I'd note that it's worked for us for longer than the other democracies around the world have BEEN democracies.
Oh, Switzerland beats the U.S. hands down with about 700 years of democracy. Not a perfect one, and surely with lots of regularia during its history, which would make it look quite undemocratic today. But this is even so with the U.S. democracy, which had to overcome lots of obstacles and undemocratic sidesteps until it came where it is now.
Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 1
They do so wear uniforms: Orange jumpsuits for the pilots, white artic gear for soldiers on Hoth, camo gear when they fought on Endor...
You don't know what an uniform (in the sense of the Geneva Convention) is. It has at least to show the flag of the government you are fighting for in a size no less than about 1"x2". It has to show your name and rank. And it has to differ from the clothes plain civilians are wearing. And we were talking about "the other freedom fighters" in the prison. If they were regular troups, they wouldn't have been in prison (again Geneva convention) at all, but in a separate camp.
Finally, they are commanded by Princess Leia, a representative of the Republic government in exile.
As far as I know they are fighting for Princess Leia, but they fight on their own.
You never read any Asterix & Obelix cartoons, do you?
Re:The logistics of building the Death Star
on
Star Wars Minutiae
·
· Score: 5, Funny
[...] but many of them were probably genuine freedom fighters [...]
It's terrorist, man. They don't wear uniforms, they are not commanded by a government, they are not for open battle, but doing stealth attacks... So they are terrorists, and any support to them is punishable by the PATRIOT act.
On the other hand they borrowed from Carlo Collodi to make Pinocchio. And they made Pinocchio in 1940, the year after Carlo Collodi's Copyright ran out. He died in 1890, just 50 years before. Strange, isn't it?;)
Disney played very well on the copyright instrument, grabbing everything as soon as it was free of charge and put their own version in place, for which the copyright should never ever expire.
It's a poll, not an election or decision. So what matters is not your vote. Did you vote on the color of your staple? Or did you just take the one fitting your needs or the one being available at the time?
Interestingly though the town of Freiberg has an university too, and a quite old one. In fact, founded in 1765, it's the second oldest university for technology of the world.
It depends strongly on the age of the people listening to the music.
Young people tend to like modern equipment better, older people (30years and older) want tube amplifiers. So why is that? It's because of the things the people grew up with. You are accustomed to the sound of your childhood, and that's the sound that is comfy to you. It has nothing to do with the naturality of the sound or anything else, it's pure conditioning.
I remember an experiment done by the c't magazine, where they tried to find out what compression format sounds better. The only one who was pretty good in finding out if the sound was coming from a compressed source even at higher bit rates was one with a slight ear damage, because he had a different listening curve than the others.
And if you would make an experiment where the sound is played live vs. played from a digitized or an analog source, you will notice a similar thing: The live sound will be the least pleasing to the people who want tube amplifiers. But if you put a low pass filter on the digitized source they won't be able to tell the difference.
If you look at the current electronic music scene, you will find that it has adapted to this already. You can put "analog" filters to make the sound more seventies, you can add "vinyl crack" to improve on that. Basicly the "back to the analog naturality" movement is nothing else than a "back to the limitations of 60ies technology". Eventually it will die out when the people used to those limitations die out.
Hardware Abstraction Layers are VERY old. Even the 6502 based Commodore computer series (PET, VC20, C64 et. al.) had some kind of HAL, it was called the Kernel ROM, and developers were strongly encouraged to use the I/O-Routines provided by the Kernel ROM instead of writing their own.
The whole point of the VM/CMS operation system from IBM was hardware abstraction. That's where the name comes from: Virtual Machine CMS. VM/CMS was providing an abstract CMS system (CMS being the predecessor of VM/CMS) for each process or task, so you could use multiple virtual CMS systems on your hardware.
Just because WinNT uses hardware abstraction doesn't make it an innovative idea from Microsoft.
Same about KDevelop. Ever used an OSF Motif Toolkit? They are around since the early days of Motif (around 1988), and the Visual series from Microsoft could easily be called an ripoff. Not to forget the Turbo Pascal/Borland Pascal/Delphi IDEs or again IBM with the VisualAge series of compilers.
The real power of Microsoft is not innovation, it is the sheer manpower and organisation they have to integrate ideas that proved to work into a single, quite coherent system (even though in the beginning, Microsoft's offerings didn't integrate very well into each other... The first MS Office suites for instance had different file dialogs in every program, and different ways to set up the printer... but it got better every version).
And for becoming "more and more similar to Windows": If the default installation is in a substantial way different than Windows, the whining goes: "Steep learning curve! It's too different!". If the differences are hidden, then the whining is: "It's becoming more and more Windows! Where is the innovation?" It seems as if the GUI developers have to choose between Scylla and Charybdis here.
You didn't get my point. If every spammer would comply with the request and sign the spam messages, then we had a way to check if a spam message is really originating from a certain website. If every spammer would put "ADV:" at the begin of the Subject: line, then building a spam filter would be easy. But, alas. Spammers don't put "ADV:" in their messages very often, and many of them will refrain from signing their spam messages.
This is acutally a myth. Nova means "new" in spanish. So a Chevy Nova has in reality a positive name. The 'no va' joke is old, but I guess, most Mexicans won't even get it, because they read nova as nóva, not as no vá. If a car doesn't move, they would probably say 'no functionar' or similar.
This is no different than requiring spam messages having "ADV:" in their Subject: line. It doesn't stop spammers from sending out spam which doesn't comply. And it surely doesn't stop schemes like Nigeria 419ers.
There are some things you just don't do. You don't try to sell a product called "Mist Stick" in Germany (because this sounds like Miststueck = piece of junk). You shouldn't try to call a car 'Pajero' in Spain (because pajero means something like wanker). You shouldn't try to market a map of Israel in Israel with the U.N. demarkation lines put in and call the Westbank, East Jerusalem and Gazah "Palestina".
Basicly some of those mistakes are unavoidable if you are taking a single product and derive localized versions of it. Call them 'social bugs'. It happens, and you should fix them and get over it. It gets really nasty when you are informed beforehand about some blunders and still don't change your product though.
The fact that only a small amount of Google stock is available for public trading. Currently you can get about 8,5% of Google by buying all outstanding shares. This is far away from controlling the company.
More so: The source code has to be accessible on the same way the binaries are accessible and under the same conditions (namely refering to section 1 and 2 of the GPL).
To quote the GPL itself:
3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable
source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections
1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three
years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your
cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete
machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be
distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium
customarily used for software interchange; or,
c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer
to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
This means: Of course you can charge for the executables. But you have to provide the source code at no more cost than just handling and shipping, if the people who got the executables from you are interested. And you are not allowed to avoid the cost and hassle by just pointing at other sources than yourself, if you are charging for the executables.
But... Luxembourg has won already two gold medals at the Olympics: One in 1900, and one in 1952, accompagnied by a silver medal in 1920, and two other silver medals in 1992.
Although my own political beliefs tell me that Socialism (a nicer word for Communism) is better for the majority, my human nature to compete asks me to move toward Capitalism in order to better myself financially; this issue will plague us for generations.
Actually Socialism is not 'a nicer word for Communism'. Socialism and Communism are quite different concepts. Socialism is anti-capitalist, and Communism is post-capitalist. So Socialism is about minimizing the impact of a capitalist system to society by socialising the profits. Communism is about building the society after capitalism died by its inner antagonistics.
There are much more types of Socialism than the one that claims Socialism was the means to get to a communist society. There is the concept of social revolutionism, there are the different types of national socialisms (italian, german, argentinian, arabian (Baath party)). And so I don't believe Socialism is in any way a 'nicer word'.
Of course he is anti-semite in the pure sense of the word. Semites are the descendants of Sem, which both Arabs and Jews claim to be their forefather. Semites in the scientific sense of the word means: people speaking a semitic language, which includes (for instance) babylonian, assyrian, arabian and hebrew. Even from a racist point of view both arabs and jews are Semites, meaning they belong to the same human race. The Third Reich failed to stirr an all arabian war against the british administration in the Middle East during the World War II because the arabs were well aware about the anti semitic propaganda of the german leaders and turned them down for being anti-arabian.
Accusing both Israelis and Palestinians of atrocities and telling both are equally guilty in continuing the conflict is thus anti-semitic.
A laser is a L.A.S.E.R., which stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This means that the laser light is an amplification of a smaller light source. Because of the amplification, the laser light waves are synchronous to each other, because they are the amplification of the same light wave. This type of light is called coherent. And because the light waves are synchronous, they can't be diffuse, which would be a contradiction in itself.
If laser light travels, it loses this coherency, so the laser light gets more and more diffuse (the coherency gets slowly down, so the diffuse part increases). Optically this means that the light beam diameter gets wider and wider with the distance from the source. If the starting laser beam is very strongly bundled and has a very small diameter (thus a high energy density), this widening effect gets stronger. Less strong bundled lasers with lower energy density don't widen that much, so most long distance laser experiments (like measuring the distance to the Moon by shooting a laser beam there and take the time until the reflection can be measured) use quite large diameters, which you wouldn't call "laser" at all, because they don't spur the needle fine light:)
You both are wrong. There is a decision from the European Court declaring such non competing clauses void because they are contradicting the free choice of the workplace as laid down in the European Contracts.
Of course you are not allowed to take trade secrets with you, and if someone can prove that you did, you are in deep trouble. There are lots of contracts with non competing clauses in Europe. But the fact that the clauses are there doesn't make them enforceable throughout the European Union.
(There is another argument why those clauses are void: As soon as your contract ends, all clauses within the contract end too. All your former company has to enforce certain things to you are laid down in law, not in contract.)
This phone actually uses several layers of authentication: First: The authentication is tied to the SIM card or a similar ID inside the phone. Second: The phone itself is protected by a PIN, so not everyone can use it. And then there is the third layer, the finger printing.
All together create a quite high security, because it checks for three different things: 1) Something the user possesses (the phone with the right ID), 2) Something the user knows (the PIN to activate the phone) and 3) something the user is (her fingerprint). I doubt you can use the m-commerce feature by just lending the phone of someone else and sending your finger print out.
The "blurr" you are describing, which is missing in computer generated graphics is something you could call time aligned antialiasing. A typical aliasing effect are the seemingly backwards turning weels often seen in movies. Here you have an aliasing to a different movement, because two sequences differ in a way that you align the wrong patches to the same object (in this case the spokes of the wheel), so you see a different movement than the one actually depicted.
Another effect is the ability of the eye to see subharmonics of the actual shown frequencies. So with a 60fps game you see also 30fps, 20fps, 15fps and sometimes 10fps effects, which surely are starting to flicker before your eyes, especially if the shown sequence itself contains a high level of order, as typical in computer games.
In standstill computer graphics this effect is minimized by using random dithering, so there are no subfrequencies of the dithering pattern your eyes can catch. For movies you would need to have the 60fps not having all exact 1/60sec time distance to each other, but rather a variation of 1/55 to 1/65sec. This surely would suppress most of the lower "ghost" frequencies. You could even go back to 30fps and most of the effects causing flickering would vanish.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd note that it's worked for us for longer than the other democracies around the world have BEEN democracies.
Oh, Switzerland beats the U.S. hands down with about 700 years of democracy. Not a perfect one, and surely with lots of regularia during its history, which would make it look quite undemocratic today. But this is even so with the U.S. democracy, which had to overcome lots of obstacles and undemocratic sidesteps until it came where it is now.
They do so wear uniforms: Orange jumpsuits for the pilots, white artic gear for soldiers on Hoth, camo gear when they fought on Endor...
You don't know what an uniform (in the sense of the Geneva Convention) is. It has at least to show the flag of the government you are fighting for in a size no less than about 1"x2". It has to show your name and rank. And it has to differ from the clothes plain civilians are wearing. And we were talking about "the other freedom fighters" in the prison. If they were regular troups, they wouldn't have been in prison (again Geneva convention) at all, but in a separate camp.
Finally, they are commanded by Princess Leia, a representative of the Republic government in exile.
As far as I know they are fighting for Princess Leia, but they fight on their own.
You never read any Asterix & Obelix cartoons, do you?
[...] but many of them were probably genuine freedom fighters [...]
It's terrorist, man. They don't wear uniforms, they are not commanded by a government, they are not for open battle, but doing stealth attacks... So they are terrorists, and any support to them is punishable by the PATRIOT act.
On the other hand they borrowed from Carlo Collodi to make Pinocchio. And they made Pinocchio in 1940, the year after Carlo Collodi's Copyright ran out. He died in 1890, just 50 years before. Strange, isn't it? ;)
Disney played very well on the copyright instrument, grabbing everything as soon as it was free of charge and put their own version in place, for which the copyright should never ever expire.
It's a poll, not an election or decision. So what matters is not your vote. Did you vote on the color of your staple? Or did you just take the one fitting your needs or the one being available at the time?
Interestingly though the town of Freiberg has an university too, and a quite old one. In fact, founded in 1765, it's the second oldest university for technology of the world.
That's why I didn't spot the error immediately.
It depends strongly on the age of the people listening to the music.
Young people tend to like modern equipment better, older people (30years and older) want tube amplifiers. So why is that? It's because of the things the people grew up with. You are accustomed to the sound of your childhood, and that's the sound that is comfy to you. It has nothing to do with the naturality of the sound or anything else, it's pure conditioning.
I remember an experiment done by the c't magazine, where they tried to find out what compression format sounds better. The only one who was pretty good in finding out if the sound was coming from a compressed source even at higher bit rates was one with a slight ear damage, because he had a different listening curve than the others.
And if you would make an experiment where the sound is played live vs. played from a digitized or an analog source, you will notice a similar thing: The live sound will be the least pleasing to the people who want tube amplifiers. But if you put a low pass filter on the digitized source they won't be able to tell the difference.
If you look at the current electronic music scene, you will find that it has adapted to this already. You can put "analog" filters to make the sound more seventies, you can add "vinyl crack" to improve on that. Basicly the "back to the analog naturality" movement is nothing else than a "back to the limitations of 60ies technology". Eventually it will die out when the people used to those limitations die out.
AMD and Intel have a cross license agreement for their patents. So THAT's not the issue here.
Hardware Abstraction Layers are VERY old. Even the 6502 based Commodore computer series (PET, VC20, C64 et. al.) had some kind of HAL, it was called the Kernel ROM, and developers were strongly encouraged to use the I/O-Routines provided by the Kernel ROM instead of writing their own.
The whole point of the VM/CMS operation system from IBM was hardware abstraction. That's where the name comes from: Virtual Machine CMS. VM/CMS was providing an abstract CMS system (CMS being the predecessor of VM/CMS) for each process or task, so you could use multiple virtual CMS systems on your hardware.
Just because WinNT uses hardware abstraction doesn't make it an innovative idea from Microsoft.
Same about KDevelop. Ever used an OSF Motif Toolkit? They are around since the early days of Motif (around 1988), and the Visual series from Microsoft could easily be called an ripoff. Not to forget the Turbo Pascal/Borland Pascal/Delphi IDEs or again IBM with the VisualAge series of compilers.
The real power of Microsoft is not innovation, it is the sheer manpower and organisation they have to integrate ideas that proved to work into a single, quite coherent system (even though in the beginning, Microsoft's offerings didn't integrate very well into each other... The first MS Office suites for instance had different file dialogs in every program, and different ways to set up the printer... but it got better every version).
And for becoming "more and more similar to Windows": If the default installation is in a substantial way different than Windows, the whining goes: "Steep learning curve! It's too different!". If the differences are hidden, then the whining is: "It's becoming more and more Windows! Where is the innovation?" It seems as if the GUI developers have to choose between Scylla and Charybdis here.
You didn't get my point.
If every spammer would comply with the request and sign the spam messages, then we had a way to check if a spam message is really originating from a certain website.
If every spammer would put "ADV:" at the begin of the Subject: line, then building a spam filter would be easy.
But, alas. Spammers don't put "ADV:" in their messages very often, and many of them will refrain from signing their spam messages.
You are right. It's not castillian :)
Where is the "+5 I am so sorry for you" moderation when you need it?
This is acutally a myth. Nova means "new" in spanish. So a Chevy Nova has in reality a positive name. The 'no va' joke is old, but I guess, most Mexicans won't even get it, because they read nova as nóva, not as no vá. If a car doesn't move, they would probably say 'no functionar' or similar.
This is no different than requiring spam messages having "ADV:" in their Subject: line. It doesn't stop spammers from sending out spam which doesn't comply. And it surely doesn't stop schemes like Nigeria 419ers.
There are some things you just don't do. You don't try to sell a product called "Mist Stick" in Germany (because this sounds like Miststueck = piece of junk). You shouldn't try to call a car 'Pajero' in Spain (because pajero means something like wanker). You shouldn't try to market a map of Israel in Israel with the U.N. demarkation lines put in and call the Westbank, East Jerusalem and Gazah "Palestina".
Basicly some of those mistakes are unavoidable if you are taking a single product and derive localized versions of it. Call them 'social bugs'. It happens, and you should fix them and get over it. It gets really nasty when you are informed beforehand about some blunders and still don't change your product though.
The fact that only a small amount of Google stock is available for public trading. Currently you can get about 8,5% of Google by buying all outstanding shares. This is far away from controlling the company.
To quote the GPL itself:
This means: Of course you can charge for the executables. But you have to provide the source code at no more cost than just handling and shipping, if the people who got the executables from you are interested. And you are not allowed to avoid the cost and hassle by just pointing at other sources than yourself, if you are charging for the executables.
But... Luxembourg has won already two gold medals at the Olympics: One in 1900, and one in 1952, accompagnied by a silver medal in 1920, and two other silver medals in 1992.
Actually Socialism is not 'a nicer word for Communism'. Socialism and Communism are quite different concepts. Socialism is anti-capitalist, and Communism is post-capitalist. So Socialism is about minimizing the impact of a capitalist system to society by socialising the profits. Communism is about building the society after capitalism died by its inner antagonistics.
There are much more types of Socialism than the one that claims Socialism was the means to get to a communist society. There is the concept of social revolutionism, there are the different types of national socialisms (italian, german, argentinian, arabian (Baath party)). And so I don't believe Socialism is in any way a 'nicer word'.
Of course he is anti-semite in the pure sense of the word. Semites are the descendants of Sem, which both Arabs and Jews claim to be their forefather. Semites in the scientific sense of the word means: people speaking a semitic language, which includes (for instance) babylonian, assyrian, arabian and hebrew. Even from a racist point of view both arabs and jews are Semites, meaning they belong to the same human race. The Third Reich failed to stirr an all arabian war against the british administration in the Middle East during the World War II because the arabs were well aware about the anti semitic propaganda of the german leaders and turned them down for being anti-arabian.
Accusing both Israelis and Palestinians of atrocities and telling both are equally guilty in continuing the conflict is thus anti-semitic.
A laser is a L.A.S.E.R., which stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. This means that the laser light is an amplification of a smaller light source. Because of the amplification, the laser light waves are synchronous to each other, because they are the amplification of the same light wave. This type of light is called coherent. And because the light waves are synchronous, they can't be diffuse, which would be a contradiction in itself.
:)
If laser light travels, it loses this coherency, so the laser light gets more and more diffuse (the coherency gets slowly down, so the diffuse part increases). Optically this means that the light beam diameter gets wider and wider with the distance from the source. If the starting laser beam is very strongly bundled and has a very small diameter (thus a high energy density), this widening effect gets stronger. Less strong bundled lasers with lower energy density don't widen that much, so most long distance laser experiments (like measuring the distance to the Moon by shooting a laser beam there and take the time until the reflection can be measured) use quite large diameters, which you wouldn't call "laser" at all, because they don't spur the needle fine light
You both are wrong. There is a decision from the European Court declaring such non competing clauses void because they are contradicting the free choice of the workplace as laid down in the European Contracts.
Of course you are not allowed to take trade secrets with you, and if someone can prove that you did, you are in deep trouble. There are lots of contracts with non competing clauses in Europe. But the fact that the clauses are there doesn't make them enforceable throughout the European Union.
(There is another argument why those clauses are void: As soon as your contract ends, all clauses within the contract end too. All your former company has to enforce certain things to you are laid down in law, not in contract.)
This phone actually uses several layers of authentication: First: The authentication is tied to the SIM card or a similar ID inside the phone. Second: The phone itself is protected by a PIN, so not everyone can use it. And then there is the third layer, the finger printing.
All together create a quite high security, because it checks for three different things: 1) Something the user possesses (the phone with the right ID), 2) Something the user knows (the PIN to activate the phone) and 3) something the user is (her fingerprint). I doubt you can use the m-commerce feature by just lending the phone of someone else and sending your finger print out.
The "blurr" you are describing, which is missing in computer generated graphics is something you could call time aligned antialiasing. A typical aliasing effect are the seemingly backwards turning weels often seen in movies. Here you have an aliasing to a different movement, because two sequences differ in a way that you align the wrong patches to the same object (in this case the spokes of the wheel), so you see a different movement than the one actually depicted.
Another effect is the ability of the eye to see subharmonics of the actual shown frequencies. So with a 60fps game you see also 30fps, 20fps, 15fps and sometimes 10fps effects, which surely are starting to flicker before your eyes, especially if the shown sequence itself contains a high level of order, as typical in computer games.
In standstill computer graphics this effect is minimized by using random dithering, so there are no subfrequencies of the dithering pattern your eyes can catch. For movies you would need to have the 60fps not having all exact 1/60sec time distance to each other, but rather a variation of 1/55 to 1/65sec. This surely would suppress most of the lower "ghost" frequencies. You could even go back to 30fps and most of the effects causing flickering would vanish.