the university only provides an office and work space
That space can range from a single office to an entire building and is non-negligible in terms of cost. Administrative, computing, facilities, infrastructure -- all paid for by the university.
Indeed, one quite striking difference I've noticed between universities in the U.S. and in other countries is that in U.S. universities, the physical plant tends to be amazingly well-maintained (and clean), even when the buildings are quite old. Universities that I've visited in other countries -- even top-ranked and famous (and often very expensive) ones -- often seem to be a bit shabby and run-down by comparison.
Clearly the majority of voters in Turkey want a religious party at the helm - otherwise they would've voted for someone else.
That doesn't follow. Somewhat less than 50% of the electorate voted for a particular party (the AKP), not "a religious party" as an abstract concept. Some of those voters may indeed feel that having a religious party in control is always desirable, but undoubtedly others simply liked the policies of that particular party, in that particular election, better (or hated them less than the opposition...).
Given that the AKP seems to have some very significant policies that aren't connected with religion, this seems even more likely. [In particular, they seem to be considered very progressive with respect to EU integration, which is clearly a significant issue for Turkey.]
The -people- of Turkey want a religious, sharia law based, dictatorship. It's a foreign thought to western minds, but as you point out they've pressured for such a gov't several times. At which point the, highly secular, military comes out in a minor coup and re-establishes what was the second freest nation in the area.
No, some people in Turkey want a religious government, some would like sharia law, and a few would like a dictatorship. The number of people that actually want all those things together is probably rather small.
Isn't a massive terrorist attack causing widespread destruction likely to cause FAR more pollution than anything we'd have to do to clean up AFTER IT?
Well who knows, but the less toxic they can make it, the better, so they can slather it on like crazy without having to worry about anything except the immediate threat... if it's somewhat less effective but can be used much more freely and quickly, in greater quantity, "green" may be a huge advantage.
You seriously trust a website run by a guy who looks like this? He looks like he'd be more at home peddling CD's of his pan flute music at the local farmers market than spouting new age mumbo-jumbo and conspiracy theories on the interwebs.
As a sibling reply points out, you're way off about the sizes (maybe you're thinking of one of the other common A- or B- series papers?) -- A4 and Letter paper are almost identical in size. I print Letter-formatted documents on A4 paper all the time, and for 99% of them, there's no need even to rescale, they're so close that the parts which get chopped off or added in printing 1:1 end up being a very small part of the margin anyway.
How many of those patents have been tested? I'll bet it's not many. I'll bet the holders do not want them tested. I'll bet there are prices that can settle these matters. We're talking about Google and Intel here; they have patent lawyers. Good ones. They have deep pockets. Pockets deep enough to settle patent disputes.
Very, very, good point. So far fear, and FUD, have kept the game going. It will be interesting to see what happens when someone actually has the balls to say "bullshit" and back it up with a legal team.
Must be regional variation. Around here chow mein is mostly cabbage with onions, celery and your choice of meat cooked in. No noodles at all. Looking at the wiki article on chow mein, that particular dish looks like what is usually called chow mei-fun in the local restaurants.
Yeah, but the thing is that the word which "chow mein" is a transliteration of literally means "fried noodles." Offering a dish called "fried noodles" which doesn't contain noodles, does seem a wee bit odd.
Will be interesting to see what kind of approach HP takes with WebOS. They're in a unique position where they might have the best of both the iPad and Android tablet worlds in that they can provide a much more open experience akin to Android, but still be able to achieve the advantages Apple has from designing both the software and the hardware.
Sure, but that requires them to not fuck it up. And they're HP (a great company 30 years ago, but a pathetic shadow today).
Apple has a bazillion times more UI (and design) chops, and Google has a bazillion times more technical chops (and more freedom to be open because of their somewhat unique position in the market), so betting on what HP "could do" seems a wee bit risky.
It's open in many more ways than that... e.g. Apple wrote a BSD'd compiler for C like languages (clang) which for C and objective-c beats the pants of gcc in almost every way, and is getting *damn close* on the C++ front.
Er, clang/llvm have some grand goals, but so far, they very clearly don't "beat the pants off gcc in almost every way."
gcc optimizes better, has been ported far more widely, supports many more languages (and of course in cases like C++, is a much more complete compiler -- clang C++ support is still pretty basic), and of course is much more mature. One of clang/llvm's widely touted advantages -- faster compilation -- is shrinking as the compiler grows. clang/llvm's optimization will improve with time, but on the other hand, so will gcc's (the gcc devs are not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs).
The main advantages of clang/llvm basically seem to be (1) more modular design, which hopefully makes them easier to work on, and makes them more suitable for non-traditional roles like run-time compilation of graphics shaders etc, and (2) the BSD license, which allows companies to make proprietary extensions to them, and which seems to be the main reason apple is backing them.
Clang/llvm seem to be a nice modern design, and will no doubt provide some good competition for gcc in the future, but they're not quite there yet.
... then how are they going to know how much you earn anyway? Surely you could just tell them anything and end up paying little or no tax?
In my experience, that's what usually seems to happen: people just ignore this law because it's almost impossible to enforce in many cases.
The exception is where the person still has a significant legal connection with the U.S. -- for instance, someone who works for a U.S. company in one of their foreign offices, and is paid by the U.S. arm of the company. Even in that case, there's a pretty large exemption on which you don't have to pay U.S. taxes, which pretty much covers your entire salary unless you're very well paid.
Because of the large exemption, the IRS also has little incentive to even try to enforce the law unless you're an executive or something and they suspect you have a substantial salary.
What we don't need to do is think that Apple or whoever all of sudden violated some basic human right. Most of us don't care that we can't pull out the water pump from our car, and do car that we only have to see the mechanic once a year instead of every week. Most of us don't care that our televisions can't be repaired, but are happy that they give us a few years of good service then die so we can upgrade. Most people don't want a phone or a computer that they continuously have to fiddle with and upgrade. Those who do have cheap ones they can buy. Just not the iPad. Which is ok, because if one is a really a cool hacker, one does not need to show off with an iPad.
I totally agree; I've no beef with the ipad, it is what it is, and that might be the right thing for many people or uses (I certainly wouldn't kick one out of bed).
What makes me vaguely uncomfortable is the way many of my highly (technically) skilled friends squirm around defending apple, denying that apple wants to shut out competition, and parroting jobs' rather silly claims that all of apple's restrictions are for "technical reasons," and "to improve the user experience," rather than lockin (in reality, it's a bit of both of course -- but lockin is most certainly a big part of it). These people are very smart, but for whatever reason, when talking about the ipad (or iphone) they kind of get these silly grins and start to regurgitate apple's marketing material...
The reason this makes me uncomfortable is that although locked-down restrictive models like this have their place, I'm afraid that they'll somehow become the dominant model -- if that happens, then suddenly the comforting notion that "it's ok, you have a choice" becomes a lot less true.
Much like regular Volvo drivers, it was oblivious to everything around it.
Post-Ford Volvo drivers, thank you very much...
Volvo drivers have had this reputation for ages -- the first jokes I remember about them were from the early '80s -- long before ford had anything to do with it.
"And they accomplish this by starting with one of the purest open-source distros around -- Debian -- and then pissing all over it."
And why, exactly, does that bother you? It shouldn't, but apparently it does. Did they send someone over to specifically piss on your copy of Debian?
Or are you just assuming you've been wronged somehow in the process? Because I'll bet your life is not one iota different than it would have been had they not started with Debian.
Actually I'll bet it is.
Canonical's use of Debian as a base has had both good (some good press for debian as a side-effect of canonical's aggressive hype machine, and more people that are familiar with debian tools and infrastructure) and bad (many people who might otherwise help with debian help canonical instead, and the flow of fixes etc back to debian is at best spotty) effects on Debian, but it's surely had an effect.
I think what bothers many Debian users though, is simply the issue of "credit" -- though Canonical has done some good (and bad) work itself, through its aggressive self-promotion and targetting of new users, it inevitably ends up getting credit for stuff that's actually due to its Debian base, and I think some people feel that Canonical does not make enough effort to give Debian its due share of that credit.
Trust me, even on a good dedicated Usenet server (I've used several - most recently Astraweb, but I've also used Teranews and Giganews in the past), any group that is not moderated is FLOODED with spam
Try using news.individual.net, they do a great job of controlling spam -- there seems to be almost zero spam on any of the newsgroups I've read there (few of which moderated).
And also... really, what can you do? Bike everywhere while praying the coal industry will actually develop real-no-foolin'-seriously-this-time-it's-not-just-a-marketing-scam clean coal?
Er, well of course you can do something, it's just that many people notice that it entails some change in their dream lifestyle (which varies a lot culturally) and they run screaming. For instance, choosing a house in a higher density area, nearer to work, and closer to walkable shopping areas and mass transit.
Of course, if everybody would at least make some effort towards less silly lifestyles, it would help a lot, and would help make future changes easier (as greater demand spurs development in that direction, and changes cultural expectations similarly).
The original complaint by gamefly seems kind of bizarre though. Why on earth would the USPS care who's sending the packages, much less "preferentially" treat "traditional DVD distribution companies"?
It sounds like if there is any issue, it's a technical one (since the problem seems to be with the interaction between the DVD packages and the USPS sorting machines), and thus detailed questions about how gamefly packages their DVDs, etc, are quite apropos.
Exactly. The whole exercise part of the Wii is questionable at best. Even Miyamoto himself said that it's very unlikely that Wii Fit would actually improve someone's health, but that it's a starting point, a catalyst if you will, to put people on the right track.
Of course they should only allow it if it's somehow certified as useful (in this case his doctor apparently recommended it, but I suppose they might want broader support than one person), but I don't see why it should be categorically disallowed just because it's also a fun toy, which seems to be the government's stance.
No doubt the politicians are ranting about this particular case because see it as a chance to grand-stand and pretend to be looking out for the public's interests, but I suppose there's also the possibility that they simply hate fun.
Users don't have the choice to get support for Theora video on Apple's iWhatever platform, for instance.
And Mozilla users don't get the option of H.264 on their platform. So, why no outrage at Mozila and Firefox?
Because in Apple's case it's an explicit choice they're making, to exclude free formats in the hope that they can prevent them from becoming popular. They could easily include them if they decided it was a good idea.
In Firefox's case, they can't (legally) include it.
Slashdot Mirror
the university only provides an office and work space
That space can range from a single office to an entire building and is non-negligible in terms of cost. Administrative, computing, facilities, infrastructure -- all paid for by the university.
Indeed, one quite striking difference I've noticed between universities in the U.S. and in other countries is that in U.S. universities, the physical plant tends to be amazingly well-maintained (and clean), even when the buildings are quite old. Universities that I've visited in other countries -- even top-ranked and famous (and often very expensive) ones -- often seem to be a bit shabby and run-down by comparison.
Particularly for handheld games - They are immensely popular in Japan largely due to the excess of mass transit and lack of personal-owned cars,
I think you mean "dominance" of mass-transit (in many urban areas); there's clearly not an excess of it, since it's often very crowded.
Clearly the majority of voters in Turkey want a religious party at the helm - otherwise they would've voted for someone else.
That doesn't follow. Somewhat less than 50% of the electorate voted for a particular party (the AKP), not "a religious party" as an abstract concept. Some of those voters may indeed feel that having a religious party in control is always desirable, but undoubtedly others simply liked the policies of that particular party, in that particular election, better (or hated them less than the opposition...).
Given that the AKP seems to have some very significant policies that aren't connected with religion, this seems even more likely. [In particular, they seem to be considered very progressive with respect to EU integration, which is clearly a significant issue for Turkey.]
The -people- of Turkey want a religious, sharia law based, dictatorship. It's a foreign thought to western minds, but as you point out they've pressured for such a gov't several times. At which point the, highly secular, military comes out in a minor coup and re-establishes what was the second freest nation in the area.
No, some people in Turkey want a religious government, some would like sharia law, and a few would like a dictatorship. The number of people that actually want all those things together is probably rather small.
...
The rest of us are the two pedigreed schnoodles sitting in the back seat, trying to eat bacon and egg sandwiches.
Does that answer your question?
You forgot the freaky right-wing rant!
Isn't a massive terrorist attack causing widespread destruction likely to cause FAR more pollution than anything we'd have to do to clean up AFTER IT?
Well who knows, but the less toxic they can make it, the better, so they can slather it on like crazy without having to worry about anything except the immediate threat... if it's somewhat less effective but can be used much more freely and quickly, in greater quantity, "green" may be a huge advantage.
You seriously trust a website run by a guy who looks like this? He looks like he'd be more at home peddling CD's of his pan flute music at the local farmers market than spouting new age mumbo-jumbo and conspiracy theories on the interwebs.
Seriously! It's much safer to only trust people with a more orthodox appearance...
On other news, RedHat announced it does not use Windows on its web servers and Apple announced that no employees use Windows Mobile phones.
But what's amusing, of course, is that a huge proportion of MS employees seem to have an iphone... (based on what my friends working at MS say)
As a sibling reply points out, you're way off about the sizes (maybe you're thinking of one of the other common A- or B- series papers?) -- A4 and Letter paper are almost identical in size. I print Letter-formatted documents on A4 paper all the time, and for 99% of them, there's no need even to rescale, they're so close that the parts which get chopped off or added in printing 1:1 end up being a very small part of the margin anyway.
How many of those patents have been tested? I'll bet it's not many. I'll bet the holders do not want them tested. I'll bet there are prices that can settle these matters. We're talking about Google and Intel here; they have patent lawyers. Good ones. They have deep pockets. Pockets deep enough to settle patent disputes.
Very, very, good point. So far fear, and FUD, have kept the game going. It will be interesting to see what happens when someone actually has the balls to say "bullshit" and back it up with a legal team.
Must be regional variation. Around here chow mein is mostly cabbage with onions, celery and your choice of meat cooked in. No noodles at all. Looking at the wiki article on chow mein, that particular dish looks like what is usually called chow mei-fun in the local restaurants.
Yeah, but the thing is that the word which "chow mein" is a transliteration of literally means "fried noodles." Offering a dish called "fried noodles" which doesn't contain noodles, does seem a wee bit odd.
Silly regional dialects...
yeesh, my nick has silly historical causes...
Anyway, I'm not saying it's bad that HP is doing this, just that betting on them to succeed is risky.
Will be interesting to see what kind of approach HP takes with WebOS. They're in a unique position where they might have the best of both the iPad and Android tablet worlds in that they can provide a much more open experience akin to Android, but still be able to achieve the advantages Apple has from designing both the software and the hardware.
Sure, but that requires them to not fuck it up. And they're HP (a great company 30 years ago, but a pathetic shadow today).
Apple has a bazillion times more UI (and design) chops, and Google has a bazillion times more technical chops (and more freedom to be open because of their somewhat unique position in the market), so betting on what HP "could do" seems a wee bit risky.
It's open in many more ways than that... e.g. Apple wrote a BSD'd compiler for C like languages (clang) which for C and objective-c beats the pants of gcc in almost every way, and is getting *damn close* on the C++ front.
Er, clang/llvm have some grand goals, but so far, they very clearly don't "beat the pants off gcc in almost every way."
gcc optimizes better, has been ported far more widely, supports many more languages (and of course in cases like C++, is a much more complete compiler -- clang C++ support is still pretty basic), and of course is much more mature. One of clang/llvm's widely touted advantages -- faster compilation -- is shrinking as the compiler grows. clang/llvm's optimization will improve with time, but on the other hand, so will gcc's (the gcc devs are not just sitting around twiddling their thumbs).
Here's a recent comparison of gcc 4.5 and llvm 2.7: http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2010-04/msg00948.html
The main advantages of clang/llvm basically seem to be (1) more modular design, which hopefully makes them easier to work on, and makes them more suitable for non-traditional roles like run-time compilation of graphics shaders etc, and (2) the BSD license, which allows companies to make proprietary extensions to them, and which seems to be the main reason apple is backing them.
Clang/llvm seem to be a nice modern design, and will no doubt provide some good competition for gcc in the future, but they're not quite there yet.
... then how are they going to know how much you earn anyway? Surely you could just tell them anything and end up paying little or no tax?
In my experience, that's what usually seems to happen: people just ignore this law because it's almost impossible to enforce in many cases.
The exception is where the person still has a significant legal connection with the U.S. -- for instance, someone who works for a U.S. company in one of their foreign offices, and is paid by the U.S. arm of the company. Even in that case, there's a pretty large exemption on which you don't have to pay U.S. taxes, which pretty much covers your entire salary unless you're very well paid.
Because of the large exemption, the IRS also has little incentive to even try to enforce the law unless you're an executive or something and they suspect you have a substantial salary.
What we don't need to do is think that Apple or whoever all of sudden violated some basic human right. Most of us don't care that we can't pull out the water pump from our car, and do car that we only have to see the mechanic once a year instead of every week. Most of us don't care that our televisions can't be repaired, but are happy that they give us a few years of good service then die so we can upgrade. Most people don't want a phone or a computer that they continuously have to fiddle with and upgrade. Those who do have cheap ones they can buy. Just not the iPad. Which is ok, because if one is a really a cool hacker, one does not need to show off with an iPad.
I totally agree; I've no beef with the ipad, it is what it is, and that might be the right thing for many people or uses (I certainly wouldn't kick one out of bed).
What makes me vaguely uncomfortable is the way many of my highly (technically) skilled friends squirm around defending apple, denying that apple wants to shut out competition, and parroting jobs' rather silly claims that all of apple's restrictions are for "technical reasons," and "to improve the user experience," rather than lockin (in reality, it's a bit of both of course -- but lockin is most certainly a big part of it). These people are very smart, but for whatever reason, when talking about the ipad (or iphone) they kind of get these silly grins and start to regurgitate apple's marketing material...
The reason this makes me uncomfortable is that although locked-down restrictive models like this have their place, I'm afraid that they'll somehow become the dominant model -- if that happens, then suddenly the comforting notion that "it's ok, you have a choice" becomes a lot less true.
Much like regular Volvo drivers, it was oblivious to everything around it.
Post-Ford Volvo drivers, thank you very much...
Volvo drivers have had this reputation for ages -- the first jokes I remember about them were from the early '80s -- long before ford had anything to do with it.
"And they accomplish this by starting with one of the purest open-source distros around -- Debian -- and then pissing all over it."
And why, exactly, does that bother you? It shouldn't, but apparently it does. Did they send someone over to specifically piss on your copy of Debian?
Or are you just assuming you've been wronged somehow in the process? Because I'll bet your life is not one iota different than it would have been had they not started with Debian.
Actually I'll bet it is.
Canonical's use of Debian as a base has had both good (some good press for debian as a side-effect of canonical's aggressive hype machine, and more people that are familiar with debian tools and infrastructure) and bad (many people who might otherwise help with debian help canonical instead, and the flow of fixes etc back to debian is at best spotty) effects on Debian, but it's surely had an effect.
I think what bothers many Debian users though, is simply the issue of "credit" -- though Canonical has done some good (and bad) work itself, through its aggressive self-promotion and targetting of new users, it inevitably ends up getting credit for stuff that's actually due to its Debian base, and I think some people feel that Canonical does not make enough effort to give Debian its due share of that credit.
Trust me, even on a good dedicated Usenet server (I've used several - most recently Astraweb, but I've also used Teranews and Giganews in the past), any group that is not moderated is FLOODED with spam
Try using news.individual.net, they do a great job of controlling spam -- there seems to be almost zero spam on any of the newsgroups I've read there (few of which moderated).
Really? I stop by the technet forums all the time and have never seen spam.
... and I read netnews via news.individual.net, and have never seen spam.
The point being, both technologies can be spammed, but largely eliminating spam is also possible with both.
Thus by saying they're making this change "to control spam," MS shows that they're either incompetent, or dishonest.
And also... really, what can you do? Bike everywhere while praying the coal industry will actually develop real-no-foolin'-seriously-this-time-it's-not-just-a-marketing-scam clean coal?
Er, well of course you can do something, it's just that many people notice that it entails some change in their dream lifestyle (which varies a lot culturally) and they run screaming. For instance, choosing a house in a higher density area, nearer to work, and closer to walkable shopping areas and mass transit.
Of course, if everybody would at least make some effort towards less silly lifestyles, it would help a lot, and would help make future changes easier (as greater demand spurs development in that direction, and changes cultural expectations similarly).
The original complaint by gamefly seems kind of bizarre though. Why on earth would the USPS care who's sending the packages, much less "preferentially" treat "traditional DVD distribution companies"?
It sounds like if there is any issue, it's a technical one (since the problem seems to be with the interaction between the DVD packages and the USPS sorting machines), and thus detailed questions about how gamefly packages their DVDs, etc, are quite apropos.
Exactly. The whole exercise part of the Wii is questionable at best. Even Miyamoto himself said that it's very unlikely that Wii Fit would actually improve someone's health, but that it's a starting point, a catalyst if you will, to put people on the right track.
Of course they should only allow it if it's somehow certified as useful (in this case his doctor apparently recommended it, but I suppose they might want broader support than one person), but I don't see why it should be categorically disallowed just because it's also a fun toy, which seems to be the government's stance.
No doubt the politicians are ranting about this particular case because see it as a chance to grand-stand and pretend to be looking out for the public's interests, but I suppose there's also the possibility that they simply hate fun.
Users don't have the choice to get support for Theora video on Apple's iWhatever platform, for instance.
And Mozilla users don't get the option of H.264 on their platform. So, why no outrage at Mozila and Firefox?
Because in Apple's case it's an explicit choice they're making, to exclude free formats in the hope that they can prevent them from becoming popular. They could easily include them if they decided it was a good idea.
In Firefox's case, they can't (legally) include it.
I, for one, do not understand why Apple computers only understand numbers ending in .99...
It's a math fixation... row one, column two.
Wait, doesn't that mean all their prices should end in .71...?