I always hate having to ask the cabbie to turn off the damn radio. I feel bad because I've already asked him to get off the cell phone, and I'm lowering the tip by a dollar for every request I'm forced to make. This makes absolutely no sense since the radio is obviously only for the drivers benefit, it being in the front of the cab after all. I could see some people paying an extra 25 cents for turning on a back seat radio, but the cabbie's radio is just a nuisance for the rider.
Is it okay to dig up ancient graves, remains, etc.
Why should current beliefs really enter into this? The best reason I can see for not digging up someones remains is if we have reason to believe they didn't want to be dug up. Just as a matter of respect for another human. I find the idea that someone might dig up my body 20,000 years from now to learn about my people and me pretty exciting. Someone else might find it repulsive. If we don't know what they wanted it should be weighed against whatever value we might get out of it. If you find a 1000 bodies, the first 20 you dig up and analyse maybe worth it, but if we learn to read the inscription that says, "please leave this body be" or "please dig me up" then it should be respected. If we find the body was buried so the relatives didn't have to watch it picked apart by buzzards or just to keep from spreading disease, then modern ideas have more value.
I really find no reason to think the ancients were more supersticious than some of our contemporaries. When you read Plato do you think he thinks of the gods as symbols or as real living breathing people? I know I don't think of gods as being real but I often speak of them because it is convenient shorthand for more complicated ideas. If someone is buried with appeals to a god, is that because they believe in it or because a relative does, or because a relative saw some political gain in looking like they believed in it, or was it just tradition that was seen as valuable for mourning? Some cultures don't have a god creation myth...
Layering on modern beliefs doesn't help, but respecting their true beliefs has value to us today. We might wish that our remains are respected in our way 10,000 years from now when everyone knows there are four gods that require bodies to be exhumed and reburied in dog dung, then posed in sex acts with goats, and sent into the sun on inter-planetary television.
Sume dæge hit gelamp æt an nunnan of æm ilcan mynstre geforon in on hire wyrt-tun. Ond ær heo gesawon an leahtric, and hit gelyste æs.
It's funny, half those words sound Icelandic or German, how long does it usually take someone with those languages and English to pick start reading olde english? My native tounge is Icelandic but while not understanging say a Swedish speaker I can read the other Scandinavian languages without any formal training, which is usual I think. (Leaving out Finland, a Nordic not Scandinavian country in my opinion.) Same with old Norse you just forget some of the constinants ever existed and pretty quickly you start reading it. The trick with cross reading Scandinavian languages is almost the opposite, the vowels change but the constinants are similar... A gloss instead of a proper translation of the above excerpt might be more useful... Oh and why the inconsistency of Ond & and? og(IS), und(DL), and(EN)
Just from a quick look I saw this
[The] Same day, she X X a nun of that same monistery went into X valuable land. And there she saw a/an X and she X it/this/that.
Although not exactly, the "æ.." words can actually carry different and greater meaning depending on the X words I couldn't understand but could guess at from your translation.. Also the word endings seem to be like Icelandic or Japanese in how they connect the sentence together, telling you what belongs to what else, how they are related, etc... I was totally amazed when I learned Japanese also had 17 word endings like Icelandic, but then I guess you have to express all the same things on the other side of the world using a similar mechanism. Not so surprising after all. They don't do all the same things though Icelandic doesn't have the "ga?" and I don't think Japan sexes as many words as most European languages, so some of those dual or triple connectors collapse to one (The it/he/she are covered with a single ending, though Icelandic reuses some for endings different purposes, so it gets complicated.)
Ok this was a huge digression I really just wanted you to write a word for word translation... with the grammar explained instead of rewritten in modern english word order.
The Matrox box was very easy on the eyes while the Nvidia always looked fuzzy. The Matrox white backgrounds were solid white while the Nvidia painted rainbows and shifting Moire patterns.
I wish more people complained about this, something might get done about it then. The prime reason for this difference is that the Matrox uses a nice filter after their DAC(s) while Nvidia doesn't, in the reference design. Any of the graphics card manufacturers using nVidia chipset in their cards could add a filter for less than $1 in components and a few days of an analog engineer's time. None do, even though I have to recommend Matrox cards to all my non-gamer friends and have overheard computer neophites talk about nVidia cards as inferior because of the fuzzys. It's just baffling, I can only think they want to hide aliasing with blur, but then nVidia must realize people use the same video card to read text, esp with their GeForce series.
only 17%
Not only is 17% a whole hell of a lot, but isn't even the total cost. When you take into account benefits for retired soldiers and their spouse's benefits it grows even larger. We spend more on just the Veterans Affairs office than Germany spends on it's entire military. We could afford to spend 2-3% and still feel very safe.
If they cut that budget they could lower payroll taxes, pay the federal public dept, pay back the dept to Social Security, and send a paltry 30 billion to OSS a year. In 40-50 years when the baby boomers start to drop, they might even have a little left over to refinance some of the State and Local debt at inflationary rates or even shock lower taxes in for the long term.
If we had any sense we'd try to reform the UN (more democratic, voting bonus for democratically elected representitive, elimination of the veto, etc.) and sell parts of our offensive military to them to police the Bosnias and Rwandas of the world.
Anyway, is anyone really surprised that.Net is going to be much faster than Java?
Have you used.NET? It's slow as a dead dog. Intrepreted Java is faster. The only reason it hasn't been published is that the friggin EULA doesn't allow you to publish the numbers.
I hear people saying how neat it.NET or C# is and I just wonder. If this were '91-92 sure, but it's friggin 2002, and their flailing about trying to implement a Java 0.9 lookalike, with an extra special JNI pre-processor.
By changing the ISA of the CPUs, one can avoid lots of the bubbles (all if one is mean to the compiler). Just introduce branch delay slots and you lose a whole lot of bubbles and complexity.
It seems to me they are constantly trying to introduce simpler instruction sets. i860, i960, ia64 all tried to change the instruction set to make processors that waste less time on keeping the pipelines full. But developers keep rejecting them. They would probably have to have some kind of developer discount program to get programmers to play with them. If developers could get one for $200-500 they would probably get enough mindshare to make these work. I don't know why they haven't, Intel has sent me manuals for free that I would have gladly paid for, so I'm sure they've thought of it.
AMD might succeed though, just eliminating older less used instructions so most things will run, then you can just buy one as your primary PC. If they also spend some money on funding optimization for gcc perhaps even releasing it under multiple licences so commercial compilers can use it, then they could slowly get rid of less efficient instructions but useful instrustions.
I've seen vector graphics with millions of lines inserted into word. Fine for a drawing package or desktop publishing app, but god awful slow in Word. Not really a fault of MS, it's these people should be using a desktop publishing application, Word is for wordprocessing.
Only half true. Microsoft offers [microsoft.com] a little known Word 2000 viewer (and similar viewers for Excel etc) that is available gratis [microsoft.com].
It's only free as in beer. I can use xpdf and the like to view pdf's... Also I've had the experience of the Word Viewer crashing on complex word documents. Only ones from Microsofties so far, but even so it's sad when I have to turn to openoffice to view a word file (even if it takes minutes to render a page), and then convert it to postscript to be able to view it in something solid like ghostview.
What an astounding bit of moral equivalency.
Let's see, Bush is a brutal dictator who bombs innocents in the name of political terror, the Iraq is a republic defending itself and it's freedom by selectively attacking only those who attacked it first, and in the process bringing freedom to millions.
Yeah, no difference whatsoever. Fucking asshole.
What impressed me and a ton of other people in the room was the kick ass handwriting recognition.
Try writing fuck into it, won't work. It's not in their dictionary, you have to write one letter at a time, takes 3x as long as grafitti. I saw a PhD thesis with this level of handwriting regognition a couple years ago. It is impressive that it made it to market so quickly, but technically not very impressive.
I do want one of those tablets though. It's got one of those Wacom tablets under the LCD which makes it like a real dynabook. The first prototypes I saw were completely unusable because the screen was so thick that you got lots of parallax. But the Acer doesn't have a glass covering the screen so it's completely usable. The glass used to be there to protect the LCD, so no heavy handed drawing on the Acer. Unfortunately the Acer is very fragile in many other ways too, but I think if Apple ever makes one of these it will be great.
You don't use it as a tablet when browsing the web or writing anything significant. But if you want to draw something it is much nicer than a wacom tablet, you get feedback right under the pen. And since the screen is soft you get a better feel.* Unlike a PDA you have everything a Wacom tablet has, pressure sensitivity, pen angle, and accuracy. The handwriting recognition is fine for writing the small anotations it's intended for, just insert your words into the dictionary first.
*BTW if you've tried a Wacom tablet but didn't like it, fastening a piece of paper on top of the drawing surface gives it a much better feel. You get some of that friction you get using a pencil on paper.
If Rosen had given $100,000 to those student union members voting for her, and $2,000,000 to those vocally supporting her position then it would be something like a congressional debate. Without bribery you might as well get rid of the so called "representatives" and have a democracy.
I know there are going to be those that rally for proportional representation, but you still have bribery targets in that type of system. It would be easy to switch to democracy now that we have technology like television, radio and telephone. And it would be bribery immune, or at least require that the funding for the bribes would be not be off the backs of at least half of the 30%* of the population that votes in Senate elections. 15% is a lot better than the 4.8% support you need in the USA to elect a majority Senate now. The house seats are effectively unelected in all but a dozen cases, no point in even thinking that's an elected body. But while you could elect representatives with proportional representation, all would still accept bribes, 40 million people are much harder to bribe effectively than 51 Senators (or less if you actually have anyone agreeing with you before they see the check.)
* 30% guestimated, all other figures calculated from 30% times known figures.
The hemp the constitution is written on is wasted. Keep the bill of rights, strengthen it, and then start over on the rest. We don't need a Senate to preserve slavery anymore, and the House is an outdated concept, elect some people to debate each side in an issue before bills are proposed, but god forbid don't let those scoundrels vote!
The DMCA would not have passed the Senate 99-0 in a democracy, hell none of it would have passed except the safe harbor for ISPs.
The guy who didn't vote, Gregg, is trying to pass a law making encryption illegal unless you give the secret key to everyone first. I can't believe such an idiotic walking turd wouldn't have voted against free thought if he were there that day. The internet cencorship bill(CDA) passed 84-16, a little better you think? But then that one was blatantly unconstitutional, in any fair system passing such laws should not only be illegal but punished with jail terms or fines. 99-0 on the DMCA! An issue where the informed public is somewhere much much nearer to 0-99. Passed without debates or amendments allowed...
Without considering the bribery, err donations and gifts, you'd think a cat at a keyboard passes the Turing test better. But these are not severely mentally challenged men but simply career criminals that just happen to run our government.
If Google took them down from it's US site, then they did so voluntarily, not by government decree. Important difference.
It is an important difference, but I believe at least links to Scientology websites were taken down due to fear of court rulings after the 2600 case in New York. Now I know the 2600 case isn't a precident for California, but courts do look for how judges have ruled in similar cases in other jurisdictions. Plus, if you look at what doesn't have 1st ammendment protection in the USA it's generally either sexual, inciting to violence/revolution or copyrighted; pretty much the same as Europe. Where the draw the fuzzy line is different, but not in any real sense.
My biggest problem with Google's policy is that they don't just remove files from their cache, but from the searchable index as well. That makes every search suspect. At the very least they should publish a list of every URL/IP/domain they block, so we can verify whether the consorship is just. Very few people think all censorship is unjust so we're not gonna win that battle.
But also it highlights how oppression elsewhere can chill freedom everywhere. I would change the elsewhere to anywhere.
Right, the RIAA. The same way the MPAA sent a take-down order for a fourth-grader's book report about Harry Potter. They don't care if the claim has any merit. If this really is pervasive it shouldn't be to hard to get a Judge to enjoin the RIAA, MPAA, and their agents from sending DMCA requests at all.
All you need is enough plaintifs to file a class action suit, file for injunctive relief from irreprable harm, then take as many years as you need to get a settlement that pays recording artists and movie makers for the loss of potential revenue due to the actions of the RIAA and MPAA, and gets the ??AAs to promise not to do stupid things in the future. By the time they do you might even have a justice department which will eliminate these cartels.
But Google has removed sites from it's index in the US too. Just different ones for different reasons. The Free Press listing was from Reporters without borders which is an organization concerned with the physical intimidation, arrest and murder of reporters. Even those countries ranked 1st aren't angels either, just better.
I've wondered about this too. I would imagine that the power required could be generated with a combination of solar cells and a decay reactor. Both for redundancy. This would also have the advantage that you could allocate more or less power to the shield depending on whether the station was occupied, or if you needed it for other things, or if there was a solar storm, etc.
The disadvantage is that the radiation would only be redirected toward the poles, so you would still need protection there. Hopefully this would still lower costs. There is also the issue of how strong the field would have to be? Would it affect electronics in the station? Would it take away a lot of usable space with a magnetic iron pole running through the station? Is it even feasable to generate?
I just looked at their current website and the deeper pages all seem pretty Lynx friendly. It's only the home pages which is missing descriptions for 8 of the images, 7 about buying tickets, and to get the page in spanish. So if you just picked any of the unlabeled links you'd start collecting information about schedules, fares, special offers, and ordering tickets.
Has it changed since the lawsuit was filed? Currently it looks like a 5 minute job for your average tool using monkey to make it PDA/cell phone/blind usable.
It depends very much on the car. A foreign SUV or light truck has a 33% tariff. And, there is a small luxury tax on something like a BMW. There are property taxes and sales tax on transportation.
So it can add up, but that's if you're buying an imported BMW or Lexus SUV. If it's a small US car the taxes are minscule, even an American $50k SUV doesn't then it's only a few percent.
There is also taxes on the workers income, and any profit, but that's going to depend a lot on the country it's made in and where it's made. I could believe the 50% figure on an SUV made in Germany, but not on a some car made in Mexico(no tariff) for a US company racking up losses not profits.
As long as you're an adult and you can't inflict this on any kids I think you should be able to do anything to your damn self as you please. It shouldn't be a hostile takeover of an entire state. It would be fairer if you came together and bought some territory from some state+country, that is paid the current residents and the state+country it was in it's expected value + future cost to defend the new border from illegal immigration.
It would be important to shot anyone trying to cross out of the territory on sight so that they wouldn't export their less productive citizens to the US. They would of course have to give up their citizenship on entry, and put in escrow the cost of their possible reintegration into society if they wanted a visa to visit the US + pay Visa processing costs + taxes for the days they planned to spend in the US. The escrow would be set by the state department officer that processed their visa, so that lower fees could be charged for a respectible person with a PhD than some down on their luck refugee.
Wouldn't it be easier to just move to some third world country without much of a government than try to buy land from one of the richest countries in the world? I'm ignoring the hostile takeover of a state because that's just wrong. Or, maybe find a down on their luck indian tribe that will accept 10 billion a head to leave or accept you as voters. Probably the cheapest solution, you would only have to bargain with the US Government for air rights and entry rights with your new passports after you renounced US Citizenship.
I bought ChairME from him 2 years ago, but the chair just flipped over and my butt smacked the floor hard
I have to speak in EvilCabbage's defence, it's the wheel vendors that never made a driver that could support floor contact. They decided to only support the Chair2000 intended for office since that was their target market. You shouldn't have been attempting to use Chair95 drivers for the more advanced WheelFREE! ChairME.
Chair2000, ChairMe, WheelFREE are trademarked properties of Evil Inc.
I'm not going to say anything about the direction of "up" that's just to pedantic.
But the history of Japan is not that simple. There are 'native' Japanese that actually look kind of European, though probably not any closer to Europeans genetically since that bog man from Washington state is thought by some to look similar to the native Japanese. The general populace is probably mostly of Chinese/Korean/native mixed ancenstry, and then there are people that are from relatively recent Chinese, Korean, and Brazilian extraction. Recent enough that they are descriminated against. Of course, there are even more recent American, European, Pacific Islanders; most recent immigrants don't have sufferage even if born in Japan, though there tenative moves to fix this on occasion, the "ethnic Japanese" constititute 99% of the population, though what this means outside the main 4 islands... Japan has a reputation for being very homogenous and intolerant of outsiders, but then again America only abandoned de jure apartite in most of our lifetimes, and has yet to actually get de facto integration in many places.
But then how seperate are China and Korea, people move, people mix, sometimes with the borders, sometimes not. Not that this clarifies the GO question... Unless you just say it was probably invented by humans, no one's gonna refute that.
Just because some fascist says it's so doesn't mean it's so.
(Not that Atlas Shrugged is a bad book, I enjoyed a lot of it, though I skipped the 70 boring pages in both readings, you know the ones.)
She makes a strong arguement that I should be compensated for my work, even if it means I have to kill some of the less brilliant in my way. But there is also the part where all the dweebs living off their inheritance and their talented minions just tune out and drop out of the broken system and join a commune based around their charismatic figurehead. So they're not really motivated by power/money anymore, but human qualities like higher ideals mixed with some adolescent spite and cluelessness.
Of course, unlike poor Rand, real Americans know that a plutocracy like we have now can be just as silly and inefficient as the democratic republic she preached against. Both are slightly more efficient than the English aristocracy based on inheritance and meritocracy that our revolution tried to prevent. (Sidebar: I read that Iowans actually manage to elect their representatives by not having the ruling party gerrymander the districts every 10 years, this small state has 4 competitive races, more than our 4 of our bigger states California, Texas, New York and Illinois combined.)
Reasonable, but also against the terms of the Berne Convention. Breaking the Berne treaty could get U.S. copyrights de-recognized all over the world.
Did we sign the earlier Rome convention? I think we did, in which case we could go back to the pre-1976, 36 years + renewable for 36 years by the author and still have U.S. Copyrights recognized the world over(Clause 7). Not that it matters, WTO members must recognize each others copyrights, and IMF loans always specify such things, so that covers just about everyone except Antarctica.
The Berne convention doesn't provide the same protection for Films, only 50 years after release. Just making that reform to US law could save a lot of films from decaying before they can be saved. For other works the convention specified life of author + 50 years, or 50 years for anonymous works, but countries don't have to extend copyrights if they signed the Rome treaty, and don't have honor a foreign country's copyright if it's expired there but not in your own country. So if a copyright expired in Angola after 20 years, we wouldn't have to extend it to life+70 here like we do with copyrights claimed in the US.
Putting public domain words into a new format does not suddenly make them copyrightable, nor mean that you own the copyright to it.
The law doesn't really agree with you. I think the cases were mostly decided on phone book suits. The information is not copyrighted, but any unique formatting that is innovative and creative can be. So you could copy the phone numbers and the names and addresses into your own "Yellow Book" but you couldn't Xerox it with new ads taped over the old ones and give it away because they might have just the right number of tabs and just the right font to make it better than anything you could produce by just copying the uncopyrightable information.
So you can retype those transcripts and sell those but someone prolly signed a contract saying they wouldn't do that for at least X number of months, so they could be in trouble for letting you see a copy without agreeing not to copy it.
I don't know a single korean who doesn't have an e-mail address or an IM id.
I ran into an old friend a few years ago on the subway, we chatted it up and then as her train was leaving I asked for her e-mail so I could get back in touch with her. She said she didn't have one and I was so befudled that I didn't catch her phone number as a the train pulled out.
That is I could also almost say that in the US, even though millions of Americans don't even have e-mail. Hell I only know a couple people without broadband, even though most people don't have it here yet.
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I always hate having to ask the cabbie to turn off the damn radio. I feel bad because I've already asked him to get off the cell phone, and I'm lowering the tip by a dollar for every request I'm forced to make. This makes absolutely no sense since the radio is obviously only for the drivers benefit, it being in the front of the cab after all. I could see some people paying an extra 25 cents for turning on a back seat radio, but the cabbie's radio is just a nuisance for the rider.
Is it okay to dig up ancient graves, remains, etc. Why should current beliefs really enter into this? The best reason I can see for not digging up someones remains is if we have reason to believe they didn't want to be dug up. Just as a matter of respect for another human. I find the idea that someone might dig up my body 20,000 years from now to learn about my people and me pretty exciting. Someone else might find it repulsive. If we don't know what they wanted it should be weighed against whatever value we might get out of it. If you find a 1000 bodies, the first 20 you dig up and analyse maybe worth it, but if we learn to read the inscription that says, "please leave this body be" or "please dig me up" then it should be respected. If we find the body was buried so the relatives didn't have to watch it picked apart by buzzards or just to keep from spreading disease, then modern ideas have more value. I really find no reason to think the ancients were more supersticious than some of our contemporaries. When you read Plato do you think he thinks of the gods as symbols or as real living breathing people? I know I don't think of gods as being real but I often speak of them because it is convenient shorthand for more complicated ideas. If someone is buried with appeals to a god, is that because they believe in it or because a relative does, or because a relative saw some political gain in looking like they believed in it, or was it just tradition that was seen as valuable for mourning? Some cultures don't have a god creation myth... Layering on modern beliefs doesn't help, but respecting their true beliefs has value to us today. We might wish that our remains are respected in our way 10,000 years from now when everyone knows there are four gods that require bodies to be exhumed and reburied in dog dung, then posed in sex acts with goats, and sent into the sun on inter-planetary television.
Sume dæge hit gelamp æt an nunnan of æm ilcan mynstre geforon in on hire wyrt-tun. Ond ær heo gesawon an leahtric, and hit gelyste æs. It's funny, half those words sound Icelandic or German, how long does it usually take someone with those languages and English to pick start reading olde english? My native tounge is Icelandic but while not understanging say a Swedish speaker I can read the other Scandinavian languages without any formal training, which is usual I think. (Leaving out Finland, a Nordic not Scandinavian country in my opinion.) Same with old Norse you just forget some of the constinants ever existed and pretty quickly you start reading it. The trick with cross reading Scandinavian languages is almost the opposite, the vowels change but the constinants are similar... A gloss instead of a proper translation of the above excerpt might be more useful... Oh and why the inconsistency of Ond & and? og(IS), und(DL), and(EN) Just from a quick look I saw this [The] Same day, she X X a nun of that same monistery went into X valuable land. And there she saw a/an X and she X it/this/that. Although not exactly, the "æ.." words can actually carry different and greater meaning depending on the X words I couldn't understand but could guess at from your translation.. Also the word endings seem to be like Icelandic or Japanese in how they connect the sentence together, telling you what belongs to what else, how they are related, etc... I was totally amazed when I learned Japanese also had 17 word endings like Icelandic, but then I guess you have to express all the same things on the other side of the world using a similar mechanism. Not so surprising after all. They don't do all the same things though Icelandic doesn't have the "ga?" and I don't think Japan sexes as many words as most European languages, so some of those dual or triple connectors collapse to one (The it/he/she are covered with a single ending, though Icelandic reuses some for endings different purposes, so it gets complicated.) Ok this was a huge digression I really just wanted you to write a word for word translation... with the grammar explained instead of rewritten in modern english word order.
The Matrox box was very easy on the eyes while the Nvidia always looked fuzzy. The Matrox white backgrounds were solid white while the Nvidia painted rainbows and shifting Moire patterns.
I wish more people complained about this, something might get done about it then. The prime reason for this difference is that the Matrox uses a nice filter after their DAC(s) while Nvidia doesn't, in the reference design. Any of the graphics card manufacturers using nVidia chipset in their cards could add a filter for less than $1 in components and a few days of an analog engineer's time. None do, even though I have to recommend Matrox cards to all my non-gamer friends and have overheard computer neophites talk about nVidia cards as inferior because of the fuzzys. It's just baffling, I can only think they want to hide aliasing with blur, but then nVidia must realize people use the same video card to read text, esp with their GeForce series.
only 17% Not only is 17% a whole hell of a lot, but isn't even the total cost. When you take into account benefits for retired soldiers and their spouse's benefits it grows even larger. We spend more on just the Veterans Affairs office than Germany spends on it's entire military. We could afford to spend 2-3% and still feel very safe. If they cut that budget they could lower payroll taxes, pay the federal public dept, pay back the dept to Social Security, and send a paltry 30 billion to OSS a year. In 40-50 years when the baby boomers start to drop, they might even have a little left over to refinance some of the State and Local debt at inflationary rates or even shock lower taxes in for the long term. If we had any sense we'd try to reform the UN (more democratic, voting bonus for democratically elected representitive, elimination of the veto, etc.) and sell parts of our offensive military to them to police the Bosnias and Rwandas of the world.
Anyway, is anyone really surprised that .Net is going to be much faster than Java?
.NET? It's slow as a dead dog. Intrepreted Java is faster. The only reason it hasn't been published is that the friggin EULA doesn't allow you to publish the numbers.
.NET or C# is and I just wonder. If this were '91-92 sure, but it's friggin 2002, and their flailing about trying to implement a Java 0.9 lookalike, with an extra special JNI pre-processor.
Have you used
I hear people saying how neat it
By changing the ISA of the CPUs, one can avoid lots of the bubbles (all if one is mean to the compiler). Just introduce branch delay slots and you lose a whole lot of bubbles and complexity. It seems to me they are constantly trying to introduce simpler instruction sets. i860, i960, ia64 all tried to change the instruction set to make processors that waste less time on keeping the pipelines full. But developers keep rejecting them. They would probably have to have some kind of developer discount program to get programmers to play with them. If developers could get one for $200-500 they would probably get enough mindshare to make these work. I don't know why they haven't, Intel has sent me manuals for free that I would have gladly paid for, so I'm sure they've thought of it. AMD might succeed though, just eliminating older less used instructions so most things will run, then you can just buy one as your primary PC. If they also spend some money on funding optimization for gcc perhaps even releasing it under multiple licences so commercial compilers can use it, then they could slowly get rid of less efficient instructions but useful instrustions.
Users do stupid things.
I've seen vector graphics with millions of lines inserted into word. Fine for a drawing package or desktop publishing app, but god awful slow in Word. Not really a fault of MS, it's these people should be using a desktop publishing application, Word is for wordprocessing.
Only half true. Microsoft offers [microsoft.com] a little known Word 2000 viewer (and similar viewers for Excel etc) that is available gratis [microsoft.com]. It's only free as in beer. I can use xpdf and the like to view pdf's... Also I've had the experience of the Word Viewer crashing on complex word documents. Only ones from Microsofties so far, but even so it's sad when I have to turn to openoffice to view a word file (even if it takes minutes to render a page), and then convert it to postscript to be able to view it in something solid like ghostview.
What an astounding bit of moral equivalency. Let's see, Bush is a brutal dictator who bombs innocents in the name of political terror, the Iraq is a republic defending itself and it's freedom by selectively attacking only those who attacked it first, and in the process bringing freedom to millions. Yeah, no difference whatsoever. Fucking asshole.
Try writing fuck into it, won't work. It's not in their dictionary, you have to write one letter at a time, takes 3x as long as grafitti. I saw a PhD thesis with this level of handwriting regognition a couple years ago. It is impressive that it made it to market so quickly, but technically not very impressive.
I do want one of those tablets though. It's got one of those Wacom tablets under the LCD which makes it like a real dynabook. The first prototypes I saw were completely unusable because the screen was so thick that you got lots of parallax. But the Acer doesn't have a glass covering the screen so it's completely usable. The glass used to be there to protect the LCD, so no heavy handed drawing on the Acer. Unfortunately the Acer is very fragile in many other ways too, but I think if Apple ever makes one of these it will be great.
You don't use it as a tablet when browsing the web or writing anything significant. But if you want to draw something it is much nicer than a wacom tablet, you get feedback right under the pen. And since the screen is soft you get a better feel.* Unlike a PDA you have everything a Wacom tablet has, pressure sensitivity, pen angle, and accuracy. The handwriting recognition is fine for writing the small anotations it's intended for, just insert your words into the dictionary first.
*BTW if you've tried a Wacom tablet but didn't like it, fastening a piece of paper on top of the drawing surface gives it a much better feel. You get some of that friction you get using a pencil on paper.
I know there are going to be those that rally for proportional representation, but you still have bribery targets in that type of system. It would be easy to switch to democracy now that we have technology like television, radio and telephone. And it would be bribery immune, or at least require that the funding for the bribes would be not be off the backs of at least half of the 30%* of the population that votes in Senate elections. 15% is a lot better than the 4.8% support you need in the USA to elect a majority Senate now. The house seats are effectively unelected in all but a dozen cases, no point in even thinking that's an elected body. But while you could elect representatives with proportional representation, all would still accept bribes, 40 million people are much harder to bribe effectively than 51 Senators (or less if you actually have anyone agreeing with you before they see the check.)
* 30% guestimated, all other figures calculated from 30% times known figures.
The hemp the constitution is written on is wasted. Keep the bill of rights, strengthen it, and then start over on the rest. We don't need a Senate to preserve slavery anymore, and the House is an outdated concept, elect some people to debate each side in an issue before bills are proposed, but god forbid don't let those scoundrels vote!
The DMCA would not have passed the Senate 99-0 in a democracy, hell none of it would have passed except the safe harbor for ISPs.
The guy who didn't vote, Gregg, is trying to pass a law making encryption illegal unless you give the secret key to everyone first. I can't believe such an idiotic walking turd wouldn't have voted against free thought if he were there that day. The internet cencorship bill(CDA) passed 84-16, a little better you think? But then that one was blatantly unconstitutional, in any fair system passing such laws should not only be illegal but punished with jail terms or fines. 99-0 on the DMCA! An issue where the informed public is somewhere much much nearer to 0-99. Passed without debates or amendments allowed...
Without considering the bribery, err donations and gifts, you'd think a cat at a keyboard passes the Turing test better. But these are not severely mentally challenged men but simply career criminals that just happen to run our government.
If Google took them down from it's US site, then they did so voluntarily, not by government decree. Important difference.
It is an important difference, but I believe at least links to Scientology websites were taken down due to fear of court rulings after the 2600 case in New York. Now I know the 2600 case isn't a precident for California, but courts do look for how judges have ruled in similar cases in other jurisdictions. Plus, if you look at what doesn't have 1st ammendment protection in the USA it's generally either sexual, inciting to violence/revolution or copyrighted; pretty much the same as Europe. Where the draw the fuzzy line is different, but not in any real sense.
My biggest problem with Google's policy is that they don't just remove files from their cache, but from the searchable index as well. That makes every search suspect. At the very least they should publish a list of every URL/IP/domain they block, so we can verify whether the consorship is just. Very few people think all censorship is unjust so we're not gonna win that battle.
But also it highlights how oppression elsewhere can chill freedom everywhere.
I would change the elsewhere to anywhere.
Right, the RIAA. The same way the MPAA sent a take-down order for a fourth-grader's book report about Harry Potter. They don't care if the claim has any merit.
If this really is pervasive it shouldn't be to hard to get a Judge to enjoin the RIAA, MPAA, and their agents from sending DMCA requests at all.
All you need is enough plaintifs to file a class action suit, file for injunctive relief from irreprable harm, then take as many years as you need to get a settlement that pays recording artists and movie makers for the loss of potential revenue due to the actions of the RIAA and MPAA, and gets the ??AAs to promise not to do stupid things in the future. By the time they do you might even have a justice department which will eliminate these cartels.
But Google has removed sites from it's index in the US too. Just different ones for different reasons. The Free Press listing was from Reporters without borders which is an organization concerned with the physical intimidation, arrest and murder of reporters. Even those countries ranked 1st aren't angels either, just better.
I've wondered about this too. I would imagine that the power required could be generated with a combination of solar cells and a decay reactor. Both for redundancy. This would also have the advantage that you could allocate more or less power to the shield depending on whether the station was occupied, or if you needed it for other things, or if there was a solar storm, etc.
The disadvantage is that the radiation would only be redirected toward the poles, so you would still need protection there. Hopefully this would still lower costs. There is also the issue of how strong the field would have to be? Would it affect electronics in the station? Would it take away a lot of usable space with a magnetic iron pole running through the station? Is it even feasable to generate?
I just looked at their current website and the deeper pages all seem pretty Lynx friendly. It's only the home pages which is missing descriptions for 8 of the images, 7 about buying tickets, and to get the page in spanish. So if you just picked any of the unlabeled links you'd start collecting information about schedules, fares, special offers, and ordering tickets.
Has it changed since the lawsuit was filed? Currently it looks like a 5 minute job for your average tool using monkey to make it PDA/cell phone/blind usable.
It depends very much on the car. A foreign SUV or light truck has a 33% tariff. And, there is a small luxury tax on something like a BMW. There are property taxes and sales tax on transportation.
So it can add up, but that's if you're buying an imported BMW or Lexus SUV. If it's a small US car the taxes are minscule, even an American $50k SUV doesn't then it's only a few percent.
There is also taxes on the workers income, and any profit, but that's going to depend a lot on the country it's made in and where it's made. I could believe the 50% figure on an SUV made in Germany, but not on a some car made in Mexico(no tariff) for a US company racking up losses not profits.
As long as you're an adult and you can't inflict this on any kids I think you should be able to do anything to your damn self as you please. It shouldn't be a hostile takeover of an entire state. It would be fairer if you came together and bought some territory from some state+country, that is paid the current residents and the state+country it was in it's expected value + future cost to defend the new border from illegal immigration.
It would be important to shot anyone trying to cross out of the territory on sight so that they wouldn't export their less productive citizens to the US. They would of course have to give up their citizenship on entry, and put in escrow the cost of their possible reintegration into society if they wanted a visa to visit the US + pay Visa processing costs + taxes for the days they planned to spend in the US. The escrow would be set by the state department officer that processed their visa, so that lower fees could be charged for a respectible person with a PhD than some down on their luck refugee.
Wouldn't it be easier to just move to some third world country without much of a government than try to buy land from one of the richest countries in the world? I'm ignoring the hostile takeover of a state because that's just wrong. Or, maybe find a down on their luck indian tribe that will accept 10 billion a head to leave or accept you as voters. Probably the cheapest solution, you would only have to bargain with the US Government for air rights and entry rights with your new passports after you renounced US Citizenship.
I bought ChairME from him 2 years ago, but the chair just flipped over and my butt smacked the floor hard
I have to speak in EvilCabbage's defence, it's the wheel vendors that never made a driver that could support floor contact. They decided to only support the Chair2000 intended for office since that was their target market. You shouldn't have been attempting to use Chair95 drivers for the more advanced WheelFREE! ChairME.
Chair2000, ChairMe, WheelFREE are trademarked properties of Evil Inc.
I'm not going to say anything about the direction of "up" that's just to pedantic.
But the history of Japan is not that simple. There are 'native' Japanese that actually look kind of European, though probably not any closer to Europeans genetically since that bog man from Washington state is thought by some to look similar to the native Japanese. The general populace is probably mostly of Chinese/Korean/native mixed ancenstry, and then there are people that are from relatively recent Chinese, Korean, and Brazilian extraction. Recent enough that they are descriminated against. Of course, there are even more recent American, European, Pacific Islanders; most recent immigrants don't have sufferage even if born in Japan, though there tenative moves to fix this on occasion, the "ethnic Japanese" constititute 99% of the population, though what this means outside the main 4 islands... Japan has a reputation for being very homogenous and intolerant of outsiders, but then again America only abandoned de jure apartite in most of our lifetimes, and has yet to actually get de facto integration in many places.
But then how seperate are China and Korea, people move, people mix, sometimes with the borders, sometimes not. Not that this clarifies the GO question... Unless you just say it was probably invented by humans, no one's gonna refute that.
Just because some fascist says it's so doesn't mean it's so.
(Not that Atlas Shrugged is a bad book, I enjoyed a lot of it, though I skipped the 70 boring pages in both readings, you know the ones.)
She makes a strong arguement that I should be compensated for my work, even if it means I have to kill some of the less brilliant in my way. But there is also the part where all the dweebs living off their inheritance and their talented minions just tune out and drop out of the broken system and join a commune based around their charismatic figurehead. So they're not really motivated by power/money anymore, but human qualities like higher ideals mixed with some adolescent spite and cluelessness.
Of course, unlike poor Rand, real Americans know that a plutocracy like we have now can be just as silly and inefficient as the democratic republic she preached against. Both are slightly more efficient than the English aristocracy based on inheritance and meritocracy that our revolution tried to prevent. (Sidebar: I read that Iowans actually manage to elect their representatives by not having the ruling party gerrymander the districts every 10 years, this small state has 4 competitive races, more than our 4 of our bigger states California, Texas, New York and Illinois combined.)
Reasonable, but also against the terms of the Berne Convention. Breaking the Berne treaty could get U.S. copyrights de-recognized all over the world.
Did we sign the earlier Rome convention? I think we did, in which case we could go back to the pre-1976, 36 years + renewable for 36 years by the author and still have U.S. Copyrights recognized the world over(Clause 7). Not that it matters, WTO members must recognize each others copyrights, and IMF loans always specify such things, so that covers just about everyone except Antarctica.
The Berne convention doesn't provide the same protection for Films, only 50 years after release. Just making that reform to US law could save a lot of films from decaying before they can be saved. For other works the convention specified life of author + 50 years, or 50 years for anonymous works, but countries don't have to extend copyrights if they signed the Rome treaty, and don't have honor a foreign country's copyright if it's expired there but not in your own country. So if a copyright expired in Angola after 20 years, we wouldn't have to extend it to life+70 here like we do with copyrights claimed in the US.
Putting public domain words into a new format does not suddenly make them copyrightable, nor mean that you own the copyright to it.
The law doesn't really agree with you. I think the cases were mostly decided on phone book suits. The information is not copyrighted, but any unique formatting that is innovative and creative can be. So you could copy the phone numbers and the names and addresses into your own "Yellow Book" but you couldn't Xerox it with new ads taped over the old ones and give it away because they might have just the right number of tabs and just the right font to make it better than anything you could produce by just copying the uncopyrightable information.
So you can retype those transcripts and sell those but someone prolly signed a contract saying they wouldn't do that for at least X number of months, so they could be in trouble for letting you see a copy without agreeing not to copy it.
I don't know a single korean who doesn't have an e-mail address or an IM id.
I ran into an old friend a few years ago on the subway, we chatted it up and then as her train was leaving I asked for her e-mail so I could get back in touch with her. She said she didn't have one and I was so befudled that I didn't catch her phone number as a the train pulled out.
That is I could also almost say that in the US, even though millions of Americans don't even have e-mail. Hell I only know a couple people without broadband, even though most people don't have it here yet.