Suppose the temperate band moves 5 degrees towards the poles, what happens? Would there be the same amount of arable land, or more, or less?
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY has the slightest idea. And even worse, nobody will ever have. You see, climate is the poster child for dynamic complex systems, and is inherently unpredictable beyond a few days. Climate is obviously affected by global mean temperature, but is not the same thing. A lot of people here seems to think that a warmer Earth will be just like now, but you know, warmer. In reality, even a small change of mean temperature is going to cause massive disruptions in climate patterns, but we have no way to predict them.
This "war-mongering theocracy," which permits the practice or non-practice of any religion just established a giant nominally Muslim democracy
Democracy? In which alternate universe? FOX News planet? Marlin, you had a vote in the half of an OCCUPIED COUNTRY that was not fully absorbed with a civil war and resistence to the invader. You call the result democracy?
Are you free to practice (or not practice) any religion in your country?
Yes, we are. Since 1810. And we abolished slavery in 1813, with no civil war. And we weren't lynching blacks in 1950. And we weren't stuffing ballots in 2000. No big deal, no other civilized country was either. Except for one. Do you study History of the World in school? From here it looks like you don't.
When was the last time your country replaced a dictator in another nation with a democratic government?
1868, and the resentment, bitterness and plain hate that the experience brought took almost a century to fade. Maybe that's why we have avoided invading countries since then. (And their dictator was a REAL bad ass dictator, and a REAL menace to neighbouring countries). Or maybe is just that we don't like being hated, and you are so used to it that you don't mind.
a small but vocal minority of so-called Christians do push their own agendas, but most of us ignore them
Pity your government doesn't.
I don't believe that the Republicans serve them, although the Republicans do tolerate them.
Once upon a time, German industrialists really believed that they were using this funny guy Hitler. (Godwin's Law exception)
I don't know what country you are in, but if their intellectual idols are Castro, the French, and Chavez, then it has some serious problems.
Friend, ALL countries have serious problems, but not every one CREATES their problems. And, just to keep the discussion honest: I didn't say that Castro et al were our idols. Lame intent to create a strawman.Mature people don't have idols. I really said they were clowns, but any clown looks good compared to Bush and his gang (textual)
And no, it doesn't really matter: at least not to us.
Can you spell denial? D-E-N-I-A-L. And delusional? All countries have had good, bad and worse governments. No intelligent person think that his country is always right. Most people doesn't confuse his government with his country, and don't take offense when others are less than adoring. Live with it: your country's finest hour was in WWII and aftermath, and has been going slowly downhill since then, with ups and downs, like everybody else. Now it's the pits. Maybe you recover sanity, and avoid the worse, and maybe not, but don't fool yourselves, there's trouble ahead.
Can someone explain what the problem with the current situation is?
The problem with the current situation is that the rest of the world just doesn't trust the USA anymore, and is positioning for a future in wich this kind of confrontation is going to be more and more frequent.
I'm going to repeat something a lot of previous postres have said: US citizens seem to be unaware of the damage the Bush administration has done and keeps doing to the US image abroad. When we say that the worst danger to peace comes from a war-mongering theocracy, we're thinking about the USA, not Iran.
Here, the people in the street is saying: "you see, Castro was right all the time". "The French were right". "Chavez is right". Any clown looks better than Bush and his gang.
A tragedy, even if some of you think it doesn't matter. It matters.
The DoD is not developing an unmanned ground assault vehicle, and they do not state that explicitly at all. They are looking to procure an unmanned cargo carrying vehicle by 2015. You will, of course, probably point to how everything in the military is designed to support operations and is therefore contributing to killing people, but that'd just be weaseling. You clearly thought they were developing killer robots. Let's hear it for reading comprehension! Moron.
So let's see...
You read the DoD PR, believe it, and call the other guy a moron?
My suggestion is just to follow the mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox approach and break the suite up and develop the components separately.......... The Office suite as a monolithic application was really a marketing innovation, not something that was user driven.
I'm out of moderating points, so please accept my virtual +1, Insightful.
What amazes me is that I had to read this far until someone points the obvious solution. (BTW, being obvious doesn't make it any less true)
OTOH, if I lose my luggage, I've only lost 3-5 books. If I lost an e-book, I might lose 4,000+ books!
Backups are your friend.;-)
Seriously, that's why e-books should be kept only as unencumbered TXT files.(And why the e-book reader should be CHEAP, meaning a no-frills under U$S100 gadget).
Why would people replace their books with the same thing, but digital? Long established technologies don't get overthrown by slight improvements, but radical departures.
Because a good e-book reader replaces no one book, but a trunk full of books... Tomorrow I'm going to spend two weeks in the mountains. Right now I'm doing triage to the pile of books I want to read while there, discarding, discarding, discarding... I'd kill for a good, simple, cheap no frills TXT reader, with capacity for 50/100 books.
A three inch by four inch by one inch square can provide 40 or 50 hours of entertainment...
Almost nobody will want to publish without DRM and even then they'll be afraid the DRM scheme will be broken.
DRM for books is such a ludicrous concept that I can't see why it keeps being discussed. A book is composed of text. If every other hack fails, you can always type it by hand as a TXT file. Maybe typing a whole book (gasp) looks like a Gargantuan task here, bust be assured that thousands and thousands of secretaries and dactilographers are doing it at this precise moment, and have been doing it for decades. By gosh, people has been copying books by hand for centuries. Once one person (or group, see Gutemberg project) has a book converted to TXT, it stays converted, and you are free to share it with a million of your best friends. If you're going to obey copyright laws is up to you and the laws of the country you happen to live.
And that is the reason the publishing houses are going to fight tooth and nail to prevent a simple, cheap portable TXT reader. they are interested in making us believe than an e-book must have color, DRM, complex functions, the works. Because you cant make this monster CHEAP.
Indeed. Microsoft is going to have to rely heavily on its marketing dept. in order for Vista to sell.
May I suggest there's a confusion about the meaning of "sell"? Vista is not going to be sold, but is going to be preloaded with almost every new computer. MSFT sells to OEMs, not to people. You and me sure try a new Linux distro every couple of months, but in the Windows Universe users just don't change OSes. And they tend to keep using the computers until they fall apart. My wife uses three PCs in her small business: one Win95, two Win98. They're really old, but they do the job. There are millions and millions like her out there. On the other side, big businesses have preplanned replacement of hardware, on a three, four or five year cycle that's almost set on stone.
So my point is that for MSFT no new product is going to be either a blockbuster or an abject failure. They're going to follow the hardware replacement cycle, meaning they have an income flow guaranteed, but no upside neither.
My guess is that this hoopla about Vista is just a smokescreen directed to their shareholders, because when they realise that MSFT is not going to be a growth company anymore the P/E will have to adjust, and is going to get ugly. I'd bet a stock price of 15 in one or two years.
I don't need to go anywhere else. I can look right here on Slashdot. Not only do the various readers of Slashdot (myself included) have spelling and grammar mistakes, the "editors" do as well.
Dude, the implicit comparation you're doing is rather disingenuous. Slashdot is not the equivalent of the New York Times, or the Atlantic Monthly, but of a bunch of random guys in a bar. For such BoRGIAB I found it amazingly literate, specially reading at +3.
And, before someone nitpicks my grammar, yes, English is not my first language ( not even the second).
Good post (pity I'm out of moderating points), but I'm wondering about this part:
We're starting to see the effects of this with the ongoing culture war (don't flame me, I didn't coin the term) in the US -
Why would anybody flame you?
At least looking from the outside, is pretty obvious that the USA is undergoing a raging culture war, with profound political consequences, internal and external. The rest of the world is looking at your country amazed, scratching heads, and wondering... Once upon a time, the URSS looked solid too.
I think the problem we have here is the definition of "passing" the Turing Test. Turing himself used the term very specifically, as in "passing = fooling the interogator", but he never really went into what constitutes an adequate interrogator!
Maybe we must stop thinking of the Turing test as an "yes or no" problem, but as a "relative" one. Who does the program fools? What percentile of testers?
When the program fools everyone, I, for one, will welcome our new test-passing overlords.
Slashdotters often think that because they have the motivation and the skills to jump through hoops to defeat DRM, then the public at large must also have this same motivation and skill. But, let's face it: when it comes to things technical, Slashdot readers are often up above the 90th percentile.
But the point is, security has to be defeated just once. Then the guy passes the unencrypted result (hopefully) to his 10K best friends.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose the temperate band moves 5 degrees towards the poles, what happens? Would there be the same amount of arable land, or more, or less?
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY has the slightest idea.
And even worse, nobody will ever have.
You see, climate is the poster child for dynamic complex systems, and is inherently unpredictable beyond a few days.
Climate is obviously affected by global mean temperature, but is not the same thing.
A lot of people here seems to think that a warmer Earth will be just like now, but you know, warmer.
In reality, even a small change of mean temperature is going to cause massive disruptions in climate patterns, but we have no way to predict them.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
This "war-mongering theocracy," which permits the practice or non-practice of any religion just established a giant nominally Muslim democracy
Democracy? In which alternate universe? FOX News planet?
Marlin, you had a vote in the half of an OCCUPIED COUNTRY that was not fully absorbed with a civil war and resistence to the invader. You call the result democracy?
Are you free to practice (or not practice) any religion in your country?
Yes, we are. Since 1810.
And we abolished slavery in 1813, with no civil war.
And we weren't lynching blacks in 1950.
And we weren't stuffing ballots in 2000.
No big deal, no other civilized country was either.
Except for one.
Do you study History of the World in school?
From here it looks like you don't.
When was the last time your country replaced a dictator in another nation with a democratic government?
1868, and the resentment, bitterness and plain hate that the experience brought took almost a century to fade.
Maybe that's why we have avoided invading countries since then. (And their dictator was a REAL bad ass dictator, and a REAL menace to neighbouring countries).
Or maybe is just that we don't like being hated, and you are so used to it that you don't mind.
a small but vocal minority of so-called Christians do push their own agendas, but most of us ignore them
Pity your government doesn't.
I don't believe that the Republicans serve them, although the Republicans do tolerate them.
Once upon a time, German industrialists really believed that they were using this funny guy Hitler. (Godwin's Law exception)
I don't know what country you are in, but if their intellectual idols are Castro, the French, and Chavez, then it has some serious problems.
Friend, ALL countries have serious problems, but not every one CREATES their problems.
And, just to keep the discussion honest: I didn't say that Castro et al were our idols. Lame intent to create a strawman.Mature people don't have idols.
I really said they were clowns, but any clown looks good compared to Bush and his gang (textual)
And no, it doesn't really matter: at least not to us.
Can you spell denial? D-E-N-I-A-L.
And delusional?
All countries have had good, bad and worse governments.
No intelligent person think that his country is always right.
Most people doesn't confuse his government with his country, and don't take offense when others are less than adoring.
Live with it: your country's finest hour was in WWII and aftermath, and has been going slowly downhill since then, with ups and downs, like everybody else. Now it's the pits. Maybe you recover sanity, and avoid the worse, and maybe not, but don't fool yourselves, there's trouble ahead.
Cheers,
Can someone explain what the problem with the current situation is?
The problem with the current situation is that the rest of the world just doesn't trust the USA anymore, and is positioning for a future in wich this kind of confrontation is going to be more and more frequent.
I'm going to repeat something a lot of previous postres have said: US citizens seem to be unaware of the damage the Bush administration has done and keeps doing to the US image abroad. When we say that the worst danger to peace comes from a war-mongering theocracy, we're thinking about the USA, not Iran.
Here, the people in the street is saying: "you see, Castro was right all the time". "The French were right". "Chavez is right". Any clown looks better than Bush and his gang.
A tragedy, even if some of you think it doesn't matter. It matters.
The DoD is not developing an unmanned ground assault vehicle, and they do not state that explicitly at all. They are looking to procure an unmanned cargo carrying vehicle by 2015. You will, of course, probably point to how everything in the military is designed to support operations and is therefore contributing to killing people, but that'd just be weaseling. You clearly thought they were developing killer robots. Let's hear it for reading comprehension! Moron.
So let's see...
You read the DoD PR, believe it, and call the other guy a moron?
There's a bridge here that may interest you.
Cheers,
Y Mendieta?
Saludos,
Carlos Cesar (Tigre)
To earn some extra money?
To prevent competing office suites from gaining traction?
To completely own the Bloated Office Behemot (tm) segment?
To keep a foot in the door if some business goes the Linux way?
Windows being MSFT's main product is getting more and more debatable. IMHO, Office is, by a sizable margin.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
My suggestion is just to follow the mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox approach and break the suite up and develop the components separately. ... ... ... The Office suite as a monolithic application was really a marketing innovation, not something that was user driven.
I'm out of moderating points, so please accept my virtual +1, Insightful.
What amazes me is that I had to read this far until someone points the obvious solution.
(BTW, being obvious doesn't make it any less true)
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
OTOH, if I lose my luggage, I've only lost 3-5 books. If I lost an e-book, I might lose 4,000+ books!
;-)
Backups are your friend.
Seriously, that's why e-books should be kept only as unencumbered TXT files.(And why the e-book reader should be CHEAP, meaning a no-frills under U$S100 gadget).
Cheers,
Will ebooks replace books? Maybe not for the vast majority of the public, but for me, tehy pretty much already have.
I feel you pain. Last time I counted I had 4000+ paper books, and space is an issue.
I travel with 10/12 books, and weight is an issue.
Don't you have the feeling that people posting here about e-books aren't really heavy book users?
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Why would people replace their books with the same thing, but digital? Long established technologies don't get overthrown by slight improvements, but radical departures.
Because a good e-book reader replaces no one book, but a trunk full of books...
Tomorrow I'm going to spend two weeks in the mountains. Right now I'm doing triage to the pile of books I want to read while there, discarding, discarding, discarding...
I'd kill for a good, simple, cheap no frills TXT reader, with capacity for 50/100 books.
A three inch by four inch by one inch square can provide 40 or 50 hours of entertainment...
Wow, a slow reader, aren't you?
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Almost nobody will want to publish without DRM and even then they'll be afraid the DRM scheme will be broken.
DRM for books is such a ludicrous concept that I can't see why it keeps being discussed.
A book is composed of text. If every other hack fails, you can always type it by hand as a TXT file.
Maybe typing a whole book (gasp) looks like a Gargantuan task here, bust be assured that thousands and thousands of secretaries and dactilographers are doing it at this precise moment, and have been doing it for decades. By gosh, people has been copying books by hand for centuries.
Once one person (or group, see Gutemberg project) has a book converted to TXT, it stays converted, and you are free to share it with a million of your best friends. If you're going to obey copyright laws is up to you and the laws of the country you happen to live.
And that is the reason the publishing houses are going to fight tooth and nail to prevent a simple, cheap portable TXT reader. they are interested in making us believe than an e-book must have color, DRM, complex functions, the works. Because you cant make this monster CHEAP.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Indeed. Microsoft is going to have to rely heavily on its marketing dept. in order for Vista to sell.
May I suggest there's a confusion about the meaning of "sell"?
Vista is not going to be sold, but is going to be preloaded with almost every new computer.
MSFT sells to OEMs, not to people. You and me sure try a new Linux distro every couple of months, but in the Windows Universe users just don't change OSes. And they tend to keep using the computers until they fall apart.
My wife uses three PCs in her small business: one Win95, two Win98. They're really old, but they do the job. There are millions and millions like her out there.
On the other side, big businesses have preplanned replacement of hardware, on a three, four or five year cycle that's almost set on stone.
So my point is that for MSFT no new product is going to be either a blockbuster or an abject failure. They're going to follow the hardware replacement cycle, meaning they have an income flow guaranteed, but no upside neither.
My guess is that this hoopla about Vista is just a smokescreen directed to their shareholders, because when they realise that MSFT is not going to be a growth company anymore the P/E will have to adjust, and is going to get ugly.
I'd bet a stock price of 15 in one or two years.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Or are they merely collecting people and figuring out what to do with them later? From the outside looking in, it sure seems like the latter.
If you have money, it really isn't bad strategy.
I'm sure we can think of a lot far worse ones.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
I don't need to go anywhere else. I can look right here on Slashdot. Not only do the various readers of Slashdot (myself included) have spelling and grammar mistakes, the "editors" do as well.
Dude, the implicit comparation you're doing is rather disingenuous.
Slashdot is not the equivalent of the New York Times, or the Atlantic Monthly, but of a bunch of random guys in a bar.
For such BoRGIAB I found it amazingly literate, specially reading at +3.
And, before someone nitpicks my grammar, yes, English is not my first language ( not even the second).
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Good post (pity I'm out of moderating points), but I'm wondering about this part:
We're starting to see the effects of this with the ongoing culture war (don't flame me, I didn't coin the term) in the US -
Why would anybody flame you?
At least looking from the outside, is pretty obvious that the USA is undergoing a raging culture war, with profound political consequences, internal and external.
The rest of the world is looking at your country amazed, scratching heads, and wondering...
Once upon a time, the URSS looked solid too.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
What do you think is better:
a) Slashdot teenager style:
Tim Berners-Lee (if you need explanation, you're reading the wrong site) is interviewed
b) Profesional looking style:
Tim Berners-Lee is interviewed.
It's your choice.
Well, if the choice is beween
a) Tongue in cheek, establishes a bond, friendly,
or
b) Pedantic, uptight,
I'd choose the a) guy every time, specially for a beer after work.
Hint:
a) is not teenager style, is good people skills and
b) is not professional, just insecure.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
I think the problem we have here is the definition of "passing" the Turing Test. Turing himself used the term very specifically, as in "passing = fooling the interogator", but he never really went into what constitutes an adequate interrogator!
Maybe we must stop thinking of the Turing test as an "yes or no" problem, but as a "relative" one.
Who does the program fools?
What percentile of testers?
When the program fools everyone, I, for one, will welcome our new test-passing overlords.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Do you think any office worker who puts in a 10-hour day actually does more than 3 hours of work?
To the moron who moderated you as Troll: this comment is a +1, Insightful. Idiots.
You're going right to my friends list.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Chavez also constantly says the US is planning to invade Venezuela.
If you're willing to believe everything the man says without question, he's perfectly willing to lie about the US.
One word: Irak
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
I've heard no one support Pat Robertson's comments -- in fact Bush completely and utterly condemned Robertson's comments.
Two words: Trial balloon.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Frankly, this should concern us. How is it that someone can gain popularity by saying they hate America?
Not to pick on your fine post, but you don't travel abroad much, true?
Best wishes,
Carlos Cesar
Slashdotters often think that because they have the motivation and the skills to jump through hoops to defeat DRM, then the public at large must also have this same motivation and skill. But, let's face it: when it comes to things technical, Slashdot readers are often up above the 90th percentile.
But the point is, security has to be defeated just once.
Then the guy passes the unencrypted result (hopefully) to his 10K best friends.
Cheers,
I don't know where you got that impression
In Astroturf School, where else?
What if all the studios agreed to a salary cap for stars? No one makes more than $5 million and set a maximum percentage too.
What if at least one of the studios gives leading roles to some of the great actors/actresses that aren't stars?
Private Catholic schools (for instance) have higher aptitude scores for math and science.
Please, don't put Catholics in the same basket with your funny Protestant sects. We Catholics find the Bible Fundamentalism disgusting and dangerous.
We, obviously, are far from perfect, but with respect to intellectual rigor Catholicism is not even in the same league with your average Baptist.
Thanks,