If you watch the video, the guy was perfectly capable of verbally abusing the officers, yelling about how he's being brutalized, and the like for a couple minutes after the first tasing before getting it the second time. You can't really see much of him in the video (most of the video is of the backs of onlookers), but from what I could see it certainly looked to me like he was purposefully resisting them.
Of course, everyone who has already made up their minds that it was unwarranted sees something different.
So I can't use ClearCase on Debian. BFD. That has no effect on open source software.
And now, the fact that I won't be able to use MS Office on Debian in five years is somehow supposed to kill open source software on Linux, even though it's chugging along just fine without Word today.
Of course, rodentia is wrong. Try reading the relevant section of the US Code before you take his advice and start photocopying all of the textbooks in the library willy-nilly. The law explicitly states that all of the four factors enumerated there will be considered when determining if something is fair use, and those factors include the type of use (educational or commercial, for instance), the amount of material copied, and the effect on the market.
I consider it far more likely to be a fluff piece to get the techies voting for continued US warmongering, given it's fortuitous release on the day of an important US vote.
Reporters Without Borders is the organization that keeps downgrading the US on "press freedom" because the US government seems to think that journalists aren't above the law. By its past behavior, they're much more likely to be spreading anti- rather than pro-American propaganda.
Believe it or not, just because somebody doesn't always call the US the ultimate evil doesn't make them a mouthpiece for the White House.
From reading the linked story, the calls might be a little misleading, but they're not claiming to be from a democrat -- in fact, the message ends with the obligatory "paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee" mssage. It's bad, though not really any worse than the "phone poll" smear calls that I was getting several weeks ago (which were all badmouthing republican candidates, for all those idiots who seem to think that this stupidity is limited to the party that they don't like.) Calls that falsely claim to be from a particular party are much worse, although I suspect that most of them are done by individual pranksters and not condoned by the people who stand to benefit.
I used to make a point of not voting for anyone who disrespects the people enough to harass them with automated phone calls. Of course, at this point, that pretty much means turning in an empty ballot.
At least in California, it is impossible to vote for a single party all at once - there simply isn't an option to do so. You have to place a vote for each individual race.
Until reading this, I had never even heard of such an option. What a terrible idea -- do we really need to give people more encouragement to vote without using their brains?
Although I'm too lazy to read this year's article, in previous years the complaints against the US were primarily related to journalists being arrested for breaking the law -- for instance, for trespassing while trying to gather their stories. If you don't buy into the premise that the press is above the law, then the whole thing kind of fell apart.
Funny that these conservatives never seem to object to the right-wing bias of the private talk radio industry (which even goes out over public radio spectrum).
It is, of course, no more funny than the fact that whenever a similar story is posted to slashdot about a "liberal" person/story being "censored" by a private company, there are immediately dozens of long diatribes posted about how doing so is unconstitutional and evil modded up to +5, while I only see only one -- relatively mild -- example of that in the entire first page of posts to this story.
I might take the people (on both sides) more seriously if they weren't all hypocrites.
No, it's not enough. Here in the real world, some of us make decisions based on the actual benefits and drawbacks of a service, rather than just assuming that everything is terrible because they do one thing that somebody doesn't like.
Because it's (more or less) exactly balanced by the centripetal acceleration of the earth's orbital motion.
No, it's not. The centripetal force is the force of gravity between the earth and the sun. It's not "balanced" by it. The grandparent poster was right on this one: you don't feel the force of the sun's gravity because you, the earth, and everything on it are all in free fall around the sun, just like when astronauts are orbiting the earth.
This is, incidentally, one of the toughest things to teach new physics students. It's very difficult to convince them that a body in rotational motion doesn't have a force acting outward to counteract the force acting towards the center.
Wow, when the only way you can downplay negative effects of some action is by comparing it to what America already do, you know you're in trouble!!!
"Downplaying" means to minimize the significance of something, which wasn't what I was doing. Rather, I was responding to someone who was vastly misrepresenting the effect that this would have -- he said that it was "enough SOx into the atmosphere to disolve every limestone structure on the earth and rot out the lungs of half the airbreather as well as burn the gills of all the fish," which is obviously not reality.
I never said that I thought this was a particularly good idea.
Those guys are really whacked, on the surface of it they are seriously sugesting we put enough SOx into the atmosphere to disolve every limestone structure on the earth and rot out the lungs of half the airbreather as well as burn the gills of all the fish, hello fucktards SOx + HOH make sulphuric acid and thats a bad thing.
From what I can find, it looks like US emissions of sulphur dioxide are somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 million tons (down about a third from its high, due to programs to prevent acid rain.) I wasn't able to find any statistics on worldwide artificial or natural emissions, but I would assume that the total is significantly more. 5 million tons on top of that, while not exactly trivial, isn't going to cause widespread destruction.
However, given those numbers, it does make me wonder why these people expect that adding the extra amount would have much of an effect.
Also since when did sulpur oxides in the air cool things, I thought they were one of the strongest greenhouse gasses as in Venus atmosphere of sulphuric acid and surface temperature of about 900 F.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus) the atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen, and 0.015% sulphur dioxide -- the high temperature is due to the carbon dioxide. Although I don't have any information on whether sulphur dioxide is a greenhouse gas or how powerful a one it is, at those concentrations (and at even smaller concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere), it's not worth worrying about.
But, of course, at this point we really have no idea how good this new controller is going to be for playing games. If it ends up being used for a couple of gimmicky features and otherwise a standard-style controller would suffice, then I'd say that $60 is far too much.
It looks as though the Wii is going to live or die based on how well the new controller works. If it turns out to be everything the hype is claiming, then you're right and nobody will mind paying for it. But otherwise, that price is going to be a real turn-off for many people. The $30 controller prices for last-generation consoles was bad enough.
That's scary. Tom Sawyer is on the compulsory literature list in my country, I remember reading it as a kid and then rereading it when I was like 12 for the school literature lessons.
In the US, Tom Sawyer (and, more commonly, Huckleberry Finn) are commonly used in school classrooms. What the listing of these (and most of the other books on the list) really means is that a few people have complained about them or tried to have them removed; it doesn't mean that they're "banned" in any real sense of the word. Really, it shouldn't be that amazing that in a country of 300 million, there are some wackos.
While I don't support book banning, I think that these lists are pretty meaningless as they equate things like a single parent who complains about a particular book to a school district which decides to remove a particular book from their shelves. There's a world of difference between the two.
Or, maybe, instead of posting a video of him reading from a script, he could have just posted the script. Saves a lot of time and bandwidth for everyone involved.
At least now the "I only pirate to decide whether to buy it" crowd has no excuse any more.
They'll just switch to "I have to hear it on my MP3 player to decide whether I like it enough to buy it." Or, how about, "They're giving the music away for free, so I should be able to download another copy and use it any way I want?" And, of course, don't forget "targetted advertising is violating my privacy rights, so I'm entitled to do whatever I want with their products."
For the lazy, here's the description from the article about how the futuristic OS is going to work:
Here's an example for you: imagine you are sitting there working away on a video project. After stopping for a break, your OS pops up with a small alert box asking you if you'd like the PC to roll into adaptive mode. You select yes and the OS begins to learn, as you work, what your needs are.
You go to open your video project again after lunch and almost immediately, you find that the program feels more in tune and responsive to your needs. On the second monitor, you discover a virtual palette of all the editing tools you use the most. No longer are you being forced to locate the editing tools you need from some arcane menu. No, instead your PC has done the work for you with no interaction on your part whatsoever. Sounds interesting? Just wait, it gets weirder...
During the course of your editing work, your PC has already learned from previous experiences that you do not like to be bothered with e-mail alerts when working on specific projects. It's not so much the software being used mind you, rather the type of "work" being done at the time.
An important e-mail from your client comes rolling in along with a number of less important messages. Thanks to Brand X OS' new probability engine, the only e-mail you are alerted to is the one the OS knows will be critical. Even though the other less important e-mails are coming from the same person, your OS understands how to handle this just the way you prefer.
Now, I don't know about anybody else, but I would kind of expect that the video editing program would make the tools easily accessible the first time I use it, rather than waiting until I've spent a couple hours hunting through menus before doing so. And my e-mail program already has an option controlling whether it notifies me of new messages or not.
In a general sense, the idea of an adaptive OS sounds nice, but the author sure didn't come up with any examples that sound particularly compelling -- or even interesting -- to me. The hard part of coming up with a next-generation OS isn't in programming new features; it's actually inventing or designing something that people will find useful.
If the astronomers really just wanted and needed a consistent scientific term that covers those bodies in their new "planet" definition, they could have just made up a new term. No need to try to change a word in popular use. However, in this case, they decided beforehand which bodies were planets and then made up a definition to fit. That hardly seems like something born out of scientific neccessity.
I think that the definition of planet should be "Anything in our solar system named Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto." There. Simple, and no more arguing over whether X or Y is a planet or not. We can revisit the definition in a few hundred years when we're actually reaching other solar systems.
Seriously, why is it considered so important to redefine "planet"? Don't these astronomers have anything better to do with their time?
Slashdot Mirror
If you watch the video, the guy was perfectly capable of verbally abusing the officers, yelling about how he's being brutalized, and the like for a couple minutes after the first tasing before getting it the second time. You can't really see much of him in the video (most of the video is of the backs of onlookers), but from what I could see it certainly looked to me like he was purposefully resisting them.
Of course, everyone who has already made up their minds that it was unwarranted sees something different.
So I can't use ClearCase on Debian. BFD. That has no effect on open source software.
And now, the fact that I won't be able to use MS Office on Debian in five years is somehow supposed to kill open source software on Linux, even though it's chugging along just fine without Word today.
Right.I must have missed the day that all software stopped working on Debian because you couldn't get official ClearCase support on it.
Of course, rodentia is wrong. Try reading the relevant section of the US Code before you take his advice and start photocopying all of the textbooks in the library willy-nilly. The law explicitly states that all of the four factors enumerated there will be considered when determining if something is fair use, and those factors include the type of use (educational or commercial, for instance), the amount of material copied, and the effect on the market.
Reporters Without Borders is the organization that keeps downgrading the US on "press freedom" because the US government seems to think that journalists aren't above the law. By its past behavior, they're much more likely to be spreading anti- rather than pro-American propaganda.
Believe it or not, just because somebody doesn't always call the US the ultimate evil doesn't make them a mouthpiece for the White House.
From reading the linked story, the calls might be a little misleading, but they're not claiming to be from a democrat -- in fact, the message ends with the obligatory "paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee" mssage. It's bad, though not really any worse than the "phone poll" smear calls that I was getting several weeks ago (which were all badmouthing republican candidates, for all those idiots who seem to think that this stupidity is limited to the party that they don't like.) Calls that falsely claim to be from a particular party are much worse, although I suspect that most of them are done by individual pranksters and not condoned by the people who stand to benefit.
I used to make a point of not voting for anyone who disrespects the people enough to harass them with automated phone calls. Of course, at this point, that pretty much means turning in an empty ballot.
I started smoking because of Bush.
More to the point, given that Lua is widely used, only an idiot would try to claim that Lua is "DOA" because of its license.
Although I'm too lazy to read this year's article, in previous years the complaints against the US were primarily related to journalists being arrested for breaking the law -- for instance, for trespassing while trying to gather their stories. If you don't buy into the premise that the press is above the law, then the whole thing kind of fell apart.
It is, of course, no more funny than the fact that whenever a similar story is posted to slashdot about a "liberal" person/story being "censored" by a private company, there are immediately dozens of long diatribes posted about how doing so is unconstitutional and evil modded up to +5, while I only see only one -- relatively mild -- example of that in the entire first page of posts to this story.
I might take the people (on both sides) more seriously if they weren't all hypocrites.No, it's not. The centripetal force is the force of gravity between the earth and the sun. It's not "balanced" by it. The grandparent poster was right on this one: you don't feel the force of the sun's gravity because you, the earth, and everything on it are all in free fall around the sun, just like when astronauts are orbiting the earth.
This is, incidentally, one of the toughest things to teach new physics students. It's very difficult to convince them that a body in rotational motion doesn't have a force acting outward to counteract the force acting towards the center.
"Downplaying" means to minimize the significance of something, which wasn't what I was doing. Rather, I was responding to someone who was vastly misrepresenting the effect that this would have -- he said that it was "enough SOx into the atmosphere to disolve every limestone structure on the earth and rot out the lungs of half the airbreather as well as burn the gills of all the fish," which is obviously not reality.
I never said that I thought this was a particularly good idea.
From what I can find, it looks like US emissions of sulphur dioxide are somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 million tons (down about a third from its high, due to programs to prevent acid rain.) I wasn't able to find any statistics on worldwide artificial or natural emissions, but I would assume that the total is significantly more. 5 million tons on top of that, while not exactly trivial, isn't going to cause widespread destruction.
However, given those numbers, it does make me wonder why these people expect that adding the extra amount would have much of an effect.
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus) the atmosphere of Venus is 96.5% carbon dioxide, 3.5% nitrogen, and 0.015% sulphur dioxide -- the high temperature is due to the carbon dioxide. Although I don't have any information on whether sulphur dioxide is a greenhouse gas or how powerful a one it is, at those concentrations (and at even smaller concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere), it's not worth worrying about.But, of course, at this point we really have no idea how good this new controller is going to be for playing games. If it ends up being used for a couple of gimmicky features and otherwise a standard-style controller would suffice, then I'd say that $60 is far too much.
It looks as though the Wii is going to live or die based on how well the new controller works. If it turns out to be everything the hype is claiming, then you're right and nobody will mind paying for it. But otherwise, that price is going to be a real turn-off for many people. The $30 controller prices for last-generation consoles was bad enough.
In the US, Tom Sawyer (and, more commonly, Huckleberry Finn) are commonly used in school classrooms. What the listing of these (and most of the other books on the list) really means is that a few people have complained about them or tried to have them removed; it doesn't mean that they're "banned" in any real sense of the word. Really, it shouldn't be that amazing that in a country of 300 million, there are some wackos.
While I don't support book banning, I think that these lists are pretty meaningless as they equate things like a single parent who complains about a particular book to a school district which decides to remove a particular book from their shelves. There's a world of difference between the two.
Or, maybe, instead of posting a video of him reading from a script, he could have just posted the script. Saves a lot of time and bandwidth for everyone involved.
For the lazy, here's the description from the article about how the futuristic OS is going to work:
Now, I don't know about anybody else, but I would kind of expect that the video editing program would make the tools easily accessible the first time I use it, rather than waiting until I've spent a couple hours hunting through menus before doing so. And my e-mail program already has an option controlling whether it notifies me of new messages or not.
In a general sense, the idea of an adaptive OS sounds nice, but the author sure didn't come up with any examples that sound particularly compelling -- or even interesting -- to me. The hard part of coming up with a next-generation OS isn't in programming new features; it's actually inventing or designing something that people will find useful.
If the astronomers really just wanted and needed a consistent scientific term that covers those bodies in their new "planet" definition, they could have just made up a new term. No need to try to change a word in popular use. However, in this case, they decided beforehand which bodies were planets and then made up a definition to fit. That hardly seems like something born out of scientific neccessity.
I think that the definition of planet should be "Anything in our solar system named Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto." There. Simple, and no more arguing over whether X or Y is a planet or not. We can revisit the definition in a few hundred years when we're actually reaching other solar systems.
Seriously, why is it considered so important to redefine "planet"? Don't these astronomers have anything better to do with their time?