At the time of Locke, the Laws of Nature is the same as the Laws of Physics.
Not at all. Locke would have included not only the laws of physics in what he called laws of nature, but a lot of other stuff besides: life, liberty, property. These are not laws, and are not evident in nature. They are cognitive and social constructs. They sometimes serve good purpose, but that doesn't make them irrefutable.
As far as the Laws of God, well, perhaps you have heard of the Ten Commandments. Locke was religious as were most men at his time. you may be an Athiest, but that is not a reason to condemn Locke.
Who's condemning Locke? I'm just arguing with him, and the OP (and you). The fact that Locke believed in laws of god and nature gives them no additional credence or weight. Many people alive during that time believed that the earth was flat, that women and non-Europeans were basically cattle, and that chicken manure was a good poltice for open wounds. Their beliefs are interesting and necessary to understand their arguments, but by no means should be a basis for argument today.
I asked the OP to define the laws of god and nature, not to parrot what Locke would have said. Locke was wrong, and demonstrably so. Show me these laws, define them and argue for them, and then we can talk about whether they justify the idea of "nation's rights."
There's a large and important difference between making an argument and repeatedly stating a point. You've done the latter, not the former.
Locke was a good thinker, but he saw ghosts everywhere. Laws of god and nature? That's delusional. There are laws of physics, but I defy you to define for me the laws of god or the laws of nature.
It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.
Bullshit. Pure drivel. Asserting the existence of a right does not bring it into being. "Liberate other nations" is doublespeak for unprovoked war. Civilians always suffer the most during war. It is not for an external force to decide that those who survive will be better off with their government overthrown and many of their number murdered.
A society may have the right to remove minors from a home environment it thinks is abusive; this is debatable, but you can make good arguments for it. That society does not have the right to break into the house, torch it, and kill the minor's father and sister.
There is no similar analogy for nations. No nation can be "liberated" without huge cost to innocents, on both sides. She dehumanizes herself by failing to acknowledge this.
Have you looked at SlimServer? It's an open source Perl server designed to power Slim Devices' MP3 players.
I used it for a bit, but ditched it in favor of Lincoln Stein's Apache::MP3. My SO still uses SlimServer to stream from home to work, though. The two coexist well on my little Debian server. I don't know if SlimServer supports FLAC; Apache::MP3 does.
One of the scariest moments of my life was formatting my company's 150GB Netware server. It died early one Monday morning: power supply and two disks in the RAID just vaporized. The UPS, mysteriously, was fine. This was a 60-person architecture office; architecture's nearly all electronic these days, so that server *was* the company.
I put in new drives and restored from the previous Friday's tape. One guy had done some work on Saturday, which he lost, but everything else was perfect. Numerous times I've gone back to a tape from months previously (grandfather-father-son scheme) to get one or two files, and I've never had one failure. So personally, I'm a big believer in tapes.
At the end of the day, no it's not. Broken is broken.
Broken is broken, yes: that's a tautology. But some things are more important than others. Which would you rather have broken on your car? The hubcap or the rim? The ashtray or the steering wheel?
IE's standards support bites ass. Its absolute lack of two things (full PNG support and fixed positioning) has hindered web development greatly. It's piss-poor box model is responsible for some of the nastiest-looking CSS hacks around. Firefox's support isn't perfect, but it's very good.
If the only commonality you can find between two things is lack of perfection, you need to look harder.
These folks have done some cool work, but they're totally missing the point. Steve Jobs would rather shave with a cheese grater than let these things out into the wild with an Apple logo on them. Take one look at any of these gadgets and my first reaction is, "Huh, I bet that does a lot of cool stuff." But I'm a geek, and these designs are by geeks for geeks, and that's exactly what Apple is trying to avoid.
That silly-looking wirless iPod necklace thing -- what's with the bevelled see-through skeleton around it? How does that make it work better? The skeleton around the iPodWatch -- what does it add?
Apple succeeds because they hide the complexity, not because they call attention to it. Flashy complicated designs advertise internal complexity. While a geek sees power in complexity, most people see added cognitive burden. "Oh, shit, I bet that thing has a million features that I'll never figure out."
Now my boss wants 6 weeks notice plus on call service for another 3 months at subsidized rates. Is my boss being reasonable?"
As my dad used to say, "People in hell want ice water." Your boss has been taking advantage of you for two years, and he's trying to keep doing it.
Another requirement he added was the need that I be on-call if any disaster strikes with the server infrastructure.
"Requirement??" Unless you signed a contract allowing him to place arbitrary restrictions on your freedom (and, frankly, even then) he's in no place to require anything. "Ask politely while blowing money at you with a fire hose," maybe, but certainly not "require."
Should I negotiate or just ignore them? Is a burnt bridge worth it?"
If you do negotiate, remembe that when you leave it's his ass on the line, not yours. How much is his ass worth to him?
Personally I'd stick with two weeks and let him sink. Your offer of four weeks was very generous; you're not required to give him 5 minutes. His evil attempts to muscle you into doing something that is not in your best interests, or the interests of your new employer, should be repaid with a firm and polite, "I believe two weeks is customary. Best of luck finding someone new."
I don't know much about the research, but my own experience is that I'm very bothered by low refresh rates. Looking at a 60Hz screen gives me a headache in less than 60 seconds. 75Hz is unpleasant after a few minutes. I can work at 85Hz, but I can tell the difference between 85 and 100Hz. I can't tell the difference between any frequencies over 100Hz.
I've worked with people who literally can't tell. I'd switch back and forth between 60Hz and 100Hz, asking them to evaluate each, and they could see no difference.
For a fan production I'd officially say "not bad." It obviously took a lot of work, and I can't denigrate that.
OTOH, it kinda sucked. I've seen cable access shows with better acting. Not surprisingly given the source material, it's pretty similar to most of the scifi crap Lucas, and Hollywood, churn out these days: blow the budged on special effects, look to Ed Wood for directing inspiration.
It sounds to me like you need to read more about the game. For one thing, understand the handicap system. A stronger player (in this case the computer) should give a weaker player a number of handicap stones to compensate. This isn't a computer thing -- go players have been doing it for centuries, and it's one of the best things about the game.
Play Goban (or, more accurately, GNU go, which is what Goban uses) on a 9x9 board and have it give you 5 stones. Concentrate on keeping your groups alive. If 5 isn't enough, increase it. There's no shame in a handicap, only in not improving it over time.
More importantly, find another human. People all over play the game, and it's much more enjoyable to play with a friend than a machine. Get online and play on one of the go servers. Got questions? Visit Sensei's Library.
But couldn't one turn chess into a 'spectacularly complex' game by increasing the number of squares say... to 16*16? Or even into 3D:-)
Yes, but then it wouldn't be chess anymore. You'd need more pieces, for one thing. Go, on the other hand, requires no rule changes at all to scale to any size. There are only four rules, none of which depend on board size.
The other issue is that, regardless of search space size, go is inherently more difficult to evaluate. In chess, if the king is captured the game's over. In go, you have to count territory to determine a winner, and territory is space surrounded by stones. So to get an accurate territory count you have to know the life or death status of every stone on the board. Unless you have strong judgement this is very difficult. I'm a weak amateur myself, but I can trivially solve life/death problems that the very bext computer programs cannot.
For chess to be 'solved', would a computer have to know definite answers to the best moves...
My understanding of it is that "solved" means, "one player can always force a win." IOW, you don't need to calculate moves anymore, just look up positions on a chart. Of course, given (for go) 361! positions, that's far from trivial. Even for chess the search space is enormous.
If computers can beat chess grandmasters and similar feats, how is this anything special?
It's special for two reasons. For one thing, even though computer programs can beat most humans, chess itself has not been solved. That's a very different proposition.
For another thing, go is spectacularly more complex than chess. The very best go programs are competition only for weak amateurs. There's an archived NYT article that summarizes the problems reasonably well.
Although the standard go board is 19x19 intersections, the game scales, unlike chess. Things you learn on a small board are sometimes applicable to larger ones. A 5x5 is usually not interesting for human play; most consider 9x9 the minimum size for a worthwhile game. This means that a computer has been programmed to force a guaranteed win at a smaller size, and hopefully paves the way for further development and understanding.
For a while now the Brother HL-1440 has been Consumer Report's higest-rated laser printer. My business partner has one, and had no trouble setting it up with CUPS under Red Hat. It's fast, not too loud, good quality, and less than $200.
The article also explains that the suite is strong in typographic and visual features - the areas where Office is weakest.
Speaking as an ex IT manager and someone with many Office-using friends, the weakest part of Office isn't it's formatting. What most people I know hate about Office is Word's attitude. "Did you really mean to do that? How 'bout if I correct it for you?" "Are you sure you wanted to paste that? Don't you want me to change the styles a little?"
Word encapsulates Microsoft's condescending attitude towards its users; it tells users that they're idiots and need hand-holding. Apple's software tells its users that their time is valuable, that they're probably right most of the time, and that they're smarter than their computers.
Being a geek forum, I can see the responses now: "Ha! Those lusers just don't know how to use it. That's their own fault." Wrong. Microsoft's UI and workflow are driven by program managers with a list of market-driven features. Apple does the same thing, but adds list item zero, non-negotiable, absolutely primary, that Microsoft doesn't understand: the user experience.
A few years ago I was doing graphic design and programming for a web site launch. Near the end I worked 3 100-hour weeks in a row. I'd start the week coding, and then when my brain fried I'd start on design.
I found that after about 70 hours I was no longer productive writing code. It wasn't that I was writing a lot of bugs, really, just that I was less able to understand the problems. For me, a large part of programming is keeping many variables in my head at once. The longer I work without a break the harder I find this. My logic skills don't deteriorate much, but after many hours my retention does.
Switching between coding and design helped me wring a few more semi-productive hours out of the week. Design uses a very different part of my brain and doesn't tire me as much. I don't need to remember all sorts of variables because my eye can perceive them with little effort. So for design or art I think 80-hour weeks are more feasible than for programming.
But year, it doesn't take much of that shit to realize that no amount of money is worth it.
That's all good information, and I certainly don't mean to deny that the problem exists. My question was an honest one, not sarcastic. Most of what you listed doesn't affect most people, but the for the people who are affected Rational, for example, is a deal-breaker. FWIW I run IE and Acccess in VPC with little trouble. Access is slow and nasty, but then it is in Winders too:)
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That's because you've given us an example of a font attribute, not a font tag. Duh.
font attribute <p font="foo"> font tag <font face="foo"> There is not now, and never was, a font attribute.I asked the OP to define the laws of god and nature, not to parrot what Locke would have said. Locke was wrong, and demonstrably so. Show me these laws, define them and argue for them, and then we can talk about whether they justify the idea of "nation's rights."
There's a large and important difference between making an argument and repeatedly stating a point. You've done the latter, not the former.
Locke was a good thinker, but he saw ghosts everywhere. Laws of god and nature? That's delusional. There are laws of physics, but I defy you to define for me the laws of god or the laws of nature.
A society may have the right to remove minors from a home environment it thinks is abusive; this is debatable, but you can make good arguments for it. That society does not have the right to break into the house, torch it, and kill the minor's father and sister.
There is no similar analogy for nations. No nation can be "liberated" without huge cost to innocents, on both sides. She dehumanizes herself by failing to acknowledge this.
Have you looked at SlimServer? It's an open source Perl server designed to power Slim Devices' MP3 players.
I used it for a bit, but ditched it in favor of Lincoln Stein's Apache::MP3. My SO still uses SlimServer to stream from home to work, though. The two coexist well on my little Debian server. I don't know if SlimServer supports FLAC; Apache::MP3 does.
One of the scariest moments of my life was formatting my company's 150GB Netware server. It died early one Monday morning: power supply and two disks in the RAID just vaporized. The UPS, mysteriously, was fine. This was a 60-person architecture office; architecture's nearly all electronic these days, so that server *was* the company.
I put in new drives and restored from the previous Friday's tape. One guy had done some work on Saturday, which he lost, but everything else was perfect. Numerous times I've gone back to a tape from months previously (grandfather-father-son scheme) to get one or two files, and I've never had one failure. So personally, I'm a big believer in tapes.
http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks
Broken is broken, yes: that's a tautology. But some things are more important than others. Which would you rather have broken on your car? The hubcap or the rim? The ashtray or the steering wheel?
IE's standards support bites ass. Its absolute lack of two things (full PNG support and fixed positioning) has hindered web development greatly. It's piss-poor box model is responsible for some of the nastiest-looking CSS hacks around. Firefox's support isn't perfect, but it's very good.
If the only commonality you can find between two things is lack of perfection, you need to look harder.
These folks have done some cool work, but they're totally missing the point. Steve Jobs would rather shave with a cheese grater than let these things out into the wild with an Apple logo on them. Take one look at any of these gadgets and my first reaction is, "Huh, I bet that does a lot of cool stuff." But I'm a geek, and these designs are by geeks for geeks, and that's exactly what Apple is trying to avoid.
That silly-looking wirless iPod necklace thing -- what's with the bevelled see-through skeleton around it? How does that make it work better? The skeleton around the iPodWatch -- what does it add?
Apple succeeds because they hide the complexity, not because they call attention to it. Flashy complicated designs advertise internal complexity. While a geek sees power in complexity, most people see added cognitive burden. "Oh, shit, I bet that thing has a million features that I'll never figure out."
Personally I'd stick with two weeks and let him sink. Your offer of four weeks was very generous; you're not required to give him 5 minutes. His evil attempts to muscle you into doing something that is not in your best interests, or the interests of your new employer, should be repaid with a firm and polite, "I believe two weeks is customary. Best of luck finding someone new."
OK, I'll bite. What part of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" do you not understand?
I don't know much about the research, but my own experience is that I'm very bothered by low refresh rates. Looking at a 60Hz screen gives me a headache in less than 60 seconds. 75Hz is unpleasant after a few minutes. I can work at 85Hz, but I can tell the difference between 85 and 100Hz. I can't tell the difference between any frequencies over 100Hz. I've worked with people who literally can't tell. I'd switch back and forth between 60Hz and 100Hz, asking them to evaluate each, and they could see no difference.
For a fan production I'd officially say "not bad." It obviously took a lot of work, and I can't denigrate that.
OTOH, it kinda sucked. I've seen cable access shows with better acting. Not surprisingly given the source material, it's pretty similar to most of the scifi crap Lucas, and Hollywood, churn out these days: blow the budged on special effects, look to Ed Wood for directing inspiration.
I find VB revolting as well.
It sounds to me like you need to read more about the game. For one thing, understand the handicap system. A stronger player (in this case the computer) should give a weaker player a number of handicap stones to compensate. This isn't a computer thing -- go players have been doing it for centuries, and it's one of the best things about the game.
Play Goban (or, more accurately, GNU go, which is what Goban uses) on a 9x9 board and have it give you 5 stones. Concentrate on keeping your groups alive. If 5 isn't enough, increase it. There's no shame in a handicap, only in not improving it over time.
More importantly, find another human. People all over play the game, and it's much more enjoyable to play with a friend than a machine. Get online and play on one of the go servers. Got questions? Visit Sensei's Library.
The other issue is that, regardless of search space size, go is inherently more difficult to evaluate. In chess, if the king is captured the game's over. In go, you have to count territory to determine a winner, and territory is space surrounded by stones. So to get an accurate territory count you have to know the life or death status of every stone on the board. Unless you have strong judgement this is very difficult. I'm a weak amateur myself, but I can trivially solve life/death problems that the very bext computer programs cannot. My understanding of it is that "solved" means, "one player can always force a win." IOW, you don't need to calculate moves anymore, just look up positions on a chart. Of course, given (for go) 361! positions, that's far from trivial. Even for chess the search space is enormous.
For another thing, go is spectacularly more complex than chess. The very best go programs are competition only for weak amateurs. There's an archived NYT article that summarizes the problems reasonably well.
Although the standard go board is 19x19 intersections, the game scales, unlike chess. Things you learn on a small board are sometimes applicable to larger ones. A 5x5 is usually not interesting for human play; most consider 9x9 the minimum size for a worthwhile game. This means that a computer has been programmed to force a guaranteed win at a smaller size, and hopefully paves the way for further development and understanding.
For a while now the Brother HL-1440 has been Consumer Report's higest-rated laser printer. My business partner has one, and had no trouble setting it up with CUPS under Red Hat. It's fast, not too loud, good quality, and less than $200.
Word encapsulates Microsoft's condescending attitude towards its users; it tells users that they're idiots and need hand-holding. Apple's software tells its users that their time is valuable, that they're probably right most of the time, and that they're smarter than their computers.
Being a geek forum, I can see the responses now: "Ha! Those lusers just don't know how to use it. That's their own fault." Wrong. Microsoft's UI and workflow are driven by program managers with a list of market-driven features. Apple does the same thing, but adds list item zero, non-negotiable, absolutely primary, that Microsoft doesn't understand: the user experience.
A few years ago I was doing graphic design and programming for a web site launch. Near the end I worked 3 100-hour weeks in a row. I'd start the week coding, and then when my brain fried I'd start on design.
I found that after about 70 hours I was no longer productive writing code. It wasn't that I was writing a lot of bugs, really, just that I was less able to understand the problems. For me, a large part of programming is keeping many variables in my head at once. The longer I work without a break the harder I find this. My logic skills don't deteriorate much, but after many hours my retention does.
Switching between coding and design helped me wring a few more semi-productive hours out of the week. Design uses a very different part of my brain and doesn't tire me as much. I don't need to remember all sorts of variables because my eye can perceive them with little effort. So for design or art I think 80-hour weeks are more feasible than for programming.
But year, it doesn't take much of that shit to realize that no amount of money is worth it.
Damn. This means that my site is obsolete. Hope the next guy is as photogeneic ...
That's all good information, and I certainly don't mean to deny that the problem exists. My question was an honest one, not sarcastic. Most of what you listed doesn't affect most people, but the for the people who are affected Rational, for example, is a deal-breaker. FWIW I run IE and Acccess in VPC with little trouble. Access is slow and nasty, but then it is in Winders too :)