To summarize, if Galileo had said "The Earth revolves around the Sun" and left it at that, he probably would have been ignored by the Church. Instead he said "The Earth revolves around the Sun, which contradicts Church doctrine, so the Church is full of idiots who are utterly, completely wrong about this, wow, look how stupid they are!" Big difference.
This is overstating the case in the other direction. He simply wrote his book as a Socratic arguement. One voice would ask a question or make a statement based on "common sense" and the other would decimate the "common sense" idea based on logical arguement based on simple facts both accepted. Some people in the church thought the common sense character represented them. Galileo said it didn't, it represented his own arguements and the logical arguements were just mouthing Copernicus as a devil's advocate. Obviously this didn't didn't hold much water since anyone reading the book knew the "common sense" was nonsense and Copernicus was right. Galileo thought he could get away with speaking the truth because he was friends with the pope who very much liked science and Galileo's ideas. He thought the pope would intervene on his behalf, but the pope was in the middle of a political war and dropped him as quick as Mr. Clinton dropped Dr. Joycelyn Elders for speaking another unpopular truth.
In other words he just had terrible political timing. We all know politics still effects science as much as we wish it didn't. That Jesuit probably did some good things to deserve the honor, just like some usually incomprehensibly idiotic seeming politicians sometimes do even today.
Galileo was nothing but political road kill.
Besides if it weren't for the Inquisition, my City of New York wouldn't have had it's first mass immigration of Jews and Muslims, and we wouldn't have had the Flushing Declaration (of human rights for all taxpayers) affirmed by the Dutch, and so we my have never had that freedom loving language in the Declaration of Independence or even the Bill of Rights.
In the USA, life expectancy increased 60% from 1900 to 2000. In Italy, 80%. In Japan, 80%. In Mexico, 120%.
Most of the increase in life expectency between 1900 and 2000 in the western world came before penicillin. Yep washing our hands after going to the bathroom and not drinking foul water or eating spoilt food accounts for most of it. There were people who lived a century long before modern medicine, they were just real lucky not to get diarrhea and die. But how many 5000 y.o. are there still around?
I don't believe it. We are carbon based beings. Carbon eventually deteriorates(sp?).
Are you serious? You're worried about the carbon turning into Boron and Helium? Most of your Carbon molecules will be just fine at the last gasp of the universe billions of years hence.
Are you worried about the molecules breaking down? Your body is constantly remaking and repairing itself. I doubt you have very many of the molecules you were born with. Silicon isn't any better really, neither is germanium, tin, or lead, all bond pretty much the same and are really more likely to decay into other elements than carbon; not that you really have to worry about that.
How do they go about maintaining the carbon in our bodies? Your body does that quite well, that's sort of the basis for carbon dating and all that. While you are alive you constantly replace your carbon atoms, maintaining a balance of carbon-12 and carbon-14. Once your dead the process soon stops and you start to contain more and more carbon-12 and less and less carbon-14. (i.e. you lose enough weight that your granny might start to worry about your health.)
Don't turn anthills into mountains, people. I am sure even the dumber PHB can understand that this file has nothing to do with "Pac Man"... Ooops... There goes another DMCA violation!!;-)
Ummm, yeah except my internet connection was down for almost a week because of one of these dumb ass letters that was obviously never verified by a human being. These things cause real damage. I'd be very willing to join a class action we could call it "Humanity vs. Evil Monopolists" to avoid listing all 6 billion of us and the evil DMCA using bastards.
My letter just spurred me to e-mail some friends at the BBC and NYT and set up a few freenet nodes, but I wish I could do more. At the very least each of these letters should require them to put a few hundred dollars in escrow payable to the innocent victim. Then they might hire someone to verify their claims or at least make a good faith effort to contact the person, they could have Googled for my subnet and gotten my e-mail.
Subscribe to this list, and you had this story about 12 hours ago. You also downloaded and updated your src tree and fixed the bug in a matter of a few minutes. Why is it that a FreeBSD SA makes it to this site and Linux SAs don't?
Prolly cuz the editor and poster were thinking of "only one remote security breach in the default configuration in seven years" OpenBSD. There are local user exploits found all the time in the Linux distros and in the BSDs, when remote vulnerabilities are found in any of them it usually does make it to/.
But yeah, I usually read about and check my system based on security advisories before it ever makes it to slashdot.. prolly everyone else does as well which explains the 12 hour lag.
Sounds like you watched that PBS special on the Greeks last night...
hehe, caught red eyed. I just saw a few minutes of it, I was waiting for King of the Hill to come on; gotta connect with my redneck roots once in a while. But I always find the Greeks fascinating. There seems to be an analog to just about every modern problem in their history somewhere. I'm sure there were in other cultures as well, but they are so comparitively well documented. That's one thing we should thank the ancient Semites, Persians and Turks for...I remember when I first read Plato it was like I knew these people talking, they didn't seem like "ancient peoples" anymore. Maybe someday we'll find someone saved some of those books the Jesuits were so intent on burning in South America. I imagine those stories it would prove as interesting as the Greeks have been to us. There are plenty of desert caves west of the Andes that could preserve manuscripts for millenia.
The same thing the government gained when it executed the Rosenbergs for relatively minor espionage crimes.
There have also been admisions that they knew Ethel was completely innocent and they made up the bomb stuff to get a confession out of Julius. They bluffed to extract a confession and it started a ball rolling they couldn't stop. For all we know this is similar, and maybe we will know in 50 years... Those who assume Mike is guilty need to educate themselves on previous witch hunts.
Yeah, those that trained Bin Laden should indeed be punished. Oh wait, that would be the CIA - I guess the world isn't black and white after all.
Has there ever been any dictator/terrorist the CIA didn't train?
The CIA does seem to be the undisputed master of finding the future evildoers of the world and bankrolling them.
Does anyone want to take bets on when Japan will turn over Fujimori, the US backed former dictator of Peru? Peru's now democratic government turned over 700 pages of evidence of death squads and truely magnificant levels of corruption captured on tape by his former security chief and, of course, CIA informant, Vladamir Montesinos. (Magnificent in the sense of 1 Billion dollars stolen from the state coffers of a poor country of a few million, purportedly all for bribes. Our congresscritters would eat live babies for that level of corruption. And Montesinos even paid the bribes in US greenbacks.) I guess it ain't terror if you're just killing Native Americans and forcibly sterilizing their widows.
If he had been born a US citizen, I'd cut him some slack and merely imprison him for the duration of hostilities. As a naturalized citizen, he deserves either deportation or more jail time for lying during the naturization process.
Woah, first off I'm sure he gave his pledge of allegiance honestly. The USA was a very different country 14 years ago. It was a country where we tried and convicted Americans that promoted terrorsism like John Poindexter and Oliver North. Now one of those traitors is heading up the TIA and the other is a motivational speaker.
Just because someone is naturalized does not mean they ever had to take an oath of any kind. I was born at the only hospital near the military base my mother was living at. She immediately applied for my citizenship and I have been a naturalized citizen since before I knew we were still following that tragic example of the Spartans*. Or much less that we still used that other tool of oppression the super class conscious British Empire invented, the passport. She could have been anywhere outside the United States and could have applied for my citizenship, at the time any white child born to an American citizen had the right to citizenship. Now you are an alien under our laws until you are naturalized but then it was just a formality, if your mother was a citizen you had the right to a citizenship and could apply for it when you felt like it.
*The Spartans kept redefining citizenship after their pride ran even higher at the defeat of Athens, narrowing and narrowing it until there were just a thousand full citizens left. Then they battled the tiny city next door, who after decades of being plundered had learned to fight. They put ten men on every one Spartan, they wiped out four hundred of them in one fell swoop. Sparta soon lost not only it's slave class but all the tens of thoasands of people who had their citizenship stripped for not being patriotic enough or not paying their taxes promptly enough or marrying the wrong woman, etc. A few hundred years later they were a turist attraction for the Romans; a Colonial Williamsburg of their day, except they whipped boys to death in dramatic retellings of their former glory.
I know NOTHING about Linux. Except that it is free (as in beer). Okay I know a little bit more then that. Like how it is user supported and such. Only "free (as in beer)" versions of Linux are user supported various vendors produce their own versions with various support levels.
My first question is, is there a movement to get the SCO code out of Linux?
As far as anyone knows there is no SCO code in Linux. SCO has hinted that they think own anything derived from UNIX ideas, which might include any program written in C, C++, Java and C# under their expansive interpretation of derivative rights. This includes practically all software not written in COBOL, even Lisp interpreters are written in C. But no one thinks that this is how any sane judge would ever think of defining copyright derivation this way, especially as it goes against every precident known to man.
There is another unsubstanciated allegation that SCO has thrown out that there are outright copies of code, this is possible, but 99.999999999% chance that the copy was from Linux into a SCO product, meaning the SCO product is in violation of someone's copyright. In anycase there is no movement to remove such code since no one knows what it might be, everyone knows their own code is clean, perhaps someone dead did something not kosher? No way to know unless SCO substanciates their slander.
Another idea SCO has suggested is that JFS the OS/2 filesystem, now supported in Linux, is a derivative due to the details of how the port to Linux was done. No one really believes derivative rights are a strong enough concept for this to fly. Essentially they are saying because AIX has a SystemV compatibility layer that IBM bought a perpetual license to from a former holder of the SystemV copyright and they ported the OS/2 filesystem to POSIX (A standard not owned by SCO) and may have made some modifications to the interface that were specific to SystemV that survived to Linux, which is a POSIX compatible system with few SystemV lineages outside of the ones in POSIX. Because of all those conditionals SCO owns the Linux implementation of the OS/2 filesystem. But still this has a much better chance of being found tenable than the "all bases belong to us" arguement. And if they should win, JFS can be removed in 10 minutes time since it's an also-ran fs that seems to have lost out to XFS and ext3 in Linux. Of course should this arguement win in court it will cause a lot of troubles world wide, expect shreaders to be bought in bulk and very tough document retention policies to become the norm, and computer books to be banned from the workplace.
SCO may have a case against IBM seperate from all these unfounded and unlikely crackpot theories they have made up. IBM vehemently denies it, but if not for SCO's looney statements and behaviour IBM's credibility wouldn't be so much greater than SCO's. But this relationship is governed by secret contracts none of us are privy to. Perhaps they will settle and JFS will be removed, I wouldn't bet on it, but anything is possible in a common law country. From all appearances SCO has performed this hara-kari to get bought out, the "we may be a 2 bit company but we can cause you billions in damages by blowing ourselves up - why don't you give us $100 million to go quietly into the night" strategy. IBM didn't bite any neither did any of the smaller players. Even Mandrake buying these suckers would have been more than nothing. So they proceed with the suicide to prove a point and make it easier for future extortionists to ply their trade. (Of course, there seems to be some insider trading going on, so the strategy may be to abscond in some western nation that doesn't extradite non-violent financial criminals.)
In fact, a small amount of noise actual can improve the signal representation! But that is a rather long discussion.
How do CD players reconstruct the signal these days? When I was doing my EE there were graduate students working on polynomial reconstruction. I guess at that point CD's either just used a straight DAC to analog filter (cheap) or a linear filter into an analog filter. I'd think now CD players could have the brains to introduce to push the estimated error in the current sample's reconstruction to the reconstruction of the next sample if the output accuracy isn't great enough (say you have 20 bits in and 24 bits out and you really would like 32 bits out.)
I work in computer graphics and we add pseudo-randomness all the time to get a better reconstruction. But it's because we have an infinite frequency signal (the model) that we sample that only a few times per pixel. With a CD all of that should be done in the studio with no sampling error showing up at on the CD except in the form of a little noise. Truthfully my impression is that you need a low pass filter on CD audio maybe with a 3db at 17khz, just because there are so many CD's that are made by people without any basic understanding of the technology. If I were making a home stereo as opposed to a car/portable player I wouldn't do any filtering except for the limits of the amplifier stage, but have a "Amateur CD" button that did the filtering digitaly so that people might return some of these things if they were expecting a professionally made CD. I'd also use a decent DSP enough DSP to do have a "Cathode Tube" sound filter. Maybe have a simple ADC input so that the owner's children could use the stereo system as a guitar amp.
I brought a couple friends to a Si Se concert a couple days ago and had to apologise to them after the first few songs sounded like crap. The band started to play quiter songs after that and the mix engineer was apparently disabused from turning up the volume again, but it happened again on the second to last song. It wasn't that the first songs were painfully loud dB wise it was just it was louder than the sound system could handle so all the peaks were clipped to white noise. (Si Se has a Brazil Pop sound so there are plenty of drums, and there is a viola too.) Ironically their CD is mastered acceptably, there are a few songs sound better on a television recording I heard but for the most part it's ok.
OGL 2.0...
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OpenGL 1.5
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· Score: 3, Informative
- What still remains before we can say OpenGL is back toward its original goal (you write for one standard instead of having to write for every single little card driver, something kind of ruined by the fact that many things these days, every card uses a different opengl "extention" to do the exact same goal.)
- What still remains that DirectX excels at that OpenGL is lagging behind at
I don't think pt.1 has really been lost, unless you are doing really cutting edge stuff you can use OpenGL pretty happily as is. Many scientific applications are actually coded to Performer which works just fine on OpenGL 1.0. I've written lots of stuff, some just a couple years ago, that used plain immediate mode OGL 1.0, with a switch added later on for vertex arrays.
What remains is the vertex and pixel shaders, these will be in 2.0. They are already pretty much supported with the nv FX and I guess the 3D Labs card. I haven't been programming the ATI card, though many have for it's speed advantage, but from what I understand it doesn't quite live up to the requirements of 2.0. Also I think 3D Labs is pressing for infinite length programs, this can be implemented in the driver by simply compiling to multiple passes implicitly, though who knows about the performance. But the nv would handily beat the ATI if you do this because it can natively handle pretty long instruction streams. Unless this is already a driver trick, I dunno.
2.0 will almost certainly wait until ATI is ready on the hardware level at least. If you program to extensions...OpenGL is ahead of Direct X, but this means you are stuck with the vendor if you use their specific stuff, say using fp30 Cg on the FX. I think everyone pretty much does program to extensions and not the standard if they are doing cutting edge stuff, usually with a compile or run-time code switch based on the extensions present.
That's _thee_ key feature Apple needed to do the fully OpenGL desktop, along with a pile of more eligant error handling of course. Glad to see it's now standard.
I suspect it's for bind to texture, not anything that can already be done by just using part of the texture. Supposedly nVidia has been waiting for 1.5 before doing bind to texture in UNIX environments (currently only a WGL extension.) For me, on the FX, copy has actually turned out faster than bind, but that is hopefully just a driver limitation. Rectangular textures also have nice coordinates for using them in multi-layer programmable pipeline settings. (I haven't read the specs yet, just extrapolating from the nVidia extension.)
The "code is law" argument is also somewhat of a slogan for those who advocate all source being Open Source. I don't agree with that either. Yes, the file formats and protocols should be open, but all kinds of "citizens" should be allowed to use them.
I'm in the camp that thinks all source should be published, but not everything should be open source, as in GPL/BSD. (I don't think we should compel this state of affairs with law, but perhaps encourage it by denying copyright, trade secret, and patent protection on anything in unpublished code and their derivative works, they could still rely on contract law however.) I do think governments should not pay for election machines that are not open source on basic economic grounds, but should never ever ever never in a million billion years on threat of slow and painful death allow an election to be run on code that is not published and available to all comers in compilable and executable form with no restrictions on access. The difference is, I think closed source can delay progress and cause economic harm under certain conditions while undiscoverable fixed elections destroy our liberty. One is a policy arguement I could debate and accept compromise or even temporary loss on, the other is a basic liberty issue I would shoot people over.
I further think, at least for now, election machines should print out a paper ballot that you drop folded in half into a clear acrylic or glass box. And that any instant tallying only be unofficial and the paper ballots be electronically counted twice and hand counted in case of problems. At some point it may be acceptible to print out a receipt that you can use to confirm your vote in a later date in some place where we can be sure no one is looking over your shoulder and that you are in fact holding your own receipt. But only once such procedures are well audited and there is some benefit to that over an electronically assisted paper ballot system. Electronic Assist is great though, you can eliminate spoilt ballots, write in candidates can be tallied electronically, the illiterate and those with a poor memory for names can vote based on icon or picture, and everyone will have an easier time when someone runs a candidate with the same name as their opponent as a spoiler (or at least the person running the spoiler will need to find someone that looks like their opponent too).
Sure.. And right after I describe a division of the country (code fork) and that I intend to modify their laws and enforce then in that region without publishing the new laws (BSD Laws would allow this), they lock me up!
I think they would be more amused than terrified.
"Anyone can create a complete copy of the country at minimal cost. Including the weapons, we call these protocols. This is frowned upon in all open source communities mostly because usually the people living in each country split amoung the two and less gets done on the whole. But sometimes this leads to an arms race, which can be good at promoting progress. The GPL group insists that any copied country have the same basic rights and freedoms as the original, while the BSD group believes humans are basically good and in the unlikely event that the new country goes totalitarian they will move to a free country. The GPL group points to the often high cost of moving and thinks the BSD group is a bit too idealistic, the BSD group is split on the justification, some say if you chose to live in a totalitarian society that's your choice, others think the serfs would move if they only knew the grass really was greener on the other side, others think it's ok since they make things better for the serfs wherever they are instead of just for the free like with GPL. There were some academic experiments with countries that could not be copied but did share the laws with the citizens and allowed them to start groups within that country with a different set of laws called patches, this failed for the most part. The threat of someone copying the country whole tended to keep the GPL/BSD rulers responsive and fair."
"So, Ummm, Errr, Ahhh, I think your time is up Mr. Taylor. Let's hear what Stalin has to say, Mr. Balmer?"
"We see BSD as acceptable in some limited circumstances, but GPL violates the American way of life......"
I was thinking more along the lines of descriping just the redistribution aspect which is like those zoning laws that are copyrighted, but in the U.S.A. enrich the public domain once adopted into law. This is somewhat like BSD. GPL restricts you from taking a public law and making it private again in modified form, but that is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in law. Sometimes politicians or political thinkers get upset when someone else gets full credit for their idea, but usually are happy to have their system adopted since those in the know will know it was their idea and they didn't expect financial reward anyway. In software it seems no matter what you contribute to the free world you still end up with a boss that wants you to live in China.
I hate that fucking quote. Rather, I don't, but the ONLY TIME IT IS EVER USED is for completely stupid contexts that cheapen the impact of the quote.
I first saw it in the Holocaust Museum in Washington so I have a pretty positive view of it. I don't think it is really applicable in this debate, but I don't think you are right in saying it is something like calling you a Nazi. It's about the wrongness in targeting any minority for bad treatment. There were good people who feared the Communists and Unions and Jews, they were often being manipulated by the media, but even those in the media weren't all evil. They were just reporting the facts as they knew them. What happened in Germany is a threat in any democracy, it's really just an extension of what happened to Socrates in the first documented democracy. The Athenians learned their lesson and for a long time had stable good government after they killed him, I'm sure people tired of hearing Socrates quoted when they wanted to just regulate the schools or something like that, but for whatever overzealotness it worked to keep their government decent.
This website is owned by a music stealing group known as buy.com
Why didn't anyone point this out? I spent the two days before Christmas 2000 (it might have been 2001) shopping all over town to replace an order buy.com had no record of. Lucky me my credit card's bank did. Anyone shopping with a vendor that uses ASP is just asking to be ripped off, especially if it is buy.com. Who cares what their prices are if you never get the products you ordered? Anyway, I think buy.com is pretty well known as a fraudulent merchant so any subsidiary they have should not be reported on without mentioning that is run by a company that loses orders on a regular basis, and their "support staff" requires you to contact your bank to cancel the charge on the order that they forgot you made.
Have you ever tried to explain "source" to a politician? I have. Let me tell you. Just getting them over that hurdle is tough enough.
If you ever have the opportunity again, try explaining it in terms of law. That Closed Source is like passing laws that are secret and enforced by secret courts. They can be understood by seeing who gets arrested and disappear, this is like reverse engineering software code. Published Source is like publishing the laws and sometimes perhaps debating them before they are passed. The laws aren't understood by the general populace but we can hire lawyers and/or hire lobbyists to change them and/or become experts in the laws that most directly affect us. This is like the general populace can hire programmers to audit the software and/or improvement and/or learn to modify it themselves.
I think they will understand that Closed Source may have merit in some extraordinary circumstances, but should not be used for most things. If you have to explain Open Source you can explain this in terms of law too, but probably only to an IP lawyer who hopefully already understands the concept. It might be easier to explain it colloquially in terms of kindergarten principles, and only go into the economic principles if they are actually interested since you really have to go into John Smith and the like which is the type of thing that is widely misunderstood and you really have to be well grounded to explain it to someone who hasn't read the source material and is just asking clarifying questions.
At least links give some response.. when's the last time voting had any effect whatsoever? Press link #1 for corrupt democrat.. Press link #2 for corrupt republican.. maybe even a rare extra option to Press link #3 for insane third-party canidate.
There are some elections that are competitive. I read an economist article where they asserted that in a couple of midwestern states and one tiny east coast state (RI?/DE?) your vote actually counts. The midwestern states had a non-partisan committee (or rather dual-party) to draw the district boundaries. The boundaries are normally drawn to benefit the current state party, witness Texas. To add insult to injury the state houses usually have even more biased districting that doesn't even take population into account. The small eastern state just happened to have one representative and a population evenly divided between the major parties.
It's not that the fixed nature of US elections is a new problem. Thomas Gilpin wrote about it in 1844, well off Pennsylvania paper maker. Senator Charles Buckalew described the major problems in such timeless words that when I first read them I thought they were written in the 1990's not the 1870's. And then there were better systems, such as the proportional representation during NYC's 20th century golden decades. In NYC the democratic machine defeated PR by appealing to the fear of communism, there were a couple communists elected, along with a dozen other minor party seats, but the Democrats real objection was with having only 2/3 of the seats, so opponents, especially Republicans could embarass them when they engaged in corruption. About 10 other cities adopted PR around the turn of the century and corruption dropped by 90% to 99% depending on who you listen to and how bad things were before. Cincinatti went from the most corrupt city in America to winning an award for being least corrupt in just a few years. There PR was defeated by appealing to whites fears of blacks getting representatives on the city council.
Proportional Representation was an English and French idea expounded by some of the same people that first understood how capitalism worked and wanted to apply those lessons to government. It's distinct from Parlimentary government. We could get PR state by state in at least the larger states, there are some federal laws to discourage it but I don't think they outlaw it. A state like California or New York has enough representatives that they could do it. Probably the system that would appeal most to Americans is one where anyone that won an outright victory would get their seat but seats where no one won outright would be split up between the parties in proportion to their tally in the overall vote minus the seats won outright.
In CA lets say they have 53 seats and the Democrats got 45% of the vote and 15 seats outright, Republicans got 44% of the vote and 5 seats outright, while the Greens got 5% and the Libertarians 4% and others 2%. Here's how it would go:
OS PRS Total
D 45% 15 9 24
R 44% 5 19 24
G 5% 0 3 3
L 4% 0 2 2
O 2% 0 0 0 - none qualify for seats
It's not as fair as pure democracy due to both rounding error as you can see with the Green vs. Liberterian party in this example. And, people not affiliated with a strong enough party get no seats. This also ignores the new dynamics that would emerge, I for one would stop voting for the Republicrats, but I would split my vote between the Green and Liberterian Ticket. Right now it would be Green locally and Liberterian nationally, but then again we probably wouldn't be in the current mess if we had PR. And this would change depending issues on the slate. I might vote for a single issue party on the state level if the others were ignoring the issue, say the education reform party, and then abandon them once the reforms were adopted. If I were a Brooklynite I would probably looking for a fusion Judgeship reform party so that legal winners would no longer be picked based o
That's what I call "the wrong way around". You should have it really stored at the same place on every installation. But to the user you should have a localisation layer, that translates "Program Files" to whatever her locale wants to have. So no program has ever to take care where to store its files, and the localisation layer transforms it to whatever the local user wants.
The "Program Files" directory is specified in the registry. Installers should be looking this up in the registry and not using the path on their particular install. Mine was "C:\usr\local\bin" when I ran windows... If you use the Install Shield I'm pretty sure it does the right thing. Using it as a hard coded path is no better than those VB scripters who paint parts of their UI "windows gray" only to have it look like crap for anyone with a slightly different color scheme.
Not that I don't agree everything should be in a standard location with symlinks for the happy fuzzy names. Unfortunately I think we have to wait for NT6.0 before there will true be symlinks on the Windows file system. I never understood why it's taken them so long, even MS-DOS 2.0 could have had hard links without much trouble.
"My controller has failed. He is going to be replaced" can mean:
You are right, I doubt there will be a system to translate a Nabokov novel before we have machines that think and reason and hope and doubt. But I think you are ignoring the huge utility of even simple glosses like babblefish. You can read one of those and get a good idea of what the writer meant. A gloss and a small understanding of the culture gives you about as much understanding as you would have after a year of studying the language. This system is better than a gloss with grammatical rules because it is easier to construct and it takes whole sentences into account so another posters "hydrolic ram" would not get translated to "water sheep". But mostly because it is easier to construct, wouldn't it be nice to have even a Babelfish type translator for Quechua and Finnish and Icelandic instead of just the usual suspects?
These can also be an aid to people that speak both languages, but aren't translators. Many multiple language speakers think in whatever language they are reading or speaking at the moment, this is not good for translation. But if they could read a passage in one language for the meaning, and then fix machine translation adding back ambiguities and poetry with the machine translation as a memory aid this would be good. For me looking at the original every couple lines would cause an unwanted context switch. I personally don't quite understand how translators can do it. I get so confused going back and forth between languages that I find myself reading the captions on an American movie when visiting family overseas even though I could understand the spoken English just fine.
Re:Engineers Always Invent The Best Stuff Over Bee
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Another Beer Please
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· Score: 1
Many employers give programmers free all-you-can-drink soft drinks. Engineers should get free all-you-can-drink beer. As caffeine boosts productivity for some, alcohol boosts creativity for others.
I used to work at a software firm that gave free alcohol to the employees. It pretty much ended when five of us brought back a $900+ bar bill. Or bills rather. From then on we were restricted to the dive across the street once a week (twice on a good week). It wasn't really our fault, the boss was sending off the VP so he left us at a pricey bar...and we were all, ummm, experienced drinkers.
We didn't have free cola btw, there were some "energy drinks" and granola bars, and they would supply pizza near deadlines. It was actually a much more sociable workplace than most of the other places I've worked. We were mostly programmers unlike every other place I've worked. I'm not sure what that says about the lack of social skills we're known for. Either this place was anomalous or we simply don't interact well with the normals.
None of your argument is any more relevant to OSS than to software from any company. Since all the new IP laws and interpretations are ill-defined (i.e. "shades of gray") everybody is infringing on everybody else. So don't just avoid OSS, avoid everybody.
I see BG point here though. He knows that with our patent office granting patents on the flimsiest of grounds that all software of any complexity violates a shitload of patents, including their own software. But his point is that when someone bugs a big company that doesn't "give away" all their patent rights with the GPL they can counter sue and then work out a non-agression pact with the complainant. The problem with his reasoning is that only the complainant's GPL'd programs are safe from the big company's patent suit. If they are suing you for using their patents in GPL'd software they can't be providing an implementation of that patent in their own GPL'd software so if they have a product it must be proprietary and hence vulnerable to a patent suit from a GPL shop.
The real threat to both proprietary and open source software is firms with a patent protected idea that have no product and never hope to have a product, these are not vulnerable to a countersuit and hence are an equal threat to anyone contributing any value to the economy. Currently these are more of a threat to a firm like Microsoft because they have most of the profits, but if GPL software firms begin overtaking proprietary firms as we expect they will be more threatened. (They are already threated though as legal vultures often begin by snacking on a business that can't afford a good legal defence in order to rack up victories and hopefully precedents to bring to the big boys for a quick settlement.)
I think the elimination of software patents is one area where there is the potential for Stallman to team up with the likes of Microsoft. The cross-licensing that has helped to eliminate competition for the established firms is breaking down as lawyers have figured out the money to be made leaching off successful firms by simply closing up shop and hence eliminating the threat of a counter suit. Can you imagine the carnage to Microsoft if Sun went under without selling their patents to them? They were able to buy the SGI patents when they looked to be sinking, so they can disappear without threat. But Sun would never sell out to MSFT, some lawyers would be sure to buy enough of the patents to shave several hundred billion off MSFT's valuation.
previously, the population was estimated by using the logbooks from the whalers. these results were generally in line with the amount of whale oil sold.
I'm not going to defend the study's numbers, since I haven't read the study, except to say genetic studies of human populations have come to similar counts using different methods. This is only the first such study of whales so we need some more to have the level of confidence we need in the number. This is especially true considering it's disagreement with log books.
But I also have some doubt in the old numbers. One of my great grandfathers was a whaler. He would sometimes go out in small independent parties without log books and occationally brought back a whale from these adventures. He had a great story about a whale that he speared and shot at from his one man boat for more than a day before pulling him in. He still had the gun and you can bet my eyes widened as when he handed it over to me in the telling of the story. -- Of course, if you listened to my great grandmother more often than not he came home from his whaling expeditions brused and battered with no whale in tow. The question is how many whales died from their injuries without ever providing a log entry or lamp oil? Whaling was the dot com of an earlier era except it lasted much longer. It is possible that for every whale lost by the most organized and successful whalers, that left log books behind to be scoured today, the less organized ones lost many more.
Slashdot Mirror
To summarize, if Galileo had said "The Earth revolves around the Sun" and left it at that, he probably would have been ignored by the Church. Instead he said "The Earth revolves around the Sun, which contradicts Church doctrine, so the Church is full of idiots who are utterly, completely wrong about this, wow, look how stupid they are!" Big difference.
This is overstating the case in the other direction. He simply wrote his book as a Socratic arguement. One voice would ask a question or make a statement based on "common sense" and the other would decimate the "common sense" idea based on logical arguement based on simple facts both accepted. Some people in the church thought the common sense character represented them. Galileo said it didn't, it represented his own arguements and the logical arguements were just mouthing Copernicus as a devil's advocate. Obviously this didn't didn't hold much water since anyone reading the book knew the "common sense" was nonsense and Copernicus was right. Galileo thought he could get away with speaking the truth because he was friends with the pope who very much liked science and Galileo's ideas. He thought the pope would intervene on his behalf, but the pope was in the middle of a political war and dropped him as quick as Mr. Clinton dropped Dr. Joycelyn Elders for speaking another unpopular truth.
In other words he just had terrible political timing. We all know politics still effects science as much as we wish it didn't. That Jesuit probably did some good things to deserve the honor, just like some usually incomprehensibly idiotic seeming politicians sometimes do even today.
Galileo was nothing but political road kill.
Besides if it weren't for the Inquisition, my City of New York wouldn't have had it's first mass immigration of Jews and Muslims, and we wouldn't have had the Flushing Declaration (of human rights for all taxpayers) affirmed by the Dutch, and so we my have never had that freedom loving language in the Declaration of Independence or even the Bill of Rights.
In the USA, life expectancy increased 60% from 1900 to 2000. In Italy, 80%. In Japan, 80%. In Mexico, 120%.
Most of the increase in life expectency between 1900 and 2000 in the western world came before penicillin. Yep washing our hands after going to the bathroom and not drinking foul water or eating spoilt food accounts for most of it. There were people who lived a century long before modern medicine, they were just real lucky not to get diarrhea and die. But how many 5000 y.o. are there still around?
I don't believe it. We are carbon based beings. Carbon eventually deteriorates(sp?).
Are you serious? You're worried about the carbon turning into Boron and Helium? Most of your Carbon molecules will be just fine at the last gasp of the universe billions of years hence.
Are you worried about the molecules breaking down? Your body is constantly remaking and repairing itself. I doubt you have very many of the molecules you were born with. Silicon isn't any better really, neither is germanium, tin, or lead, all bond pretty much the same and are really more likely to decay into other elements than carbon; not that you really have to worry about that.
How do they go about maintaining the carbon in our bodies?
Your body does that quite well, that's sort of the basis for carbon dating and all that. While you are alive you constantly replace your carbon atoms, maintaining a balance of carbon-12 and carbon-14. Once your dead the process soon stops and you start to contain more and more carbon-12 and less and less carbon-14. (i.e. you lose enough weight that your granny might start to worry about your health.)
Don't turn anthills into mountains, people. I am sure even the dumber PHB can understand that this file has nothing to do with "Pac Man"... Ooops... There goes another DMCA violation!!
Ummm, yeah except my internet connection was down for almost a week because of one of these dumb ass letters that was obviously never verified by a human being. These things cause real damage. I'd be very willing to join a class action we could call it "Humanity vs. Evil Monopolists" to avoid listing all 6 billion of us and the evil DMCA using bastards.
My letter just spurred me to e-mail some friends at the BBC and NYT and set up a few freenet nodes, but I wish I could do more. At the very least each of these letters should require them to put a few hundred dollars in escrow payable to the innocent victim. Then they might hire someone to verify their claims or at least make a good faith effort to contact the person, they could have Googled for my subnet and gotten my e-mail.
Subscribe to this list, and you had this story about 12 hours ago. You also downloaded and updated your src tree and fixed the bug in a matter of a few minutes. Why is it that a FreeBSD SA makes it to this site and Linux SAs don't?
/.
Prolly cuz the editor and poster were thinking of "only one remote security breach in the default configuration in seven years" OpenBSD. There are local user exploits found all the time in the Linux distros and in the BSDs, when remote vulnerabilities are found in any of them it usually does make it to
But yeah, I usually read about and check my system based on security advisories before it ever makes it to slashdot.. prolly everyone else does as well which explains the 12 hour lag.
Sounds like you watched that PBS special on the Greeks last night...
hehe, caught red eyed. I just saw a few minutes of it, I was waiting for King of the Hill to come on; gotta connect with my redneck roots once in a while. But I always find the Greeks fascinating. There seems to be an analog to just about every modern problem in their history somewhere. I'm sure there were in other cultures as well, but they are so comparitively well documented. That's one thing we should thank the ancient Semites, Persians and Turks for...I remember when I first read Plato it was like I knew these people talking, they didn't seem like "ancient peoples" anymore. Maybe someday we'll find someone saved some of those books the Jesuits were so intent on burning in South America. I imagine those stories it would prove as interesting as the Greeks have been to us. There are plenty of desert caves west of the Andes that could preserve manuscripts for millenia.
The same thing the government gained when it executed the Rosenbergs for relatively minor espionage crimes.
There have also been admisions that they knew Ethel was completely innocent and they made up the bomb stuff to get a confession out of Julius. They bluffed to extract a confession and it started a ball rolling they couldn't stop. For all we know this is similar, and maybe we will know in 50 years... Those who assume Mike is guilty need to educate themselves on previous witch hunts.
Yeah, those that trained Bin Laden should indeed be punished. Oh wait, that would be the CIA - I guess the world isn't black and white after all.
Has there ever been any dictator/terrorist the CIA didn't train?
The CIA does seem to be the undisputed master of finding the future evildoers of the world and bankrolling them.
Does anyone want to take bets on when Japan will turn over Fujimori, the US backed former dictator of Peru? Peru's now democratic government turned over 700 pages of evidence of death squads and truely magnificant levels of corruption captured on tape by his former security chief and, of course, CIA informant, Vladamir Montesinos. (Magnificent in the sense of 1 Billion dollars stolen from the state coffers of a poor country of a few million, purportedly all for bribes. Our congresscritters would eat live babies for that level of corruption. And Montesinos even paid the bribes in US greenbacks.) I guess it ain't terror if you're just killing Native Americans and forcibly sterilizing their widows.
If he had been born a US citizen, I'd cut him some slack and merely imprison him for the duration of hostilities. As a naturalized citizen, he deserves either deportation or more jail time for lying during the naturization process.
Woah, first off I'm sure he gave his pledge of allegiance honestly. The USA was a very different country 14 years ago. It was a country where we tried and convicted Americans that promoted terrorsism like John Poindexter and Oliver North. Now one of those traitors is heading up the TIA and the other is a motivational speaker.
Just because someone is naturalized does not mean they ever had to take an oath of any kind. I was born at the only hospital near the military base my mother was living at. She immediately applied for my citizenship and I have been a naturalized citizen since before I knew we were still following that tragic example of the Spartans*. Or much less that we still used that other tool of oppression the super class conscious British Empire invented, the passport. She could have been anywhere outside the United States and could have applied for my citizenship, at the time any white child born to an American citizen had the right to citizenship. Now you are an alien under our laws until you are naturalized but then it was just a formality, if your mother was a citizen you had the right to a citizenship and could apply for it when you felt like it.
*The Spartans kept redefining citizenship after their pride ran even higher at the defeat of Athens, narrowing and narrowing it until there were just a thousand full citizens left. Then they battled the tiny city next door, who after decades of being plundered had learned to fight. They put ten men on every one Spartan, they wiped out four hundred of them in one fell swoop. Sparta soon lost not only it's slave class but all the tens of thoasands of people who had their citizenship stripped for not being patriotic enough or not paying their taxes promptly enough or marrying the wrong woman, etc. A few hundred years later they were a turist attraction for the Romans; a Colonial Williamsburg of their day, except they whipped boys to death in dramatic retellings of their former glory.
I know NOTHING about Linux. Except that it is free (as in beer).
Okay I know a little bit more then that. Like how it is user supported and such.
Only "free (as in beer)" versions of Linux are user supported various vendors produce their own versions with various support levels.
My first question is, is there a movement to get the SCO code out of Linux?
As far as anyone knows there is no SCO code in Linux. SCO has hinted that they think own anything derived from UNIX ideas, which might include any program written in C, C++, Java and C# under their expansive interpretation of derivative rights. This includes practically all software not written in COBOL, even Lisp interpreters are written in C. But no one thinks that this is how any sane judge would ever think of defining copyright derivation this way, especially as it goes against every precident known to man.
There is another unsubstanciated allegation that SCO has thrown out that there are outright copies of code, this is possible, but 99.999999999% chance that the copy was from Linux into a SCO product, meaning the SCO product is in violation of someone's copyright. In anycase there is no movement to remove such code since no one knows what it might be, everyone knows their own code is clean, perhaps someone dead did something not kosher? No way to know unless SCO substanciates their slander.
Another idea SCO has suggested is that JFS the OS/2 filesystem, now supported in Linux, is a derivative due to the details of how the port to Linux was done. No one really believes derivative rights are a strong enough concept for this to fly. Essentially they are saying because AIX has a SystemV compatibility layer that IBM bought a perpetual license to from a former holder of the SystemV copyright and they ported the OS/2 filesystem to POSIX (A standard not owned by SCO) and may have made some modifications to the interface that were specific to SystemV that survived to Linux, which is a POSIX compatible system with few SystemV lineages outside of the ones in POSIX. Because of all those conditionals SCO owns the Linux implementation of the OS/2 filesystem. But still this has a much better chance of being found tenable than the "all bases belong to us" arguement. And if they should win, JFS can be removed in 10 minutes time since it's an also-ran fs that seems to have lost out to XFS and ext3 in Linux. Of course should this arguement win in court it will cause a lot of troubles world wide, expect shreaders to be bought in bulk and very tough document retention policies to become the norm, and computer books to be banned from the workplace.
SCO may have a case against IBM seperate from all these unfounded and unlikely crackpot theories they have made up. IBM vehemently denies it, but if not for SCO's looney statements and behaviour IBM's credibility wouldn't be so much greater than SCO's. But this relationship is governed by secret contracts none of us are privy to. Perhaps they will settle and JFS will be removed, I wouldn't bet on it, but anything is possible in a common law country. From all appearances SCO has performed this hara-kari to get bought out, the "we may be a 2 bit company but we can cause you billions in damages by blowing ourselves up - why don't you give us $100 million to go quietly into the night" strategy. IBM didn't bite any neither did any of the smaller players. Even Mandrake buying these suckers would have been more than nothing. So they proceed with the suicide to prove a point and make it easier for future extortionists to ply their trade. (Of course, there seems to be some insider trading going on, so the strategy may be to abscond in some western nation that doesn't extradite non-violent financial criminals.)
In fact, a small amount of noise actual can improve the signal representation! But that is a rather long discussion.
How do CD players reconstruct the signal these days? When I was doing my EE there were graduate students working on polynomial reconstruction. I guess at that point CD's either just used a straight DAC to analog filter (cheap) or a linear filter into an analog filter. I'd think now CD players could have the brains to introduce to push the estimated error in the current sample's reconstruction to the reconstruction of the next sample if the output accuracy isn't great enough (say you have 20 bits in and 24 bits out and you really would like 32 bits out.)
I work in computer graphics and we add pseudo-randomness all the time to get a better reconstruction. But it's because we have an infinite frequency signal (the model) that we sample that only a few times per pixel. With a CD all of that should be done in the studio with no sampling error showing up at on the CD except in the form of a little noise. Truthfully my impression is that you need a low pass filter on CD audio maybe with a 3db at 17khz, just because there are so many CD's that are made by people without any basic understanding of the technology. If I were making a home stereo as opposed to a car/portable player I wouldn't do any filtering except for the limits of the amplifier stage, but have a "Amateur CD" button that did the filtering digitaly so that people might return some of these things if they were expecting a professionally made CD. I'd also use a decent DSP enough DSP to do have a "Cathode Tube" sound filter. Maybe have a simple ADC input so that the owner's children could use the stereo system as a guitar amp.
I brought a couple friends to a Si Se concert a couple days ago and had to apologise to them after the first few songs sounded like crap. The band started to play quiter songs after that and the mix engineer was apparently disabused from turning up the volume again, but it happened again on the second to last song. It wasn't that the first songs were painfully loud dB wise it was just it was louder than the sound system could handle so all the peaks were clipped to white noise. (Si Se has a Brazil Pop sound so there are plenty of drums, and there is a viola too.) Ironically their CD is mastered acceptably, there are a few songs sound better on a television recording I heard but for the most part it's ok.
- What still remains before we can say OpenGL is back toward its original goal (you write for one standard instead of having to write for every single little card driver, something kind of ruined by the fact that many things these days, every card uses a different opengl "extention" to do the exact same goal.)
- What still remains that DirectX excels at that OpenGL is lagging behind at
I don't think pt.1 has really been lost, unless you are doing really cutting edge stuff you can use OpenGL pretty happily as is. Many scientific applications are actually coded to Performer which works just fine on OpenGL 1.0. I've written lots of stuff, some just a couple years ago, that used plain immediate mode OGL 1.0, with a switch added later on for vertex arrays.
What remains is the vertex and pixel shaders, these will be in 2.0. They are already pretty much supported with the nv FX and I guess the 3D Labs card. I haven't been programming the ATI card, though many have for it's speed advantage, but from what I understand it doesn't quite live up to the requirements of 2.0. Also I think 3D Labs is pressing for infinite length programs, this can be implemented in the driver by simply compiling to multiple passes implicitly, though who knows about the performance. But the nv would handily beat the ATI if you do this because it can natively handle pretty long instruction streams. Unless this is already a driver trick, I dunno.
2.0 will almost certainly wait until ATI is ready on the hardware level at least. If you program to extensions...OpenGL is ahead of Direct X, but this means you are stuck with the vendor if you use their specific stuff, say using fp30 Cg on the FX. I think everyone pretty much does program to extensions and not the standard if they are doing cutting edge stuff, usually with a compile or run-time code switch based on the extensions present.
"Non power-of-two Textures"
That's _thee_ key feature Apple needed to do the fully OpenGL desktop, along with a pile of more eligant error handling of course. Glad to see it's now standard.
I suspect it's for bind to texture, not anything that can already be done by just using part of the texture. Supposedly nVidia has been waiting for 1.5 before doing bind to texture in UNIX environments (currently only a WGL extension.) For me, on the FX, copy has actually turned out faster than bind, but that is hopefully just a driver limitation. Rectangular textures also have nice coordinates for using them in multi-layer programmable pipeline settings. (I haven't read the specs yet, just extrapolating from the nVidia extension.)
The "code is law" argument is also somewhat of a slogan for those who advocate all source being Open Source. I don't agree with that either. Yes, the file formats and protocols should be open, but all kinds of "citizens" should be allowed to use them.
I'm in the camp that thinks all source should be published, but not everything should be open source, as in GPL/BSD. (I don't think we should compel this state of affairs with law, but perhaps encourage it by denying copyright, trade secret, and patent protection on anything in unpublished code and their derivative works, they could still rely on contract law however.) I do think governments should not pay for election machines that are not open source on basic economic grounds, but should never ever ever never in a million billion years on threat of slow and painful death allow an election to be run on code that is not published and available to all comers in compilable and executable form with no restrictions on access. The difference is, I think closed source can delay progress and cause economic harm under certain conditions while undiscoverable fixed elections destroy our liberty. One is a policy arguement I could debate and accept compromise or even temporary loss on, the other is a basic liberty issue I would shoot people over.
I further think, at least for now, election machines should print out a paper ballot that you drop folded in half into a clear acrylic or glass box. And that any instant tallying only be unofficial and the paper ballots be electronically counted twice and hand counted in case of problems. At some point it may be acceptible to print out a receipt that you can use to confirm your vote in a later date in some place where we can be sure no one is looking over your shoulder and that you are in fact holding your own receipt. But only once such procedures are well audited and there is some benefit to that over an electronically assisted paper ballot system. Electronic Assist is great though, you can eliminate spoilt ballots, write in candidates can be tallied electronically, the illiterate and those with a poor memory for names can vote based on icon or picture, and everyone will have an easier time when someone runs a candidate with the same name as their opponent as a spoiler (or at least the person running the spoiler will need to find someone that looks like their opponent too).
Sure.. And right after I describe a division of the country (code fork) and that I intend to modify their laws and enforce then in that region without publishing the new laws (BSD Laws would allow this), they lock me up!
I think they would be more amused than terrified.
"Anyone can create a complete copy of the country at minimal cost. Including the weapons, we call these protocols. This is frowned upon in all open source communities mostly because usually the people living in each country split amoung the two and less gets done on the whole. But sometimes this leads to an arms race, which can be good at promoting progress. The GPL group insists that any copied country have the same basic rights and freedoms as the original, while the BSD group believes humans are basically good and in the unlikely event that the new country goes totalitarian they will move to a free country. The GPL group points to the often high cost of moving and thinks the BSD group is a bit too idealistic, the BSD group is split on the justification, some say if you chose to live in a totalitarian society that's your choice, others think the serfs would move if they only knew the grass really was greener on the other side, others think it's ok since they make things better for the serfs wherever they are instead of just for the free like with GPL. There were some academic experiments with countries that could not be copied but did share the laws with the citizens and allowed them to start groups within that country with a different set of laws called patches, this failed for the most part. The threat of someone copying the country whole tended to keep the GPL/BSD rulers responsive and fair."
"So, Ummm, Errr, Ahhh, I think your time is up Mr. Taylor. Let's hear what Stalin has to say, Mr. Balmer?"
"We see BSD as acceptable in some limited circumstances, but GPL violates the American way of life......"
I was thinking more along the lines of descriping just the redistribution aspect which is like those zoning laws that are copyrighted, but in the U.S.A. enrich the public domain once adopted into law. This is somewhat like BSD. GPL restricts you from taking a public law and making it private again in modified form, but that is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist in law. Sometimes politicians or political thinkers get upset when someone else gets full credit for their idea, but usually are happy to have their system adopted since those in the know will know it was their idea and they didn't expect financial reward anyway. In software it seems no matter what you contribute to the free world you still end up with a boss that wants you to live in China.
I hate that fucking quote. Rather, I don't, but the ONLY TIME IT IS EVER USED is for completely stupid contexts that cheapen the impact of the quote.
I first saw it in the Holocaust Museum in Washington so I have a pretty positive view of it. I don't think it is really applicable in this debate, but I don't think you are right in saying it is something like calling you a Nazi. It's about the wrongness in targeting any minority for bad treatment. There were good people who feared the Communists and Unions and Jews, they were often being manipulated by the media, but even those in the media weren't all evil. They were just reporting the facts as they knew them. What happened in Germany is a threat in any democracy, it's really just an extension of what happened to Socrates in the first documented democracy. The Athenians learned their lesson and for a long time had stable good government after they killed him, I'm sure people tired of hearing Socrates quoted when they wanted to just regulate the schools or something like that, but for whatever overzealotness it worked to keep their government decent.
This website is owned by a music stealing group known as buy.com
Why didn't anyone point this out? I spent the two days before Christmas 2000 (it might have been 2001) shopping all over town to replace an order buy.com had no record of. Lucky me my credit card's bank did. Anyone shopping with a vendor that uses ASP is just asking to be ripped off, especially if it is buy.com. Who cares what their prices are if you never get the products you ordered? Anyway, I think buy.com is pretty well known as a fraudulent merchant so any subsidiary they have should not be reported on without mentioning that is run by a company that loses orders on a regular basis, and their "support staff" requires you to contact your bank to cancel the charge on the order that they forgot you made.
Have you ever tried to explain "source" to a politician? I have. Let me tell you. Just getting them over that hurdle is tough enough.
If you ever have the opportunity again, try explaining it in terms of law. That Closed Source is like passing laws that are secret and enforced by secret courts. They can be understood by seeing who gets arrested and disappear, this is like reverse engineering software code. Published Source is like publishing the laws and sometimes perhaps debating them before they are passed. The laws aren't understood by the general populace but we can hire lawyers and/or hire lobbyists to change them and/or become experts in the laws that most directly affect us. This is like the general populace can hire programmers to audit the software and/or improvement and/or learn to modify it themselves.
I think they will understand that Closed Source may have merit in some extraordinary circumstances, but should not be used for most things. If you have to explain Open Source you can explain this in terms of law too, but probably only to an IP lawyer who hopefully already understands the concept. It might be easier to explain it colloquially in terms of kindergarten principles, and only go into the economic principles if they are actually interested since you really have to go into John Smith and the like which is the type of thing that is widely misunderstood and you really have to be well grounded to explain it to someone who hasn't read the source material and is just asking clarifying questions.
At least links give some response.. when's the last time voting had any effect whatsoever? Press link #1 for corrupt democrat.. Press link #2 for corrupt republican.. maybe even a rare extra option to Press link #3 for insane third-party canidate.
There are some elections that are competitive. I read an economist article where they asserted that in a couple of midwestern states and one tiny east coast state (RI?/DE?) your vote actually counts. The midwestern states had a non-partisan committee (or rather dual-party) to draw the district boundaries. The boundaries are normally drawn to benefit the current state party, witness Texas. To add insult to injury the state houses usually have even more biased districting that doesn't even take population into account. The small eastern state just happened to have one representative and a population evenly divided between the major parties.
It's not that the fixed nature of US elections is a new problem. Thomas Gilpin wrote about it in 1844, well off Pennsylvania paper maker. Senator Charles Buckalew described the major problems in such timeless words that when I first read them I thought they were written in the 1990's not the 1870's. And then there were better systems, such as the proportional representation during NYC's 20th century golden decades. In NYC the democratic machine defeated PR by appealing to the fear of communism, there were a couple communists elected, along with a dozen other minor party seats, but the Democrats real objection was with having only 2/3 of the seats, so opponents, especially Republicans could embarass them when they engaged in corruption. About 10 other cities adopted PR around the turn of the century and corruption dropped by 90% to 99% depending on who you listen to and how bad things were before. Cincinatti went from the most corrupt city in America to winning an award for being least corrupt in just a few years. There PR was defeated by appealing to whites fears of blacks getting representatives on the city council.
Proportional Representation was an English and French idea expounded by some of the same people that first understood how capitalism worked and wanted to apply those lessons to government. It's distinct from Parlimentary government. We could get PR state by state in at least the larger states, there are some federal laws to discourage it but I don't think they outlaw it. A state like California or New York has enough representatives that they could do it. Probably the system that would appeal most to Americans is one where anyone that won an outright victory would get their seat but seats where no one won outright would be split up between the parties in proportion to their tally in the overall vote minus the seats won outright.
In CA lets say they have 53 seats and the Democrats got 45% of the vote and 15 seats outright, Republicans got 44% of the vote and 5 seats outright, while the Greens got 5% and the Libertarians 4% and others 2%. Here's how it would go:
OS PRS Total
D 45% 15 9 24
R 44% 5 19 24
G 5% 0 3 3
L 4% 0 2 2
O 2% 0 0 0 - none qualify for seats
It's not as fair as pure democracy due to both rounding error as you can see with the Green vs. Liberterian party in this example. And, people not affiliated with a strong enough party get no seats. This also ignores the new dynamics that would emerge, I for one would stop voting for the Republicrats, but I would split my vote between the Green and Liberterian Ticket. Right now it would be Green locally and Liberterian nationally, but then again we probably wouldn't be in the current mess if we had PR. And this would change depending issues on the slate. I might vote for a single issue party on the state level if the others were ignoring the issue, say the education reform party, and then abandon them once the reforms were adopted. If I were a Brooklynite I would probably looking for a fusion Judgeship reform party so that legal winners would no longer be picked based o
That's what I call "the wrong way around". You should have it really stored at the same place on every installation. But to the user you should have a localisation layer, that translates "Program Files" to whatever her locale wants to have. So no program has ever to take care where to store its files, and the localisation layer transforms it to whatever the local user wants.
The "Program Files" directory is specified in the registry. Installers should be looking this up in the registry and not using the path on their particular install. Mine was "C:\usr\local\bin" when I ran windows... If you use the Install Shield I'm pretty sure it does the right thing. Using it as a hard coded path is no better than those VB scripters who paint parts of their UI "windows gray" only to have it look like crap for anyone with a slightly different color scheme.
Not that I don't agree everything should be in a standard location with symlinks for the happy fuzzy names. Unfortunately I think we have to wait for NT6.0 before there will true be symlinks on the Windows file system. I never understood why it's taken them so long, even MS-DOS 2.0 could have had hard links without much trouble.
"My controller has failed. He is going to be replaced" can mean:
You are right, I doubt there will be a system to translate a Nabokov novel before we have machines that think and reason and hope and doubt. But I think you are ignoring the huge utility of even simple glosses like babblefish. You can read one of those and get a good idea of what the writer meant. A gloss and a small understanding of the culture gives you about as much understanding as you would have after a year of studying the language. This system is better than a gloss with grammatical rules because it is easier to construct and it takes whole sentences into account so another posters "hydrolic ram" would not get translated to "water sheep". But mostly because it is easier to construct, wouldn't it be nice to have even a Babelfish type translator for Quechua and Finnish and Icelandic instead of just the usual suspects?
These can also be an aid to people that speak both languages, but aren't translators. Many multiple language speakers think in whatever language they are reading or speaking at the moment, this is not good for translation. But if they could read a passage in one language for the meaning, and then fix machine translation adding back ambiguities and poetry with the machine translation as a memory aid this would be good. For me looking at the original every couple lines would cause an unwanted context switch. I personally don't quite understand how translators can do it. I get so confused going back and forth between languages that I find myself reading the captions on an American movie when visiting family overseas even though I could understand the spoken English just fine.
Many employers give programmers free all-you-can-drink soft drinks. Engineers should get free all-you-can-drink beer. As caffeine boosts productivity for some, alcohol boosts creativity for others.
I used to work at a software firm that gave free alcohol to the employees. It pretty much ended when five of us brought back a $900+ bar bill. Or bills rather. From then on we were restricted to the dive across the street once a week (twice on a good week). It wasn't really our fault, the boss was sending off the VP so he left us at a pricey bar...and we were all, ummm, experienced drinkers.
We didn't have free cola btw, there were some "energy drinks" and granola bars, and they would supply pizza near deadlines. It was actually a much more sociable workplace than most of the other places I've worked. We were mostly programmers unlike every other place I've worked. I'm not sure what that says about the lack of social skills we're known for. Either this place was anomalous or we simply don't interact well with the normals.
None of your argument is any more relevant to OSS than to software from any company. Since all the new IP laws and interpretations are ill-defined (i.e. "shades of gray") everybody is infringing on everybody else. So don't just avoid OSS, avoid everybody.
I see BG point here though. He knows that with our patent office granting patents on the flimsiest of grounds that all software of any complexity violates a shitload of patents, including their own software. But his point is that when someone bugs a big company that doesn't "give away" all their patent rights with the GPL they can counter sue and then work out a non-agression pact with the complainant. The problem with his reasoning is that only the complainant's GPL'd programs are safe from the big company's patent suit. If they are suing you for using their patents in GPL'd software they can't be providing an implementation of that patent in their own GPL'd software so if they have a product it must be proprietary and hence vulnerable to a patent suit from a GPL shop.
The real threat to both proprietary and open source software is firms with a patent protected idea that have no product and never hope to have a product, these are not vulnerable to a countersuit and hence are an equal threat to anyone contributing any value to the economy. Currently these are more of a threat to a firm like Microsoft because they have most of the profits, but if GPL software firms begin overtaking proprietary firms as we expect they will be more threatened. (They are already threated though as legal vultures often begin by snacking on a business that can't afford a good legal defence in order to rack up victories and hopefully precedents to bring to the big boys for a quick settlement.)
I think the elimination of software patents is one area where there is the potential for Stallman to team up with the likes of Microsoft. The cross-licensing that has helped to eliminate competition for the established firms is breaking down as lawyers have figured out the money to be made leaching off successful firms by simply closing up shop and hence eliminating the threat of a counter suit. Can you imagine the carnage to Microsoft if Sun went under without selling their patents to them? They were able to buy the SGI patents when they looked to be sinking, so they can disappear without threat. But Sun would never sell out to MSFT, some lawyers would be sure to buy enough of the patents to shave several hundred billion off MSFT's valuation.
previously, the population was estimated by using the logbooks from the whalers. these results were generally in line with the amount of whale oil sold.
I'm not going to defend the study's numbers, since I haven't read the study, except to say genetic studies of human populations have come to similar counts using different methods. This is only the first such study of whales so we need some more to have the level of confidence we need in the number. This is especially true considering it's disagreement with log books.
But I also have some doubt in the old numbers. One of my great grandfathers was a whaler. He would sometimes go out in small independent parties without log books and occationally brought back a whale from these adventures. He had a great story about a whale that he speared and shot at from his one man boat for more than a day before pulling him in. He still had the gun and you can bet my eyes widened as when he handed it over to me in the telling of the story. -- Of course, if you listened to my great grandmother more often than not he came home from his whaling expeditions brused and battered with no whale in tow. The question is how many whales died from their injuries without ever providing a log entry or lamp oil? Whaling was the dot com of an earlier era except it lasted much longer. It is possible that for every whale lost by the most organized and successful whalers, that left log books behind to be scoured today, the less organized ones lost many more.