I think you overestimate it, and are clearly ignorant of some key facts with regard to it.
On any terms it is quite a remarkable book. Few books make the same claims. Few books have been so thoroughly tested.
That's not true at all. You are ignoring many books from several Eastern philosophies. The Baghavad Ghita, the Dhamapada, the Analects of Confusius, the I Ching, Sun Tzu's Art of War. All of these have been around for at least centuries, in some cases millenia, and are at least as "tested" as the Bible.
You compare it to contemporary fiction, what is the difference between books written now and books written in the last 2000 years?
2000 years from now, how will anyone know that Cryptonomicon is fiction? There is no way to know. In fact, it's totally possible for all the events described to have happened, and it would not be unreasonable for archeologists to assume that it is a description of actual events. The same is true for pretty much all of the works of Steinbeck, or Hemmingway, or any countless number of other authors.
Why do so few other books survive?
Because they don't have a massive political power structure behind them? And for the record, I'm not convinced that the Bible has actually survived, either.
I say that the bible has been thoroughly tested, you assert that I am standing on sand. Are you aware that there is more documentary evidence that Jesus lived than that Julius Caesar (by a factor of 10)?
By what measure? How reliable is the evidence?
There's probably a hundred times more "documentary evidence" of the existence of Lawrence Prichard Waterhouse than there is of my existence, and yet I doubt anyone would argue that he is real and I am a fictional character. The simple fact is, most people who actually exist have very little documentation supporting that fact. The reason is very simple: we don't need it. How can you deny my existence when I can walk up and punch you in the face?
Fictional characters, on the other hand, have no support for their existence other than documentation, and therefor need a lot of it.
Isn't it strange that a book written over hundreds of years by many different authors contains no contradictions?
Not really, in light of the actual evidence. The fact is that there are no complete copies older than 900AD, and there are no fragments older than 300AD, and there is strong evidence that entire books have been removed (the Dead Sea Scrolls are a prime example, but by no means the only one).
So no, it is not at all strange that any contradictions have been edited out over the course of the last 2000 years, and that evidence of that tampering was systematicly destroyed. In fact, given what we know of human nature, and especially the effects power has on people, it is much easier to believe this than that the Bible as we know it today is in its origional, unaltered form.
Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence of tampering in the Bible itself. For example, the idea of a soul is a Greek concept, and doesn't exist at all in historical Hebrew philosophy, which holds that it is the Jewish race that is eternal, not the spirit or essence of the individual.
Interestingly, the vast majority of early converts were brought in by Paul, a greek who never even met Jesus. I'm sure it's mere coincidence that many of the miracles performed by Jesus had supposedly also been performed by the patron demigod of Paul's home village.
Additionally, the term "Son of God" was quite common in those times, and refered to any Jewish male. Everyone else was a "Son of Man".
(Sorry, I don't have any documentation of any of this handy, these are just a few things I remember from the World Religeons class I took many years ago. The instructor, whose name was Moorman, spent 8 years in a seminary college before dropping since, as a homosexual, he was considered an irredem
Look, the point is that all the systems we have are really just a way for the rich to get richer at the expense of the rest of us. You can nitpick all you want, but at the core they're really pretty much all the same.
And don't tell me about idealistic capitalism while ignoring the fact that communism was suppost to be socialist anarchy. I don't know a lot about early feudalism, but I'm betting it started out as a pretty simple division of labor: the guys who're good at defending the village should focus on that, and the guys who're good at growing food should focus on that.
In a somewhat unrelated (and more painful) story, using my vast intellect I once attempted to replace a PCI card (of some sort) in a running computer and shocked the shit out of myself.
I've done that a few times, though with EISA cards. Somehow I've managed to get away with it every time so far, without even so much as a shock. If anyone's wondering why I would keep doing this, I have some exploded test fixtures for a product I support, and sometimes it's not so easy to tell if their on or not.
Now, this particular product has been in existence for about 10 years, in various incarnations. There's the old EISA-based version, which I support, and there's a newer PCI-based version, which is supported by another guy. Both versions have RS-422 cards that are made by the same manufacturer. Both are the same red color, and have almost exactly the same chips. The only difference is that one is EISA and on is PCI.
So, my boss (who definately does not have pointy hair) for some reason puts one of the PCI cards into my EISA fixture. Burned up the RS-422 card, the motherboard, and the CPU card, and I got to point and laugh at a man with a good 20 years of technical experience on me.
All the pictures I've seen have included active duty US military personel. They may have been acting at the behest of some contractor, but there were most definately US troops involved, and they are now facing court marshall.
It's actually very rare that a workman in any industry gets to pick his tools. Construction is the only industry I've worked in where that's even close to true, and even then there are plenty of times when you just have to use what's provided. After all, most people don't own their own jackhammer, for example, not even the guys who use them every day.
Additionally, they are usually limited to certain materials. Most houses are built with pine studs and fiberglass insulation, even though structural foam is stronger, more bug resistant, more fire resistant, and provides better insulation. Despite these limitations, good workmen are still able to build good houses that people are happy to live in for decades.
A good workman is aware of the limitations of the tools and materials they have at hand and is able to compensate for them. That's what makes them good. If you can't do that than you are merely a mediocre workman.
The software industry is not somehow magically different. The analogy is apt. Stop making excuses.
Heh, I just had an image of a guy in a suit, sitting at a desk in a cubicle, pressing really hard on his crappy, worn out, Speak'n'Spell keyboard, trying to log on to the network, wincing and looking around nervously as it broadcasts every character of his password in its distorted mechanical voice.
From A Rulebook for Arguments, 3rd ed., by Anthony Weston: "Do not make your argument look good by mocking or distorting the other side. Generally, people advocate a position for serious and sincere reasons." (Chapter 1, section 5, pp. 6-7).
So, in other words, you should counter the CONTENT of their arguement rather than mocking the STYLE with which it was presented. Maybe you should try actually following these rules before you start quoting them.
Ease of development & maintenance, lack of buffer overflows, security, reasonably standard APIs, quantity of available developers, platform independence are all legitimate requirements.
I agree that these are legitimate requirements, but for most applications they are, at best, secondary to the user experience, of which speed is often a critical component. After all, if the user doesn't like using your app, and chooses a competitor which offers a "better" user experience, then all the rest amounts to little more than a waste of time and money.
It's modded funny because rocketry is much more restricted in Europe than it is here, even with the new regulations. In fact, most of the freedoms we've been grummbling about losing the last few years nobody in Europe ever had.
Oh, and it's difficult to imigrate to Europe in general, certainly much more so than imigrating to the US. The biggest problem, according to friends who've done it, is getting a job. Companies have to prove that there are no suitable natives available before they can even consider hiring a foreigner, and if you go too long with no job you get deported (this is in England, IIRC Ireland is more restrictive of foreign labor, as is Germany).
Once a kid is ten years old, he starts to understand different things, and what to do and not to do. However, before that age, children can only imitate what they hear (which sucks if they grow up in a home with parents yelling at each other).
I don't know who told you that, but they were quite wrong. Maybe it takes that long for a kid to figure it out on their own, but a child that has someone to teach them what's appropriate is quite capable of learning, even at your brothers age.
Case in point: my 4-year-old daughter. My wife, who is a cop, and whose dad is a trucker, has a potty mouth that could make a sailor blush, and seems to be incapable of controlling it in casual situations (she's very professional while on the job). Our daughter is thus exposed to all manner of foul language on a regular basis, and has been her entire life, and yet she hardly ever uses that kind of language, and has never (to my knowledge) done so in a situation where it would be considered inappropriate.
Kids learn context at a very young age. Any kid that has multiple caregivers knows before the age of 2 what behaviors each caregiver will tolerate (or not), and will modify their behavior accordingly while in their presence.
Most of us who say home-schooled kids are socially inept are speaking from personal experience. Personally, I've never met anyone who was home schooled who wasn't socially inept, and your strawman example doesn't even begin to refute that.
Socially inept children don't walk up to other kids and say, "Hi, I'm Katie. What's your name? Do you want to go play on the slide with me?"
Actually, yes they do. Gee, great, so they walk up and introduce themselves. Then they proceed to act in irritating, overbearing, self-righteous ways.
Making friends isn't just 2 kids meeting for the first time and playing together for a while. The day after your little experiment, why don't you try asking if SocializedKid wants to go over to HomeSchooledKid's house to play. I'll bet they won't.
You say the government is purely parasitic, but how can that be when it provides services in return for the money we pay?
It seems that by your definition all businesses are parasites, and I really don't think that's what you believe.
We are deeply unhappy when our money is used for nefarious, stupid, or simply wasteful purposes.
The problem is, we disagree on what purposes fall into these categories. Many say that wellfare and public education qualify, but I look at the problems in the inner cities (gangs, drugs, etc) and think how much worse and more widespread it would be if we didn't provide for food, shelter, and education for all. One could say that these are central elements of the government's most critical function: providing and maintaining the peaceful, well-ordered society on which our prosperity depends.
If the government were truely parasitic then we would be able to get by just as well, if not better, without it. I don't think that's true, but I'd be interested in hearing any arguements to the contrary. (Mind you, I'm an ex-anarchist. Once I actually sat down and thought out the consequences I found it unsupportable.)
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What do you think error checking is for? If you're using any RAID type other than 0 and you lose a drive the RAID will use the data on the other drives in the RAID to rebuild the information that was supposed to be on the dead drive. Whether that data was ever actually written to the platter of the now dead drive is irrelevant.
I strongly suggest you educate yourself on how RAID works. Here is a good place to start.
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I don't believe he is speaking about a general power failure, but a failure of a drive that has say 8mb cache memory. From the standpoint of the OS, the data has been written to the HD but it is actually "lost".
If you've got any kind of error checking at all that shouldn't even be an issue. If the OS thinks the data was written to a drive then it should be recovered during rebuild, assuming it was only one drive that went. That's exactly the sort of failure that every RAID level other than 0 is designed to recover from.
Now, what would be a problem is if the data is stuck in the cache of the hardware RAID controller when power fails, as then the parity information would probably not have been written to disk either. In that case your data would be gone, and that's what the battery backed-up cache is all about.
Yeah, that's a great idea... if you want to completely destroy morale!
Most of the soldiers I know are able to get through the day because they feel that they're fighting for something important to them: their friends and family. Take away that connection and you take away their reason for fighting, and suddenly you no longer have an effective fighting force (at best, at worst you create more traitors and the problem, rather than being solved, only gets bigger).
Before you say they should use snail mail, would you? In a day when near instant communication is not only possible, but common in every home, restricting soldiers to doing things the old way just isn't acceptable. Never mind the fact that snail mail often ends up chasing a soldier around for weeks before finally catching up to them, and it's not uncommon for it to never catch up at all.
FWIW my soldier friends who're deployed are pretty much restricted to using their.mil addresses, which I'm sure go through some sort of filtering before delivery. No sane military commander would restrict it much more than that except in the most extreme circumstances.
I'm shamefully uninformed (RTFA? What?), but I'm guessing Vorbis is to Theora as mp3 is to MPEG. What will be interesting to see is if Theora adoption will drive Vorbis adoption.
While it is a Buddhist symbol, they inherited it from the Hindu. In fact, swastika is actually a Sanscrit word. It's use as a symbol of life and good luck predates both, and is found in cultures all over the world, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.
Additionally, both the swastika and sauvastika (reverse swastika) are Hindu/Buddhist symbols. Traditionally the swastika meant Life and Luck, and the sauvastika meant Death and Misfortune. Some are now trying to swap the meanings in response to the Nazi connotation.
I started off by saying that we should learn from politicians. These people know how to fight and win. Otherwise prepare to be roadkill.
Remember the old Nuclear War computer game? Where they showed the "winner" jumping up and down in the middle of a smoldering slag heap shouting "I win! I win!"? Ever heard of a "Pyrrhic victory"?
What kind of really crappy admins are working on a system where servers go down 2 hours a week?
There's a server at my work that's probably down about 2 hours per week, due to a third party application with super crappy license management. It's not a Microsoft problem per se, but it does require that the whole server be rebooted instead of just that service, which is how it would be on a Linux machine.
Perhaps by "crappy admins" you meant "admins who didn't fight tooth and nail against the carpet-landers who insisted on this crappy software", in which case I think the answer is "the kind that are still employed".
I guess I'm asking why do windows users hate MACs? How many Windows users have used a MAC, and I mean used a MAC. Anyone have a founded reason?
What I don't get is why everyone thinks MacOS is so usable. I've never liked it, and yes I have spent enough time on a Mac to get to know it (OS8 mostly, but the things I don't like are pretty fundamental to the Mac "look and feel", so they haven't been fixed yet and likely never will be).
I guess I just have a fundamental disagreement with the cannans of UI design. While usability does imply a certain amount of simplicity, I think Apple has taken it too far. I think the limitations of the one-button mouse sums up my feelings pretty well. Yes, I know you can hook up just about any USB mouse you want, but it's really the design philosophy that considers a one-button mouse to be an acceptable default that I take issue with. It's oversimplification where intelligent organization would be more appropriate.
As for Grandma, I think we make a lot of assumptions about what she's comfortable with. Taking night classes at the local CC has given me a lot of opportunity to talk to older users who are getting to a point where they know a thing or two about computers, and every single one of them has said they prefer a CLI to a GUI. The main reason is a CLI is "quiet", where a GUI is a confusing jumble of colors and flash with way too many options presented at once, sort of like trying to make your way through a casino. Sure, a CLI takes a bit more effort to learn, but in some ways it's a lot less intimidating.
"They're too expensive" - not going to argue, but maybe if they gave them out for free, and a pony....
I think it depends on what you're looking at. Last time I looked I found the ibook to be the best price for a given feature list for a laptop. My dislike of MacOS was largely irrelevant since I planned on installing Linux either way, unfortunately some of the stuff I wanted to do still required x86 hardware underneath.
Or just "They're slow" - not true.
Actually, this one I would argue. Sure, I've seen the benchmarks that "prove" a Mac is faster than a Wintel with twice the clock speed, but I remember there being some fine print that pretty much invalidated them as a basis for any useful comparison. I've also seen benchmarks which I consider much more balanced and reliable which show, for example, that a G4 is pretty much equivalent to an Athlon or P3 of the same clock speed.
Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)?
I think I may have been partially guilty of that at some point, but that was years ago. Since then I've taken the time to learn *nix, and now I hate Windows because the way it does things is wrong and stupid.
The thing I've always hated about Windows is that Microsoft seems to think that "user friendly" is a euphamism for "user limiting", although in all honesty I blame Apple for starting that meme (I've never liked the Mac interface, and although I learned to hate it on OS8, they haven't fixed any of the things I hate in OSX, probably because many of them are fundamental to the Mac "look and feel"). Still, that doesn't excuse MS from buying into it.
FWIW, I think Windows is OK for everyday, userland stuff, although IMO KDE is better. It's when you get into the Admin stuff that the stupidity really starts slapping you in the face, especially if you're dealing with multiple versions.
Why do people think that just because they're building a solution on top of an OSS platform their whole solution has to be OSS? IBM and Oracle certainly don't feel that way, and there's no reason you should either.
You need to ask yourself: if the hardware and software are both commodities, what are we selling? If you have a compelling answer to that, then that's what you tell your boss. If not, drop it; it's a stupid idea.
I'm looking forward to the first person to +5 insightfully point out that CDs cost only $0.25 to press, thus there's bags of margin to be made at sub-$10, so I can school them on the important differences between manufacturing cost and cost of sale, and between gross and net margin.
Feel free to try, I expect you to fail miserably.
Manufacturing costs are are slightly higher for DVDs than CDs, and cost of sales is roughly the same. The content of a DVD is much more expensive to produce, at 10s of millions of dollars compared to at most about $300k for an album. More importantly, though, the content of the DVD has a much higher percieved value to the consumer.
I don't pretend to be an expert, but I'm not totally clueless (another division of my company mass produces DVDs). However, a federal judge, when presented with all the arguements, facts, and evidence, determined that domestic CDs should cost on average about $5 less than they currently do, so frankly I don't believe you'd have a leg to stand on if we could see the real numbers.
Finally, and this is purely annecdotal, I used to know a guy who owned a record store and sold CDs for no more than $12, and this was 10-15 years ago, and he was still able to make money. It's basic supply and demand. A lot of people will pick something up just to check it out for $10, where they'd have to already know they liked it before they'd pay $20, or even $15.
Simply put, the RIAA is pricing themselves out of the market. I don't see how you can argue otherwise, but the first ammendment says you have the right to try.
I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard that concerts are often expected to lose money but help promote album sales.
You have it exactly backwards. In general, signed artists make no money on CDs. If they're lucky and the CD does very well they might make enough to pay back the advance the record company gave them to record it. In real numbers that often means the album most go platinum for the artist to pay back a typical advance of about $250k.
Now, that's based on basic royalties for the performer. Songwriter royalties are seperate, and often higher, so if they wrot their own material they might be able to pay off their advance faster. Even if they never sell a single copy, though, they still have that debt hanging over them.
Concerts are where the artist makes money. If you're just looking ticket sales, then yeah, the concert might be seen as losing money. Artists typically get the proceeds from merchandise though, so the t-shirt sales should more than make up for any loss they're taking on tickets.
Note that the situation is often the exact opposite for bands who are playing small local clubs and produced their own album, but then those bands are largel irrelevant to a discussion of RIAA practices.
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I think you underestimate the bible as a book.
I think you overestimate it, and are clearly ignorant of some key facts with regard to it.
On any terms it is quite a remarkable book. Few books make the same claims. Few books have been so thoroughly tested.
That's not true at all. You are ignoring many books from several Eastern philosophies. The Baghavad Ghita, the Dhamapada, the Analects of Confusius, the I Ching, Sun Tzu's Art of War. All of these have been around for at least centuries, in some cases millenia, and are at least as "tested" as the Bible.
You compare it to contemporary fiction, what is the difference between books written now and books written in the last 2000 years?
2000 years from now, how will anyone know that Cryptonomicon is fiction? There is no way to know. In fact, it's totally possible for all the events described to have happened, and it would not be unreasonable for archeologists to assume that it is a description of actual events. The same is true for pretty much all of the works of Steinbeck, or Hemmingway, or any countless number of other authors.
Why do so few other books survive?
Because they don't have a massive political power structure behind them? And for the record, I'm not convinced that the Bible has actually survived, either.
I say that the bible has been thoroughly tested, you assert that I am standing on sand. Are you aware that there is more documentary evidence that Jesus lived than that Julius Caesar (by a factor of 10)?
By what measure? How reliable is the evidence?
There's probably a hundred times more "documentary evidence" of the existence of Lawrence Prichard Waterhouse than there is of my existence, and yet I doubt anyone would argue that he is real and I am a fictional character. The simple fact is, most people who actually exist have very little documentation supporting that fact. The reason is very simple: we don't need it. How can you deny my existence when I can walk up and punch you in the face?
Fictional characters, on the other hand, have no support for their existence other than documentation, and therefor need a lot of it.
Isn't it strange that a book written over hundreds of years by many different authors contains no contradictions?
Not really, in light of the actual evidence. The fact is that there are no complete copies older than 900AD, and there are no fragments older than 300AD, and there is strong evidence that entire books have been removed (the Dead Sea Scrolls are a prime example, but by no means the only one).
So no, it is not at all strange that any contradictions have been edited out over the course of the last 2000 years, and that evidence of that tampering was systematicly destroyed. In fact, given what we know of human nature, and especially the effects power has on people, it is much easier to believe this than that the Bible as we know it today is in its origional, unaltered form.
Indeed, there is a great deal of evidence of tampering in the Bible itself. For example, the idea of a soul is a Greek concept, and doesn't exist at all in historical Hebrew philosophy, which holds that it is the Jewish race that is eternal, not the spirit or essence of the individual.
Interestingly, the vast majority of early converts were brought in by Paul, a greek who never even met Jesus. I'm sure it's mere coincidence that many of the miracles performed by Jesus had supposedly also been performed by the patron demigod of Paul's home village.
Additionally, the term "Son of God" was quite common in those times, and refered to any Jewish male. Everyone else was a "Son of Man".
(Sorry, I don't have any documentation of any of this handy, these are just a few things I remember from the World Religeons class I took many years ago. The instructor, whose name was Moorman, spent 8 years in a seminary college before dropping since, as a homosexual, he was considered an irredem
Right. There's so much choice involved.
Look, the point is that all the systems we have are really just a way for the rich to get richer at the expense of the rest of us. You can nitpick all you want, but at the core they're really pretty much all the same.
And don't tell me about idealistic capitalism while ignoring the fact that communism was suppost to be socialist anarchy. I don't know a lot about early feudalism, but I'm betting it started out as a pretty simple division of labor: the guys who're good at defending the village should focus on that, and the guys who're good at growing food should focus on that.
In a somewhat unrelated (and more painful) story, using my vast intellect I once attempted to replace a PCI card (of some sort) in a running computer and shocked the shit out of myself.
I've done that a few times, though with EISA cards. Somehow I've managed to get away with it every time so far, without even so much as a shock. If anyone's wondering why I would keep doing this, I have some exploded test fixtures for a product I support, and sometimes it's not so easy to tell if their on or not.
Now, this particular product has been in existence for about 10 years, in various incarnations. There's the old EISA-based version, which I support, and there's a newer PCI-based version, which is supported by another guy. Both versions have RS-422 cards that are made by the same manufacturer. Both are the same red color, and have almost exactly the same chips. The only difference is that one is EISA and on is PCI.
So, my boss (who definately does not have pointy hair) for some reason puts one of the PCI cards into my EISA fixture. Burned up the RS-422 card, the motherboard, and the CPU card, and I got to point and laugh at a man with a good 20 years of technical experience on me.
All the pictures I've seen have included active duty US military personel. They may have been acting at the behest of some contractor, but there were most definately US troops involved, and they are now facing court marshall.
It's actually very rare that a workman in any industry gets to pick his tools. Construction is the only industry I've worked in where that's even close to true, and even then there are plenty of times when you just have to use what's provided. After all, most people don't own their own jackhammer, for example, not even the guys who use them every day.
Additionally, they are usually limited to certain materials. Most houses are built with pine studs and fiberglass insulation, even though structural foam is stronger, more bug resistant, more fire resistant, and provides better insulation. Despite these limitations, good workmen are still able to build good houses that people are happy to live in for decades.
A good workman is aware of the limitations of the tools and materials they have at hand and is able to compensate for them. That's what makes them good. If you can't do that than you are merely a mediocre workman.
The software industry is not somehow magically different. The analogy is apt. Stop making excuses.
Heh, I just had an image of a guy in a suit, sitting at a desk in a cubicle, pressing really hard on his crappy, worn out, Speak'n'Spell keyboard, trying to log on to the network, wincing and looking around nervously as it broadcasts every character of his password in its distorted mechanical voice.
I think I'll be chuckling about that all day.
From A Rulebook for Arguments, 3rd ed., by Anthony Weston: "Do not make your argument look good by mocking or distorting the other side. Generally, people advocate a position for serious and sincere reasons." (Chapter 1, section 5, pp. 6-7).
So, in other words, you should counter the CONTENT of their arguement rather than mocking the STYLE with which it was presented. Maybe you should try actually following these rules before you start quoting them.
Ease of development & maintenance, lack of buffer overflows, security, reasonably standard APIs, quantity of available developers, platform independence are all legitimate requirements.
I agree that these are legitimate requirements, but for most applications they are, at best, secondary to the user experience, of which speed is often a critical component. After all, if the user doesn't like using your app, and chooses a competitor which offers a "better" user experience, then all the rest amounts to little more than a waste of time and money.
It's modded funny because rocketry is much more restricted in Europe than it is here, even with the new regulations. In fact, most of the freedoms we've been grummbling about losing the last few years nobody in Europe ever had.
Oh, and it's difficult to imigrate to Europe in general, certainly much more so than imigrating to the US. The biggest problem, according to friends who've done it, is getting a job. Companies have to prove that there are no suitable natives available before they can even consider hiring a foreigner, and if you go too long with no job you get deported (this is in England, IIRC Ireland is more restrictive of foreign labor, as is Germany).
Once a kid is ten years old, he starts to understand different things, and what to do and not to do. However, before that age, children can only imitate what they hear (which sucks if they grow up in a home with parents yelling at each other).
I don't know who told you that, but they were quite wrong. Maybe it takes that long for a kid to figure it out on their own, but a child that has someone to teach them what's appropriate is quite capable of learning, even at your brothers age.
Case in point: my 4-year-old daughter. My wife, who is a cop, and whose dad is a trucker, has a potty mouth that could make a sailor blush, and seems to be incapable of controlling it in casual situations (she's very professional while on the job). Our daughter is thus exposed to all manner of foul language on a regular basis, and has been her entire life, and yet she hardly ever uses that kind of language, and has never (to my knowledge) done so in a situation where it would be considered inappropriate.
Kids learn context at a very young age. Any kid that has multiple caregivers knows before the age of 2 what behaviors each caregiver will tolerate (or not), and will modify their behavior accordingly while in their presence.
Most of us who say home-schooled kids are socially inept are speaking from personal experience. Personally, I've never met anyone who was home schooled who wasn't socially inept, and your strawman example doesn't even begin to refute that.
Socially inept children don't walk up to other kids and say, "Hi, I'm Katie. What's your name? Do you want to go play on the slide with me?"
Actually, yes they do. Gee, great, so they walk up and introduce themselves. Then they proceed to act in irritating, overbearing, self-righteous ways.
Making friends isn't just 2 kids meeting for the first time and playing together for a while. The day after your little experiment, why don't you try asking if SocializedKid wants to go over to HomeSchooledKid's house to play. I'll bet they won't.
You've contradicted yourself.
You say the government is purely parasitic, but how can that be when it provides services in return for the money we pay?
It seems that by your definition all businesses are parasites, and I really don't think that's what you believe.
We are deeply unhappy when our money is used for nefarious, stupid, or simply wasteful purposes.
The problem is, we disagree on what purposes fall into these categories. Many say that wellfare and public education qualify, but I look at the problems in the inner cities (gangs, drugs, etc) and think how much worse and more widespread it would be if we didn't provide for food, shelter, and education for all. One could say that these are central elements of the government's most critical function: providing and maintaining the peaceful, well-ordered society on which our prosperity depends.
If the government were truely parasitic then we would be able to get by just as well, if not better, without it. I don't think that's true, but I'd be interested in hearing any arguements to the contrary. (Mind you, I'm an ex-anarchist. Once I actually sat down and thought out the consequences I found it unsupportable.)
What do you think error checking is for? If you're using any RAID type other than 0 and you lose a drive the RAID will use the data on the other drives in the RAID to rebuild the information that was supposed to be on the dead drive. Whether that data was ever actually written to the platter of the now dead drive is irrelevant.
I strongly suggest you educate yourself on how RAID works. Here is a good place to start.
I don't believe he is speaking about a general power failure, but a failure of a drive that has say 8mb cache memory.
From the standpoint of the OS, the data has been written to the HD but it is actually "lost".
If you've got any kind of error checking at all that shouldn't even be an issue. If the OS thinks the data was written to a drive then it should be recovered during rebuild, assuming it was only one drive that went. That's exactly the sort of failure that every RAID level other than 0 is designed to recover from.
Now, what would be a problem is if the data is stuck in the cache of the hardware RAID controller when power fails, as then the parity information would probably not have been written to disk either. In that case your data would be gone, and that's what the battery backed-up cache is all about.
Yeah, that's a great idea... if you want to completely destroy morale!
.mil addresses, which I'm sure go through some sort of filtering before delivery. No sane military commander would restrict it much more than that except in the most extreme circumstances.
Most of the soldiers I know are able to get through the day because they feel that they're fighting for something important to them: their friends and family. Take away that connection and you take away their reason for fighting, and suddenly you no longer have an effective fighting force (at best, at worst you create more traitors and the problem, rather than being solved, only gets bigger).
Before you say they should use snail mail, would you? In a day when near instant communication is not only possible, but common in every home, restricting soldiers to doing things the old way just isn't acceptable. Never mind the fact that snail mail often ends up chasing a soldier around for weeks before finally catching up to them, and it's not uncommon for it to never catch up at all.
FWIW my soldier friends who're deployed are pretty much restricted to using their
I'm shamefully uninformed (RTFA? What?), but I'm guessing Vorbis is to Theora as mp3 is to MPEG. What will be interesting to see is if Theora adoption will drive Vorbis adoption.
While it is a Buddhist symbol, they inherited it from the Hindu. In fact, swastika is actually a Sanscrit word. It's use as a symbol of life and good luck predates both, and is found in cultures all over the world, including Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas.
Additionally, both the swastika and sauvastika (reverse swastika) are Hindu/Buddhist symbols. Traditionally the swastika meant Life and Luck, and the sauvastika meant Death and Misfortune. Some are now trying to swap the meanings in response to the Nazi connotation.
Pull your head out of your ass. It's the addiction that's the problem, in most cases the actual thing the person is addicted to is largely irrelevant.
I started off by saying that we should learn from politicians. These people know how to fight and win. Otherwise prepare to be roadkill.
Remember the old Nuclear War computer game? Where they showed the "winner" jumping up and down in the middle of a smoldering slag heap shouting "I win! I win!"? Ever heard of a "Pyrrhic victory"?
Frankly, I'd rather live RMS' "Right to Read".
What kind of really crappy admins are working on a system where servers go down 2 hours a week?
There's a server at my work that's probably down about 2 hours per week, due to a third party application with super crappy license management. It's not a Microsoft problem per se, but it does require that the whole server be rebooted instead of just that service, which is how it would be on a Linux machine.
Perhaps by "crappy admins" you meant "admins who didn't fight tooth and nail against the carpet-landers who insisted on this crappy software", in which case I think the answer is "the kind that are still employed".
I guess I'm asking why do windows users hate MACs? How many Windows users have used a MAC, and I mean used a MAC. Anyone have a founded reason?
What I don't get is why everyone thinks MacOS is so usable. I've never liked it, and yes I have spent enough time on a Mac to get to know it (OS8 mostly, but the things I don't like are pretty fundamental to the Mac "look and feel", so they haven't been fixed yet and likely never will be).
I guess I just have a fundamental disagreement with the cannans of UI design. While usability does imply a certain amount of simplicity, I think Apple has taken it too far. I think the limitations of the one-button mouse sums up my feelings pretty well. Yes, I know you can hook up just about any USB mouse you want, but it's really the design philosophy that considers a one-button mouse to be an acceptable default that I take issue with. It's oversimplification where intelligent organization would be more appropriate.
As for Grandma, I think we make a lot of assumptions about what she's comfortable with. Taking night classes at the local CC has given me a lot of opportunity to talk to older users who are getting to a point where they know a thing or two about computers, and every single one of them has said they prefer a CLI to a GUI. The main reason is a CLI is "quiet", where a GUI is a confusing jumble of colors and flash with way too many options presented at once, sort of like trying to make your way through a casino. Sure, a CLI takes a bit more effort to learn, but in some ways it's a lot less intimidating.
"They're too expensive" - not going to argue, but maybe if they gave them out for free, and a pony....
I think it depends on what you're looking at. Last time I looked I found the ibook to be the best price for a given feature list for a laptop. My dislike of MacOS was largely irrelevant since I planned on installing Linux either way, unfortunately some of the stuff I wanted to do still required x86 hardware underneath.
Or just "They're slow" - not true.
Actually, this one I would argue. Sure, I've seen the benchmarks that "prove" a Mac is faster than a Wintel with twice the clock speed, but I remember there being some fine print that pretty much invalidated them as a basis for any useful comparison. I've also seen benchmarks which I consider much more balanced and reliable which show, for example, that a G4 is pretty much equivalent to an Athlon or P3 of the same clock speed.
Again, excellent GUI, but there's definitely a feeling (misguided, I think) that Windows "has" to be bad because it's used everywhere. This doesn't translate to some other consumer products (PS2, anyone) so I'm not sure why geeks hate Windows in particular. Do we hate it because we perceive everyone else hates it (the same way people who use MacOS love it more because everyone else who uses it loves it)?
I think I may have been partially guilty of that at some point, but that was years ago. Since then I've taken the time to learn *nix, and now I hate Windows because the way it does things is wrong and stupid.
The thing I've always hated about Windows is that Microsoft seems to think that "user friendly" is a euphamism for "user limiting", although in all honesty I blame Apple for starting that meme (I've never liked the Mac interface, and although I learned to hate it on OS8, they haven't fixed any of the things I hate in OSX, probably because many of them are fundamental to the Mac "look and feel"). Still, that doesn't excuse MS from buying into it.
FWIW, I think Windows is OK for everyday, userland stuff, although IMO KDE is better. It's when you get into the Admin stuff that the stupidity really starts slapping you in the face, especially if you're dealing with multiple versions.
My thoughts exactly: why would you?
Why do people think that just because they're building a solution on top of an OSS platform their whole solution has to be OSS? IBM and Oracle certainly don't feel that way, and there's no reason you should either.
You need to ask yourself: if the hardware and software are both commodities, what are we selling? If you have a compelling answer to that, then that's what you tell your boss. If not, drop it; it's a stupid idea.
I'm looking forward to the first person to +5 insightfully point out that CDs cost only $0.25 to press, thus there's bags of margin to be made at sub-$10, so I can school them on the important differences between manufacturing cost and cost of sale, and between gross and net margin.
Feel free to try, I expect you to fail miserably.
Manufacturing costs are are slightly higher for DVDs than CDs, and cost of sales is roughly the same. The content of a DVD is much more expensive to produce, at 10s of millions of dollars compared to at most about $300k for an album. More importantly, though, the content of the DVD has a much higher percieved value to the consumer.
I don't pretend to be an expert, but I'm not totally clueless (another division of my company mass produces DVDs). However, a federal judge, when presented with all the arguements, facts, and evidence, determined that domestic CDs should cost on average about $5 less than they currently do, so frankly I don't believe you'd have a leg to stand on if we could see the real numbers.
Finally, and this is purely annecdotal, I used to know a guy who owned a record store and sold CDs for no more than $12, and this was 10-15 years ago, and he was still able to make money. It's basic supply and demand. A lot of people will pick something up just to check it out for $10, where they'd have to already know they liked it before they'd pay $20, or even $15.
Simply put, the RIAA is pricing themselves out of the market. I don't see how you can argue otherwise, but the first ammendment says you have the right to try.
I have no idea if it's true, but I've heard that concerts are often expected to lose money but help promote album sales.
You have it exactly backwards. In general, signed artists make no money on CDs. If they're lucky and the CD does very well they might make enough to pay back the advance the record company gave them to record it. In real numbers that often means the album most go platinum for the artist to pay back a typical advance of about $250k.
Now, that's based on basic royalties for the performer. Songwriter royalties are seperate, and often higher, so if they wrot their own material they might be able to pay off their advance faster. Even if they never sell a single copy, though, they still have that debt hanging over them.
Concerts are where the artist makes money. If you're just looking ticket sales, then yeah, the concert might be seen as losing money. Artists typically get the proceeds from merchandise though, so the t-shirt sales should more than make up for any loss they're taking on tickets.
Note that the situation is often the exact opposite for bands who are playing small local clubs and produced their own album, but then those bands are largel irrelevant to a discussion of RIAA practices.