If people really don't think it's worth it to clean up the environment, then I suppose the cost to clean it is more than the damages caused by not cleaning it. In that case, let's just pay the people who are damaged by the pollution whatever's left. But throwing grants at companies who are going to do the research anyway is a big waste - and a form of corporate welfare.
It's not that I don't think it isn't worth cleaning up the environment, it's that I think there's better ways to spend the resources with the same ultimate goal. I'm not going to repeat myself, but I am going to say one thing:
If it sits better with you, then call it a tax break instead of a grant. It's really not any different from what the US government has been doing for well over a century, except that it's in a different industry. You do realize that the US government has a *long* history of offering tax breaks to help in the development of new industries that can help its ultimate goals, right? It's not corporate welfare, it's incentive to develop an industry that wouldn't otherwise be developped for decades.
Contrary to what you seem to think, free market is a bad thing. Open market = good. Free market = bad. Without some form of intervention to point the market in a direction that's good for the people at large, and in this case the environment, a free market economy will not do *anything* that doesn't serve the wants of profiteers first. Most people don't give a shit about the needs of others, and are quite happy looking out for themselves. That's why we have labour laws and minimum wage....
I think you're placing too much trust in the free market. Yes, it can easily be more efficient than government usually is (so can government, but that's an aside). It's also incredibly stagnant when there isn't a demand for change. We've got enough fuel to last us decades, particularly if this shale oil thing takes off, and because of that, there isn't enough of a desire in the free market to develop alternative fuels.
There *are* companies that are developping alternative fuel technologies, but do I really need to remind you what happened to the EV1? The car industry has already proven that it can create super-efficient vehicles and cars that run on alternative fuels. So how come you still can't buy a car that doesn't require gasoline or diesel? Because the car manufacturers also own the gas companies. They make more money on fossil fuel-burning cars, so they won't be developping alternative fuel vehicles until they run out of fossil fuels.
I'm not saying that the government should be the ones developping alternative fuels, I'm saying that the government should be giving grants to the companies that *are* developping it, so that these companies can finish their development faster, and the government should be giving grants to promote the sale of alternative fuel vehicles.
In the long run, it's a losing proposition: as a larger percentage of vehicles run on alternative fuels, the revenues from taxing fossil fuels go down. You'll eventually reach a point where you're spending more on grants than you take in through taxes. The idea is to create an artificial demand for a product so that industry can spend resources developping the supply needed to lower the price naturally. Theoretically, by the time you start losing money through a system of grants, the supply will be there, and the price will be such that you no longer need an artificial demand to sustain the market.
If we're removing hydrocarbons at the same rate as we're dumping them out, then the situation is most certainly improved.
Do you honestly think that we could clean up that much? I don't. Not without a significant decrease in the pollutants that we're putting out. And that's my whole point. When the amount of energy we have is finite, we should be spending that energy where it'll have the biggest impact. There's nothing wrong with trying to clean up the environment, it's just that given the amount of resources available, we can have a bigger impact by spending them to cut back our output than by cleaning up what's already been released.
Steps of developping a new product... 1: See if you can do it 2: See if you can control it 3: Find a way to do it that's cheap enough for mainstream
For alternative fuels, we're stuck at step 2. We know we can build H2-powered vehicles. We know how to make hydraulically-powered vehicles. We know how to make solar cars. We know how to make electrically powered cars that can be charged from the power grid. What we don't have, yet, is the ability to make these vehicles cheaply, and keep them powered cheaply.
Spend the tax money on finishing the development of these technologies. Specifically, spend it on finding ways to bring the cost down so that it's cheap enough for mainstream.
Spending the money on cleaning up the environment does nothing to improve the situation, because we'd still be dumping out hydrocarbons from our dependance on fossil fuels. The real solution to the environmental problems isn't to clean up the environment, it's to stop producing pollutants. We do that, the Earth can clean itself up, and probably do it a whole lot faster than we could. We don't need to waste energy cleaning up the environment, we need to spend that energy finding ways to coexist with the environment in such a way that lets it clean itself up without sacrificing our existing standards of living.
Wrong, IT is a service department - which means giving the users what they want in order to do their jobs. Now sometimes there are conflicts - for example users want a secure environment but they also instant messaging so part of the IT department's job is to work out what the priorities are and then to both implement those priorities and explain them.
Except that in this case, the "users" (or more accurately, the "clients") are the people paying the IT department, not the people who use the services. Usually, it isn't IT that decides that the users don't need instant messaging software or the ability to surf porn, it's management that thinks that the use of this software will reduce your productivity.
And you know what? It does reduce your productivity. If you need IM for work, so that you can keep in touch with your coworkers, there's a number of different options. If your company is full of Microsoft fanboys, they can get a Messenger server to run on the corporate intranet, only allowing you to use Messenger services internally. Alternatively, they can set up an IRC server and let people in the company use that.
If you think you need a piece of software that's disabled, go to your management and make your case. Don't bitch and moan at IT, because 99% of the time, there's fsck-all they can do about it.
As a lifeguard I'd think you'd agree that no computer system can see what a good lifeguard can spot in the pool.
Absolutely. And if some beancounter ever does try to use such a system as an excuse to cut back on staffing, I'll be the first banging on their door and telling them it's a stupid idea. I'll also be doing my level best to prevent them from ever going ahead with it, and to stir up public outrage at the idea. If people stop swimming at the pool because they don't feel safe, the pool will have to hire more lifeguards....
The £65,000 cost of the Poseidon system would have been better spend hiring more and better trained lifeguards and keeping them well trained.
Shame on you. If you're really an experienced lifeguard, you would understand that the best lifeguard in the world can still make mistakes. All the training in the world won't give them a 100% guarantee of saving everybody who has an accident in the pool, and any system that improves the odds is a good investment. Whether better training could have saved the girl any better is something we can't know. What we do know, however, is that the girl wasn't noticed by the lifeguards, and that the system's alarm helped the lifeguards to react in time to save her life. 65k well spent.
The problem with holding your breath underwater is that all the air you are holding in will cause you to float to the top, due to the fact that the air is making you less dense than the water.
Depends on the person.:) With my lungs so full that I can't take any more air in, I "float" about 6" below the surface of my pool. If I'm anywhere below capacity, I sink to the bottom of the pool. I actually really enjoy holding my breath, and sitting on the bottom of the pool, watching the sky by overhead. Very relaxing, even though I can only do it for about 3 minutes at a stretch.
I'm saying this as a lifeguard, not as somebody who's ever drowned....
The part while you're conscious is terrifying. If you lose conscious, you suffocate. I've had vascular chokes applied at Jiu Jitsu, and I imagine that drowning, when unconscious, is much the same... you start to grey out, you get weak, then you get numb, and finally, everything goes limp and you black out. If it's done right, you're out in under 20 seconds, and probably won't remember anything that just happened. Likewise, I think that drowning, once you go unconscious, is a pretty peaceful way to go, and you probably won't have much memory of the conscious part if you're rescued and revived. You could very easily have hallucinations or dreams while you're suffocating, depending on how far gone you are. Children tend to have lower oxygen carrying capacity than adults, because of a lesser volume of blood, and as a result they usually go unconscious faster. They are also a lot easier to revive:)
However... the part before you fall unconscious is pretty darned frightening. You run on complete adrenaline, and are a lot stronger than you would normally be. People who think they're drowning, and realize what that means, will grab on to anything that floats, including rescuers, but they'll usually relax, and sometimes pass out as soon as they realize that they're safe. Sometimes, however, it's safer for the rescuer to wait until the victim goes unconscious before rescuing them, particularly when you aren't part of a team, and don't have people to help you.
The real risk with drowning cases, and the reason I suggest that anybody who drowns goes to the hospital irregardless of how they feel after revival is secondary drowning. Often what happens, when your lungs fill with water, is that the water will be absorbed into the blood stream. Later, when you're asleep, the blood can reenter the lungs and because your pulse is lower and your breathing is both slower and shallower, you can suffocate hours after the accident actually happened. If you've had an accident in the water and there's *any* chance that water entered your lungs, you should go to the hospital for observation overnight.
I had an e-mail exchange with Bill Hilf, and he was able to point out a couple of fairly significant differences that *are* going to make it into Vista.
Probably the most interesting to the Linux community is that the services for Unix (SFU) POSIX-compliancy layer is going to be running at the same level as the Win32 execution code. They aren't going to be nested, they're going to be parallel. Theoretically, it might even be possible to replace USER, GDI, and EXPLORER with your favourite X server and DE/WM. Theoretically. I won't be able to tell for sure until I get my hands on a copy, and I cancelled my subscription to MSDN years ago.
Maybe somebody else who actually has a copy can expand on it....
My LILO bootloader has an option in the menu that never changes: the original install kernel, with append="3" to force it into runlevel 3. If, somehow, I manage to royally screw things up, I can choose that option to boot with a known-good kernel.
As for what the grandparent was talking about, however... that option in the bootmenu doesn't show up. By commenting out the line "prompt" in the lilo.conf, it skips the menu and automatically boots the default image (2.6.12.3 kernel on the laptop). If, OTOH, I want the boot menu with the known good kernel, I hold down CTRL at boot, and I'm presented with the LILO bootmenu where I can choose whatever image I want.
Incidentally... commenting out the "prompt" line will disable the automatic display of the menu irregardless of what you've set the timeout to. Likewise, holding down CTRL to force it to display the menu will show the menu with no timeout, no matter what the timeout is set to. With LILO, you only need to start typing, or on newer versions use the arrow keys to choose between menu options and the timer stops until you press return/enter.
Phone companies make a profit from the stealing of cell phones. It would be foolish to try to combat it (at the cost of maintaining some blacklist server). A stolen phone needs replacement, and the stolen phone is put on the network by someone else, bringing in revenue.
*cough* bullshit. Phone companies do not make a profit from the stealing of a phone. They lose money on it. The price of new phones is artificially deflated, because the phone companies subsidize the purchase. You ever wonder why you pay twice as much to buy the phone without a term contract? Even when you're supposedly paying "full price" on a phone without a contract, you're still not paying what the thing's worth.
Cell phone companies lose money on every new phone sold. They bank on your using the service for long enough for them to make a profit back, but that doesn't always happen, so they often charge some exorbitant fee to cancel the contract early.
Usually, having the appropriate information in the watch list is enough to block the phone from being activated on the cellular network. Sometimes, it isn't. It is, however, in the cell company's best interest to help in the safe return of the phone.
In related news, industry analysts have examined the expected content of this "new & improved" web, and have decided to call it the "National Science Foundation Web", or "NSFW" for short. When asked for comment, an official replied "finally, the Internet will have a name that accurate reflects the majority of its content."
Whatever happened to security envelopes? I mean, they shouldn't be the only thing protecting such information, but you shouldn't overlook the usefulness of opaque windowless envelopes.... Use 28lb paper with a 100% coverage of toner (not ink) or some other material that's black and opaque, and you can't read the contents of the envelope without opening it.
When dealing with that kind of information, I'd be happy to spend an extra $0.05 on the mailer....
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was Cruise's little tirade - how dare a peon like you play a joke on your Thetan master!
I dunno.... after looking at that video, I gotta side with Tom on that. I was expecting you to post a link to his behaviour on Oprah (or the Daily Show coverage, which is how I know about it), but instead you post a link to a video of him getting squirted in the eye with what looks like milk from a trick microphone while he's giving an interview.
I thought the bodyguards going gaga over it were overkill, but the message is pretty much it: the guy who did it really needs to reexamine his sense of humour. It isn't a funny joke. If it was something remotely funny, then Tom calling him a jerk would be out of line, and I'd be asking where his sense of humour went. But that wasn't funny, it was stupid.
you know the other person, the rare kind, who yells "SHUT UP!" at the first group of people when they start misbehaving? yeah, that one's me. and I've actually gotten applause for it. I do feel like I may be disturbing the movie, too, and I feel bad about it, I do, but if you people can't control yourselves/your children/your cellphone, I'm going to yell at you to shut up.
A woman after my own heart....
I've been known to confiscate the battery in such situations. One person actually called in the manager on me, and I explained that she could have it when the movie was over. He looked back at the girl, said it was a fair offer, and left.:)
Personally, I rank films in two groups: films that must be seen on the big screen - and films that would be just as fine seen on TV at home on some cool channel like Sundance or IFC or BBC or CBC where they don't edit it to make it saccharine barf city like the lower bands do.
You're missing the ever-prevalent 3rd category: movies that start off as "saccharine barf city".... Far too many movies being made these days are utter crap, and in no way worth the $10 for the price of a ticket. Hell... most movies being made aren't even worth the $5 to rent the damned thing from Blockbuster, and I'm finding it harder and harder to justify my subscription to the movie channels, even though that only costs me $15/month.
I've got a friend that works at a movie theatre, and as a student, I already have an annual bus pass. Going to the theatre with that friend costs me absolutely nothing but time, and even then I find myself wanting my money back after some of the recent offerings. There *are* some movies that I think are worth seeing, and I'm looking forward to them (both of the ones you mentionned are on that list ^_^), but by and large, I don't think I'd notice or care if Hollywood were to suddenly cease to exist.
Even if you're red/green blind, you still know that red = stop and green = go. It's something that gets emphasized in all of the traffic books I've seen. None of my colourblind friends have ever had a problem knowing that concept at an intellectual level, even though they can't personally see the difference... besides which, it was an example.
As for watching a computer build up a database of all the possible questions... a human still has to answer the questions if the computer isn't intelligent enough to know what is being asked of it. Sure, a computer could build up a database of all of the possible questions, but it would have to be smart enough to understand the instructions given (do you want me to type the phrase I see, or answer it?), and there's nothing to stop you from expanding the dictionary.
The only way to lock something like that down and prevent spammers it to make it by invitation only. If the messageboard/blog/whatever isn't invitation only, then anybody can log in and post.
Re:Using Captcha for distributed processing
on
Defeating Captcha
·
· Score: 1
Actually... first thing I'd do when presented with that would be to ask "is that Degrees, Radians, or Gradians?" Since there's no units, that would mean Radians, but as anybody who's taken math should (I hope) be able to tell you, that isn't a rational multiple of Pi, and as such, it isn't an easily solvable number and would require a calculator....
An intelligence test, however, isn't a bad idea. Something much simpler might make more sense, though. Say a relatively simple CAPTCHA (that's 100% human solvable, and probably 95% machine solvable), but doesn't contain the answer you're looking for. A phrase like "if green means go, what does red mean?". Most children over the age of 5 can answer that, no matter where you are in the world (red = stop is pretty much universal), but a computer would have to be able to pass the CAPTCHA, *and* have sufficient AI to understand what it's looking for.
And as always, provide an e-mail address for humans who aren't able to do the CAPTCHA to contact you for a manual account creation. I'm thinking of the blind, not the stupid here....
Don't argue with a lawyer....
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Back when I was working at Compaq, pre-merger, my most memorable call was from a lawyer. Seems he had gotten so totally frustrated with the quality of support at HP that he'd thrown his computer through his 6th floor window and into the street below.
Not out the window, mind you... through the window. Shattering the glass on the way by. That afternoon, he was on the phone with me, at Compaq, for help installing his software and restoring backups. (amazingly enough, he'd been smart enough to make backups just before throwing the damned thing out the window:), and didn't mind paying the $40 fee for help with unsupported software, as long as I was able to get the thing working.)
The story does not end there. He was so happy with the support that he asked to talk to my supervisor.... A half hour later, the supervisor comes by and asks if I'm busy. He's just finished talking to the lawyer, and found out that the cause of his problem was his HP laser printer that didn't have driver support for his new Windows XP-based computer, and he didn't like being told by HP that they didn't support that printer with XP yet.... So my boss asks if I'm busy, and I say no, so he hands the guy off to me again to fix his printer, on the house.
How did I fix it? I sent him to HP's website to download the Windows 2000 drivers for the printer. I explain to him that yes, I'm aware that he's running Windows XP, but that Windows XP shares a kernel with Windows 2000, and that because of it, XP Home will not install as an upgrade over 2k Pro. Basically, they're the same OS, except that XP has flashy graphical enhancements. (at the time, that was true). So we download the 2k driver for the printer, and 5 minutes later, he's printing again, and asks to talk to the supervisor again.:)
Long story short... $100 gift certificate for a local steakhouse, and a plaque that reads "top letter generator" is all I have to show for it. Oh, and the satisfaction of knowing that 4 months later, HP announced the Compaq acquisition.... I bet he was peeved at that.:)
1. Installing apps sucks on Linux. And don't say "oh, well if you take a couple hours and learn all the commands and how to work out the dependencies, it's really not that bad." It shouldn't be bad at all. It should be a non-issue in 2005. I heard there are some simpler ways that are gaining popularity, but I won't learn about them till next year.
download package-in-question. For 90% of apps, all of the dependancies are already there. For the purposes of argument, let's call it foo-bar-1.0.tgz. Here's how you install it: installpkg foo-bar-1.0.tgz And here's how you uninstall it: removepkg foo-bar-1.0
That's it, that's all. And as I said, 90% of apps out there have most or all of their dependancies already in the base install of Slack if you installed everything in the "l" set of packages.
2. It seems that a lot of Linux enthusiasts are very interested in tinkering with their OS and tweaking stuff and getting it all the way they want it. When I was 16, that might have been interesting. I'm a little older now, and now I'm more interested in doing stuff than getting my OS ready for something I haven't even identified yet. For example, I don't want to tweak ASIO drivers for my sound card, I want to make music.
Slack's the only distro that "just works" for me. Using cars as an analogy, you've basically just bought a really cool car. It'll work out of the box, and you can be productive. If you feel like it, you can take it apart, and rebuild it. Better. Stronger. Faster.
And yes, for me, it "just works". Out of the box, my video card works (1024x768 resolution), out of the box the sound cards on both my desktop (Live! 24-bit) and my laptop work. Out of the box, everything just works.
3. Too many distributions, no unity, blah blah blah.
Fundamental philosophy in Linux: if you don't like the way somebody's doing it, then fork off.:) Make your own distro and do things the way you want. The end result is that yes, there isn't a whole lot of unity, and there are a whole lot of distros out there. This works to Linux's advantage, however, not towards its detriment. Most distros can be used for basic productivity, but there's a bunch of highly specialized distros out there that do one specific task extremely well. No matter what task you're looking to accomplish, there's a distro that's specialized for it, and there's several other distros that can perform the task with minimal tweaking.
4. Those cursed bootloaders. Moving on...
liloconfig is your friend. Choose "automatic", and sit back and let the bootloader configure itself. There's a reason for the bootloaders, btw: allowing you to have multiple operating systems. If you really feel that strongly about it, you can even configure the Windows bootloader to load Linux.... you did know that Windows has a bootloader too, right?
5. Someone else replied to this article and suggested that Windows users need to strap on a pair and get into Linux. Commercial software (Windows, OSX) has evolved to the point where the act of strapping on pair can be reserved for things that actually require balls. Computing is not one of those things (unless you're in the business of making mind-blowing software or something). Linux still hasn't dug itself out of the user-unfriendliness hole. It's getting better, but it's still a biatch. I'm not going to wrestle with an OS unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I have better things to do.
I installed Linux on my mom's computer, and she didn't even notice for two weeks. She uses the damned thing daily, and when I explained my reasons, she decided to continue running Linux.
It is user friendly, as long as you're willing to take the time to configure it to do what you want. If you prefer a desktop where everything is similar to Windows, use KDE or Gnome. To some extent, XFCE is just as user-friendly as Windows, too. Couple that with a sane
Your choice of window manager has almost nothing to do with how the system is for gaming. FWIW, I play SuperTux, GTK-Board, and Battle for Wesnoth fairly frequently, and they all run great.
What's important from the gaming perspective is your choice of X server, and your graphics driver. With X.Org 6.8.1 and the latest drivers from ATI, my desktop, which has a Radeon 9600 Ultra, gets about 13,000fps in glxgears, and around 100-150fps in things that actually matter like games. I play some games through Cedega or natively (NWN), but I also dualboot that system with XP Professional, which I use when I want to play games that don't run well under Linux.
Only if Linux is your hobby. Something it will never be, and shouldn't be, for the vast majority of people.
You do yourself a disservice by assuming that Gnome and KDE are the only viable DEs for X. I'm sensing that there isn't much point in trying to tell you otherwise, so I'll only bother to point out that even if you want a clone of the Windows or Mac UI, there's alternatives to Gnome/KDE. FVWM leaps to mind immediately, since it's actually supposed to be a Win clone with the default configuration....
As for XFCE, it draws its inspiration from CDE, and should be pretty intuitive and require minimal configuration. Even the right-click program menu automatically updates itself for most applications you install. Couple that with a binary distribution like Debian and an X-based package installation tool, and you've got a ridiculously easy to use Linux system, requiring a minimum of configuration, and all without ever once touching KDE or Gnome.
Jeebus, I'm starting to sound like some kind of fanboy....
You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right? I find that those two DEs go down fairly frequently as well. Since switching to XFCE, however, I have never had a crash. Ever. It's absolutely rock-solid, and as long as it's development is focused on speed and stability over, say, bells&whistles, it's going to continue to be rock-solid.
And if you don't like XFCE, there's nothing to stop you from using *box, fvwm, or hell, even tab-window-manager. Maybe your problems with X have less to do with X or Linux themselves, and more to do with your choice of using Desktop Environments with known memory leaks (KDE) and stability problems when dealing with unexpected library versions (Gnome).
And in the event of an X crash, I wouldn't lose my documents, either. At most, I'd lose 5 minutes' work, because that's the interval at which AbiWord is set to autosave my work. Hell, my music wouldn't even stop playing, thanks to me using MPD.
Microsoft may not be evil, but I do feel the need to point out that Microsoft's idea of "default" security permissions is an accident waiting to happen.
Face it. 95% of Windows users haven't got a clue how to secure their Windows box. I'm not going to argue that Windows hasn't come a *long* way since its early versions, and I'm not going to argue that it's impossible to lock down a Windows box to be as secure as any Unix/Linux box you can throw into the fray. You probably know as well as I do that it's entirely possible to harden a Windows machine against most kinds of intrusion.
The problem, however, is that this security is *not* the default setting. By default in Windows XP, users run with root permissions. When you enable a user as an administrator, Windows does not pop up a warning saying "you dummy, this could open you up to some serious security threats like spybots, worms, and malicious code". It just does it and assumes that the user knows what they're doing. That's a mistake when 95% of the users haven't got a clue about computer security.
Sure, there probably are security holes in OSS. But it's open source. *ANYBODY* who wants to can download the source code and do a security audit. They can fix the holes and publish the fixes if they like, or they can take advantage of it for nefarious purposes. Really, they can do whatever they want with the knowledge, though most people publish it. But as long as the user isn't running with root permissions, the kernel will not allow them to write anywhere outside of their home directory.
See, that's the main reason I like Linux: you could probably write a virus or malicious app for Linux, and you could probably dupe *somebody* into running it. But even if you manage to get somebody to run the virus, the worst that will happen is that they'll need to recreate their userid and homedir. The system itself will not come down, because the virus is still being run in userspace.
Couple that with ActiveX, which is a great way to distribute executable code to computers without the user knowing about it, and Microsoft's interesting take on standards (just look at IE), and it's easy to see why people think of MS as evil. I don't see them as evil, I just think that even though they're working on it, they aren't going to be able to fix their security problems until they reexamine their user/admin model, and that they aren't going to ever do that, because they're convinced that it's more user friendly to allow the user to install software without logging in as a special user. It's that very requirement, however, that convinces me that my Linux boxen are stabler and more secure.
As to the original topic, I just want to point out to you that in the realm of software and intellectual property, the past is not an indicator of the future. Just because MS hasn't ever sued anybody doesn't mean that they don't intend to. I can't tell you what the future will bring, and so with MS holding patents such as this I simply have to take it on good faith that they won't sue me for it. That doesn't mean, however, that I shouldn't try to do anything about it to prevent them from getting asinine patents such as this; in fact, it means that I *should* do everything I can to prevent them from ever having that kind of power.
Slashdot Mirror
If people really don't think it's worth it to clean up the environment, then I suppose the cost to clean it is more than the damages caused by not cleaning it. In that case, let's just pay the people who are damaged by the pollution whatever's left. But throwing grants at companies who are going to do the research anyway is a big waste - and a form of corporate welfare.
It's not that I don't think it isn't worth cleaning up the environment, it's that I think there's better ways to spend the resources with the same ultimate goal. I'm not going to repeat myself, but I am going to say one thing:
If it sits better with you, then call it a tax break instead of a grant. It's really not any different from what the US government has been doing for well over a century, except that it's in a different industry. You do realize that the US government has a *long* history of offering tax breaks to help in the development of new industries that can help its ultimate goals, right? It's not corporate welfare, it's incentive to develop an industry that wouldn't otherwise be developped for decades.
Contrary to what you seem to think, free market is a bad thing. Open market = good. Free market = bad. Without some form of intervention to point the market in a direction that's good for the people at large, and in this case the environment, a free market economy will not do *anything* that doesn't serve the wants of profiteers first. Most people don't give a shit about the needs of others, and are quite happy looking out for themselves. That's why we have labour laws and minimum wage....
I think you're placing too much trust in the free market. Yes, it can easily be more efficient than government usually is (so can government, but that's an aside). It's also incredibly stagnant when there isn't a demand for change. We've got enough fuel to last us decades, particularly if this shale oil thing takes off, and because of that, there isn't enough of a desire in the free market to develop alternative fuels.
There *are* companies that are developping alternative fuel technologies, but do I really need to remind you what happened to the EV1? The car industry has already proven that it can create super-efficient vehicles and cars that run on alternative fuels. So how come you still can't buy a car that doesn't require gasoline or diesel? Because the car manufacturers also own the gas companies. They make more money on fossil fuel-burning cars, so they won't be developping alternative fuel vehicles until they run out of fossil fuels.
I'm not saying that the government should be the ones developping alternative fuels, I'm saying that the government should be giving grants to the companies that *are* developping it, so that these companies can finish their development faster, and the government should be giving grants to promote the sale of alternative fuel vehicles.
In the long run, it's a losing proposition: as a larger percentage of vehicles run on alternative fuels, the revenues from taxing fossil fuels go down. You'll eventually reach a point where you're spending more on grants than you take in through taxes. The idea is to create an artificial demand for a product so that industry can spend resources developping the supply needed to lower the price naturally. Theoretically, by the time you start losing money through a system of grants, the supply will be there, and the price will be such that you no longer need an artificial demand to sustain the market.
If we're removing hydrocarbons at the same rate as we're dumping them out, then the situation is most certainly improved.
Do you honestly think that we could clean up that much? I don't. Not without a significant decrease in the pollutants that we're putting out. And that's my whole point. When the amount of energy we have is finite, we should be spending that energy where it'll have the biggest impact. There's nothing wrong with trying to clean up the environment, it's just that given the amount of resources available, we can have a bigger impact by spending them to cut back our output than by cleaning up what's already been released.
Steps of developping a new product...
1: See if you can do it
2: See if you can control it
3: Find a way to do it that's cheap enough for mainstream
For alternative fuels, we're stuck at step 2. We know we can build H2-powered vehicles. We know how to make hydraulically-powered vehicles. We know how to make solar cars. We know how to make electrically powered cars that can be charged from the power grid. What we don't have, yet, is the ability to make these vehicles cheaply, and keep them powered cheaply.
Spend the tax money on finishing the development of these technologies. Specifically, spend it on finding ways to bring the cost down so that it's cheap enough for mainstream.
Spending the money on cleaning up the environment does nothing to improve the situation, because we'd still be dumping out hydrocarbons from our dependance on fossil fuels. The real solution to the environmental problems isn't to clean up the environment, it's to stop producing pollutants. We do that, the Earth can clean itself up, and probably do it a whole lot faster than we could. We don't need to waste energy cleaning up the environment, we need to spend that energy finding ways to coexist with the environment in such a way that lets it clean itself up without sacrificing our existing standards of living.
Wrong, IT is a service department - which means giving the users what they want in order to do their jobs. Now sometimes there are conflicts - for example users want a secure environment but they also instant messaging so part of the IT department's job is to work out what the priorities are and then to both implement those priorities and explain them.
Except that in this case, the "users" (or more accurately, the "clients") are the people paying the IT department, not the people who use the services. Usually, it isn't IT that decides that the users don't need instant messaging software or the ability to surf porn, it's management that thinks that the use of this software will reduce your productivity.
And you know what? It does reduce your productivity. If you need IM for work, so that you can keep in touch with your coworkers, there's a number of different options. If your company is full of Microsoft fanboys, they can get a Messenger server to run on the corporate intranet, only allowing you to use Messenger services internally. Alternatively, they can set up an IRC server and let people in the company use that.
If you think you need a piece of software that's disabled, go to your management and make your case. Don't bitch and moan at IT, because 99% of the time, there's fsck-all they can do about it.
As a lifeguard I'd think you'd agree that no computer system can see what a good lifeguard can spot in the pool.
Absolutely. And if some beancounter ever does try to use such a system as an excuse to cut back on staffing, I'll be the first banging on their door and telling them it's a stupid idea. I'll also be doing my level best to prevent them from ever going ahead with it, and to stir up public outrage at the idea. If people stop swimming at the pool because they don't feel safe, the pool will have to hire more lifeguards....
The £65,000 cost of the Poseidon system would have been better spend hiring more and better trained lifeguards and keeping them well trained.
Shame on you. If you're really an experienced lifeguard, you would understand that the best lifeguard in the world can still make mistakes. All the training in the world won't give them a 100% guarantee of saving everybody who has an accident in the pool, and any system that improves the odds is a good investment. Whether better training could have saved the girl any better is something we can't know. What we do know, however, is that the girl wasn't noticed by the lifeguards, and that the system's alarm helped the lifeguards to react in time to save her life. 65k well spent.
And incidentally, I got my NLS back when it was still called the Royal Lifesaving Society of Canada (RLSSC).
The problem with holding your breath underwater is that all the air you are holding in will cause you to float to the top, due to the fact that the air is making you less dense than the water.
:) With my lungs so full that I can't take any more air in, I "float" about 6" below the surface of my pool. If I'm anywhere below capacity, I sink to the bottom of the pool. I actually really enjoy holding my breath, and sitting on the bottom of the pool, watching the sky by overhead. Very relaxing, even though I can only do it for about 3 minutes at a stretch.
Depends on the person.
I'm saying this as a lifeguard, not as somebody who's ever drowned....
:)
The part while you're conscious is terrifying. If you lose conscious, you suffocate. I've had vascular chokes applied at Jiu Jitsu, and I imagine that drowning, when unconscious, is much the same... you start to grey out, you get weak, then you get numb, and finally, everything goes limp and you black out. If it's done right, you're out in under 20 seconds, and probably won't remember anything that just happened. Likewise, I think that drowning, once you go unconscious, is a pretty peaceful way to go, and you probably won't have much memory of the conscious part if you're rescued and revived. You could very easily have hallucinations or dreams while you're suffocating, depending on how far gone you are. Children tend to have lower oxygen carrying capacity than adults, because of a lesser volume of blood, and as a result they usually go unconscious faster. They are also a lot easier to revive
However... the part before you fall unconscious is pretty darned frightening. You run on complete adrenaline, and are a lot stronger than you would normally be. People who think they're drowning, and realize what that means, will grab on to anything that floats, including rescuers, but they'll usually relax, and sometimes pass out as soon as they realize that they're safe. Sometimes, however, it's safer for the rescuer to wait until the victim goes unconscious before rescuing them, particularly when you aren't part of a team, and don't have people to help you.
The real risk with drowning cases, and the reason I suggest that anybody who drowns goes to the hospital irregardless of how they feel after revival is secondary drowning. Often what happens, when your lungs fill with water, is that the water will be absorbed into the blood stream. Later, when you're asleep, the blood can reenter the lungs and because your pulse is lower and your breathing is both slower and shallower, you can suffocate hours after the accident actually happened. If you've had an accident in the water and there's *any* chance that water entered your lungs, you should go to the hospital for observation overnight.
I had an e-mail exchange with Bill Hilf, and he was able to point out a couple of fairly significant differences that *are* going to make it into Vista.
Probably the most interesting to the Linux community is that the services for Unix (SFU) POSIX-compliancy layer is going to be running at the same level as the Win32 execution code. They aren't going to be nested, they're going to be parallel. Theoretically, it might even be possible to replace USER, GDI, and EXPLORER with your favourite X server and DE/WM. Theoretically. I won't be able to tell for sure until I get my hands on a copy, and I cancelled my subscription to MSDN years ago.
Maybe somebody else who actually has a copy can expand on it....
My LILO bootloader has an option in the menu that never changes: the original install kernel, with append="3" to force it into runlevel 3. If, somehow, I manage to royally screw things up, I can choose that option to boot with a known-good kernel.
As for what the grandparent was talking about, however... that option in the bootmenu doesn't show up. By commenting out the line "prompt" in the lilo.conf, it skips the menu and automatically boots the default image (2.6.12.3 kernel on the laptop). If, OTOH, I want the boot menu with the known good kernel, I hold down CTRL at boot, and I'm presented with the LILO bootmenu where I can choose whatever image I want.
Incidentally... commenting out the "prompt" line will disable the automatic display of the menu irregardless of what you've set the timeout to. Likewise, holding down CTRL to force it to display the menu will show the menu with no timeout, no matter what the timeout is set to. With LILO, you only need to start typing, or on newer versions use the arrow keys to choose between menu options and the timer stops until you press return/enter.
Phone companies make a profit from the stealing of cell phones. It would be foolish to try to combat it (at the cost of maintaining some blacklist server). A stolen phone needs replacement, and the stolen phone is put on the network by someone else, bringing in revenue.
*cough* bullshit. Phone companies do not make a profit from the stealing of a phone. They lose money on it. The price of new phones is artificially deflated, because the phone companies subsidize the purchase. You ever wonder why you pay twice as much to buy the phone without a term contract? Even when you're supposedly paying "full price" on a phone without a contract, you're still not paying what the thing's worth.
Cell phone companies lose money on every new phone sold. They bank on your using the service for long enough for them to make a profit back, but that doesn't always happen, so they often charge some exorbitant fee to cancel the contract early.
Usually, having the appropriate information in the watch list is enough to block the phone from being activated on the cellular network. Sometimes, it isn't. It is, however, in the cell company's best interest to help in the safe return of the phone.
In related news, industry analysts have examined the expected content of this "new & improved" web, and have decided to call it the "National Science Foundation Web", or "NSFW" for short. When asked for comment, an official replied "finally, the Internet will have a name that accurate reflects the majority of its content."
Whatever happened to security envelopes? I mean, they shouldn't be the only thing protecting such information, but you shouldn't overlook the usefulness of opaque windowless envelopes.... Use 28lb paper with a 100% coverage of toner (not ink) or some other material that's black and opaque, and you can't read the contents of the envelope without opening it.
When dealing with that kind of information, I'd be happy to spend an extra $0.05 on the mailer....
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was Cruise's little tirade - how dare a peon like you play a joke on your Thetan master!
I dunno.... after looking at that video, I gotta side with Tom on that. I was expecting you to post a link to his behaviour on Oprah (or the Daily Show coverage, which is how I know about it), but instead you post a link to a video of him getting squirted in the eye with what looks like milk from a trick microphone while he's giving an interview.
I thought the bodyguards going gaga over it were overkill, but the message is pretty much it: the guy who did it really needs to reexamine his sense of humour. It isn't a funny joke. If it was something remotely funny, then Tom calling him a jerk would be out of line, and I'd be asking where his sense of humour went. But that wasn't funny, it was stupid.
you know the other person, the rare kind, who yells "SHUT UP!" at the first group of people when they start misbehaving? yeah, that one's me. and I've actually gotten applause for it. I do feel like I may be disturbing the movie, too, and I feel bad about it, I do, but if you people can't control yourselves/your children/your cellphone, I'm going to yell at you to shut up.
:)
A woman after my own heart....
I've been known to confiscate the battery in such situations. One person actually called in the manager on me, and I explained that she could have it when the movie was over. He looked back at the girl, said it was a fair offer, and left.
Personally, I rank films in two groups: films that must be seen on the big screen - and films that would be just as fine seen on TV at home on some cool channel like Sundance or IFC or BBC or CBC where they don't edit it to make it saccharine barf city like the lower bands do.
You're missing the ever-prevalent 3rd category: movies that start off as "saccharine barf city".... Far too many movies being made these days are utter crap, and in no way worth the $10 for the price of a ticket. Hell... most movies being made aren't even worth the $5 to rent the damned thing from Blockbuster, and I'm finding it harder and harder to justify my subscription to the movie channels, even though that only costs me $15/month.
I've got a friend that works at a movie theatre, and as a student, I already have an annual bus pass. Going to the theatre with that friend costs me absolutely nothing but time, and even then I find myself wanting my money back after some of the recent offerings. There *are* some movies that I think are worth seeing, and I'm looking forward to them (both of the ones you mentionned are on that list ^_^), but by and large, I don't think I'd notice or care if Hollywood were to suddenly cease to exist.
Even if you're red/green blind, you still know that red = stop and green = go. It's something that gets emphasized in all of the traffic books I've seen. None of my colourblind friends have ever had a problem knowing that concept at an intellectual level, even though they can't personally see the difference... besides which, it was an example.
As for watching a computer build up a database of all the possible questions... a human still has to answer the questions if the computer isn't intelligent enough to know what is being asked of it. Sure, a computer could build up a database of all of the possible questions, but it would have to be smart enough to understand the instructions given (do you want me to type the phrase I see, or answer it?), and there's nothing to stop you from expanding the dictionary.
The only way to lock something like that down and prevent spammers it to make it by invitation only. If the messageboard/blog/whatever isn't invitation only, then anybody can log in and post.
Actually... first thing I'd do when presented with that would be to ask "is that Degrees, Radians, or Gradians?" Since there's no units, that would mean Radians, but as anybody who's taken math should (I hope) be able to tell you, that isn't a rational multiple of Pi, and as such, it isn't an easily solvable number and would require a calculator....
An intelligence test, however, isn't a bad idea. Something much simpler might make more sense, though. Say a relatively simple CAPTCHA (that's 100% human solvable, and probably 95% machine solvable), but doesn't contain the answer you're looking for. A phrase like "if green means go, what does red mean?". Most children over the age of 5 can answer that, no matter where you are in the world (red = stop is pretty much universal), but a computer would have to be able to pass the CAPTCHA, *and* have sufficient AI to understand what it's looking for.
And as always, provide an e-mail address for humans who aren't able to do the CAPTCHA to contact you for a manual account creation. I'm thinking of the blind, not the stupid here....
Back when I was working at Compaq, pre-merger, my most memorable call was from a lawyer. Seems he had gotten so totally frustrated with the quality of support at HP that he'd thrown his computer through his 6th floor window and into the street below.
:), and didn't mind paying the $40 fee for help with unsupported software, as long as I was able to get the thing working.)
:)
:)
Not out the window, mind you... through the window. Shattering the glass on the way by. That afternoon, he was on the phone with me, at Compaq, for help installing his software and restoring backups. (amazingly enough, he'd been smart enough to make backups just before throwing the damned thing out the window
The story does not end there. He was so happy with the support that he asked to talk to my supervisor.... A half hour later, the supervisor comes by and asks if I'm busy. He's just finished talking to the lawyer, and found out that the cause of his problem was his HP laser printer that didn't have driver support for his new Windows XP-based computer, and he didn't like being told by HP that they didn't support that printer with XP yet.... So my boss asks if I'm busy, and I say no, so he hands the guy off to me again to fix his printer, on the house.
How did I fix it? I sent him to HP's website to download the Windows 2000 drivers for the printer. I explain to him that yes, I'm aware that he's running Windows XP, but that Windows XP shares a kernel with Windows 2000, and that because of it, XP Home will not install as an upgrade over 2k Pro. Basically, they're the same OS, except that XP has flashy graphical enhancements. (at the time, that was true). So we download the 2k driver for the printer, and 5 minutes later, he's printing again, and asks to talk to the supervisor again.
Long story short... $100 gift certificate for a local steakhouse, and a plaque that reads "top letter generator" is all I have to show for it. Oh, and the satisfaction of knowing that 4 months later, HP announced the Compaq acquisition.... I bet he was peeved at that.
Sounds like you need Slackware. Here's why:
:) Make your own distro and do things the way you want. The end result is that yes, there isn't a whole lot of unity, and there are a whole lot of distros out there. This works to Linux's advantage, however, not towards its detriment. Most distros can be used for basic productivity, but there's a bunch of highly specialized distros out there that do one specific task extremely well. No matter what task you're looking to accomplish, there's a distro that's specialized for it, and there's several other distros that can perform the task with minimal tweaking.
... you did know that Windows has a bootloader too, right?
1. Installing apps sucks on Linux. And don't say "oh, well if you take a couple hours and learn all the commands and how to work out the dependencies, it's really not that bad." It shouldn't be bad at all. It should be a non-issue in 2005. I heard there are some simpler ways that are gaining popularity, but I won't learn about them till next year.
download package-in-question. For 90% of apps, all of the dependancies are already there. For the purposes of argument, let's call it foo-bar-1.0.tgz. Here's how you install it:
installpkg foo-bar-1.0.tgz
And here's how you uninstall it:
removepkg foo-bar-1.0
That's it, that's all. And as I said, 90% of apps out there have most or all of their dependancies already in the base install of Slack if you installed everything in the "l" set of packages.
2. It seems that a lot of Linux enthusiasts are very interested in tinkering with their OS and tweaking stuff and getting it all the way they want it. When I was 16, that might have been interesting. I'm a little older now, and now I'm more interested in doing stuff than getting my OS ready for something I haven't even identified yet. For example, I don't want to tweak ASIO drivers for my sound card, I want to make music.
Slack's the only distro that "just works" for me. Using cars as an analogy, you've basically just bought a really cool car. It'll work out of the box, and you can be productive. If you feel like it, you can take it apart, and rebuild it. Better. Stronger. Faster.
And yes, for me, it "just works". Out of the box, my video card works (1024x768 resolution), out of the box the sound cards on both my desktop (Live! 24-bit) and my laptop work. Out of the box, everything just works.
3. Too many distributions, no unity, blah blah blah.
Fundamental philosophy in Linux: if you don't like the way somebody's doing it, then fork off.
4. Those cursed bootloaders. Moving on...
liloconfig is your friend. Choose "automatic", and sit back and let the bootloader configure itself. There's a reason for the bootloaders, btw: allowing you to have multiple operating systems. If you really feel that strongly about it, you can even configure the Windows bootloader to load Linux.
5. Someone else replied to this article and suggested that Windows users need to strap on a pair and get into Linux. Commercial software (Windows, OSX) has evolved to the point where the act of strapping on pair can be reserved for things that actually require balls. Computing is not one of those things (unless you're in the business of making mind-blowing software or something). Linux still hasn't dug itself out of the user-unfriendliness hole. It's getting better, but it's still a biatch. I'm not going to wrestle with an OS unless there is a compelling reason to do so. I have better things to do.
I installed Linux on my mom's computer, and she didn't even notice for two weeks. She uses the damned thing daily, and when I explained my reasons, she decided to continue running Linux.
It is user friendly, as long as you're willing to take the time to configure it to do what you want. If you prefer a desktop where everything is similar to Windows, use KDE or Gnome. To some extent, XFCE is just as user-friendly as Windows, too. Couple that with a sane
Doesn't that mean that they slowed it down by 900million m/s?
:)
So they made light go backwards?
At twice the original 300million m/s, hence the mention in the article about sending part of the signal faster than the speed of light.
Your choice of window manager has almost nothing to do with how the system is for gaming. FWIW, I play SuperTux, GTK-Board, and Battle for Wesnoth fairly frequently, and they all run great.
What's important from the gaming perspective is your choice of X server, and your graphics driver. With X.Org 6.8.1 and the latest drivers from ATI, my desktop, which has a Radeon 9600 Ultra, gets about 13,000fps in glxgears, and around 100-150fps in things that actually matter like games. I play some games through Cedega or natively (NWN), but I also dualboot that system with XP Professional, which I use when I want to play games that don't run well under Linux.
Only if Linux is your hobby. Something it will never be, and shouldn't be, for the vast majority of people.
You do yourself a disservice by assuming that Gnome and KDE are the only viable DEs for X. I'm sensing that there isn't much point in trying to tell you otherwise, so I'll only bother to point out that even if you want a clone of the Windows or Mac UI, there's alternatives to Gnome/KDE. FVWM leaps to mind immediately, since it's actually supposed to be a Win clone with the default configuration....
As for XFCE, it draws its inspiration from CDE, and should be pretty intuitive and require minimal configuration. Even the right-click program menu automatically updates itself for most applications you install. Couple that with a binary distribution like Debian and an X-based package installation tool, and you've got a ridiculously easy to use Linux system, requiring a minimum of configuration, and all without ever once touching KDE or Gnome.
Jeebus, I'm starting to sound like some kind of fanboy....
But KDE and Gnome go down all the time.
You do realise that there's other desktop environments and window managers than KDE/Gnome, right? I find that those two DEs go down fairly frequently as well. Since switching to XFCE, however, I have never had a crash. Ever. It's absolutely rock-solid, and as long as it's development is focused on speed and stability over, say, bells&whistles, it's going to continue to be rock-solid.
And if you don't like XFCE, there's nothing to stop you from using *box, fvwm, or hell, even tab-window-manager. Maybe your problems with X have less to do with X or Linux themselves, and more to do with your choice of using Desktop Environments with known memory leaks (KDE) and stability problems when dealing with unexpected library versions (Gnome).
And in the event of an X crash, I wouldn't lose my documents, either. At most, I'd lose 5 minutes' work, because that's the interval at which AbiWord is set to autosave my work. Hell, my music wouldn't even stop playing, thanks to me using MPD.
Microsoft may not be evil, but I do feel the need to point out that Microsoft's idea of "default" security permissions is an accident waiting to happen.
Face it. 95% of Windows users haven't got a clue how to secure their Windows box. I'm not going to argue that Windows hasn't come a *long* way since its early versions, and I'm not going to argue that it's impossible to lock down a Windows box to be as secure as any Unix/Linux box you can throw into the fray. You probably know as well as I do that it's entirely possible to harden a Windows machine against most kinds of intrusion.
The problem, however, is that this security is *not* the default setting. By default in Windows XP, users run with root permissions. When you enable a user as an administrator, Windows does not pop up a warning saying "you dummy, this could open you up to some serious security threats like spybots, worms, and malicious code". It just does it and assumes that the user knows what they're doing. That's a mistake when 95% of the users haven't got a clue about computer security.
Sure, there probably are security holes in OSS. But it's open source. *ANYBODY* who wants to can download the source code and do a security audit. They can fix the holes and publish the fixes if they like, or they can take advantage of it for nefarious purposes. Really, they can do whatever they want with the knowledge, though most people publish it. But as long as the user isn't running with root permissions, the kernel will not allow them to write anywhere outside of their home directory.
See, that's the main reason I like Linux: you could probably write a virus or malicious app for Linux, and you could probably dupe *somebody* into running it. But even if you manage to get somebody to run the virus, the worst that will happen is that they'll need to recreate their userid and homedir. The system itself will not come down, because the virus is still being run in userspace.
Couple that with ActiveX, which is a great way to distribute executable code to computers without the user knowing about it, and Microsoft's interesting take on standards (just look at IE), and it's easy to see why people think of MS as evil. I don't see them as evil, I just think that even though they're working on it, they aren't going to be able to fix their security problems until they reexamine their user/admin model, and that they aren't going to ever do that, because they're convinced that it's more user friendly to allow the user to install software without logging in as a special user. It's that very requirement, however, that convinces me that my Linux boxen are stabler and more secure.
As to the original topic, I just want to point out to you that in the realm of software and intellectual property, the past is not an indicator of the future. Just because MS hasn't ever sued anybody doesn't mean that they don't intend to. I can't tell you what the future will bring, and so with MS holding patents such as this I simply have to take it on good faith that they won't sue me for it. That doesn't mean, however, that I shouldn't try to do anything about it to prevent them from getting asinine patents such as this; in fact, it means that I *should* do everything I can to prevent them from ever having that kind of power.