I'm happy with my Linux system right now. It supports all my hardware and gives me a nice desktop. Why, beyond standard geek curiosity, should I switch to *BSD? I've used OpenBSD a bit and the ports system seemed kinda cool, though not as simple or powerful as my distribution's package manager. Where's the big advantage for me? Performance? Philosophy? In my very limited and anecdotal experience, Linux has seemed much faster than OpenBSD. I'd ideally like to try one of the free BSDs, but I'm having trouble convincing myself that there's really a point. (This is not intended as a troll. Really, I just want to know.)
Dude, iTMS is not a micropayment system. It's analogous to long-distance phone calls (remember when you didn't use your cell phone for those?). You have an existing relationship with a business whereby you can easily make small charges against an account that you pay for in a monthly bill. That doesn't require an intermediary; the customer does business directly with the producer or service provider.
The whole point of micropayments is that you can make lots of little payments to different parties without having to set up billing arrangements with each. This almost requires a business to facilitate; this intermediary will have established relationships with a multitude of customers and a multitude of businesses, so that any customer can easily make a payment to any business.
The proper analogy for micropayments is a credit card system (or currency itself). It is not analogous to a store like iTMS. Note that it's not the cost that prevents iTMS from being a micropayment system; even if every song were literally a millionth of a cent, it would still be a store, not a financial intermediary.
The problem, and challenge is providing the voter with some verification that does not lead to corruption(vote selling)
Give the voter a paper receipt. The voter gets to verify that the paper receipt matches his choices. The voter has to drop the paper receipt into a ballot box on the way out. After the polls close, randomly pick these ballot boxes and hand-tabulate the paper receipts. Check the totals against what the machines said they were for that polling place. If the machines are honest, the errors will be statistically insignificant. But even a 0.1% bias towards a candidate should be detectable in this way. And if you do detect cheating, you have a full paper trail so you can figure out the real results before the replacement system can be produced and delivered.
Hey, this was funny the first time. And the second, I have to admit. And maybe the third. But when I read this every other day, it gets old. Can we stick to some sort of schedule for posting this, say every third space story?
The lameness filter blows. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Yeah, but IBM is pretty clearly staking their future on Linux. They have all sorts of weird advertisements on TV right now for Linux. I believe one of them says something like "the future is open". IBM may make money on Windows for years to come, but I think it's fair to say they have an interest in the success of Linux.
He's just trying to get some good publicity after the last time he was in the papers. In a rare triumph of grass-roots activism across the political spectrum, his plan to deregulate media ownership rules was denied by Congress. To save his political career, he's trying to do consumer-friendly things now.
I don't know about GTA3 but in VC there are (at least) five phone numbers advertised in radio ads. I first thought to try calling one because it was an 866 number, and a game so faithful to the 80's would have used 800 numbers if they weren't meant to be called. (For non-US people: 800 was the area code for toll-free (callee-pays) calls for the longest time. They ran out of 800 numbers in the 90s and started handing out toll-free numbers in area codes like 888 and 866. Thus RockStar ended up with 866 numbers because 800 numbers were too scarce and expensive.)
Whether this is a good cause or not, it won't work. In the US, minors can't get credit cards without a cosigner, but they can get debit cards. Since these work just as well when buying things online, "underage" video game buyers will just order online with debit cards.
Kids will go a long way to avoid censorship. When stores made a fuss about selling "dirty" lyrics to minors, they went online to download it instead.
I've never seen a figure for what the 9/11 attack actually cost to pull off. I suspect it was actually quite low, even if you count the overhead of running the various terrorist cells that contributed. I'm not sure that cutting off funding is really an effective tactic against the sort of terrorist threats the US faces. OTOH, following the money might lead you to the terrorists themselves, which would be useful.
I'm hardly a "flag waving nationalist". I didn't support the recent war in Iraq. But if I'm going to criticize American foreign policy, I'd lose credibility if I ignorantly bashed America. Which brings me to your post.
The Japanese had been fighting among themselves for thousands of years before Perry came. The Meiji Restoration unified Japan for the first time in centuries; previously, it had been engaged in countless internal wars. The US hardly introduced militarism to Japan. Militarism had been the rule, rather than the exception, for almost every part of the world since the dawn of the iron age.
This is not to say Perry had any right to force open Japan. Nor do I claim the US did not dabble in economic imperialism. But there is a leftist racism in view post-warlord Japan as a history of reaction to the West. (Note: I am a leftist myself. I just don't let my politics cloud my history.) Japan had its own political dynamic and its own initiative. When you take that away and try to paint modern Japanese history as a series of reactions to the West, you end up with ridiculous claims like "Perry taught the Japanese to take things by force".
The Japanese, as you correctly point out, tried to expand (by force) to fuel their industrial growth. The Americans responded to this. That version of cause and effect is as "correct" as yours.
The addresses ending in one dot are technically valid adresses. If handled correctly by the software that is used, they should cause no problems. However, when sending bulk e-mail your goal would be to reach as many as possible and one would prefer to play at safe.
Hitler launched Barbarossa before finishing off England. (Hitler was also a military fool, but about that I'm not complaining.) If America hadn't been supplying the British with arms, food, oil, protection in the Western Atlantic, and so on, Britain would have been conquered by the Nazis before they turned their sights on Russia, and they would have no one standing in their way in North Africa so they would have seized the oil of the Middle East to help them. In other words, they very well might have won the war. Roosevelt pushed Lend-Lease through Congress and then made a very liberal interpretation of what he could use it for; he declared a "neutrality zone" that allowed the US Navy to hunt U-Boats; he banned arms sales to Germany. All these things helped the UK immensely and though it is impossible to know for sure, they may well have saved Britain from German occupation.
What other outcome? Maybe that they'd actually comply with the entirely reasonable demands that they cease their war against China. Hey, it's easy to say in hindsight that the Japanese would never do that, but there was actually a debate within the Japanese government about whether to do just that in response to the threatened embargo.
The lack of radio silence (sources?) wouldn't mean all that much--the US didn't have the same signal intelligence infrastructure it does today.
Since I'm trying very hard not to consider your post an uninformed troll, I won't go for a cheap shot like "if it weren't for us you'd all be speaking German".
Come to think of it we also went pretty far in antagonizing Japan into going to war with us.
The US gave Japan an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from China or we'll stop selling you oil. Realpolitik considerations about American business in China aside, pressuring Japan to end their war of conquest and exploit in China was the right thing to do. Japan could have forsworn militarism and ensured their oil supply from America; instead, they chose to expand the war by attacking the US. This was a decision that led to the eventually ruin of Japan. It was a decision made by Japan, not America. It's easy to say "America should have known they'd make that decision" but it apparently wasn't so obvious at the time.
I'm not generally an apologist for US foreign policy. But in the specific instance you mention, I feel obliged to set the record straight. Whatever the root causes of WWII, America was not trying to goad Japan into war. Japan chose to attack America as part of an expansionist campaign to secure the resources of the East Asia and the Pacific; the terrible consequences of that decision must be laid first and foremost on Japan.
Actually, they wanted to be lazy in figuring out when leap years happen. See, they happen on years divisible by 4, except that they do not happen in years divisible by 100, except that in fact they do happen in years divisible by 400. So, there was no leap year in 1900 but there was in 2000. This made it very convenient to start in 1904, because the number of days since the start of time becomes day_in_current_year + 365*dyear + dyear/4, where dyear = year - 1904 is the stored variable. As far as date calculations go, that one is remarkably simple and valid through the 28 Feb 2400. Also, it requires no branches. If they had started with (say) 1980 instead of 1904, it would have been hard to (for example) calculate the age of a user based on his birthday, which they saw as more important than how long the storage format would be good for in the future.
Palm OS also uses 1904 as 0. I don't know about Macs, but I do know that the DateType structure uses a 7-bit field for the year, so 2027 will be the end of the world for Palm handhelds.
It's not just noise now. When I watched RotK (a long movie) in a theatre, people kept checking the time. For some people that meant pressing the little "light" button on their watches, which was annoying enough. But it seems most people nowadays use their cell phones as watches. And the backlights on those phones seem designed to serve as emergency runway markers. It was very disconcerting to watch the screen and see all these blue, green, and white light sources in the corner of my eye. Come on people, if you have somewhere to go, check the movie length before you choose a showtime; otherwise, just sit back and enjoy it!
Linear? Perhaps; I don't know much about video compression algorithms. But I do know that uncompressed video is huge, so if it is linear it must be a fairly significant factor. If you have real numbers I'd be interested to know.
I don't like your GC analogy but I'm not sure I have anythign better. I can't think of any good examples of a strictly linear gain.
You're obviously not a programmer. Video is something that places demands on computing that grow to fill the available phenomenon. Double the available storage, and people will want twice the length of video, or twice the bitrate, or whatnot. It's an old phenomenon. As the amount of memory available has increased, so has the amount demanded by applications. To look at it another way, compare O(N^3) bubble sort to O(N log N) merge sort. Just because we have faster computers doesn't mean we can use inefficient algorithms. If I had a dime for every time I've heard some beginning programming student say "but with faster computers, why does time complexity matter?" I'd be, well, able to buy a cheap lunch.
I live outside of Houston and hear people constantly complain about the traffic, then turn around and complain when construction starts.
Part of the reason for that is that the construction isn't actually alleviating the problem. Under DeLay's iron-fisted "roads or broke" program, the Houston area gets more and more roads leading into it. This encourages people in the suburbs to drive in and patronize city businesses, which is a good thing. But they also crowd the city streets, which DeLay doesn't fund. And worse, most of them don't do their shopping in Houston; they do it out in First Colony or Katy or wherever they live. They work in Houston, drive through it every day, expect Houston to provide police protection while they're here, and then don't pay a dime of tax to Houston. Houston tries to annex them (e.g. Kingwood) so they have to pay their fair share, they call it tyranny.
But back to road construction: what the Houston area really needs is not more concrete, but a real mass transit solution. I don't know whether this means a massively improved bus system, or light rail, or what have you. I'm not an expert in the field. But DeLay and friends block funding for studies of mass transit in Houston (Dallas gets them) and instead supports abominations like the Katy corridor, which would have 10 lanes (plus shoulders) in each direction. We complain about traffic, but proposals like that will only make it worse for us. (They will--temporarily--make it better for a few suburban commuters.)
So in summary, not all of us are being hypocrites by complaining about both traffic and construction. Some of us actually live in Houston and we're sick of our city's transportation agenda being hijacked by national politicians who represent the leeching suburbs.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm happy with my Linux system right now. It supports all my hardware and gives me a nice desktop. Why, beyond standard geek curiosity, should I switch to *BSD? I've used OpenBSD a bit and the ports system seemed kinda cool, though not as simple or powerful as my distribution's package manager. Where's the big advantage for me? Performance? Philosophy? In my very limited and anecdotal experience, Linux has seemed much faster than OpenBSD. I'd ideally like to try one of the free BSDs, but I'm having trouble convincing myself that there's really a point. (This is not intended as a troll. Really, I just want to know.)
Dude, iTMS is not a micropayment system. It's analogous to long-distance phone calls (remember when you didn't use your cell phone for those?). You have an existing relationship with a business whereby you can easily make small charges against an account that you pay for in a monthly bill. That doesn't require an intermediary; the customer does business directly with the producer or service provider.
The whole point of micropayments is that you can make lots of little payments to different parties without having to set up billing arrangements with each. This almost requires a business to facilitate; this intermediary will have established relationships with a multitude of customers and a multitude of businesses, so that any customer can easily make a payment to any business.
The proper analogy for micropayments is a credit card system (or currency itself). It is not analogous to a store like iTMS. Note that it's not the cost that prevents iTMS from being a micropayment system; even if every song were literally a millionth of a cent, it would still be a store, not a financial intermediary.
Give the voter a paper receipt. The voter gets to verify that the paper receipt matches his choices. The voter has to drop the paper receipt into a ballot box on the way out. After the polls close, randomly pick these ballot boxes and hand-tabulate the paper receipts. Check the totals against what the machines said they were for that polling place. If the machines are honest, the errors will be statistically insignificant. But even a 0.1% bias towards a candidate should be detectable in this way. And if you do detect cheating, you have a full paper trail so you can figure out the real results before the replacement system can be produced and delivered.
Hey, this was funny the first time. And the second, I have to admit. And maybe the third. But when I read this every other day, it gets old. Can we stick to some sort of schedule for posting this, say every third space story?
Cost, cost cost. Cost cost cost cost cost, cost cost cost cost cost cost. Cost cost cost--cost! Cost cost cost, cost cost cost cost cost cost...cost cost. Cost cost "cost" cost cost cost cost cost cost cost cost. Cost cost cost cost cost COST cost cost.....
The lameness filter blows. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Yeah, but IBM is pretty clearly staking their future on Linux. They have all sorts of weird advertisements on TV right now for Linux. I believe one of them says something like "the future is open". IBM may make money on Windows for years to come, but I think it's fair to say they have an interest in the success of Linux.
He's just trying to get some good publicity after the last time he was in the papers. In a rare triumph of grass-roots activism across the political spectrum, his plan to deregulate media ownership rules was denied by Congress. To save his political career, he's trying to do consumer-friendly things now.
Though this should be obvious, another advantage of distributing patches as modules is that you don't need to reboot to install a module.
I don't know about GTA3 but in VC there are (at least) five phone numbers advertised in radio ads. I first thought to try calling one because it was an 866 number, and a game so faithful to the 80's would have used 800 numbers if they weren't meant to be called. (For non-US people: 800 was the area code for toll-free (callee-pays) calls for the longest time. They ran out of 800 numbers in the 90s and started handing out toll-free numbers in area codes like 888 and 866. Thus RockStar ended up with 866 numbers because 800 numbers were too scarce and expensive.)
Whether this is a good cause or not, it won't work. In the US, minors can't get credit cards without a cosigner, but they can get debit cards. Since these work just as well when buying things online, "underage" video game buyers will just order online with debit cards.
Kids will go a long way to avoid censorship. When stores made a fuss about selling "dirty" lyrics to minors, they went online to download it instead.
I'm hardly a "flag waving nationalist". I didn't support the recent war in Iraq. But if I'm going to criticize American foreign policy, I'd lose credibility if I ignorantly bashed America. Which brings me to your post.
The Japanese had been fighting among themselves for thousands of years before Perry came. The Meiji Restoration unified Japan for the first time in centuries; previously, it had been engaged in countless internal wars. The US hardly introduced militarism to Japan. Militarism had been the rule, rather than the exception, for almost every part of the world since the dawn of the iron age.
This is not to say Perry had any right to force open Japan. Nor do I claim the US did not dabble in economic imperialism. But there is a leftist racism in view post-warlord Japan as a history of reaction to the West. (Note: I am a leftist myself. I just don't let my politics cloud my history.) Japan had its own political dynamic and its own initiative. When you take that away and try to paint modern Japanese history as a series of reactions to the West, you end up with ridiculous claims like "Perry taught the Japanese to take things by force".
The Japanese, as you correctly point out, tried to expand (by force) to fuel their industrial growth. The Americans responded to this. That version of cause and effect is as "correct" as yours.
Hitler launched Barbarossa before finishing off England. (Hitler was also a military fool, but about that I'm not complaining.) If America hadn't been supplying the British with arms, food, oil, protection in the Western Atlantic, and so on, Britain would have been conquered by the Nazis before they turned their sights on Russia, and they would have no one standing in their way in North Africa so they would have seized the oil of the Middle East to help them. In other words, they very well might have won the war. Roosevelt pushed Lend-Lease through Congress and then made a very liberal interpretation of what he could use it for; he declared a "neutrality zone" that allowed the US Navy to hunt U-Boats; he banned arms sales to Germany. All these things helped the UK immensely and though it is impossible to know for sure, they may well have saved Britain from German occupation.
What other outcome? Maybe that they'd actually comply with the entirely reasonable demands that they cease their war against China. Hey, it's easy to say in hindsight that the Japanese would never do that, but there was actually a debate within the Japanese government about whether to do just that in response to the threatened embargo.
The lack of radio silence (sources?) wouldn't mean all that much--the US didn't have the same signal intelligence infrastructure it does today.
Since I'm trying very hard not to consider your post an uninformed troll, I won't go for a cheap shot like "if it weren't for us you'd all be speaking German".
The US gave Japan an ultimatum: withdraw your troops from China or we'll stop selling you oil. Realpolitik considerations about American business in China aside, pressuring Japan to end their war of conquest and exploit in China was the right thing to do. Japan could have forsworn militarism and ensured their oil supply from America; instead, they chose to expand the war by attacking the US. This was a decision that led to the eventually ruin of Japan. It was a decision made by Japan, not America. It's easy to say "America should have known they'd make that decision" but it apparently wasn't so obvious at the time.
I'm not generally an apologist for US foreign policy. But in the specific instance you mention, I feel obliged to set the record straight. Whatever the root causes of WWII, America was not trying to goad Japan into war. Japan chose to attack America as part of an expansionist campaign to secure the resources of the East Asia and the Pacific; the terrible consequences of that decision must be laid first and foremost on Japan.
Actually, they wanted to be lazy in figuring out when leap years happen. See, they happen on years divisible by 4, except that they do not happen in years divisible by 100, except that in fact they do happen in years divisible by 400. So, there was no leap year in 1900 but there was in 2000. This made it very convenient to start in 1904, because the number of days since the start of time becomes day_in_current_year + 365*dyear + dyear/4, where dyear = year - 1904 is the stored variable. As far as date calculations go, that one is remarkably simple and valid through the 28 Feb 2400. Also, it requires no branches. If they had started with (say) 1980 instead of 1904, it would have been hard to (for example) calculate the age of a user based on his birthday, which they saw as more important than how long the storage format would be good for in the future.
Lameness filters suck.
Palm OS also uses 1904 as 0. I don't know about Macs, but I do know that the DateType structure uses a 7-bit field for the year, so 2027 will be the end of the world for Palm handhelds.
It's not just noise now. When I watched RotK (a long movie) in a theatre, people kept checking the time. For some people that meant pressing the little "light" button on their watches, which was annoying enough. But it seems most people nowadays use their cell phones as watches. And the backlights on those phones seem designed to serve as emergency runway markers. It was very disconcerting to watch the screen and see all these blue, green, and white light sources in the corner of my eye. Come on people, if you have somewhere to go, check the movie length before you choose a showtime; otherwise, just sit back and enjoy it!
Yeah, you're right. I wasn't thinking.
Linear? Perhaps; I don't know much about video compression algorithms. But I do know that uncompressed video is huge, so if it is linear it must be a fairly significant factor. If you have real numbers I'd be interested to know.
I don't like your GC analogy but I'm not sure I have anythign better. I can't think of any good examples of a strictly linear gain.
You're obviously not a programmer. Video is something that places demands on computing that grow to fill the available phenomenon. Double the available storage, and people will want twice the length of video, or twice the bitrate, or whatnot. It's an old phenomenon. As the amount of memory available has increased, so has the amount demanded by applications. To look at it another way, compare O(N^3) bubble sort to O(N log N) merge sort. Just because we have faster computers doesn't mean we can use inefficient algorithms. If I had a dime for every time I've heard some beginning programming student say "but with faster computers, why does time complexity matter?" I'd be, well, able to buy a cheap lunch.
Stock manipulation is generally illegal. I am neither a lawyer nor a broker, but I'd talk to both before trying anything like that.
Part of the reason for that is that the construction isn't actually alleviating the problem. Under DeLay's iron-fisted "roads or broke" program, the Houston area gets more and more roads leading into it. This encourages people in the suburbs to drive in and patronize city businesses, which is a good thing. But they also crowd the city streets, which DeLay doesn't fund. And worse, most of them don't do their shopping in Houston; they do it out in First Colony or Katy or wherever they live. They work in Houston, drive through it every day, expect Houston to provide police protection while they're here, and then don't pay a dime of tax to Houston. Houston tries to annex them (e.g. Kingwood) so they have to pay their fair share, they call it tyranny.
But back to road construction: what the Houston area really needs is not more concrete, but a real mass transit solution. I don't know whether this means a massively improved bus system, or light rail, or what have you. I'm not an expert in the field. But DeLay and friends block funding for studies of mass transit in Houston (Dallas gets them) and instead supports abominations like the Katy corridor, which would have 10 lanes (plus shoulders) in each direction. We complain about traffic, but proposals like that will only make it worse for us. (They will--temporarily--make it better for a few suburban commuters.)
So in summary, not all of us are being hypocrites by complaining about both traffic and construction. Some of us actually live in Houston and we're sick of our city's transportation agenda being hijacked by national politicians who represent the leeching suburbs.