The ICC has no jurisdiction over events before the ratification of the treaty. The current administration just wants to make sure they can continue to commit war crimes in the future.
The V2 was not an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. It could make it accross the English channel, but that was about it. It was arguably the first ballistic missile, for some definitions of missile.
The first ICBM was not launched until October 1957.
What the heck? Everybody has a cellphone (at least here they do, from CEOs down to homeless people, old ladies down to 10-year-olds). Nobody can control when or where they will get calls. Therefore, everybody understands when others receive calls at inopportune times. Usual courtesy is to leave the room when you receive a call, but people don't look at you like you've committed some heinous crime or something. It happens to everybody, it's the price you pay for being able to reach others, in an emergency or otherwise. Getting angry about it would be like getting angry at somebody for sneezing.
There is legal DVD playback for Linux. I play DVDs with mplayer+decss all the time. Nothing illegal about that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I live in Tanzania, but I think most other sensible countries also allow DeCSS etc.
Don't blame Linux for your government's stupidity.
Why is everyone so obsessed with increasing Linux/open source adoption? Do we really want every single computer user leeching off our community without being able to give anything back? Why is it necessary for products to succeed with "the non-geeks who actually have a social life"? I am happy with Linux as it is. As long as I can continue using it, and continue coming up with hacks to solve any problems I have, I really couldn't care less about marketshare.
Suppose there are 100 million computer users. Then there are nearly 5 million linux users. Then revenue, if every Linux user in the world bought one copy of a given game, would be half a billion dollars. Quite enough to cover the cost of a port.
You, and most other posters here, miss the point. People Don't Want Games. I have never felt the need to install any games on my system, with the possible exception chess (xboard) and solitaire (kpat). The majority of Linux users, and for that matter the majority of computer users, are like-minded: either they only use a computer to check email and word process, or they are intelligent enough to find shooting games to be rather dull and boring compared to all the fascinating information one can access with a computer.
I fail to see how the interfaces are functionally different, even now. Children using computer as educational tools mostly involves word processing and web browsing, both of which are roughly the same on Windows and Linux. Whether the 'save' button is a few pixels away from where it used to be is irrelevant, in fact its important the children learn general concepts rather than exact interfaces.
Whenever I show windows-using friends my Linux (KDE) desktop, the first thing they common on is how it looks just like windows. OpenOffice and Mozilla (with some themes) both have essentially identical interfaces to Word and IE, respectively. The address bar is in the same place, the forward and back buttons are in the same place, the keyboard has the same layout, therefore students can do research exactly the same as they would on Windows.
How about one of these? Clean, elegant design, packed with very feature available. Completely in contrast to the hop-on POS, which looks like a cross between a fisher price toy and a brick.
Well if you still don't own a mobile phone, and suddenly decide you need one, then (unless you only use it a couple times a year) buying a real phone with a prepaid plan is cheaper than buying a new disposable every few months. Plus, with a real phone you can get nice features like text messaging, rudimentary internet access, a digital camera, increasingly amusing games, simple PIM features, etc. To me, a disposable phone is like a disposable computer; you're limiting yourself to a very minimal and locked-down version of a device whose real usefulness lies in its ability to do things it wasn't designed to do.
Clearly, if you use a phone often or for a long period of time, it's cheaper to go out and buy a real phone than to continue buying replacement disposable ones. The main market, therefore, seems to be travelers etc. who will only be in an area for a short while. I'm sorry, but why can't such people just buy another simcard for their existing phone? (As opposed to this crappy disposable one, which apparently can't even send text messages. What the heck is the point of a phone that can't send text messages?) Simcards cost about $6 in most countries, much cheaper than one of these things, and you get the benefit of still being able to use your own phone.
The nVidia Linux drivers are buggy, crash-prone and nastily closed source. I got so sick of them I just went back to using unaccelerated graphics. ATI at least provides information for DRI, resulting in Free (if unadvanced) drivers.
They already have a slightly competent judge. Its probably better for everybody for IBM to fight this out based on the case they already have. We need a legal affirmation of the GPL, for one thing, which is unlikely to come up if IBM has another, better case based on the Novell copyrights. After SCO loses, then IBM can buy Novell.
To submit such a statement would be to claim that what SCO says is true. We know (almost for certain) that SCO's claims will not hold up in court, which would render your claims invalid as well (since SCO using the code is allowed by the GPL) and in theory make you guilty of purjury.
Actually, you can. PPC has some special optimizations for emulating x86 (IIRC), which are what VirtualPC uses, and their removal/modification is why VPC doesn't work (yet) on G5. Athlon64, likewise, has plenty of cruft for compatibility with 32bit x86, but bochs can't really take advantage of it. Arguably this is something compilers should deal with, but they don't always manage, and they never do so as well as human-written platform-specific code.
Looking at the prices on these things at NewEgg, it looks like I would have to pay $450 US just to get a crippled version with no dual channel, and $750 for the main product. Can somebody explain to me why this is a better idea than buying an Opteron 140? (currently $248 on pricewatch.) The Opteron is socket 940, supports dual channel, and (aside from clockspeed) seems quite superior to the Athlon64 nonFX. So why is the Athlon64 so much more expensive?
I don't live in the US. But I've visted there several times in the last few years, and there is nowhere I can find a simcard for my GSM phone. I have my phone scan for GSM networks and it finds none, even in large cities. When I am am back outside the US and my phone works again, I send messages to cell phones in the States (using numbers that work for voice-calling the same phones) but the messages are never received. My phone works in places like Tanzania, but not in the US.
Perhaps I'm just missing something huge, but I have get to find any evidence that the US system is anything but horibly behind the rest of the world.
"There have been similar designs in the past, but nothing with this kind of power."
Sorry, but smaller, equally powerful machines have been quite available for a while now. Notable examples include the SaintSong Latte P4 (specs here) and the Jadetec Micropc4 just to name Pentium4-capable solutions. In cases where a slower CPU will do, even smaller options are available, such as the SaintSong Cappuccino or Espresso systems (specs here and here).
The main unifying factor of all these systems is that all claim to be the world's smallest. Currently, the title of "World's Smallest Desktop Pentium4" claimed in the article title actually belongs to the Latte (above), which has a volume of about 1951 cm^3 (although the Micropc4 comes close at 1976 cm^3). The iWill ZPC in the article is comparatively huge, at over 2613 cm^3, although Shuttle's XPC systems are over 11000 cm^3, so the iWill is certainly a small system. However, while the iWill looks to have other interesting innovations as far as minimizing temperature and noise, it fails to beat the competition in both size and performance.
Actually inheritance tax is a good idea, and should be 100% for everybody IMHO. Why the heck should any person get more money than another simply because their parents had more? The whole concept of inheritance is unfair and allows people to become rich without working for it.
Of course, if all inheritance was confiscated by the government, parents who were near death would simply make large gifts to their children, but gifts in kind could be limited to a fixed value (say 10000 GBP, varying with inflation) to prevent too much of this.
Both the VAT and the hormone beef issues are cases of the EU crippling its own industries and then expecting other nations to do the same. The unfair advantage given to the US companies could be removed if the EU stopped taxing online sales and allowed hormone beef production. Instead, the EU insists on forcing its own industries to be inferior.
Yes, there are some justifications for online taxing and hormone beef prohibition, but the methods the EU chooses are hardly the best. Any extra revenue coming from online sales tax could be gotten through instead raising income tax, which would have the effect of getting more money from those with a lot of money rather than more money from those who shop a lot. As for hormone beef, if people are willing to live with any risk from the hormones in exchange for lower price and longer shelf life, then thats their right. Others can buy 'organic' beef.
*sigh* Yet another reason I'm glad I live in Africa.
I disagree. Picking up your pencil and moving it a few millimeters doesn't slow you down that much. I recently sat IGCSE (UK essay-style) examinations, writing exclusively with print (seperate) letters, and in general I finished just as quickly as those of my classmates who wrote in cursive. A much more important factor is how much practice one has had with each type of writing, which is why I am faster at typing than printing, faster at printing than SMSing, and faster at SMSing than cursive.
At any rate, its not just about how much you write, its about the content. If you know what you're doing you can compress the content, write concisely, and finish quickly no matter how you are writing.
No matter how advanced you make your AI brain, it's still a turing machine (with maybe a few quantum effects, which just work out to probability and more pure math), and no matter how advanced you make the mechanical part of it, it's still limited by laws of physics, which boil down to more math. Same is true of, well, everything in the world.
Americans, it's time you do something about the thieves running the current Administration! They do not represent the will of the people of the United States of America.
The disturbing thing is, increasingly it seems that the do represent the "will of the people". Judging from the polls, large number of people are war-loving "my country right or wrong" rednecks. Even more people that the administration's policies would suggest seem to hate all people of islamic descent. And even more people seem to think that anybody who dissents is un-American.
Slashdot Mirror
The ICC has no jurisdiction over events before the ratification of the treaty. The current administration just wants to make sure they can continue to commit war crimes in the future.
v2 = first ICBM
The V2 was not an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile. It could make it accross the English channel, but that was about it. It was arguably the first ballistic missile, for some definitions of missile.
The first ICBM was not launched until October 1957.
What the heck? Everybody has a cellphone (at least here they do, from CEOs down to homeless people, old ladies down to 10-year-olds). Nobody can control when or where they will get calls. Therefore, everybody understands when others receive calls at inopportune times. Usual courtesy is to leave the room when you receive a call, but people don't look at you like you've committed some heinous crime or something. It happens to everybody, it's the price you pay for being able to reach others, in an emergency or otherwise. Getting angry about it would be like getting angry at somebody for sneezing.
There is legal DVD playback for Linux. I play DVDs with mplayer+decss all the time. Nothing illegal about that. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I live in Tanzania, but I think most other sensible countries also allow DeCSS etc.
Don't blame Linux for your government's stupidity.
Why is everyone so obsessed with increasing Linux/open source adoption? Do we really want every single computer user leeching off our community without being able to give anything back? Why is it necessary for products to succeed with "the non-geeks who actually have a social life"? I am happy with Linux as it is. As long as I can continue using it, and continue coming up with hacks to solve any problems I have, I really couldn't care less about marketshare.
Suppose there are 100 million computer users. Then there are nearly 5 million linux users. Then revenue, if every Linux user in the world bought one copy of a given game, would be half a billion dollars. Quite enough to cover the cost of a port.
You, and most other posters here, miss the point. People Don't Want Games. I have never felt the need to install any games on my system, with the possible exception chess (xboard) and solitaire (kpat). The majority of Linux users, and for that matter the majority of computer users, are like-minded: either they only use a computer to check email and word process, or they are intelligent enough to find shooting games to be rather dull and boring compared to all the fascinating information one can access with a computer.
Except you can buy an unlocked phone, and put your own sim in. It's just a lot more expensive.
I fail to see how the interfaces are functionally different, even now. Children using computer as educational tools mostly involves word processing and web browsing, both of which are roughly the same on Windows and Linux. Whether the 'save' button is a few pixels away from where it used to be is irrelevant, in fact its important the children learn general concepts rather than exact interfaces.
Whenever I show windows-using friends my Linux (KDE) desktop, the first thing they common on is how it looks just like windows. OpenOffice and Mozilla (with some themes) both have essentially identical interfaces to Word and IE, respectively. The address bar is in the same place, the forward and back buttons are in the same place, the keyboard has the same layout, therefore students can do research exactly the same as they would on Windows.
Running debian here, but it kills me to have non-free stuff installed. Plus, nVidias drivers don't compile well under 2.6.
How about one of these? Clean, elegant design, packed with very feature available. Completely in contrast to the hop-on POS, which looks like a cross between a fisher price toy and a brick.
Well if you still don't own a mobile phone, and suddenly decide you need one, then (unless you only use it a couple times a year) buying a real phone with a prepaid plan is cheaper than buying a new disposable every few months. Plus, with a real phone you can get nice features like text messaging, rudimentary internet access, a digital camera, increasingly amusing games, simple PIM features, etc. To me, a disposable phone is like a disposable computer; you're limiting yourself to a very minimal and locked-down version of a device whose real usefulness lies in its ability to do things it wasn't designed to do.
If you enjoy actual audio-based talking so much, what are you doing posting to Slashdot?
Text in general is a much more efficient, less ambiguous, less error prone, and (IMHO) vastly superior way of communicating information.
Clearly, if you use a phone often or for a long period of time, it's cheaper to go out and buy a real phone than to continue buying replacement disposable ones. The main market, therefore, seems to be travelers etc. who will only be in an area for a short while. I'm sorry, but why can't such people just buy another simcard for their existing phone? (As opposed to this crappy disposable one, which apparently can't even send text messages. What the heck is the point of a phone that can't send text messages?) Simcards cost about $6 in most countries, much cheaper than one of these things, and you get the benefit of still being able to use your own phone.
The nVidia Linux drivers are buggy, crash-prone and nastily closed source. I got so sick of them I just went back to using unaccelerated graphics. ATI at least provides information for DRI, resulting in Free (if unadvanced) drivers.
They already have a slightly competent judge. Its probably better for everybody for IBM to fight this out based on the case they already have. We need a legal affirmation of the GPL, for one thing, which is unlikely to come up if IBM has another, better case based on the Novell copyrights. After SCO loses, then IBM can buy Novell.
To submit such a statement would be to claim that what SCO says is true. We know (almost for certain) that SCO's claims will not hold up in court, which would render your claims invalid as well (since SCO using the code is allowed by the GPL) and in theory make you guilty of purjury.
Actually, you can. PPC has some special optimizations for emulating x86 (IIRC), which are what VirtualPC uses, and their removal/modification is why VPC doesn't work (yet) on G5. Athlon64, likewise, has plenty of cruft for compatibility with 32bit x86, but bochs can't really take advantage of it. Arguably this is something compilers should deal with, but they don't always manage, and they never do so as well as human-written platform-specific code.
Looking at the prices on these things at NewEgg, it looks like I would have to pay $450 US just to get a crippled version with no dual channel, and $750 for the main product. Can somebody explain to me why this is a better idea than buying an Opteron 140? (currently $248 on pricewatch.) The Opteron is socket 940, supports dual channel, and (aside from clockspeed) seems quite superior to the Athlon64 nonFX. So why is the Athlon64 so much more expensive?
I don't live in the US. But I've visted there several times in the last few years, and there is nowhere I can find a simcard for my GSM phone. I have my phone scan for GSM networks and it finds none, even in large cities. When I am am back outside the US and my phone works again, I send messages to cell phones in the States (using numbers that work for voice-calling the same phones) but the messages are never received. My phone works in places like Tanzania, but not in the US.
Perhaps I'm just missing something huge, but I have get to find any evidence that the US system is anything but horibly behind the rest of the world.
There is no sig.
"There have been similar designs in the past, but nothing with this kind of power."
Sorry, but smaller, equally powerful machines have been quite available for a while now. Notable examples include the SaintSong Latte P4 (specs here) and the Jadetec Micropc4 just to name Pentium4-capable solutions. In cases where a slower CPU will do, even smaller options are available, such as the SaintSong Cappuccino or Espresso systems (specs here and here).
The main unifying factor of all these systems is that all claim to be the world's smallest. Currently, the title of "World's Smallest Desktop Pentium4" claimed in the article title actually belongs to the Latte (above), which has a volume of about 1951 cm^3 (although the Micropc4 comes close at 1976 cm^3). The iWill ZPC in the article is comparatively huge, at over 2613 cm^3, although Shuttle's XPC systems are over 11000 cm^3, so the iWill is certainly a small system. However, while the iWill looks to have other interesting innovations as far as minimizing temperature and noise, it fails to beat the competition in both size and performance.
There is no sig.
Actually inheritance tax is a good idea, and should be 100% for everybody IMHO. Why the heck should any person get more money than another simply because their parents had more? The whole concept of inheritance is unfair and allows people to become rich without working for it.
Of course, if all inheritance was confiscated by the government, parents who were near death would simply make large gifts to their children, but gifts in kind could be limited to a fixed value (say 10000 GBP, varying with inflation) to prevent too much of this.
There is no sig.
Both the VAT and the hormone beef issues are cases of the EU crippling its own industries and then expecting other nations to do the same. The unfair advantage given to the US companies could be removed if the EU stopped taxing online sales and allowed hormone beef production. Instead, the EU insists on forcing its own industries to be inferior.
Yes, there are some justifications for online taxing and hormone beef prohibition, but the methods the EU chooses are hardly the best. Any extra revenue coming from online sales tax could be gotten through instead raising income tax, which would have the effect of getting more money from those with a lot of money rather than more money from those who shop a lot. As for hormone beef, if people are willing to live with any risk from the hormones in exchange for lower price and longer shelf life, then thats their right. Others can buy 'organic' beef.
*sigh* Yet another reason I'm glad I live in Africa.
There is no sig.
I disagree. Picking up your pencil and moving it a few millimeters doesn't slow you down that much. I recently sat IGCSE (UK essay-style) examinations, writing exclusively with print (seperate) letters, and in general I finished just as quickly as those of my classmates who wrote in cursive. A much more important factor is how much practice one has had with each type of writing, which is why I am faster at typing than printing, faster at printing than SMSing, and faster at SMSing than cursive.
At any rate, its not just about how much you write, its about the content. If you know what you're doing you can compress the content, write concisely, and finish quickly no matter how you are writing.
Hate to break it to you, but it's ALL pure math.
No matter how advanced you make your AI brain, it's still a turing machine (with maybe a few quantum effects, which just work out to probability and more pure math), and no matter how advanced you make the mechanical part of it, it's still limited by laws of physics, which boil down to more math. Same is true of, well, everything in the world.
This sig is false.
Americans, it's time you do something about the thieves running the current Administration! They do not represent the will of the people of the United States of America.
The disturbing thing is, increasingly it seems that the do represent the "will of the people". Judging from the polls, large number of people are war-loving "my country right or wrong" rednecks. Even more people that the administration's policies would suggest seem to hate all people of islamic descent. And even more people seem to think that anybody who dissents is un-American.
*sigh* What a sad country I used to live in...