Re:Tappin to the music...
on
The Mouse Vanishes
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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I have a Toshiba Satellite S25-L119 (which is a 3+ year old budget laptop) and I can do the 2-finger scroll with its touchpad. Well, in Linux anyways... not in Windows (go figure)
Yes, all of the laptops that I've got (even old ones) running linux can do a two finger scroll thing. The setting to turn it on is tricky to find, though, I can never remember where it is.
Soccer is what the rest of the world follows for sports as they don't have access to baseball or football or basketball or hockey.
I think that's your imagination speaking there, soccer is the beautiful game. Everyone has access to those sports you mentioned, but no-one except Americans wants them.
As a native South African, I'll concede that the vuvuzela is quite awful. I've grown up with it around though, so I've sort of learned to ignore it.
Revoke all corporate licenses. That would weaken the ability of the rich to consolidate wealth, and eliminate "limited liability" so that CEOs are directly responsible for any deaths/harm they cause.
The disadvantage to that though is that it would discourage many people from taking the risks involved to start / run such businesses. That, I think, would cause a lot of problems.
The article does make some suggestions and makes comparisons with the airline industry, and the measures that they've taken to prevent things from going wrong. Perhaps a restructuring of the "limited liability" principle would help.
Am I to understand that you mean the same sort of legal status where if a business for example goes bust then the owner(s) assets aren't at stake, as opposed to the man whose business goes down and then he subsequently loses his house and his car etc. ? I an economics class in high school that covered this sort of thing but I don't remember it really.
Even so, if the corporate entity is treated this way, the entity itself doesn't actually DO anything, all its actions are due to those actual humans that operate inside it... Surely they should be held to account for their actions? I'm not entirely sure of the way the legal system works in the US, I'm assuming you're from there, I'm not.
That's the sort of answer that I was expecting... This isn't the place for a debate as to the pros and cons of Socialism though. It suffices me to say that I'm opposed to it.
Well, in theory that is the system that is in place in most Western countries. I'd venture a guess that in most cases, it's not in the interests of the people in charge to have justice run its course properly.
The other thing that one would need to consider is, despite what everyone said, who is at fault? Was it an accident? Or was it on account of negligence or evil intent? (Or stupidity as the article says...)
Not just referring to the BP case specifically there, but in general. Things like that are IMO difficult to determine conclusively.
While I was in school, the programming textbooks that we had commented just about every single line, like this:
int foo( int bar) {/*begin function foo, accepts bar as an argument */
return bar * bar;/*multiplies bar with itself and returns the value*/
}/*end function definition for foo */
That hurt my eyes quite a bit while I was trying to read code (especially since a lot of the students copied the style). You'd imagine that it would be fine for the introductory "Hello World" listings, but even when we're past pointers etc. the style still continued.
I'm all for good documentation of code, and I agree that it does need to be maintained, but there is such a thing as too much, I think.
Another thing that kind of drives me crazy is when the opening brace isn't on its own line, like in the example above. I like them to be nicely lined up underneath one another, but that's just me, I suppose.
The Fine Manual isn't always that good, though, and it's not always that easy to find in the first place. I've got a fair amount of experience with *nix and "man " sometimes even confuses me... "I just want to know what the option does!!!" or "What the config file is called!!!" A lot of people I know weren't even aware that such a thing as "man" existed, and when I've told them about it, a lot have said similar things to what I've just expressed, often man pages are very technical and don't answer obvious questions. (Obvious to my mind anyway...)
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of new users wouldn't be able to get that far. I've had experience recently of a friend who is new on linux calling me just about every week to come to fix something that he doesn't know how to do, he's not a stupid chap, but it seems as though a lot of things that were obvious to me just weren't to him. F/LOSS is sort of lacking in the documentation front, just in my experience...
I disagree, I shouldn't think it would be too difficult for programmers to do a bit of learning... The majorest open-source projects, kde, mozilla, etc. all have fairly professional developers and I'd be willing to bet there'd be some UI designers in there. The smaller projects would be the ones that would suffer the most in this regard, I think.
I find it interesting that "morals" seem to be labelled as "facism" these days. If it so happens that the ISP does respect family values or not want malware, and if you actually DO want malware and whatever porn you feel you need, then I'm sure there will be other ISPs that will be glad of your custom.
Then we can all put our money where our mouths are, and let capitalism do the talking. See what happens. I am personally opposed to pornography, I think it's quite a despicable thing. That's not the topic of this discussion though, so without going on any more about my own moral reservations, I'm in favour of the.xxx domain, so that anyone who doesn't want to use it can avoid it more easily, and those who do want to can find it more easily.
I agree with this, actually... Even if we totally avoid the moral issues, or the "Protect the children" ones, (face it, if the kids want to get at it they'll find a way somehow), the fact that something is designated clearly will help a lot.
As a bit of an illustration the other day, me being quite a keen hobbyist I googled for "models", what I got wasn't exactly what I was anticipating, though. I realise that this is not exactly the same thing, but to illustrate, the.xxx domain will make a difference to URLs that are a bit ambiguous... With models.xxx there'd be no mistaking for what it is, whereas models.com might be a bit ambiguous.
I have to agree with you there, as far as I'm concerned, the US and Canada have nothing to complain about...
Here in South Africa, only the more well-to-do can afford broadband, and average speed is between 512k and 1mbps... 4mbps is something of your wildest dreams...
AND we have a limit to the amount that we can use every month, it's between 3 to 5GB depending on the package, unlimited ADSL costs about three times as much as the regular kind, which in effect means only businesses can afford it, and even then there is normally some throttling if your useage exceeds a certain amount.
I have a friend who has family in the states, and he says the internet there is like a dream come true.
I suspect that there's a lot of truth in that... I've a funny feeling that the percentage of people who have tried calculating the probability of finding a girlfriend is higher among the/. readers than the population in general... we're just that sort.:-)
Sounds like an interesting thing to do in one's spare time, if that's the sort of thing you're into, I'm surprised it made it all the way to slashdot's front page though.
I agree 100%. I started becoming interested in programming at that age, I found a C++ tutorial, and not knowing any better, I gave it a whirl. I got about as far as pointers and gave up, later I started on Pascal and got quite far, I wrote a few little DOS games that my brothers and I played, and I learned quite a bit.
These days I still dabble a little in programming but it's not really my main field of interest anymore. The ability that I had to make my own decisions helped me learn tremendously though.
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I have a Toshiba Satellite S25-L119 (which is a 3+ year old budget laptop) and I can do the 2-finger scroll with its touchpad. Well, in Linux anyways... not in Windows (go figure)
Yes, all of the laptops that I've got (even old ones) running linux can do a two finger scroll thing. The setting to turn it on is tricky to find, though, I can never remember where it is.
If someone organises that, I'm in.
Well, I drink tap water from wherever unless I've been specifically warned not to.
I doubt that if I travel somewhere for a week that it will have chance to leave mineral deposits in my hair though... surely?
That's tough to swallow...
Agreed. One would wonder just how much water one would need to drink for it to reflect in one's hair, if this is true.
Soccer is what the rest of the world follows for sports as they don't have access to baseball or football or basketball or hockey.
I think that's your imagination speaking there, soccer is the beautiful game. Everyone has access to those sports you mentioned, but no-one except Americans wants them.
As a native South African, I'll concede that the vuvuzela is quite awful. I've grown up with it around though, so I've sort of learned to ignore it.
Not as though this topic hasn't been discussed over and over here though.
Revoke all corporate licenses. That would weaken the ability of the rich to consolidate wealth, and eliminate "limited liability" so that CEOs are directly responsible for any deaths/harm they cause.
The disadvantage to that though is that it would discourage many people from taking the risks involved to start / run such businesses. That, I think, would cause a lot of problems.
The article does make some suggestions and makes comparisons with the airline industry, and the measures that they've taken to prevent things from going wrong. Perhaps a restructuring of the "limited liability" principle would help.
Hmmm...
Am I to understand that you mean the same sort of legal status where if a business for example goes bust then the owner(s) assets aren't at stake, as opposed to the man whose business goes down and then he subsequently loses his house and his car etc. ? I an economics class in high school that covered this sort of thing but I don't remember it really.
Even so, if the corporate entity is treated this way, the entity itself doesn't actually DO anything, all its actions are due to those actual humans that operate inside it... Surely they should be held to account for their actions? I'm not entirely sure of the way the legal system works in the US, I'm assuming you're from there, I'm not.
I'm not sure what you mean there by "corporate personhood"... perhaps it's something I just know by another name?
That's the sort of answer that I was expecting... This isn't the place for a debate as to the pros and cons of Socialism though. It suffices me to say that I'm opposed to it.
Well, in theory that is the system that is in place in most Western countries. I'd venture a guess that in most cases, it's not in the interests of the people in charge to have justice run its course properly.
The other thing that one would need to consider is, despite what everyone said, who is at fault? Was it an accident? Or was it on account of negligence or evil intent? (Or stupidity as the article says...)
Not just referring to the BP case specifically there, but in general. Things like that are IMO difficult to determine conclusively.
Got it. I suppose this is as opposed to a stabbing or something where someone clearly didn't want to be involved.
And the alternative to such a system is... ?
How do you define "victimless crimes" exactly?
While I was in school, the programming textbooks that we had commented just about every single line, like this:
/*begin function foo, accepts bar as an argument */ /*multiplies bar with itself and returns the value*/ /*end function definition for foo */
int foo( int bar) {
return bar * bar;
}
That hurt my eyes quite a bit while I was trying to read code (especially since a lot of the students copied the style). You'd imagine that it would be fine for the introductory "Hello World" listings, but even when we're past pointers etc. the style still continued.
I'm all for good documentation of code, and I agree that it does need to be maintained, but there is such a thing as too much, I think.
Another thing that kind of drives me crazy is when the opening brace isn't on its own line, like in the example above. I like them to be nicely lined up underneath one another, but that's just me, I suppose.
The Fine Manual isn't always that good, though, and it's not always that easy to find in the first place. I've got a fair amount of experience with *nix and "man " sometimes even confuses me... "I just want to know what the option does!!!" or "What the config file is called!!!" A lot of people I know weren't even aware that such a thing as "man" existed, and when I've told them about it, a lot have said similar things to what I've just expressed, often man pages are very technical and don't answer obvious questions. (Obvious to my mind anyway...)
I'd be willing to bet that a lot of new users wouldn't be able to get that far. I've had experience recently of a friend who is new on linux calling me just about every week to come to fix something that he doesn't know how to do, he's not a stupid chap, but it seems as though a lot of things that were obvious to me just weren't to him. F/LOSS is sort of lacking in the documentation front, just in my experience...
I disagree, I shouldn't think it would be too difficult for programmers to do a bit of learning... The majorest open-source projects, kde, mozilla, etc. all have fairly professional developers and I'd be willing to bet there'd be some UI designers in there. The smaller projects would be the ones that would suffer the most in this regard, I think.
I find it interesting that "morals" seem to be labelled as "facism" these days. If it so happens that the ISP does respect family values or not want malware, and if you actually DO want malware and whatever porn you feel you need, then I'm sure there will be other ISPs that will be glad of your custom.
.xxx domain, so that anyone who doesn't want to use it can avoid it more easily, and those who do want to can find it more easily.
Then we can all put our money where our mouths are, and let capitalism do the talking. See what happens. I am personally opposed to pornography, I think it's quite a despicable thing. That's not the topic of this discussion though, so without going on any more about my own moral reservations, I'm in favour of the
I agree with this, actually... Even if we totally avoid the moral issues, or the "Protect the children" ones, (face it, if the kids want to get at it they'll find a way somehow), the fact that something is designated clearly will help a lot.
.xxx domain will make a difference to URLs that are a bit ambiguous... With models.xxx there'd be no mistaking for what it is, whereas models.com might be a bit ambiguous.
As a bit of an illustration the other day, me being quite a keen hobbyist I googled for "models", what I got wasn't exactly what I was anticipating, though. I realise that this is not exactly the same thing, but to illustrate, the
Probably why it was posted by an Anonymous Coward...
I have to agree with you there, as far as I'm concerned, the US and Canada have nothing to complain about...
Here in South Africa, only the more well-to-do can afford broadband, and average speed is between 512k and 1mbps... 4mbps is something of your wildest dreams...
AND we have a limit to the amount that we can use every month, it's between 3 to 5GB depending on the package, unlimited ADSL costs about three times as much as the regular kind, which in effect means only businesses can afford it, and even then there is normally some throttling if your useage exceeds a certain amount.
I have a friend who has family in the states, and he says the internet there is like a dream come true.
mod parent +1 insightful
You've probably got the best point out of everyone here, having thought about it.
I suspect that there's a lot of truth in that... I've a funny feeling that the percentage of people who have tried calculating the probability of finding a girlfriend is higher among the /. readers than the population in general... we're just that sort. :-)
Sounds like an interesting thing to do in one's spare time, if that's the sort of thing you're into, I'm surprised it made it all the way to slashdot's front page though.
I agree 100%. I started becoming interested in programming at that age, I found a C++ tutorial, and not knowing any better, I gave it a whirl. I got about as far as pointers and gave up, later I started on Pascal and got quite far, I wrote a few little DOS games that my brothers and I played, and I learned quite a bit. These days I still dabble a little in programming but it's not really my main field of interest anymore. The ability that I had to make my own decisions helped me learn tremendously though.