Please stop whining, open up KDE control panel, select peripherals->mouse and click on "double click to open files and folders".
KDE can be configured, you know
I'm not using KDE; I'm using Krita. I know and care nothing about KDE other than it looks and feels like Windows. I came here to put that behind me.
I didn't know I had a kcontrol, and I'd never heard of it. Krita is the only KDE program I have knowingly installed but obviously it's dragged a lot of other stuff in with it. Where abouts in the kcontrol is the single/double click setting? There are a lot of sub-panels.
Serious players play with their mates on a regular basis. Sad autistic nerds organise and play tournaments and console themselves with a feeling of superiority because they can bend the rules and have the backing of a crowd of other nerds who will say that it's okay. It's the same in every boardgame, whether it's Go, Chess, Bridge, or Cosmic Encounter.
As a very serious gamer indeed, I repeat my advice to avoid all such groups of morons.
Very slow and clunky. Ugly as sin. Memory use a-go-go. Irritating KDE-style one-click interface for the file selector. Indispensable for its ability to handle CMYK and 16+bit.
I don't need it often and I'm always glad to close it afterwards, but until the Gimp handles 16bit at least for its working space, there's no way to live without it and do photo-manip under Linux.
Indeed. The "Official" Scrabble dictionary is not even a dictionary. It's just a long list of words, many many of which are in fact illegal under the rules as they are foreign. We play with a Concise Oxford with allowances to appeal to the Shorter Oxford (which is in the other room and a pain to carry about) only if the player can correctly define the word.
The "Official" Scrabble dictionary is just a marketing toy and of no interest to either serious players nor ones out for a simple, fun game. Anally-retentive boring bastards, on the other hand, love showing off their ability to robotically reel off lists of words which they have little or no understanding of. The best solution is not to play with morons like that.
Google anyway. PageRank worked for about a year until people got the hang of rigging it and now Google is pretty shit. Meanwhile Wikipedia was a stupid idea from the start and never got any better. Stiil, it's handy if you want to know something trivial and a quick answer is more important than a reliable one.
The current worthlessness of Google is shown by the frequency of Wikipedia in its first page of results.
The String theory is scientific, because it is mathematics.
That makes it mathematical, which is not a superset of scientific as you imply. To be scientific it has to be testable. Many trivial mathematical operations are non-scientific and are called axioms: n raised to the power of 0 is 1, for example. There's nothing scientific about that, it's just part of the framework to the particular type of maths you learned at school; there are other axioms which define other "types" of maths from the common one.
There are certain assumptions in the various sciences which appear to be axioms but in reality scientists are always poking at them to test them too, whereas to a mathematician the question "Is n to the 0th power REALLY always 1?" is nonsensical and the correct answer is "If you want it to be, yes. How did you get into my house?".
So, the leader has blatantly broken the law and lied about it and been caught. So what do you do about it? Have the law amended so that the leader has not broken the law!
Isn't that exactly what Caesar requested his senate do for him in order to make him Dictator?
Well, they didn't ban Microsoft, and if they did they'd only be making a prudent decision anyway. Microsoft has held back computing in the West for 20 years; why let it hold India back too? Plus, of course, Microsoft embody the anti-capitalist bogyman far better than some communist local government. Capitalism only works when government intervenes to prevent monopolies growing to the point where they can control the market. Once that point is reached capitalism breaks down, which is what all western companies want. The perfect situation for a western company is to have no competition and customers who have to pay whatever you tell them to. Enron in California is the ultimate example of the perfect western company from the point of view of the owners.
Microsoft would dearly like to be in the same situation as Enron was before it got busted; does your desire to sell your country to the West really go so far as to want that?
I think you have a very distorted view of exactly how business in the West works and, more importantly, how western businesses view your country. You are a market to be milked, nothing more. The companies involved will happily collude to screw you and your countrymen to the wall. If it means a few Bhopals or the total loss of control of the power generation system, or the sale of all your fresh water to factories resulting in famine in rual areas, then they care not a jot.
I know this because I live in the west and they have done these things here. Now most of them are illegal, so they are off to suck you dry before you get wise. A few million dollars in bribes to officials can save them billions off their bottom line, so they will do it. Once they own the government, you'll be praying for communists or anyone else to do something about it. Come to Britain and see what it's like to have a government totally controlled by big business. Fraud and corruption are rife while education, health, housing, and employment are collapsing around us and the electorate can do nothing about it because of the gerrymandering that keeps a party with a third of the vote in absolute power with a vast majority in parliament.
Or go to America, where the entire cabinet is made up of unelected oil company directors. Literally tens of thousands of people have died, and more die every day, because these represetatives of western business that you are so worried about upsetting are pursuing their business agendas using tanks and missiles. They are also supporting Pakistan's development of WMD which may one day be used on you. They are doing these things not because they hate you but because it makes them money. Lots of money. Nothing else matters.
As for you, to them you are just cheap labour. By undermining the employment market in their home countries, western businesses can use you to increase the gap in wages between the people who produce their products and the massive salaries they award themselves. As long as you depend on the West to build your economy instead of using your own resources you will never be anything more than a well-dressed slave.
India has natural resources, plenty of people, and a tradition of education and technical skill that a country like America can only dream of. What the hell do you need us for? Get yourself some self-respect and make your own software, your own computers, your own soft drinks; your own future.
Kerala banned it. They are anti-western business. They are communists.
So what? Who cares? If they're real communists then that's probably good (but hopelessly idealistic, like real capitalists). If they're just Stalinists then that's bad. But banning a couple of products because of a health scare doesn't seem particularly tyrannical to me.
Most people in Scotland would not agree with your definition of Britain, although some Welsh might
Are you seriously suggesting that most people in Scotland do not think of themselves as being in Britain?!!? I know that many Scotish Nationalists would not, but they are a clear minority. Scotland is British and part of the UK in the legal sense as well as the cultural and geographical ones. I fear that you are thinking that British=English, which it most certainly does not.
The purpose of the NNPT was so that signatory countries can avoid a multi-sided destabilizing nuclear arms race by being reasonably sure that it's neighbors and enemies aren't doing so.
AND be permitted peaceful use of nuclear power. That was the carrot intended to make up for the loss of the nukes. The US is saying that Iran can have neither. My view is that they are taking that unreasonable stance specifically to prop up the current leadership in Iran.
By making anyone in Iran who opposes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look like they are folding under US pressure, Bush &co. have silenced that internal opposition and ensured that he will remain in power and eventually give them a reason to enact "regime change".
They have motive, opportunity, the means, and a track record of invading countries under false pretences.
The only thing that I can see in your argument is that the US is "bad" and has a history of being "bad", so it must be "bad" in this case too. I'm not so sure that Iran is in any position to call the kettle black...
I agree but only because the US government is specifically keeping the "bad" Iranian in power, just as they were happy to keep Saddam propped up and supplied with WMD as long as he was dropping them on Iran.
Before all this nuclear stuff started there were powerful clerics in Iran speaking out against him, as well as a great deal of unease in the population. The US has squashed those voices by its actions and seem to be determined to keep them squashed.
Remember that the CIA under Bush snr actually helped Saddam hunt down dissidents in Iraq and elsewhere. Even after the first Gulf War, they kept Saddam in power because he was a threat to Iran. Chaney, Rumsfeld, and Bush, all really really hate Iran, while Wolfowitz really really wants its oil, or at least to stop China having its oil and has even publicly said so. (Channey, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Bush all want the oil too, of course - their personal wealth is tied to it.) The same old faces are enacting the same old policies as they did when they used Saddam as their cat's-paw.
I would expect this to happen not just in the UK (which is far more than Britain, as any Scot or Welshman could tell you, and I'm both),
Er... Scotland and Wales are in both Britain and the UK. Great Britain (as opposed to Lesser Britain - AKA Brittany in France) is the main island, and so includes England, Scotland, and Wales, while the UK additionally includes Northern Ireland, but not the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, both of which are part of the British Isles. I've neither the time nor the energy to go into the loads of other subtle shades of classification for places like The Bahamas, Australia etc.
However trying to say "The US has nukes so Iran getting them is the same thing," isn't the case, regardless of what level you choose to look at it on.
How about "Pakistan has nukes so Iran getting them is the same thing"?
The legalistic argument is null and void as the US has shown through the invasion of Iraq and support for Israel - and other events - that there is no such concept. At the international level it is "might makes right" and that's the whole of the law.
The moral view that you put forward is more a "we deserve them" argument. We're nice, we can be trusted. I don't trust the US, so for me that's an empty argument. Note that I don't mean that I don't trust Bush (who does?). Since the start of the first world war the US has shown itself, at the governmental level, to be toally untrustworthy. Alliances are made and broken entirely on the issue of what makes a quick buck for those who have the power in America. In fact, I would say that there is no country in the world to whom America has actually allied in nearly 100 years now. Plenty think they have, but America feels no debt of honour to those "allies" when push comes to shove. A treaty with America has never been worth the paper it was written on. Go ask any historian on a reservation.
Now, lets look at your statement "Iran isn't allowed to develop nukes". Iran is a signitory of the NNPT and as such is not allowed nuclear weapons. What it is allowed is nuclear power and, in fact, America is treaty bound by the NNPT to help them aquire that technology as a sort of quid pro quo for not making weapons.
As mentioned above, however, America never has any compunction about breaking treaties and the Non-Proliferation Treaty is no exception. Thus, they have worked day and night to prevent Iran getting either nuclear power or nuclear weapons while allowing India, Pakistan and Israel to gain both.
THIS is the real moral argument: no rational government with any interest in preserving the independance of their country could possibly swallow the treatment Iran has received from the Americans on this topic. It is utterly unreasonable to ask them - nay, tell them - to do so. In a very real sense, the moral attitude for Iran to take is that America is simply not an honest partner and should be ignored. Indeed, to not ignore America's gross imperialistic interference and breach of treaty obligations would be to undermine the security and sovereignty of Iran, which is an immoral path for a government to take.
Basically, America has purposely pushed Iran into this position knowing full well that everything they have done have made it harder and harder for moderates in Iran to do anything about their President's extreme views and actions without looking like traitors willing to let a foreign power dictate how they run their country. This is because America's government does not want a peaceful resolution to this issue. They want a causis belli to attack Iran, just as they were looking (since 1999 before they even gained power) for one to invade Iraq. They used 9/11 for that and they're using nuclear power as one today. Both are totally artificial and fully and consciously desired by the US administration. Wolfowitz's worst nightmare (for it is he who designed the strategy with Rumsfeld, Chaney, Bush, and to a lesser extent Rice) is that Iran might turn around and scrap the nuke programme. That is what would really screw up US policy in the Middle East.
Ignoring the issues of monocropping your meat supply (duh!), there is another issue here. Food production in the west already takes far more calories to make it than we get out of eating it - several orders of magnitude - so anything which requires even more technical intervention to make the meat is wholly unwelcome. What it comes down to is that most of those calories derive eventually from oil (some fertilizers, pesticides, fuel for machinery and transport etc) so we've really just got an incredibly inefficient method of turning oil into food. Not good when the oil is running out and causing prices to go up. And up. And up.
That's the simple answer. Apart from the cable companies, who will all kick you for that level of usage, all the other lines are ultimately owned by BT and they don't sell wholesale unlimited lines to the other ISPs (nor do they reserve them for their own customers). There is no totally unlimited bradband in the UK because of this.
How easy is it to transfer DNA "evidence"? Trivial.
DNA is the single most worthless piece of crap for proving anything. All these experts talk about is how exact they can be about who's DNA it is, they never talk about how exact they can be about how it got to where it was found.
TWW
PS. This is my 3000th and last post. It's been fun and all that but I'm running out of years to be spending them ranting for free on/. Bye bye.
OK, smart guy. Say I go to a new site that I don't really know (followed a link, say) and they have a certificate from Verisign. What use is that to me? What protection does it actually give me?
Got mine off eBay for 14 quid. It'll probably outlast me; it's tough enough to travel by air in my rucksack without worrying about what shape it'll be when it comes out of the baggage carousel.
should've been recognized as a really bad idea, even with the technology and education levels available at the time.
Which I think takes the Comet off your list. The knowledge of the effects of metal fatigue on large, high-altitude pressurised passenger aircraft with all their windows came out of the Comet investigation; I don't think it was a reasonable thing to have been predicted at the time.
Also, The Titanic (RMS for "Royal Mail Steamer", not HMS) was built beyond the normal engineering standards of the day and the lifeboat allocation was also perfectly normal and not an engineering decision. The crew (which specific member(s) is unclear) sunk the Titanic, not the designer or builders.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not using KDE; I'm using Krita. I know and care nothing about KDE other than it looks and feels like Windows. I came here to put that behind me.
I didn't know I had a kcontrol, and I'd never heard of it. Krita is the only KDE program I have knowingly installed but obviously it's dragged a lot of other stuff in with it. Where abouts in the kcontrol is the single/double click setting? There are a lot of sub-panels.
Serious players play with their mates on a regular basis. Sad autistic nerds organise and play tournaments and console themselves with a feeling of superiority because they can bend the rules and have the backing of a crowd of other nerds who will say that it's okay. It's the same in every boardgame, whether it's Go, Chess, Bridge, or Cosmic Encounter.
As a very serious gamer indeed, I repeat my advice to avoid all such groups of morons.
Very slow and clunky. Ugly as sin. Memory use a-go-go. Irritating KDE-style one-click interface for the file selector. Indispensable for its ability to handle CMYK and 16+bit.
I don't need it often and I'm always glad to close it afterwards, but until the Gimp handles 16bit at least for its working space, there's no way to live without it and do photo-manip under Linux.
The "Official" Scrabble dictionary is just a marketing toy and of no interest to either serious players nor ones out for a simple, fun game. Anally-retentive boring bastards, on the other hand, love showing off their ability to robotically reel off lists of words which they have little or no understanding of. The best solution is not to play with morons like that.
The current worthlessness of Google is shown by the frequency of Wikipedia in its first page of results.
That's pretty well the meaning of flimsy right there, aprt from "uncomfortable", which is just a bonus problem.
Perhaps you should learn English before trying to be pedantic in it.
That makes it mathematical, which is not a superset of scientific as you imply. To be scientific it has to be testable. Many trivial mathematical operations are non-scientific and are called axioms: n raised to the power of 0 is 1, for example. There's nothing scientific about that, it's just part of the framework to the particular type of maths you learned at school; there are other axioms which define other "types" of maths from the common one.
There are certain assumptions in the various sciences which appear to be axioms but in reality scientists are always poking at them to test them too, whereas to a mathematician the question "Is n to the 0th power REALLY always 1?" is nonsensical and the correct answer is "If you want it to be, yes. How did you get into my house?".
Only because some cheaty bastard would run on while all the honest people were in the pub.
The 8th Doctor is alive and well on BBC Radio. The Sword of Orion is running at the moment.
Isn't that exactly what Caesar requested his senate do for him in order to make him Dictator?
Whither democracy?
As for simulating real humans: we're no closer today than in 1960.
Well, they didn't ban Microsoft, and if they did they'd only be making a prudent decision anyway. Microsoft has held back computing in the West for 20 years; why let it hold India back too? Plus, of course, Microsoft embody the anti-capitalist bogyman far better than some communist local government. Capitalism only works when government intervenes to prevent monopolies growing to the point where they can control the market. Once that point is reached capitalism breaks down, which is what all western companies want. The perfect situation for a western company is to have no competition and customers who have to pay whatever you tell them to. Enron in California is the ultimate example of the perfect western company from the point of view of the owners.
Microsoft would dearly like to be in the same situation as Enron was before it got busted; does your desire to sell your country to the West really go so far as to want that?
I think you have a very distorted view of exactly how business in the West works and, more importantly, how western businesses view your country. You are a market to be milked, nothing more. The companies involved will happily collude to screw you and your countrymen to the wall. If it means a few Bhopals or the total loss of control of the power generation system, or the sale of all your fresh water to factories resulting in famine in rual areas, then they care not a jot.
I know this because I live in the west and they have done these things here. Now most of them are illegal, so they are off to suck you dry before you get wise. A few million dollars in bribes to officials can save them billions off their bottom line, so they will do it. Once they own the government, you'll be praying for communists or anyone else to do something about it. Come to Britain and see what it's like to have a government totally controlled by big business. Fraud and corruption are rife while education, health, housing, and employment are collapsing around us and the electorate can do nothing about it because of the gerrymandering that keeps a party with a third of the vote in absolute power with a vast majority in parliament.
Or go to America, where the entire cabinet is made up of unelected oil company directors. Literally tens of thousands of people have died, and more die every day, because these represetatives of western business that you are so worried about upsetting are pursuing their business agendas using tanks and missiles. They are also supporting Pakistan's development of WMD which may one day be used on you. They are doing these things not because they hate you but because it makes them money. Lots of money. Nothing else matters.
As for you, to them you are just cheap labour. By undermining the employment market in their home countries, western businesses can use you to increase the gap in wages between the people who produce their products and the massive salaries they award themselves. As long as you depend on the West to build your economy instead of using your own resources you will never be anything more than a well-dressed slave.
India has natural resources, plenty of people, and a tradition of education and technical skill that a country like America can only dream of. What the hell do you need us for? Get yourself some self-respect and make your own software, your own computers, your own soft drinks; your own future.
So what? Who cares? If they're real communists then that's probably good (but hopelessly idealistic, like real capitalists). If they're just Stalinists then that's bad. But banning a couple of products because of a health scare doesn't seem particularly tyrannical to me.
Are you seriously suggesting that most people in Scotland do not think of themselves as being in Britain?!!? I know that many Scotish Nationalists would not, but they are a clear minority. Scotland is British and part of the UK in the legal sense as well as the cultural and geographical ones. I fear that you are thinking that British=English, which it most certainly does not.
AND be permitted peaceful use of nuclear power. That was the carrot intended to make up for the loss of the nukes. The US is saying that Iran can have neither. My view is that they are taking that unreasonable stance specifically to prop up the current leadership in Iran.
By making anyone in Iran who opposes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look like they are folding under US pressure, Bush &co. have silenced that internal opposition and ensured that he will remain in power and eventually give them a reason to enact "regime change".
They have motive, opportunity, the means, and a track record of invading countries under false pretences.
The only thing that I can see in your argument is that the US is "bad" and has a history of being "bad", so it must be "bad" in this case too. I'm not so sure that Iran is in any position to call the kettle black...
I agree but only because the US government is specifically keeping the "bad" Iranian in power, just as they were happy to keep Saddam propped up and supplied with WMD as long as he was dropping them on Iran.
Before all this nuclear stuff started there were powerful clerics in Iran speaking out against him, as well as a great deal of unease in the population. The US has squashed those voices by its actions and seem to be determined to keep them squashed.
Remember that the CIA under Bush snr actually helped Saddam hunt down dissidents in Iraq and elsewhere. Even after the first Gulf War, they kept Saddam in power because he was a threat to Iran. Chaney, Rumsfeld, and Bush, all really really hate Iran, while Wolfowitz really really wants its oil, or at least to stop China having its oil and has even publicly said so. (Channey, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Bush all want the oil too, of course - their personal wealth is tied to it.) The same old faces are enacting the same old policies as they did when they used Saddam as their cat's-paw.
Er... Scotland and Wales are in both Britain and the UK. Great Britain (as opposed to Lesser Britain - AKA Brittany in France) is the main island, and so includes England, Scotland, and Wales, while the UK additionally includes Northern Ireland, but not the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands, both of which are part of the British Isles. I've neither the time nor the energy to go into the loads of other subtle shades of classification for places like The Bahamas, Australia etc.
How about "Pakistan has nukes so Iran getting them is the same thing"?
The legalistic argument is null and void as the US has shown through the invasion of Iraq and support for Israel - and other events - that there is no such concept. At the international level it is "might makes right" and that's the whole of the law.
The moral view that you put forward is more a "we deserve them" argument. We're nice, we can be trusted. I don't trust the US, so for me that's an empty argument. Note that I don't mean that I don't trust Bush (who does?). Since the start of the first world war the US has shown itself, at the governmental level, to be toally untrustworthy. Alliances are made and broken entirely on the issue of what makes a quick buck for those who have the power in America. In fact, I would say that there is no country in the world to whom America has actually allied in nearly 100 years now. Plenty think they have, but America feels no debt of honour to those "allies" when push comes to shove. A treaty with America has never been worth the paper it was written on. Go ask any historian on a reservation.
Now, lets look at your statement "Iran isn't allowed to develop nukes". Iran is a signitory of the NNPT and as such is not allowed nuclear weapons. What it is allowed is nuclear power and, in fact, America is treaty bound by the NNPT to help them aquire that technology as a sort of quid pro quo for not making weapons.
As mentioned above, however, America never has any compunction about breaking treaties and the Non-Proliferation Treaty is no exception. Thus, they have worked day and night to prevent Iran getting either nuclear power or nuclear weapons while allowing India, Pakistan and Israel to gain both.
THIS is the real moral argument: no rational government with any interest in preserving the independance of their country could possibly swallow the treatment Iran has received from the Americans on this topic. It is utterly unreasonable to ask them - nay, tell them - to do so. In a very real sense, the moral attitude for Iran to take is that America is simply not an honest partner and should be ignored. Indeed, to not ignore America's gross imperialistic interference and breach of treaty obligations would be to undermine the security and sovereignty of Iran, which is an immoral path for a government to take.
Basically, America has purposely pushed Iran into this position knowing full well that everything they have done have made it harder and harder for moderates in Iran to do anything about their President's extreme views and actions without looking like traitors willing to let a foreign power dictate how they run their country. This is because America's government does not want a peaceful resolution to this issue. They want a causis belli to attack Iran, just as they were looking (since 1999 before they even gained power) for one to invade Iraq. They used 9/11 for that and they're using nuclear power as one today. Both are totally artificial and fully and consciously desired by the US administration. Wolfowitz's worst nightmare (for it is he who designed the strategy with Rumsfeld, Chaney, Bush, and to a lesser extent Rice) is that Iran might turn around and scrap the nuke programme. That is what would really screw up US policy in the Middle East.
Ignoring the issues of monocropping your meat supply (duh!), there is another issue here. Food production in the west already takes far more calories to make it than we get out of eating it - several orders of magnitude - so anything which requires even more technical intervention to make the meat is wholly unwelcome. What it comes down to is that most of those calories derive eventually from oil (some fertilizers, pesticides, fuel for machinery and transport etc) so we've really just got an incredibly inefficient method of turning oil into food. Not good when the oil is running out and causing prices to go up. And up. And up.
Sorry
How easy is it to transfer DNA "evidence"? Trivial.
DNA is the single most worthless piece of crap for proving anything. All these experts talk about is how exact they can be about who's DNA it is, they never talk about how exact they can be about how it got to where it was found.
TWW
PS. This is my 3000th and last post. It's been fun and all that but I'm running out of years to be spending them ranting for free on /. Bye bye.
I think that more goes back to Godel.
Switch to a non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software model and the problem will disappear.
Along with your productivity!
TWW
TWW
Got mine off eBay for 14 quid. It'll probably outlast me; it's tough enough to travel by air in my rucksack without worrying about what shape it'll be when it comes out of the baggage carousel.
TWW
Which I think takes the Comet off your list. The knowledge of the effects of metal fatigue on large, high-altitude pressurised passenger aircraft with all their windows came out of the Comet investigation; I don't think it was a reasonable thing to have been predicted at the time.
Also, The Titanic (RMS for "Royal Mail Steamer", not HMS) was built beyond the normal engineering standards of the day and the lifeboat allocation was also perfectly normal and not an engineering decision. The crew (which specific member(s) is unclear) sunk the Titanic, not the designer or builders.
TWW