"Supposedly the 'pill' is what 98% effective? And condoms are 99% effective? Hell, add those two up and you have 197% protection!"
Too much fuzzy math for these republicans...:-)
I do agree with you though that if you use birth control then you have little to worry about. Problem is some people don't and just get an abortion when they get pregnant. Thus my position on abortion is that it should be more expensive, but covered by medicare for certain people, i.e. low-income who can't afford a child and at-risk pregnancies.
It does already! Apple has the quicktime codecs released and are cross-OS, so they work as long as you have a(n) i386, Alpha, or PPC. On a Debian system, you can install the xanim-modules package to get these, as well as AVI codecs.
This came from dpkg -p xanim; I don't actually use it, so this may not work so well. I don't know.
EFS is an SGI filesystem, isn't it? Oops, that sounds patented. Sorry patent office, time to sue yourself:-) Tripping over its own two feet, this time on a _legitimate_ patent!
It's partially his ideas we support, not just him.
Remember John McCain? He may have made a pretty good president, and his ideas of campaign finance reform were not that widely popular among the other candidates. When McCain's popularity, however, became a concern for Bush et al, they all started supporting McCain's issues to get votes. At first it wasn't working for Bush; he was losing states in the primaries pretty quickly, but eventually it paid off. Now both candidates are making as a major issue campaign finance reform.
So even if Nader doesn't get elected, Gore should be smart enough to see that if he wants Nader's five percent, he has to support Nader's ideas to get some support and win the election. If he's not smart enough to figure that out, then I don't want him to be president.
This seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the electoral college system.
From how I understand it, the college works by having a bunch of electors, the number being proportional to the population of the state. Each elector is for a certain political candidate; the popular vote is actually electing these electors for each party (since Nader has no electors, he can't get electoral votes, same with Perot); then whoever has a majority of the popular vote in the state takes all the electoral votes. Electors can switch sides, but this is rare and doesn't affect the outcome that much (but it could possibly give one or two electoral votes for a 3rd party, not likely)
Now, since a lot of these states are borderline, and if even a few percent votes for Nader (a lot more than a few right now; upwards of 5%!) it could tip the scales in Bush's favor and give him all of the electoral votes in that state.
I agree about the "mission" question, only because we can't judge our own behaviors and motivations until fifty years from now, and look back and see where we blindly led ourselves. That's history, folks. People living in the Dark Ages weren't all gloomy and unhappy that they were living in a wretched time; they thought it was simply an extension of the times they knew, not necessarily bad. But from our hindisght we can tell they had it rough.
Bush didn't have to work hard to make his money, he inherited it. Same with many of the other rich people. Once people get to the point where their interest rates on their savings in the Caymans or something are plenty to live on plus taxes, they may stop contributing to society (this doesn't happen much, but Gates could do it...). Yes, when you're rich you get more benfits than the rest of us, but that doesn't mean you should have so much money while some guy is living on a meager income barely making enough money to pay his bills. This only makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (since the revenue would have to come from them if not the rich)
I hate microsoft as much as the next linux geek, but they're not just a huge group of millionaires sitting around plotting how to destroy Linux. They would not let someone steal their source code in such a risky venture just to shut down a few MS-related projects like samba, wine, and maybe abiword. It would turn them into who they hate most: people who give away thier source.
Since we can't read the article before posting (like we do that anyway:-) ), I'd like to know why people aren't interested in 2.4. Is it that it's been delayed so long it's like vaporware? Or is it because USB support along with the rest of the new stuff is patchable?
I wasn't around during the 2.0->2.2 transition; was all the new stuff in 2.2 like SMP available as a back-patch? 2.2 also had huge delays, so I doubt that's the problem.
You are defining randomness as nothing; in other words, you argue that if the Universe was random you probably would not exist; that doesn't mean you won't.
Here: consider a bag with four marbles of different colors, red, yellow, blue, and green. If I pick one at random (and I mean random, whatever that is) it may be any of these four, but just because I can't be sure doesn't mean it won't be any of them.
Extend this analogy almost infinitely; the chance that you exist compared to every other possibility, something has to happen, and by chance you exist and posted this. It's random. Something had to happen, so something did happen.
Edwim Abbott Abbott would not like D, the idea that life can only exist in three dimensions? Why is this so anyway? I can easily think of life existing in two dimensions, and in four we may not be able to perceive it. One I cannot see life existing in, but a two-dimensional universe can have a surprisingly similar structure to our three dimensional one, using a Bohr model for the atoms (remember laws revolve around the properties, so a Bohr model might work in another universe with two-dimensional representations of the orbitals) and with some different elements (since nuclei cannot bond in three dimensions given a two-dimensional universe, more or less neutrons may be needed). So if these quantum properties can be acheived, one would think you could have a life-forming two-dimensional universe (people might not be different regular shapes, however:-) )
I am a high school physics student, so I am obviously to be pitied for my ignorance; why can't a two-dimensional universe sustain life?
If you keep rebuilding on old code that someone else did, you get Y2k all over again. Not only that, it's harder for the developer to maintain if he/she doesn't understand it.
In response to the question posed, there are several neat, new text editors out there that seek to accomplish a variety of goals. But if one editor had all the features of all this software combined, you get emacs, a 40-50MB "text editor". I think that if OSS works the way this guy thinks it should, we would have a kernel, init, a shell, and emacs. That's it.
Examples of text editors: nano, free pico clone with extra features; jed, editor with hilighted C/C++ syntax; joe; ae; and more. Each of these has its own style to suit its own target, for example nano and ae are not for people who like to memorize lots of control keystrokes.
There's some resort out there which is made entirely of ice; it melts during the summer months and they recarve it come winter. Right now it's pretty expensive; maybe they could make it cheaper with one of these?
The resort seems pretty neat (I'm avoiding the use of "cool" here); it's all hand-carved and extremely intricate.
now expensive restaurants can make ice cubes in the shape of their restaraunt logo. Oh boy.
Maybe his would be good for top-secret documents that melt after they've been around for an hour or so? Good for evil companies who write incriminating internal memos:-) Or would they get nailed for "destruction of evidence"?
The patent office may not be too smart, but we should leave them alone and just make fun of them without interfering.
And don't encourage that patent to get filed; it's a joke, if it really were enforceable then it would have terrible consequences, which is why it's funny.
"Thank you for posting to slashdot; troll filters indicate you need to pay $.75 for that comment; enter your credit card number and expiration date below:"
or:
"As an anonymous coward you cannot post any comment with the words "Natalie Portman" in it; this is a violation of patent law. please log in or create an account."
wait, this is good! No more ridiculous anonymous posts!
I'm surprised I have to defend this, but here goes...
The ISS is a critical investment in space exploration and expansion. One of its long-term uses will be as a waystation for interplanetary travel. Besides, if it were somehow possible to assemble a vessel in space as opposed to on the ground and then launching it (space launch "guns" have been discussed to launch small payloads cheaply) it would make space travel much cheaper; most of the cost of the Shuttle is the propellant and that fuel tank that they don't reuse.
Having a space station is a foothold in space; if you want to accomplish something in space cheaply (i.e. without launching off the Earth every time) then you need a space station to do it, and that's how the ISS can be useful.
There are more reasons, such as the political benefits of internationl cooperation, but I'm no diplomat so some other slashdotter can comment on those.
I don't know if this is still true, but last I heard IBM is not giving it all away to the Linux community. Aren't the sound systems in their ThinkPad notebooks still that proprietary thing tied in with the modem that doesn't work with Linux? Maybe not, but I've heard that sound won't work for this reason and IBM refuses to release specs.
Sure, it's great that they are offering linux on their mainframes, but it would be nice to be able to have a choice between major OEMs for Linux laptops (Dell is the only one I would fully trust, and the small linux-only companies are *expensive*!)
I understand why they did this; GCC 2.95.2 probably doesn't have full 2.4 compatibility (I think, i'm no expert) but they couldn't wait to release a different version. After all this is a commercial company that has to keep making releases, even if everyone I know still uses RedHat 6.1 (at least those who use RedHat)
Still, they must look pretty silly after this and the 2.4 kernel delay that will probably make 2.4 come out after 7.1 is released. So much for all that preparation to make RH7 2.4 compliant:-)
The school libraries do this as well, but not to the extremes of blocking all but one app. Unfortunately people waste time checking email all day on a computer, waiting for more or reading irrelevant chatter (I used to do that), so all these organizations got the wrong impression.
A better method, I think, is to allow these kinds of things, but to be ready to let others use the computers for more important activities, if our society wasn't too uptight to talk to strangers...
I just found a great text-mode borwser with dynamic loading and table support, in addition to color and mouse support: called links. It works great, but as of now it holds cache and cookies in memory only. The cookie thing is good everywhere except/. Oh well. Still I'm composing this in links now.
Check it out:
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
Make sure your terminal is bigger than 80x24 (slightly); tables are bound to be wide.
Slashdot Mirror
"Supposedly the 'pill' is what 98% effective? And condoms are 99% effective? Hell, add those two up and you have 197% protection!"
:-)
Too much fuzzy math for these republicans...
I do agree with you though that if you use birth control then you have little to worry about. Problem is some people don't and just get an abortion when they get pregnant. Thus my position on abortion is that it should be more expensive, but covered by medicare for certain people, i.e. low-income who can't afford a child and at-risk pregnancies.
It does already! Apple has the quicktime codecs released and are cross-OS, so they work as long as you have a(n) i386, Alpha, or PPC. On a Debian system, you can install the xanim-modules package to get these, as well as AVI codecs.
This came from dpkg -p xanim; I don't actually use it, so this may not work so well. I don't know.
EFS is an SGI filesystem, isn't it? Oops, that sounds patented. Sorry patent office, time to sue yourself :-) Tripping over its own two feet, this time on a _legitimate_ patent!
It's partially his ideas we support, not just him.
Remember John McCain? He may have made a pretty good president, and his ideas of campaign finance reform were not that widely popular among the other candidates. When McCain's popularity, however, became a concern for Bush et al, they all started supporting McCain's issues to get votes. At first it wasn't working for Bush; he was losing states in the primaries pretty quickly, but eventually it paid off. Now both candidates are making as a major issue campaign finance reform.
So even if Nader doesn't get elected, Gore should be smart enough to see that if he wants Nader's five percent, he has to support Nader's ideas to get some support and win the election. If he's not smart enough to figure that out, then I don't want him to be president.
This seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the electoral college system.
From how I understand it, the college works by having a bunch of electors, the number being proportional to the population of the state. Each elector is for a certain political candidate; the popular vote is actually electing these electors for each party (since Nader has no electors, he can't get electoral votes, same with Perot); then whoever has a majority of the popular vote in the state takes all the electoral votes. Electors can switch sides, but this is rare and doesn't affect the outcome that much (but it could possibly give one or two electoral votes for a 3rd party, not likely)
Now, since a lot of these states are borderline, and if even a few percent votes for Nader (a lot more than a few right now; upwards of 5%!) it could tip the scales in Bush's favor and give him all of the electoral votes in that state.
I agree about the "mission" question, only because we can't judge our own behaviors and motivations until fifty years from now, and look back and see where we blindly led ourselves. That's history, folks. People living in the Dark Ages weren't all gloomy and unhappy that they were living in a wretched time; they thought it was simply an extension of the times they knew, not necessarily bad. But from our hindisght we can tell they had it rough.
Bush didn't have to work hard to make his money, he inherited it. Same with many of the other rich people. Once people get to the point where their interest rates on their savings in the Caymans or something are plenty to live on plus taxes, they may stop contributing to society (this doesn't happen much, but Gates could do it...). Yes, when you're rich you get more benfits than the rest of us, but that doesn't mean you should have so much money while some guy is living on a meager income barely making enough money to pay his bills. This only makes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer (since the revenue would have to come from them if not the rich)
I hate microsoft as much as the next linux geek, but they're not just a huge group of millionaires sitting around plotting how to destroy Linux. They would not let someone steal their source code in such a risky venture just to shut down a few MS-related projects like samba, wine, and maybe abiword. It would turn them into who they hate most: people who give away thier source.
Since we can't read the article before posting (like we do that anyway :-) ), I'd like to know why people aren't interested in 2.4. Is it that it's been delayed so long it's like vaporware? Or is it because USB support along with the rest of the new stuff is patchable?
I wasn't around during the 2.0->2.2 transition; was all the new stuff in 2.2 like SMP available as a back-patch? 2.2 also had huge delays, so I doubt that's the problem.
You are defining randomness as nothing; in other words, you argue that if the Universe was random you probably would not exist; that doesn't mean you won't.
Here: consider a bag with four marbles of different colors, red, yellow, blue, and green. If I pick one at random (and I mean random, whatever that is) it may be any of these four, but just because I can't be sure doesn't mean it won't be any of them.
Extend this analogy almost infinitely; the chance that you exist compared to every other possibility, something has to happen, and by chance you exist and posted this. It's random. Something had to happen, so something did happen.
Edwim Abbott Abbott would not like D, the idea that life can only exist in three dimensions? Why is this so anyway? I can easily think of life existing in two dimensions, and in four we may not be able to perceive it. One I cannot see life existing in, but a two-dimensional universe can have a surprisingly similar structure to our three dimensional one, using a Bohr model for the atoms (remember laws revolve around the properties, so a Bohr model might work in another universe with two-dimensional representations of the orbitals) and with some different elements (since nuclei cannot bond in three dimensions given a two-dimensional universe, more or less neutrons may be needed). So if these quantum properties can be acheived, one would think you could have a life-forming two-dimensional universe (people might not be different regular shapes, however :-) )
I am a high school physics student, so I am obviously to be pitied for my ignorance; why can't a two-dimensional universe sustain life?
three flatpanels and three video cards is probably better off, depending on how much it really costs.
:-)
So much for flatpanels being a way of freeing deskspace
well Taco, if you want a jet pack you should join NASA. Then we'd have some "Geeks in Space" news again... :-)
If you keep rebuilding on old code that someone else did, you get Y2k all over again. Not only that, it's harder for the developer to maintain if he/she doesn't understand it.
In response to the question posed, there are several neat, new text editors out there that seek to accomplish a variety of goals. But if one editor had all the features of all this software combined, you get emacs, a 40-50MB "text editor". I think that if OSS works the way this guy thinks it should, we would have a kernel, init, a shell, and emacs. That's it.
Examples of text editors: nano, free pico clone with extra features; jed, editor with hilighted C/C++ syntax; joe; ae; and more. Each of these has its own style to suit its own target, for example nano and ae are not for people who like to memorize lots of control keystrokes.
There's some resort out there which is made entirely of ice; it melts during the summer months and they recarve it come winter. Right now it's pretty expensive; maybe they could make it cheaper with one of these?
The resort seems pretty neat (I'm avoiding the use of "cool" here); it's all hand-carved and extremely intricate.
now expensive restaurants can make ice cubes in the shape of their restaraunt logo. Oh boy.
:-) Or would they get nailed for "destruction of evidence"?
Maybe his would be good for top-secret documents that melt after they've been around for an hour or so? Good for evil companies who write incriminating internal memos
that's called "Denial of Serive attack."
The patent office may not be too smart, but we should leave them alone and just make fun of them without interfering.
And don't encourage that patent to get filed; it's a joke, if it really were enforceable then it would have terrible consequences, which is why it's funny.
"Thank you for posting to slashdot; troll filters indicate you need to pay $.75 for that comment; enter your credit card number and expiration date below:"
or:
"As an anonymous coward you cannot post any comment with the words "Natalie Portman" in it; this is a violation of patent law. please log in or create an account."
wait, this is good! No more ridiculous anonymous posts!
I'm surprised I have to defend this, but here goes...
The ISS is a critical investment in space exploration and expansion. One of its long-term uses will be as a waystation for interplanetary travel. Besides, if it were somehow possible to assemble a vessel in space as opposed to on the ground and then launching it (space launch "guns" have been discussed to launch small payloads cheaply) it would make space travel much cheaper; most of the cost of the Shuttle is the propellant and that fuel tank that they don't reuse.
Having a space station is a foothold in space; if you want to accomplish something in space cheaply (i.e. without launching off the Earth every time) then you need a space station to do it, and that's how the ISS can be useful.
There are more reasons, such as the political benefits of internationl cooperation, but I'm no diplomat so some other slashdotter can comment on those.
I thoguht it said "solar army" at first. I didn't think our preesidential candidates wanted to increase military spending THAT much...
I don't know if this is still true, but last I heard IBM is not giving it all away to the Linux community. Aren't the sound systems in their ThinkPad notebooks still that proprietary thing tied in with the modem that doesn't work with Linux? Maybe not, but I've heard that sound won't work for this reason and IBM refuses to release specs.
Sure, it's great that they are offering linux on their mainframes, but it would be nice to be able to have a choice between major OEMs for Linux laptops (Dell is the only one I would fully trust, and the small linux-only companies are *expensive*!)
All the companies boasting Crusoe-based prototypes are always scaled-down little itsy things, not real laptops for people demanding tasks.
This just takes the cake, however. At first I though the Thinkpads IBM was using were bad (lowest, cheapest model) but this is just sad.
When are the cool laptops coming out, with lots of niceties and less "efficiency" (in a laptop efficiency almost always means less features)
Three penguins in a row on slashdot.org! That looks really wierd. Good thing the icons in the header don't repeat.
Still, they must look pretty silly after this and the 2.4 kernel delay that will probably make 2.4 come out after 7.1 is released. So much for all that preparation to make RH7 2.4 compliant :-)
The school libraries do this as well, but not to the extremes of blocking all but one app. Unfortunately people waste time checking email all day on a computer, waiting for more or reading irrelevant chatter (I used to do that), so all these organizations got the wrong impression.
A better method, I think, is to allow these kinds of things, but to be ready to let others use the computers for more important activities, if our society wasn't too uptight to talk to strangers...
I just found a great text-mode borwser with dynamic loading and table support, in addition to color and mouse support: called links. It works great, but as of now it holds cache and cookies in memory only. The cookie thing is good everywhere except /. Oh well. Still I'm composing this in links now.
Check it out:
http://artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~mikulas/links/
Make sure your terminal is bigger than 80x24 (slightly); tables are bound to be wide.