I assume you think that comic made fun of muslims.
But why? It did not ridicule their beliefs in any way. In fact, it started off by distinguishing "radical islamist" from even muslim fundamentalism. The only way it possibly made fun of anyone was in caricaturing the way some muslims dress. Is that not allowed? We caricature how non-muslims dress all the time. But it makes no fun of muslims beliefs.
The butt of the joke are two fictional white middle class characters - one whose chauvinistic tendencies show through when he is distinctly happy at the prospect of her submitting to his will, and one whose apparently shopping around for a religion that might fit her based on superficial factors. That she's not seriously following the teachings of the religions she tries on we find out immediately, when Steve mentions she's tried being an amish nudist, and so we even have no reason to believe her idea of "radical islamism" is even in any way an accurate portayal.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the same newspapers would run a strip like that if it used jews or amish or christians instead of muslims.
In London most cab companies add a 12.5% surcharge if you pay by credit card.
A little Google search on "surcharge for paying with credit cards" show that they are far from alone in adding surcharges if you pay by card.
Besides, it's not the card issuers that set the rules, but the card associations (Visa, Mastercard/Eurocard, AmEx, Discover etc. - they are generally not the issuers; by far the most cards are issued by banks under license).
You gloss over a lot under the sentence par "As long as the application is designed sanely to start with".
In a HA environment, developers need to worry about a range of things such as minimizing state in any process, ensuring operations are idempotent (can be retried with the same result) etc., or keepalived/LVS/VRRP will not help you much.
You need to design your apps to be resistant to bad results, suddenly dropped network connections, timeouts, high load situations (i.e. ensuring additional clients to any component gets rejected if it would jeopardize the whole component) etc.
By "resistant" I mean "don't just feed errors back to the user if you have any way of recovering".
Frankly, most applications not explicitly designed with HA in mind fail on most or all of these.
Your point being? The claim isn't analogous, and the Jaguar actually had 64 bit co-processors so the claim wasn't completely unfounded. Even then the claim caused widespread scorn from people who thought it had no merit, and so is yet another reason lesson to any marketing department trying to go further.
I agree with what you say, but for 99% of applications out there, being "compatible with the internet" means being able to address nodes in [insert new system here] that needs to be publicly accessible with ipv4 addresses and talk to them via tcp and udp. Now, the applications running on that new system does not need to know tcp or udp - they just need to know a stream oriented and packet oriented protocol that can be reasonably easily proxied to look like tcp or udp to the world at large. Same goes for a lot of application level protocols. SMTP gateways to/from proprietary mail systems used to be commonplace, and HTTP proxies are easy to write.
You can replace a huge part of what we consider "the internet" with new technology and still interoperate reasonably easy as long as you plan for it.
Assuming that any new network would have more advanced capabilities than the current one, presumably tunneling tcp/ip or running would not be a problem either if people need/want to run older network services.
This is largely true for IP v6 too. The main reason we're not seeing for example ISP's deploy IPv6 in their core infrastructure and hand out IPv6 routers NAT'ing IPv4 clients is that they don't really have a compelling reason to - they still get enough IPv4 addresses and IPv6 doesn't give enough new capabilities to be worth it.
I think making it compelling enough to get people to want to switch really is a far greater challenge.
The point is that if the source to a competitive search engine was freely available, the cost of actually competing with Google is pretty low. Google has tremendous hardware costs, but mostly due to scale. The minimum cost to start indexing the web is pretty modest - you can crawl at least tens of millions of pages a day on a single Xeon box (been there, done that), and you can create a search index from tens to hundreds of millions of documents in a day on a single box depending on how good your indexer is (again, been there, done that) and how much metadata etc. you want to index. As such, you could get going with a dozen EC2 licenses or a few thousand a month in hosting fees.
The sticking point is search quality. That's a hard problem. And that is what is limiting most of the companies trying to compete with Google: Finding ways of getting results that are as good as or better than Google's without having Google's resources available.
The crawling, the indexing and returning basic results is easy. Back in '97 I shortly did a Linux specific search engine. It took only about a week to write the basic elements, and I indexed about a million pages to test it. Today it would've taken more care, as the number of documents you'd need even for a narrow niche vertical search engine is far higher, but there are also more off the shelf full text engines available that can easily handle at least up to the tens of millions, some into the hundreds or more (though _all_ of them are slow) if you don't want to do the work yourself. But that part is not hard work.
Most of the rest of what Google does well is scale the system, and that contributes to their margins, but it's something any competitor would have a lot of time to figure out too. Besides, over the next few years we're going to see a huge number of ex-Google employees who have learned a lot about scaling from Google's system, and who are back in the job market for various reasons, or looking to start their own companies.
So if a candidate told you he got visits from invisible pink unicorns at night sent by the little green men from Mars, and that told him what decisions to make, you would think it would be discrimination to judge them on it and would still consider voting for them?
See, that is roughly how ridiculous I consider a belief in creationism.
Yes, people are entitled to their opinions, but they also have to expect that if they hold opinions that diverge massively from mine I won't trust them to run a nation in a way I consider responsible, and so I wouldn't vote for them.
I think even if the argument is kept to what can be seen, creationism comes out first.
Really? Because I haven't seen anything that remotely supports creationism. In fact, funny that you should mention "see", because the human eye is a perfect thing to take a closer look at for anyone who believes in a "designer". You see, the human eye is outside in. It is extremely obvious if you look at it, and something no sane human designer would have been stupid enough to do, at least, though, because it's awfully inelegant and if creating an eye from scratch it would be trivial to get it right (after all, lots of other animals have almost the same eye structure except it's the right way around). In the human eye, you see, the optical nerve enters through the back of the eye, and the nerves spread out over the retina to connect to the cells. This is what creates our blind spot - we have a big fucking "wire" going straight through and taking up space where our sensors should be. Now, if I were a god, a flaw like that would embarrass the hell out of me, and I would've set it right. I mean, give the crowning glory of your creation, a being "made in my own image" an eye based on a design that even a child can see is flawed?
On the other hand, this fits in perfectly with evolution - an eye developing from scratch is well understood. Even a few slightly light sensitive cells is an evolutionary advantage, and each successive step to improve your vision would help to a point. Humans have reached that point - our other advantages means that slightly improved vision isn't a big deal. On the other hand, once you start moving down the path of a reversed eye, it would take a pretty large change (or many small ones) to get it the right way. You get stuck in a local maximum in the search space of evolutionary fitness where most changes towards correcting the error are highly likely to lead to reduced fitness in the short term. Hence mutations that would have moved human ancestors towards fixing the flaw got increasingly unlikely as the eye got more and more developed.
The human eye itself is one of my favorite examples of why a designer is unlikely. If you believe in a designer, you have to believe that he on purpose adds huge, obvious flaws to his design and never bothers correcting them, or you have to be blind enough to drag out the tired old "god moves in mysterious ways" crap which is intellectually equivalent to putting your fingers in your ears and shouting la-la-la-la, whereas it's natural for these things to happen as a result of evolution - in fact, it's predictable, as it's easy to create computer models that demonstrate that searching through a function space with mechanisms modeling natural selection will give you prolonged periods stuck in local maxima.
Well, since homosexuality is so widespread, it clearly needs to have an evolutionary advantage for the species of some sort. A possible explanation is that having childless adults around makes it more likely for the children of those in their community who breed to survive, and carry on most of the same genes.
In any case, the fact that homosexuality is so widespread despite the fact that fewer of them breed is a pretty damn good indication that "mother nature" is telling them they are a benefit and are there for a reason.
Your comment is almost ingenious in the way it tries to sneak errors past. It stands as a great example of how sly creationism proponents get:
Neither theory can be experimentally verified as this would require the creation of a new universe.
No it does not.
First of all, the theory of evolution does not say anything about the creation of the universe, but about how species develop and separate.
Now, there are two aspects to that: Does the mechanism work in general? That can be proven in labs, or it can be substantiated by making a wide range of predictions and see how they match the data. This could also be proven by the creation of a new universe. Secondly, is this the mechanism that has been used on earth? That can't be proven by the creation of a new universe - it requires we work with the available data.
The same applies to creationism, except it doesn't lend itself very well to a lab.
Unbiased scientific study requires the ability to admit that your pet theory may be wrong if none of the facts that you find are predicted by your theory.
Exactly. So what are the predictions made by creationism? Unless it makes unambiguous falsifiable predictions it's not a theory at all.
Evolution predicts that one species (ie a bird) will evolve from a species that is not a bird (ie a reptile). Yet any evolutionist worth his salt will have to admit (when pushed) that no transitional fossils have been found.
See, this transition was a great attempt, though severely flawed. You try to go from stating one has to admit a theory is wrong if none of the facts are predicted by the theory to presenting an prediction, and one way of verifying that prediction that hasn't happened yet. But there are huge number of predictions that have been made based on evolution that have shown to be true. There have also been huge number of predictions that turned out to be false and that required adjustments to the theory. That's how science works, contrary to fairy tales like creationism that does not make falsifiable predictions and hence can't be tested.
That part of the predictions are still untested does not change that balance: We have huge amounts of data on evolution that supports it. We have no data that supports creationism because it makes no predictions.
Also Evolution requires that the earth as a system goes from a system containing only single celled organisms to what we have today. This means that a lot of information has to be added to the system (ie DNA) where even one mistake in that DNA could spell doom for the entire new species.
Another great try. Yes, one mistake in that DNA could spell doom for the entire new species of one individual. Much as we regularly see birth defects cause the death of newborn human children and animals alike, but what we don't see are the successful mutations, because any change is likely to be miniscule. We know of a huge number of tiny changes to DNA that are advantageous in some circumstances, and where we can document how they've spread as a result of natural selection (an example would be the gene making you a carrier of sickle cell anemia for example, makes you more resistant to Malaria, and so is widespread in sub-saharan Africa).
As for adding information to a system, yes you are, but by trying and failing. It is easy to show through computer simulations, or even show in nature, that natural selection leads to exactly rapid addition of useful information to a system that make it far outstrip a random exhaustive search, which kills the typical "oooh, but the odds are so bad" argument of creationists.
Therefore the new species has to be virtually born as is from parents that do not contain all the genetic information that the new born child has.
It can mean that, and mutation happens regularly. Most of them yields an unviable offspring. Some of them do not. It can also mean being born with a slightl
I liked it too. In fact, I've just finally gotten around to reading the original Philip K. Dick short story, and I like the movie better. PKD is great, but many of his early short stories explicitly explain pretty obvious plot points in ways that often just seems out of place, and often too early in the story. In Paycheck, for example, the main character's train of thought is almost immediately used to make it blatantly obvious that he could see the future during his contract, when there was no reason to explain it to the reader.
And you're illustrating exactly why he is outraged: The errors affected the US. The effect on the data for the global temperatures was so small as to be dwarfed by the overall margin of error for the data, but the media completely ignored that, and ignored that it changes nothing with respects to long term trends and overall global warming.
I didn't, because I know that's not what most Yahoo users see. In fact, a huge percentage of the people who do go to Yahoo's homepage do so only to immediately click through to one of the other services (like mail etc.), and a huge part of their users will also go straight to those other services... Whenever Yahoo is discussed on Slashdot, the homepage comes up, completely ignoring the fact that the homepage is only one of a huge number of services, and many Yahoo users can go years without ever seeing the homepage.
You know, someone will be supplying the OLPC's. That same someone could just as easily be supplying spare parts if one breaks. If they can supply spare parts rather than have to supply complete replacements, thats a cost saving measure.
I'm all for buying from companies in developing countries. However that does not remove the very valid concern of how they are treating their employees.
Consider this: You are right that stopping to use them would be bad for the workers too. However, as a consumer spending lots of money with these companies you have the choice to learn about which of these companies treat their customers best and take that into account when picking products. You also have the choice of threatening companies using the worst offenders with boycotts unless they improve conditions.
You and I can help these people by making informed choices and supporting those companies that are willing to treat their workers better.
In our own countries we can achieve that by voting for politicians that put in place laws to prevent predatory employers, but voting with our wallets often works better, and has the advantage that it works worldwide.
Frankly, I'd happily pay a bit more for my electronic goods if I knew they came from manufacturers that treated their workers better.
The US labor movement was one of the most militant in the world for decades, because the US government frequently murdered strikers.
US union members DIED by the dozen for our 8 hour working days.
In fact, May 1 as an international day for international labor demonstrations was a direct result of the US labor movements demonstrations for 8 hour working days and the resulting bloodshed.
I find it sad that so few Americans actually know anything about how the US used to be at the forefront of the fights for workers rights, and the large number of lives lost in fighting your government and industry to get the protections you have now. It is one of the things you truly have to be proud of, as it had a significant impact on labor movements worldwide and so directly affected workers rights throughout the industrialized world.
My impression was pretty much the same. I'm from Norway, and can't say I'd ever heard about Voltron before, though Transformers were huge despite only being available on satellite and cable at a time when only a relatively small part of the population had access to it.
I used to live literally right next door to school, and we used to gather up at my place to watch the old Sky Channel (which is what ultimately morphed into Sky One, but which then was then mostly/only available outside the UK) and end up running out the door when the bell rang...
I loved the Transformers movie. But then I expected action, losts of explosions, and big shiny robots, not a meaningful plot. After all, the original Transformers cartoons had nothing resembling a meaningful plot. They were little more than badly disguised toy ads.
And so the movie was fun because it made no pretense at all about being a serious movie, and kept making playful jabs at the series by throwing in lots of comments pointing to the original title song, and showing lots of action, explosions and big shiny robots.
I'm 32. I was at the right age when Transformers were airing in Norway where I'm from. I loved it, as I loved lots of the other toy commercial cartoons of the 80's. But I have no illusions now that there was anything deep there. As such I have no problem disassociating the Transformers movie, which I considered lighthearted entertainment and nostalgia, from "serious" sci-fi and the portrayal of robots in stories with serious plots.
The two simply have nothing in common.
I just saw the Transformers cartoons at near giveaway prices at my local DVD store... I resisted exactly because I know I'd probably cringe if I saw them again. The Transformers movie on the other hand was near perfect in balancing the cheesiness of the original series, the nostalgia, and updated action. And of course really fucking big shiny robots...
Because many people buy it for the games. In many cases you'll find people buy a console on the strength of a small selection of games they really want, or even a single game. Whatever else it can do is at best an unexpected bonus, at worst a distraction they couldn't care less about.
People are using Mutt because it works and has the features lots of people needs. I have to question why people keep upgrading just for the sake of it. As for an event system, Linux has had that too for ages - search for dnotify and inotify.
However Mutt's use of atime simply is cheap enough that there's simply never been a reason to change it all the time most people have had atime updates on anyway. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
No, it isn't, and you've obviously fallen in the trap of dividing one by 1277 and forgetting that 1% == 0.01. Which means you're probably right the public school system has bigger problems than internet access.
The Marx I read never advocated a revolution, resource distribution, or any of that other socialist stuff.
Really? And which Marx did you read? Groucho?
It's true that a key difference between Marx and Lenin was Lenin's insistence that a revolutionary vanguard could guide a country into socialism without a well developed capitalism - in fact Marx wrote in The German Ideology that an economy well developed enough that redistribution would not cause need as a prerequisite for socialism or "the same shit would just start all over again" (paraphrased).
The difference being that Marx' believed that there were necessary prerequisites, and that revolution could not just happen at just any time and be successful.
But to say that Marx never advocated revolution or resource distribution means you can't have read much of Marx' works.
I quote, for example, from the Communist Manifesto, chapter 2:
"The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."
"The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few."
All of his adult life Marx' was actively involved in political movements agitating for revolution and redistribution of wealth. Large parts of his writings were intended as practical political work far more than any attempt at developing theory - The Communist Manifesto being the prime example, but also other text like Critique of the Gotha Programme.
I do agree with you that there's a huge difference between Marx' careful analysis and Lenin who often took significant shortcuts in the interest of pushing forward whether or not it was the right thing to do, but that does not mean Marx' didn't want revolution. He wanted revolution at the right time, and even then because he saw it as inevitable rather than something to be desired - he expected that any attempt at peaceful transition of power when there was majority support for communist policies would still be attempted stopped by force.
The entire point of FISA is to provide oversight of surveillance involving foreign parties. Internal US wired calls is entirely outside the scope of FISA, for a very good reason: They are already covered elsewhere.
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But why? It did not ridicule their beliefs in any way. In fact, it started off by distinguishing "radical islamist" from even muslim fundamentalism. The only way it possibly made fun of anyone was in caricaturing the way some muslims dress. Is that not allowed? We caricature how non-muslims dress all the time. But it makes no fun of muslims beliefs.
The butt of the joke are two fictional white middle class characters - one whose chauvinistic tendencies show through when he is distinctly happy at the prospect of her submitting to his will, and one whose apparently shopping around for a religion that might fit her based on superficial factors. That she's not seriously following the teachings of the religions she tries on we find out immediately, when Steve mentions she's tried being an amish nudist, and so we even have no reason to believe her idea of "radical islamism" is even in any way an accurate portayal.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the same newspapers would run a strip like that if it used jews or amish or christians instead of muslims.
They are being over sensitive.
A little Google search on "surcharge for paying with credit cards" show that they are far from alone in adding surcharges if you pay by card.
Besides, it's not the card issuers that set the rules, but the card associations (Visa, Mastercard/Eurocard, AmEx, Discover etc. - they are generally not the issuers; by far the most cards are issued by banks under license).
In a HA environment, developers need to worry about a range of things such as minimizing state in any process, ensuring operations are idempotent (can be retried with the same result) etc., or keepalived/LVS/VRRP will not help you much.
You need to design your apps to be resistant to bad results, suddenly dropped network connections, timeouts, high load situations (i.e. ensuring additional clients to any component gets rejected if it would jeopardize the whole component) etc.
By "resistant" I mean "don't just feed errors back to the user if you have any way of recovering".
Frankly, most applications not explicitly designed with HA in mind fail on most or all of these.
Probably more than that - many licenses will have changed multiple times over the lifetime of the application.
Your point being? The claim isn't analogous, and the Jaguar actually had 64 bit co-processors so the claim wasn't completely unfounded. Even then the claim caused widespread scorn from people who thought it had no merit, and so is yet another reason lesson to any marketing department trying to go further.
You can replace a huge part of what we consider "the internet" with new technology and still interoperate reasonably easy as long as you plan for it.
Assuming that any new network would have more advanced capabilities than the current one, presumably tunneling tcp/ip or running would not be a problem either if people need/want to run older network services.
This is largely true for IP v6 too. The main reason we're not seeing for example ISP's deploy IPv6 in their core infrastructure and hand out IPv6 routers NAT'ing IPv4 clients is that they don't really have a compelling reason to - they still get enough IPv4 addresses and IPv6 doesn't give enough new capabilities to be worth it.
I think making it compelling enough to get people to want to switch really is a far greater challenge.
The sticking point is search quality. That's a hard problem. And that is what is limiting most of the companies trying to compete with Google: Finding ways of getting results that are as good as or better than Google's without having Google's resources available.
The crawling, the indexing and returning basic results is easy. Back in '97 I shortly did a Linux specific search engine. It took only about a week to write the basic elements, and I indexed about a million pages to test it. Today it would've taken more care, as the number of documents you'd need even for a narrow niche vertical search engine is far higher, but there are also more off the shelf full text engines available that can easily handle at least up to the tens of millions, some into the hundreds or more (though _all_ of them are slow) if you don't want to do the work yourself. But that part is not hard work.
Most of the rest of what Google does well is scale the system, and that contributes to their margins, but it's something any competitor would have a lot of time to figure out too. Besides, over the next few years we're going to see a huge number of ex-Google employees who have learned a lot about scaling from Google's system, and who are back in the job market for various reasons, or looking to start their own companies.
See, that is roughly how ridiculous I consider a belief in creationism.
Yes, people are entitled to their opinions, but they also have to expect that if they hold opinions that diverge massively from mine I won't trust them to run a nation in a way I consider responsible, and so I wouldn't vote for them.
Really? Because I haven't seen anything that remotely supports creationism. In fact, funny that you should mention "see", because the human eye is a perfect thing to take a closer look at for anyone who believes in a "designer". You see, the human eye is outside in. It is extremely obvious if you look at it, and something no sane human designer would have been stupid enough to do, at least, though, because it's awfully inelegant and if creating an eye from scratch it would be trivial to get it right (after all, lots of other animals have almost the same eye structure except it's the right way around). In the human eye, you see, the optical nerve enters through the back of the eye, and the nerves spread out over the retina to connect to the cells. This is what creates our blind spot - we have a big fucking "wire" going straight through and taking up space where our sensors should be. Now, if I were a god, a flaw like that would embarrass the hell out of me, and I would've set it right. I mean, give the crowning glory of your creation, a being "made in my own image" an eye based on a design that even a child can see is flawed?
On the other hand, this fits in perfectly with evolution - an eye developing from scratch is well understood. Even a few slightly light sensitive cells is an evolutionary advantage, and each successive step to improve your vision would help to a point. Humans have reached that point - our other advantages means that slightly improved vision isn't a big deal. On the other hand, once you start moving down the path of a reversed eye, it would take a pretty large change (or many small ones) to get it the right way. You get stuck in a local maximum in the search space of evolutionary fitness where most changes towards correcting the error are highly likely to lead to reduced fitness in the short term. Hence mutations that would have moved human ancestors towards fixing the flaw got increasingly unlikely as the eye got more and more developed.
The human eye itself is one of my favorite examples of why a designer is unlikely. If you believe in a designer, you have to believe that he on purpose adds huge, obvious flaws to his design and never bothers correcting them, or you have to be blind enough to drag out the tired old "god moves in mysterious ways" crap which is intellectually equivalent to putting your fingers in your ears and shouting la-la-la-la, whereas it's natural for these things to happen as a result of evolution - in fact, it's predictable, as it's easy to create computer models that demonstrate that searching through a function space with mechanisms modeling natural selection will give you prolonged periods stuck in local maxima.
In any case, the fact that homosexuality is so widespread despite the fact that fewer of them breed is a pretty damn good indication that "mother nature" is telling them they are a benefit and are there for a reason.
Neither theory can be experimentally verified as this would require the creation of a new universe.
No it does not.
First of all, the theory of evolution does not say anything about the creation of the universe, but about how species develop and separate.
Now, there are two aspects to that: Does the mechanism work in general? That can be proven in labs, or it can be substantiated by making a wide range of predictions and see how they match the data. This could also be proven by the creation of a new universe. Secondly, is this the mechanism that has been used on earth? That can't be proven by the creation of a new universe - it requires we work with the available data.
The same applies to creationism, except it doesn't lend itself very well to a lab.
Unbiased scientific study requires the ability to admit that your pet theory may be wrong if none of the facts that you find are predicted by your theory.
Exactly. So what are the predictions made by creationism? Unless it makes unambiguous falsifiable predictions it's not a theory at all.
Evolution predicts that one species (ie a bird) will evolve from a species that is not a bird (ie a reptile). Yet any evolutionist worth his salt will have to admit (when pushed) that no transitional fossils have been found. See, this transition was a great attempt, though severely flawed. You try to go from stating one has to admit a theory is wrong if none of the facts are predicted by the theory to presenting an prediction, and one way of verifying that prediction that hasn't happened yet. But there are huge number of predictions that have been made based on evolution that have shown to be true. There have also been huge number of predictions that turned out to be false and that required adjustments to the theory. That's how science works, contrary to fairy tales like creationism that does not make falsifiable predictions and hence can't be tested.
That part of the predictions are still untested does not change that balance: We have huge amounts of data on evolution that supports it. We have no data that supports creationism because it makes no predictions.
Also Evolution requires that the earth as a system goes from a system containing only single celled organisms to what we have today. This means that a lot of information has to be added to the system (ie DNA) where even one mistake in that DNA could spell doom for the entire new species.
Another great try. Yes, one mistake in that DNA could spell doom for the entire new species of one individual. Much as we regularly see birth defects cause the death of newborn human children and animals alike, but what we don't see are the successful mutations, because any change is likely to be miniscule. We know of a huge number of tiny changes to DNA that are advantageous in some circumstances, and where we can document how they've spread as a result of natural selection (an example would be the gene making you a carrier of sickle cell anemia for example, makes you more resistant to Malaria, and so is widespread in sub-saharan Africa).
As for adding information to a system, yes you are, but by trying and failing. It is easy to show through computer simulations, or even show in nature, that natural selection leads to exactly rapid addition of useful information to a system that make it far outstrip a random exhaustive search, which kills the typical "oooh, but the odds are so bad" argument of creationists.
Therefore the new species has to be virtually born as is from parents that do not contain all the genetic information that the new born child has.
It can mean that, and mutation happens regularly. Most of them yields an unviable offspring. Some of them do not. It can also mean being born with a slightl
I liked it too. In fact, I've just finally gotten around to reading the original Philip K. Dick short story, and I like the movie better. PKD is great, but many of his early short stories explicitly explain pretty obvious plot points in ways that often just seems out of place, and often too early in the story. In Paycheck, for example, the main character's train of thought is almost immediately used to make it blatantly obvious that he could see the future during his contract, when there was no reason to explain it to the reader.
But alcohol doesn't remove your memories from a month ago.
And you're illustrating exactly why he is outraged: The errors affected the US. The effect on the data for the global temperatures was so small as to be dwarfed by the overall margin of error for the data, but the media completely ignored that, and ignored that it changes nothing with respects to long term trends and overall global warming.
I didn't, because I know that's not what most Yahoo users see. In fact, a huge percentage of the people who do go to Yahoo's homepage do so only to immediately click through to one of the other services (like mail etc.), and a huge part of their users will also go straight to those other services... Whenever Yahoo is discussed on Slashdot, the homepage comes up, completely ignoring the fact that the homepage is only one of a huge number of services, and many Yahoo users can go years without ever seeing the homepage.
You know, someone will be supplying the OLPC's. That same someone could just as easily be supplying spare parts if one breaks. If they can supply spare parts rather than have to supply complete replacements, thats a cost saving measure.
Consider this: You are right that stopping to use them would be bad for the workers too. However, as a consumer spending lots of money with these companies you have the choice to learn about which of these companies treat their customers best and take that into account when picking products. You also have the choice of threatening companies using the worst offenders with boycotts unless they improve conditions.
You and I can help these people by making informed choices and supporting those companies that are willing to treat their workers better.
In our own countries we can achieve that by voting for politicians that put in place laws to prevent predatory employers, but voting with our wallets often works better, and has the advantage that it works worldwide.
Frankly, I'd happily pay a bit more for my electronic goods if I knew they came from manufacturers that treated their workers better.
US union members DIED by the dozen for our 8 hour working days.
In fact, May 1 as an international day for international labor demonstrations was a direct result of the US labor movements demonstrations for 8 hour working days and the resulting bloodshed.
I find it sad that so few Americans actually know anything about how the US used to be at the forefront of the fights for workers rights, and the large number of lives lost in fighting your government and industry to get the protections you have now. It is one of the things you truly have to be proud of, as it had a significant impact on labor movements worldwide and so directly affected workers rights throughout the industrialized world.
I used to live literally right next door to school, and we used to gather up at my place to watch the old Sky Channel (which is what ultimately morphed into Sky One, but which then was then mostly/only available outside the UK) and end up running out the door when the bell rang...
And so the movie was fun because it made no pretense at all about being a serious movie, and kept making playful jabs at the series by throwing in lots of comments pointing to the original title song, and showing lots of action, explosions and big shiny robots.
I'm 32. I was at the right age when Transformers were airing in Norway where I'm from. I loved it, as I loved lots of the other toy commercial cartoons of the 80's. But I have no illusions now that there was anything deep there. As such I have no problem disassociating the Transformers movie, which I considered lighthearted entertainment and nostalgia, from "serious" sci-fi and the portrayal of robots in stories with serious plots.
The two simply have nothing in common.
I just saw the Transformers cartoons at near giveaway prices at my local DVD store... I resisted exactly because I know I'd probably cringe if I saw them again. The Transformers movie on the other hand was near perfect in balancing the cheesiness of the original series, the nostalgia, and updated action. And of course really fucking big shiny robots...
Because many people buy it for the games. In many cases you'll find people buy a console on the strength of a small selection of games they really want, or even a single game. Whatever else it can do is at best an unexpected bonus, at worst a distraction they couldn't care less about.
However Mutt's use of atime simply is cheap enough that there's simply never been a reason to change it all the time most people have had atime updates on anyway. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
No, it isn't, and you've obviously fallen in the trap of dividing one by 1277 and forgetting that 1% == 0.01. Which means you're probably right the public school system has bigger problems than internet access.
Really? And which Marx did you read? Groucho?
It's true that a key difference between Marx and Lenin was Lenin's insistence that a revolutionary vanguard could guide a country into socialism without a well developed capitalism - in fact Marx wrote in The German Ideology that an economy well developed enough that redistribution would not cause need as a prerequisite for socialism or "the same shit would just start all over again" (paraphrased).
The difference being that Marx' believed that there were necessary prerequisites, and that revolution could not just happen at just any time and be successful.
But to say that Marx never advocated revolution or resource distribution means you can't have read much of Marx' works.
I quote, for example, from the Communist Manifesto, chapter 2:
"The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat."
"The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few."
All of his adult life Marx' was actively involved in political movements agitating for revolution and redistribution of wealth. Large parts of his writings were intended as practical political work far more than any attempt at developing theory - The Communist Manifesto being the prime example, but also other text like Critique of the Gotha Programme.
I do agree with you that there's a huge difference between Marx' careful analysis and Lenin who often took significant shortcuts in the interest of pushing forward whether or not it was the right thing to do, but that does not mean Marx' didn't want revolution. He wanted revolution at the right time, and even then because he saw it as inevitable rather than something to be desired - he expected that any attempt at peaceful transition of power when there was majority support for communist policies would still be attempted stopped by force.
The entire point of FISA is to provide oversight of surveillance involving foreign parties. Internal US wired calls is entirely outside the scope of FISA, for a very good reason: They are already covered elsewhere.