It looks fine under Netscape 6, and it looks horrible under IE 2.0. QED, Netscape must rule and IE suck, right? Because comparing a current release brower to an obsolete one is what we do on Slashdot, right?
Does the USsian goverment think that Canada belongs to them
Yes. Oh, it's more nunanced than that, but Canada is a military and economic appendage of the United States, and English-speaking Canada isn't any more culturally distinct from the U.S. than Texans, Californians, Rhode Islanders, and Michiganians are from each other. While Canada isn't states 51 through 60, it might as well be.
Perhaps the PC industry has always remained stuck in the x86 rut not out of choice, but because it couldn't escape
Er, no. Transitioning to NT for Alpha with FX!32 was no more technically difficult than the 68k-PPC transition. The reason that the PC industry has "remained stuck in the x86 rut" is because it didn't have a dictator like Apple to force a transition, and because RISC isn't magically superior.
Software designed and optimized for a consumer-grade desktop RISC chip doesn't perform any better than software designed and optimized for a consumer-grade desktop x86 chip. Relative "elegance" is irrelevant -- there is no material benefit to a switch.
Nor is it an effect of market position giving higher-volume consumer chipmakers an advantage -- otherwise a top-of-the-line Motorola chip would certainly outperform a top-of-the-line AMD chip, given the 1995 positions of each company. But the Athlon manages to kick the consumer-grade PPC's ass anyway.
All the bullshit about RISC superiority is just that -- bullshit. Inertia is an excuse, not an explanation.
But defining a natural base unit for time might be difficult unless you do it at an atomic level
You mean like, say, the Planck interval, the fundamental quanta of time throughout the universe, already mentioned in my post?
And who cares if the units conform to the real-life lengths of the year or day? That's nice for parochial use on Earth, but utterly useless anywhere else in the universe.
But how do you scale that up with out calling it a mega-atomic-modulation or some idiotic thing that would end up being based in 10 anyhow
You use base 12. You know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 20...
----
Finally, note that in follow-up to a different reply, I revealed that I'm not serious. I'm merely pointing out that the Metric system is as culturally-conformant and irrational as all the other systems of measure. The only advantage it has is that modern education in mathematics trains us to use base 10, instead of calculating by multiplying by small numbers (2, 3, 4) to next-larger units. But base 10 is a body-based cultural choice just like the length of the foot was; the logical choices would be binary for simplicity (with humans using octal or hexdecimal for convenience), or base 12/60/420/840/2520/etc. for easy divisibility.
The law you're looking for is "contributing to the delinquency of a minor". The teacher induced a minor to break a law by claiming there was a reward for taking the action. That's a serious offense, especially for a teacher.
In terms of propellant, the Earth-Mars, Mars-Earth, and Mars-Moon trips are each shorter than the Earth-Moon trip*. And Mars can be a lot more self-sufficient for far less capital investment than a moon base can.
So colonization of Mars will be cheaper than colonization of the Moon, and the costs of establishing both Martian and Lunar bases will be cheaper in the order of Mars-Moon than the order of Moon-Mars.
*The reason we went to the Moon first is that, if you have to take all your fuel from Earth, the combined Earth-Moon-Earth round trip takes less than an Earth-Mars-Earth trip. But we've figured out how to make propellant on Mars.
AFAIK the body causing the perturbations of the orbit of Uranus that lead him to look have still not been located - Pluto wasn't it.
In fact, there's no such perturbations. With the Voyager 2 flyby, we now know the masses of Uranus and Neptune far more accurately; using those values, the perturbations disappear.
OTOH, it's possible there's a.03-stellar-mass luminous star orbiting the Sun at a mere two light years, or a brown dwarf even closer; there are lots of 12th apparent magnitude and lower objects out there that haven't had their apparent motions catalogued.
If you read mine again, you'll note that it uses the same 12 you like as the ratio of the inch to the foot.
That lends itself well to creating "good for everyday human use" units that are simple integer ratios to all the other scientific units, by making the human unit twice (1/6), thrice (1/4), four times (1/3), or six times (1/2) the smaller (larger) scientific unit.
And since the ultimately fundamental units are universal constants, it's actually a better system for science than the metric system, if the scientist can let go of their irrational preference for using base 10 in favor of the far more logical base 12.
Er, let's move to something a bit more logical than the Metric system, with its completely ad-hoc collection of basic units and arbitrary base-ten mathematics.
No, let's use truly basic units. The Planck interval for time, the Planck length for distance, an electron volt for electrical charge, an electron mass for mass, etc. In base-12 for the convenient evenly-divisibility by 2, 3, and 4.
Or, perhaps because Israel is concerned about non-government paramilitary organizations hostile to Israel having access to satellite data?
Sure, such organizations do have contacts with national governments hostile to Israel, but in general it's easier for the Israelis to infiltrate governments than paramilitary organizations, and the time to procure the imaging would be longer if the paramilitaries have to work through national intelligence bureaucracies.
Absolutely nothing stopped any other company from making their servers accessible to AIM. The only "interoperability" problem was other chat providers demanding to be able to use the AOL IM servers and userbase without giving even ad revenue back to AOL. They wanted a larger network of users than AIM had that would be mostly paid for by AOL; a double win for the non-AOL side and a double loss for AOL.
So, now MS and Yahoo are going to be rewarded for their attempts to hijack AOL servers with an FCC mandate for AOL to open up its userbase, giving them far greater benefits than AOL will recieve by having access to either the MS or Yahoo chat userbases. Aren't Yahoo and Microsoft big enough to stand on their own two feet?
But the Soviet Union is the only country to ever have 10+ million curies reactor incidents -- 20 million curies at Lake Kystym in 1957, and 100 million at Chernobyl in 1986.
Really? The guy had to litigate, sure, but he wound up with millions. Without patents, he wouldn't have had grounds to sue.
Laws against murder don't protect you from getting murdered, they merely set up penalties if you do get murdered. So by your analysis of patents not working, if you do get murdered, then the murder laws don't work.
"The heroin-induced belief that IBM is in any kind of trouble right now is essentially Libertarian apologetics. 'Oh, the magical mystical hand of the free market will kill the monopoly, there's no need for the DOJ anti-trust investigation.'"
We still use the system because we don't listen to our government.
See, the U.S. Constitution only allows Congress to set weights and measures, and the only weights and meaures Congress ever authorized was the Metric system, back in 1866. In 1875 we were one of the original signatories of the Treaty of the Meter. Since 1893, the internationally agreed-to metric standards have served as the fundamental measurement standards of the United States.
So, we've been legally metric longer than Australia's been independent. But we'll still be using U.S. Customary (which isn't really the same as Imperial, although most of the units are the same) until some bureaucrats start issuing fines for using it. Even then, we'll probably use.30 caliber rifle ammunition (aka "7.62mm NATO") to protest the decision;-)
So you use one of the dozens of free POP3 servers on the Net for your mail, if you're an individual.
Or, if you're spending 5 digits each month, you won't notice another $20, so you buy a dial-in or shell account with any fricking ISP of your choice on Earth and access its servers via TCP/IP over your five-figure account.
It's not a problem to get a non-RBLed account if you know what you're doing.
Quick check -- do you believe the U.S. or the Netherlands is more corporatist?
If you answered the U.S., please take the time to read a book on political science so you don't abuse the term "corporatism" the way Katz does. The U.S. is one of the least corporatist developed nations on Earth. If you prefer the Netherlands' socioeconomic system to that of the U.S., your boogeyman is free-market capitalism, not corporatism.
If you were actually referring to the anticaptialists who wish to use government regualtions and government-union-corporate consultation to insulate big companies from disruptive market forces, then I apologize for questioning your use of "corporatists".
Your suggestion would violate at least three provisions of the Universal Copyright Convention (specifying minimum length of copyright, barring continuing registration requirements, and barring members from ever shortening the copyright protections provided for in their laws). And UCC complinace is required by the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade, which has massive repercusions for every U.S. industry that sells anything overseas.
Back nigh twenty years ago, another company that dominated the computer industry released a platform that was open in specifications, except a small bit of proprietary code. The proprietary bit was cloned and others sold a nearly-identical product for less.
It was IBM, and the product was the PC, and we know how that turned out.
BTW, the browser wars were MS killing a potential alternate platform to their moneymaker with software that they *still* don't make any money from. So that analogy is useless, since MS in this case would theoretically want to continue to make money from OS sales. (Esp. if broken up...)
It's the whole point of religion. "Those that believe are saved, everybody else is doomed".
Er, no, you're wrong. For example, the belief you cite is not a doctrine of the largest single Christian sect on Earth, the Roman Catholic Church (hasn't been since Vatican II). Nor is it a doctrine of Hinduism. Or Buddhism. And those three represent more than half of the religious believers on Earth.
So next time you feel like generalizing on what "all religion" is like, a grasp of actual religious doctrines would be useful to have first.
And before you start slamming into me, first note that I am also an atheist. However, I made sure I knew what I was rejecting first. You obviously didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn straight! While the comparison was mildly funny, the fact that /. linked to it only hours after the Register's article was hilarious...
It looks fine under Netscape 6, and it looks horrible under IE 2.0. QED, Netscape must rule and IE suck, right? Because comparing a current release brower to an obsolete one is what we do on Slashdot, right?
Does the USsian goverment think that Canada belongs to them
Yes. Oh, it's more nunanced than that, but Canada is a military and economic appendage of the United States, and English-speaking Canada isn't any more culturally distinct from the U.S. than Texans, Californians, Rhode Islanders, and Michiganians are from each other. While Canada isn't states 51 through 60, it might as well be.
Perhaps the PC industry has always remained stuck in the x86 rut not out of choice, but because it couldn't escape
Er, no. Transitioning to NT for Alpha with FX!32 was no more technically difficult than the 68k-PPC transition. The reason that the PC industry has "remained stuck in the x86 rut" is because it didn't have a dictator like Apple to force a transition, and because RISC isn't magically superior.
Software designed and optimized for a consumer-grade desktop RISC chip doesn't perform any better than software designed and optimized for a consumer-grade desktop x86 chip. Relative "elegance" is irrelevant -- there is no material benefit to a switch.
Nor is it an effect of market position giving higher-volume consumer chipmakers an advantage -- otherwise a top-of-the-line Motorola chip would certainly outperform a top-of-the-line AMD chip, given the 1995 positions of each company. But the Athlon manages to kick the consumer-grade PPC's ass anyway.
All the bullshit about RISC superiority is just that -- bullshit. Inertia is an excuse, not an explanation.
But defining a natural base unit for time might be difficult unless you do it at an atomic level
You mean like, say, the Planck interval, the fundamental quanta of time throughout the universe, already mentioned in my post?
And who cares if the units conform to the real-life lengths of the year or day? That's nice for parochial use on Earth, but utterly useless anywhere else in the universe.
But how do you scale that up with out calling it a mega-atomic-modulation or some idiotic thing that would end up being based in 10 anyhow
You use base 12. You know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 1A, 1B, 20...
----
Finally, note that in follow-up to a different reply, I revealed that I'm not serious. I'm merely pointing out that the Metric system is as culturally-conformant and irrational as all the other systems of measure. The only advantage it has is that modern education in mathematics trains us to use base 10, instead of calculating by multiplying by small numbers (2, 3, 4) to next-larger units. But base 10 is a body-based cultural choice just like the length of the foot was; the logical choices would be binary for simplicity (with humans using octal or hexdecimal for convenience), or base 12/60/420/840/2520/etc. for easy divisibility.
According to the article, the student was taken to a police station and threatened with criminal charges for his actions.
If the teacher asked the students to commit a crime, could it not be conspiracy?
Maybe not conspiracy, but certainly contributing to delinquency of a minor.
The law you're looking for is "contributing to the delinquency of a minor". The teacher induced a minor to break a law by claiming there was a reward for taking the action. That's a serious offense, especially for a teacher.
In terms of propellant, the Earth-Mars, Mars-Earth, and Mars-Moon trips are each shorter than the Earth-Moon trip*. And Mars can be a lot more self-sufficient for far less capital investment than a moon base can.
So colonization of Mars will be cheaper than colonization of the Moon, and the costs of establishing both Martian and Lunar bases will be cheaper in the order of Mars-Moon than the order of Moon-Mars.
*The reason we went to the Moon first is that, if you have to take all your fuel from Earth, the combined Earth-Moon-Earth round trip takes less than an Earth-Mars-Earth trip. But we've figured out how to make propellant on Mars.
AFAIK the body causing the perturbations of the orbit of Uranus that lead him to look have still not been located - Pluto wasn't it.
.03-stellar-mass luminous star orbiting the Sun at a mere two light years, or a brown dwarf even closer; there are lots of 12th apparent magnitude and lower objects out there that haven't had their apparent motions catalogued.
In fact, there's no such perturbations. With the Voyager 2 flyby, we now know the masses of Uranus and Neptune far more accurately; using those values, the perturbations disappear.
OTOH, it's possible there's a
Okay, that's a nice rant about the metric system.
If you read mine again, you'll note that it uses the same 12 you like as the ratio of the inch to the foot.
That lends itself well to creating "good for everyday human use" units that are simple integer ratios to all the other scientific units, by making the human unit twice (1/6), thrice (1/4), four times (1/3), or six times (1/2) the smaller (larger) scientific unit.
And since the ultimately fundamental units are universal constants, it's actually a better system for science than the metric system, if the scientist can let go of their irrational preference for using base 10 in favor of the far more logical base 12.
(In short, yes, I am joking.)
Er, let's move to something a bit more logical than the Metric system, with its completely ad-hoc collection of basic units and arbitrary base-ten mathematics.
No, let's use truly basic units. The Planck interval for time, the Planck length for distance, an electron volt for electrical charge, an electron mass for mass, etc. In base-12 for the convenient evenly-divisibility by 2, 3, and 4.
making statements against or for far-future technology never works out well..
Sure it does:
"No perpetual motion machine will ever be built."
"No chemical battery can store more power than the maximum energy of chemical bonds."
"No device will ever be able to simultaneously detect the momentum and location of a subatomic particle."
"No optical imaging device can resolve objects to a greater resolution than the limit caused by the diffraction of an intervening medium."
Or, perhaps because Israel is concerned about non-government paramilitary organizations hostile to Israel having access to satellite data?
Sure, such organizations do have contacts with national governments hostile to Israel, but in general it's easier for the Israelis to infiltrate governments than paramilitary organizations, and the time to procure the imaging would be longer if the paramilitaries have to work through national intelligence bureaucracies.
Absolutely nothing stopped any other company from making their servers accessible to AIM. The only "interoperability" problem was other chat providers demanding to be able to use the AOL IM servers and userbase without giving even ad revenue back to AOL. They wanted a larger network of users than AIM had that would be mostly paid for by AOL; a double win for the non-AOL side and a double loss for AOL.
So, now MS and Yahoo are going to be rewarded for their attempts to hijack AOL servers with an FCC mandate for AOL to open up its userbase, giving them far greater benefits than AOL will recieve by having access to either the MS or Yahoo chat userbases. Aren't Yahoo and Microsoft big enough to stand on their own two feet?
But the Soviet Union is the only country to ever have 10+ million curies reactor incidents -- 20 million curies at Lake Kystym in 1957, and 100 million at Chernobyl in 1986.
Really? The guy had to litigate, sure, but he wound up with millions. Without patents, he wouldn't have had grounds to sue.
Laws against murder don't protect you from getting murdered, they merely set up penalties if you do get murdered. So by your analysis of patents not working, if you do get murdered, then the murder laws don't work.
1980:
"The heroin-induced belief that IBM is in any kind of trouble right now is essentially Libertarian apologetics. 'Oh, the magical mystical hand of the free market will kill the monopoly, there's no need for the DOJ anti-trust investigation.'"
There's an exception to that. If you're a libertarian who has been called a Communist, you get to countercall "Nazi" without losing.
We still use the system because we don't listen to our government.
.30 caliber rifle ammunition (aka "7.62mm NATO") to protest the decision ;-)
See, the U.S. Constitution only allows Congress to set weights and measures, and the only weights and meaures Congress ever authorized was the Metric system, back in 1866. In 1875 we were one of the original signatories of the Treaty of the Meter. Since 1893, the internationally agreed-to metric standards have served as the fundamental measurement standards of the United States.
So, we've been legally metric longer than Australia's been independent. But we'll still be using U.S. Customary (which isn't really the same as Imperial, although most of the units are the same) until some bureaucrats start issuing fines for using it. Even then, we'll probably use
Uh-huh.
So you use one of the dozens of free POP3 servers on the Net for your mail, if you're an individual.
Or, if you're spending 5 digits each month, you won't notice another $20, so you buy a dial-in or shell account with any fricking ISP of your choice on Earth and access its servers via TCP/IP over your five-figure account.
It's not a problem to get a non-RBLed account if you know what you're doing.
Quick check -- do you believe the U.S. or the Netherlands is more corporatist?
If you answered the U.S., please take the time to read a book on political science so you don't abuse the term "corporatism" the way Katz does. The U.S. is one of the least corporatist developed nations on Earth. If you prefer the Netherlands' socioeconomic system to that of the U.S., your boogeyman is free-market capitalism, not corporatism.
If you were actually referring to the anticaptialists who wish to use government regualtions and government-union-corporate consultation to insulate big companies from disruptive market forces, then I apologize for questioning your use of "corporatists".
One more drawback:
Your suggestion would violate at least three provisions of the Universal Copyright Convention (specifying minimum length of copyright, barring continuing registration requirements, and barring members from ever shortening the copyright protections provided for in their laws). And UCC complinace is required by the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade, which has massive repercusions for every U.S. industry that sells anything overseas.
Let's assume MS does release an MS Linux.
Back nigh twenty years ago, another company that dominated the computer industry released a platform that was open in specifications, except a small bit of proprietary code. The proprietary bit was cloned and others sold a nearly-identical product for less.
It was IBM, and the product was the PC, and we know how that turned out.
BTW, the browser wars were MS killing a potential alternate platform to their moneymaker with software that they *still* don't make any money from. So that analogy is useless, since MS in this case would theoretically want to continue to make money from OS sales. (Esp. if broken up...)
It's the whole point of religion. "Those that believe are saved, everybody else is doomed".
Er, no, you're wrong. For example, the belief you cite is not a doctrine of the largest single Christian sect on Earth, the Roman Catholic Church (hasn't been since Vatican II). Nor is it a doctrine of Hinduism. Or Buddhism. And those three represent more than half of the religious believers on Earth.
So next time you feel like generalizing on what "all religion" is like, a grasp of actual religious doctrines would be useful to have first.
And before you start slamming into me, first note that I am also an atheist. However, I made sure I knew what I was rejecting first. You obviously didn't.