Clinton didn't have a majority of the vote, but he did have a clear plurality (ie: he got more votes than anyone else). While a better vote-counting system (such as Approval or Condorcet) might be nice, a first-past-the-post system based on the popular vote would have unambiguously selected Clinton as the winner.
Yes -- at least the "distributed" part. Nicer branching and merging is something I might use, but I can live just fine without it.
Lots of coders claim they don't really need atomic commits (and thus either SVN, Arch, or any of the non-CVS alternatives) until they've used a RCS that supports them for a while.
While I certainly like atomic commits, I'd go back to CVS in an instant if, for instance, the SVN maintainers became evil and started to sue everyone who had ever downloaded their software.
Well, yes, but there are only two distributed revision control systems with wide enough userbases to really trust them for production-level software, and both of them are developed by people who are arguably asshats.
Yes, because we all know that every project needs a distributed revision control system. That's why the free software movement is falling apart, after all -- no-one can manage their source code without a distributed revision control system! I'm sure that all the problems experienced by in-house programmers are also directly due to their pressing need for a distributed revision control system. And did I mention that my thesis work is impossible to keep track of because it's not in a distributed revision control system? (well, that might have been damage from the flock of flying pigs that smashed into my apartment and savaged all the electronics they could find...)
I'm sure glad we have nice guys like Tom Lord and Larry McVoy to save us; after all, without a distributed revision control system, we'd be up against nothing less than the end of Western civilization itself.
I really don't know what you're talking about. I wasn't homeschooled, but I know a number of people who were, and they're generally among the most articulate, outgoing, and even adventurous of my friends and acquaintances. If the mythical anti-socialized home-schooled person exists, I haven't met them (okay, probably because they're hiding in their room, but never mind:) ).
Wikipedia is pretty good for topics that are prominent and well-known, and decent for technical topics. For stuff that's more obscure, though...it's interesting to browse around but you definitely don't want to take it too seriously!
Actually, a wooden table is probably one of the worse surfaces you could use (and my experience has borne this out), for two reasons:
(1) many tables have vanished, glossy surfaces. 'nuff said.
(2), probably more important: wood grain. I believe that optical mice use an algorithm along the lines of "try to compare the image I see with the previous image, match similar points, and guess how I moved". This algorithm is confused by textures that have long, mostly parallel lines, because it's hard to tell which way, if any, the mouse moved. Wood grain on tables generally has a lot of parallel lines, so it's going to trigger this problem.
Humans have the same problem: imagine an object covered in stripes moving parallel to the stripes. Depending on how uniform the stripes are, it can be difficult or impossible to tell how quickly the object is moving along that axis; if the stripes are very regularly spaced, it can even be difficult to figure out how fast it's moving along the perpendicular axis as well.
The hotpad in question has a crosshatch pattern (ie, squares whose sides are 45 degrees from vertical) with a relatively large distance (~1 inch) between lines, so there's always at least one clear line that the mouse is not moving parallel to; in fact, the more parallel its motion is to one set of lines, the less parallel it is to the other.
My reasons may be wrong, but I've found that my optical mouse is least reliable on wood-grain tables.
I just tried with my cheap optical mouse that I'm using here, and it seems to work fine. I've seen this same mouse be unreliable, though -- when using it *on other surfaces*. You might want to see if your mouse works better if you change its pad (right now I'm actually using a potholder!)
We have strict restrictions on the creation of smallpox because the release of smallpox into the wild could cause a massive epidemic and kill thousands or tens of thousands of people. I know that the *AA are fond of hyperbole, but comparing the theoretical loss of potential income to the deaths of thousands is simply grotesque.
A better analogy would be lockpicks: as far as I know, it's entirely legal to possess and even use lockpicks, as long as they aren't used for illegal purposes -- even though most lockpicks are used to commit crimes that cause financial damage to individuals and businesses. (of course, you probably don't want to be discovered outside a bank vault at midnight with a pile of lock-picking tools:-) )
I'm not claiming that baroque music and computer science are the "same thing" (which is an unfortunately popular meme). However, they both have at their heart a sense of patterns and structures; if you're good at one of them you're potentially (at least in my arrogant opinion:) ) good at the other.
Moreover, you seem to be suggesting that studying baroque music is a "girl thing". This was never true historically: most of the great composers and performers of the past were men. Oh, there was a fad in the 1800s for teaching girls to play the piano, but this was seen mainly as a diversion to keep them out of trouble until they got married. [0]
I have studied music (including baroque music), and I haven't seen a preponderance of one gender or the other in the classes I've taken. I don't think it's sensible to call music a "girl" thing in any way.
Daniel
[0] not to detract from the few great female performers and composers, such as Clara Schumann nee Wieck, who did manage to be recognized for their talents. (and as far as computer science being intrinsically a "guy" thing, I think that when nearly 40% of CS degrees were given to females and nearly 30% are given to them now, that's a silly claim)
And it happens that I'm now into computer science, while she's baroque music. So even when given the same opportunities as kids, grown up by the same parents at the same place and going to the same schools until we were 17 year old or so, we have completely different interests now. (emphasis mine)
Hi, pedants. I realize the CBO is not quite Congress, but the point is that this report is a recommendation from within the government to at least temporarily hold up the "copyright über alles" trend in Washington.
Ignore the fact that the public domain is slowly drying up as Corporate America constantly lengthens copyrights.
Corporate America does not lengthen copyrights. *Congress* lengthens copyrights. (ok, often at the behest of Corporate America, but they are two separate entities) Corporate America has, of late, put several proposals on the table for even more egregious grabs of power. This is a report from within *Congress* (remember, the guys who actually have the authority to adjust copyright law) stating that copyright law doesn't need to be fiddled with any more.
In other words, while this report recommends doing nothing, that *is* a change from Congress' past record, and will directly address one of the issues you mentioned if followed through on (at least by keeping it from getting worse, even if it doesn't make things better). Although I must admit that with the amount of lobbying power the copyright industries have, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them to follow through...
Oh, and
So in a nutshell, this report is sort of like the 9/11 Commission's report: "Nothing seriously wrong here, let's just talk about it to placate the public and then the public will go back to debating which Superbowl commercial is better..."
I have to admit I didn't read the entire report, but my impression is that it basically said that (a) the government blew it against the 9/11 attacks, (b) there are likely to be attacks on the same scale or worse in the future [0], and (c) we need to make a bunch of radical changes to keep the government from blowing it next time. Whether you agree with their conclusions and proposals or not, I don't see how you can possibly describe that as a do-nothing report.
I now return you to your daily dose of uniquely Slashdot paranoia.
Daniel
[0] to be fair, I don't remember if (b) was in the report, or if it was just the personal opinion of one committee member. But even without this point it's still far from "nothing to see here, move along citizen"....
Go to sit-down restaurants, the portions have absolutely ballooned in size, most restaurants serve entrees with enough for 2-3 people, and that's just dinner alone, not counting appetizers and desert, I have no idea how people can eat that much.
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. Think "three meals for the price of one".:-)
That's the sort of dangerous mentality that the open source community needs to get away from. If accepting too many defaults gets you into a mess, it will never be acceptable to the vast majority of users.
The problem was that I then ran a bunch of site customization scripts that I wrote, and one of them installed a piece of software that caused all X programs to segfault because of hardware incompatibilities. (non-nvidia cards don't like nvidia drivers, imagine that!:) ) Do you really think that was the installer's fault?
Slashdot Mirror
Clinton didn't have a majority of the vote, but he did have a clear plurality (ie: he got more votes than anyone else). While a better vote-counting system (such as Approval or Condorcet) might be nice, a first-past-the-post system based on the popular vote would have unambiguously selected Clinton as the winner.
Daniel
Are you so sure you'd never use them?
Yes -- at least the "distributed" part. Nicer branching and merging is something I might use, but I can live just fine without it.
Lots of coders claim they don't really need atomic commits (and thus either SVN, Arch, or any of the non-CVS alternatives) until they've used a RCS that supports them for a while.
While I certainly like atomic commits, I'd go back to CVS in an instant if, for instance, the SVN maintainers became evil and started to sue everyone who had ever downloaded their software.
Daniel
Well, yes, but there are only two distributed revision control systems with wide enough userbases to really trust them for production-level software, and both of them are developed by people who are arguably asshats.
Yes, because we all know that every project needs a distributed revision control system. That's why the free software movement is falling apart, after all -- no-one can manage their source code without a distributed revision control system! I'm sure that all the problems experienced by in-house programmers are also directly due to their pressing need for a distributed revision control system. And did I mention that my thesis work is impossible to keep track of because it's not in a distributed revision control system? (well, that might have been damage from the flock of flying pigs that smashed into my apartment and savaged all the electronics they could find...)
I'm sure glad we have nice guys like Tom Lord and Larry McVoy to save us; after all, without a distributed revision control system, we'd be up against nothing less than the end of Western civilization itself.
<sarcasm mode="off">
Daniel
Unless you're somewhere where they hand-count ballots (and that's nowhere in America, as far as I know)
I'm pretty sure I've heard that Canada counts by hand.
Daniel
Not identical streams of bits (which is all md5sum would prove)
In fact, md5sum doesn't prove anything except that they have the same MD5 hash.
Daniel
My dictionary (written circa 1911) says:
CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Does that answer the question?
Daniel
If current versions of Windows didn't have this ability from Day 1, my opinion of Windows just slipped another notch.
Daniel
Most serious chess games are played with a clock; this analysis shows how to rig the clock on ICC.
Daniel
I really don't know what you're talking about. I wasn't homeschooled, but I know a number of people who were, and they're generally among the most articulate, outgoing, and even adventurous of my friends and acquaintances. If the mythical anti-socialized home-schooled person exists, I haven't met them (okay, probably because they're hiding in their room, but never mind :) ).
Daniel
Wikipedia is pretty good for topics that are prominent and well-known, and decent for technical topics. For stuff that's more obscure, though...it's interesting to browse around but you definitely don't want to take it too seriously!
Daniel
...that they take place before the Endor Holocaust.
Daniel
It doesn't matter whose fault it is; what matters is that the hardware doesn't work.
Daniel
WARNING: mostly unfounded speculation follows!
Actually, a wooden table is probably one of the worse surfaces you could use (and my experience has borne this out), for two reasons:
(1) many tables have vanished, glossy surfaces. 'nuff said.
(2), probably more important: wood grain. I believe that optical mice use an algorithm along the lines of "try to compare the image I see with the previous image, match similar points, and guess how I moved". This algorithm is confused by textures that have long, mostly parallel lines, because it's hard to tell which way, if any, the mouse moved. Wood grain on tables generally has a lot of parallel lines, so it's going to trigger this problem.
Humans have the same problem: imagine an object covered in stripes moving parallel to the stripes. Depending on how uniform the stripes are, it can be difficult or impossible to tell how quickly the object is moving along that axis; if the stripes are very regularly spaced, it can even be difficult to figure out how fast it's moving along the perpendicular axis as well.
The hotpad in question has a crosshatch pattern (ie, squares whose sides are 45 degrees from vertical) with a relatively large distance (~1 inch) between lines, so there's always at least one clear line that the mouse is not moving parallel to; in fact, the more parallel its motion is to one set of lines, the less parallel it is to the other.
My reasons may be wrong, but I've found that my optical mouse is least reliable on wood-grain tables.
Daniel
I just tried with my cheap optical mouse that I'm using here, and it seems to work fine. I've seen this same mouse be unreliable, though -- when using it *on other surfaces*. You might want to see if your mouse works better if you change its pad (right now I'm actually using a potholder!)
Daniel
We have strict restrictions on the creation of smallpox because the release of smallpox into the wild could cause a massive epidemic and kill thousands or tens of thousands of people. I know that the *AA are fond of hyperbole, but comparing the theoretical loss of potential income to the deaths of thousands is simply grotesque.
:-) )
A better analogy would be lockpicks: as far as I know, it's entirely legal to possess and even use lockpicks, as long as they aren't used for illegal purposes -- even though most lockpicks are used to commit crimes that cause financial damage to individuals and businesses. (of course, you probably don't want to be discovered outside a bank vault at midnight with a pile of lock-picking tools
Daniel
Well, they said that Dirac is sticking to techniques published at least 20 years ago, so patents shouldn't be much of an issue.
Daniel
To make myself a little less opaque:
:) ) good at the other.
I'm not claiming that baroque music and computer science are the "same thing" (which is an unfortunately popular meme). However, they both have at their heart a sense of patterns and structures; if you're good at one of them you're potentially (at least in my arrogant opinion
Moreover, you seem to be suggesting that studying baroque music is a "girl thing". This was never true historically: most of the great composers and performers of the past were men. Oh, there was a fad in the 1800s for teaching girls to play the piano, but this was seen mainly as a diversion to keep them out of trouble until they got married. [0]
I have studied music (including baroque music), and I haven't seen a preponderance of one gender or the other in the classes I've taken. I don't think it's sensible to call music a "girl" thing in any way.
Daniel
[0] not to detract from the few great female performers and composers, such as Clara Schumann nee Wieck, who did manage to be recognized for their talents. (and as far as computer science being intrinsically a "guy" thing, I think that when nearly 40% of CS degrees were given to females and nearly 30% are given to them now, that's a silly claim)
Women can be doctors, lawyers, construction workers, and IT professionals
I'm pretty sure I heard recently that women outnumber men either in law practice or in law school. Can anyone confirm or refute this?
Daniel
And it happens that I'm now into computer science, while she's baroque music. So even when given the same opportunities as kids, grown up by the same parents at the same place and going to the same schools until we were 17 year old or so, we have completely different interests now. (emphasis mine)
I can see you haven't studied baroque music.
Daniel
within *Congress*
Hi, pedants. I realize the CBO is not quite Congress, but the point is that this report is a recommendation from within the government to at least temporarily hold up the "copyright über alles" trend in Washington.
Daniel
Ignore the fact that the public domain is slowly drying up as Corporate America constantly lengthens copyrights.
Corporate America does not lengthen copyrights. *Congress* lengthens copyrights. (ok, often at the behest of Corporate America, but they are two separate entities) Corporate America has, of late, put several proposals on the table for even more egregious grabs of power. This is a report from within *Congress* (remember, the guys who actually have the authority to adjust copyright law) stating that copyright law doesn't need to be fiddled with any more.
In other words, while this report recommends doing nothing, that *is* a change from Congress' past record, and will directly address one of the issues you mentioned if followed through on (at least by keeping it from getting worse, even if it doesn't make things better). Although I must admit that with the amount of lobbying power the copyright industries have, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for them to follow through...
Oh, and
So in a nutshell, this report is sort of like the 9/11 Commission's report: "Nothing seriously wrong here, let's just talk about it to placate the public and then the public will go back to debating which Superbowl commercial is better..."
I have to admit I didn't read the entire report, but my impression is that it basically said that (a) the government blew it against the 9/11 attacks, (b) there are likely to be attacks on the same scale or worse in the future [0], and (c) we need to make a bunch of radical changes to keep the government from blowing it next time. Whether you agree with their conclusions and proposals or not, I don't see how you can possibly describe that as a do-nothing report.
I now return you to your daily dose of uniquely Slashdot paranoia.
Daniel
[0] to be fair, I don't remember if (b) was in the report, or if it was just the personal opinion of one committee member. But even without this point it's still far from "nothing to see here, move along citizen"....
Go to sit-down restaurants, the portions have absolutely ballooned in size, most restaurants serve entrees with enough for 2-3 people, and that's just dinner alone, not counting appetizers and desert, I have no idea how people can eat that much.
:-)
You're looking at it from the wrong angle. Think "three meals for the price of one".
Daniel
It's just an example to show by comparison the severity of the problem.
In other words, you made it up. Please try the installer yourself before commenting further; I have, and the common case *is* streamlined.
Daniel
let's consider that the average number of interactive prompts is 50.
Where did you get this figure?
Daniel
That's the sort of dangerous mentality that the open source community needs to get away from. If accepting too many defaults gets you into a mess, it will never be acceptable to the vast majority of users.
:) ) Do you really think that was the installer's fault?
The problem was that I then ran a bunch of site customization scripts that I wrote, and one of them installed a piece of software that caused all X programs to segfault because of hardware incompatibilities. (non-nvidia cards don't like nvidia drivers, imagine that!
Daniel