from their hardware sales, so yes, the cost is rolled into the cost of the hardware.
Why is that strange?
When my old laptop died I was considering buying a beefed up Thinkpad setup that would have run me about $3500. It would have spent 99% of its time in Linux.
I didn't because replacing the north foundation on my house and getting a new roof is a bit more important. I did spend ~$1300 on my current Thinkpad, which spends 99% of its time in Linux.
They way I figure it, Linux users probably care more about their hardware than the average PC or Mac user.
Um, no. You need to have that knee of yours checked out, because it's jerking a bit much.
Jesus used a lot of parables and metaphors, and often expressed concepts that took more than the one or two sentences that often get quoted. In the the text, it's generally obvious by context what was actually meant.
For instance, Jesus said that you should hate your mother and father (along with the rest of your family and even your own life). Sounds bad, right? Yeah, it's Luke 14:26.
Except, if you actually read around it, you find that he was telling a large crowd the sacrifices that are needed to be made to be a disciple. You had to give up your family and all your possessions. It wasn't necessary to do so to follow Jesus' teachings, but it was necessary if you wanted to physically follow him around and preach. The point he was conveying was that you shouldn't start following him if you weren't prepared to give up your old life.
Yeah, the bible gets misquoted and taken out of context a lot. Christians are as guilty of this (if not moreso) as their detractors. People tend to try to read their own beliefs into the words. So what? You just did the same with with my post above.
These days, yes, although I disabled automatic updates on my girlfriend's computer because it wanted to reboot the machine at night after certain updates, and her motherboard is flaky and doesn't reboot right sometimes.
That doesn't explain why it was slow for more than a decade.
I'm not complaining (anymore), since I no longer work with Windows machines except for a few family computers. I'm just curious as to what it's doing that makes it so slow.
Jesus was all about tearing families apart and seemed generally against marriages (although being sort of weaselly about it and saying that as much as it should be avoided, it wasn't outright a sin or anything)
I think most of that sentiment was attributed to Paul (or the forgeries in his name). Jesus did say a few things that, when taken out of context, can be thought of as anti-marriage or anti-family, but most of those were metaphors for other things. Peter and Andrew's family let the deciples stay with them on at least one or two occasions. Also, consider that the first miracle attributed to Jesus was to supply wine for a wedding.
Paul believed that the world would end in his lifetime or shortly after. The way he saw it, there wasn't any point in marrying or starting a family, because your children would never get to grow up. It was better to stay celibate and devote yourself to God (although, if you couldn't keep it in your pants, it was better to marry than to commit fornication).
Jesus never said anything about gays, AFAIK, but he was definitely anti-divorce. According to him, a woman could only ever be with one man - even if she divorced for reasons of infidelity (the only reason Jesus supported for divorce), she couldn't remarry without committing adultry. Men, of course, could remarry to their heart's content.
(Note: I'm no longer religious, but I grew up that way. I'm not arguing that any of this stuff is true or should be heeded - I'm just clearing up what the bible actually said.)