I'll agree that Gnome currently beats the KDE 4.x series in usability, but neither comes even close to KDE 3.5. I say this as someone who's currently using Gnome, because of problems with KDE 4.x usability. But prior to that I tried Gnome several times and always bounced back to KDE 3.x over usability issues.
I certainly hope that at least one of: A) one of the minor Desktop Environments (LXCE?) get's good enough or B) KDE 4.x improves enough to be a good choice before Gnome comes out with the Gnome3 branch.
Even more directly, the versions of the promises that I read contained explicit statement that MS reserved the right to change it's mind whenever it felt like it, no reasons required. Granted, this particular set of promises were the ones it made while signing the contract with Novell, and those might not be the ones you are referring to. Still, the secondary sources reporting the promises ignored the disclaimers. I'd be quite suspicious of any reports of what the promises were that appear in secondary sources.
Actually, Debian also installs mono stuff if you choose the Gnome package. It's easy to get rid of, but not easy to avoid. I consider this a serious mistake, but I'm not a part of the project.
N.B.: Currently this could be avoided by just choosing different packages for the initial install. That they haven't so chosen seems to be ridiculously short-sighted. It wouldn't cost them anything, and it would save them much future hassle.
What I heard, a couple of decades ago, and with no way to verify it, was that each independent group at MS had to work in ignorance of the code that the other sections were writing, and the decisions they were making.
If this it is true, it would go a long way to explaining the series of disasters, even if each group was writing "pretty good" code. (OTOH, I've also heard *that* called into question. Perhaps it depends on what you think of as good.)
One thing to remember is that with each group hiding the code that it writes (true?) even a few bad choices could really foul things up, and nobody might be certain of why.
This is something that the wide distribution of benefits MS, so they are acting to cause it to be distributed more widely. Yeah, they've done things like that before.
As to MS "doing the right thing" for Stac... has anyone heard of that company in the last decade or so? MS blatantly killed them, and then paid some minor amount of weregild. If corporations are persons, that's premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder, denial of civil rights, etc. (OK, I don't think corporations are people. But they still got off paying less than it benefited them, so they made a net profit out of breaking the law to destroy a competitor.)
And for just terminals, you don't even need coper. Steel, esp. stainless, will work quite well. It may not be as conductive, but you're only talking about a very short path.
There may not have been the expectation of privacy, but there has been the expectation of anonymity, a very close cousin. "On the internet nobody knows if you're a dog." was the famous cartoon that summarized this. (Yeah, it also had other meanings. But that was one of them.)
Well, anonymity is pretty much gone, so now privacy has become quite important...and I don't care about how it used to be. Either one works, but you've got to have at least one of them.
Perhaps things aren't quite as clear as you seem to presume.
Given the presented information, one would assume that Artiflex would have an open and shut case against Palm. In such case it wouldn't even have gone to court. Not unless someone is really incompetent. So there's probably something going on that we don't understand. Just what is too large an area, so I can't even guess what it is.
FWIW, it looks to me as if the posters suppositioning that the original problem was caused by an innocent mistake are correct. The problem, then, would seem to lie in "how to resolve the mistake".
FWIW, phosphorous will burn water. It pulls the oxygen away from the hydrogen. So in my high school chem lab it was stored under kerosene instead. Quite mind boggling at the time.
So if you're going to worry about spontaneous combustion, perhaps you should cool your computer with kerosene rather than water.
The post didn't deserve "troll". Overrated, yes, even at 1. Possibly even at 0. But it's not a Troll, and it's not Flamebait.
P.S.: There needs to be a "meta" tag, independent of mod-points. It should be able to be applied by the post's creator, and it should be one of the filterable tags. (As in "I don't want to read any meta posts".) It should also be apply-able by moderators, as should a "not-meta" tag. And again, this should be independent of mod-points, so something could be moderated as being, perhaps, both troll and meta, but since moderators are applying this tag, it should be scored. A meta value of [0.0-1.0] seems reasonable. Given the average and the count of votes, any new vote could be scaled in appropriately:
result = ((average * oldVoteCount) + newVote) / newVoteCount. Here I'm presuming that each vote counts as 1 or 0.
I haven't yet seen anything substantive that makes me certain the policies they were recommending were wrong. I've seen some things that indicate they did wrong, but that isn't the same thing.
OTOH, I'm not even certain exactly what they did, and how abnormal it was. It certainly isn't the way I want people to act, but I've lots of times noticed that people often don't act as I want them to.
I'm reminded of a presidential election. Whichever side you look at, it's abusing the process, and breaking the laws. (Perhaps this would be less so if there were more than two significant parties, but our election process pretty much guarantees that there won't be more than two, and strongly encourages there to be two.) So depending on your sympathies, you look at the opposition and talk about how they are criminals. And you're right. But you're ignoring that your favored side is doing the same thing.
I really wish they hadn't done whatever they actually did. (I'm not quite certain about that.) But I still think that the preponderance of the evidence shows that global warming is happening, and that the rate is increasing. And that one of the key factors is the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere. And that we have been acting in ways that increase that value. And this basic level doesn't rely on any one team of scientists, or any five, or any twenty. Details are, of course, important, and the details *do* rely on scientists acting honorably.
It would definitely be beneficial if all climate data were made publicly accessible. It would also be beneficial if the models that were made which interpreted the data were published as open source. I'm not sure precisely which license would be appropriate, though. You want attribution to be required, and ALL modifications to be listed and attributed. This would allow for independent validation of every version of the models.
(Actually, these closed sources are the kind of reason I don't trust closed source programs to do what they claim. And for science that's a fatal flaw.)
This still leaves the problem of how to trust the data. It's one thing to say "This data fed into these models yield these results." and that can be solved via standard Open Source protocols. But it doesn't address the assertion "This data is honest and reliable." Open publication at an early stage of the raw data is an appropriate step, but it still leaves room for doubts about the honesty BEFORE the publication happened.
Sorry to disappoint you, but though I'm anti-cap and trade, it's for quite different reasons.
Where it's been tried, cap and trade as been demonstrated to be a failure as a carbon control measure. It's been a subterfuge to award grants to carbon emitting companies, officially for not polluting, but actually there's no measured success rate. It generally has been used to subsidize things that were going to be done anyway.
A carbon tax is a much better answer. It doesn't require the immense bureaucracy, but that isn't my reason. By putting costs at the source (e.g. where fuel is either imported or extracted) the ability to ensure that limits are enforced is stronger. (The EPA should also be allowed to regulate carbon emissions...as they were briefly around a decade ago, but that isn't sufficient...though it's also a requirement unless the carbon tax is quite punitive, and that would encourage smugglers.)
FWIW, if you're employed, you're on someone's payroll.
Very few scientists these days are independently wealthy. (There was the "Surfer Dude" we heard about about a year ago, but he's about it as far as my knowledge goes.)
I don't know about him, but I've an unpatched MSWind95 box that I use for a proprietary graphics program and a proprietary music score editing program. No new data is generated on that system, but occasionally it's important to get at old data.
My method of securing it is not to put it on the Internet at all. Not every purpose needs an Internet connection. (When the box MUST be on the Internet, I boot it with a live-CD and plug in the Ethernet cable temporarily.)
It's not memory issues. The printing doesn't even start. And it's not landscape. (The exported PDFs *do* print properly.)
I'm pretty sure it's got to be something involving both svg and the printer driver (HP PSC 2500), since the same file will print properly from other programs (if rescaled) and other svgs will print properly from Inkscape. This doesn't pin things down very much though. I do know that sometimes it will happen with very simple figures. Once, if I remember properly, it was on a figure that had only six nodes in it. Other times it prints properly figures that are quite complex.
Well, maybe the problem will have just disappeared with the new version.
P.S.: Perhaps tiled clones isn't what I meant after all. I looked at the controls, and it didn't look like what I was after. I generally don't want rows and columns, but a series of figures each rotated slightly from the prior one about a designated center. (Often I'll take one figure, duplicate it, rotate it 180 degrees, move it into position, group the two figures. Then I can rotate the group around the center. If it's an odd number of figures, however, it's more difficult, and I don't know how to proceed for a prime number of figures. [Well, actually you double the number of figures, proceed as abover, then go back and delete half the number you've built. It's doable, but the process is a lot uglier than I'd like.])
Did you find out that it was actually a scam? Or did you just accept someone else's word that it was?
I know that I haven't read the original documents. Did you? If not, whose summary are you accepting?
I think that a lot of "rush to judgement" is happening, and that probably it will turn out to be much less significant than many are asserting. I also, however, believe that global warming is, indeed, happening. And I believe that there are lots of independent lines of evidence, to such a degree that even if the entire basis of this site turned out to be based around fraud (which I rate quite unlikely) there's still enough independent evidence of global warming. It's possible that it isn't happening quite as rapidly as I feared, but there's so much evidence that I suspect that our current estimates UNDERSTATE the rapidity of global warming. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the projections removed all information originating at this site. We know that politically motivated decsions have occasionally caused climate scientists to be less alarmist in officially published reports. I.e., a report would be submitted, and the authors would be instructed by their political managers to reduce the estimated rate and impact. This, of course, doesn't prove that the rewrite didn't make the report more accurate, but politically motivated rewrites don't have much of a history for doing that.
That's a separate accusation. Tribalism is proven easily by the e-mails. That fraud happened isn't at all clear. It was clearly solicited, but if the outcome of the solicitation was to become an accomplice isn't clear.
That said, I'm relying on summaries provided by other people. I didn't read the things myself. (I deal with more e-mail than I want to each day already.) But if you want me to accept an accusation of fraud, you'll need to point to specific evidence, not to thousands of e-mails. (I don't even know that all the "Canadian Pharmacies with vastly reduced prices" are frauds. I just know I'm not going to bother checking them out.)
I'm not absolutely sure you're correct. Radiodurans might be able to evolve an immunity to it. (Any bacteria that can grow inside an active nuclear reactor has a good head start.)
OTOH, it's not something I'd expect very quickly.
P.S.: My first thought was: "I wonder how long until dentists start using this?"
I'd pay a bit for that, if it covered what I was interested in, but how do you convince me that you're offering it?
These days I read New Scientist, Scientific American, a couple of Linux mags. (sometimes), Slashdot, Groklaw, and entertaining fiction. I'd like something of the quality of Groklaw covering national politics...but I haven't found it anywhere, neither in print nor on the web.
And if I catch you lying to me, I won't pay you a penny from then on.
Somebody mentioned the London Economist. I read an issue of that, and it wasn't bad. But it wasn't covering what I wanted covered. (Not too surprising.) You might see if it's what you want.
If they did, I might just subscribe to them...until i caught them lying to me.
Most of the current newspapers and media don't deserve to exist. They only promulgate lies. Of the existing papers, my favorite is the Weekly World News. In that one you don't need to wonder how they are lying to you.
From my individual point of view the large newspapers and media channels have destroyed their rationale for existing by lying to me and careless neglect of verification of the data that they could easily have done. (Both/and, not either/or). There are local newspapers that I still trust moderately.
I've been on site (sight?) of a few news events which I later saw covered on the TV, or by a newspaper. Without exception I have found the stories to be grossly, almost grotesquely, distorted. I presume that the news I can't check on is no more reliable than the news that I have been able to check on. I no longer trust ANY media to report accurately. Occasionally by comparing two or three independent sources I can determine a few features of what probably happened.
N.B.: I said distort. AFAICT the media rarely resorts to direct lies, except where they are quoting someone, and even then it's often a lie by omission. But there are a tremendous number of incoming signals. I've seen a single building on fire converted in a news story into an apparent conflagration spreading over much of a city. (In this particular case, that was basically laziness. There were, indeed, numerous buildings on fire, they just didn't bother to photograph any except the most photogenic one. Even so they vastly overstated the degree of the disaster.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree that Gnome currently beats the KDE 4.x series in usability, but neither comes even close to KDE 3.5. I say this as someone who's currently using Gnome, because of problems with KDE 4.x usability. But prior to that I tried Gnome several times and always bounced back to KDE 3.x over usability issues.
I certainly hope that at least one of:
A) one of the minor Desktop Environments (LXCE?) get's good enough
or
B) KDE 4.x improves enough to be a good choice
before Gnome comes out with the Gnome3 branch.
Even more directly, the versions of the promises that I read contained explicit statement that MS reserved the right to change it's mind whenever it felt like it, no reasons required. Granted, this particular set of promises were the ones it made while signing the contract with Novell, and those might not be the ones you are referring to. Still, the secondary sources reporting the promises ignored the disclaimers. I'd be quite suspicious of any reports of what the promises were that appear in secondary sources.
Ah. And you trust De Icaza's legal opinions as to what MS can do?
Personally, I don't believe he's honest, but even if he is, that statement isn't something I'd trust him on. He's not an expert in the field.
Actually, Debian also installs mono stuff if you choose the Gnome package. It's easy to get rid of, but not easy to avoid. I consider this a serious mistake, but I'm not a part of the project.
N.B.: Currently this could be avoided by just choosing different packages for the initial install. That they haven't so chosen seems to be ridiculously short-sighted. It wouldn't cost them anything, and it would save them much future hassle.
What I heard, a couple of decades ago, and with no way to verify it, was that each independent group at MS had to work in ignorance of the code that the other sections were writing, and the decisions they were making.
If this it is true, it would go a long way to explaining the series of disasters, even if each group was writing "pretty good" code. (OTOH, I've also heard *that* called into question. Perhaps it depends on what you think of as good.)
One thing to remember is that with each group hiding the code that it writes (true?) even a few bad choices could really foul things up, and nobody might be certain of why.
"Like that before" is somewhat vague.
This is something that the wide distribution of benefits MS, so they are acting to cause it to be distributed more widely. Yeah, they've done things like that before.
As to MS "doing the right thing" for Stac ... has anyone heard of that company in the last decade or so? MS blatantly killed them, and then paid some minor amount of weregild. If corporations are persons, that's premeditated murder, conspiracy to commit premeditated murder, denial of civil rights, etc. (OK, I don't think corporations are people. But they still got off paying less than it benefited them, so they made a net profit out of breaking the law to destroy a competitor.)
But gold is more corrosion resistant. That's why "gold plated" contacts are sort of reasonable. (Of course, that doesn't take MUCH gold.)
And for just terminals, you don't even need coper. Steel, esp. stainless, will work quite well. It may not be as conductive, but you're only talking about a very short path.
There may not have been the expectation of privacy, but there has been the expectation of anonymity, a very close cousin. "On the internet nobody knows if you're a dog." was the famous cartoon that summarized this. (Yeah, it also had other meanings. But that was one of them.)
Well, anonymity is pretty much gone, so now privacy has become quite important...and I don't care about how it used to be. Either one works, but you've got to have at least one of them.
Perhaps things aren't quite as clear as you seem to presume.
Given the presented information, one would assume that Artiflex would have an open and shut case against Palm. In such case it wouldn't even have gone to court. Not unless someone is really incompetent. So there's probably something going on that we don't understand. Just what is too large an area, so I can't even guess what it is.
FWIW, it looks to me as if the posters suppositioning that the original problem was caused by an innocent mistake are correct. The problem, then, would seem to lie in "how to resolve the mistake".
FWIW, phosphorous will burn water. It pulls the oxygen away from the hydrogen. So in my high school chem lab it was stored under kerosene instead. Quite mind boggling at the time.
So if you're going to worry about spontaneous combustion, perhaps you should cool your computer with kerosene rather than water.
The post didn't deserve "troll". Overrated, yes, even at 1. Possibly even at 0. But it's not a Troll, and it's not Flamebait.
P.S.: There needs to be a "meta" tag, independent of mod-points. It should be able to be applied by the post's creator, and it should be one of the filterable tags. (As in "I don't want to read any meta posts".) It should also be apply-able by moderators, as should a "not-meta" tag. And again, this should be independent of mod-points, so something could be moderated as being, perhaps, both troll and meta, but since moderators are applying this tag, it should be scored. A meta value of [0.0-1.0] seems reasonable. Given the average and the count of votes, any new vote could be scaled in appropriately:
result = ((average * oldVoteCount) + newVote) / newVoteCount.
Here I'm presuming that each vote counts as 1 or 0.
Here
I haven't yet seen anything substantive that makes me certain the policies they were recommending were wrong. I've seen some things that indicate they did wrong, but that isn't the same thing.
OTOH, I'm not even certain exactly what they did, and how abnormal it was. It certainly isn't the way I want people to act, but I've lots of times noticed that people often don't act as I want them to.
I'm reminded of a presidential election. Whichever side you look at, it's abusing the process, and breaking the laws. (Perhaps this would be less so if there were more than two significant parties, but our election process pretty much guarantees that there won't be more than two, and strongly encourages there to be two.) So depending on your sympathies, you look at the opposition and talk about how they are criminals. And you're right. But you're ignoring that your favored side is doing the same thing.
I really wish they hadn't done whatever they actually did. (I'm not quite certain about that.) But I still think that the preponderance of the evidence shows that global warming is happening, and that the rate is increasing. And that one of the key factors is the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere. And that we have been acting in ways that increase that value. And this basic level doesn't rely on any one team of scientists, or any five, or any twenty. Details are, of course, important, and the details *do* rely on scientists acting honorably.
It would definitely be beneficial if all climate data were made publicly accessible. It would also be beneficial if the models that were made which interpreted the data were published as open source. I'm not sure precisely which license would be appropriate, though. You want attribution to be required, and ALL modifications to be listed and attributed. This would allow for independent validation of every version of the models.
(Actually, these closed sources are the kind of reason I don't trust closed source programs to do what they claim. And for science that's a fatal flaw.)
This still leaves the problem of how to trust the data. It's one thing to say "This data fed into these models yield these results." and that can be solved via standard Open Source protocols. But it doesn't address the assertion "This data is honest and reliable." Open publication at an early stage of the raw data is an appropriate step, but it still leaves room for doubts about the honesty BEFORE the publication happened.
Sorry to disappoint you, but though I'm anti-cap and trade, it's for quite different reasons.
Where it's been tried, cap and trade as been demonstrated to be a failure as a carbon control measure. It's been a subterfuge to award grants to carbon emitting companies, officially for not polluting, but actually there's no measured success rate. It generally has been used to subsidize things that were going to be done anyway.
A carbon tax is a much better answer. It doesn't require the immense bureaucracy, but that isn't my reason. By putting costs at the source (e.g. where fuel is either imported or extracted) the ability to ensure that limits are enforced is stronger. (The EPA should also be allowed to regulate carbon emissions...as they were briefly around a decade ago, but that isn't sufficient...though it's also a requirement unless the carbon tax is quite punitive, and that would encourage smugglers.)
FWIW, if you're employed, you're on someone's payroll.
Very few scientists these days are independently wealthy. (There was the "Surfer Dude" we heard about about a year ago, but he's about it as far as my knowledge goes.)
I don't know about him, but I've an unpatched MSWind95 box that I use for a proprietary graphics program and a proprietary music score editing program. No new data is generated on that system, but occasionally it's important to get at old data.
My method of securing it is not to put it on the Internet at all. Not every purpose needs an Internet connection. (When the box MUST be on the Internet, I boot it with a live-CD and plug in the Ethernet cable temporarily.)
It's not memory issues. The printing doesn't even start. And it's not landscape. (The exported PDFs *do* print properly.)
I'm pretty sure it's got to be something involving both svg and the printer driver (HP PSC 2500), since the same file will print properly from other programs (if rescaled) and other svgs will print properly from Inkscape. This doesn't pin things down very much though. I do know that sometimes it will happen with very simple figures. Once, if I remember properly, it was on a figure that had only six nodes in it. Other times it prints properly figures that are quite complex.
Well, maybe the problem will have just disappeared with the new version.
P.S.: Perhaps tiled clones isn't what I meant after all. I looked at the controls, and it didn't look like what I was after. I generally don't want rows and columns, but a series of figures each rotated slightly from the prior one about a designated center. (Often I'll take one figure, duplicate it, rotate it 180 degrees, move it into position, group the two figures. Then I can rotate the group around the center. If it's an odd number of figures, however, it's more difficult, and I don't know how to proceed for a prime number of figures. [Well, actually you double the number of figures, proceed as abover, then go back and delete half the number you've built. It's doable, but the process is a lot uglier than I'd like.])
It was a real estate salesman's name. Lief Erickson was trying to set up a colony, so he had to make it sound attractive.
"The law of gravity would be thrown into doubt if there were a commercial interest involved." -- H.L. Mencken
Did you find out that it was actually a scam? Or did you just accept someone else's word that it was?
I know that I haven't read the original documents. Did you? If not, whose summary are you accepting?
I think that a lot of "rush to judgement" is happening, and that probably it will turn out to be much less significant than many are asserting. I also, however, believe that global warming is, indeed, happening. And I believe that there are lots of independent lines of evidence, to such a degree that even if the entire basis of this site turned out to be based around fraud (which I rate quite unlikely) there's still enough independent evidence of global warming. It's possible that it isn't happening quite as rapidly as I feared, but there's so much evidence that I suspect that our current estimates UNDERSTATE the rapidity of global warming. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the projections removed all information originating at this site. We know that politically motivated decsions have occasionally caused climate scientists to be less alarmist in officially published reports. I.e., a report would be submitted, and the authors would be instructed by their political managers to reduce the estimated rate and impact. This, of course, doesn't prove that the rewrite didn't make the report more accurate, but politically motivated rewrites don't have much of a history for doing that.
That's a separate accusation. Tribalism is proven easily by the e-mails. That fraud happened isn't at all clear. It was clearly solicited, but if the outcome of the solicitation was to become an accomplice isn't clear.
That said, I'm relying on summaries provided by other people. I didn't read the things myself. (I deal with more e-mail than I want to each day already.) But if you want me to accept an accusation of fraud, you'll need to point to specific evidence, not to thousands of e-mails. (I don't even know that all the "Canadian Pharmacies with vastly reduced prices" are frauds. I just know I'm not going to bother checking them out.)
I'm not absolutely sure you're correct. Radiodurans might be able to evolve an immunity to it. (Any bacteria that can grow inside an active nuclear reactor has a good head start.)
OTOH, it's not something I'd expect very quickly.
P.S.: My first thought was: "I wonder how long until dentists start using this?"
I'd pay a bit for that, if it covered what I was interested in, but how do you convince me that you're offering it?
These days I read New Scientist, Scientific American, a couple of Linux mags. (sometimes), Slashdot, Groklaw, and entertaining fiction. I'd like something of the quality of Groklaw covering national politics...but I haven't found it anywhere, neither in print nor on the web.
And if I catch you lying to me, I won't pay you a penny from then on.
Somebody mentioned the London Economist. I read an issue of that, and it wasn't bad. But it wasn't covering what I wanted covered. (Not too surprising.) You might see if it's what you want.
If they did, I might just subscribe to them...until i caught them lying to me.
Most of the current newspapers and media don't deserve to exist. They only promulgate lies. Of the existing papers, my favorite is the Weekly World News. In that one you don't need to wonder how they are lying to you.
From my individual point of view the large newspapers and media channels have destroyed their rationale for existing by lying to me and careless neglect of verification of the data that they could easily have done. (Both/and, not either/or). There are local newspapers that I still trust moderately.
I've been on site (sight?) of a few news events which I later saw covered on the TV, or by a newspaper. Without exception I have found the stories to be grossly, almost grotesquely, distorted. I presume that the news I can't check on is no more reliable than the news that I have been able to check on. I no longer trust ANY media to report accurately. Occasionally by comparing two or three independent sources I can determine a few features of what probably happened.
N.B.: I said distort. AFAICT the media rarely resorts to direct lies, except where they are quoting someone, and even then it's often a lie by omission. But there are a tremendous number of incoming signals. I've seen a single building on fire converted in a news story into an apparent conflagration spreading over much of a city. (In this particular case, that was basically laziness. There were, indeed, numerous buildings on fire, they just didn't bother to photograph any except the most photogenic one. Even so they vastly overstated the degree of the disaster.)