What he's more likely to do is discover that the "originals" have various problems, like not working in his cars, while the stuff you get from Kazaa, or any of the other p2p-networks doesn't have that problem.
Thus he gets it from kazaa. If it initially took 5 minutes of work to rip the CD, or 30, is without consequence to him, as is what technical knowledge is required, because he's not going to be the one doing it. He's only going to download the finished, ripped-by-someone-else unencumbered mp3.
I understand what you say. But I'm afraid I'm still not convinced.
Thing is, how do you justify letting "stronger" females play in the male league without also letting weaker males play in the female league ?
And if you allow that, the effect would be precisely what I predicted above: The top *5* leagues or so would be filled with males, from strong to medium, and only thereunder would the top women have a chance at competing against the medium to weak males.
I'm just not convinced that'd help the status of female sports.
Unless you really think that equality demands that females have access to all areas, all leagues, all competitions, but excluding males from certain leagues, competitions and areas are perfectly ok.
That is, however a sorta odd definition of "equality".
Why is it so freaking hard to accept that males and females are different in some areas ? Everyone knows that with equal training, a male will almost always beat a female in sports requiring lots of muscle-strength and/or being large. I really don't see why that is so controverisal. It's *really* *REALLY* obvious to even a casual observer.
There migth be sports where with equal training, males and females would do similarily well, I have no objections to joining the leagues there. Perhaps chess, shooting, pool and FPS belong in this class of sports. (I said *perhaps*, I consider it possible that less femals FPS-champs is only a result of less players and/or less training, but I also consider it possible that there are physiological differences that play a role.)
No. On operating-systems for personal computers. If you count only x86 personal computers MS has maybe 97% market-penetration, if you count all personal computers, they have maybe 95% market penetration.
The other architectures are simply so small that their inclusion or exclusion makes no real difference to the overall conclusions.
If you talk about *server*-OSes you'll get very different conclusions, that's why I spesifically said "personal" computers.
You're close, but not quite. The rule goes like this: When you are a monopolist in one market (and Microsoft has been found in a court of law to be a monopolist in the market for operating-systems for personal computers), you are not allowed to use this dominant position to gain monopoly-status in other markets.
And that is *precisely* what MS is doing. Does anyone think that IE would have like 90% market-penetration if not for the fact that MS uses it's monopoly in OSes to push it ?
Does anyone think that WMP would be used by something like 80% of all people for playing mp3s and watching divx-movies if not for the fact that MS uses it's powers as monopolist in order to push it ?
The thing which you refuse to face is that there *ARE* certain actions that are perfectly legal in ordinary bussiness, but which are illegal if done by a actor enjoying monopoly-status. And there are *reasons* for this. The main reason is that if we don't have such rules, monopolies have a tendency to grow;
MS has a monopoly in OSes for personal computers. Next they'll use that to gain a monopoly in web-browsers (some would argue they're already close to this.)(and no, before you start, monopoly does not mean there are no alternatives, only that you have a market-penetration so high that your actions completely dominate the market.)
Next they'll do the same for email, instant messaging and all other much-used internet-protocols. Then they'll use this to gain an advantage in the server-market. Afterall, it's somewhat easier to be the server if you own all the clients. You can "extend" the protocols in arbitrary ways and force all competitors to play catch-up for example.
Next, after you control the personal computers and the servers, you go after the hardware. Since you choose to support only a certain platform, makers of all other platforms are bust.
Next you go for mobile phones. And pdas. You argue that yours will always "work better" with the PC, logically enough since you control the PC.
And so on.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, they increase prices ("monopoly-rent"), and decrease choise, quality and speed of development.
They are also bad for the economy. People pay "rent" to the monopolist instead of using the money to develop truly new products or to truly improve the existing ones.
Thus, it makes sense to have rules to regulate the powers of monopolies.
I think it depends on how fragmented we can make the thing.
Being hit by a thousand 10-tonners migth not be preferable to being hit by a single supertanker.
But being hit with a billion 100g-pieces would certainly be better. The energy is the same, but in this case they would pretty much all burn up in the high atmosphere, and the energy would be a lot more spread out.
If you can blow the thing up early enough, many of the pieces will even miss the earth completely. Because even if the *average* course of the asteroid does not change (it migth, depending on where you set of the bomb (nuke probably), the course of the individual pieces migth change drastically.
For example, A piece which gets thrown off the main course by 10m/s (around 20 miles/hour) one week before impact would very very likely miss the earth completely.
So, it's more like either being hit by a round from a tank, or having a cloud consisting of a billion sand-grains heading your way, but so that a large fraction of them will miss you completely, and more still will be stopped by your atmosphere.
Proven enough. Granted, there is some uncertanity around details like if the impact was the only reason for the mass extinction, or if other factors also played a role and so on. But there is no serious doubt in the scientific community that the earth was indeed hit by a pretty big asteroid. around the time the dinosaurs died out.
Besides, if you really doubt that this happens, you need only to take a look at the moon. It has no atmosphere which causes smaller asteroids to evaporate before impact, and also helps washing away the signs of impacts after they happen. It's probably a fair bet that the earth gets hit more often than the moon, given that it's so much larger. It's also a fair bet that anything that is big enough to create a major crater on the moon is also big enough to punch trough the atmosphere and create major destruction here.
Sure. We know the chanses are low. Allthough we don't know exactly how low. We *do* know that in the last century alone we've had atleast a few impacts big enough that if they had happened to hit a major city rather than (for example) the tundra in Siberia, tens of thousands of dead would result.
We also know that major impacts, the sort that changes the climate over the entire globe and causes mass extinction of species has happened atleast on a few occasions.
But we don't really know enough to say anything about the true risks. For that reason alone, the first nice thing to do would probably be to increase funding for telescopes, radars and other instruments for better accessing the real risk. That is not a very expensive proposition, as this is an area that is very lowly funded today, a little bit of extra cash will go a long way towards establishing the real risks.
If we should do anything more depends on the risks and the costs of potential defences. It's a cost/benefit calculation.
You are rigth that ICBM-interception-systems are irrelevant for this purpose. All realistic systems for doing something about asteroid-impacts rely on the fact that a small change to the orbit of the thing a long distance from earth will result in a major change, enough to miss the earth, by the time it gets here. Changing the orbit in the last few hours is going to be impractical, it'd require huge amounts of energy. Sligthly more practical migth be blowing the thing up, which would result in a large number of smaller impacts instead of a single big one.
To stop a ICBM you need to hit it with, say, the explosive force of a hand-grenade. That's not going to cut it if you want to blow apart a asteroid of extinction-threathening size.
You're confusing two different things. Yes, one unix-admin can in general admin more servers, or maintain more desktops than one windows-guy.
But that doesn't mean that you won't require more or less the same amount for user-support as you needed under Windows. Indeed you'd probably need more in the change-over period. Not because Linux is so much harder to use, but simply because *any* change requires some amount of retraining. (changing from Linux to Windows would also require extra user-support for a period.)
So, the likely calculations goes something like this:
Licensing: Savings from day 1 onwards.
User-support: Initially extra costs, later the same as now.
Administration: Initially extra costs, later savings.
In the short range (~6 months) the re-training and conversion, installation of new systems and so on will likely outweigh the saved licensing-costs. (depending on spesifics ofcourse)
Thereafter you'll save money, because re-training and higher costs in support for converting stuff is a one-off affair while the savings in licensing and in lower administration are permanent.
For foreign (as in Non-US) governments an additional factor is at work; The licensing-money you save would have been shipped more or less wholesale to the US. The wages you pay local people stay in the local economy, goes to grow the local IT-bussiness and you get parts of it back (the people hired pay income-tax which return to the state, then they buy stuff in the shops, where the VAT returns to the state etc etc etc)
So, what you are saying is that separate female leagues in basketball is wrong, and they should instead play in the minor league aslong and try to compete their way into the main league by playing well enough ?
The problem with that theory is that basically no woman would ever play in say the top 5 leagues. There are large, obvious, physical differences. The female national champions in basket would probably get their asses kicked by the average male junior team.
This ain't sexist. This is true. I *know* that being politically correct is all the vogue these days. But it goes to far when you start insisting on ignoring reality.
REALITY is that without female-only leagues, no female (or close enough as makes no difference) would be able to hold her own in most professional sports, ESPECIALLY those where size and muscle-mass plays a large role, like basket.
I already said I see no reason, in principle, why we couldn't have one class only in sports where such issues play no role. I honestly don't know why women do poorer for example in shooting. Still, they do. I witnessed the last Norwegian national championship in field-shooting. You migth not *like* it, but the fact is, if everyone competed in one class, the females there would all be in the bottom half of the result-list, most in the bottom quarter. Infact, there where several males good enough to beat the top woman who where nevertheless not even qualified to participate in the male class.
Separating people into leagues by skill will ensure, in most sports, that no female can do professional sports. Because with the same effort, her chanse of ever reaching the higher leagues is close to zero. Separating with handicaps will ensure that few or none of the females or female teams ever get a low handicap.
As I said; in some sports this migth function. In many many others, such as those where it's an advantage to be big and strong, your "solution" would only manage one thing; to get rid of the top women alltogether.
But we're discussing competitions. We're discussing the performance of the *top* people.
You're correct that the strongest woman is (MUSCH) stronger than the weakest guy. That is however totally irrelevant if you're considering whether or not to have separate classes for males and females in weight-lifting.
Similarily, the best female Counterstrikers can undoubtedly beat the average male. They can however in general NOT hold their own against the *best* male players, and that's what they have to do to avoid getting crushed in competitions.
When we're talking competitions, average performances are quite irrelevant, the interesting question is if a well-trained female can hold her own on equal terms with a well-trained male. In some sports there's no reason why that shouldn't be so (example: shooting, snooker, FPS, chess), while in others they very obviously can not. (i.e. anything where muscle-mass plays a big role.))
I agree with your point about fire-persons. If a job requires the ability to life 100 pounds, then obviously anyone who's qualified, male or female, should be able to apply for the job
Rigth, while putting the 7 female teams in among the 50 male ones, all probably finishing in the bottom third would do WONDERS to destroy the idea of female inferiority.
Here's a hint: Noone would have dreamed of stopping a female team from competing in the male class. None of the team wanted to though, because they all knew they'd get their ass kicked.
I'm sorry, I know this ain't politically correct. But that doesn't make it less true.
Re:Okay, so let's put that theory to the test...
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Girls in the Gaming World
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Sure. I'm all for letting girls who want to try their luck in the male classes. There's no reason not to.
Some though, would feel that allowing that would further underline the differences. Today we can all play make-believe and say there's one class only for girls, one only for boys, so it's equal in a way.
If we let girls compete whereever they choose (and I see no reason not to) then we also need to be intellectually honest enough that there's one "free for all" class, and one "females only", and we can no longer pretend it's "equal".
The risk is that this would further undermine the status of the females-only class. It'd be sorta like there's special classes in many sports for "only those under 16".
You'd have a situation where it'd basically be a male as "World-Champion" (or whatever) in any sport, and the females would be relegated to "World-Champion - female only class"
It's a tricky bussiness. It's tricky because we have this ideal, and the political correctness, that we're supposed to be equal. And the fact of the matter is that today we are not. In some sports, like those where muscle-mass play a role, we'll never be. In others, where muscles are irrelevant, we *migth* get there some day, but today we're not. (Personally I'd be overjoyed to see a female F1-winner or chess grandmaster)
You got it wrong. The girls are in their own competition, not because the males have a problem with playing against them, but because if the 7 female teams played in the male league, together with the 50 male teams, they would very likely end up grind into dust.
Sorry, but it's true. I'm not saying they'll nessecarily finish places 51-57, but my guess is that they would all be in the bottom half, and most of them in the bottom quarter.
I agree there's no reason why females, in principle, couldnt't play FPS games as well as or better than males. In the real world that's rare though. The reason being that fewer girls play, and those the play play less on the average.
The same is true in any number of other sports where physical size and strength in principle should not play a role. Snooker. Dart. Shooting. Racing, hell even Chess.
In all these sports there's no big reason why females couldn't compete in the same class with the boys, except in general the result would be a few females on the bottom-quarter of the result-list. Which ain't very inspiring and migth aswell lead to more sexism as to less.
I'm sure someone will jump at me, for being politically uncorrect or something. Those people should instead tell me the names of women who can actually hold their own agains say the top 20 males in chess, snooker, racing or dart.
Morse code manages to encode the 26 letters of the alphabet in 4 bits maximum and much less than 4 bits per letter on average.
That'd be a clever trick, if it was true, given that 2^4 is only 16. It's impossible to encode 26 different letters with all fitting in 4 bits, much less an even lower average as you claim.
The trick is offcourse that morse is not binary, as in having 2 different symbols, but rather atleast ternary. A morse-sequence consists not of dots and dashes, but from dots, dashes and pauses. Without the pauses it's not uniquely decodable.
3^4 is 81, so that leaves enough space not only to encode all the letters, but also, as you say, to give shorter encodings to commonly used letters.
Are you suggesting that there are moral absolutes,
Obviously, YES, I am. For a person who is a complete moral relativist, a discussion about morale is pointless.
tend not to believe in moral absolutes, that you can't project your own morals or principles onto others, especially if they live in another country, without implicitly acknowledging that you believe their culture's moral values are wrong.
Where'd you get the idea that anyone is really a relativist ? There's some who claim so, in an intellectual sort of way. But kick them in the leg, and ask them if that is perfectly fine, assuming it's a nice thing to do in my value system. They all say no.
I don't see what the imaginary concept "countries" has to do with it.
but I see the attitude that American views of sexuality are wrong far too often on a forum where most participants, statistically speaking, seem to be moral relativists.
I think you are wrong. I see no evidence that most slashdotters are moral relativists. I believe, by the way, that even most Americans agree that sex between consenting adults is more desireable than unprovoked violence. I mean, most adults have sex several times a week (no compulsory nerd-jokes please!), and consider it to be a nice and enjoyable part of their relationship. (if not they'd not do it...) Most people also find unprovoked violence bad.
If people where relativists, they wouldn't desire punishment for criminals. They would not support human rigths. They would not consider the way females are treated in Iran wrong. But infact, pretty much everyone do.
You can't have it both ways!
You're the only one who is claiming people here want it both ways. I see no evidence of that whatsoever. I *certainly* don't want to live in a world where nobody gives a fuck. I'd rather live in a world full of people who disagree with me than in a world where nobody holds an opinion.
A problem with the ratings is that they map it all to a single number; recommended form age X.
And still, the rating-system is not (and cannot be!) neutral at all, not all parents will agree (or even come close to agree!) on what their kids should be shielded for. In particular, to most scandinawians the US guideleines are ridicolously strict on nudity and/or language, while being similarily soft on violence.
It's hard to believe this has to do with the well-being of children, more likely it reflects the puritanity of the reviewers or the parents.
No kid will ever be scared, hurt or otherwise damaged by seeing a naked female breast. Indeed most kids do so from age ~2 minutes. Noone is going to wake up in the nigth, having nigthmares, because they've seen a penis.
It always seemed ridiculous to me that in these rating-systems, showing 2 seconds of naked skin seems on par with decapitating people, blood gushing all over the place.
Thus, I'd never trust the rating-systems anyway, and would vastly prefer spending the required time myself to make up my own damn opinion. What's so wrong about spending time with your child anyway ?
Why ? There's no way the raw logs will fill more than say 100GB a day or so. That amount of data is peanuts for a company the size of Google, especially since searching is the core of their bussiness.
Even if you stored it on triple-redundant raid-arrays, and kept it online forever, that is, no migration to tape-libraries or similar, it'd still only be a cost of around $500/day.
The thing is, even people who are quite into technology are unable to wrap their heads around how mind-bogglingly cheap storage has become.
IBM released these things under the GPL... so what license did IBM really have from SCO to do this?
That is entirely the wrong question. IBM wrote the code. IBM owns the code. IBM contributed the code. SCO is *claiming* that doing so violates some contract IBM has with them. The burden of proof lies on them. The question is NOT what "licence" IBM has from SCO to release their own stuff under the GPL. (you don't need a "license" to do what you please with stuff you wrote yourself.) The question is, what evidence does SCO have that IBM is, infact, violating some agreement with them by doing as it does.
I'm genuinely curious though, what does it do that a recent version of Kmail does not ?
People have mentioned filtering. Every client under the sun does this, kmail does it very well, and very inituitive.
There was talk of gpg/pgp-integrations. Kmail has done this too for quite some time. After selecting which key to use for signing, use couldn't be simpler.
This backup-thing sounds ok. Allthough I must admit I don't quite see why each app should try to implement backup by itself, rather than having one backup-solution for your entire computer. It'd be a hassle to have to separately backup in each and every program that stores data, rather than just, as I do now, mirror $HOME daily.
What more is there to it ? In particular, what does it do that kmail doesn't ?
But, the exit-case is obviously the person who's only slept with one other person, and therefore cannot be the *source* of any STDs into the network.
Unless, and that's the kicker offcourse, the disease first came into existence in this person, by mutating form some other harmless variant or something.
Re:I though otherwise, so did my physics teacher.
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Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
the Matrix uses martial arts for the same reason martial arts works perfectly well alongside machine-guns in the Final-Fantasy series, or any other number of Fantasy/Science Fiction;
Because it looks cool on film.
There's no other reason. In the real world calling karate "useless" against attackers with machine-guns is the understatement of the century or something.
I like the Indiana Jones episode where he is faced by some martial-arts ninja who hops around screams and shouts, waves his hands around menacingly and prepares to attack. Indiana lifts his gun and pulls the trigger once. "Bang". Attacker drops dead. End of scene.
Just so that noone gets me wrong; I *do* think that women today experience sexist-based discrimination more often than males. I *do* think that we're still in a situation where the way we treat women is poorer than the way we treat males. All I wanted to point out is that it does happen to males too, allbeit probably less frequently.
However, they would argue that there is no such thing as "correct" and "incorrect" because our understandings of such are merely anchored within the model we hold of the world around us.
Yeah, something like that. But that's just playing with semantics, not really changing anything. If I make calculations, construct a plane, and the plane does, indeed, fly, the calculations and constructions where likely correct, or close enough to work as intended anyway.
Postmodernists migth argue, in a teoretical kind of way, that no calculation is any more correct than any other, but this is merely intellectual masturbation, when it comes down to it, they're still all willing to ACT as if that single calculation is correct and all others wrong.
When it comes down to it, none of them are willing to accept that when they buy something for $3, and pay with a tenner, that you have given "correct" change when you give them a single dollar.
Thus, when intellectually masturbating they migth construct arguments saying that nothing is more correct than anything else. The remainin 99% of the time, however, they have the same PRACTICAL view of the meaning of "correct" as the rest of us.
You are rigth. It's unfair. You *deserve* to be treated as equally knowledgeable as a average man (until you talk enough with the clerk that he/she understands that you're above-average).
But it's not, in this case, male ego, but rather experience. The practical experience of those working in computer-shops (I know, I used to do it) is that the *average* knowledge of women who come in is, infact, like it or not, a LOT lower than the average knowledge of men.
That ain't a good excuse to act as if you assume ALL women know nothing, there are plenty of exceptions in both directions (cluefull women, and clueless men), but the general trend is IMPOSSIBLE to not notice, even if you're trying.
A clueful sales-person will however be very quick to take a hint. Both sorts of hints. The woman who comes in and says she needs a new CPU, yet obviously thinks the entire box is the CPU is probably average or below-average in knowledge. The one who comes in and wonders if the dual-screen output on the Matrox 550 will work with Linux is with certanity above-average.
I don't know if it's much of a comfort to you, but we males experience such discrimination too, only in different areas of life. Who do you think is taken seriously when me and my fiancee is looking for clothing or equipment for our baby ? How often do you think I experience well-meaning women completely unmotivated coming over and giving me "helpful hints" about how to do perfectly basic things with the baby that I've known how to do for decades ? Somehow they all seem to assume that Silvia knows these things already...
How many times have I heard some variation of; "Not bad at all, it's *soo* nice with a man who can cook", as if that was the exception and in general males suck at it.
In general the biggest one is everything to do with kids. It's *common* to find that when malls or whatever have rooms for changing on a baby, that room is marked with Woman/baby-symbols. (in general there's three Woman, Man, and Woman/baby) I can tell you it's a lot of fun when some woman wants to chase you away with a "Can't you read?", and when I say; "Yeah, but this is the only changing room for babies here" I'm met with a "Can't the mother do it ?" and a look of total disbelief and strong suspicion when I say that, as a matter of fact, the mother is working, and I'm taking care of MY kid by myself.
Well, except the xbox supports "importing", storing and playing music too, for which purpose 8GB is ridiculous.
Anyways, I'm not arguing 8GB is not sufficient for most gaming-purposes, I'm only saying that these days there's no reason to capitalize FULL harddisk when, as a matter of fact, the harddisk in question is positively puny.
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What he's more likely to do is discover that the "originals" have various problems, like not working in his cars, while the stuff you get from Kazaa, or any of the other p2p-networks doesn't have that problem.
Thus he gets it from kazaa. If it initially took 5 minutes of work to rip the CD, or 30, is without consequence to him, as is what technical knowledge is required, because he's not going to be the one doing it. He's only going to download the finished, ripped-by-someone-else unencumbered mp3.
Thing is, how do you justify letting "stronger" females play in the male league without also letting weaker males play in the female league ?
And if you allow that, the effect would be precisely what I predicted above: The top *5* leagues or so would be filled with males, from strong to medium, and only thereunder would the top women have a chance at competing against the medium to weak males.
I'm just not convinced that'd help the status of female sports.
Unless you really think that equality demands that females have access to all areas, all leagues, all competitions, but excluding males from certain leagues, competitions and areas are perfectly ok.
That is, however a sorta odd definition of "equality".
Why is it so freaking hard to accept that males and females are different in some areas ? Everyone knows that with equal training, a male will almost always beat a female in sports requiring lots of muscle-strength and/or being large. I really don't see why that is so controverisal. It's *really* *REALLY* obvious to even a casual observer.
There migth be sports where with equal training, males and females would do similarily well, I have no objections to joining the leagues there. Perhaps chess, shooting, pool and FPS belong in this class of sports. (I said *perhaps*, I consider it possible that less femals FPS-champs is only a result of less players and/or less training, but I also consider it possible that there are physiological differences that play a role.)
The other architectures are simply so small that their inclusion or exclusion makes no real difference to the overall conclusions.
If you talk about *server*-OSes you'll get very different conclusions, that's why I spesifically said "personal" computers.
And that is *precisely* what MS is doing. Does anyone think that IE would have like 90% market-penetration if not for the fact that MS uses it's monopoly in OSes to push it ?
Does anyone think that WMP would be used by something like 80% of all people for playing mp3s and watching divx-movies if not for the fact that MS uses it's powers as monopolist in order to push it ?
The thing which you refuse to face is that there *ARE* certain actions that are perfectly legal in ordinary bussiness, but which are illegal if done by a actor enjoying monopoly-status. And there are *reasons* for this. The main reason is that if we don't have such rules, monopolies have a tendency to grow;
MS has a monopoly in OSes for personal computers. Next they'll use that to gain a monopoly in web-browsers (some would argue they're already close to this.)(and no, before you start, monopoly does not mean there are no alternatives, only that you have a market-penetration so high that your actions completely dominate the market.)
Next they'll do the same for email, instant messaging and all other much-used internet-protocols. Then they'll use this to gain an advantage in the server-market. Afterall, it's somewhat easier to be the server if you own all the clients. You can "extend" the protocols in arbitrary ways and force all competitors to play catch-up for example.
Next, after you control the personal computers and the servers, you go after the hardware. Since you choose to support only a certain platform, makers of all other platforms are bust.
Next you go for mobile phones. And pdas. You argue that yours will always "work better" with the PC, logically enough since you control the PC.
And so on.
Monopolies are bad for consumers, they increase prices ("monopoly-rent"), and decrease choise, quality and speed of development.
They are also bad for the economy. People pay "rent" to the monopolist instead of using the money to develop truly new products or to truly improve the existing ones.
Thus, it makes sense to have rules to regulate the powers of monopolies.
Being hit by a thousand 10-tonners migth not be preferable to being hit by a single supertanker.
But being hit with a billion 100g-pieces would certainly be better. The energy is the same, but in this case they would pretty much all burn up in the high atmosphere, and the energy would be a lot more spread out.
If you can blow the thing up early enough, many of the pieces will even miss the earth completely. Because even if the *average* course of the asteroid does not change (it migth, depending on where you set of the bomb (nuke probably), the course of the individual pieces migth change drastically.
For example, A piece which gets thrown off the main course by 10m/s (around 20 miles/hour) one week before impact would very very likely miss the earth completely.
So, it's more like either being hit by a round from a tank, or having a cloud consisting of a billion sand-grains heading your way, but so that a large fraction of them will miss you completely, and more still will be stopped by your atmosphere.
Besides, if you really doubt that this happens, you need only to take a look at the moon. It has no atmosphere which causes smaller asteroids to evaporate before impact, and also helps washing away the signs of impacts after they happen. It's probably a fair bet that the earth gets hit more often than the moon, given that it's so much larger. It's also a fair bet that anything that is big enough to create a major crater on the moon is also big enough to punch trough the atmosphere and create major destruction here.
We also know that major impacts, the sort that changes the climate over the entire globe and causes mass extinction of species has happened atleast on a few occasions.
But we don't really know enough to say anything about the true risks. For that reason alone, the first nice thing to do would probably be to increase funding for telescopes, radars and other instruments for better accessing the real risk. That is not a very expensive proposition, as this is an area that is very lowly funded today, a little bit of extra cash will go a long way towards establishing the real risks.
If we should do anything more depends on the risks and the costs of potential defences. It's a cost/benefit calculation.
You are rigth that ICBM-interception-systems are irrelevant for this purpose. All realistic systems for doing something about asteroid-impacts rely on the fact that a small change to the orbit of the thing a long distance from earth will result in a major change, enough to miss the earth, by the time it gets here. Changing the orbit in the last few hours is going to be impractical, it'd require huge amounts of energy. Sligthly more practical migth be blowing the thing up, which would result in a large number of smaller impacts instead of a single big one.
To stop a ICBM you need to hit it with, say, the explosive force of a hand-grenade. That's not going to cut it if you want to blow apart a asteroid of extinction-threathening size.
But that doesn't mean that you won't require more or less the same amount for user-support as you needed under Windows. Indeed you'd probably need more in the change-over period. Not because Linux is so much harder to use, but simply because *any* change requires some amount of retraining. (changing from Linux to Windows would also require extra user-support for a period.)
So, the likely calculations goes something like this:
- Licensing: Savings from day 1 onwards.
- User-support: Initially extra costs, later the same as now.
- Administration: Initially extra costs, later savings.
In the short range (~6 months) the re-training and conversion, installation of new systems and so on will likely outweigh the saved licensing-costs. (depending on spesifics ofcourse)Thereafter you'll save money, because re-training and higher costs in support for converting stuff is a one-off affair while the savings in licensing and in lower administration are permanent.
For foreign (as in Non-US) governments an additional factor is at work; The licensing-money you save would have been shipped more or less wholesale to the US. The wages you pay local people stay in the local economy, goes to grow the local IT-bussiness and you get parts of it back (the people hired pay income-tax which return to the state, then they buy stuff in the shops, where the VAT returns to the state etc etc etc)
The problem with that theory is that basically no woman would ever play in say the top 5 leagues. There are large, obvious, physical differences. The female national champions in basket would probably get their asses kicked by the average male junior team.
This ain't sexist. This is true. I *know* that being politically correct is all the vogue these days. But it goes to far when you start insisting on ignoring reality.
REALITY is that without female-only leagues, no female (or close enough as makes no difference) would be able to hold her own in most professional sports, ESPECIALLY those where size and muscle-mass plays a large role, like basket.
I already said I see no reason, in principle, why we couldn't have one class only in sports where such issues play no role. I honestly don't know why women do poorer for example in shooting. Still, they do. I witnessed the last Norwegian national championship in field-shooting. You migth not *like* it, but the fact is, if everyone competed in one class, the females there would all be in the bottom half of the result-list, most in the bottom quarter. Infact, there where several males good enough to beat the top woman who where nevertheless not even qualified to participate in the male class.
Separating people into leagues by skill will ensure, in most sports, that no female can do professional sports. Because with the same effort, her chanse of ever reaching the higher leagues is close to zero. Separating with handicaps will ensure that few or none of the females or female teams ever get a low handicap.
As I said; in some sports this migth function. In many many others, such as those where it's an advantage to be big and strong, your "solution" would only manage one thing; to get rid of the top women alltogether.
You're correct that the strongest woman is (MUSCH) stronger than the weakest guy. That is however totally irrelevant if you're considering whether or not to have separate classes for males and females in weight-lifting.
Similarily, the best female Counterstrikers can undoubtedly beat the average male. They can however in general NOT hold their own against the *best* male players, and that's what they have to do to avoid getting crushed in competitions.
When we're talking competitions, average performances are quite irrelevant, the interesting question is if a well-trained female can hold her own on equal terms with a well-trained male. In some sports there's no reason why that shouldn't be so (example: shooting, snooker, FPS, chess), while in others they very obviously can not. (i.e. anything where muscle-mass plays a big role.))
I agree with your point about fire-persons. If a job requires the ability to life 100 pounds, then obviously anyone who's qualified, male or female, should be able to apply for the job
Here's a hint: Noone would have dreamed of stopping a female team from competing in the male class. None of the team wanted to though, because they all knew they'd get their ass kicked.
I'm sorry, I know this ain't politically correct. But that doesn't make it less true.
Some though, would feel that allowing that would further underline the differences. Today we can all play make-believe and say there's one class only for girls, one only for boys, so it's equal in a way.
If we let girls compete whereever they choose (and I see no reason not to) then we also need to be intellectually honest enough that there's one "free for all" class, and one "females only", and we can no longer pretend it's "equal".
The risk is that this would further undermine the status of the females-only class. It'd be sorta like there's special classes in many sports for "only those under 16".
You'd have a situation where it'd basically be a male as "World-Champion" (or whatever) in any sport, and the females would be relegated to "World-Champion - female only class"
It's a tricky bussiness. It's tricky because we have this ideal, and the political correctness, that we're supposed to be equal. And the fact of the matter is that today we are not. In some sports, like those where muscle-mass play a role, we'll never be. In others, where muscles are irrelevant, we *migth* get there some day, but today we're not. (Personally I'd be overjoyed to see a female F1-winner or chess grandmaster)
Sorry, but it's true. I'm not saying they'll nessecarily finish places 51-57, but my guess is that they would all be in the bottom half, and most of them in the bottom quarter.
I agree there's no reason why females, in principle, couldnt't play FPS games as well as or better than males. In the real world that's rare though. The reason being that fewer girls play, and those the play play less on the average.
The same is true in any number of other sports where physical size and strength in principle should not play a role. Snooker. Dart. Shooting. Racing, hell even Chess.
In all these sports there's no big reason why females couldn't compete in the same class with the boys, except in general the result would be a few females on the bottom-quarter of the result-list. Which ain't very inspiring and migth aswell lead to more sexism as to less.
I'm sure someone will jump at me, for being politically uncorrect or something. Those people should instead tell me the names of women who can actually hold their own agains say the top 20 males in chess, snooker, racing or dart.
That'd be a clever trick, if it was true, given that 2^4 is only 16. It's impossible to encode 26 different letters with all fitting in 4 bits, much less an even lower average as you claim.
The trick is offcourse that morse is not binary, as in having 2 different symbols, but rather atleast ternary. A morse-sequence consists not of dots and dashes, but from dots, dashes and pauses. Without the pauses it's not uniquely decodable.
3^4 is 81, so that leaves enough space not only to encode all the letters, but also, as you say, to give shorter encodings to commonly used letters.
Obviously, YES, I am. For a person who is a complete moral relativist, a discussion about morale is pointless.
tend not to believe in moral absolutes, that you can't project your own morals or principles onto others, especially if they live in another country, without implicitly acknowledging that you believe their culture's moral values are wrong.
Where'd you get the idea that anyone is really a relativist ? There's some who claim so, in an intellectual sort of way. But kick them in the leg, and ask them if that is perfectly fine, assuming it's a nice thing to do in my value system. They all say no.
I don't see what the imaginary concept "countries" has to do with it.
but I see the attitude that American views of sexuality are wrong far too often on a forum where most participants, statistically speaking, seem to be moral relativists.
I think you are wrong. I see no evidence that most slashdotters are moral relativists. I believe, by the way, that even most Americans agree that sex between consenting adults is more desireable than unprovoked violence. I mean, most adults have sex several times a week (no compulsory nerd-jokes please!), and consider it to be a nice and enjoyable part of their relationship. (if not they'd not do it...) Most people also find unprovoked violence bad.
If people where relativists, they wouldn't desire punishment for criminals. They would not support human rigths. They would not consider the way females are treated in Iran wrong. But infact, pretty much everyone do.
You can't have it both ways!
You're the only one who is claiming people here want it both ways. I see no evidence of that whatsoever. I *certainly* don't want to live in a world where nobody gives a fuck. I'd rather live in a world full of people who disagree with me than in a world where nobody holds an opinion.
And still, the rating-system is not (and cannot be!) neutral at all, not all parents will agree (or even come close to agree!) on what their kids should be shielded for. In particular, to most scandinawians the US guideleines are ridicolously strict on nudity and/or language, while being similarily soft on violence.
It's hard to believe this has to do with the well-being of children, more likely it reflects the puritanity of the reviewers or the parents.
No kid will ever be scared, hurt or otherwise damaged by seeing a naked female breast. Indeed most kids do so from age ~2 minutes. Noone is going to wake up in the nigth, having nigthmares, because they've seen a penis.
It always seemed ridiculous to me that in these rating-systems, showing 2 seconds of naked skin seems on par with decapitating people, blood gushing all over the place.
Thus, I'd never trust the rating-systems anyway, and would vastly prefer spending the required time myself to make up my own damn opinion. What's so wrong about spending time with your child anyway ?
Even if you stored it on triple-redundant raid-arrays, and kept it online forever, that is, no migration to tape-libraries or similar, it'd still only be a cost of around $500/day.
The thing is, even people who are quite into technology are unable to wrap their heads around how mind-bogglingly cheap storage has become.
That is entirely the wrong question. IBM wrote the code. IBM owns the code. IBM contributed the code. SCO is *claiming* that doing so violates some contract IBM has with them. The burden of proof lies on them. The question is NOT what "licence" IBM has from SCO to release their own stuff under the GPL. (you don't need a "license" to do what you please with stuff you wrote yourself.) The question is, what evidence does SCO have that IBM is, infact, violating some agreement with them by doing as it does.
People have mentioned filtering. Every client under the sun does this, kmail does it very well, and very inituitive.
There was talk of gpg/pgp-integrations. Kmail has done this too for quite some time. After selecting which key to use for signing, use couldn't be simpler.
This backup-thing sounds ok. Allthough I must admit I don't quite see why each app should try to implement backup by itself, rather than having one backup-solution for your entire computer. It'd be a hassle to have to separately backup in each and every program that stores data, rather than just, as I do now, mirror $HOME daily.
What more is there to it ? In particular, what does it do that kmail doesn't ?
Unless, and that's the kicker offcourse, the disease first came into existence in this person, by mutating form some other harmless variant or something.
Because it looks cool on film.
There's no other reason. In the real world calling karate "useless" against attackers with machine-guns is the understatement of the century or something.
I like the Indiana Jones episode where he is faced by some martial-arts ninja who hops around screams and shouts, waves his hands around menacingly and prepares to attack. Indiana lifts his gun and pulls the trigger once. "Bang". Attacker drops dead. End of scene.
Just so that noone gets me wrong; I *do* think that women today experience sexist-based discrimination more often than males. I *do* think that we're still in a situation where the way we treat women is poorer than the way we treat males. All I wanted to point out is that it does happen to males too, allbeit probably less frequently.
Yeah, something like that. But that's just playing with semantics, not really changing anything. If I make calculations, construct a plane, and the plane does, indeed, fly, the calculations and constructions where likely correct, or close enough to work as intended anyway.
Postmodernists migth argue, in a teoretical kind of way, that no calculation is any more correct than any other, but this is merely intellectual masturbation, when it comes down to it, they're still all willing to ACT as if that single calculation is correct and all others wrong.
When it comes down to it, none of them are willing to accept that when they buy something for $3, and pay with a tenner, that you have given "correct" change when you give them a single dollar.
Thus, when intellectually masturbating they migth construct arguments saying that nothing is more correct than anything else. The remainin 99% of the time, however, they have the same PRACTICAL view of the meaning of "correct" as the rest of us.
But it's not, in this case, male ego, but rather experience. The practical experience of those working in computer-shops (I know, I used to do it) is that the *average* knowledge of women who come in is, infact, like it or not, a LOT lower than the average knowledge of men.
That ain't a good excuse to act as if you assume ALL women know nothing, there are plenty of exceptions in both directions (cluefull women, and clueless men), but the general trend is IMPOSSIBLE to not notice, even if you're trying.
A clueful sales-person will however be very quick to take a hint. Both sorts of hints. The woman who comes in and says she needs a new CPU, yet obviously thinks the entire box is the CPU is probably average or below-average in knowledge. The one who comes in and wonders if the dual-screen output on the Matrox 550 will work with Linux is with certanity above-average.
I don't know if it's much of a comfort to you, but we males experience such discrimination too, only in different areas of life. Who do you think is taken seriously when me and my fiancee is looking for clothing or equipment for our baby ? How often do you think I experience well-meaning women completely unmotivated coming over and giving me "helpful hints" about how to do perfectly basic things with the baby that I've known how to do for decades ? Somehow they all seem to assume that Silvia knows these things already...
How many times have I heard some variation of; "Not bad at all, it's *soo* nice with a man who can cook", as if that was the exception and in general males suck at it.
In general the biggest one is everything to do with kids. It's *common* to find that when malls or whatever have rooms for changing on a baby, that room is marked with Woman/baby-symbols. (in general there's three Woman, Man, and Woman/baby) I can tell you it's a lot of fun when some woman wants to chase you away with a "Can't you read?", and when I say; "Yeah, but this is the only changing room for babies here" I'm met with a "Can't the mother do it ?" and a look of total disbelief and strong suspicion when I say that, as a matter of fact, the mother is working, and I'm taking care of MY kid by myself.
Anyways, I'm not arguing 8GB is not sufficient for most gaming-purposes, I'm only saying that these days there's no reason to capitalize FULL harddisk when, as a matter of fact, the harddisk in question is positively puny.