If he's wearing and eating cast-offs, they are still cast-offs which are near-infinitely better than those any pauper in history has ever had. That's part of my point: it's not that the lot of poverty is good; it's that said lot is very much better than it has been.
Maximising economic growth does maximises joy and minimise suffering. The old saw that money doesn't buy happiness is, quite frankly, nonsense. Money is what buys quality food; what buys a nice home; what pays for entertainment; what purchases time off to enjoy the above things. When the economy grows, everyone is better off, the poor as well as the rich. Would you rather have 1/120,495,968,575 of $97 billion or $852 trillion?
The modern pauper commands more wealth than an ancient emperor: he wears clothing made in some other part of the world from fibres imported from yet other regions of the globe; he eats food shipped across thousands of miles and delivered fresh; he listens to music each minute of which has had hours of labour spent to maximise its value. That's all due to a growing economy. Sure, he's a pauper in relation to me--but he's a very rich man indeed in relation to the pauper of a dozen years ago, or a century, or in the time of King Edmund.
A rising tide floats all boats--consider it like that. As the size of the economy increases, each man's share of it increases. When a rich man makes money, he's got to spend it somewhere--those he spends it on (tailors, cooks, farmers, whatever) are now each a little richer; each person they money on will then be a little richer, and so on. `Well,' you may ask, `how do we ensure that the right people get that money to begin with?' That's the beauty of a free market: when everyone is free to spend his money where he will, whoever gets the most money is providing the good or service most desired. Who else could possibly claim that money? Whoever gets the least is doing the least for everyone else; how can he possibly claim more?
Two things screw up this happy arrangement: those who cannot work (and thus should and must be provided for by the rest of us), and when some external force screws up the market so that the man with the most money isn't the one who provides the most value. The first is a necessity; I have no wish to live in a world where the blind and lame are left to die because they do not produce enough. The second is as well: as long as we have government, we will have those who take more than they give. The goal is to keep that negative effect as small as possible.
If drug research were publically funded, who would determine which drugs are researched? How would we know which are the best drugs to research, and which not? The free market is a wonderful mechanism to determine this: if there's a lot of demand for something, then folks will see a lot of money to be made there (whoever discovers a good anti-cancer drug with no side-effects will be a very rich man indeed). Central planning, OTOH, ignores the relevant market (in this case, the drug market) in favour of the political market. Perhaps drugs would be researched based on which senator's kid was sick, or based on what crying-baby campaign ran the most ads before the elections, or what-have-you. My point is that socialist medical research would be worse than free medical research.
History bears me out on this. Any student of economics knows that free markets invariably produce better outcomes overall than do centralised economies. Yes, there are always losers--but in a free market their loss is less, and there are less of them, than otherwise. Consider the US, in which being overweight is a greater problem amonst the poor than is malnutrition: because of our (relatively) free markets, the standard of living of everyone has increased.
Were drug research socialised, we can expect that the overall quality of drugs, and hence of medicine, would be less than it would otherwise be. So your scheme has ended up killing and crippling millions. Sharp.
There are specific conventions on how to treat suspected criminals, or terrorists, which should be adhered to. Rather than follow conventions, America decided to put people suspected of terrorism in a deliberate state of limbo where they can do anything they want.
Criminal law is a matter of national, not international, interest. The US may deal with their citizens as the US would like; so too for any other nation.
For example, the death penalty. It's all very well saying "Fry them!" or whatever, but when you're accused and found guilty of a crime you didn't commit, or you get found guilty because you're black, poor and can't afford proper legal representation, it's a whole new story.
The same may be said of someone who spends his life--or even a few years--in jail, as well. Our legal system does its absolute best to ensure that those who are convicted are actually guilty. Having done the most possible to free the innocent, it then metes out punishment as appropriate to the crime. Yes, there are mistakes, but they are few and far between. One can no more give a man back a lost year of his life than give him back his life--why is it any better to imprison him than kill him?
Abortions: it's all well and good to say no to abortions but when it's your daughter, your sister or you who's pregnant and shouldn'tt to give birth for whatever reason, it's different.
Abortion is murder: it is the killing of another human being. Your argument is akin to `theft: it's all well and good to say no to theft, but when it's your stomach that empty, it's different.' Guess what--it's not. Murder is rightly illegal; abortion is murder; therefor abortion is rightly illegal.
Note I'm not arguing the moral case against abortion. Morality is not something to be legislated. Laws should exist to punish those who violate the rights of others; thus they should ban rape, theft, murder, fraud and the like. Whether abortion is moral or not is immaterial to whether it should be legal or not.
When your family member/friend is dying from Parkinson's or some other degenerate disease, you'll be wishing the government would allow stem cell research, or at least sooner.
Convenience doesn't make it any more right. That a man might testify against me in court gives me no right to kill him. That his money may pay for my hospital bills gives me no right to steal from him.
The National Socialists conducted medical tests on Jews--murdering embryos to harvest their cells is no more justified.
...growing up in Southern Virginia, just being seen play with a black kid would get your ass kicked.
I grew up in southern Virginia (about 30 minutes from the Carolina border), and that was never the case. I had black friends, and so did many folks. This was in the eighties; certainly things were different in the past, as a direct result of the War of Northern Aggression.
One of my pet peeves in the Linux community is all the legacy cruft. I'd much rather not see time and energy spent on a game started 17 years ago.
That's one of the more ignorant things I've read of late (which says a lot--I've been reading socialist and Democratic writings recently). The `legacy cruft,' as you so blithely dismiss it, is often very good. Do we get rid of printf() simply because it's old? Of course not. Do we abandon Unix because it's `legacy cruft'? Of course not.
It so happens that xconq is an incredibly cool and extensible conquer-the-world game. In fact, it makes more sense to fiddle with it than to reinvent the wheel.
Take a look at nethack sometime. It's been around for years, and the reason it's so fun is precisely that. Old things have had more time spent on them, more features added, more cruft removed. Which is the prettier city: London or Albaquerque?
FYI, reader, embryonic stem cell research is carried out on what used to be embryos, before they were aborted (either by request or by requirement [medical etc.]).
Yes--and those embryos are no less human beings than are infants, children, adults or even teenagers. They were killed, and in the vast majority of cases they were murdered (obv. there are cases where it is necessary to abort). It is not right that they should be used for medical experimentation--who can rightly give permission? Certainly not their parents who murdered them.
Pragmatism beats 4 religious aces.
I'm not taking a religious stance (although I am, in fact, and Orthodox Christian)--I don't believe that it's proper to force one's morals or religion on others. I also--and I recognise that in this day and age it's quite unfashionable--don't believe that it is proper to kill innocents. The secular argument against abortion is quite compelling--see Libertarians for Life, which is founded and run by atheists.
I wish to run my life as I see fit and let you do the same--right up until you harm another. And abortion is by its very nature harming another human being (the embryo is not its mother; it is a distinct individual): it's killing, and is almost always murder. That is, abortion is acceptable in exactly those cases where killing is acceptable.
Yeah, and the Allies in WWII suffered in the medical field due to a puritanical refusal to perform grotesque tests on human subjects. Embryonic stem cell research (the only sort anyone objects to, AFAIK) is fueled by murder: the murder of the humans in question. It is unconscionable, and not to be stood.
There are few things which should be illegal: fraud, theft, rape & murder just about sum it up. Ebryonic stem cell research is murder (as it involves the killing of a human being), and should be illegal.
Well, yeah. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. We're like the big brother watching his little brother climb a tree--we feel no need to bother anymore.
Plus--and here's a big secret--we know what they don't know: it's not worth doing. It's just a lot of money with no return. It'd be cheaper to burn a pile of $100 bills. Heck, it'd be cheaper to burn a pile of $1,000,000 bills!
The thing is, Communism (which is, incidentally, identical to Socialism--read up on history...) was rotten to the core from the beginning. Stalinism mas the logical extension of Leninism. In Lenin's era they brutally murdered the tsar and his family (incl. his daughters and young son), as well as hundreds of thousands of bishops, priests, monks and nuns, and many of the aristocracy. Stalin just brought mass-murder to the masses.
Stalinism isn't a perversion of Leninism: it is Leninism.
Ummm... While certainly X can be improved quite a bit,QT is not the way to go (it's C++, for Pete's sake!). X provides a lot of important things and does a pretty good job. It's not terribly broken, so don't fix it terribly.
And all my PC keyboards waste plastic on these little windows looking keys next to alt that seem to do nothing in linux.
What you need to do is remap those keys to something useful. I figured that since there's a picture of a window on 'em, it'd be cool to use them for window manager functions. So I mapped them to Super (the modifiers are Shift, Control, Alt, Super & Hyper--most folks only use the first three), then configured my window manager to use Super rather than Alt as its prefix. I also remapped the Caps Lock key to Control, because Caps Lock is a stupid thing. The upshot is that I can use Alt-TAB in emacs as it was meant to be, and I never have to worry about accidentally hitting Caps Lock and that I have some cool abilities, and life is sweet:-)
To do the above, use xmodmap to 'remove Lock = Caps_lock', 'add control = Caps_Lock', 'keycode 115 = Super_L', 'keycode 116 = Super_R', 'add Mod3 = Super_L', 'add Mod3 = Super_R'. I used xev to get the keycodes--they _may_ differ on different keyboards. I put the xmodmap commands in my.bash_profile; I'm sure that there's a way to configure it for the entire machine, but I'm lazy, and every once in awhile someone else uses my box; no sense confusing him.
STOP OBSESSING OVER THE COMMAND LINE. The mass market does not care to have to type in lines of commands to do something. They want to click.
I don't really care about the mass market. Command-lines are better for some things; text-base duser interfaces (think ncurses) are better for others. GUIs are better for yet others. For a lot of work, though, the text interface is sufficient, just as speaking is normally sufficient, rather than drawing a picture.
Users need to get over the idea that a computer is easy to use. It's not; it is, in fact, far more complex than a car--and it should thus take far more time to learn.
Typical answer, now explain to me how the newbie is suppose to use this if it isn't in the distro or in the documentation for the distro?
The typical newbie should stop being a newbie. He should take the time to actually sit down and learn about this device he has. People learn how to drive a car; they should learn how to use a computer. Remember the old days, when software came with manuals? Remember when it was assumed that users wished to reduce their ignorance? We should strive to return to those days, not turn our backs on them.
Computers are complex, necessarily so. A user should accept this, and dedicate some time to learning how to operate this amazing piece of machinery.
Look into the amazing work of Rivest & Ellison on SPKI/SDSI. This is a much more powerful tool than PGP's web of trust, building on the same ideas to what could one day be a total trust & verification solution. It's really very exciting stuff, and more attention should have been paid to it.
George W. Bush is not `the "president" of the United States'; he's the President of the United States. He was elected in the appropriate Constitutional manner by electors from the fifty states (and DC?), and his election has been accepted by said states and the courts. He is the president.
When it comes to how people voted, he did win the majority in Florida, as has been constantly demonstrated.
I'm really not all that keen on him (I voted for Brown), but the fact remains that George W. Bush is our president. The leftists who try to pretend that he's not (incl. Michael Moore, whom I saw on British television making near-treasonous comments regarding Bush) need to get lives. But then, that applies to all leftists.
...my Pentium-III 550, a scant four years old...just how often am I supposed to replace my machine to keep it reasonable?
Every three years is pretty standard. The usual progression is: the first year is wonderful; the second usable; the third painful. Anything past three years old is masochism IMHO. Technology simply moves too fast, and bloat continues.
Note, though, that you needn't replace your box; simply upgrade the motherboard and/or CPU. As you get the money, install more RAM or another hard drive. A computer should be an organism, not something plucked off of a shelf.
Another note: if you're using a Unix box, this is less important, esp. if you limit yourself to more traditional applications such as emacs, mutt, slrn, nethack &c. Any modern machine is more than fast enough to run them. It's stuff like GNOME and KDE which eat resources--but even they seem to be slimming of late.
[ruhl@warmachine ruhl]$ guile -v Guile 1.3.4 Copyright (c) 1995, 1996, 1997 Free Software Foundation Guile may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence; certain other uses are permitted as well. For details, see the file `COPYING', which is included in the Guile distribution. There is no warranty, to the extent permitted by law. [ruhl@warmachine ruhl]$ guile guile> (expt 4 2000) 1318204093430943100103889794236591363184019 16109327276909280345024175692811283445510797521231 72122033140940756480716823038446817694240581281731 06245251218403854467444438688895632897064277199393 00365865529242495144888321833894158323756200092849 22608946111038578754077913265440918583125586050431 64728460363649082385000782681167246890021068910448 80894853471921527088201197650061259448583977618746 69301278745233504796586994514054435217053803732703 24028340081592616934836479947271609457689400724316 86625688866030658324868306061250176433564697324072 52874567217733694824236675323341755681839221954693 82045607202025388437122682684485863619421287513956 65874453900680147479758139717481147704392488266886 67129237954128555841874460665729630492658600179338 27257911002088122876736120060347897312016889399757 43537276539989692230927982557016660679726989062369 21628764772837915526086464389161570534616956703744 84050297527909408758729896842351653162609089838935 14490200568512210790489667188789433092320719785756 39877208621237040940126912767610658141079378758043 40361142545474418057715085520493716346090251273255 12605396392214570059772472666763440181556475095153 96711351487546062479444592779055555421362722504575 706910949376 guile> (debug-set! stack 0) (stack 0 debug depth 20 maxdepth 1000 frames 3 indent 10 width 79 procnames cheap) guile> (fact 1000) 4023872600770937735437024339230039857193748 64210714632543799910429938512398629020592044208486 96940480047998861019719605863166687299480855890132 38296699445909974245040870737599188236277271887325 19779505950995276120874975462497043601418278094646 49629105639388743788648733711918104582578364784997 70124766328898359557354325131853239584630755574091 14262417474349347553428646576611667797396668820291 20737914385371958824980812686783837455973174613608 53795345242215865932019280908782973084313928444032 81231558611036976801357304216168747609675871348312 02547858932076716913244842623613141250878020800026 16831510273418279777047846358681701643650241536913 98281264810213092761244896359928705114964975419909 34222156683257208082133318611681155361583654698404 67089756029009505376164758477284218896796462449451 60765353408198901385442487984959953319101723355556 60213945039973628075013783761530712776192684903435 26252000158885351473316117021039681759215109077880 19393178114194545257223865541461062892187960223838 97147608850627686296714667469756291123408243920816 01537808898939645182632436716167621791689097799119 03754031274622289988005195444414282012187361745992 64295658174662830295557029902432415318161721046583 20367869061172601587835207515162842255402651704833 04226143974286933061690897968482590125458327168226 45806652676995865268227280707578139185817888965220 81643483448259932660433676601769996128318607883861 50279465955131156552036093988180612138558600301435 69452722420634463179746059468257310379008402443243 84656572450144028218852524709351906209290231364932 73497565513958720559654228749774011413346962715422 84586237738753823048386568897646192738381490014076 73104466402598994902222217659043399018860185665264 85061799702356193897017860040811889729918311021171 22984590164192106888438712185564612496079872290851 92968193723886426148396573822911231250241866493531 43970137428531926649875337218940694281434118520158 01412334482801505139969429015348307764456909907315 24332782882698646027898643211390835062170950025973 89863554277196742822248757586765752344220207573630 56949882508796892816275384886339690995982628095612 14509948717012445164612603790293091208890869420285 10640182154399457156805941872748998094254742173582 40106367740459574178516082923013535808184009699637 25242305608559037006242712434169090041536901059339 83835777939410970027753472000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000 guile>
The exponential was instantaneous, while the factorial took about 3/4 second. This is on a 300 MHz Pentium II (594.73 BogoMIPS). On my home machine (2,299 BogoMIPS) the factorial is also essentially instantaneous.
Contrary to the write-up, if one RTFA one finds nowhere is it stated that International Business Machines let anyone down. The only mentions of IBM are that the old system used DB2 (along with Oracle 7) and S/390 mainframes, while the new system used Oracle 9i and BEA WebLogic (on what platform, it doesn't say).
Reading further, I think that one can tell what went wrong with this project: rather than relying on proven technology, they wanted to make it all snazzy: voice recognition, Java, web application, XML &c. &c. &c. ad infinitum. Instead of sticking to what works, they went with what doesn't. It's like replacing a rock-solid program written in Lisp and running on a Unix system with something written in Visual Basic written on Windows. Don't have high hopes: it may run as well or better, but I'm not betting on it. The likely answer is that this system was over-designed and under-implemented. Too much fun, cutting edge technology and not enough old-fashioned engineering.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM--when I saw the writeup, I read the article. I have nothing to do with our OS/390 division or our DB2 division. I'm a Unix admin, that's all.
Well if there is a company which has X,000 employees the statistical chances of the %'s being well out and the firm choosing their employees regardless of race and sex, are very very low.
You're assuming that the percentage of women or minorities eligible and willing to fill positions at a given company is approximately equal to the percentage of men or whites eligibile and willing. This is not necessarily true. Many minorities are of a lower socio-economic class and are therefor not as employable. One doesn't want one's stockbroker to be white trash or blasting rap music out his office windows.
Many women don't particularly seem to care as much about their careers in relation to the rest of their lives as most men do. I know that most of the women I have as friends certainly don't: we men consider our jobs the centre of our lives, while women tend not to. There is also the issue of aptitude--it appears that men may have a certain amount of additional ability in some fields (e.g. technology), while women have more ability in others.
Thus the chances are actually quite high that depending on the position and industry, the percentage of men, women, blacks, asians, arabs, caucasians or Hindus is likely to vary.
Isn't it funny, that Texas, a state where anyone can carry a gun as long as its *plainly visable*...
I don't mean to be a jerk, but I went to school in Tx. and unless things have changed in the last few years it's against the law to carry openly, and has been for several decades. What Texas does have is a `shall-issue' concealed-carry law, which means that permits are issued to those who have no criminal or mental-health record, and who have passed a course.
Here in Colorado, open carry is supposed to be the law, but several of the larger cities forbid it (despite it being explicitly in the state Constitution!). I'm personally more in favour of open carry than concealed. Why hide the fact that you're a responsible man? It also allows those who are not comfortable with weapons to ask you to vacate their premises, which I believe is their right (they're stupid, but we're free to be morons in this country, or should be).
Vermont has unlimited concealed and open carry, as I understand it, and has very few weapons problems.
You can mod me down for making a hippie-like statement, but a stereo, a TV and a PC can be replaced, even something like a guitar which has emotional value to me. My life, and that of my GF who lives with me is indefenitly more valuable.
I hate to break it to you, but the kind of people who break into homes are not nice, sane & rational like we are. Their minds are not functioning correctly and lack the moral sense to know that one should not hurt another by stealing from him. Would you rather cower in your bedroom hoping said person doesn't get the idea that there might be jewelry in your girlfriend's dresser, or simply kill him and be done with it?
Killing is an awful, horrible thing. But I'd rather kill another than risk my life and the lives of my loved ones trusting in the good intentions of some criminal. YMMV.
Re:I was hoping they would wait.
on
New Red Hat Beta
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· Score: 2
Also, note that RedHat is the _only_ distro that ships GNOME as the default desktop...
And a good thing, too. KDE is just not the way to go, IMHO. It has some good ideas, but it's all in C++ (bastard C++, IIRC). While they've achieved some neat features, it doesn't really fit in with everything else I use (well, just about everything else). C is the language of Unix; it is the language of the Internet; it should be the language of the Unix desktop. It is the language of the Unix desktop: GNOME.
Plus, GNOME just feels better to me:-)
But KDE really is pretty cool. I wish its developers would have spent their energy within a more pleasant environment. They could have really achieved a lot.
Their prediction that almost all data will be `push' instead of `pull' sounds way off to me.
That's because that wasn't their prediction. One wonders if you read the article. I quote:
By 2012, the general mode of information supply of the 20th century--push--will be superseded by pull, where information is sent on demand or filtered by user profiles (0.6 probability).
Note how it states that push will be superseded by pull. Which is a pretty good bet, for the reasons you mentioned as well as others.
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If he's wearing and eating cast-offs, they are still cast-offs which are near-infinitely better than those any pauper in history has ever had. That's part of my point: it's not that the lot of poverty is good; it's that said lot is very much better than it has been.
The modern pauper commands more wealth than an ancient emperor: he wears clothing made in some other part of the world from fibres imported from yet other regions of the globe; he eats food shipped across thousands of miles and delivered fresh; he listens to music each minute of which has had hours of labour spent to maximise its value. That's all due to a growing economy. Sure, he's a pauper in relation to me--but he's a very rich man indeed in relation to the pauper of a dozen years ago, or a century, or in the time of King Edmund.
A rising tide floats all boats--consider it like that. As the size of the economy increases, each man's share of it increases. When a rich man makes money, he's got to spend it somewhere--those he spends it on (tailors, cooks, farmers, whatever) are now each a little richer; each person they money on will then be a little richer, and so on. `Well,' you may ask, `how do we ensure that the right people get that money to begin with?' That's the beauty of a free market: when everyone is free to spend his money where he will, whoever gets the most money is providing the good or service most desired. Who else could possibly claim that money? Whoever gets the least is doing the least for everyone else; how can he possibly claim more?
Two things screw up this happy arrangement: those who cannot work (and thus should and must be provided for by the rest of us), and when some external force screws up the market so that the man with the most money isn't the one who provides the most value. The first is a necessity; I have no wish to live in a world where the blind and lame are left to die because they do not produce enough. The second is as well: as long as we have government, we will have those who take more than they give. The goal is to keep that negative effect as small as possible.
History bears me out on this. Any student of economics knows that free markets invariably produce better outcomes overall than do centralised economies. Yes, there are always losers--but in a free market their loss is less, and there are less of them, than otherwise. Consider the US, in which being overweight is a greater problem amonst the poor than is malnutrition: because of our (relatively) free markets, the standard of living of everyone has increased.
Were drug research socialised, we can expect that the overall quality of drugs, and hence of medicine, would be less than it would otherwise be. So your scheme has ended up killing and crippling millions. Sharp.
Criminal law is a matter of national, not international, interest. The US may deal with their citizens as the US would like; so too for any other nation.
For example, the death penalty. It's all very well saying "Fry them!" or whatever, but when you're accused and found guilty of a crime you didn't commit, or you get found guilty because you're black, poor and can't afford proper legal representation, it's a whole new story.
The same may be said of someone who spends his life--or even a few years--in jail, as well. Our legal system does its absolute best to ensure that those who are convicted are actually guilty. Having done the most possible to free the innocent, it then metes out punishment as appropriate to the crime. Yes, there are mistakes, but they are few and far between. One can no more give a man back a lost year of his life than give him back his life--why is it any better to imprison him than kill him?
Abortions: it's all well and good to say no to abortions but when it's your daughter, your sister or you who's pregnant and shouldn'tt to give birth for whatever reason, it's different.
Abortion is murder: it is the killing of another human being. Your argument is akin to `theft: it's all well and good to say no to theft, but when it's your stomach that empty, it's different.' Guess what--it's not. Murder is rightly illegal; abortion is murder; therefor abortion is rightly illegal.
Note I'm not arguing the moral case against abortion. Morality is not something to be legislated. Laws should exist to punish those who violate the rights of others; thus they should ban rape, theft, murder, fraud and the like. Whether abortion is moral or not is immaterial to whether it should be legal or not.
When your family member/friend is dying from Parkinson's or some other degenerate disease, you'll be wishing the government would allow stem cell research, or at least sooner.
Convenience doesn't make it any more right. That a man might testify against me in court gives me no right to kill him. That his money may pay for my hospital bills gives me no right to steal from him.
The National Socialists conducted medical tests on Jews--murdering embryos to harvest their cells is no more justified.
I grew up in southern Virginia (about 30 minutes from the Carolina border), and that was never the case. I had black friends, and so did many folks. This was in the eighties; certainly things were different in the past, as a direct result of the War of Northern Aggression.
Literally the only country other than:
- Afghanistan
- Albania
- Australia
- Azerbaijan
- Bulgaria
- Colombia
- the Czech Republic
- Denmark
- El Salvador
- Eritrea
- Estonia
- Ethiopia
- Georgia
- Holland
- Honduras
- Hungary
- Iceland
- Italy
- Japan
- Portugal
- Singapore
- South Korea
- Latvia
- Lithuania
- Macedonia
- Nicaragua
- Philippines
- Poland
- Romania
- Slovakia
- Spain
- Turkey
- Uzbekistan
Gosh, that's a lot.That's one of the more ignorant things I've read of late (which says a lot--I've been reading socialist and Democratic writings recently). The `legacy cruft,' as you so blithely dismiss it, is often very good. Do we get rid of printf() simply because it's old? Of course not. Do we abandon Unix because it's `legacy cruft'? Of course not.
It so happens that xconq is an incredibly cool and extensible conquer-the-world game. In fact, it makes more sense to fiddle with it than to reinvent the wheel.
Take a look at nethack sometime. It's been around for years, and the reason it's so fun is precisely that. Old things have had more time spent on them, more features added, more cruft removed. Which is the prettier city: London or Albaquerque?
Yes--and those embryos are no less human beings than are infants, children, adults or even teenagers. They were killed, and in the vast majority of cases they were murdered (obv. there are cases where it is necessary to abort). It is not right that they should be used for medical experimentation--who can rightly give permission? Certainly not their parents who murdered them.
Pragmatism beats 4 religious aces.
I'm not taking a religious stance (although I am, in fact, and Orthodox Christian)--I don't believe that it's proper to force one's morals or religion on others. I also--and I recognise that in this day and age it's quite unfashionable--don't believe that it is proper to kill innocents. The secular argument against abortion is quite compelling--see Libertarians for Life, which is founded and run by atheists.
I wish to run my life as I see fit and let you do the same--right up until you harm another. And abortion is by its very nature harming another human being (the embryo is not its mother; it is a distinct individual): it's killing, and is almost always murder. That is, abortion is acceptable in exactly those cases where killing is acceptable.
There are few things which should be illegal: fraud, theft, rape & murder just about sum it up. Ebryonic stem cell research is murder (as it involves the killing of a human being), and should be illegal.
Well, yeah. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. We're like the big brother watching his little brother climb a tree--we feel no need to bother anymore.
Plus--and here's a big secret--we know what they don't know: it's not worth doing. It's just a lot of money with no return. It'd be cheaper to burn a pile of $100 bills. Heck, it'd be cheaper to burn a pile of $1,000,000 bills!
Stalinism isn't a perversion of Leninism: it is Leninism.
Ummm... While certainly X can be improved quite a bit,QT is not the way to go (it's C++, for Pete's sake!). X provides a lot of important things and does a pretty good job. It's not terribly broken, so don't fix it terribly.
What you need to do is remap those keys to something useful. I figured that since there's a picture of a window on 'em, it'd be cool to use them for window manager functions. So I mapped them to Super (the modifiers are Shift, Control, Alt, Super & Hyper--most folks only use the first three), then configured my window manager to use Super rather than Alt as its prefix. I also remapped the Caps Lock key to Control, because Caps Lock is a stupid thing. The upshot is that I can use Alt-TAB in emacs as it was meant to be, and I never have to worry about accidentally hitting Caps Lock and that I have some cool abilities, and life is sweet:-)
To do the above, use xmodmap to 'remove Lock = Caps_lock', 'add control = Caps_Lock', 'keycode 115 = Super_L', 'keycode 116 = Super_R', 'add Mod3 = Super_L', 'add Mod3 = Super_R'. I used xev to get the keycodes--they _may_ differ on different keyboards. I put the xmodmap commands in my .bash_profile; I'm sure that there's a way to configure it for the entire machine, but I'm lazy, and every once in awhile someone else uses my box; no sense confusing him.
I don't really care about the mass market. Command-lines are better for some things; text-base duser interfaces (think ncurses) are better for others. GUIs are better for yet others. For a lot of work, though, the text interface is sufficient, just as speaking is normally sufficient, rather than drawing a picture.
Users need to get over the idea that a computer is easy to use. It's not; it is, in fact, far more complex than a car--and it should thus take far more time to learn.
The typical newbie should stop being a newbie. He should take the time to actually sit down and learn about this device he has. People learn how to drive a car; they should learn how to use a computer. Remember the old days, when software came with manuals? Remember when it was assumed that users wished to reduce their ignorance? We should strive to return to those days, not turn our backs on them.
Computers are complex, necessarily so. A user should accept this, and dedicate some time to learning how to operate this amazing piece of machinery.
Look into the amazing work of Rivest & Ellison on SPKI/SDSI. This is a much more powerful tool than PGP's web of trust, building on the same ideas to what could one day be a total trust & verification solution. It's really very exciting stuff, and more attention should have been paid to it.
When it comes to how people voted, he did win the majority in Florida, as has been constantly demonstrated.
I'm really not all that keen on him (I voted for Brown), but the fact remains that George W. Bush is our president. The leftists who try to pretend that he's not (incl. Michael Moore, whom I saw on British television making near-treasonous comments regarding Bush) need to get lives. But then, that applies to all leftists.
Every three years is pretty standard. The usual progression is: the first year is wonderful; the second usable; the third painful. Anything past three years old is masochism IMHO. Technology simply moves too fast, and bloat continues.
Note, though, that you needn't replace your box; simply upgrade the motherboard and/or CPU. As you get the money, install more RAM or another hard drive. A computer should be an organism, not something plucked off of a shelf.
Another note: if you're using a Unix box, this is less important, esp. if you limit yourself to more traditional applications such as emacs, mutt, slrn, nethack &c. Any modern machine is more than fast enough to run them. It's stuff like GNOME and KDE which eat resources--but even they seem to be slimming of late.
The exponential was instantaneous, while the factorial took about 3/4 second. This is on a 300 MHz Pentium II (594.73 BogoMIPS). On my home machine (2,299 BogoMIPS) the factorial is also essentially instantaneous.
Reading further, I think that one can tell what went wrong with this project: rather than relying on proven technology, they wanted to make it all snazzy: voice recognition, Java, web application, XML &c. &c. &c. ad infinitum. Instead of sticking to what works, they went with what doesn't. It's like replacing a rock-solid program written in Lisp and running on a Unix system with something written in Visual Basic written on Windows. Don't have high hopes: it may run as well or better, but I'm not betting on it. The likely answer is that this system was over-designed and under-implemented. Too much fun, cutting edge technology and not enough old-fashioned engineering.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM--when I saw the writeup, I read the article. I have nothing to do with our OS/390 division or our DB2 division. I'm a Unix admin, that's all.
You're assuming that the percentage of women or minorities eligible and willing to fill positions at a given company is approximately equal to the percentage of men or whites eligibile and willing. This is not necessarily true. Many minorities are of a lower socio-economic class and are therefor not as employable. One doesn't want one's stockbroker to be white trash or blasting rap music out his office windows.
Many women don't particularly seem to care as much about their careers in relation to the rest of their lives as most men do. I know that most of the women I have as friends certainly don't: we men consider our jobs the centre of our lives, while women tend not to. There is also the issue of aptitude--it appears that men may have a certain amount of additional ability in some fields (e.g. technology), while women have more ability in others.
Thus the chances are actually quite high that depending on the position and industry, the percentage of men, women, blacks, asians, arabs, caucasians or Hindus is likely to vary.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but I went to school in Tx. and unless things have changed in the last few years it's against the law to carry openly, and has been for several decades. What Texas does have is a `shall-issue' concealed-carry law, which means that permits are issued to those who have no criminal or mental-health record, and who have passed a course.
Here in Colorado, open carry is supposed to be the law, but several of the larger cities forbid it (despite it being explicitly in the state Constitution!). I'm personally more in favour of open carry than concealed. Why hide the fact that you're a responsible man? It also allows those who are not comfortable with weapons to ask you to vacate their premises, which I believe is their right (they're stupid, but we're free to be morons in this country, or should be).
Vermont has unlimited concealed and open carry, as I understand it, and has very few weapons problems.
I hate to break it to you, but the kind of people who break into homes are not nice, sane & rational like we are. Their minds are not functioning correctly and lack the moral sense to know that one should not hurt another by stealing from him. Would you rather cower in your bedroom hoping said person doesn't get the idea that there might be jewelry in your girlfriend's dresser, or simply kill him and be done with it?
Killing is an awful, horrible thing. But I'd rather kill another than risk my life and the lives of my loved ones trusting in the good intentions of some criminal. YMMV.
And a good thing, too. KDE is just not the way to go, IMHO. It has some good ideas, but it's all in C++ (bastard C++, IIRC). While they've achieved some neat features, it doesn't really fit in with everything else I use (well, just about everything else). C is the language of Unix; it is the language of the Internet; it should be the language of the Unix desktop. It is the language of the Unix desktop: GNOME.
Plus, GNOME just feels better to me:-)
But KDE really is pretty cool. I wish its developers would have spent their energy within a more pleasant environment. They could have really achieved a lot.
That's because that wasn't their prediction. One wonders if you read the article. I quote:
Note how it states that push will be superseded by pull. Which is a pretty good bet, for the reasons you mentioned as well as others.