Let me start by observing that anyone who generalizes based upon nationality is falling into a trap. People are people; shaped by their environment, sure, but incredibly diverse in nature. I've met my share of people from all over the world. Some were asshats, some were kind and generous almost to a fault. Personally, I never noticed that any particular nation had a monopoly on one extreme or the other.
As to American attitudes towards Canadians? I can't speak to your personal experience. I can say that I grew up in northern Minnesota just 100 miles from the border. We used to have Canadians down for skiing trips all the time. When they came down, they were ready to party hard. The running joke was that only a Canuck could out drink a jackpine savage (our local version of a backwoods redneck, a community which I am still proud to consider myself a member).:)
Unfortunately, some Canadians gave the rest of you a bad name by being belligerent drunks. Should I have assumed that all Canadians were asshats because of that? Or would you rather that I just regard those individuals as jerks and not representative of Canadians as a whole?
To quote the punchline to a very old joke, "Can't we all just get along?!?":)
Tell you what. In the words of Arlo Guthrie, let's start a movement. Instead of protesting war and stuff, we'll just aim at learning to respect and trust each other. I won't judge all Canadians by a small handful of drunks if you'll accept that not all Americans are rude jerks. Then all we have to do is find a Brit who isn't a soccer hooligan (should be pretty easy, actually) and we've got ourselves an honest to God English speaking love fest going. Add in a Quebecois or two, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, and a Mexican and we'll have the start of a North Atlantic love-in! Then we add a Brazilian and a Namibian and we've got the South Atlantic covered! W00t! Can you see how it could grow?:)
Wrong comparison. If you want to think in just legal terms, think about this one? A $300 PC with a $10-$15 license for a Starter edition of MS Windows with no office suite or any other closed source apps, or a $300 PC with a copy of Ubuntu with the broad range and depth of their repository?
THAT's what Microsoft faces. They're not just competing with pirated copies of their own products, they're competing with alternatives that in some ways are superior. The alternatives are demonstrably superior to their crippled legal version. The Starter editions of their OS simply help to highlight that fact to anyone who wants to remain legal. (Tiny though that population seems to be...)
In America (at least, in my home state of Minnesota) it's a required part of junior and senior high curriculums. The focus is on how our government formed (American history classes) and how it works (Civics). In the better schools, the Civics classes tend to go beyond the theory to actually demonstrating things through mock elections and mock economy games where a lot of horse trading is required between the kids assigned to be labor, civil service, company owners, etc. in order to meet their conflicting goals in the game. Quite the lesson in practical politics.:)
The KDE group still screwed up. A beta is supposed to be feature complete. 4.0 was FAR from feature complete as they're still adding stuff in. It should have been an alpha release, or they should divide KDE into at least two parts; basic functionality and apps. Heck, they could subdivide the app part into several different ones if they wanted, but I digress.
If they had just released the core, I could almost see releasing 4.0 as a beta, although they were still messing with the APIs. 4.1 looks like they have pretty much reached stability of the core, so call that RC-1 of the core and the first beta of a few of the apps. 4.2 becomes 4.0 of the core, RC-1 of the app portion.
If they had done that, none of the distros would have been as tempted to jump on it quite so fast. KDE would have lost maybe a year of end user deployments but would have had a FAR better perception of KDE 4 overall.
I'm glad you like OS/X's UI. I hope you won't mind when I say that I've never liked them. I've used Apple GUIs off and on since the very first Macs came out, too. I find Apple's UIs limiting, unintuitive, and irritating. I would FAR rather use a good CLI like VAX/VMS or one of the Unix derived ones. UI design is not just about GUI, after all. There are other imperatives that can drive design decisions besides making things as idiot proof as possible (although VMS came close.:-) )
If I'm using a GUI, give me something that puts ME in control, not any company, no matter how good their design staff is. My GUI of choice at the moment is KDE 3.5 with occasional use of fluxbox, xfce, and Gnome. However, I've found even MS Windows to be more customizable than Apple's when it come to allowing me to work the way that I want.
Lets say that the "worst case possible scenario" for catastrophic global climate change is death of all humans, in that case we can assume that the damage is infinite. If the damage is infinite then even if the likelihood is very very small anything times infinity equals infinity. Resulting in the basic truth that global climate change has basically infinite risk to all humanity.
IANA climatologist, nor do I pretend to be. Even so, I can spot a hole in your logic big enough to put Mack truck through while it's sliding along in a jackknifed drift.
The point that you fail to acknowledge is that no reasonable study that I've read (that is aimed at laymen, anyhow) has shown any indication of the kind of catastrophic change that you're postulating. Even Gore's nightmarish scenario, as unlikely as some scientists find it, fails to take into account that people will have time to adapt over a period of decades, not days or weeks. Plenty of time to move cities, which makes the resulting mess more of an economic problem than an immediate fatal threat.
With that in mind, we need to weigh the costs and risks of adopting any proposed change to current policies against the likelihood of the entire gamut of potential outcomes while also taking into account that old military adage, "the map is not the terrain." In this context, this means that we have to recognize that our climate models are not and may never be perfect predictors. We shouldn't treat them as such.
Figure out a mathematical model that will allow that kind of probability analysis with that many unknowns and you've got yourself a winner. In the meantime, I hope you'll accept the fact that many of us skeptics are very concerned about the obvious politicization of climatology. It becomes extremely difficult to determine who's driving an agenda and who has actually done their homework.
For example, take the point that the GP made about the level of CO2 in the atmosphere half a billion years ago is news to me. If it's true, it's a fact that is being ignored by much of the current establishment. If it's false, it's yet another red herring. However, it's sounds like something that's easily refuted by anyone who knows where to look for the data. Therefore, I eagerly await any such refutations. If they don't show up, then I'll have to add that to the list of objections that sound like they may actually have some real meat to them.
And likes to wait for others to find the biggest bugs before installing? I tend to wait about 2 months after an LTS release comes out before upgrading myself. Heck, I don't always bother. I've got two 7.04 systems running right now that I'll probably wait until June or July of this year to move to 9.04. Assuming that I don't just let them coast as is for another year.
Note: I've also got 2 8.04 systems that I'll probably upgrade in May or June as I tend to spend more time on the keyboards of those.
Oh, for heaven's sake! You are talking about people who had just overthrown their government and you immediately jump to the conclusion that it was all about slaves? Have you ever bothered to read the Declaration of Indpendence? The Federalist Papers? Any contemporary commentary?
This environment is called the IT industry. One that you obviously don't participate in much. Shit goes wrong all the time. People who know better get complacent and don't do what they are supposed to. This all adds up and you cannot say that it has never happened in your company unless it is 2 months old of something. Give it 8 years or more and you will sing another tune.
Excuse me? If this is really what the IT industry is like, then I must be imagining all of the data retention laws that require my company to retain all electronic records for all of our registered traders (stock brokers and the like) for up to 7 years. Not just email, either. We also have to retain copies of all texts as well.
I must also be imagining the $12 million fine that we were slapped with 5 or 6 years ago when just one case of WORM media got accidentally destroyed by our external records storage vendor that unfortunately contained emails related to a civil suit that a former employee got us embroiled in. The Justice Department, the OCC, and the SEC have no sense of humor about this stuff. (Before you ask, yes, it was a real accident. Settling the suit itself cost us less than $1 million. You think we wanted to put ourselves in a position to risk that kind of fallout over such a small legal issue?)
BTW, you ever heard of Sarbanes-Oxley? Have you ever tried to tap dance your way out of an audit by claiming that you just "lost" some files that were more than a few months old?
I'll go further and assert that not even the most incompetent Federal organization is so bad that they accidentally lose that much email. This is about the most routine IT task imaginable. Solutions for automated, multi-level backups of email have been around for literally decades. There is simply no conceivable reason to assume that the Feds haven't implemented such solutions at every level and in every branch. The fact that you regard this as SOP simply highlights just how little you really know about what IT means in the context of large corporations and governments.
Long, protracted wars are nearly always bad for an economy, though, as we've known for thousands of years:
He who wishes to fight must first count the cost. When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be dampened. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. Now, when your weapons are dulled, your ardor dampened, your strength exhausted and your treasure spent, other chieftains will spring up to take advantage of your extremity. Then no man, however wise, will be able to avert the consequences that must ensue... In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.
btw, I'd like to quote the 9th and 10th amendments, as I believe that they are key to understanding what the Constitution is really all about:
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
People who argue that we in the U.S. only have rights 'granted' by the the Constitution have apparently never read it.
I read an older edition of the latter a couple of years ago and found it to be an excellent introductory text. I have no doubt that the new paper version will be well worth adding to your collection.:)
Also, keep in mind that you might only get a small percentage of sales in foreign countries. My book was translated into Russian and Mandarin, however I got no revenues from that. Also, the book is in Safari's Bookshelf, but I get no compensation for that either.
Did you read the contract you signed? If you haven't, dig it up and go through it. Unless there are terms in there that signed away publication or copyright rights, you are owed compensation for that republication.
Well, Dapper Drake is getting pretty dated. It's no longer officially supported by the Ubuntu team. Your best bet would be to stick in a LiveCD for Hardy Heron (8.04) or Intrebid Ibex (8.10) and do a fresh install.
Before doing so, copy your entire home directory off to some other media; another computer, an external hard drive, whatever. When you re-install, select a manual partition of your hard drive. Carve off a partition for/home. Complete the install normally, then copy your data back over.
Then, the next time you need to do a full upgrade, you won't be forced to do the copy off, copy back routine if you don't want to. Just select manual partition again and tell the install script not to format the partition dedicated to/home. Makes doing Linux upgrades sooo much nicer than Windows!:)
Age of consent is currently defined between the ages of 16 and 21 as no more than 4 years age separation between the parties involved. This is a change from a standard where the age of consent for girls was 16 and boys was 18. The laudable goal of Minnesota's legislation in both cases was to allow for healthy relationships to develop without creating situations where the potential for the more mature party to dominate it. In general, it seems to work reasonably well.
In this particular case, you've got a 17 year old girl and a 21 year old man. Depending upon their birth dates, they may have fallen within the 48 month window. Other states define the age of consent as 16. A lot of countries do, too. Therefore, assuming that the girl was under the age of consent was higher just doesn't make sense to me. This may have been a case where the charges were dropped because they weren't legal in the first place.
Personally, I think the 21 year old was the one who showed some truly bad judgment. Dating a cop's underage (as in, under 18) daughter is one thing. Seducing her, even with the dad's knowledge and consent, was about as dumb a move as I've read about in quite a while.
When it's implemented correctly. Here is a study that was recently completed for a Minnesota school district. We recently had a presentation of a study done by the U of MN of the use of technology in our two junior high schools. One has a 3:1 student to laptop ratio and the other has a 1:1. An article summarizing the results and the study itself can be be found at:
More than three-fourths of the teachers surveyed said access to a computer or laptop contributed some or a lot to students demonstrating more higher-order thinking. Eighty-four percent said they were better able to meet their curriculum goals when students had access to computers. More than 90 percent of teachers agreed they were better able to access diverse teaching materials and resources for their students. Two-thirds of teachers also said that students' level of engagement increased when using computers. Researchers noted the increased engagement during classroom observations in which they counted the number of students actively engaged in the activity as much as 30 minutes into the class.
Students also had a chance to explain how they use technology both in school and at home. Students indicated that they use computers to find information for assignments, email teachers and/or other students, organize information, and work on assignments. More than half of the students surveyed said they are better able to understand their schoolwork when they have access to computers. The vast majority of students at both schools also indicated that using a computer at school or home makes schoolwork more enjoyable. The survey also showed more communication between students and teachers as a result of access to technology.
Enhanced communication between home and school was a major benefit for parents as well. More than half of the parents surveyed said they now spend more time than before talking with their child about grades.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me start by observing that anyone who generalizes based upon nationality is falling into a trap. People are people; shaped by their environment, sure, but incredibly diverse in nature. I've met my share of people from all over the world. Some were asshats, some were kind and generous almost to a fault. Personally, I never noticed that any particular nation had a monopoly on one extreme or the other.
As to American attitudes towards Canadians? I can't speak to your personal experience. I can say that I grew up in northern Minnesota just 100 miles from the border. We used to have Canadians down for skiing trips all the time. When they came down, they were ready to party hard. The running joke was that only a Canuck could out drink a jackpine savage (our local version of a backwoods redneck, a community which I am still proud to consider myself a member). :)
Unfortunately, some Canadians gave the rest of you a bad name by being belligerent drunks. Should I have assumed that all Canadians were asshats because of that? Or would you rather that I just regard those individuals as jerks and not representative of Canadians as a whole?
To quote the punchline to a very old joke, "Can't we all just get along?!?" :)
Tell you what. In the words of Arlo Guthrie, let's start a movement. Instead of protesting war and stuff, we'll just aim at learning to respect and trust each other. I won't judge all Canadians by a small handful of drunks if you'll accept that not all Americans are rude jerks. Then all we have to do is find a Brit who isn't a soccer hooligan (should be pretty easy, actually) and we've got ourselves an honest to God English speaking love fest going. Add in a Quebecois or two, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, and a Mexican and we'll have the start of a North Atlantic love-in! Then we add a Brazilian and a Namibian and we've got the South Atlantic covered! W00t! Can you see how it could grow? :)
Hey, I can dream, can't I? :D
Wrong comparison. If you want to think in just legal terms, think about this one? A $300 PC with a $10-$15 license for a Starter edition of MS Windows with no office suite or any other closed source apps, or a $300 PC with a copy of Ubuntu with the broad range and depth of their repository?
THAT's what Microsoft faces. They're not just competing with pirated copies of their own products, they're competing with alternatives that in some ways are superior. The alternatives are demonstrably superior to their crippled legal version. The Starter editions of their OS simply help to highlight that fact to anyone who wants to remain legal. (Tiny though that population seems to be...)
Wind chill on the old scale, too, which tended to run a lot lower than the new one.
Wow. No lessons in politics or government at all?
In America (at least, in my home state of Minnesota) it's a required part of junior and senior high curriculums. The focus is on how our government formed (American history classes) and how it works (Civics). In the better schools, the Civics classes tend to go beyond the theory to actually demonstrating things through mock elections and mock economy games where a lot of horse trading is required between the kids assigned to be labor, civil service, company owners, etc. in order to meet their conflicting goals in the game. Quite the lesson in practical politics. :)
The KDE group still screwed up. A beta is supposed to be feature complete. 4.0 was FAR from feature complete as they're still adding stuff in. It should have been an alpha release, or they should divide KDE into at least two parts; basic functionality and apps. Heck, they could subdivide the app part into several different ones if they wanted, but I digress.
If they had just released the core, I could almost see releasing 4.0 as a beta, although they were still messing with the APIs. 4.1 looks like they have pretty much reached stability of the core, so call that RC-1 of the core and the first beta of a few of the apps. 4.2 becomes 4.0 of the core, RC-1 of the app portion.
If they had done that, none of the distros would have been as tempted to jump on it quite so fast. KDE would have lost maybe a year of end user deployments but would have had a FAR better perception of KDE 4 overall.
I'm glad you like OS/X's UI. I hope you won't mind when I say that I've never liked them. I've used Apple GUIs off and on since the very first Macs came out, too. I find Apple's UIs limiting, unintuitive, and irritating. I would FAR rather use a good CLI like VAX/VMS or one of the Unix derived ones. UI design is not just about GUI, after all. There are other imperatives that can drive design decisions besides making things as idiot proof as possible (although VMS came close. :-) )
If I'm using a GUI, give me something that puts ME in control, not any company, no matter how good their design staff is. My GUI of choice at the moment is KDE 3.5 with occasional use of fluxbox, xfce, and Gnome. However, I've found even MS Windows to be more customizable than Apple's when it come to allowing me to work the way that I want.
Isn't it nice that we have choice? :)
Read this post. NT's POSIX ACLs came from the same place that Linux's did; Unix.
IANA climatologist, nor do I pretend to be. Even so, I can spot a hole in your logic big enough to put Mack truck through while it's sliding along in a jackknifed drift.
The point that you fail to acknowledge is that no reasonable study that I've read (that is aimed at laymen, anyhow) has shown any indication of the kind of catastrophic change that you're postulating. Even Gore's nightmarish scenario, as unlikely as some scientists find it, fails to take into account that people will have time to adapt over a period of decades, not days or weeks. Plenty of time to move cities, which makes the resulting mess more of an economic problem than an immediate fatal threat.
With that in mind, we need to weigh the costs and risks of adopting any proposed change to current policies against the likelihood of the entire gamut of potential outcomes while also taking into account that old military adage, "the map is not the terrain." In this context, this means that we have to recognize that our climate models are not and may never be perfect predictors. We shouldn't treat them as such.
Figure out a mathematical model that will allow that kind of probability analysis with that many unknowns and you've got yourself a winner. In the meantime, I hope you'll accept the fact that many of us skeptics are very concerned about the obvious politicization of climatology. It becomes extremely difficult to determine who's driving an agenda and who has actually done their homework.
For example, take the point that the GP made about the level of CO2 in the atmosphere half a billion years ago is news to me. If it's true, it's a fact that is being ignored by much of the current establishment. If it's false, it's yet another red herring. However, it's sounds like something that's easily refuted by anyone who knows where to look for the data. Therefore, I eagerly await any such refutations. If they don't show up, then I'll have to add that to the list of objections that sound like they may actually have some real meat to them.
Who modded this insightful? My eee 901 can go for about 5.5 to 6 hours unplugged under pretty heavy use. That's a pretty bizarre definition of "FAIL".
Would I like more time untethered? Certainly! But that doesn't mean you can bet my eee away from me! :)
And likes to wait for others to find the biggest bugs before installing? I tend to wait about 2 months after an LTS release comes out before upgrading myself. Heck, I don't always bother. I've got two 7.04 systems running right now that I'll probably wait until June or July of this year to move to 9.04. Assuming that I don't just let them coast as is for another year.
Note: I've also got 2 8.04 systems that I'll probably upgrade in May or June as I tend to spend more time on the keyboards of those.
Oh, for heaven's sake! You are talking about people who had just overthrown their government and you immediately jump to the conclusion that it was all about slaves? Have you ever bothered to read the Declaration of Indpendence? The Federalist Papers? Any contemporary commentary?
Because it's not proprietary?
Excuse me? If this is really what the IT industry is like, then I must be imagining all of the data retention laws that require my company to retain all electronic records for all of our registered traders (stock brokers and the like) for up to 7 years. Not just email, either. We also have to retain copies of all texts as well.
I must also be imagining the $12 million fine that we were slapped with 5 or 6 years ago when just one case of WORM media got accidentally destroyed by our external records storage vendor that unfortunately contained emails related to a civil suit that a former employee got us embroiled in. The Justice Department, the OCC, and the SEC have no sense of humor about this stuff. (Before you ask, yes, it was a real accident. Settling the suit itself cost us less than $1 million. You think we wanted to put ourselves in a position to risk that kind of fallout over such a small legal issue?)
BTW, you ever heard of Sarbanes-Oxley? Have you ever tried to tap dance your way out of an audit by claiming that you just "lost" some files that were more than a few months old?
I'll go further and assert that not even the most incompetent Federal organization is so bad that they accidentally lose that much email. This is about the most routine IT task imaginable. Solutions for automated, multi-level backups of email have been around for literally decades. There is simply no conceivable reason to assume that the Feds haven't implemented such solutions at every level and in every branch. The fact that you regard this as SOP simply highlights just how little you really know about what IT means in the context of large corporations and governments.
Move to California. :)
THANK YOU!
btw, I'd like to quote the 9th and 10th amendments, as I believe that they are key to understanding what the Constitution is really all about:
People who argue that we in the U.S. only have rights 'granted' by the the Constitution have apparently never read it.
Whooshh... :)
Whooshh... :)
Dead tree version available soon. GPL licensed, electronic versions available here and here.
I read an older edition of the latter a couple of years ago and found it to be an excellent introductory text. I have no doubt that the new paper version will be well worth adding to your collection. :)
Did you read the contract you signed? If you haven't, dig it up and go through it. Unless there are terms in there that signed away publication or copyright rights, you are owed compensation for that republication.
Well, Dapper Drake is getting pretty dated. It's no longer officially supported by the Ubuntu team. Your best bet would be to stick in a LiveCD for Hardy Heron (8.04) or Intrebid Ibex (8.10) and do a fresh install.
Before doing so, copy your entire home directory off to some other media; another computer, an external hard drive, whatever. When you re-install, select a manual partition of your hard drive. Carve off a partition for /home. Complete the install normally, then copy your data back over.
Then, the next time you need to do a full upgrade, you won't be forced to do the copy off, copy back routine if you don't want to. Just select manual partition again and tell the install script not to format the partition dedicated to /home. Makes doing Linux upgrades sooo much nicer than Windows! :)
Well, if a 17 year old girl can seduce a 21 year old man, he's even dumber than I thought! rofl
n/t
Age of consent is currently defined between the ages of 16 and 21 as no more than 4 years age separation between the parties involved. This is a change from a standard where the age of consent for girls was 16 and boys was 18. The laudable goal of Minnesota's legislation in both cases was to allow for healthy relationships to develop without creating situations where the potential for the more mature party to dominate it. In general, it seems to work reasonably well.
In this particular case, you've got a 17 year old girl and a 21 year old man. Depending upon their birth dates, they may have fallen within the 48 month window. Other states define the age of consent as 16. A lot of countries do, too. Therefore, assuming that the girl was under the age of consent was higher just doesn't make sense to me. This may have been a case where the charges were dropped because they weren't legal in the first place.
Personally, I think the 21 year old was the one who showed some truly bad judgment. Dating a cop's underage (as in, under 18) daughter is one thing. Seducing her, even with the dad's knowledge and consent, was about as dumb a move as I've read about in quite a while.
When it's implemented correctly. Here is a study that was recently completed for a Minnesota school district. We recently had a presentation of a study done by the U of MN of the use of technology in our two junior high schools. One has a 3:1 student to laptop ratio and the other has a 1:1. An article summarizing the results and the study itself can be be found at:
Access to technology changing way teachers teach and students learn
A couple of quotes: