The irritation of that is pretty minimal compared to some asshole with "Windows sounds" turned on. If you think a phone going off during a film is annoying, imagine hearing "You got mail" all the damn film.
Because it was only a small part of the congressman's letter, and because it is a significant fact in demonstrating how Microsoft does business which no-one in the media picked up at the time.
And also, the very fact that everyone in the media took their eye off the ball and didn't notice this is quite interesting, and the guys who won didn't make a big deal of it. Hell, if I'd been the company that won that case, I'd be shouting it to everyone. Or even better, I'd use the money to post full-page ads in all the major papers saying "Microsoft are software pirates". After all, the fundamental principle in libel is that it's not libel if you can prove it's true.
You got rated as a troll, which is a bit unfair since that's basically how it goes. It's quite similar in Britain too. The trouble is that the word's got debased by "heating engineers", "plumbing engineers" and "waste disposal engineers". God I hate that - you go to uni for 4 years to become an engineer, and then some guy with a pair of long rubber gloves and a lingering smell of shit and disinfectant tells you he's a "sanitation engineer". NO YOU'RE NOT, YOU'RE A *$%&ING TOILET CLEANER! Argh!
Nope, but everyone who gets an engineering degree *and* spends x years working in engineering in a position of some responsibility.
Incidentally, in some countries in mainland Europe the word "engineer" has the same status as the word "doctor". You actually call yourself "Engineer Smith" the same way as you'd call an MD or PhD "Doctor Jones". To avoid this getting diluted, there's high standards for getting your "Engineer" title. And as a result of that, engineers have a high status in society and engineering is seen as a top career.
A junior doctor doesn't spend all those 8 years in school - most of it is spent working and learning how to apply the knowledge they've got from their course. Which is the same as any engineer does when they get out of school.
When you are incapacitated in some way and can't do it yourself. Quadraplegics, MS sufferers, etc.
I suggest you read the coverage of the case of Diane Pretty in the UK. She suffers from MS and now can only communicate with the aid of a Stephen-Hawking-type setup. Soon she will lose even that and be completely unable to communicate, and some time after that she will die from failure of her heart and lung muscles - but only after doctors have attempted to extend that period for which she is trapped in a non-functioning body for as long as possible. There is no hope of recovery - it's not just unlikely (like cancer remission), it's simply not possible.
She wants to die, but lacks the ability to do it herself, and doctors can't do that in the UK (bcos of said Oath), so she wants her husband to kill her (I guess cleanly, via injection/overdose). They went to court to try to get consent that he would not be prosecuted if they went ahead, and the courts said they couldn't guarantee that. My guess is that they'll go ahead anyway and he'll get tried and convicted.
Grab.
(a bit off-topic, but anyway, it answers the question)
But only if you are ordered to build a robot, are ordered to program it to kill people, and then are ordered to let it loose in the streets. Somehow, I don't think getting a couple dozen spams a day comes into quite the same category as being killed.
No way. Reality: lack of knowledge removes your right to make a decision yourself with no external help.
Which is what happened. This guy said to the game manufacturer, "I don't know enough about computer games to say whether they have plot and depth. Find me some computer games which you think have depth, and explain to me why they have depth, and I'll make a decision based on that." So the dumb asses went and dug out the four LEAST depth-full games and went and showed them to him, and he quite rightly said, "Those games suck. You lose." This is ENTIRELY the fault of the manufacturer.
The judge can ONLY make decisions based on what he's told in court. In fact, if he has a deep interest in the subject under trial, he MUST NOT judge the case and must recuse himself, in the same way that a judge with a deep interest in environmental issues must recuse himself from a dispute between Greenpeace and Exxon, for instance. If he didn't, the appeal court would toss the case out in 5 minutes flat. The judge must be impartial, and that means forcing each side to make their case.
We will still have this happening in the future, for the same reason that we still have film classifications. The difference will be that the games manufacturers will start doing as the film industry does, submitting copies to the classification board for comments and reworking/editting accordingly. When the games manufacturers get their fingers out of their asses and realise that game classification is going to happen and they need to think about how to target their games, this'll stop being an issue.
Yep, and even more so back then. Back in the 70s and 80s, a single creative genius is just how it worked. Adrian Braybrook (sp?) was single-handedly responsible for some of the most significant games of the early 80s on the Commodore 64 - he pioneered the use of parallax scrolling in top-view shoot-em-ups, for example. And in the early 80s, the C64 was the _only_ serious games machine, it set the standard for everything else (flame on, Spectrum users!;-)
Of those early games, most of the good ones were created by individuals or small teams of 2 or 3 ppl, and most of the real dogs were created by teams of coding drudges turning out crap using film tie-ins (eg. US Gold).
I suggest you move to Britain, and most specifically South Wales. The hills in South Wales are littered with burned-out cars that have been joy-ridden until they ran out of petrol and then pushed off a cliff. And everywhere else in Britain, there's plenty of smashed-up/burned-out cars around from joyriding.
Maybe American kids are naturally more law-abiding...
I'm part of a team working on one of these at the moment. Yeah, they're pretty good, certainly better efficiency than pure electric cars.
Of course, this has been buggered senseless by the marketing ppl. Honda and Toyota went out and said, "Let's build a car that's really efficient. And if we're going to make it efficient, let's use a small, well-tuned engine (which is adequate for any day-to-day use) and make the car nice and light."
Ford OTOH (my employer) said, "Screw that. We're building an SUV with a 2.3l engine. It only gets 30mpg compared to the 50-60mpg of the others, but hey, it's an SUV." Great...
I'll probably sell the hardware design to Everyday Practical Electronics. This makes it easier for ppl to build the stuff, bcos EPE can get a few hundred PCBs cranked out and sold for a reasonable price to hobbyists. And it gets the design to a wider audience than it'd otherwise see if I just posted it on my website. Plus of course it lets me get a bit of cash from the time I've put into it!:-) Not serious money, but enough to finance another guitar or two, or pay for a holiday.
The software (I'm planning on using Qt for the front end) will be freely available, along with the specs for the parallel port interface to the main programmer board. An API will be provided for adding new chips to the list supported by the programmer. The spec for the internal bus interface will also be available for ppl to design their own slave boards, to expand the programmer as they want. And the code for the PICs used to control it all will be available.
The only thing that may not be available will be DLLs for the chips supported. PICs are OK, their programming interface is public domain; most other chips use proprietary algorithms which require an NDA to be signed though, so you could only release the compiled code for that and not source. Not ideal, but that's the way the electronics industry works. And if ppl can at least contribute their own DLLs then it's open to individuals to expand the chips supported.
I make my own PCBs for electronics projects I build myself. And I do go straight from design to PCB, bcos I don't often make serious mistakes in the design and the errors I do make can be fixed with patch wires. If you have your own PCB-making kit (total price around £100) then it's much easier to do that than to mess around with wire-wrap and matrix-board, especially for large circuits.
And what I work on is stuff which doesn't much exist elsewhere, or is outrageously expensive elsewhere. My current project is a universal chip programmer. To buy a 40-pin chip programmer costs minimum £250 - I reckon I can put one together for around £80-100 that'll perform better than even the high-end (£400) programmers. Not bad, eh?
If the companies producing gadgets aren't churning out like a few thousand a week, then the chances are that the drop in cost from them buying in bulk is more than offset by the cost of labour to make the gadget and the profit added on. If a hobbyist doesn't consider their time to be a cost in the project and only counts money spent on parts, there's still plenty you can do yourself for cheaper than buying it.
Not even that - we just focus on building different equipment.
Maybe there's no longer the huge boom of electronics magazines, but there's still quite a few left. Everyday Practical Electronics is a good magazine for beginner and intermediate-level hobbyists, and contains many useful circuits.
The place where amateurs can't do much is in anything using low-power components. Radios, computers etc are all long-gone. But anything involving power components is still well within the reach of hobbyists. Hi-fi amps, power supplies etc can all be built more cheaply to a higher quality than commercial equipment. The simple reason is that if it's high-power, the components can't be miniaturised like low-power ones.
The other place where hobbyist stuff scores is on anything esoteric. You want an automatic plant-waterer, or a touch-panel light switch, or anything out-of-the-ordinary which you can't easily buy off the shelf, you can build it yourself.
It's very like software, really. A few large organisations (MS, the Linux kernel group, Gnome, KDE) have put lots of time into developing operating systems, window managers, utilities and office programs, so a lone individual can't hope to compete with that work on their own. But if the lone individual spots an application which hasn't yet been written, they can still crank that out and make it a success.
I honestly don't think there's that much actual research can be done by hobbyists. The main problem is that there's too many patents around, so you can unintentionally be infringing a zillion patents with your obvious ideas. The fact that the patents are garbage is neither here nor there when the lawyers come down on you.
Re the hydrogen/fuel-cell engine, it can certainly be produced, but it's still big, bulky, inefficient, expensive, and uses large quantities of rare metals which require extraction processes which cause much pollution.
Electric cars are only a solution if local pollution in cities is a seriously big deal (eg. LA). It takes several times more fossil fuel to drive an electric car than a gasoline car; the difference is that the burning of fossil fuels occurs at a physically remote place, ie. the power station.
Re preserving seaweeds, most of it is in the middle of oceans where the "humans-pumping-crud-into-the-sea" effect is minimal. The most likely reason seaweed will have a major die-off is due to a sudden rise in ocean temperatures, and that sudden rise could be caused by - hey, here's our old friend CO2 again!
Simplicity is better. And this idea is as simple as it gets - instead of trying to influence CO2 levels indirectly by planting more trees or relying on existing trees (which no-one yet knows will work, see the latest New Scientist), get the CO2 out of the air directly. Job done.
"Sucks less" is not the position - the position is "sucks less than IE and Netscape 4". And that's a competitive position - you're explicitly saying that your category for success is to build a better browser than those two.
Python's only a competitor to every other high-level language out there. It was conceived as a language to do stuff better than other high-level languages. That's competition.
John Ford lifts from pre-existing cowboy fiction novels. Pre-existing cowboy fiction novels lift from every fiction cliche down the ages. Fiction cliches lift from anything that'll interest kids round a camp-fire.
Which is interesting, bcos Homer's stuff is basically splatter-novels. I mean, the guy invented body-count! He spends like a dozen pages in a battle, but no description of how the battle goes overall, just an endless parade of "Humorles the Thracian struck down Bangles and Fiddla and left them lying in their entrails, but his armour could not stop the well-made bronze spear of Biggawanga, the Ionian brother of Idioci, who gutted him like a fish".
So do you think there were Greek versions of film snobs today, saying "Well that Homer's stories are OK for a trashy couple of hours entertainment, but they're no classics"?;-)
Let me know when they find that the world really _was_ created in 6 days, ok? And is floating in a bubble with water below and water above...
Thing is, Arthurian legends have only had to survive 1500 years, and they're all screwed up. Robin Hood has got nice and twisted in 800 years. Yet the Bible is supposed to be word-perfect after 4000 years?
We know from archaeology that there were quite a few kings around in the Arthurian period who'd fit the bill, and that's from getting a fair amount of archaeological evidence; many stories from many kings may have been melded together to form Arthur. Empires come and go in a century or so; all we know is that there was a fairly powerful king at one point. Ditto your Solomon - except that here, we only know that there was a king, and there's nothing else. There could have been 1 Solomon or 1000, we don't know.
The New Testament is full of inaccuracies. Jesus's lineage to David is incredibly tenuous. The date of Jesus's birth can't be fixed, bcos the Roman governor mentioned wasn't around at the time of a census. A whole bunch of the "prophesies" mentioned by the four main writers are junk, if you cross-reference them back. And then there's the theory (most famously used by Neal Stephenson in "Snow Crash") that the whole Pentecostal thing is fiction.
And never mind the (in)famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which pretty effectively put a dampener on any theory that the history of Biblical events has been passed down without any loss of information...
1) Most of your water will go straight in and straight out again without doing much cooling. A heatsink should force the water to go all the way round the heatsink - try adding some baffles inside the box to improve that.
2) Have you never heard of hose clips? 50c each and 100% reliable at clamping off flexible hoses without leakage.
3) Get some heatsink compound between the heatsink and the processor. Without it, a fair chunk of the heat is never even getting to the heatsink, so the whole point of having a nice efficient heatsink is wasted.
George Soros the billionaire who made his wealth in the global economy says that it's a good thing. Well, duh! you think the turkeys are going to vote for Christmas?!
Certainly there's good things about globalisation, like getting poorer countries richer by global companies opening offices over there. Ireland is a good example - piss-poor 20-30 years back, now a thriving technology centre trading off the intelligence of its workforce. If you're contracting your coding out, the result should be the same whether the coders are 5 minutes round the corner or in Outer Mongolia. And that gets more money into Outer Mongolia (or wherever).
But it also means you're competing against ppl in other countries for work, which screws up richer countries. Why hire a team of American engineers at $50k each when you can hire a team of British engineers at £25k ($35K) each? Or why hire a team of British engineers when you can hire a team of Ukrainian engineers for $10k each?
Human cloning where clones are carried to term is illegal in the US and all European countries, due to the dangers for the cloned infant. The only countries in which this is not illegal are Third World countries where the ppl (and more importantly the government) will do anything to feed themselves.
So he's getting round the laws in all the First World countries by using test subjects from Third World countries - up to this point, he's used 5000 women to get one impregnation. That's 4999 women miscarrying. That's ethical for sure. Suppose you had a vaccine which you thought might be dangerous - would it be right to go to Ethiopia and hand out $10 to everyone who'll try it for you? bcos that's exactly what he's doing. I'll grant you it's not illegal in that country, but there's plenty of places where murder, rape and torture are not illegal - it doesn't mean that we should go there to try them out!
Mengele conducted experiments on humans to find out what would happen, without consideration of the fate of those humans. Antinori is doing exactly the same. In labs, most cloned embryos are miscarried; of the ones that are carried to term, many are stillborn, or are deformed and must be destroyed. The only clone of a largish mammal, Dolly the sheep, is suffering from premature aging and no-one yet knows whether this is just a coincidence or whether it's a fundamental issue with cloning. And with this total lack of information, Antinori is cloning a human to see what will happen. The only certainty is that 4999 women have suffered the pain first of the operation and then of the miscarriage; whether further pain is in store for the child is as yet unknown, since no research anywhere has proved it safe for lab rats, never mind humans. Does this sound like a valid scientific position to you?
There's nothing wrong with wanting your name in the papers. But if he's prepared to instigate the successor to thalidomide by taking a chance on producing many deformed children in his quest for fame and fortune (and more likely the latter), then I think he's seriously screwed up.
I've no doubt the scientific community will learn a lot from what he's doing. Mengele and his friends taught us just about everything we know today about the body's reaction to freezing to death - but at a tremendous cost. And they too thought they were doing a great job in advancing the cause of science. The point of the laws against carrying clones to term is to prevent another Mengele going for scientific knowledge at the cost of human life.
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The irritation of that is pretty minimal compared to some asshole with "Windows sounds" turned on. If you think a phone going off during a film is annoying, imagine hearing "You got mail" all the damn film.
Grab.
Because it was only a small part of the congressman's letter, and because it is a significant fact in demonstrating how Microsoft does business which no-one in the media picked up at the time.
And also, the very fact that everyone in the media took their eye off the ball and didn't notice this is quite interesting, and the guys who won didn't make a big deal of it. Hell, if I'd been the company that won that case, I'd be shouting it to everyone. Or even better, I'd use the money to post full-page ads in all the major papers saying "Microsoft are software pirates". After all, the fundamental principle in libel is that it's not libel if you can prove it's true.
Grab.
You got rated as a troll, which is a bit unfair since that's basically how it goes. It's quite similar in Britain too. The trouble is that the word's got debased by "heating engineers", "plumbing engineers" and "waste disposal engineers". God I hate that - you go to uni for 4 years to become an engineer, and then some guy with a pair of long rubber gloves and a lingering smell of shit and disinfectant tells you he's a "sanitation engineer". NO YOU'RE NOT, YOU'RE A *$%&ING TOILET CLEANER! Argh!
Grab.
Nope, but everyone who gets an engineering degree *and* spends x years working in engineering in a position of some responsibility.
Incidentally, in some countries in mainland Europe the word "engineer" has the same status as the word "doctor". You actually call yourself "Engineer Smith" the same way as you'd call an MD or PhD "Doctor Jones". To avoid this getting diluted, there's high standards for getting your "Engineer" title. And as a result of that, engineers have a high status in society and engineering is seen as a top career.
A junior doctor doesn't spend all those 8 years in school - most of it is spent working and learning how to apply the knowledge they've got from their course. Which is the same as any engineer does when they get out of school.
Grab.
When you are incapacitated in some way and can't do it yourself. Quadraplegics, MS sufferers, etc.
I suggest you read the coverage of the case of Diane Pretty in the UK. She suffers from MS and now can only communicate with the aid of a Stephen-Hawking-type setup. Soon she will lose even that and be completely unable to communicate, and some time after that she will die from failure of her heart and lung muscles - but only after doctors have attempted to extend that period for which she is trapped in a non-functioning body for as long as possible. There is no hope of recovery - it's not just unlikely (like cancer remission), it's simply not possible.
She wants to die, but lacks the ability to do it herself, and doctors can't do that in the UK (bcos of said Oath), so she wants her husband to kill her (I guess cleanly, via injection/overdose). They went to court to try to get consent that he would not be prosecuted if they went ahead, and the courts said they couldn't guarantee that. My guess is that they'll go ahead anyway and he'll get tried and convicted.
Grab.
(a bit off-topic, but anyway, it answers the question)
But only if you are ordered to build a robot, are ordered to program it to kill people, and then are ordered to let it loose in the streets. Somehow, I don't think getting a couple dozen spams a day comes into quite the same category as being killed.
Grab.
No way. Reality: lack of knowledge removes your right to make a decision yourself with no external help.
Which is what happened. This guy said to the game manufacturer, "I don't know enough about computer games to say whether they have plot and depth. Find me some computer games which you think have depth, and explain to me why they have depth, and I'll make a decision based on that." So the dumb asses went and dug out the four LEAST depth-full games and went and showed them to him, and he quite rightly said, "Those games suck. You lose." This is ENTIRELY the fault of the manufacturer.
The judge can ONLY make decisions based on what he's told in court. In fact, if he has a deep interest in the subject under trial, he MUST NOT judge the case and must recuse himself, in the same way that a judge with a deep interest in environmental issues must recuse himself from a dispute between Greenpeace and Exxon, for instance. If he didn't, the appeal court would toss the case out in 5 minutes flat. The judge must be impartial, and that means forcing each side to make their case.
We will still have this happening in the future, for the same reason that we still have film classifications. The difference will be that the games manufacturers will start doing as the film industry does, submitting copies to the classification board for comments and reworking/editting accordingly. When the games manufacturers get their fingers out of their asses and realise that game classification is going to happen and they need to think about how to target their games, this'll stop being an issue.
Grab.
Herbal remedies on a Mac.
Oh yes, I have just the thing for you. Ladies and gentlemen, the iBong!
Inhale and enjoy...
Grab.
I refer you to the story about cloning above... ;-)
Grab.
Yep, and even more so back then. Back in the 70s and 80s, a single creative genius is just how it worked. Adrian Braybrook (sp?) was single-handedly responsible for some of the most significant games of the early 80s on the Commodore 64 - he pioneered the use of parallax scrolling in top-view shoot-em-ups, for example. And in the early 80s, the C64 was the _only_ serious games machine, it set the standard for everything else (flame on, Spectrum users! ;-)
Of those early games, most of the good ones were created by individuals or small teams of 2 or 3 ppl, and most of the real dogs were created by teams of coding drudges turning out crap using film tie-ins (eg. US Gold).
Grab.
All the places I drove... over a 2 minute period. So he can get me, as long as I leave my car somewhere that's 2 minutes drive away from my house! :-)
Grab.
I suggest you move to Britain, and most specifically South Wales. The hills in South Wales are littered with burned-out cars that have been joy-ridden until they ran out of petrol and then pushed off a cliff. And everywhere else in Britain, there's plenty of smashed-up/burned-out cars around from joyriding.
Maybe American kids are naturally more law-abiding...
Grab.
I'm part of a team working on one of these at the moment. Yeah, they're pretty good, certainly better efficiency than pure electric cars.
Of course, this has been buggered senseless by the marketing ppl. Honda and Toyota went out and said, "Let's build a car that's really efficient. And if we're going to make it efficient, let's use a small, well-tuned engine (which is adequate for any day-to-day use) and make the car nice and light."
Ford OTOH (my employer) said, "Screw that. We're building an SUV with a 2.3l engine. It only gets 30mpg compared to the 50-60mpg of the others, but hey, it's an SUV." Great...
Grab.
That is the idea.
:-) Not serious money, but enough to finance another guitar or two, or pay for a holiday.
I'll probably sell the hardware design to Everyday Practical Electronics. This makes it easier for ppl to build the stuff, bcos EPE can get a few hundred PCBs cranked out and sold for a reasonable price to hobbyists. And it gets the design to a wider audience than it'd otherwise see if I just posted it on my website. Plus of course it lets me get a bit of cash from the time I've put into it!
The software (I'm planning on using Qt for the front end) will be freely available, along with the specs for the parallel port interface to the main programmer board. An API will be provided for adding new chips to the list supported by the programmer. The spec for the internal bus interface will also be available for ppl to design their own slave boards, to expand the programmer as they want. And the code for the PICs used to control it all will be available.
The only thing that may not be available will be DLLs for the chips supported. PICs are OK, their programming interface is public domain; most other chips use proprietary algorithms which require an NDA to be signed though, so you could only release the compiled code for that and not source. Not ideal, but that's the way the electronics industry works. And if ppl can at least contribute their own DLLs then it's open to individuals to expand the chips supported.
Grab.
I make my own PCBs for electronics projects I build myself. And I do go straight from design to PCB, bcos I don't often make serious mistakes in the design and the errors I do make can be fixed with patch wires. If you have your own PCB-making kit (total price around £100) then it's much easier to do that than to mess around with wire-wrap and matrix-board, especially for large circuits.
And what I work on is stuff which doesn't much exist elsewhere, or is outrageously expensive elsewhere. My current project is a universal chip programmer. To buy a 40-pin chip programmer costs minimum £250 - I reckon I can put one together for around £80-100 that'll perform better than even the high-end (£400) programmers. Not bad, eh?
If the companies producing gadgets aren't churning out like a few thousand a week, then the chances are that the drop in cost from them buying in bulk is more than offset by the cost of labour to make the gadget and the profit added on. If a hobbyist doesn't consider their time to be a cost in the project and only counts money spent on parts, there's still plenty you can do yourself for cheaper than buying it.
Graham.
Not even that - we just focus on building different equipment.
Maybe there's no longer the huge boom of electronics magazines, but there's still quite a few left. Everyday Practical Electronics is a good magazine for beginner and intermediate-level hobbyists, and contains many useful circuits.
The place where amateurs can't do much is in anything using low-power components. Radios, computers etc are all long-gone. But anything involving power components is still well within the reach of hobbyists. Hi-fi amps, power supplies etc can all be built more cheaply to a higher quality than commercial equipment. The simple reason is that if it's high-power, the components can't be miniaturised like low-power ones.
The other place where hobbyist stuff scores is on anything esoteric. You want an automatic plant-waterer, or a touch-panel light switch, or anything out-of-the-ordinary which you can't easily buy off the shelf, you can build it yourself.
It's very like software, really. A few large organisations (MS, the Linux kernel group, Gnome, KDE) have put lots of time into developing operating systems, window managers, utilities and office programs, so a lone individual can't hope to compete with that work on their own. But if the lone individual spots an application which hasn't yet been written, they can still crank that out and make it a success.
I honestly don't think there's that much actual research can be done by hobbyists. The main problem is that there's too many patents around, so you can unintentionally be infringing a zillion patents with your obvious ideas. The fact that the patents are garbage is neither here nor there when the lawyers come down on you.
Graham.
Re the hydrogen/fuel-cell engine, it can certainly be produced, but it's still big, bulky, inefficient, expensive, and uses large quantities of rare metals which require extraction processes which cause much pollution.
Electric cars are only a solution if local pollution in cities is a seriously big deal (eg. LA). It takes several times more fossil fuel to drive an electric car than a gasoline car; the difference is that the burning of fossil fuels occurs at a physically remote place, ie. the power station.
Re preserving seaweeds, most of it is in the middle of oceans where the "humans-pumping-crud-into-the-sea" effect is minimal. The most likely reason seaweed will have a major die-off is due to a sudden rise in ocean temperatures, and that sudden rise could be caused by - hey, here's our old friend CO2 again!
Simplicity is better. And this idea is as simple as it gets - instead of trying to influence CO2 levels indirectly by planting more trees or relying on existing trees (which no-one yet knows will work, see the latest New Scientist), get the CO2 out of the air directly. Job done.
Grab.
And NTHell are going down the toilet, big-style. See this BBC news announcement here.
;-)
You can hear the sound of the flush, it's only bcos NTHell are such a big turd that they're putting up resistance.
Grab.
Well, I just hope that /. never gets a mod "-1, stating the bleeding obvious". :-) Mind you, if it did, how many posts would survive...?
Grab.
"Sucks less" is not the position - the position is "sucks less than IE and Netscape 4". And that's a competitive position - you're explicitly saying that your category for success is to build a better browser than those two.
Python's only a competitor to every other high-level language out there. It was conceived as a language to do stuff better than other high-level languages. That's competition.
Grab.
John Ford lifts from pre-existing cowboy fiction novels.
;-)
Pre-existing cowboy fiction novels lift from every fiction cliche down the ages.
Fiction cliches lift from anything that'll interest kids round a camp-fire.
Which is interesting, bcos Homer's stuff is basically splatter-novels. I mean, the guy invented body-count! He spends like a dozen pages in a battle, but no description of how the battle goes overall, just an endless parade of "Humorles the Thracian struck down Bangles and Fiddla and left them lying in their entrails, but his armour could not stop the well-made bronze spear of Biggawanga, the Ionian brother of Idioci, who gutted him like a fish".
So do you think there were Greek versions of film snobs today, saying "Well that Homer's stories are OK for a trashy couple of hours entertainment, but they're no classics"?
Grab.
Let me know when they find that the world really _was_ created in 6 days, ok? And is floating in a bubble with water below and water above...
Thing is, Arthurian legends have only had to survive 1500 years, and they're all screwed up. Robin Hood has got nice and twisted in 800 years. Yet the Bible is supposed to be word-perfect after 4000 years?
We know from archaeology that there were quite a few kings around in the Arthurian period who'd fit the bill, and that's from getting a fair amount of archaeological evidence; many stories from many kings may have been melded together to form Arthur. Empires come and go in a century or so; all we know is that there was a fairly powerful king at one point. Ditto your Solomon - except that here, we only know that there was a king, and there's nothing else. There could have been 1 Solomon or 1000, we don't know.
The New Testament is full of inaccuracies. Jesus's lineage to David is incredibly tenuous. The date of Jesus's birth can't be fixed, bcos the Roman governor mentioned wasn't around at the time of a census. A whole bunch of the "prophesies" mentioned by the four main writers are junk, if you cross-reference them back. And then there's the theory (most famously used by Neal Stephenson in "Snow Crash") that the whole Pentecostal thing is fiction.
And never mind the (in)famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which pretty effectively put a dampener on any theory that the history of Biblical events has been passed down without any loss of information...
Grab.
Yeah, pretty grim.
For the benefit of that guy, if he's reading...
1) Most of your water will go straight in and straight out again without doing much cooling. A heatsink should force the water to go all the way round the heatsink - try adding some baffles inside the box to improve that.
2) Have you never heard of hose clips? 50c each and 100% reliable at clamping off flexible hoses without leakage.
3) Get some heatsink compound between the heatsink and the processor. Without it, a fair chunk of the heat is never even getting to the heatsink, so the whole point of having a nice efficient heatsink is wasted.
Grab.
George Soros the billionaire who made his wealth in the global economy says that it's a good thing. Well, duh! you think the turkeys are going to vote for Christmas?!
Certainly there's good things about globalisation, like getting poorer countries richer by global companies opening offices over there. Ireland is a good example - piss-poor 20-30 years back, now a thriving technology centre trading off the intelligence of its workforce. If you're contracting your coding out, the result should be the same whether the coders are 5 minutes round the corner or in Outer Mongolia. And that gets more money into Outer Mongolia (or wherever).
But it also means you're competing against ppl in other countries for work, which screws up richer countries. Why hire a team of American engineers at $50k each when you can hire a team of British engineers at £25k ($35K) each? Or why hire a team of British engineers when you can hire a team of Ukrainian engineers for $10k each?
Grab.
Human cloning where clones are carried to term is illegal in the US and all European countries, due to the dangers for the cloned infant. The only countries in which this is not illegal are Third World countries where the ppl (and more importantly the government) will do anything to feed themselves.
So he's getting round the laws in all the First World countries by using test subjects from Third World countries - up to this point, he's used 5000 women to get one impregnation. That's 4999 women miscarrying. That's ethical for sure. Suppose you had a vaccine which you thought might be dangerous - would it be right to go to Ethiopia and hand out $10 to everyone who'll try it for you? bcos that's exactly what he's doing. I'll grant you it's not illegal in that country, but there's plenty of places where murder, rape and torture are not illegal - it doesn't mean that we should go there to try them out!
Mengele conducted experiments on humans to find out what would happen, without consideration of the fate of those humans. Antinori is doing exactly the same. In labs, most cloned embryos are miscarried; of the ones that are carried to term, many are stillborn, or are deformed and must be destroyed. The only clone of a largish mammal, Dolly the sheep, is suffering from premature aging and no-one yet knows whether this is just a coincidence or whether it's a fundamental issue with cloning. And with this total lack of information, Antinori is cloning a human to see what will happen. The only certainty is that 4999 women have suffered the pain first of the operation and then of the miscarriage; whether further pain is in store for the child is as yet unknown, since no research anywhere has proved it safe for lab rats, never mind humans. Does this sound like a valid scientific position to you?
There's nothing wrong with wanting your name in the papers. But if he's prepared to instigate the successor to thalidomide by taking a chance on producing many deformed children in his quest for fame and fortune (and more likely the latter), then I think he's seriously screwed up.
I've no doubt the scientific community will learn a lot from what he's doing. Mengele and his friends taught us just about everything we know today about the body's reaction to freezing to death - but at a tremendous cost. And they too thought they were doing a great job in advancing the cause of science. The point of the laws against carrying clones to term is to prevent another Mengele going for scientific knowledge at the cost of human life.
Grab.