Why does open source have to design a UI the same way proprietary software does? Can't we give control of how this stuff looks to a userbase of tweakers and then do some survival-of-the-fittest collaboration to arrive at the defaults for the next person who downloads the app?
Well, that's pretty much the path emacs took, and as a result it's the most powerful, easiest-to-use editor out there because one can customise it to do exactly what you want, how you want. Unfortunately, it turns out that easy to use and customisable do not equal easy to learn; it also turns out that most users don't want to do meta-using, when they must think about what they do (most folks simply don't care to think; the large number of socialists proves it).
Violent crimes like muggings are pretty high in the UK, car crime too - but they aren't exactly the sort of crime that having a gun (Unless you are carrying it with you) is going to help against.
Yeah, but in a lot of US states (not all of them, of course--our states can have very different laws from one another) it's legal to carry openly; in many it is possible to get a permit to carry concealed; in a few (Vermont and Arizona are the ones I know about) it's legal for anyone to carry concealed. I don't carry, but that's mostly because lugging a belt-weight around in the remote case of needing it doesn't normally make sense.
Although one wonders why I need this pager, then:-)
How many countries involved? Half a dozen or so? So $52,560,000/year--$2,628,0000,000 over half a millennium in order to save 150,000 lives (let's imagine that they would all be saved, which is false): $175,000/person. That might actually be worthwhile, to tell the truth. Although I daresay a more in-depth analysis would probably reveal that the funds would be better allocated elsewhere.
Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?
Once again, what kind of person is so morally bankrupt as to compare human life to money? In other words, shouldn't we be doing BOTH?
In answer to the first question: a sane one. Human life is not infinitely valuable (although it is, of course, quite valuable, and any given individual's life is priceless to him). It would not, for example, be a good thing to spend all the money in the world to save the life of one man--everyone would starve to death, being unable to buy food.
In answer to the second question: sure, it'd be great if we could do everything possible to save everyone's life from everything that could end it. But resources are finite (which is why money is finite: money is just a convenient representation of resources): we can't do everything. Thus one must consider what is a wise use of money and what is not. Eliminating malaria would use up a chunk of money, but it'd save more lives (certainly) for less money (probably) than creating a tsunami centre.
It's a question of return on investment: how much can we improve how many people's lives, and how much does it cost? Money just tracks resources, and the decisions one makes on how those resources are allocated have very real effects on people's lives.
I'm just pointing out that spending billions to save a life is stupid. Lives do have value--whatever it is. Yes, we're all children of God, and yes one shouldn't be able to just buy and sell lives--but it doesn't make sense to spend billions to save a single life. If that were true, cars would go no faster than 5 miles an hours and be protected with forty feet of pillows.
Given the existance of Krakotoa, the probability of a tsunami happening in the Indian Ocean within 500 years was very close to 100%.
How much would it cost to staff a tsunami centre for 500 years? How much would it cost to make every structure--even those which only last for a decade or two--tsunami-proof? Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?
It's not generally worth worrying about once-in-a-century disasters, much less twice-in-a-millennia ones, unless the costs are high enough. Asteroids probably fall into the not likely enough to be worth worrying about category even given the amount of damage one could do, simply because the odds are so low.
FAR better to cost several billion dollars of economic dislocation than lose a single human life...
I disagree. Human life is valuable, yes: that means that it has a value. At $50,000/yr for 50 years, that's $2.5 million earned--you're saying that it's fine to incur thousands of times more than the average person earns (his earnings, of course, measure his economic contribution to society). That's insane, and a very quick way to go bankrupt.
Building a tsunami readiness centre is like anything else: there's a cost, and there's a benefit. Considering the unlikelihood of a tsunami, the benefit is neglible, practically non-existent.
Re:Good luck building a military when you need it
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Business Under Fire
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Our Iraq action has the legitimacy of being supported by the entire Coalition, in response to a war which had been going on for over a decade--which is true.
Clinton's war was one of premeditated choice (he chose to intervene), based on ideology (that states should interfere in the internal affairs of other states), whose authors attempted to deceive the world by ignoring evidence (e.g. the massive Croat-on-Serb, Bosnian-on-Serb and Kosovar-Albanian-on-Serb atrocities).
If Clinton had invaded Iraq he'd be the great hero of the Left--although to be fair the response from the Right would probably be little better than it was for the Yugoslavian intervention.
Why can they not glorify God and take care of the poor? Charity is not the sole virtue one should strive for.
Re:Good luck building a military when you need it
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Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
But I admit that USA has at this point disprortionately powerful army which is being used in a way unthinkable just a decade ago: an uprovoked war of aggression and occupation.
How is that any different from Clinton's unprovoked war on and occupation of Serbia? At least Iraq was a threat to our interests.
You have a special and unique gift Rorschach. Use it in a humanitarian manner and *gasp* buy some Microsoft stock.
That would suck tho if they didn't go under after that however, as you would just end up helping them out.
Ummm...no. Buying a company's stock doesn't help them unless you buy it at their IPO. When you buy stock, you are buying the company itself--you own part of it--from someone who had bought it before and thus are entitled to a vote in how that company is run (including for its directors). You also generally get paid a portion of it profits as a dividend.
If you thought it was a good investment at $x, then you should think that it's a great investment at $.7x. Don't invest in companies because they won't get any lower; invest in them because you believe that they have sound business fundamentals and will grow in the future.
You have to multiply the cost of the disaster by its likelihood and compare that to the cost of the preventive action. E.g. it makes sense to spend $1 to prevent a 1-in-1,000 risk which would cost $10,000. It doesn't make sense to spend fifty cents to prevent a 1-in-1,000,000 risk which would cost $50,000. Considering how expensive it would be to sink part of the Canary Islands, and how astronomically unlikely they are to create a tsunami, it almost certainly does not make sense.
When I hear "Open Source" I think of "free beer" or GPL. I assume you mean software that must be distributed for free along with the source code and any changes. I don't assume you mean software I'm allowed to view the source of but not modify for my own profit (FreeBSD and such).
Both of these are actually incorrect. GPLed software can be distributed for a price--even an absurdly high price (look at what the FSF used to charge for tapes of emacs...), but any distribution must include full source code and the ability to modify and redistribute the same.
BSDLed code may be used for anything--you can take it, change it and sell it and not include the source.
Thus the GPL protects the freedom of users (who can always modify and redistribute the code), whilst the BSDL protects the freedom of the code itself (it imposts almost no restrictions on the code or its use). I prefer the GPL, since as an author I don't want someone else to take my code proprietary.
Any citizen has the right to protect himself. I'm no fonder of cops than most people (they exist solely to project force on their fellow citizens, and most of them are military wannabes, and the majority support the enforcement of unjust laws), but cops have no fewer rights than the rest of us. The guy had a reasonable fear of danger, and took reasonable steps to neutralise that danger. It would be just as legal for you or me to do the same.
I'm from North Carolina, and saw what happened when the textile factories went to China, when the equipment was packed off to Shanghai. Who benefitted - the American public, the managers, or the shareholders?
The American public benefited, because we now get less expensive clothing (you know, there was a time when most folks had only a single change of clothing). The managers benefited, because they were given incentives to increase profits. The shareholders (who are the owners of the company, and are often folks just like you & me, or their agents) benefited, because their profits increased.
Free trade is a Good Thing. Everyone does what he does best (e.g. China does textiles better than the Carolinas), and we end up with everyone better off in the long run. In the short run, of course, there is suffering as those who were dedicated to an inefficient industry (American textiles) lose their jobs. I'm a libertarian, but I do see a place here for a very limited social safety net (better would be private unemployment insurance which will pay for retraining, but...).
Would you pay $4 for an apple when another store sells the same thing for 25 cents? Of course not. Would you pay $4 for a moldy apple when another store sells a sweet, fresh, crunchy apple for 25 cents? Certainly not. Why should an employer pay lazy, expensive Americans when others are willing to do better work for less?
I'm not certain modern journalism has many of the restraints of traditional journalism, either--hence the popularity of the new media. Since the old media are turning into propagandists and shills, we all might as well be.
French units are easier to convert between--they're actually more difficult to work with. Try to divide a 1L bottle of water into ten decilitres, then try to divide one quart into jills (halve->pints, halve->cups, halve->jills). Or try to cut a decimetre into centimetres vs. cutting a foot into inches (halve, halve, cut in thirds).
.rpm is the equivalent of.deb, not apt. And apt runs atop rpms these days--I'm happily using it with Fedora Core 2 & 3. rpms are actually pretty nice. Not perfect, but decent.
Uh, yeah... cuz there's no more communist nations in the world, right?China is not really communist; it's oppressive and totalitarian, but it's not soviet.
North Korea is a holdout (which is the international community's shame--NK is worse than Nazi Germany ever was, and no-one cares).
And just because they're communist must mean they're bad, right?
Considering that communism has killed more people than any other ideology in history, yeah.
You know, I never thought that the day would come when I would defend Israel, but it is the only true democracy in the Middle East; Arabs sit in the Israeli parliament (the Knesset or something, right?), while no Jews are in power in the Arab countries; despite its disregard for certain parts of international law (e.g. the Eichmann kidnapping), it tends to be a decent state. Although I'll never forgive the Israelis for their unprovoked attack on and sinking of the USS Liberty, which murdered thirty-four US sailors.
But for all their sins, the Israelis are far more palatable than anyone else in the region. Jordan? Egypt? Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia? All are hellholes by comparison.
And as for the United States, we need no defence. From our victory over militarism in '18, to our victory over national socialism in '45, to our victory over communism in '89, to our ongoing war against Islamofascism (not to mention our suppression of the Barbary pirates; our suppression of the slavery trade and eventually slavery itself; our pacification of the American aborigines and so on) we have been on the whole a force for good. Yes, we screwed up in the Phillipines and Hawaii, and in the long Cold War we were often forced to choose the least of some pretty nasty evils, but we've done much more good than harm.
Gigantic storms like hurricanes and large hurricane-like winter storms can now be spotted and residents warned with fair accuracy 24 hours in advance.
That is a great advance and it does save innumerable lives, but it's not really all that impressive, and it doesn't involve much in the way of prediction. We can just look down with a satellite and see where the storm is and in which direction it's heading...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's pretty much the path emacs took, and as a result it's the most powerful, easiest-to-use editor out there because one can customise it to do exactly what you want, how you want. Unfortunately, it turns out that easy to use and customisable do not equal easy to learn; it also turns out that most users don't want to do meta-using, when they must think about what they do (most folks simply don't care to think; the large number of socialists proves it).
Yeah, but in a lot of US states (not all of them, of course--our states can have very different laws from one another) it's legal to carry openly; in many it is possible to get a permit to carry concealed; in a few (Vermont and Arizona are the ones I know about) it's legal for anyone to carry concealed. I don't carry, but that's mostly because lugging a belt-weight around in the remote case of needing it doesn't normally make sense.
Although one wonders why I need this pager, then:-)
How many countries involved? Half a dozen or so? So $52,560,000/year--$2,628,0000,000 over half a millennium in order to save 150,000 lives (let's imagine that they would all be saved, which is false): $175,000/person. That might actually be worthwhile, to tell the truth. Although I daresay a more in-depth analysis would probably reveal that the funds would be better allocated elsewhere.
Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?
Once again, what kind of person is so morally bankrupt as to compare human life to money? In other words, shouldn't we be doing BOTH?
In answer to the first question: a sane one. Human life is not infinitely valuable (although it is, of course, quite valuable, and any given individual's life is priceless to him). It would not, for example, be a good thing to spend all the money in the world to save the life of one man--everyone would starve to death, being unable to buy food.
In answer to the second question: sure, it'd be great if we could do everything possible to save everyone's life from everything that could end it. But resources are finite (which is why money is finite: money is just a convenient representation of resources): we can't do everything. Thus one must consider what is a wise use of money and what is not. Eliminating malaria would use up a chunk of money, but it'd save more lives (certainly) for less money (probably) than creating a tsunami centre.
It's a question of return on investment: how much can we improve how many people's lives, and how much does it cost? Money just tracks resources, and the decisions one makes on how those resources are allocated have very real effects on people's lives.
I'm just pointing out that spending billions to save a life is stupid. Lives do have value--whatever it is. Yes, we're all children of God, and yes one shouldn't be able to just buy and sell lives--but it doesn't make sense to spend billions to save a single life. If that were true, cars would go no faster than 5 miles an hours and be protected with forty feet of pillows.
How much would it cost to staff a tsunami centre for 500 years? How much would it cost to make every structure--even those which only last for a decade or two--tsunami-proof? Could that money be used for better purposes? Last I checked the tsunami killed about 150,000 people--that's 300 people a year for 500 years. Could that money be used to save 1,000 lives a year?
It's not generally worth worrying about once-in-a-century disasters, much less twice-in-a-millennia ones, unless the costs are high enough. Asteroids probably fall into the not likely enough to be worth worrying about category even given the amount of damage one could do, simply because the odds are so low.
I disagree. Human life is valuable, yes: that means that it has a value. At $50,000/yr for 50 years, that's $2.5 million earned--you're saying that it's fine to incur thousands of times more than the average person earns (his earnings, of course, measure his economic contribution to society). That's insane, and a very quick way to go bankrupt.
Building a tsunami readiness centre is like anything else: there's a cost, and there's a benefit. Considering the unlikelihood of a tsunami, the benefit is neglible, practically non-existent.
Clinton's war was one of premeditated choice (he chose to intervene), based on ideology (that states should interfere in the internal affairs of other states), whose authors attempted to deceive the world by ignoring evidence (e.g. the massive Croat-on-Serb, Bosnian-on-Serb and Kosovar-Albanian-on-Serb atrocities).
If Clinton had invaded Iraq he'd be the great hero of the Left--although to be fair the response from the Right would probably be little better than it was for the Yugoslavian intervention.
Why can they not glorify God and take care of the poor? Charity is not the sole virtue one should strive for.
How is that any different from Clinton's unprovoked war on and occupation of Serbia? At least Iraq was a threat to our interests.
You live up well to your name, Ignoramus Maximus.
That would suck tho if they didn't go under after that however, as you would just end up helping them out.
Ummm...no. Buying a company's stock doesn't help them unless you buy it at their IPO. When you buy stock, you are buying the company itself--you own part of it--from someone who had bought it before and thus are entitled to a vote in how that company is run (including for its directors). You also generally get paid a portion of it profits as a dividend.
The company doesn't make any money from you.
If you thought it was a good investment at $x, then you should think that it's a great investment at $.7x. Don't invest in companies because they won't get any lower; invest in them because you believe that they have sound business fundamentals and will grow in the future.
You have to multiply the cost of the disaster by its likelihood and compare that to the cost of the preventive action. E.g. it makes sense to spend $1 to prevent a 1-in-1,000 risk which would cost $10,000. It doesn't make sense to spend fifty cents to prevent a 1-in-1,000,000 risk which would cost $50,000. Considering how expensive it would be to sink part of the Canary Islands, and how astronomically unlikely they are to create a tsunami, it almost certainly does not make sense.
Both of these are actually incorrect. GPLed software can be distributed for a price--even an absurdly high price (look at what the FSF used to charge for tapes of emacs...), but any distribution must include full source code and the ability to modify and redistribute the same.
BSDLed code may be used for anything--you can take it, change it and sell it and not include the source.
Thus the GPL protects the freedom of users (who can always modify and redistribute the code), whilst the BSDL protects the freedom of the code itself (it imposts almost no restrictions on the code or its use). I prefer the GPL, since as an author I don't want someone else to take my code proprietary.
Any citizen has the right to protect himself. I'm no fonder of cops than most people (they exist solely to project force on their fellow citizens, and most of them are military wannabes, and the majority support the enforcement of unjust laws), but cops have no fewer rights than the rest of us. The guy had a reasonable fear of danger, and took reasonable steps to neutralise that danger. It would be just as legal for you or me to do the same.
The American public benefited, because we now get less expensive clothing (you know, there was a time when most folks had only a single change of clothing). The managers benefited, because they were given incentives to increase profits. The shareholders (who are the owners of the company, and are often folks just like you & me, or their agents) benefited, because their profits increased.
Free trade is a Good Thing. Everyone does what he does best (e.g. China does textiles better than the Carolinas), and we end up with everyone better off in the long run. In the short run, of course, there is suffering as those who were dedicated to an inefficient industry (American textiles) lose their jobs. I'm a libertarian, but I do see a place here for a very limited social safety net (better would be private unemployment insurance which will pay for retraining, but...).
Would you pay $4 for an apple when another store sells the same thing for 25 cents? Of course not. Would you pay $4 for a moldy apple when another store sells a sweet, fresh, crunchy apple for 25 cents? Certainly not. Why should an employer pay lazy, expensive Americans when others are willing to do better work for less?
I'm not certain modern journalism has many of the restraints of traditional journalism, either--hence the popularity of the new media. Since the old media are turning into propagandists and shills, we all might as well be.
French units are easier to convert between--they're actually more difficult to work with. Try to divide a 1L bottle of water into ten decilitres, then try to divide one quart into jills (halve->pints, halve->cups, halve->jills). Or try to cut a decimetre into centimetres vs. cutting a foot into inches (halve, halve, cut in thirds).
.rpm is the equivalent of .deb, not apt. And apt runs atop rpms these days--I'm happily using it with Fedora Core 2 & 3. rpms are actually pretty nice. Not perfect, but decent.
Imagine being able to work from a bar, bookstore or coffeeshop: heaven!
North Korea is a holdout (which is the international community's shame--NK is worse than Nazi Germany ever was, and no-one cares).
And just because they're communist must mean they're bad, right?
Considering that communism has killed more people than any other ideology in history, yeah.
But for all their sins, the Israelis are far more palatable than anyone else in the region. Jordan? Egypt? Syria? Iran? Saudi Arabia? All are hellholes by comparison.
And as for the United States, we need no defence. From our victory over militarism in '18, to our victory over national socialism in '45, to our victory over communism in '89, to our ongoing war against Islamofascism (not to mention our suppression of the Barbary pirates; our suppression of the slavery trade and eventually slavery itself; our pacification of the American aborigines and so on) we have been on the whole a force for good. Yes, we screwed up in the Phillipines and Hawaii, and in the long Cold War we were often forced to choose the least of some pretty nasty evils, but we've done much more good than harm.
And unfortunately it doesn't always seem to work--at least with Evolution & Firefox in FC 3.
That is a great advance and it does save innumerable lives, but it's not really all that impressive, and it doesn't involve much in the way of prediction. We can just look down with a satellite and see where the storm is and in which direction it's heading...
I love gtk+/GNOME, but Mono is idiotic. Microsoft will not let it stand, should it ever become a threat.