X.org and XWin do not compete; X.org is just the reference implementation of the X Window System. I don't know what you mean here; perhaps you're referring to XFree86 but for the most part X.org and XFree86 development were in serial. XFree86 became untouchable, so almost everyone moved to X.org and then everyone else moved to X.org. That's surely the kind of development you want. I don't even known if XFree86 exists any more! if it does, I certainly don't care.
KDE and Gnome don't compete against X.org, XWin or XFree86; in fact, they depend on the X Window System (however it's implemented.)
KDE and Gnome don't really compete against each other but cater to different needs. Any union of the two groups would simply result in one market being uncatered for. You might as well say they should both give up and just develop good free software for Windows.
As for sound, again, we have Esound, Jack and Artsd depending on OSS and ALSA. ALSA has the disadvantage of having a Linux-specific API so to the extent that OSS still exists, that's why. As for Esound, Jack and Artsd, I thought at least Esound and Artsd were essentially EOLed and I have no idea what Jack is. I use sound on Linux all the time both input and output and this sound daemon stuff hasn't been relevant since ALSA became stable. I would be happy to give you a dollar for ever time you had to make that change, but I think you'd find your bank balance wouldn't change as much as you think. There's a danger in knowing too much, but not enough.
But yes. Let's restrict ourselves to just web browsers. If everyone focussed on developing Firefox, then we wouldn't have a half-decent web browser for Linux. We'd have an imposing Windows program using a silly toolkit that just barely integrates some of its look to that of Linux. The developers of Galeon and Epiphany have nothing to do with the development of Gecko; they simply use a library provided by Mozilla (rather than waste time reinventing the wheel making their own!) to use a nice, native user interface. (Which is not an issue of speed; it as issue of integration. Firefox neither looks nor feels like a Gnome program, nor like a KDE program, nor, indeed, like anything much.) Epiphany and Galeon are in the process of merging which is, surely, the sort of development you want. K-Meleon is a Windows program so it's completely irrelevant. In any case, I have been bemoaning the lack of competition for web browsers on GTK-based Linux for some time; we have paid too much for too long by only having one reasonable option. Five years ago, I didn't think I'd ever say it, but I envy Windows users their choice in this regard. I will be very happy when WebKit matures enough to be useable.
I don't know if you are a troll or not — if you are, I'm sorry to everyone else for biting. If you aren't, you really don't know much of what you're talking about.
How does that work? Does the independent have to win a certain proportion of the national vote? Do all candidates campaign nationally/provincially?
The Senate is elected by state. Each state has twelve senators, six of whom are elected every three years (unless the Senate and House of Representatives don't get on, in which case they can all be elected at once less than three years after the last half-election). Voters mark a ballot either by putting a number against every candidate representing their relative preference (called voting below the line), or by voting for a group of two or more candidates, whether independent or a party (called voting above the line or ticket voting), in which case the voter's preferences are determined by the group according to a ticket given to the Australian Electoral Commission before the election.
In order to get elected, each candidate must get a quota of the vote (14 per cent), but if no candidate gets more than a quota, or not enough candidates get a quota, then whichever candidate has the least votes is eliminated, and their votes transferred according to the next preference. Likewise, if a candidate gets more than a quota, then they are declared elected, and the excess vote is distributed according to the next preference (in this case, all votes that could've elected that candidate are reduced in value until the total value is the same as the excess). This method of voting is called "Proportional Representation by the Single Transferable Vote" and is probably described better on Wikipedia. In addition to being used for essentially all proportional elections in Australia, it's used in Ireland and I think some Canadian province was thinking they might adopt it a while ago, but didn't.
All of this has the following implications. Firstly, in small states the number of votes you need is not very high. In fact, Tasmania elects more senators during a regular half-senate election than they elect MPs to the House of Representatives. On the other hand, in large states, most people live in the same city. Over 60 per cent of people in New South Wales live in Sydney; over 70 per cent of Victorians are live in Melbourne. The two independent senators(-elect) that I know anything about also started out in their state parliament, which means they already had a profile (trying to dive straight into the deep end is never a good idea).
Secondly, parties and independents bargain for preferences before an election, because most people vote above the line. This means it is possible to get elected off a small primary vote. Victorian Senator Steven Fielding of the Family First Party who no-one knew anything about before he was elected, was elected off about two percent of the primary vote if I remember correctly. I consider this to be a bad thing, but I'm biased—I vote for the Greens who regularly get the highest vote of any mainland state in Victoria, around nine per cent, but they've never got a seat here.
As for the voting for the party vs voting for the candidate thing, over here in Australia it's a big news item if a politician crosses the floor. Labor politicians actually make a pledge that they will always vote the party line on pain of losing pre-selection. And politicians who do lose pre-selection and try to stand as an independent rarely make it in, because people are voting for the party, not the person.
In the Australian Senate, we use a system of proportional representation, and frequently have independent senators. South Australia just elected Nick Xenophon to represent them at the election on 24 November, for instance.
Two-party system: Vote for someone you don't want (who gets to form government), or someone else you don't want (who gets to be the opposition). If you're lucky enough that your opinions actually align with whoever forms government, you'll quickly find that they become as bad as the other guys and don't/can't keep all their promises.
Multi-party system: Vote for someone you want. Let them contribute to government and have some chance of influencing national policy. Discover that they don't/can't keep all their promises because of the coalition arrangement.
The outcome is much the same. One method decreases stability, but your opinion is actual heard and has a greater chance of being acted on. If you vote for sensible people than the risk of a vote of no confidence is reduced anyway. The other increases stability, but so many people don't get their actual opinions heard.
Text, especially repetitive text like your lorem ipsum, is highly compressible. PDF is (optionally, at least) partially compressed; this is why PDFs are usually a bit bigger than their ps.gz equivalents, and no-where near as big as the raw PS.
Most things that I change relate to making me use the computer faster (get stuff done) rather than on aesthetics.
And it's really in this regard the fact that Windows and Mac OS X are unconfigurable becomes obvious. (For my part, I don't usually even bother setting a desktop wallpaper. The limits of my visual customisation is just to make the colors less garish.) They're both "take it or leave it" for the most part. Do you find the taskbar irritable, or the application-centred focus unusable? Then you can't use Windows or the Mac.
For the first five years I was using GNU/Linux and FreeBSD I was one of the people trying to configure their system as much as possible. But about five years ago, I came up with a system I largely liked and since then I've never made any large changes and stuck with them --- so I rarely make changes at all. (Once every now and again I think, "I wonder what [KDE/Enlightenment/WindowMaker/other thing I used to use] is like nowadays" and I give it a try during free time, but I never expect to stay switched.)
The links Wikipedia points to are from 2001, before the free trade agreement of 2004; when implemented in law, this would presumably have over-ruled the Trade Practices Act in that regard. But the Wikipedia page on the FTA in the "intellectual properties" section says a government report described the digital restrictions management section as containing significant, absurd and lamentable flaws. The relevant sections haven't been implemented in law. These sections were probably the ones I was thinking of, so it seems I'm wrong, though not for want of trying on the part of American media companies.
It seems neither option, neither paying for it not getting it for free will stop you from whinging. Will you ever stop crying?
Turns out I'm probably wrong and it's still legal to buy region-free DVD players. In which case I'm happy enough to pay for them. (Honestly, I've been happy enough to pay for them in the time being too; it's easier and less immoral even if it was (so I thought) more illegal, and I like to support movies and tv shows I like because they're often less popular ones.)
Oh wait --- you probably never expected me to admit to when I'm wrong. If it makes you feel better I'll take it all back and say "American media companies want to treat me as a fourth-class customer so I'll treat them as fourth-class companies and do what I want".
Because legally, we're not allowed to do that? The US is region one, Australia is region four. Most people have multi-region players, but my understanding is they've been illegal since we got a so-called free trade agreement with the US a few years back. Both options are piracy. Why should I pay to pirate, when I can pirate for free?
This is hardly a new problem. TeX and Postscript are both complete programming languages (indeed, PDF was meant to be just programming-language-free version of Postscript). Most word processors and necessarily all spreadsheets have programming languages built-in. If you want any degree of context-sensitivity, interaction or convenience, you pretty much need your text documents to have programming language support. Security needs to be achieved by limiting/carefully controlling network access or access to the rest of the system, because it can't be achieved by forbidding interactive documents.
I meant treated differently by other people. I will have different expectations of calling a landline and mobile. I can call someone during the day on their mobile phone, but I wouldn't want to waste my time doing that with their landline, because they're probably not home. Or if it's a person who lives with their parents, then a mobile number is going to be very different from a landline number. These are consequences of the technology; the differences between mobile and landline phones cannot be made transparent simply by not clearly distinguishing them.
04xx xxx xxx = pay extra (mobile, anywhere in Australia) 03 9xxx xxxx = don't pay extra (Melbourne)
just the same as
02 xxxx xxxx = pay extra (NSW, ACT) 03 5xxx xxxx = pay extra (regional Victoria) 1800 xxx xxx = pay less (free call)
I gather Americans like their system of conflating mobile numbers and local numbers because you can easily switch from one to another, but I'd personally like to know if I'm calling a mobile so I can know how likely they are to answer it. And number portability would confuse everyone if you could take a landline number from Melbourne to a mobile in Perth, but with a separate prefix my mobile number doesn't care where I live.
So area codes in America aren't geographically based then? Do you always have to dial all ten digits of a number every time you call?
In any case, in Australia most adults who've always had a land line also have a mobile phone, so they actually have two numbers, whereas younger people tend to only have a mobile phone and if they have their own home they might have a landline but not generally use it. (What good is switching your number from a mobile to a landline if you can only receive calls then when you're at home?) The mobile number works just as well in Hobart as in Darwin, and the landline number can be moved to any landline in the same local area.
How can a dead cat observe itself? That's half the point of being dead — no more observation for you! OTOH, a living cat can observe itself, so either cats never die because of quantum, or only people can change cats just by watching them. My money's on the first: I've never seen a cat die, I expect that just before they would've, they cause themselves to be both dead and alive, redirect the deadness to their dead half, make sure they observe themselves, et voilà! Immortal cats! Would explain a lot, at least.
UNKNOWN ENGLISH (ENGLISH)=40 (LATIN)=(per cent) ENGLISH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH FRENCH. ENGLISH (ENGLISH)=fifteen LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH. ENGLISH GREEK-via-FRENCH ENGLISH ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH ENGLISH ?DUTCH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH, ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH ENGLISH FRENCH LATIN.
33 words of English origin. 7 words of French origin (mostly the word "French") 7 words of Latin origin (i.e. learned borrowings from Latin, not vulgar evolutions) 1 word of Greek origin via French, a learned borrowing that is somewhat masked. Also fun is the related word "glamor", so let no-one tell you that grammar's not glamorous.
The dictionary has lots of French words, but most of the words we use most of the time are English words. Even if we ignored repetition, it'd only reduce the degree of English's win, and not the amount. Most of the time people talk you get the same result. (Prepared speeches on academic topics are the most likely to be different.)
(Errors might have crept into that; I did it mostly on memory rather than by consulting a dictionary. I also might have missed words
And you mean us Australians would celebrate Christmas in Winter? Okay --- that settles it. Something needs to be done. God never meant Christmas to be celebrated in Winter.
XP didn't cease to be Windows after the release of Vista, so the GP is right, and your correction is wrong.
If what you say is true,[*] Microsoft is to be congratulated for (finally) being concerned with the safety & security of their operating system and users, but unfortunately the release of Vista doesn't suddenly cure the millions of deployed XP boxes, many of which will probably still be in use ten years hence.
[*]: I make no apologies for not keeping up-to-date with the latest details of Windows however, and base my comment exclusively on yours.
When British prisons were getting over-crowded, prisoners were transported. Until America politely indicated they wanted no further convicts in the late eighteenth century, they were sent there. But having lost these colonies, Great Britain continued to pile up with prisoners no-one knew what to do with. So they decided to develop new colonies in an unknown land: Australia. The convicts made the land hospitable to future settlers, and guaranteed assistance to early ones. Today, Australia is an advanced western nation with many natural resources to offer the rest of the world.
American prisons are currently over-crowded with victims of the War on Drugs. Although it would be far simpler to simply decriminalise marijuana and offer rehabilitation and diversionary/work programs to users of harmful drugs, it doesn't seem like that is going to happen any time soon. My suggestion is therefore the colonisation and economic development of the Moon.
Criminals sentenced to a term of, say, six or more years for non-violent crimes will have the option of or be compelled to take transport to the moon. Initial transportees will work on performing limited terraforming so that people can do most of the work without needing to wear spacesuits all the time. Researchers and scientists, prison guards, medical and religious personel and other enterprising people will go up as free settlers and the earliest reasonable opportunity. Eventually, the Moon base will be as self-sufficient as any human society and may choose to form a nation independent of the United States.
The advantages are manifold: People who shouldn't really be in prison are taken out of the system and set to work, giving us something back. They're not free of course, because they can't (legally) return to Earth, but it's better than nothing. The technology to develop space travel and colonisation techniques will be necessarily developed at a faster rate that we are currently inclined to. Because we're obviously not really at a point where this is an easy task to perform, it will be expensive: This means other expensive excursions (such as the war in Iraq) will no longer be financially viable and America can get back to doing stuff that matters. The economic development will arrest this current decline America is undergoing and ensure it remains one of the Earth's—and indeed the world's—superpowers for a long time to come. And of course, we get all of the resources the moon has to offer. And of course, it needn't be one-sided: A nation like China or a bloc like the EU might choose to engage America in a second space race and construct other moon bases for their own use.
(Don't you love the sort of thing you read on the Internet?)
The r's never made it to Boston. They died over in London. From London they lack of r's spread to most of England, New England and the South of the US, Australia, most of New Zealand, South Africa and a lot of the parts of Asia where English is spoken. So I dunno... while there's probably more US speakers than speakers of other dialects, it's a little unfair on the rest of us to say we're uncivilised. (If I said "quarter dark" in isolation it'd probably sound like "coda doc" to you; much more like your "KWATAH DAHK" than the way you said "quarter dark". PS: I take no offence; I can smell a joke.)
Also, you seem to be under the misconception that you put a comma before quotation marks. You don't. You put it before a direct quotation after a verb like "said", but normally you run them together. It depends on whether you pause while speaking.
This is a standard feature of -all- GTK apps; for most you just need to change a system-wide setting which our friendly overlords at Gnome have seen fit not to include in the Control Panel, but I think it's in gconf somewhere.
And this is one of those many great features of GTK+ that is not included in Firefox and precisely why I think "cross-platform" GUIs like Firefox are 99% of the time implemented to give us the worst of all world. The Gimp is another great example of this: It's got a great GUI on Linux/X11, but works appallingly on Windows. Cross-platform appls should always be like Gaim/Adium: a common library that does the hard work, and platform-specific GUI that lets it integrate into your system and take advantage of all the best features.
Why is this "Informative" and gp is "Troll"? Neither seems informative. Taken as a whole, I can get informed that some people like Ubuntu and some people don't. But that's about it. But I neither really informs me as to why they think it's good or bad.
(fwiw, I've used Ubuntu, but I prefer Debian. It was too hard to get not use one of the officially-supported desktops and still have my laptop hardware supported. In the end, I decided I was essentially treating Ubuntu as Debian, so I decided I would just use Debian.)
But the different GNU/Linux distributions aren't forks of the same code base. Debian and Red Hat both use GNU for the userspace space BSDs maintain, and Linux for the kernel stuff the BSDs maintain. They each have minor patches, but not such that they're radically different. If Debian GNU/Linux gets support for a particular wireless driver, then you can be sure Red Hat will include it too. If FreeBSD gets support for a particular wireless driver, it needs to be ported to NetBSD before it gets support, and it might never happen.
Linux distributions which don't use GNU and GNU distributions which don't use Linux are of course different matters, but both of these are realtively rare, at least outside of embedded and similar constrained systems.
The BSDs[*] are each individual operating systems, and are forks. GNU/Linux distributions are distributions of the same operating system, and are not forks.
Probably a lot of what causes different distributions is the same as what causes different forks, and the piecemeal vs unitary approach of GNU/Linux and the BSDs is the cause of distributions vs forks. This is to GNU/Linux's advantage and credit, even though it is probably the result of an accident of history (the Hurd was never released, so GNU OS has never been released, so the GNU tools aren't seen as the same way as the BSD ones).
[*] I gather there exist redistributions of FreeBSD, which are considered BSDs. These obviously aren't what I'm talking about.
I have almost given up my Slashdot addiction, precisely because of this problem. The one article I bother reading every couple of times I visit this site once every week or so, always seems to be filled with responses to people asking why this is news. Would that there were a decent replacement. (Technocrat's okay, but doesn't have enough discussion and tends to have articles that are too political or too repetitive — one global warming article a year is enough.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's HTML 5, not XHTML 5. HTML is SGML and can't be mixed with XML. So there's no problem there...
X.org and XWin do not compete; X.org is just the reference implementation of the X Window System. I don't know what you mean here; perhaps you're referring to XFree86 but for the most part X.org and XFree86 development were in serial. XFree86 became untouchable, so almost everyone moved to X.org and then everyone else moved to X.org. That's surely the kind of development you want. I don't even known if XFree86 exists any more! if it does, I certainly don't care.
KDE and Gnome don't compete against X.org, XWin or XFree86; in fact, they depend on the X Window System (however it's implemented.)
KDE and Gnome don't really compete against each other but cater to different needs. Any union of the two groups would simply result in one market being uncatered for. You might as well say they should both give up and just develop good free software for Windows.
As for sound, again, we have Esound, Jack and Artsd depending on OSS and ALSA. ALSA has the disadvantage of having a Linux-specific API so to the extent that OSS still exists, that's why. As for Esound, Jack and Artsd, I thought at least Esound and Artsd were essentially EOLed and I have no idea what Jack is. I use sound on Linux all the time both input and output and this sound daemon stuff hasn't been relevant since ALSA became stable. I would be happy to give you a dollar for ever time you had to make that change, but I think you'd find your bank balance wouldn't change as much as you think. There's a danger in knowing too much, but not enough.
But yes. Let's restrict ourselves to just web browsers. If everyone focussed on developing Firefox, then we wouldn't have a half-decent web browser for Linux. We'd have an imposing Windows program using a silly toolkit that just barely integrates some of its look to that of Linux. The developers of Galeon and Epiphany have nothing to do with the development of Gecko; they simply use a library provided by Mozilla (rather than waste time reinventing the wheel making their own!) to use a nice, native user interface. (Which is not an issue of speed; it as issue of integration. Firefox neither looks nor feels like a Gnome program, nor like a KDE program, nor, indeed, like anything much.) Epiphany and Galeon are in the process of merging which is, surely, the sort of development you want. K-Meleon is a Windows program so it's completely irrelevant. In any case, I have been bemoaning the lack of competition for web browsers on GTK-based Linux for some time; we have paid too much for too long by only having one reasonable option. Five years ago, I didn't think I'd ever say it, but I envy Windows users their choice in this regard. I will be very happy when WebKit matures enough to be useable.
I don't know if you are a troll or not — if you are, I'm sorry to everyone else for biting. If you aren't, you really don't know much of what you're talking about.
Not Gnome 2.22. It will be available as an experimental option, but GTK WebKit isn't there yet.
How does that work? Does the independent have to win a certain proportion of the national vote? Do all candidates campaign nationally/provincially?
The Senate is elected by state. Each state has twelve senators, six of whom are elected every three years (unless the Senate and House of Representatives don't get on, in which case they can all be elected at once less than three years after the last half-election). Voters mark a ballot either by putting a number against every candidate representing their relative preference (called voting below the line), or by voting for a group of two or more candidates, whether independent or a party (called voting above the line or ticket voting), in which case the voter's preferences are determined by the group according to a ticket given to the Australian Electoral Commission before the election.
In order to get elected, each candidate must get a quota of the vote (14 per cent), but if no candidate gets more than a quota, or not enough candidates get a quota, then whichever candidate has the least votes is eliminated, and their votes transferred according to the next preference. Likewise, if a candidate gets more than a quota, then they are declared elected, and the excess vote is distributed according to the next preference (in this case, all votes that could've elected that candidate are reduced in value until the total value is the same as the excess). This method of voting is called "Proportional Representation by the Single Transferable Vote" and is probably described better on Wikipedia. In addition to being used for essentially all proportional elections in Australia, it's used in Ireland and I think some Canadian province was thinking they might adopt it a while ago, but didn't.
All of this has the following implications. Firstly, in small states the number of votes you need is not very high. In fact, Tasmania elects more senators during a regular half-senate election than they elect MPs to the House of Representatives. On the other hand, in large states, most people live in the same city. Over 60 per cent of people in New South Wales live in Sydney; over 70 per cent of Victorians are live in Melbourne. The two independent senators(-elect) that I know anything about also started out in their state parliament, which means they already had a profile (trying to dive straight into the deep end is never a good idea).
Secondly, parties and independents bargain for preferences before an election, because most people vote above the line. This means it is possible to get elected off a small primary vote. Victorian Senator Steven Fielding of the Family First Party who no-one knew anything about before he was elected, was elected off about two percent of the primary vote if I remember correctly. I consider this to be a bad thing, but I'm biased—I vote for the Greens who regularly get the highest vote of any mainland state in Victoria, around nine per cent, but they've never got a seat here.
As for the voting for the party vs voting for the candidate thing, over here in Australia it's a big news item if a politician crosses the floor. Labor politicians actually make a pledge that they will always vote the party line on pain of losing pre-selection. And politicians who do lose pre-selection and try to stand as an independent rarely make it in, because people are voting for the party, not the person.
In the Australian Senate, we use a system of proportional representation, and frequently have independent senators. South Australia just elected Nick Xenophon to represent them at the election on 24 November, for instance.
No.
Two-party system: Vote for someone you don't want (who gets to form government), or someone else you don't want (who gets to be the opposition). If you're lucky enough that your opinions actually align with whoever forms government, you'll quickly find that they become as bad as the other guys and don't/can't keep all their promises.
Multi-party system: Vote for someone you want. Let them contribute to government and have some chance of influencing national policy. Discover that they don't/can't keep all their promises because of the coalition arrangement.
The outcome is much the same. One method decreases stability, but your opinion is actual heard and has a greater chance of being acted on. If you vote for sensible people than the risk of a vote of no confidence is reduced anyway. The other increases stability, but so many people don't get their actual opinions heard.
Text, especially repetitive text like your lorem ipsum, is highly compressible. PDF is (optionally, at least) partially compressed; this is why PDFs are usually a bit bigger than their ps.gz equivalents, and no-where near as big as the raw PS.
Most things that I change relate to making me use the computer faster (get stuff done) rather than on aesthetics.
And it's really in this regard the fact that Windows and Mac OS X are unconfigurable becomes obvious. (For my part, I don't usually even bother setting a desktop wallpaper. The limits of my visual customisation is just to make the colors less garish.) They're both "take it or leave it" for the most part. Do you find the taskbar irritable, or the application-centred focus unusable? Then you can't use Windows or the Mac.
For the first five years I was using GNU/Linux and FreeBSD I was one of the people trying to configure their system as much as possible. But about five years ago, I came up with a system I largely liked and since then I've never made any large changes and stuck with them --- so I rarely make changes at all. (Once every now and again I think, "I wonder what [KDE/Enlightenment/WindowMaker/other thing I used to use] is like nowadays" and I give it a try during free time, but I never expect to stay switched.)
The links Wikipedia points to are from 2001, before the free trade agreement of 2004; when implemented in law, this would presumably have over-ruled the Trade Practices Act in that regard. But the Wikipedia page on the FTA in the "intellectual properties" section says a government report described the digital restrictions management section as containing significant, absurd and lamentable flaws. The relevant sections haven't been implemented in law. These sections were probably the ones I was thinking of, so it seems I'm wrong, though not for want of trying on the part of American media companies.
It seems neither option, neither paying for it not getting it for free will stop you from whinging. Will you ever stop crying?
Turns out I'm probably wrong and it's still legal to buy region-free DVD players. In which case I'm happy enough to pay for them. (Honestly, I've been happy enough to pay for them in the time being too; it's easier and less immoral even if it was (so I thought) more illegal, and I like to support movies and tv shows I like because they're often less popular ones.)
Oh wait --- you probably never expected me to admit to when I'm wrong. If it makes you feel better I'll take it all back and say "American media companies want to treat me as a fourth-class customer so I'll treat them as fourth-class companies and do what I want".
Because legally, we're not allowed to do that? The US is region one, Australia is region four. Most people have multi-region players, but my understanding is they've been illegal since we got a so-called free trade agreement with the US a few years back. Both options are piracy. Why should I pay to pirate, when I can pirate for free?
This is hardly a new problem. TeX and Postscript are both complete programming languages (indeed, PDF was meant to be just programming-language-free version of Postscript). Most word processors and necessarily all spreadsheets have programming languages built-in. If you want any degree of context-sensitivity, interaction or convenience, you pretty much need your text documents to have programming language support. Security needs to be achieved by limiting/carefully controlling network access or access to the rest of the system, because it can't be achieved by forbidding interactive documents.
I meant treated differently by other people. I will have different expectations of calling a landline and mobile. I can call someone during the day on their mobile phone, but I wouldn't want to waste my time doing that with their landline, because they're probably not home. Or if it's a person who lives with their parents, then a mobile number is going to be very different from a landline number. These are consequences of the technology; the differences between mobile and landline phones cannot be made transparent simply by not clearly distinguishing them.
Still, I suppose we're used to what we get.
04xx xxx xxx = pay extra (mobile, anywhere in Australia)
03 9xxx xxxx = don't pay extra (Melbourne)
just the same as
02 xxxx xxxx = pay extra (NSW, ACT)
03 5xxx xxxx = pay extra (regional Victoria)
1800 xxx xxx = pay less (free call)
I gather Americans like their system of conflating mobile numbers and local numbers because you can easily switch from one to another, but I'd personally like to know if I'm calling a mobile so I can know how likely they are to answer it. And number portability would confuse everyone if you could take a landline number from Melbourne to a mobile in Perth, but with a separate prefix my mobile number doesn't care where I live.
So area codes in America aren't geographically based then? Do you always have to dial all ten digits of a number every time you call?
In any case, in Australia most adults who've always had a land line also have a mobile phone, so they actually have two numbers, whereas younger people tend to only have a mobile phone and if they have their own home they might have a landline but not generally use it. (What good is switching your number from a mobile to a landline if you can only receive calls then when you're at home?) The mobile number works just as well in Hobart as in Darwin, and the landline number can be moved to any landline in the same local area.
How can a dead cat observe itself? That's half the point of being dead — no more observation for you! OTOH, a living cat can observe itself, so either cats never die because of quantum, or only people can change cats just by watching them. My money's on the first: I've never seen a cat die, I expect that just before they would've, they cause themselves to be both dead and alive, redirect the deadness to their dead half, make sure they observe themselves, et voilà! Immortal cats! Would explain a lot, at least.
UNKNOWN ENGLISH (ENGLISH)=40 (LATIN)=(per cent) ENGLISH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH FRENCH. ENGLISH (ENGLISH)=fifteen LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH FRENCH. ENGLISH GREEK-via-FRENCH ENGLISH ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH LATIN ENGLISH ENGLISH ?DUTCH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH, ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH ENGLISH FRENCH ENGLISH ENGLISH FRENCH LATIN.
33 words of English origin.
7 words of French origin (mostly the word "French")
7 words of Latin origin (i.e. learned borrowings from Latin, not vulgar evolutions)
1 word of Greek origin via French, a learned borrowing that is somewhat masked. Also fun is the related word "glamor", so let no-one tell you that grammar's not glamorous.
The dictionary has lots of French words, but most of the words we use most of the time are English words. Even if we ignored repetition, it'd only reduce the degree of English's win, and not the amount. Most of the time people talk you get the same result. (Prepared speeches on academic topics are the most likely to be different.)
(Errors might have crept into that; I did it mostly on memory rather than by consulting a dictionary. I also might have missed words
And you mean us Australians would celebrate Christmas in Winter? Okay --- that settles it. Something needs to be done. God never meant Christmas to be celebrated in Winter.
XP didn't cease to be Windows after the release of Vista, so the GP is right, and your correction is wrong.
If what you say is true,[*] Microsoft is to be congratulated for (finally) being concerned with the safety & security of their operating system and users, but unfortunately the release of Vista doesn't suddenly cure the millions of deployed XP boxes, many of which will probably still be in use ten years hence.
[*]: I make no apologies for not keeping up-to-date with the latest details of Windows however, and base my comment exclusively on yours.
When British prisons were getting over-crowded, prisoners were transported. Until America politely indicated they wanted no further convicts in the late eighteenth century, they were sent there. But having lost these colonies, Great Britain continued to pile up with prisoners no-one knew what to do with. So they decided to develop new colonies in an unknown land: Australia. The convicts made the land hospitable to future settlers, and guaranteed assistance to early ones. Today, Australia is an advanced western nation with many natural resources to offer the rest of the world.
American prisons are currently over-crowded with victims of the War on Drugs. Although it would be far simpler to simply decriminalise marijuana and offer rehabilitation and diversionary/work programs to users of harmful drugs, it doesn't seem like that is going to happen any time soon. My suggestion is therefore the colonisation and economic development of the Moon.
Criminals sentenced to a term of, say, six or more years for non-violent crimes will have the option of or be compelled to take transport to the moon. Initial transportees will work on performing limited terraforming so that people can do most of the work without needing to wear spacesuits all the time. Researchers and scientists, prison guards, medical and religious personel and other enterprising people will go up as free settlers and the earliest reasonable opportunity. Eventually, the Moon base will be as self-sufficient as any human society and may choose to form a nation independent of the United States.
The advantages are manifold: People who shouldn't really be in prison are taken out of the system and set to work, giving us something back. They're not free of course, because they can't (legally) return to Earth, but it's better than nothing. The technology to develop space travel and colonisation techniques will be necessarily developed at a faster rate that we are currently inclined to. Because we're obviously not really at a point where this is an easy task to perform, it will be expensive: This means other expensive excursions (such as the war in Iraq) will no longer be financially viable and America can get back to doing stuff that matters. The economic development will arrest this current decline America is undergoing and ensure it remains one of the Earth's—and indeed the world's—superpowers for a long time to come. And of course, we get all of the resources the moon has to offer. And of course, it needn't be one-sided: A nation like China or a bloc like the EU might choose to engage America in a second space race and construct other moon bases for their own use.
(Don't you love the sort of thing you read on the Internet?)
The r's never made it to Boston. They died over in London. From London they lack of r's spread to most of England, New England and the South of the US, Australia, most of New Zealand, South Africa and a lot of the parts of Asia where English is spoken. So I dunno ... while there's probably more US speakers than speakers of other dialects, it's a little unfair on the rest of us to say we're uncivilised. (If I said "quarter dark" in isolation it'd probably sound like "coda doc" to you; much more like your "KWATAH DAHK" than the way you said "quarter dark". PS: I take no offence; I can smell a joke.)
Also, you seem to be under the misconception that you put a comma before quotation marks. You don't. You put it before a direct quotation after a verb like "said", but normally you run them together. It depends on whether you pause while speaking.
This is a standard feature of -all- GTK apps; for most you just need to change a system-wide setting which our friendly overlords at Gnome have seen fit not to include in the Control Panel, but I think it's in gconf somewhere.
And this is one of those many great features of GTK+ that is not included in Firefox and precisely why I think "cross-platform" GUIs like Firefox are 99% of the time implemented to give us the worst of all world. The Gimp is another great example of this: It's got a great GUI on Linux/X11, but works appallingly on Windows. Cross-platform appls should always be like Gaim/Adium: a common library that does the hard work, and platform-specific GUI that lets it integrate into your system and take advantage of all the best features.
Why is this "Informative" and gp is "Troll"? Neither seems informative. Taken as a whole, I can get informed that some people like Ubuntu and some people don't. But that's about it. But I neither really informs me as to why they think it's good or bad.
(fwiw, I've used Ubuntu, but I prefer Debian. It was too hard to get not use one of the officially-supported desktops and still have my laptop hardware supported. In the end, I decided I was essentially treating Ubuntu as Debian, so I decided I would just use Debian.)
But the different GNU/Linux distributions aren't forks of the same code base. Debian and Red Hat both use GNU for the userspace space BSDs maintain, and Linux for the kernel stuff the BSDs maintain. They each have minor patches, but not such that they're radically different. If Debian GNU/Linux gets support for a particular wireless driver, then you can be sure Red Hat will include it too. If FreeBSD gets support for a particular wireless driver, it needs to be ported to NetBSD before it gets support, and it might never happen.
Linux distributions which don't use GNU and GNU distributions which don't use Linux are of course different matters, but both of these are realtively rare, at least outside of embedded and similar constrained systems.
The BSDs[*] are each individual operating systems, and are forks. GNU/Linux distributions are distributions of the same operating system, and are not forks.
Probably a lot of what causes different distributions is the same as what causes different forks, and the piecemeal vs unitary approach of GNU/Linux and the BSDs is the cause of distributions vs forks. This is to GNU/Linux's advantage and credit, even though it is probably the result of an accident of history (the Hurd was never released, so GNU OS has never been released, so the GNU tools aren't seen as the same way as the BSD ones).
[*] I gather there exist redistributions of FreeBSD, which are considered BSDs. These obviously aren't what I'm talking about.
If true, it's more surprising that an anonymous coward is telling the truth!
Well done.
I have almost given up my Slashdot addiction, precisely because of this problem. The one article I bother reading every couple of times I visit this site once every week or so, always seems to be filled with responses to people asking why this is news. Would that there were a decent replacement. (Technocrat's okay, but doesn't have enough discussion and tends to have articles that are too political or too repetitive — one global warming article a year is enough.)