The buisness people can and will pass any law they want on demand. The EU is still new.
Hmm, but all its members have a very long history, and that history weighs on the entire union. It's not like the US, where the country was really made anew, since the settlers decided to break away from the British rule and decided to quietly forgot about the natives' existence when the constitution was made (not counting the French influence).
Besides, look at the russian federation: it too is very new in a sense, much newer than the EU in fact, yet it's corrupt all the way to Putin, and businesses do whatever the hell they want provided they have money and don't step on the prez' toes.
Actually there's a good scifi novel called "Dune" in which a class of humans, called "mentats", receive intensive training to be able to perform complex computations.
From what I remember, there's hardly any machine-computers in Dune. The empire has great technology and all, but it's all manned (space travel by the members of the spacing guild, calculations by mentats, telepathy by the bene gesserit)...
You had to do some funny stuff for subtracting, I think you had to hold a lever down and use a number one less than what you were subtracting, but it worked.
- what happened to them when they were told to calculate the following problem: "Add one to a positive number and do it again until the result is null, then come tell me the result"
- did you have to put thermal grease under their butt to sit them on a socket-7 chair? and did they need a fan on their forehead?
- if you asked them to divide 20 by 4, would they sometime answer 4.99999999?
- Did they use their fingers to write on a certain sheet (address) and their feet to switch sheets (segments)?
But you're missing out on the real wins of a slide-rule (especially the circular ones). First: arbitrary precision. Second: better grasp of the relationships between two numbers
I know I'm being literal here, but I love that sentence. It conjures up all sorts of ideas of what could happen if Kansas bans evolution, as opposed to banning the teaching of evolution. Wouldn't it be a sight if they could ban it retroactively?
I know plenty of places in the Appalachians and in the south were they didn't wait for a state court to ban evolution...
Among the list of "crankpots" should we include mainstream religion and their various objections to things like cloning? I fail to see how mainstream religion differs significantly from the rest of the crackpots
I couldn't agree more. As for the difference between crackpots and mainstream religions, it's easy: mainstream religions are entrenched. They've taken hold centuries and millenia ago, when people didn't know better, and they've permeated the way people live, think and the societies they now live in for a very long time. Therefore, they're much harder to displace than contemporary crackpots, who now run into the wall of science and reason, and so they don't have the time to take roots.
I think the only reasonably successful "new" religion that has arisen in recent times is the Latter Day Saints, and even that was over 150 years ago and it's only a variation of Christianity. And frankly, if you read who were Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and what they did, you can't help thinking they were brigands (no offense to you LDS folks, I really like most of you a lot, but really...). But I digress...
Well, I have heard two interesting comments on this whole comet-smashing business:
One was yesterday on EuroNews (the European CNN): an shy-looking astronomer was interviewed and she said something to the effect of "you know, that experiment is sort of interesting, but we regret this "american buckaroo-style" (sic) way of doing space research, as a probe that could land and latch on the comet, then drill and study things would have done a better job for not much more money."
The other comment I've heard, from a friend who studies all kinds of space things, is that he hoped NASA picked their comet-target right, because they probably changed its trajectory in minute ways, and it could come back to haunt us if it happens to be cyclical with a very long period, and NASA didn't know about it, and it came back with something that looks like a collision course in the future.
So, I don't know personally I hope NASA doesn't go about blowing 10 or 15 more comets "to show who's boss". And on a personal side, I'd tend to agree with the astronomer's point of view and I believe more gentle probing should be developed, and I hope astronomers don't get into the habit of smashing things up to study what they want, because it's just not elegant. This said, if the experiment works, good for them and great for science.
Does anyone realize that a CPU runs at 100% all the time? It just depends on what it does.
No it doesn't. When it does nothing, it idles. Most, if not all modern OSes explicitely tell the CPU when nothing is being scheduled in the scheduler, and the CPU puts itself in low-power idle mode as a result. Look inside the Linux scheduler, in the idle thread code, if you don't believe me.
Most programs in an underused computer are waiting either for interrupts (which happen all the time, but for much less compounded time than idling), and for other programs to wake themselves. Therefore the idle thread is called often, and the CPU goes idle most of the time.
What you say was true in the DOS days, which was essentially doing polling in a loop when nothing was happening.
The basic point of the ruling is that you need to be able to have plausible deniability when it comes to promoting illegal actions. Bitorrent, for example, is able to get away with aiding mass piracy because the primary use for it is to disseminate large binary files.
Hey, that's a great idea!
Ok everybody, hear this: I am on a certain channel, on a certain IRC server, and I'm proposing to exchange Linux binaries (wink) via DCC CHAT. The distro I have here is called Linux Reloaded (nudge nudge), and it fits on a standard bootable DVD. I'll let you download Linux Reloaded if you can let me have GNU in the Shell (the "innocence" release). Leave me a message on this here board with your email addy and I'll let you know which IRC server/channel I'm on so we can exchange these insanely great, erhm, open-source softwares (get it? say no more, say no more *wink*).
But people need to think they beat the system! heck, I keep a Windows 95 CD with the serial written on the disk just the the sake of remembering the pleasure I had in the mid-90s when I though that, after all, I didn't pay for the steaming pile when I finally ditched it (which, incidentally, probably helped me ditch it earlier: if I had paid for it, I'd probably have put up with it much longer than it deserved).
We also look at the effect of piracy and ask whether piracy can ever be beneficial to Microsoft. This extension was motivated by analyzing data on a cross-section of countries on Linux penetration and piracy rates. We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate.
I have an idea then: why don't they make Linux insanely expensive, put it on a CD with a small manual that has a shiny Tux hologram on it, require the user to read a long boring EULA and enter a very long serial number, then have the Linux box display a Teletubbies-like background and make it contact an activation server at www.kernel.org? That way, pirates will just jump on it, distribute it like there's no tomorrow on P2P, and Linux will eventually displace Windows.
dead fish, seeweed, coral, or whatever might be on the ocean floor doesn't turn into smoke. Instead, it dissolves into the water and turns it some nasty foul color, in this case reddish.
So basically what you're saying is, when an underwater volcano goes off, coral and seeweed all leave the surface and rush down to the bottom of the ocean to watch the event, as well as countless schools of fish passing by, only they get too close and promptly die, thereby creating a giant fruit de mer soup?
Someone explain why the water in the picture looks red/brown?
Probably hematite, sulfur compounds and ashes coming from the volcano. They must be mixing with the water on the ocean floor and rising with the columns of hot water.
the true power of the wiki, realizing that it was introducing true debate and discussion. It was making people think, and that is something that the Old Media cannot have.
You know, they're actually reinventing the wheel. Old-style, *independent* media of the past did exactly what you describe (i.e. keeping politicos in check, breaking stories, and giving a voice to dissenters) and they did make people who bothered reading them think. That has gone away the day big corporations started to own media outlets.
But it remains to be seen whether wikiMedia (got it right this time:-) stays impartial with those who host them (namely the big two, Yahoo and very soon, Google).
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, my bad. I stand corrected.
Oh oops, sorry about that, I didn't know that. I thought only Northern Ireland was, as part of the UK.
if eu rejects this, i'm relocating my business to europe.
I think you'll think it over when you see the taxes rate over there. Not to mention strict labor laws and unions.
You should consider Eire. It's not in the EU and it's business-friendly.
For those who don't know Der Spiegel, it meant "The Mirror". And to those in the UK, yes, it's the same kind of newspaper.
The buisness people can and will pass any law they want on demand. The EU is still new.
Hmm, but all its members have a very long history, and that history weighs on the entire union. It's not like the US, where the country was really made anew, since the settlers decided to break away from the British rule and decided to quietly forgot about the natives' existence when the constitution was made (not counting the French influence).
Besides, look at the russian federation: it too is very new in a sense, much newer than the EU in fact, yet it's corrupt all the way to Putin, and businesses do whatever the hell they want provided they have money and don't step on the prez' toes.
NI! NI!
Your proposed law was a hamster, and software patents smell of elderberries. Now go away or I shall taunt you a second taah-me.
Actually there's a good scifi novel called "Dune" in which a class of humans, called "mentats", receive intensive training to be able to perform complex computations.
From what I remember, there's hardly any machine-computers in Dune. The empire has great technology and all, but it's all manned (space travel by the members of the spacing guild, calculations by mentats, telepathy by the bene gesserit)...
You had to do some funny stuff for subtracting, I think you had to hold a lever down and use a number one less than what you were subtracting, but it worked.
Yeah, it's called a carry...
Other important questions:
- what happened to them when they were told to calculate the following problem: "Add one to a positive number and do it again until the result is null, then come tell me the result"
- did you have to put thermal grease under their butt to sit them on a socket-7 chair? and did they need a fan on their forehead?
- if you asked them to divide 20 by 4, would they sometime answer 4.99999999?
- Did they use their fingers to write on a certain sheet (address) and their feet to switch sheets (segments)?
etc...
But you're missing out on the real wins of a slide-rule (especially the circular ones). First: arbitrary precision. Second: better grasp of the relationships between two numbers
Third: geek factor
Fourth: no batteries needed
I know I'm being literal here, but I love that sentence. It conjures up all sorts of ideas of what could happen if Kansas bans evolution, as opposed to banning the teaching of evolution. Wouldn't it be a sight if they could ban it retroactively?
I know plenty of places in the Appalachians and in the south were they didn't wait for a state court to ban evolution...
Among the list of "crankpots" should we include mainstream religion and their various objections to things like cloning? I fail to see how mainstream religion differs significantly from the rest of the crackpots
I couldn't agree more. As for the difference between crackpots and mainstream religions, it's easy: mainstream religions are entrenched. They've taken hold centuries and millenia ago, when people didn't know better, and they've permeated the way people live, think and the societies they now live in for a very long time. Therefore, they're much harder to displace than contemporary crackpots, who now run into the wall of science and reason, and so they don't have the time to take roots.
I think the only reasonably successful "new" religion that has arisen in recent times is the Latter Day Saints, and even that was over 150 years ago and it's only a variation of Christianity. And frankly, if you read who were Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and what they did, you can't help thinking they were brigands (no offense to you LDS folks, I really like most of you a lot, but really...). But I digress...
Well, I have heard two interesting comments on this whole comet-smashing business:
One was yesterday on EuroNews (the European CNN): an shy-looking astronomer was interviewed and she said something to the effect of "you know, that experiment is sort of interesting, but we regret this "american buckaroo-style" (sic) way of doing space research, as a probe that could land and latch on the comet, then drill and study things would have done a better job for not much more money."
The other comment I've heard, from a friend who studies all kinds of space things, is that he hoped NASA picked their comet-target right, because they probably changed its trajectory in minute ways, and it could come back to haunt us if it happens to be cyclical with a very long period, and NASA didn't know about it, and it came back with something that looks like a collision course in the future.
So, I don't know personally I hope NASA doesn't go about blowing 10 or 15 more comets "to show who's boss". And on a personal side, I'd tend to agree with the astronomer's point of view and I believe more gentle probing should be developed, and I hope astronomers don't get into the habit of smashing things up to study what they want, because it's just not elegant. This said, if the experiment works, good for them and great for science.
In so...
Nah...
Does anyone realize that a CPU runs at 100% all the time? It just depends on what it does.
No it doesn't. When it does nothing, it idles. Most, if not all modern OSes explicitely tell the CPU when nothing is being scheduled in the scheduler, and the CPU puts itself in low-power idle mode as a result. Look inside the Linux scheduler, in the idle thread code, if you don't believe me.
Most programs in an underused computer are waiting either for interrupts (which happen all the time, but for much less compounded time than idling), and for other programs to wake themselves. Therefore the idle thread is called often, and the CPU goes idle most of the time.
What you say was true in the DOS days, which was essentially doing polling in a loop when nothing was happening.
The basic point of the ruling is that you need to be able to have plausible deniability when it comes to promoting illegal actions. Bitorrent, for example, is able to get away with aiding mass piracy because the primary use for it is to disseminate large binary files.
Hey, that's a great idea!
Ok everybody, hear this: I am on a certain channel, on a certain IRC server, and I'm proposing to exchange Linux binaries (wink) via DCC CHAT. The distro I have here is called Linux Reloaded (nudge nudge), and it fits on a standard bootable DVD. I'll let you download Linux Reloaded if you can let me have GNU in the Shell (the "innocence" release). Leave me a message on this here board with your email addy and I'll let you know which IRC server/channel I'm on so we can exchange these insanely great, erhm, open-source softwares (get it? say no more, say no more *wink*).
But people need to think they beat the system! heck, I keep a Windows 95 CD with the serial written on the disk just the the sake of remembering the pleasure I had in the mid-90s when I though that, after all, I didn't pay for the steaming pile when I finally ditched it (which, incidentally, probably helped me ditch it earlier: if I had paid for it, I'd probably have put up with it much longer than it deserved).
Concerning:
(1) that causes anxiety or uneasyness (this EFF article is concerning)
(2) to engage the attention of (this EFF article is still concerning)
(2) to be interesting (this EFF article keeps on being concerning)
On the other hand:
Disconcerting:
(1) Upsetting, embarassing (this EFF article isn't disconcerting, apart to Microsoft perhaps)
(2) Frustrating (this EFF article isn't disconcerting, even for Microsoft)
So, no, no typo there...
From TFA:
We also look at the effect of piracy and ask whether piracy can ever be beneficial to Microsoft. This extension was motivated by analyzing data on a cross-section of countries on Linux penetration and piracy rates. We found that in countries where piracy is highest, Linux has the lowest penetration rate.
I have an idea then: why don't they make Linux insanely expensive, put it on a CD with a small manual that has a shiny Tux hologram on it, require the user to read a long boring EULA and enter a very long serial number, then have the Linux box display a Teletubbies-like background and make it contact an activation server at www.kernel.org? That way, pirates will just jump on it, distribute it like there's no tomorrow on P2P, and Linux will eventually displace Windows.
dead fish, seeweed, coral, or whatever might be on the ocean floor doesn't turn into smoke. Instead, it dissolves into the water and turns it some nasty foul color, in this case reddish.
So basically what you're saying is, when an underwater volcano goes off, coral and seeweed all leave the surface and rush down to the bottom of the ocean to watch the event, as well as countless schools of fish passing by, only they get too close and promptly die, thereby creating a giant fruit de mer soup?
Interesting theory...
Someone explain why the water in the picture looks red/brown?
Probably hematite, sulfur compounds and ashes coming from the volcano. They must be mixing with the water on the ocean floor and rising with the columns of hot water.
Time to get a very large teabag...
That wasn't a troll Mister courageous AC. It's a post moderators didn't like.
the true power of the wiki, realizing that it was introducing true debate and discussion. It was making people think, and that is something that the Old Media cannot have.
:-) stays impartial with those who host them (namely the big two, Yahoo and very soon, Google).
You know, they're actually reinventing the wheel. Old-style, *independent* media of the past did exactly what you describe (i.e. keeping politicos in check, breaking stories, and giving a voice to dissenters) and they did make people who bothered reading them think. That has gone away the day big corporations started to own media outlets.
But it remains to be seen whether wikiMedia (got it right this time
Indeed I misread your post. My apologies then, as it now makes much more sense :-)