I don't think that is a relevant distinction. You asked which event was worse. Whether it was caused by humans or not, the death toll and suffering is greater here compared with 9/11.
This event is much, much worse. The death toll is much bigger, the destroyed areas are much bigger, the affected countries are much poorer, more infrastructure is destroyed. Any rational comparison tells you that this is a bigger disaster.
If casualties of the wars that followed 9/11 are counted in, the comparison is not as simple. Also, the political consequences of 9/11 were greater, 9/11 will be a more important date in the history books of the future. But measured in human suffering, it is not.
If the current numbers (3500 missing from Sweden) are correct, it means that close to a half percent of the Swedish population died in this disaster. Add to that the wounded and all the split families. This is the biggest swedish disaster since Poltava.
The biggest change I can imagine is when drive-by-wire will be fully implemented. This means among other things that steering will no longer will be done mechanically. This will change the interior or cars dramatically, see here and here.
Has anyone noticed that there seems to be a conspiracy to change the standard key layout? What seems to be happening is that the six keys Insert Delete Home End PgUp PgDown are being rearranged and only five keys will remain, and one is becoming larger than the rest. Many of Microsoft's new keyboards have this new layout, and now Logitech seem to change too.
That is actually an excellent comparison. However, should not a desktop environment be like an empty apartment, that you move into, and customize the way you want it, rather than have all the tools there already when you move in? This translated to the desktop I think means that you should plug in features, not configure them in. That is a real challenge for desktops to solve though. Pluggable features, easy to plug in?
Yes, exactly. Capsules could be programmed to enter planets with a suitable atmosphere, and so on. I don't think it will happen of course, but I don't think we can escape our solar system either. The chances of that is even more slim. At least, fertilized eggs can survive for much longer with much less energy than living human beings can, and the low temperature can be an advantage perhaps. They need to be shielded from radiation though.
Within the next 1000 years, I don't any human can go outside of our solar system and survive. That is the time scale I am talking about. In ancient Greece, people probably dreamed about going to the stars, later, Dante wrote about it, but realistically, it was impossible to do, and still is. We can still dream, but I don't think we can motivate manned spaceflight beyond earth orbit (perhaps the moon) at the current time. My motivation - it costs to much compared to the benefits and scientific value. If we on the other hand focus on robotic exploration, we will get incredible progress in the robotic field, which will benefit us much more.
If an asteroid destroys our entire civilization or even the entire human species within the next millenia - I say - tought luck! But I am more sorry for the people that will die than I am that the human species will dissappear.
In the very (say, more than 1000 years from now)long term, interstellar travel may become feasible, but as long as I live I don't think it is not motivated to spend money on even human flight to Mars, considering the options and the fact that millions of people starve, die in war and diseases all over the world.
Yes- perhaps that is what we should do. Send fertilized eggs for all kinds of organisms in every direction. After that we can put this argument behind us, and focus on robotic exploration to get anyreal science done. The eggs have better chances of surviving and escaping this solar system than any grown up human being will have, and this way we ensure that DNA is spreading, in the event of disaster.
This is my view on it: Currently what we can build are the equivalents of canoes, and Columbus would never have got to American in a canoe. In perhaps two hundred years the time has come to send people to other planets. Before that, robotic exploration is the way to go.
Since about a month, my Yahoo mail Plus account offers me ad-free email with 2 GB of space. Integrated with an address book which I can export and import in a number of formats, and a calendar. They also have a feature where I can create disposable addresses as often as I want, for example when I am web shopping. I also pay for their Personal Address feature, so that they basically host email for a domain I own. I also get POP access, forwarding, (but I don't use it) and great spam filtering.
This costs some money of course, but I think it is worth it. I haven't tried gmail (no one has invited me), many people here think it has many unique features, but yahoo mail has features that gmail does not have. Until gmail offers personal address, there is no chance I will switch.
Don't count on it. As soon as one of your friends get infected by a virus, your address is out there. Or if you have friends that like to enter your address in boxes on web pages to invite you to "cool" competitions.
I think there is too little metadata about installed applications in a regular Linux system. There is metadata in the packages (RPM for example), and there is metadata in the.desktop files. But the package metadata is on the package level, and does not describe each individual application it contains. The.desktop files are very sparse, and describes things that fit on one line of text or less. This makes it hard to write new kinds of user interfaces. I can't find any way to make a freshmeat like user interface acting on the software that is actually installed in the system, since there are no descriptions that are longer than one sentence in a.desktop file.
RDF does not equal XML. RDF is a way to express relationship through graphs. RDF/XML is one way to express these relationships, but there are other ways too. I thought that RDF always had to be expressed with XML too, but then I read the RDF primer. At first I thought it was extremely overcomplicated, but after reading some more I started to grasp the concepts. And they are not about storage formats. They are about semantics.
E-mail is the application everyone knows about. Many people are using email for much more than just communicating with friends. It is used for notes, reminders, I browse it to see what I did a certain day and so on. This suggestion builds on this usage.
Technically, HTTP does not provide much benefit over SMTP when it comes to sending a single order form for example. What mail provides today is storage.
I see XAML mentioned over and over again. I don't know about it in detail, but I do know there is a new Java technology that may come to compete with XAML: JavaServer Faces. It is a markup-agnostic server technology to ease web development.
I know it is not the same thing as XAML - but I think it may develop into an attractive solution when the problem you need to solve is : how do I create a thin user interface that does not need deployment.
The meeting suggested innovation - what about this:
Tie XForms together with email. The purpose is to allow forms to be sent with email, as alternative to HTTP POST. Integrate it with mail clients so that clicking a link opens the compose window, which will load the form, show it, ready to fill in. When clicking send, the form is evaluated and sent. This is much nicer than filling in an order form in a browser, since you get to keep a copy in the outbox. Actually, I am surprised I don't see this already. Of course, it needs to be standardized, but you have to start somewhere. Is there perhaps already an RFC in progress?
That "gorgeous mountain landscape" shown in the screenshot is surely gorgeous in itself, but the photograph is poor. Fuzzy and not good enough to be shown in that resolution. I bet it was taken with a digital camera by a SUSE employee at a ski vacation.
+ Good package management system + Good influence on the free software community
- Elitistic tendencies - Lots of flamewars - Moving too slowly
? Conservative ? Lots of packages ? Supports many architectures
For me personally, the last points are negative. I don't mind about 11 architectures, since most of them I will never use. In my summary, Debian actually ends up with negative score. But this is subjective of course. For some people, 11 architectures are more important than a release with current software.
I find it incredible that terraforming of Mars is considered an alternative today. Expect an enviromental discussion that will exceed that of the Kyoto protocol many times over.
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I don't agree, but well... lets just agree to disagree.
I don't think that is a relevant distinction. You asked which event was worse. Whether it was caused by humans or not, the death toll and suffering is greater here compared with 9/11.
You are right, thanks
This event is much, much worse. The death toll is much bigger, the destroyed areas are much bigger, the affected countries are much poorer, more infrastructure is destroyed. Any rational comparison tells you that this is a bigger disaster.
If casualties of the wars that followed 9/11 are counted in, the comparison is not as simple. Also, the political consequences of 9/11 were greater, 9/11 will be a more important date in the history books of the future. But measured in human suffering, it is not.
If the current numbers (3500 missing from Sweden) are correct, it means that close to a half percent of the Swedish population died in this disaster. Add to that the wounded and all the split families. This is the biggest swedish disaster since Poltava.
The biggest change I can imagine is when drive-by-wire will be fully implemented. This means among other things that steering will no longer will be done mechanically. This will change the interior or cars dramatically, see here and here.
Your setup sounds very interesting. Can you give more details about it - especially, did you have to do a lot of manual tweaking to get it working?
Has anyone noticed that there seems to be a conspiracy to change the standard key layout? What seems to be happening is that the six keys Insert Delete Home End PgUp PgDown are being rearranged and only five keys will remain, and one is becoming larger than the rest. Many of Microsoft's new keyboards have this new layout, and now Logitech seem to change too.
That is actually an excellent comparison. However, should not a desktop environment be like an empty apartment, that you move into, and customize the way you want it, rather than have all the tools there already when you move in? This translated to the desktop I think means that you should plug in features, not configure them in. That is a real challenge for desktops to solve though. Pluggable features, easy to plug in?
Within the next 1000 years, I don't any human can go outside of our solar system and survive. That is the time scale I am talking about. In ancient Greece, people probably dreamed about going to the stars, later, Dante wrote about it, but realistically, it was impossible to do, and still is. We can still dream, but I don't think we can motivate manned spaceflight beyond earth orbit (perhaps the moon) at the current time. My motivation - it costs to much compared to the benefits and scientific value. If we on the other hand focus on robotic exploration, we will get incredible progress in the robotic field, which will benefit us much more.
If an asteroid destroys our entire civilization or even the entire human species within the next millenia - I say - tought luck! But I am more sorry for the people that will die than I am that the human species will dissappear.
In the very (say, more than 1000 years from now)long term, interstellar travel may become feasible, but as long as I live I don't think it is not motivated to spend money on even human flight to Mars, considering the options and the fact that millions of people starve, die in war and diseases all over the world.
But probably they built it themselves, and paid for it with their own sweat
Yes- perhaps that is what we should do. Send fertilized eggs for all kinds of organisms in every direction. After that we can put this argument behind us, and focus on robotic exploration to get anyreal science done. The eggs have better chances of surviving and escaping this solar system than any grown up human being will have, and this way we ensure that DNA is spreading, in the event of disaster.
This is my view on it: Currently what we can build are the equivalents of canoes, and Columbus would never have got to American in a canoe. In perhaps two hundred years the time has come to send people to other planets. Before that, robotic exploration is the way to go.
Since about a month, my Yahoo mail Plus account offers me ad-free email with 2 GB of space. Integrated with an address book which I can export and import in a number of formats, and a calendar. They also have a feature where I can create disposable addresses as often as I want, for example when I am web shopping. I also pay for their Personal Address feature, so that they basically host email for a domain I own. I also get POP access, forwarding, (but I don't use it) and great spam filtering.
This costs some money of course, but I think it is worth it. I haven't tried gmail (no one has invited me), many people here think it has many unique features, but yahoo mail has features that gmail does not have. Until gmail offers personal address, there is no chance I will switch.
Don't count on it. As soon as one of your friends get infected by a virus, your address is out there. Or if you have friends that like to enter your address in boxes on web pages to invite you to "cool" competitions.
I think there is too little metadata about installed applications in a regular Linux system. There is metadata in the packages (RPM for example), and there is metadata in the .desktop files. But the package metadata is on the package level, and does not describe each individual application it contains. The .desktop files are very sparse, and describes things that fit on one line of text or less. This makes it hard to write new kinds of user interfaces. I can't find any way to make a freshmeat like user interface acting on the software that is actually installed in the system, since there are no descriptions that are longer than one sentence in a .desktop file.
RDF does not equal XML. RDF is a way to express relationship through graphs. RDF/XML is one way to express these relationships, but there are other ways too. I thought that RDF always had to be expressed with XML too, but then I read the
RDF primer. At first I thought it was extremely overcomplicated, but after reading some more I started to grasp the concepts. And they are not about storage formats. They are about semantics.
E-mail is the application everyone knows about. Many people are using email for much more than just communicating with friends. It is used for notes, reminders, I browse it to see what I did a certain day and so on. This suggestion builds on this usage.
Technically, HTTP does not provide much benefit over SMTP when it comes to sending a single order form for example. What mail provides today is storage.
I see XAML mentioned over and over again. I don't know about it in detail, but I do know there is a new Java technology that may come to compete with XAML: JavaServer Faces. It is a markup-agnostic server technology to ease web development.
I know it is not the same thing as XAML - but I think it may develop into an attractive solution when the problem you need to solve is : how do I create a thin user interface that does not need deployment.
The meeting suggested innovation - what about this:
Tie XForms together with email. The purpose is to allow forms to be sent with email, as alternative to HTTP POST. Integrate it with mail clients so that clicking a link opens the compose window, which will load the form, show it, ready to fill in. When clicking send, the form is evaluated and sent. This is much nicer than filling in an order form in a browser, since you get to keep a copy in the outbox. Actually, I am surprised I don't see this already. Of course, it needs to be standardized, but you have to start somewhere. Is there perhaps already an RFC in progress?
That "gorgeous mountain landscape" shown in the screenshot is surely gorgeous in itself, but the photograph is poor. Fuzzy and not good enough to be shown in that resolution. I bet it was taken with a digital camera by a SUSE employee at a ski vacation.
+ Good package management system
+ Good influence on the free software community
- Elitistic tendencies
- Lots of flamewars
- Moving too slowly
? Conservative
? Lots of packages
? Supports many architectures
For me personally, the last points are negative. I don't mind about 11 architectures, since most of them I will never use. In my summary, Debian actually ends up with negative score. But this is subjective of course. For some people, 11 architectures are more important than a release with current software.
In Sweden, Jerker is actually a pretty common name. You don't believe me? Look here
Great answer. But since we still can live here on earth today, it is not the million dollar answer. You need to provide a better one.
I find it incredible that terraforming of Mars is considered an alternative today. Expect an enviromental discussion that will exceed that of the Kyoto protocol many times over.