And I know that I would not feel comfortable running a fix that didn't come from the software maker.
You would prefer to continue running software with a well-known, publicized security whole? That's like discovering that the lock on your front door accepts any key, and then refusing to replace it with any other brand of lock.
There's a margin or error in any system you use, full stop.
Quite. So perhaps the solution is not to try to devise the perfect error-free system, but rather institute a rule that says that if the election is close enough to be within the margin of error, a run-off election must be held.
The alternative, a nation-wide popular vote, would have meant that George Bush would have been scraping through *every* state and county looking for enough questionable votes to give him the edge over Gore. You'd be multiplying the chaos by fifty times.
Yeah, heaven forbid candidates have to actually respond to the entire electorate, instead of ignoring hte 90% of the population whose votes won't matter, and only paying attention the 'swing states'....
"Greed" made the rest of the world what it is, thank you
Indeed. And that's a pretty damning indictment, given the current state of the rest of the world.
So then, every gun manufacturer should be sued for the people who use 'em to kill people?
If Mister Bad Guy goes up to Mister Gun Dealer and says "I need a gun with special poison-tipped bullets, so that I'll be sure to kill the President when I do my assassination attempt tomorrow", and Mister Gun Dealer designs, manufactures, and sells such a gun to Mister Bad Guy, then YES, Mister Gun Dealer is a knowing accomplice to the misdeed and should be punished.
Cisco designed, manufactured, and sold a custom firewall for the Chinese government, and cannot plausibley deny that they knew what the Chinese government was going to use it for. If mass censorship is a crime, then Cisco is just as guilty as the Chinese government is.
Hey there, thanks for the links. I wasn't familiar with Condorcet voting, but having read about it now, I concede that it is likely to be the superior system.
On the other hand -- wow, that's gonna be a tough sell!:^) People already think IRV is too complicated and thus don't trust it... I think Condorcet voting would have the same problem, multiplied by ten. Still, I would be interested in seeing it adopted.
But nobody, or next to nobody, will bother to download them over P2P if they don't know who the band is.
I don't know that this is true... I've often been searching for band X (which I know and like) and found that the same person was also sharing band Y (which I never heard of). In many cases I'll download a few tracks of band Y, on the assumption that the person I'm downloading from has tastes similar to mine, and thus I have a good chance of liking band Y. I've discovered lots of nice groups this way...
The point was, a videotape consumer in the '80s was willing to buy either a VHS recorder, or a Beta recorder, but not both. In the near future, consumers will be able to buy players that plays both.ogg and.mp3, for about the same price as an.mp3-only player. So there is little danger of.mp3 "crowding out".ogg (or vice versa) the way VHS crowded out BetaMax.
Nah, it's a completely different scenario, because it's cheap and easy to build an audio player that plays both mp3 and ogg. Compare that with the difficulty involved in building a VCR that plays both VHS and BetaMax.
It seems to me the real cause of the writer's grief isn't people using cell phones, but people using cell phones while trying to do something else at the same time. There seems to be a belief that you can split your attention between a phone conversation and (driving/walking/unicycling/etc) without any adverse effects, but of course it isn't so. Perhaps we just need a law that says you must be stationary whenever a cell phone is pressed to your ear.
So what would you say if a notable person doesn't speak english as his native language? Would you guys pull this shit with him too?
If someone isn't a native English speaker, he might be pardoned for using incorrect English. But to the best of my knowledge, Prince is fluent in English, and so he really has no excuse. Using phonetic/symbolic puns is the written equivalent of slang or baby talk. It might be acceptable when IM'ing with friends, but in a published work it's sloppy and dumb.
I'm glad I'm not that judgemental of people.
Your leaping to conclusions and holier-than-thou attitude regarding the previous poster's comments suggests that you are in fact judgemental.
I am not closed minded. I believe that there's one god and there's noone more powerful then him. I cannot accept that there are any more gods than the only god I know.
Well, which is it? If you were presented with incontrovertible evidence of other gods besides yours, would you accept it or not? If not, you're closed minded.
American Gods is pretty soft, although it does kind of submit at least a rational system in which gods could exist on our planet, with mindshare as their ultimate power gauge,
One thing that bothered me a little about American Gods... if each god's power is based on his/her mindshare, shouldn't Jesus/Buddha/Krishna/etc be stomping around the planet like Godzillas? (erm... no pun intended;^)). They were conspicuously absent from the novel's world....
Yeah, actually the closest thing I can imagine to a production solar-powered car would be something like this: take a standard (erm, future-standard) fuel-cell car, coat the entire body with nice flexible solar cells, and use the solar cells to recharge the battery and/or hydrolize water to refill the hydrogen tank. The solar cells wouldn't provide enough power to run the car on, but they might save you some money at the gas station, especially if you keep your car parked in sunny parking lots all day...
Or maybe not, perhaps even then the energy generated wouldn't be significant. Depends on the efficiency of the cells and the car, I suppose.
Legolas, you keep harping on the fact that the hydrogen for fuel cells has to be created somewhere. This is true, but it's also trivial -- every source of energy has to come from somewhere. Even gasoline has to come from somewhere; specifically, the energy has to be mined from the Earth's underground stores. The difference being that once the gasoline runs out, it's gone forever -- if we are using hydrogen generated from gasoline, OTOH, when the gasoline runs out we just switch to generating hydrogen from another power source. So even if we don't have a cleaner energy source at first, moving to hydrogen power still provides us with flexibility which will be useful.
And, they are designed to fail safely - no more china syndrome either. [...] The main reason the US isn't using CANDU nukes is the now knee-jerk reaction from the public that nuke == bad.
To be fair, the public was assured repeatedly that all the old-style nuclear plants were designed to fail safely also. Several horrifying nuclear disasters later, can the public be blamed for taking nuclear power safety claims with a grain of salt? Fool me twice and all that...
Windpower requires clearing hills of trees, tidal power requires dams
There are plenty of places that have lots of wind and no trees (deserts, oceans, tundra, etc). Also, I think you meant hydroelectric power, not tidal power.
Huh? You can't change licenses willy-nilly. [...] Are you saying that copyright holders should jsut give up on BSD and adopt the GPL (or dual-license)?
I think he's saying that the BSD license is very liberal -- as long as you attribute the original authors, you can do whatever you like with the code, including using the code in a GPL'd application. This right extends even to circumstances where the GPL'd application consists of nothing but formerly BSD'd code. So essentially, the BSD license permits re-licensing of the code as GPL (or even closed-source, as Microsoft and others have done).
Uh... Dude... DDR is an arcade game. Most dancers actually dance; They don't have a lot of skill at mashing buttons.
No, but dancers usually do have a developed sense of rhythm, and an ability to move to their feet to right positions at the right time. DDR may not be 'real' dancing, but that isn't to say they don't have anything in common.
In my experience, they cease being robust the moment they encounter a file or directory name with a space in it. But maybe I just hang around lousy shell script coders...
a mp3->ogg converter would still need to decode the mp3.
Someone could conceivably come up with a converter that goes directly from mp3 to ogg without ever decoding mp3 to raw audio first... I think such a program would not be covered by the mp3 patents.
First, most non-tech corporate types have heard of Exchange. Next, they like to have someone to sue.
Can someone point me to just one article that describes a company suing Microsoft for faulty software? Not actually recovering money from Microsoft, mind you, just bothering to make an attempt. If I could find even one example of that, the above comment would make more sense to me.
In that same vein, NPR is pretty good, but also mostly interested in the US current affairs, with a slight libertarian/pseudointellectual elistist bent
Just out of curiosity, why do you consider NPR to be "pseudointellectual" rather than just "intellectual"? Are they faking it?
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You would prefer to continue running software with a well-known, publicized security whole? That's like discovering that the lock on your front door accepts any key, and then refusing to replace it with any other brand of lock.
Quite. So perhaps the solution is not to try to devise the perfect error-free system, but rather institute a rule that says that if the election is close enough to be within the margin of error, a run-off election must be held.
Yeah, heaven forbid candidates have to actually respond to the entire electorate, instead of ignoring hte 90% of the population whose votes won't matter, and only paying attention the 'swing states'....
Indeed. And that's a pretty damning indictment, given the current state of the rest of the world.
So then, every gun manufacturer should be sued for the people who use 'em to kill people?
If Mister Bad Guy goes up to Mister Gun Dealer and says "I need a gun with special poison-tipped bullets, so that I'll be sure to kill the President when I do my assassination attempt tomorrow", and Mister Gun Dealer designs, manufactures, and sells such a gun to Mister Bad Guy, then YES, Mister Gun Dealer is a knowing accomplice to the misdeed and should be punished.
Cisco designed, manufactured, and sold a custom firewall for the Chinese government, and cannot plausibley deny that they knew what the Chinese government was going to use it for. If mass censorship is a crime, then Cisco is just as guilty as the Chinese government is.
On the other hand -- wow, that's gonna be a tough sell!
Personally, I'd see how long it takes to complete my "infinite loop" benchmark task...
True -- but no one's mom runs Windows unless someone sets it up for them, either.
I don't know that this is true... I've often been searching for band X (which I know and like) and found that the same person was also sharing band Y (which I never heard of). In many cases I'll download a few tracks of band Y, on the assumption that the person I'm downloading from has tastes similar to mine, and thus I have a good chance of liking band Y. I've discovered lots of nice groups this way...
The point was, a videotape consumer in the '80s was willing to buy either a VHS recorder, or a Beta recorder, but not both. In the near future, consumers will be able to buy players that plays both .ogg and .mp3, for about the same price as an .mp3-only player. So there is little danger of .mp3 "crowding out" .ogg (or vice versa) the way VHS crowded out BetaMax.
Nah, it's a completely different scenario, because it's cheap and easy to build an audio player that plays both mp3 and ogg. Compare that with the difficulty involved in building a VCR that plays both VHS and BetaMax.
It seems to me the real cause of the writer's grief isn't people using cell phones, but people using cell phones while trying to do something else at the same time. There seems to be a belief that you can split your attention between a phone conversation and (driving/walking/unicycling/etc) without any adverse effects, but of course it isn't so. Perhaps we just need a law that says you must be stationary whenever a cell phone is pressed to your ear.
If someone isn't a native English speaker, he might be pardoned for using incorrect English. But to the best of my knowledge, Prince is fluent in English, and so he really has no excuse. Using phonetic/symbolic puns is the written equivalent of slang or baby talk. It might be acceptable when IM'ing with friends, but in a published work it's sloppy and dumb.
I'm glad I'm not that judgemental of people.
Your leaping to conclusions and holier-than-thou attitude regarding the previous poster's comments suggests that you are in fact judgemental.
Well, which is it? If you were presented with incontrovertible evidence of other gods besides yours, would you accept it or not? If not, you're closed minded.
One thing that bothered me a little about American Gods... if each god's power is based on his/her mindshare, shouldn't Jesus/Buddha/Krishna/etc be stomping around the planet like Godzillas? (erm... no pun intended
Or maybe not, perhaps even then the energy generated wouldn't be significant. Depends on the efficiency of the cells and the car, I suppose.
A video game modelling the nasty Machiavellian side of human social interaction? No need to wait for Dmitry, when we've already got SissyFight 2000!!
Legolas, you keep harping on the fact that the hydrogen for fuel cells has to be created somewhere. This is true, but it's also trivial -- every source of energy has to come from somewhere. Even gasoline has to come from somewhere; specifically, the energy has to be mined from the Earth's underground stores. The difference being that once the gasoline runs out, it's gone forever -- if we are using hydrogen generated from gasoline, OTOH, when the gasoline runs out we just switch to generating hydrogen from another power source. So even if we don't have a cleaner energy source at first, moving to hydrogen power still provides us with flexibility which will be useful.
To be fair, the public was assured repeatedly that all the old-style nuclear plants were designed to fail safely also. Several horrifying nuclear disasters later, can the public be blamed for taking nuclear power safety claims with a grain of salt? Fool me twice and all that...
There are plenty of places that have lots of wind and no trees (deserts, oceans, tundra, etc). Also, I think you meant hydroelectric power, not tidal power.
I think he's saying that the BSD license is very liberal -- as long as you attribute the original authors, you can do whatever you like with the code, including using the code in a GPL'd application. This right extends even to circumstances where the GPL'd application consists of nothing but formerly BSD'd code. So essentially, the BSD license permits re-licensing of the code as GPL (or even closed-source, as Microsoft and others have done).
No, but dancers usually do have a developed sense of rhythm, and an ability to move to their feet to right positions at the right time. DDR may not be 'real' dancing, but that isn't to say they don't have anything in common.
In my experience, they cease being robust the moment they encounter a file or directory name with a space in it. But maybe I just hang around lousy shell script coders...
Someone could conceivably come up with a converter that goes directly from mp3 to ogg without ever decoding mp3 to raw audio first... I think such a program would not be covered by the mp3 patents.
Can someone point me to just one article that describes a company suing Microsoft for faulty software? Not actually recovering money from Microsoft, mind you, just bothering to make an attempt. If I could find even one example of that, the above comment would make more sense to me.
Just out of curiosity, why do you consider NPR to be "pseudointellectual" rather than just "intellectual"? Are they faking it?