I cannot conceive of a circumstance where I would be intimidated by the abundant presence of guns, while in the absence of belligerent people. The presence of belligerent people on the other hand, may intimidate me without the presence of guns. It's clear to me that guns are not what make a place dangerous.
Ah, but all people should be equally valued in the eyes of the law. That's the point. Laws should not favor the rich over the poor, or one ethnicity over another. While one person may be born into wealth, and their possession of it, therefore a given, another person born into poverty should not be barred from obtaining wealth through hard work and careful planning. When laws exist that effectively preclude the poor from gaining wealth, we now have inequality in the law, and that is what the article describes.
What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.
Because the telcos all have their own bottomless pit full of money, and uprooting their entire infrastructure should really just be a drop in the bucket to them.
If the telcos are to be forced to replace their infrastructure, then they should be subsidized for doing so. At the same time, there should be no subsidies of that sort that should be coming from our government until our politicians can get their shit together and get our treasury into a manageable state. In the mean time, it is reasonable for telcos to charge a fee to customers who want them to install fiber to their homes.
This politician's point isn't about making children read his favorite books because they're his favorites. He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study. I seldom agree with politicians, but this guy is absolutely right-- if we want to improve ourselves as a species, we need to get our youth interested in these subjects. Getting them to read Science Fiction is one good approach.
Our population grows at an exponential rate. Strictly speaking, we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be. We probably won't run out of room before food production can no longer keep up. We may find a more efficient way to produce food that can keep up, but the fact is that this will only slow down the problem. When we do run out of room (or approach that point, anyway), illness will spread quite readily, the end result being plagues, regardless of our collective hygiene. We could solve this by having regularly scheduled mass death events every few hundred years, such as nuclear wars, or maybe we can get playful with it and do some kind of gladiatorial games. Perhaps better yet, is to just get a large portion of our population to colonize new worlds. That's perhaps the only practical solution that doesn't directly involve people dieing.
This solution doesn't address the environment. This is not meant to be a solution for the environment. This is a solution for human kind. There's no reason why we can't continue to develop environmentally friendly technologies while working toward colonizing other worlds. In fact, I'd say the goals are quite compatible, as technologies which require fewer resources will contribute nicely to founding new civilizations.
Steam for Linux isn't really about bringing games to existing Linux users. This is preparation for their Steambox hardware. They're creating a market for viable game development on Linux, so that when they release the Steambox, developers won't be hesitant to develop for it. By using Linux, they don't have to provide Windows licenses for every device, thereby keeping the cost of the device down.
So you see, the existing Linux userbase really isn't an important factor in this, though that it does exist and they are interested in games, certainly furthers their goals.
The Wii sold 99 million units (making it quite easily the most popular of the generation), and was the least powerful unit of the generation. The PlayStation 3 sold 70 million units (making it arguably the least popular of the generation, though the Xbox 360's tendency toward hardware failure may very well make up for the 5 million unit difference between it and the PS3), and was the most powerful unit of the generation. Modern video game graphics are well beyond the point where we need to be desperately concerned with the limit of simultaneous colors or polygons. Nintendo is just the only one whose marketing department acknowledges this.
If you need a spreadsheet, then use a Spreadsheet format. If you need a Presentation, then consider a format appropriate for that task. RTFs are for text documents that require formatting, and this injudicious mingling of datatypes is exactly what's wrong with Microsoft Office document formats.
That's a problem with Adobe's support for Flash in Ubuntu, not specifically a problem with Ubuntu, itself. Were Ubuntu the popular OS instead of Windows, likely you'd see the problem in Windows but not Ubuntu.
That idea works well in an ideal system where everyone earns an income within a fairly narrow range. In the real world, however, the range of individual income goes from losses each year to millions each year. Sticking with an income tax is really the way to go.
I dunno, I've got only 2GB of RAM in my machine, and it does just fine. That's not to say I don't notice the lack, but I can watch a movie on one monitor while playing a modern game on the other, without either suffering significantly. I think that 2GB is the absolute minimum I'd build a computer with.
What makes you think that removing the money will stop the weapons and the violence? This isn't organized crime. Money is not the motive. The motive is crazy. Religious crazy, narcissistic crazy, and maybe even some good old fashioned just plain crazy. Without the money, some plans will change but the violence will continue, regardless. A man who commits violent acts once he has a weapon in his hand had violence in his heart, before he had a gun in his hand.
If you want to promote peace in Africa, then you must first identify what groups of people are the source of it. When you have gathered that information, you may then choose whether to deal with them by diplomacy or force. Anything else is an impotent effort.
Yes, but we are speaking English, not Latin. In English, Telepathy refers specifically to the direct transference of thought messages from one mind to another mind, without first traveling through intermediate mediums such as text or speech, perhaps even disregarding the need of language. To suggest that using a cellphone is a form of telepathy, is much the same as suggesting that shouting to a person across a large room from you is a form of telepathy. While this is apparently true for the definition of "telepathy" that you present, but this definition is not usefully distinguished from another established English term, "communication," which simply means to convey an idea or concept from one person to any number of other people over any range by any means or medium.
The concept of "Technology-enabled telepathy" therefore requires that one person be able to exchange thoughts with another person directly, with only the technology as an intermediate medium.
I design cabinets and store fixtures. It's what I do to earn a living. My company makes mid to high-end products, and we've made store fixtures for Verizon Wireless, Supercuts, Restoration Hardware, Zadig & Voltaire, Macy's and Briggs & Riley. I can tell you about the manufacturing process.
Tool changes are meaningless. CNC machines have multiple pockets to hold tools, and can switch to a new tool in short order. In a typical design, the programs I send to the machinists will have 3 different tools (5mm brad for line boring, hinge mounting holes and drawer slide mounting holes, 7mm Lance for confirmat connector holes or 8mm brad for dowel holes, and a 1/2" router compression bit, sometimes upshear, depending on the material, to cut the profile). Dowels will be installed in a different machine, or 5mm holes 35mm deep will be drilled in edges to accommodate confirmats, depending on the chosen construction method. Later, if a tool has to be changed by hand, it takes seconds, and the assemblers don't think twice about it. Tool changes are cheap (admittedly, they can take a few minutes on the panel saw, but doing so is fairly uncommon, as most wood will generally be cut by the same blade).
Even the cost of most of the material is relatively trivial. A 4'x8' sheet of Industrial Grade Particle Board costs less than $25, and it can be had pre-laminated for less than $40, maybe even less than $30, depending on the laminate (though some types of laminate can bring the price up considerably). Melamine is very cheap.
The big price of things is in labor. When I put a cabinet out into the shop, if it's rushed, it may take 12 working hours to get from the CNC machines and panel saw, down to Packing at the other end of the shop. Doweled construction is faster than confirmat construction, but not always appropriate (the joints are relatively weak, and if the piece of furniture gets moved around a lot, it will pull itself apart).
Very fine work will take much longer. A pair of 12' tall by 6' wide hardwood doors (which we do from time to time; we have a retail customer who likes to put them on their stores) may take several weeks. Mind you, a pair of doors that size, while it may seem simple, is in fact, not. You can't just nail a few pieces of milled lumber together, stain it and ship it out. The doors are very large, and require a metal frame to support the weight, which must be welded together. The doors are then built around the frame. That's just the simple of it, not even accounting for hinge mounting locations (which must be attached to the frame, not the wood, or else the frame is pointless added weight), knockers, and so forth. That sort of work is done mostly by hand, as there is no practical way to machine the parts. Those sorts of projects become very expensive.
In any event, the number of machines used is determined in the design phase, which is completely separate from the assembly phase. Normally, any given part will go through a CNC machine or panel saw, then through a banding machine, and finally through either another CNC machine (with different capabilities) or through a doweling machine. As for hand-finished edges... The banding machine does the bulk of the work, but the operator still has to smooth the rough edges. Plus, the machine only works with straight parts. If there's an irregularly shaped edge, it has to be banded by hand, which is very common on countertops.
Carpentry has thinned out. The old fashioned way, is for a single man to plan a cabinet, cut the parts, and assemble them, possibly with the aid of an assistant or apprentice. It's not a bad method by any means, but it is slow, and difficult to do on a large scale. Now, the design work is handled by one man, cutting the parts by another, and a third does the assembly. Each man can specialize in their part of the process, and come to do it very fast. This is Henry Ford's assembly line methodology at work. We produced 8 stores worth of good quality desks and fixtures for just one customer (while making products for other customers concurrently), in the last month. This is without operating at capacity. I should also point out, that I can design cabinet parts with a precision down to 0.01mm. Try that with hand tools, instead of CNC machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I cannot conceive of a circumstance where I would be intimidated by the abundant presence of guns, while in the absence of belligerent people. The presence of belligerent people on the other hand, may intimidate me without the presence of guns. It's clear to me that guns are not what make a place dangerous.
Ah, but all people should be equally valued in the eyes of the law. That's the point. Laws should not favor the rich over the poor, or one ethnicity over another. While one person may be born into wealth, and their possession of it, therefore a given, another person born into poverty should not be barred from obtaining wealth through hard work and careful planning. When laws exist that effectively preclude the poor from gaining wealth, we now have inequality in the law, and that is what the article describes.
A quick couple of searches doesn't seem to immediately turn up a definition for "countant", but a Count is in charge of a County.
Age of Consent in the US is established at the State level. It ranges from 16 to 18, but I believe that 18 is the most common.
What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.
Because the telcos all have their own bottomless pit full of money, and uprooting their entire infrastructure should really just be a drop in the bucket to them.
If the telcos are to be forced to replace their infrastructure, then they should be subsidized for doing so. At the same time, there should be no subsidies of that sort that should be coming from our government until our politicians can get their shit together and get our treasury into a manageable state. In the mean time, it is reasonable for telcos to charge a fee to customers who want them to install fiber to their homes.
If all DRM were implemented the way it is implemented with Steam, then we wouldn't be having such heated arguments about DRM.
Strictly speaking, sound waves are not made of atoms, but of energy passing through atoms.
This politician's point isn't about making children read his favorite books because they're his favorites. He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study. I seldom agree with politicians, but this guy is absolutely right-- if we want to improve ourselves as a species, we need to get our youth interested in these subjects. Getting them to read Science Fiction is one good approach.
Our population grows at an exponential rate. Strictly speaking, we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be. We probably won't run out of room before food production can no longer keep up. We may find a more efficient way to produce food that can keep up, but the fact is that this will only slow down the problem. When we do run out of room (or approach that point, anyway), illness will spread quite readily, the end result being plagues, regardless of our collective hygiene. We could solve this by having regularly scheduled mass death events every few hundred years, such as nuclear wars, or maybe we can get playful with it and do some kind of gladiatorial games. Perhaps better yet, is to just get a large portion of our population to colonize new worlds. That's perhaps the only practical solution that doesn't directly involve people dieing.
This solution doesn't address the environment. This is not meant to be a solution for the environment. This is a solution for human kind. There's no reason why we can't continue to develop environmentally friendly technologies while working toward colonizing other worlds. In fact, I'd say the goals are quite compatible, as technologies which require fewer resources will contribute nicely to founding new civilizations.
Steam for Linux isn't really about bringing games to existing Linux users. This is preparation for their Steambox hardware. They're creating a market for viable game development on Linux, so that when they release the Steambox, developers won't be hesitant to develop for it. By using Linux, they don't have to provide Windows licenses for every device, thereby keeping the cost of the device down.
So you see, the existing Linux userbase really isn't an important factor in this, though that it does exist and they are interested in games, certainly furthers their goals.
The Wii sold 99 million units (making it quite easily the most popular of the generation), and was the least powerful unit of the generation. The PlayStation 3 sold 70 million units (making it arguably the least popular of the generation, though the Xbox 360's tendency toward hardware failure may very well make up for the 5 million unit difference between it and the PS3), and was the most powerful unit of the generation. Modern video game graphics are well beyond the point where we need to be desperately concerned with the limit of simultaneous colors or polygons. Nintendo is just the only one whose marketing department acknowledges this.
If you could make a thing go away by making it illegal, why would you need to ban guns?
Are there any print video game magazines left? That are still printing physical copies, that is. I'm not aware of any.
Game Informer is still being pushed pretty heavily by GameStop.
If you need a spreadsheet, then use a Spreadsheet format. If you need a Presentation, then consider a format appropriate for that task. RTFs are for text documents that require formatting, and this injudicious mingling of datatypes is exactly what's wrong with Microsoft Office document formats.
That's a problem with Adobe's support for Flash in Ubuntu, not specifically a problem with Ubuntu, itself. Were Ubuntu the popular OS instead of Windows, likely you'd see the problem in Windows but not Ubuntu.
RTF. It has strong standardization, and so far as I know, it's universally readable.
Also, it's much easier to pass legislation for a fee, than it is to pass legislation for a tax.
We really do need punctuation to denote sarcasm on the internet.
That idea works well in an ideal system where everyone earns an income within a fairly narrow range. In the real world, however, the range of individual income goes from losses each year to millions each year. Sticking with an income tax is really the way to go.
I dunno, I've got only 2GB of RAM in my machine, and it does just fine. That's not to say I don't notice the lack, but I can watch a movie on one monitor while playing a modern game on the other, without either suffering significantly. I think that 2GB is the absolute minimum I'd build a computer with.
What makes you think that removing the money will stop the weapons and the violence? This isn't organized crime. Money is not the motive. The motive is crazy. Religious crazy, narcissistic crazy, and maybe even some good old fashioned just plain crazy. Without the money, some plans will change but the violence will continue, regardless. A man who commits violent acts once he has a weapon in his hand had violence in his heart, before he had a gun in his hand.
If you want to promote peace in Africa, then you must first identify what groups of people are the source of it. When you have gathered that information, you may then choose whether to deal with them by diplomacy or force. Anything else is an impotent effort.
Yes, but we are speaking English, not Latin. In English, Telepathy refers specifically to the direct transference of thought messages from one mind to another mind, without first traveling through intermediate mediums such as text or speech, perhaps even disregarding the need of language. To suggest that using a cellphone is a form of telepathy, is much the same as suggesting that shouting to a person across a large room from you is a form of telepathy. While this is apparently true for the definition of "telepathy" that you present, but this definition is not usefully distinguished from another established English term, "communication," which simply means to convey an idea or concept from one person to any number of other people over any range by any means or medium.
The concept of "Technology-enabled telepathy" therefore requires that one person be able to exchange thoughts with another person directly, with only the technology as an intermediate medium.
Should the Windows app store look for malware that affects Apple or Linux?
If they are going to be selling apps which may be expected to have an executable component on Apple or Linux machines, then yes.
I design cabinets and store fixtures. It's what I do to earn a living. My company makes mid to high-end products, and we've made store fixtures for Verizon Wireless, Supercuts, Restoration Hardware, Zadig & Voltaire, Macy's and Briggs & Riley. I can tell you about the manufacturing process.
Tool changes are meaningless. CNC machines have multiple pockets to hold tools, and can switch to a new tool in short order. In a typical design, the programs I send to the machinists will have 3 different tools (5mm brad for line boring, hinge mounting holes and drawer slide mounting holes, 7mm Lance for confirmat connector holes or 8mm brad for dowel holes, and a 1/2" router compression bit, sometimes upshear, depending on the material, to cut the profile). Dowels will be installed in a different machine, or 5mm holes 35mm deep will be drilled in edges to accommodate confirmats, depending on the chosen construction method. Later, if a tool has to be changed by hand, it takes seconds, and the assemblers don't think twice about it. Tool changes are cheap (admittedly, they can take a few minutes on the panel saw, but doing so is fairly uncommon, as most wood will generally be cut by the same blade).
Even the cost of most of the material is relatively trivial. A 4'x8' sheet of Industrial Grade Particle Board costs less than $25, and it can be had pre-laminated for less than $40, maybe even less than $30, depending on the laminate (though some types of laminate can bring the price up considerably). Melamine is very cheap.
The big price of things is in labor. When I put a cabinet out into the shop, if it's rushed, it may take 12 working hours to get from the CNC machines and panel saw, down to Packing at the other end of the shop. Doweled construction is faster than confirmat construction, but not always appropriate (the joints are relatively weak, and if the piece of furniture gets moved around a lot, it will pull itself apart).
Very fine work will take much longer. A pair of 12' tall by 6' wide hardwood doors (which we do from time to time; we have a retail customer who likes to put them on their stores) may take several weeks. Mind you, a pair of doors that size, while it may seem simple, is in fact, not. You can't just nail a few pieces of milled lumber together, stain it and ship it out. The doors are very large, and require a metal frame to support the weight, which must be welded together. The doors are then built around the frame. That's just the simple of it, not even accounting for hinge mounting locations (which must be attached to the frame, not the wood, or else the frame is pointless added weight), knockers, and so forth. That sort of work is done mostly by hand, as there is no practical way to machine the parts. Those sorts of projects become very expensive.
In any event, the number of machines used is determined in the design phase, which is completely separate from the assembly phase. Normally, any given part will go through a CNC machine or panel saw, then through a banding machine, and finally through either another CNC machine (with different capabilities) or through a doweling machine. As for hand-finished edges... The banding machine does the bulk of the work, but the operator still has to smooth the rough edges. Plus, the machine only works with straight parts. If there's an irregularly shaped edge, it has to be banded by hand, which is very common on countertops.
Carpentry has thinned out. The old fashioned way, is for a single man to plan a cabinet, cut the parts, and assemble them, possibly with the aid of an assistant or apprentice. It's not a bad method by any means, but it is slow, and difficult to do on a large scale. Now, the design work is handled by one man, cutting the parts by another, and a third does the assembly. Each man can specialize in their part of the process, and come to do it very fast. This is Henry Ford's assembly line methodology at work. We produced 8 stores worth of good quality desks and fixtures for just one customer (while making products for other customers concurrently), in the last month. This is without operating at capacity. I should also point out, that I can design cabinet parts with a precision down to 0.01mm. Try that with hand tools, instead of CNC machines.