Does the world really need another manufacturer producing bad goods?
Does the world really need a lawsuit for this? If you don't like it, don't buy it. It's not that he was forced to buy the XBox. And if it breaks, at least where I live, there's a thing called warranty, 12 months on the XBox, 24 if you bought it online.
I am developing FAA Level A avionics software using C++, I am sorry to say.
Dilbert: Hey Wally, I hear that in the backend software for our nation's new air traffic control system, you reused code from the payroll system. Is that true?
While I understand what you are saying because I am very familiar with this subject, I hope you realize this is not a definition of anything. The word that requires clarification here is "nation". [...] It is the course of history that more advanced, discplined tribes displace the weaker, less advanced ones. In time, these tribes became cities, and eventually they became nations. Who cares what the reasoning is. Nationalism is the modern form of tribal "us versus them".
Note that this is not a definition of anything, either. Saying that the nation is the modern extension of the tribe relies on a layman's definition of "tribe", and as such the definition is wrong again; for example, cohesion within a tribe is provided by family ties, cohesion within a nation is provided by language and, possibly, some cultural symbols. If you want to make such a statement, you'll have to provide a definition of "tribe" as a social phenomenon. Even today, you have cases of tribes within nations, such as in the USA, in South America, on the Arabian peninsula or in Central Asia, that your model completely fails to explain.
Can it be an ideal that unifies people into a nation? Of course, it certainly has with Jews for over two thousand years.
Please. Are you saying that Jews saw themselves as a nation five hundred years ago? Was there a uniting element of any kind that united all Jews into a single imagined community? A shared religion or sacral language isn't sufficient; often religious ties are much weaker than cultural or everyday linguistic differences. An European Jew of 1500 would have felt very little in common with a Central Asian Jew. Uneducated, especially non-Hebrew-speaking Jews wouldn't even have recognized each other as Jews. Actually, there are reports from Russian Jews who came to settle in Central Asia in the 1870s and felt they had nothing in common with the local counterparts.
If you talk about nations, it doesn't make much sense to start off earlier than about 1650 or 1700, and if you talk about the Jewish nation, then I guess Zionism is the decisive phenomenon.
One simple definition of nationalism is the glorification of a nation above all else.
You might try to be more precise by avoiding the term "nation" which remains to be defined. Following Anderson, I would say that nationalism is an instance of group superiority thinking based on an imagined community.
Or even whether the intentions are good or not, as exemplified by the colonial politics of the european countries throughout the 19th and early 20th century. (This was all done under the guise of bringing civilisation to conquered "savages")
Or by the US of A, too, that had two colonies: the Philippines (1898 through 1946) and Puerto Rico (1898 through 1952); as such, the USA had more of a colonial empire at this time than classical European colonial powers such as the Netherlands or Spain.
Bringing civilisation to conquered "savages" is a typical element of Western imperialist thought; it is related to imperialism, which is a different phenomenon from colonialism.
In order for a peltier to be useful, the wattage has to be greater than that of the CPUs.
uhm... Are you sure you have to put more energy into the Peltier cooler itself than into the device it's supposed to cool? While the Peltier cooler does use some energy itself, IIRC in order to transfer heat from a 100W device the cooler itself does not consume more than 100W.
Drop an iodine tablet in water and it kills all that stuff you don't want to be drinking. It tastes like shit, but its better then picking up e-coli from some mountain stream.
Note three things:
If you get your water straight from a mountain stream, there's not a lot to worry about. If you're still afraid of bacteria in there, silver oxide tablets will do.
Iodine tablets will not kill anything. In particular, there are amoeba species that will survive, and they're generally quite nasty in your intestines. You won't find them in mountain streams, however.
If you're that worried about your water quality and/or have to get your drinking water from a questionable source, you'll have to get a water filter, too. Just to filter out all the chemical stuff. It filters out dead bacteria & amoebae, as well.
{ No need to put asterisks inside curly braces } program Anniversary (OUTPUT); { define file used } begin writeln ('Happy 30th Anniversary Pascal. You roxxorzz') { semicolon not needed before end } end.
Whether or not the Dalai Lama is reasonable, Natural Law theory says that by by trying to kill you, the other guy is forfeiting his natural right to live, and thus it is morally justifiable for you to kill him
By which logic, of course, in trying to kill him, you are forfeiting your natural right to live. Enter, blood feuds and the like.
Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ
on
A Dual Monitor Experiment
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A two monitor setup was pretty common for the original IBM PC starting around 1981. The CGA and MDA (or Hercules) cards would address different memory. Many apps would use the MDA for one view and the CGA for the other. Spreadsheet on MDA, graph on CGA for many spreadsheets (remember, spreadsheets were the "killer app" of the era). Borland's IDEs used MDA for source, CGA for output.
Much more important: MDA for debugger!
IBM even allocated a register range for a secondary EGA card, so in theory it would have been possible to have two EGA or VGA cards running simultaneously under DOS.
I don't know how this is supposed to be a big thing for anyone. I've been working with a multi-monitor setup for years, first on a Mac SE/30 that is still chugging away at home, then under Windows since 98 (where it worked flawlessly) and under BSD using X. The Mac has been supporting this for ages, as long as you put in extra graphics cards. X is the most inconvenient environment because Xinerama doesn't deal that well with different screen resolutions at once.
A lot of my work involves TeX, where it is just convenient to have Emacs on one screen and the DVI output on another. I've done extensive image cataloguing and indexing, too, where you can have the image full-screen and your database next to it. This is just so convenient that I have trouble doing without it. When I bought a laptop, I always took care to pick one where the graphics chipset supported driving two monitors simultaneously.
I would like to hear more about this. Is there an English version of that article anywhere?
There are several; the best from a journalistic point of view is probably the one on Heise (English), a German technology news forum from the publishers of Germany's best computer and IT magazines (c't and iX, respectively).
Others are here, here, here and here . The journalistic quality varies. You might have to search for "Kenetech".
the pope doesn't even speak English (I don't know if he knows English, but it's not his native tongue)
Excuse me, I don't quite get what you're on about.
English is not my native tongue. I know English. By your logic, I don't speak it anyway. Am I supposed to understand you? Maybe that's where the problem with my English is.
Anyway, the Pope does speak English, but in recent years he hasn't been speaking a lot in public, given that he's an old man.
I was in a couple movies when I was young where the theater got an emergency call and stopped the film and turned the lights on so the manager could announce the names of the people who had an emergency phone call.
Just how often did it happen again? Once in about 100 movies or more often?
A vibrating cell phone and a small lighted screen are much, much better. For everyone.
Except that at least in my country, everybody over 15 has a cell phone, and hordes of schoolkids are using theirs in cinema, resulting in a much, much higher annoyance factor than if it was the occasional emergency.
How about we just give people in group 2 their own, more expensive theater.
Then I suggest giving them their own, more expensive classical music, opera theatre performances as well. Oh, and their own, more expensive church, too. Just to serve the interests of inconsiderate group 3, who have forgotten what life was like before cell-phones were invented. What would the babysitters, doctors and firemen do back then? Oh, the horror!
I've never understood what makes 3D environments better than 2D for applications and input devices made for 2D displays. In my opinion, the new spatial dimension you can move through is what makes it bad since it takes longer time to accomplish tasks.
Perhaps the guiding factor is not the convenience of the interface, but rather the intuitiveness of the interface.
To be honest, most 3D environments I've worked with feel horribly un-intuitive when I have to use them through a 2D interface. There are two exceptions:
First-person shooters. But then, you are very restricted in what you do. And 3D chat communities based on a FPS or TPS visualisation have been tried countless times. It's just that when I want to interact with people I have different priorities than when I'm running around shooting them. For example, it feels horribly un-intuitive (for me at least) to interact with a group of people, constantly having to hit some buttons or moving my mouse around just to keep them all in view. In a FPS, that's OK, because the interaction itself is rather straightforward, click, shoot, that's it. But in chat or (worse) collaborative working it gets really distracting. I don't see how this is more intuitive than having everything laid out on a 2D desktop, all in view.
3D modelling or CAD software. Here, the interface isn't really intuitive at first; it took me a while to get used to 4-way viewing, but it has the advantage of precision. However, again there is no collaboration, and the interaction is very straigtforward.
As soon as interaction is supposed to be a little more complicated than pointing and clicking, I find the need to constantly adjust my 2D view area extremely distracting and un-intuitive.
It's a different thing with 3D visualization tools; I've had the pleasure to work with some CAVE-men, and there it was OK, because it conformed to how I usually work in 3D meatspace.
[Great-grandparent]
You can do anything you like.You can't stop others from doing anything they like. [Grandparent] Looks more like the BSD license to me.
[Parent]Well, the BSD license would say:
You can do anything you want.
You can stop others from doing anything they want.
YAWN. At least try to be creative if you start a GPL vs. BSD flamewar.
You are really engaged in a battle of definitions here on what "You can stop others from doing anything they want" means. Ultimately, it boils down to your different interpretations who is meant by "you". Grandparent refers to the original developer, you refer to everybody else who might be repackaging things under a proprietary license. Technically, grandparent is right, because the license on a piece of software is issued by the developer. If you are releasing something under the BSD or Croquet license, you can't stop others from doing anything they like.
Grandparent says the BSD license means that you as a developer have very little means of stopping from doing what they want with your software including forking it. This is correct. You (Parent) say that the BSD license means that the recipient of said software can re-release a fork under a proprietary license, effectively stopping others from doing what they want. This is also correct, however you are not talking about the BSD license any more, as you are rereleasing it under a different license now. The BSD license gives you that freedom. It is up to you to determine if you consider that freedom a bad thing.
The BSD license gives you the freedom to restrict the freedoms of others. The GPL does not.
At this point, you are engaged in a debate that is based solely on the fact that you have different definitions of "freedom" and whether freedom should include freedom to restrict freedom. This is a highly academic debate on principles that is not leading anywhere by itself; partly because there is no "solution", partly because it will mislead you to equate all instances of problems to which these definitions of freedom are applicable. The situation is different in the case of slavery vs. the case of software, because slavery and software are different things, and everybody will agree on this, no matter what definition of freedom you are applying.
The BSD license gives you a right that the GPL doesn't give: the right of rerelease under a different license. Nobody will deny that. Whether that's a good thing or not or whether you want to consider the BSD license or the GPL "freer" is up to you, but here, there's no easy way to decide by means of logic alone.
Comparing this with slavery is a very bad case of argument by moral equivalence; it's bad because the moral equivalence isn't really there, unless you equate the freedom to rerelease software with the freedom to keep slaves. Do you consider these to be morally equivalent?
An unjust law is still unjust, even if it wrongs only one person.
Which is why that one person can go to court against this law if it wrongs him, and if the court agrees that he is wrongfully affected, it will require lawmakers to redesign the law to make an exception for this person's situation.
Note that I am talking in highly idealized terms here, but then, so are you.
The only people affected will be those who have a computer, but who don't have a TV. They aren't that many.
I don't think the number of affected people has an impact on the moral wrongness of this law.
Try going to court if you feel unjustly affected by this law. Germany has a strong tradition of people going to court against this sort of thing, this is one reason for the complicated structure of many German laws (some of the tax system, for example). If you are able to prove that Internet TV streams are practically inaccessible for you under reasonable expenses, chances aren't bad you might stand a chance in court. I dimly recall some cases where people on outlying islands successfully went to court in the sixties because they didn't get TV reception.
Slashdot Mirror
Wally: Here's a tip: Don't fly on pay day.
If you talk about nations, it doesn't make much sense to start off earlier than about 1650 or 1700, and if you talk about the Jewish nation, then I guess Zionism is the decisive phenomenon.
Bringing civilisation to conquered "savages" is a typical element of Western imperialist thought; it is related to imperialism, which is a different phenomenon from colonialism.
IBM even allocated a register range for a secondary EGA card, so in theory it would have been possible to have two EGA or VGA cards running simultaneously under DOS.
A lot of my work involves TeX, where it is just convenient to have Emacs on one screen and the DVI output on another. I've done extensive image cataloguing and indexing, too, where you can have the image full-screen and your database next to it. This is just so convenient that I have trouble doing without it. When I bought a laptop, I always took care to pick one where the graphics chipset supported driving two monitors simultaneously.
Others are here, here, here and here . The journalistic quality varies. You might have to search for "Kenetech".
English is not my native tongue. I know English. By your logic, I don't speak it anyway. Am I supposed to understand you? Maybe that's where the problem with my English is.
Anyway, the Pope does speak English, but in recent years he hasn't been speaking a lot in public, given that he's an old man.
The ten thousand things
How long do any persist?
The file is not there
No wonder they renamed OpenBeOS to Haiku OS
- First-person shooters. But then, you are very restricted in what you do. And 3D chat communities based on a FPS or TPS visualisation have been tried countless times. It's just that when I want to interact with people I have different priorities than when I'm running around shooting them. For example, it feels horribly un-intuitive (for me at least) to interact with a group of people, constantly having to hit some buttons or moving my mouse around just to keep them all in view. In a FPS, that's OK, because the interaction itself is rather straightforward, click, shoot, that's it. But in chat or (worse) collaborative working it gets really distracting. I don't see how this is more intuitive than having everything laid out on a 2D desktop, all in view.
- 3D modelling or CAD software. Here, the interface isn't really intuitive at first; it took me a while to get used to 4-way viewing, but it has the advantage of precision. However, again there is no collaboration, and the interaction is very straigtforward.
As soon as interaction is supposed to be a little more complicated than pointing and clicking, I find the need to constantly adjust my 2D view area extremely distracting and un-intuitive.It's a different thing with 3D visualization tools; I've had the pleasure to work with some CAVE-men, and there it was OK, because it conformed to how I usually work in 3D meatspace.
You are really engaged in a battle of definitions here on what "You can stop others from doing anything they want" means. Ultimately, it boils down to your different interpretations who is meant by "you". Grandparent refers to the original developer, you refer to everybody else who might be repackaging things under a proprietary license. Technically, grandparent is right, because the license on a piece of software is issued by the developer. If you are releasing something under the BSD or Croquet license, you can't stop others from doing anything they like.
Grandparent says the BSD license means that you as a developer have very little means of stopping from doing what they want with your software including forking it. This is correct. You (Parent) say that the BSD license means that the recipient of said software can re-release a fork under a proprietary license, effectively stopping others from doing what they want. This is also correct, however you are not talking about the BSD license any more, as you are rereleasing it under a different license now. The BSD license gives you that freedom. It is up to you to determine if you consider that freedom a bad thing.At this point, you are engaged in a debate that is based solely on the fact that you have different definitions of "freedom" and whether freedom should include freedom to restrict freedom. This is a highly academic debate on principles that is not leading anywhere by itself; partly because there is no "solution", partly because it will mislead you to equate all instances of problems to which these definitions of freedom are applicable. The situation is different in the case of slavery vs. the case of software, because slavery and software are different things, and everybody will agree on this, no matter what definition of freedom you are applying.
The BSD license gives you a right that the GPL doesn't give: the right of rerelease under a different license. Nobody will deny that. Whether that's a good thing or not or whether you want to consider the BSD license or the GPL "freer" is up to you, but here, there's no easy way to decide by means of logic alone.
Comparing this with slavery is a very bad case of argument by moral equivalence; it's bad because the moral equivalence isn't really there, unless you equate the freedom to rerelease software with the freedom to keep slaves. Do you consider these to be morally equivalent?
Note that I am talking in highly idealized terms here, but then, so are you.