The last thing some New Guinea Fore... needs to see is a damned red and blue sphere with a wavy white stripe down the middle floating across the night sky.
Use of the word "sighted" instead of "seen" when "seen" is shorter, more common in English and more easily understood by readers. In other words, your contention is that we have to believe that the writer deliberately chose an unusual verb in English to describe something rather simple.
But it's not an "unusual verb" in this context - an Australian writer in an Australian paper targeting a slightly highbrow Australian audience.
It may be an unusual verb in American English, but that's America's problem. It's certainly in common use (admittedly in both this correct and other incorrect contexts) in Australia, England, and quite possibly Canada too. So, yes, the writer did choose that particular verb, although it's not as unusual as you seem to think.
As others have pointed out, it can't possibly be "cited" because the paper has not yet been published, quite possibly hasn't even been finished, and so no citation to a verifiable version can be given. Really, it's no different than "an unusual object has been sighted off the coast" vs "an unusual object has been seen off the coast".
You yourself seem to have the view that the English language is exclusively American. That's interesting...
Well, except for when you come grovelling to the US to fight your wars for you (e.g., Serbia).
And so totally unlike when the US goes grovelling to to the rest of the world to legitimise its irrational (dare I say moon-bat here?) angry beliefs (e.g. Iraq).
I would suggest that one of your own cultural icons - Bugs Bunny - said it best. Except that "maroon" is a colour...
... maybe Europe should quit being such crybabies and take part in the world.
Europe seems to have done a reasonable job of uniting - what, 25? - different countries (most of which have been killing each other since before knives were invented), in the space of about 50 years. What has the USA done that compares to that?
The important thing is that the US system of checks and balances permits citizens to kick up an almighty stick about the systems which count (or fail to count, or alter, even worse!) their votes.
Those "checks and balances" don't seem to have worked for the last 6 years at least - in 2000 your Supreme Court basically threw up its hands and said "it's too hard, you guys go and sort it out" (and the apparent loser said 'oh well, I don't want to cause trouble'). And again, in 2004, in the face of voting irregularities which would have made Lenin sneak into Stalin's tomb and ask him "do you think something funny's going on here?", the "winning" side said 'prove it!', and the "losing" side said 'oh, it's all too hard to do'.
And there's pretty convincing evidence those "checks and balances" - the same ones which everybody in America blindly places their faith in - have been failing intermittently since... well, the early 1800's at least.
Forget the arguments over whether or not you should bring democracy to the rest of the world - how about doing whatever it takes to make sure you have a democracy worthy of being a template for the rest of the world?
Unless you're in a state that has completely open primaries, it's unfortunate that you're not registered with a party, because you're effectively disenfranchising yourself, at least from voting in the primaries.
This is one of those things about the American electoral system which is incomprehensible to non-Americans.
Why is voter registration in many places so intimately tied with party affiliation?
In any sane country, the two things are totally separate. Local/State/National elections are handled by a nominally non-aligned third party (quite often part of the bureaucracy, which in Westminster countries manages to maintain at least the illusion of impartiality). But party elections - who is nominated in what district for which position - are handled by the party, and voting is only open to party members. Party membership is totally separate, and administered by each party for themselves. Nobody outside the party - not the electoral commission, not the other party, not your neighbour down the street, not the people doing mailouts or phone polling, and not the goons for hire to 'discourage' you from voting - need know your party affiliation. It's a matter between you, your party, your trusted friends, and your God.
And yet in America, the 'greatest democracy in the world' and 'home of the free and the land of the brave', you're practically forced (note, I did say 'practically') to declare your affiliation to all and sundry - leaving the gate wide open for voter intimidation, giving unscrupulous election officials a good guideline to which booths to conveniently 'miscount' or 'lose' results from, generating a mailing list of households to target for misleading disinformation, etc, etc.
How the hell did this come about? Are the parties so afraid of losing paying and voting members under a totally optional membership scheme that they fear becoming irrelevant? Or is it a long game con, designed to encourage people to vote party lines in the face of independent thought?
In my country, you register to vote. Then if - and only if - you decide to support a party, you join that party separately. That choice is mine, and is no business of the incumbent party, the opposition party, the electoral administration, or anybody else. And nor should it be.
Re:What backwards compatibility has it broken?
on
PHP 5.2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
To be fair, this is primarily because PHP allows any clothead to write some POS code without respect for logic, security, or sanity - at which point it suddenly becomes the most popular module / mailing script / CMS / message board ever.
I happen to like PHP, but I can also appreciate what a fecked-up language it is. Anybody who isn't coding with safe mode on and register_globals off in this day and age should be taken out and shot - it's been recommended practice since 4.1, and I wished 5.0 had bitten the bullet, said "screw backwards compatibility" and just removed those options altogether. Not to mention the hundreds of other cock-ups and inconsistencies in the language - there's at least two functions for any one thing you want to do, with varying syntax and behaviour, not to mention all the other deprecated functions that are still active. Granted, PHP5 is slightly better in this regard, but it still needs a damned good cleanout.
And don't even get me started on the half-broken collection of crud that is most of PEAR. You mean there's an actual working XSLT engine in there?
Because the administration of such a system is taking a lot of money it was decided to have the broadcasters paid from general taxation.
Yeah, watch out for that. Australia did something similar 30 years ago, changing from TV licence fees nominally funding public broadcasting to a direct government finance model.
Now we have 2 badly underfunded public broadcasters strung up between competing demands to improve the quality of programming, increase local content, compete (but not too much!) with commercial stations on the basis of ratings, and better service government-determined niche markets. All amidst continual complaints (from government, not the public) of them not being fair and balanced enough to the government line - regardless of which party is in power.
Myself, I'd kill to be able to pay a licence fee to subsidise these broadcasters to remove the poisonous government interference they suffer.
(I've seen the sums - re-introducing a licence fee here on a per-household basis at an equivalent amount to the UK (AU$325) would double the funding available to public broadcasters.)
Example: I was trying to burn a DVD using the Mac Mini. I was using some new Memorex 16x compatible DVD+R discs that the lab had purchased. Our lab has a policy of burning the data at a low speed - 1x or 2x - since some IT guy decided it ensures the best chance of a successful write. Anyway, I try to burn the CD using Mac OS's built in software - basically by dragging and dropping files on the DVD, then clicking the "record" button once I'm done. I set the record speed to 1x.
And there's your problem - most higher speed disks don't contain a write strategy for 1x / 2x. Some 8x I've got here - Verbatim or TDK, I forget which - don't have any write strategies below 4x. That's actual write strategies, located in the extended data area - not the strategy stored in the drive and accessed by a MID lookup.
(In theory, 1x write strategy should be a standard across discs of all make. So say the rainbow books and, by extention, the DVD+-* standards. In practice, not so much...)
The right answer, the one your IT guy should already know if he has a clue, is to burn at the minimum speed the disc supports. I'm not familiar with the Memorex discs in question, but most 16x discs only contain write strategies for 4x - 16x.
The actual issue that people who created things years ago have stopped doing any interesting new work or contributing to society, yet still expect to get paid?
Yet, by this same argument, that work still holds value - if it didn't, no-one would be paying them for it, and no-one would want to copy it either.
The fact is that, even if no one is prepared to buy it, if just one person is prepared to copy it then it still has some value. It's just lower than the price the rights holder is asking.
And that little tidbit right there is the real problem with (current manifestations of) IP - it's bordering on legalised extortion...
(You really should read their books; they're much more interesting than you might believe, and you might even learn something! For example, that the various Open Source models - yes, even the ones that allow such attached "capitalist" trappings as Red Hat or MySQL - are much much closer to Marx & Engels' concepts than anything seen before.
The "dictatorship of the proletariat", the bit that everyone seems to get stuck on and hung up over, is itself merely one (Marx thought inevitable; Engels wasn't so sure...) stepping stone on the path to Communism
Read the books, and you might come away with the feeling that Linux itself is an expression of one of those stepping-stones...)
Just watch out if you're using it as a DHCP server as well - like many simpler servers, it doesn't play well with many embedded-type clients e.g. NSLU2s, network printers, XBoxes, etc.
Not totally its fault; the clients are to blame too, as well as some glaring holes in the DHCP spec.
Sounds like just about every small high-tech hardware development company I've ever been to - right down to the hand-drawn sign on an otherwise featureless building, and the stick-on letters on a glass and aluminium door.
To hazard a guess, does the article then go on to describe the empty (apart from an unattended and totally bare reception desk) front office, with its commercial-blue carpet tiles (scattered with opened cardboard boxes, a single unopened courier delivery languishing near the door), and the engineers in the back room huddled at their computers and/or workbenches?
A company's bigwig claiming their product, not yet shown to anyone, is somehow better than an existing product, that's been out for years, looks great to the average eye, but that somehow, although everybody wants it, has several fatal flaws! And before an IPO!
I think what you really meant to say was :
"A company's bigwig claiming their product, which is right now being demonstrated to the public and other industry partners at a trade exhibition, is somehow better than an existing product that's been out for years, has worse colour rendition and contrast than pre-existing technology, but that somehow, despite these extremely visible and annoying flaws, has somehow succeeded as a triumph of marketing over quality. And only a week after their IPO closed!"
Really, the typos and grammatical mutilations around here are becoming unbearable...
Actually, if you read carefully, the Novalux technology is the light source and the Arasor technology is the display engine. What the press releases seem to say is that the two have partnered, with Arasor taking Novalux's on-chip laser technology and integrating it with their display engine to produce a "laser-projector-on-a-chip".
One company combining two innovations to create a third with widespread practicality.
This is the sorta thing that should be in an extension!
Agreed, but it aint. There are bookmark sync extensions (e.g. Bookmark Sync & Sort), but they're (a) flakey, and (b) only share bookmarks, not other profile information.
Portable Firefox isn't really a solution - I have 2 machines here, a Mac and a PC, with a browser running on both pretty much constantly. I also occasionally use a laptop out and about. I want to be able to share bookmarks between these three, seamlessly and concurrently. Sharing other profile information would be nice too, but isn't essential for me - however, it is a big selling point for large corporate use.
I also don't want to use 3rd-party bookmark repositories or, God forbid, something like del.icio.us. I have private data there that I'd like to keep private - at least if I control the repository server I have some measure of control over its security, and don't have to worry about Uzbekistani hackers breaking in or the server owner deciding to "monetise" his "asset" (i.e. my data)...
Really, the root of the problem is the abortion of a "database" that the Mozilla bookmarks are stored in. JWZ had a nice rant about this years back. Supposedly the Mozilla organisation have plans to replace this with a real lightweight DB, which would make bookmark and profile abstraction a lot easier, but there's no signs of it actually happening yet...
Unfortunately, US law has nothing to do with it; the FreeDB2 developer is in Australia. One of the worst aspects of Australian IP law is that facts from collations of data themselves are copyright protected, thanks mainly to a legal decision over 'reverse-engineering' of phone books.
This is also the reason Windows MCE & Vista have / will have no EPG in Australia - TV guide data is collated separately by a third party (HWW, which itself was recently bought by a television / media conglomerate (PBL / Nine)), and they jealously guard it against any use by devices which allow automated recording (PVRs, media centre PCs, etc) - ostensibly, to prevent "piracy" of the network's intellectual property (aka overseas TV shows broadcast 8 months after appearing on ChannelBT). If Microsoft decided they couldn't win against this legal aberration, I don't think you whinging on/. will make a dent...
The upshot of which is, don't expect FreeDB2 data to be available under any but the most onerous of licencing conditions. In fact, conspiracy-nut though it may sound, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the FreeDB2 developer was affiliated with one of the music / media conglomerates...
Slashdot Mirror
(The real problem is, of course, getting the guy up there with his trolley to re-stock the vending machine...)
You write spam for a living, don't you?
It may be an unusual verb in American English, but that's America's problem. It's certainly in common use (admittedly in both this correct and other incorrect contexts) in Australia, England, and quite possibly Canada too. So, yes, the writer did choose that particular verb, although it's not as unusual as you seem to think.
As others have pointed out, it can't possibly be "cited" because the paper has not yet been published, quite possibly hasn't even been finished, and so no citation to a verifiable version can be given. Really, it's no different than "an unusual object has been sighted off the coast" vs "an unusual object has been seen off the coast".
You yourself seem to have the view that the English language is exclusively American. That's interesting...
I would suggest that one of your own cultural icons - Bugs Bunny - said it best. Except that "maroon" is a colour...
Europe seems to have done a reasonable job of uniting - what, 25? - different countries (most of which have been killing each other since before knives were invented), in the space of about 50 years. What has the USA done that compares to that?
And there's pretty convincing evidence those "checks and balances" - the same ones which everybody in America blindly places their faith in - have been failing intermittently since
Forget the arguments over whether or not you should bring democracy to the rest of the world - how about doing whatever it takes to make sure you have a democracy worthy of being a template for the rest of the world?
Why is voter registration in many places so intimately tied with party affiliation?
In any sane country, the two things are totally separate. Local/State/National elections are handled by a nominally non-aligned third party (quite often part of the bureaucracy, which in Westminster countries manages to maintain at least the illusion of impartiality). But party elections - who is nominated in what district for which position - are handled by the party, and voting is only open to party members. Party membership is totally separate, and administered by each party for themselves. Nobody outside the party - not the electoral commission, not the other party, not your neighbour down the street, not the people doing mailouts or phone polling, and not the goons for hire to 'discourage' you from voting - need know your party affiliation. It's a matter between you, your party, your trusted friends, and your God.
And yet in America, the 'greatest democracy in the world' and 'home of the free and the land of the brave', you're practically forced (note, I did say 'practically') to declare your affiliation to all and sundry - leaving the gate wide open for voter intimidation, giving unscrupulous election officials a good guideline to which booths to conveniently 'miscount' or 'lose' results from, generating a mailing list of households to target for misleading disinformation, etc, etc.
How the hell did this come about? Are the parties so afraid of losing paying and voting members under a totally optional membership scheme that they fear becoming irrelevant? Or is it a long game con, designed to encourage people to vote party lines in the face of independent thought?
In my country, you register to vote. Then if - and only if - you decide to support a party, you join that party separately. That choice is mine, and is no business of the incumbent party, the opposition party, the electoral administration, or anybody else. And nor should it be.
To be fair, this is primarily because PHP allows any clothead to write some POS code without respect for logic, security, or sanity - at which point it suddenly becomes the most popular module / mailing script / CMS / message board ever.
I happen to like PHP, but I can also appreciate what a fecked-up language it is. Anybody who isn't coding with safe mode on and register_globals off in this day and age should be taken out and shot - it's been recommended practice since 4.1, and I wished 5.0 had bitten the bullet, said "screw backwards compatibility" and just removed those options altogether. Not to mention the hundreds of other cock-ups and inconsistencies in the language - there's at least two functions for any one thing you want to do, with varying syntax and behaviour, not to mention all the other deprecated functions that are still active. Granted, PHP5 is slightly better in this regard, but it still needs a damned good cleanout.
And don't even get me started on the half-broken collection of crud that is most of PEAR. You mean there's an actual working XSLT engine in there?
Now we have 2 badly underfunded public broadcasters strung up between competing demands to improve the quality of programming, increase local content, compete (but not too much!) with commercial stations on the basis of ratings, and better service government-determined niche markets. All amidst continual complaints (from government, not the public) of them not being fair and balanced enough to the government line - regardless of which party is in power.
Myself, I'd kill to be able to pay a licence fee to subsidise these broadcasters to remove the poisonous government interference they suffer.
(I've seen the sums - re-introducing a licence fee here on a per-household basis at an equivalent amount to the UK (AU$325) would double the funding available to public broadcasters.)
(In theory, 1x write strategy should be a standard across discs of all make. So say the rainbow books and, by extention, the DVD+-* standards. In practice, not so much...)
The right answer, the one your IT guy should already know if he has a clue, is to burn at the minimum speed the disc supports. I'm not familiar with the Memorex discs in question, but most 16x discs only contain write strategies for 4x - 16x.
"Write Strategies for high performance DVD+R/RW"
The fact is that, even if no one is prepared to buy it, if just one person is prepared to copy it then it still has some value. It's just lower than the price the rights holder is asking.
And that little tidbit right there is the real problem with (current manifestations of) IP - it's bordering on legalised extortion...
(You really should read their books; they're much more interesting than you might believe, and you might even learn something! For example, that the various Open Source models - yes, even the ones that allow such attached "capitalist" trappings as Red Hat or MySQL - are much much closer to Marx & Engels' concepts than anything seen before.
The "dictatorship of the proletariat", the bit that everyone seems to get stuck on and hung up over, is itself merely one (Marx thought inevitable; Engels wasn't so sure...) stepping stone on the path to Communism
Read the books, and you might come away with the feeling that Linux itself is an expression of one of those stepping-stones...)
Just watch out if you're using it as a DHCP server as well - like many simpler servers, it doesn't play well with many embedded-type clients e.g. NSLU2s, network printers, XBoxes, etc.
Not totally its fault; the clients are to blame too, as well as some glaring holes in the DHCP spec.
Sounds like just about every small high-tech hardware development company I've ever been to - right down to the hand-drawn sign on an otherwise featureless building, and the stick-on letters on a glass and aluminium door.
To hazard a guess, does the article then go on to describe the empty (apart from an unattended and totally bare reception desk) front office, with its commercial-blue carpet tiles (scattered with opened cardboard boxes, a single unopened courier delivery languishing near the door), and the engineers in the back room huddled at their computers and/or workbenches?
"A company's bigwig claiming their product, which is right now being demonstrated to the public and other industry partners at a trade exhibition, is somehow better than an existing product that's been out for years, has worse colour rendition and contrast than pre-existing technology, but that somehow, despite these extremely visible and annoying flaws, has somehow succeeded as a triumph of marketing over quality. And only a week after their IPO closed!"
Really, the typos and grammatical mutilations around here are becoming unbearable...
Actually, if you read carefully, the Novalux technology is the light source and the Arasor technology is the display engine. What the press releases seem to say is that the two have partnered, with Arasor taking Novalux's on-chip laser technology and integrating it with their display engine to produce a "laser-projector-on-a-chip".
One company combining two innovations to create a third with widespread practicality.
"Grand Duke Leopold II of Habsburg, famous enlightened monarch and future Emperor of Austria, abolished the death penalty in the then-independent Granducato di Toscana (Tuscany), the first permanent abolition in modern times. On 30 November 1786, after having de facto blocked capital executions (the last was in 1769), Leopold promulgated the reform of the penal code that abolished the death penalty and ordered the destruction of all the instruments for capital execution in his land. In 2000 Tuscany's regional authorities instituted an annual holiday on 30 November to commemorate the event."
Global distribution of the death penalty.
So, you're saying the Matchbox "Zoomy Balloonie" I had as a kid was a toy, not a prototype?
Damn. Best toy I ever owned (well, tied with the Billy Blastoff I also had). I got it as a present after being in hospital...
Portable Firefox isn't really a solution - I have 2 machines here, a Mac and a PC, with a browser running on both pretty much constantly. I also occasionally use a laptop out and about. I want to be able to share bookmarks between these three, seamlessly and concurrently. Sharing other profile information would be nice too, but isn't essential for me - however, it is a big selling point for large corporate use.
I also don't want to use 3rd-party bookmark repositories or, God forbid, something like del.icio.us. I have private data there that I'd like to keep private - at least if I control the repository server I have some measure of control over its security, and don't have to worry about Uzbekistani hackers breaking in or the server owner deciding to "monetise" his "asset" (i.e. my data)...
Really, the root of the problem is the abortion of a "database" that the Mozilla bookmarks are stored in. JWZ had a nice rant about this years back. Supposedly the Mozilla organisation have plans to replace this with a real lightweight DB, which would make bookmark and profile abstraction a lot easier, but there's no signs of it actually happening yet...
Unfortunately, US law has nothing to do with it; the FreeDB2 developer is in Australia. One of the worst aspects of Australian IP law is that facts from collations of data themselves are copyright protected, thanks mainly to a legal decision over 'reverse-engineering' of phone books.
/. will make a dent...
This is also the reason Windows MCE & Vista have / will have no EPG in Australia - TV guide data is collated separately by a third party (HWW, which itself was recently bought by a television / media conglomerate (PBL / Nine)), and they jealously guard it against any use by devices which allow automated recording (PVRs, media centre PCs, etc) - ostensibly, to prevent "piracy" of the network's intellectual property (aka overseas TV shows broadcast 8 months after appearing on ChannelBT). If Microsoft decided they couldn't win against this legal aberration, I don't think you whinging on
The upshot of which is, don't expect FreeDB2 data to be available under any but the most onerous of licencing conditions. In fact, conspiracy-nut though it may sound, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the FreeDB2 developer was affiliated with one of the music / media conglomerates...
So, still no roaming profiles, or even bookmarks sharing?
(No, the bookmark sync extensions don't cut it...)
I should dust off the one sitting underneath my desk then...
I once played "Mine Storm" for ~4 1/2 hours straight (at work! Ah, the good ol' days...). IIRC, the levels wrap around after 20-something.
Hmmm, I wonder if John Dondzila is still making new games, and if Sean Kelly is still making multicart boards?
Fcuk ur teh looser!!1!1
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