This thing looks a lot like a four-door version of the BMW Isetta.
This concept Toyota could only come from the same country that gave us the Aibo. It's cute, friendly, and completely ridiculous--technology for technology's sake. Again, a quintessential modern-day Japanese idea. (On the other hand, some of their other ideas--such as the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius--are quite nice, and long overdue. I just hope enough people can overcome their SUV craze to buy these).
Well, you can get a beige G3/233 for as little as $250, but that will run OS X rather slowly (and has other limitations, such as a 66MHz FSB and no AGP). My recommendation: if you really want to play with OS X, buy a new $799 iMac (or, if you really need PCI expansion slots/internal drive bays and are willing to trade the faster CPU and integrated monitor, buy a blue and white G3 (300-450MHz) for around $600-700).
Personally, I have a 7600/200 with 176 MB RAM, and aftermarket Ultra DMA controller, but OS X chokes on the DMA controller, and I don't have large enough SCSI hard drives. Oh well, I have a friend with a new dual-800MHz G4, and another with a Titanium Powerbook G4, so that's not too much of a problem:)
No, it's because the Russians want to truck the reactor to Novosobrusk (sp), where they've dumped plenty of old submarine nuclear reactors at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
What? Do you mean Novosibirsk? If so, they probably don't dump reactors in the Arctic Ocean there, because Novosibirsk is nowhere near the Arctic Ocean, or any other major body of water for that matter. Rather, it's in southwestern Siberia.
The Russian (and Soviet) Atlantic sub fleet is based at Murmansk, and everything that happens related to the Soviet Atlantic sub fleet (including the infamous dumping of spent reactors) happens near Murmansk.
Recently, embedded systems has been one area where Linux really excels, and where the power of Open Source really shines. Especially things like the Isamu robot: would that have been possible with a closed-source OS like Windows CE, VxWorks, or QNX, no matter how good they may be? And, thanks in large part to things like the MOSIX project, Linux is ready to handle the real-time demands of applications such as these, where infallible reliability, several megabytes of RAM and a low-power microprocessor are the norm. I think the pundits are right, in a sense: Linux will invade the home and workplace. Not on the desktop, necessarily, but in all the systems you see and don't really think about, and that you don't interact with via keyboard and mouse. We're already starting to see this, as this article demonstrates.
Now, maybe you know something that's hidden from the rest of us, but everyone seems to agree that it was the American presence in Saudi Arabia (home of Mecca, remember?) that hardened his anger. I tend to think he just wanted an enemy and we provided him an excuse, but I could be wrong. Usually am.
Actually, you're right. I knew it was the gulf war that pissed him off, but I forgot about his anger at the Great Satan's presence in the home of Mecca and Medina, and the bombing was what came to mind first. Just further proof that I type faster than I think:)
Funny, anti-US terrorism and people intentionally flying planes into buildings were unheard of until Bill Clinton was elected.
You mean like the bombing of the Marines' barracks in Beirut in 1983? Or the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, in 1988? Or, for that matter, the taking of hostages in Iran in 1979? All of those happened well before Clinton was elected in 1992. And, of course, it was Bush's bombing of Iraq that made Bin Laden hate us in the first place.
The fundamentalist Islamic world hates us as a result of decades of US foreign policy, starting with the creation of Israel in 1948. Now, without the USSR to act as a counterweight, we've only gotten more brazen, and so have the extremist groups.
FTP upgrade? Use cvsup, it fetches all the changed source files for you.
When it's done, you'll want to take a look at your/usr/src/UPDATING file, which will describe the significant things that have changed.
After that, it's just a matter of doing a:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whichever kernel you are building, if you have a custom one)
make installworld
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whatever)
reboot
You should also run mergemaster after make installworld, or else you'll get weird errors (like the PAM errors from 4.2->4.3)
You're right, I am absolutely not the target audience for the iMac - the G4 tower is what I need. The problem is that the G4 tower is too expensive.
That's my major beef with Apple: they seem to have no concept of midrange. You can have the iMac and its tiny 15" built-in monitor and no expandability (want to replace the video card? Too bad) for ~$1000, or you can have the G4, which is at least $800 more expensive. Same story with their laptops: iBook for $1299, or TiBook for $2199. No good midrange $1800 laptop (the $1800 iBook is nothing more than a $1299 iBook with a DVD/CDRW drive).
I would be using a Mac if I could get a low to midrange system that was expandable and let me use my 21" monitor (yes, I know I could buy a used blue and white G3, but they're kind of dated now).
Re:Time for some highly unpopular opinion...
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Handling the Loads
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· Score: 1
The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.
I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.
yes, they care about individual policy decisions, but there isn't a nation on earth that doesn't make the exact same decisions every day. WE're criticized for butting our noses into foreign affairs, then criticized for being isolationist if we DON'T get involved in foreign affairs.
US involvement in world affairs can be good and bad. It's good when we rush to help out another country after some disaster (like the earthquakes in Asia), it's bad when we overthrow democratically elected governments in favour of brutal dictators who are friendlier to US interests (see Iran, 1954 or Vietnam, 1954-1963). Americans can't seem to distinguish between the two--they're both "foreign involvement".
We're criticized for supporting side A against B, but if we switch sides, we're criticized for supporting B against A.
No, we're criticised for supporting people and institutions whose ideals are antithetic to the freedom and democracy we claim to espouse so vigorously, then changing our tune when these same entities turn around and bite us in the ass (Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden).
There is no policy we could possibly have that would make other nations happy with us. If we withdraw, we're "ignoring our responsibilities" but if we get involved we're "flaunting our power".
Funny, nobody seems to bitch about Germany or Japan these days (and the few terrorist attacks are internal--weird cults in Japan, and anti-immigrant groups in Germany), despite the fact that they are the second and third-largest economies. Why not? Because they try to be good global citizens, cooperating with other nations instead of trying to subvert them. They didn't come up with wonderful things like Echelon, and then use them to give US businesses an advantage.
Well fuck you all very much, planet earth. We didn't ask to be the only superpower. We're not itching to feed your hungry or shelter your homeless or finance your economic devastations, but we're the ones you call on first when you need those things done.
For not asking to be the only superpower, we certainly did our best to destroy the USSR (and were left with a world far less dangerous because of its collapse). As for bailing out others' financial disasters (such as Asia in 1997), that also is done to benefit US interests--if Japan goes into a depression, we lose one of our largest trading partners.
You complain because american hegemony is destroying your cultures, then you go out and buy coca-cola and watch Friends on TV. You complain about our imperialism while ignoring the fact that Germany and Japan are our biggest competitors exactly BECAUSE we rebuilt them at OUR EXPENSE after we could have conquered them.
Ummm.. Germany was given LOANS during the Marshall Plan, to be PAID BACK with INTEREST. It was only later that the US decided to drop the requirements for the repayment of the principal and interest. Germany paid back a large portion of it anyway.
We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, so don't give me any shit that we had it coming because of our policies. NO FUCKING POLICY WILL MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY!
We're like the prettiest girl at a party -- all the women want to be her, all the men want to fuck her. There is not a country on earth that wouldn't trade places with us in a second, and on days like today i'd almost be happy to do it.
No, we're like the guy at the party who gives everyone cocaine, but nobody likes him. Several countries have tried to achieve absolute supremacy. They all failed, and fell hard from their former positions of glory. They are quite a bit more humble now.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US has a lot of good qualities (our heavyhanded government notwithstanding), I certainly do NOT condone terrorist action against our citizens, but the attitude that we're the "shining city on a hill", the be-all and end-all of civilization, is annoying and arrogant, and has a lot to do with why so many non-USians don't like us.
Now before you laugh, consider it. Wouldn't it be nice for the basic user to have all that free software just installed and updated on their system once it comes out, appearing as a shiny little KDE icon, just as easy as an AOL update? Offering options of what they can download?
Ummm.. that's part of what Red Hat is doing with Red Hat Network. And Eazel tried it, obviously it didn't work...
I think Ximian might be trying that too, but so far, their update service is free.
Is it really the american educational system that produces both illiterates and top scientists? It has always been my impressions that the US lead in science comes mainly from assimilating top scientists from abroad who never went through primary or secondary education in the US.
Definitely true. Look at the great minds of the 20th century in physics, almost all of them (except for Feynman and Hubbell) were non-USians (at least originally): Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Schroedinger, Planck, Heisenberg, Hawking, etc.
Studies like this will help make GNOME as usable as KDE, and maybe some day, both of these desktop systems will make an attempt to create usable UI, instead of simply copying MicroSoft, and calling it innovation.
For example, why does everybody copy the design that the 'window kill' button should be right next to 'maximize'? That's horrible design, put window kill on the left, maximize and minize on the right.
I know/. users like to deride Apple and its users, but this is something they got right on OS 9 (not OS X): the 'close' button is on the left, and the maximize and restore buttons are on the right
Why is it possible to click down on the 'K', move the mouse a few pixels up, release the mouse, and log yourself out. If you have a fast computer, and you use KDE, you've probably done this before.
Again, on OS 9, the Logout, Shutdown and Restart commands are at the bottom of the 'Special' menu. You generally can't click on them by accident.
GNOME allows an application to use the entire task tray, then when you have two applications, it uses half that size.... and it squeezes down. It's efficient use of space, but it's inconsistent and makes it harder to tell with a single glance what's running. KDE makes good use of the space without this annoying inconsistancy.
Or Apple's solution: an application menu in the upper right-hand corner, which you can remove and position on screen, like a GTK/GNOME menu
What the hell are these icons? Stop being cute, start being useful. If you're running KDE, hit the K menu now and tell me what the following icons mean 'quick browser', 'bookmarks', 'toys', 'system', 'preferences' (these last two are way too similar), multimedia or graphics. None of those icons gives you any intuitive notion of what you're about to launch.
All Classic Mac OS menus are labelled descriptively.
Additionally, I doubt I'm the only one who has taken the less-used apps in the menu for each level, made a folder called 'sewer' and stuck them in there. Yes, we're all proud that there are lots of applications now. No, we don't use 90% of them, and having them in our menus just slows us down.
I'm not an Apple apologist, but they really had many good ideas with the UI in the classic Mac OS (regrettably, they undid a lot of them in OS X: just what are those green, yellow and red dots in the titlebar?). It doesn't interfere with your work, and in many ways is much better thought-out than Windows, KDE or GNOME (even though a 2 or 3-button mouse for contextual clicks would be extremely nice by default). I think GNOME and KDE would be significantly better if the UI developers would buy a $150 Power Mac 7600 on eBay, install OS 9.1 or 8.6, and play around for a while.
Jon Katz himself needs to brush up on his history. Couple of mistakes on his part:
but Naval officials unaccountably ignored the flight formations it was picking up in the hours before the attack.
No, they didn't *ignore* the formation per se, but instead believed it to be a formation of B-17s due from Midway. The B-17s arrived in the middle of the attack.
Also, the United States was not a reluctant bystander. Rather, it was pretty much an Allied power at that point, through such activities as the Destroyer Deal and the Lend-Lease program.
Otherwise, though, it seems as though he knows more about history than the movie's director. Oh, and Titanic wasn't that historically accurate.
1. Airports in the centre of town You haven't been to Phoenix, have you? Our airport is rather large and is downtown. It's actually pretty convenient since no place in the metro area is too far a drive from the airport. But I guess Phoenix is a little different from most older or geographically-restricted cities.
Well.. Phoenix is kind of a special case. We're so sprawled out that everything is flat (except for downtown, and Sky Harbor is far enough away that it isn't a problem), and we can stick the airport basically anywhere. It's pretty cool though, because pretty much no matter where you are there is a nearby freeway which leads to the airport.
Re:Just One Little Problem - I Can't Find It
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FreeBSD 4.3 Released
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· Score: 1
Its usually a good idea to rebuild the kernel after an upgrade too...and a merge of config files. There's a great script on FreeBSDDiary.org that I use to simplify the build process.
Well, of course.. but the original poster was just talking about building the source tree. The kernel is just as easy, too:
cd/usr/src/sys/i386/conf
config KERNNAME
cd../../compile/KERNNAME
make depend
make
make install
If you want documentation for the kernel, just check out LINT.
Re:Just One Little Problem - I Can't Find It
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FreeBSD 4.3 Released
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· Score: 2
If this is your first build world, Read the handbook on building your world.. It's actually easier than a linux kernel build.
If that's the case, why can't you just tell us?
I never had to read a handbook on building linux.
Who knows why this guy suggested the handbook.. But anyway, here it is:
make buildworld compiles everything
make installworld installs the results of make buildworld
make world compliles and installs everything.
Why anyone would need to read the manual for this is beyond me.
Oh... wait... Mir was the only Space Station in orbit after Skylab was scrapped.
No, the Salyut 7 (basically like Mir's core module, but not expandable) was in orbit before Mir, and stayed up there until it was de-orbited by the USSR in February 1991.
It seems as though there has been a fair amount of scientific discovery within the past ten years. We have cloning, we've slowed down light by a considerable margin, and we now know a lot more about deep-space objects and cosmology than ever before--much of it thanks to things like HST and COBE. We also now have blue gallium-nitride lasers, something thought impossible 15 years ago.
In technology, it seems as if there's a breakthrough innovation/paradigm shift every 10-15 years, and everything else is incremental. For instance, we had the transistor in 1947, the IC in 1958, the microprocessor in 1971, and the GUI and Ethernet shortly thereafter (although these weren't commercially available until the '80s). As for paradigms, the '70s brought us personal computers, the '80s the networked graphical systems, and the '90s gave us the mainstream, widespread, ubiquitous Internet. We are probably due for another one, but the world is still adjusting to the Internet as an institution (see previous articles about COngressmen ignoring e-mail for an indication as to how long we still have to go for complete acceptance), and maybe isn't quite ready for a revolutionary new idea beyond the experimental stage.
You think the American Revolution was merely about taxes ? There was a lot more to it than that. Many colonists came to escape religious persecution, and there was threat of an "official religion" being instituted. The government was quartering soldiers in private homes without compensation or respect for privacy and private property. That's just a start. And when the Virginians didn't like it, the government tried to take away their guns. Gosh, you don't like it when the gov't disrespects your privacy, your possessions, and your thoughts, and then they try to take away your means of defending these rights. Sounds familiar.
Yes, the American Revolution was about taxes. Why did you think the Boston Tea Party happened? As for fleeing religious persecution, why did the Pilgrims leave the Netherlands (which has always been known for tolerance, even back then)? Answer: so they set up their own society where they wouldn't have to be tolerant of anybody else who thought differently (look up what the Puritans did to Quakers).
I'm not talking about just the police abusing their power. I'm talking about the entire system going bad. And yes, the Nazis are a perfect example of this. Without their guns, no one had even a small chance of opposing them. But hey! The economy was on the rebound so who cares! Whatever.
Who cares if you're allowed to have guns or not? THe government will always be better armed than you. This made a lot more difference in 1933 when the Nazis took power, but it's becoming more of a moot point with each new advance in military technology. Your Beretta or P99 isn't much good against an M1A1, or a batch of risin.
The US government itself has multiple agencies unconstitutionally equipped to bear arms against its own citizenry. Add to that the numerous state and local agencies. This is wrong and I don't deny that. This is why I vote Constitution , because no other party is working to change this. As another poster said somewhere in this story, US gov't in practice is a far cry from what it is on paper.
Not much argument here. It'd be nice, however, to have a real democracy where more than two parties have a chance of winning any seats (unlike in the US or the UK). This sounds intriguing; I'm going to look up the Constitutional Party. Are they like the Libertarians?
I'm not talking about petty thieves, here. I'm talking about somebody that wants you dead for whatever reason. If he's willing to break that law, I'm sure he can track down a gun (or a simple baseball bat to bash your head with!) if he wants to. An armed victim is a good deterrant.
If somebody wants you dead, and is willing to sacrifice his own life/freedom for it, and the authorities aren't aware of it, nothing will stop him. Not gun-control laws, not cameras, and not the mandatory sentencing or the "three-strikes" laws. However, these cameras will probably help cut down on random, anonymous crimes like robbery and rape.
Ethiopia was colonized by western powers for many years. This imperialist behavior disrupted the natural development of their culture and government. When independence came, the governments that were set up were modeled after those that the imperialists had set up. The system was ill-suited to the culture.
Uhh... no.
Ethiopia was one of the few countries not colonized, due largely to its inhospitable and easily defended terrain. The first time it was taken over in recent memory was in 1935, when Mussolini invaded.
"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning
as it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers, and upon the
fountains of waters;
"And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters
became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
bitter."
END Obligatory "end of the world" post
I think you're thinking of Chernobyl. (In Ukrainian, Chernobyl == Wormwood; in Russian, Mir == Peace or world)
> - why not go with a system like Canada's? Simple X in a box, hand counted, done in a few hours, no ambiguities, no problems
Not just Canada's. Actually, everywhere else in the world, they do it like that too. It's actually the US that is the exception, not the other way round.
This seems to be a good indication of the US's penchant for exhibiting the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Other countries are also notorious for this (see France), but the US is one of the worst (maybe it just seems that way because I live here). For instance, how many Americans think Alan Shepard or John Glenn was the first man in space/orbit, and that Sally Ride was the first female in space? We could use other systems, but no, we have to develop our own expensive boondoggle for the sole sake of saying, "Look! We created our own system!"
I've worked for three companies that used e-commerce, and two of those were storing the credit cards and user passwords in the databases as plain text. (And this is by no means specific to NT/IIS users. One of the shops was using NT4/IIS, the other, Linux and Apache. The people at the Linux site were using telnet to access the database server remotely, on a default RedHat 6.1 install). Of course, I converted the scripts/databases to use encryption right away, but how many other sites are there that don't know better, and will go on storing everything plaintext until someone owns them?
I recommend The Legacy of Chernobyl by Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet microbiologist. If you want a book that looks at Chernobyl from a human standpoint rather than a technical one, this isn't for you, but if you want to know the gory technical details, this is great. It goes into detail about the exact events of 26 April 1986, and also gives quite a bit of background information about the differences between RBMK and modern Western reactors. Be forewarned, though: the author's anti-Soviet biases are quite promiment.
Slashdot Mirror
This thing looks a lot like a four-door version of the BMW Isetta.
This concept Toyota could only come from the same country that gave us the Aibo. It's cute, friendly, and completely ridiculous--technology for technology's sake. Again, a quintessential modern-day Japanese idea. (On the other hand, some of their other ideas--such as the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius--are quite nice, and long overdue. I just hope enough people can overcome their SUV craze to buy these).
Well, you can get a beige G3/233 for as little as $250, but that will run OS X rather slowly (and has other limitations, such as a 66MHz FSB and no AGP). My recommendation: if you really want to play with OS X, buy a new $799 iMac (or, if you really need PCI expansion slots/internal drive bays and are willing to trade the faster CPU and integrated monitor, buy a blue and white G3 (300-450MHz) for around $600-700).
:)
Personally, I have a 7600/200 with 176 MB RAM, and aftermarket Ultra DMA controller, but OS X chokes on the DMA controller, and I don't have large enough SCSI hard drives. Oh well, I have a friend with a new dual-800MHz G4, and another with a Titanium Powerbook G4, so that's not too much of a problem
No, it's because the Russians want to truck the reactor to Novosobrusk (sp), where they've dumped plenty of old submarine nuclear reactors at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
What? Do you mean Novosibirsk? If so, they probably don't dump reactors in the Arctic Ocean there, because Novosibirsk is nowhere near the Arctic Ocean, or any other major body of water for that matter. Rather, it's in southwestern Siberia.
The Russian (and Soviet) Atlantic sub fleet is based at Murmansk, and everything that happens related to the Soviet Atlantic sub fleet (including the infamous dumping of spent reactors) happens near Murmansk.
Recently, embedded systems has been one area where Linux really excels, and where the power of Open Source really shines. Especially things like the Isamu robot: would that have been possible with a closed-source OS like Windows CE, VxWorks, or QNX, no matter how good they may be? And, thanks in large part to things like the MOSIX project, Linux is ready to handle the real-time demands of applications such as these, where infallible reliability, several megabytes of RAM and a low-power microprocessor are the norm. I think the pundits are right, in a sense: Linux will invade the home and workplace. Not on the desktop, necessarily, but in all the systems you see and don't really think about, and that you don't interact with via keyboard and mouse. We're already starting to see this, as this article demonstrates.
Now, maybe you know something that's hidden from the rest of us, but everyone seems to agree that it was the American presence in Saudi Arabia (home of Mecca, remember?) that hardened his anger. I tend to think he just wanted an enemy and we provided him an excuse, but I could be wrong. Usually am.
:)
Actually, you're right. I knew it was the gulf war that pissed him off, but I forgot about his anger at the Great Satan's presence in the home of Mecca and Medina, and the bombing was what came to mind first. Just further proof that I type faster than I think
Funny, anti-US terrorism and people intentionally flying planes into buildings were unheard of until Bill Clinton was elected.
You mean like the bombing of the Marines' barracks in Beirut in 1983? Or the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, in 1988? Or, for that matter, the taking of hostages in Iran in 1979? All of those happened well before Clinton was elected in 1992. And, of course, it was Bush's bombing of Iraq that made Bin Laden hate us in the first place.
The fundamentalist Islamic world hates us as a result of decades of US foreign policy, starting with the creation of Israel in 1948. Now, without the USSR to act as a counterweight, we've only gotten more brazen, and so have the extremist groups.
FTP upgrade? Use cvsup, it fetches all the changed source files for you.
/usr/src/UPDATING file, which will describe the significant things that have changed.
When it's done, you'll want to take a look at your
After that, it's just a matter of doing a:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whichever kernel you are building, if you have a custom one)
make installworld
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whatever)
reboot
You should also run mergemaster after make installworld, or else you'll get weird errors (like the PAM errors from 4.2->4.3)
You're right, I am absolutely not the target audience for the iMac - the G4 tower is what I need. The problem is that the G4 tower is too expensive.
That's my major beef with Apple: they seem to have no concept of midrange. You can have the iMac and its tiny 15" built-in monitor and no expandability (want to replace the video card? Too bad) for ~$1000, or you can have the G4, which is at least $800 more expensive. Same story with their laptops: iBook for $1299, or TiBook for $2199. No good midrange $1800 laptop (the $1800 iBook is nothing more than a $1299 iBook with a DVD/CDRW drive).
I would be using a Mac if I could get a low to midrange system that was expandable and let me use my 21" monitor (yes, I know I could buy a used blue and white G3, but they're kind of dated now).
The government of the United States of America has been bullying and harassing nations for a very long time, flaunting themselves as a superpower which is untouchable. They've stuck their noses in other nations' business too many times and someone had decided to cut it off.
I barely know where to begin when I read crap like this. The simple truth is that people hate us because we're the biggest kid on the block.
yes, they care about individual policy decisions, but there isn't a nation on earth that doesn't make the exact same decisions every day. WE're criticized for butting our noses into foreign affairs, then criticized for being isolationist if we DON'T get involved in foreign affairs.
US involvement in world affairs can be good and bad. It's good when we rush to help out another country after some disaster (like the earthquakes in Asia), it's bad when we overthrow democratically elected governments in favour of brutal dictators who are friendlier to US interests (see Iran, 1954 or Vietnam, 1954-1963). Americans can't seem to distinguish between the two--they're both "foreign involvement".
We're criticized for supporting side A against B, but if we switch sides, we're criticized for supporting B against A.
No, we're criticised for supporting people and institutions whose ideals are antithetic to the freedom and democracy we claim to espouse so vigorously, then changing our tune when these same entities turn around and bite us in the ass (Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden).
There is no policy we could possibly have that would make other nations happy with us. If we withdraw, we're "ignoring our responsibilities" but if we get involved we're "flaunting our power".
Funny, nobody seems to bitch about Germany or Japan these days (and the few terrorist attacks are internal--weird cults in Japan, and anti-immigrant groups in Germany), despite the fact that they are the second and third-largest economies. Why not? Because they try to be good global citizens, cooperating with other nations instead of trying to subvert them. They didn't come up with wonderful things like Echelon, and then use them to give US businesses an advantage.
Well fuck you all very much, planet earth. We didn't ask to be the only superpower. We're not itching to feed your hungry or shelter your homeless or finance your economic devastations, but we're the ones you call on first when you need those things done.
For not asking to be the only superpower, we certainly did our best to destroy the USSR (and were left with a world far less dangerous because of its collapse). As for bailing out others' financial disasters (such as Asia in 1997), that also is done to benefit US interests--if Japan goes into a depression, we lose one of our largest trading partners.
You complain because american hegemony is destroying your cultures, then you go out and buy coca-cola and watch Friends on TV. You complain about our imperialism while ignoring the fact that Germany and Japan are our biggest competitors exactly BECAUSE we rebuilt them at OUR EXPENSE after we could have conquered them.
Ummm.. Germany was given LOANS during the Marshall Plan, to be PAID BACK with INTEREST. It was only later that the US decided to drop the requirements for the repayment of the principal and interest. Germany paid back a large portion of it anyway.
We're damned if we do and damned if we don't, so don't give me any shit that we had it coming because of our policies. NO FUCKING POLICY WILL MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY!
We're like the prettiest girl at a party -- all the women want to be her, all the men want to fuck her. There is not a country on earth that wouldn't trade places with us in a second, and on days like today i'd almost be happy to do it.
No, we're like the guy at the party who gives everyone cocaine, but nobody likes him. Several countries have tried to achieve absolute supremacy. They all failed, and fell hard from their former positions of glory. They are quite a bit more humble now.
Don't get me wrong, I think the US has a lot of good qualities (our heavyhanded government notwithstanding), I certainly do NOT condone terrorist action against our citizens, but the attitude that we're the "shining city on a hill", the be-all and end-all of civilization, is annoying and arrogant, and has a lot to do with why so many non-USians don't like us.
Now before you laugh, consider it. Wouldn't it be nice for the basic user to have all that free software just installed and updated on their system once it comes out, appearing as a shiny little KDE icon, just as easy as an AOL update? Offering options of what they can download?
Ummm.. that's part of what Red Hat is doing with Red Hat Network. And Eazel tried it, obviously it didn't work...
I think Ximian might be trying that too, but so far, their update service is free.
Is it really the american educational system that produces both illiterates and top scientists? It has always been my impressions that the US lead in science comes mainly from assimilating top scientists from abroad who never went through primary or secondary education in the US.
Definitely true. Look at the great minds of the 20th century in physics, almost all of them (except for Feynman and Hubbell) were non-USians (at least originally): Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Schroedinger, Planck, Heisenberg, Hawking, etc.
Studies like this will help make GNOME as usable as KDE, and maybe some day, both of these desktop systems will make an attempt to create usable UI, instead of simply copying MicroSoft, and calling it innovation.
/. users like to deride Apple and its users, but this is something they got right on OS 9 (not OS X): the 'close' button is on the left, and the maximize and restore buttons are on the right
For example, why does everybody copy the design that the 'window kill' button should be right next to 'maximize'? That's horrible design, put window kill on the left, maximize and minize on the right.
I know
Why is it possible to click down on the 'K', move the mouse a few pixels up, release the mouse, and log yourself out. If you have a fast computer, and you use KDE, you've probably done this before.
Again, on OS 9, the Logout, Shutdown and Restart commands are at the bottom of the 'Special' menu. You generally can't click on them by accident.
GNOME allows an application to use the entire task tray, then when you have two applications, it uses half that size.... and it squeezes down. It's efficient use of space, but it's inconsistent and makes it harder to tell with a single glance what's running. KDE makes good use of the space without this annoying inconsistancy.
Or Apple's solution: an application menu in the upper right-hand corner, which you can remove and position on screen, like a GTK/GNOME menu
What the hell are these icons? Stop being cute, start being useful. If you're running KDE, hit the K menu now and tell me what the following icons mean 'quick browser', 'bookmarks', 'toys', 'system', 'preferences' (these last two are way too similar), multimedia or graphics. None of those icons gives you any intuitive notion of what you're about to launch.
All Classic Mac OS menus are labelled descriptively.
Additionally, I doubt I'm the only one who has taken the less-used apps in the menu for each level, made a folder called 'sewer' and stuck them in there. Yes, we're all proud that there are lots of applications now. No, we don't use 90% of them, and having them in our menus just slows us down.
I'm not an Apple apologist, but they really had many good ideas with the UI in the classic Mac OS (regrettably, they undid a lot of them in OS X: just what are those green, yellow and red dots in the titlebar?). It doesn't interfere with your work, and in many ways is much better thought-out than Windows, KDE or GNOME (even though a 2 or 3-button mouse for contextual clicks would be extremely nice by default). I think GNOME and KDE would be significantly better if the UI developers would buy a $150 Power Mac 7600 on eBay, install OS 9.1 or 8.6, and play around for a while.
There's another article on this at the BBC
Comes with an interior shot, too...
Jon Katz himself needs to brush up on his history. Couple of mistakes on his part:
but Naval officials unaccountably ignored the flight formations it was picking up in the hours before the attack.
No, they didn't *ignore* the formation per se, but instead believed it to be a formation of B-17s due from Midway. The B-17s arrived in the middle of the attack.
Also, the United States was not a reluctant bystander. Rather, it was pretty much an Allied power at that point, through such activities as the Destroyer Deal and the Lend-Lease program.
Otherwise, though, it seems as though he knows more about history than the movie's director. Oh, and Titanic wasn't that historically accurate.
1. Airports in the centre of town You haven't been to Phoenix, have you? Our airport is rather large and is downtown. It's actually pretty convenient since no place in the metro area is too far a drive from the airport. But I guess Phoenix is a little different from most older or geographically-restricted cities.
Well.. Phoenix is kind of a special case. We're so sprawled out that everything is flat (except for downtown, and Sky Harbor is far enough away that it isn't a problem), and we can stick the airport basically anywhere. It's pretty cool though, because pretty much no matter where you are there is a nearby freeway which leads to the airport.
Its usually a good idea to rebuild the kernel after an upgrade too...and a merge of config files. There's a great script on FreeBSDDiary.org that I use to simplify the build process.
/usr/src/sys/i386/conf
../../compile/KERNNAME
Well, of course.. but the original poster was just talking about building the source tree. The kernel is just as easy, too:
cd
config KERNNAME
cd
make depend
make
make install
If you want documentation for the kernel, just check out LINT.
If this is your first build world, Read the handbook on building your world.. It's actually easier than a linux kernel build.
If that's the case, why can't you just tell us?
I never had to read a handbook on building linux.
Who knows why this guy suggested the handbook.. But anyway, here it is:
make buildworld compiles everything
make installworld installs the results of make buildworld
make world compliles and installs everything.
Why anyone would need to read the manual for this is beyond me.
Oh... wait... Mir was the only Space Station in orbit after Skylab was scrapped.
No, the Salyut 7 (basically like Mir's core module, but not expandable) was in orbit before Mir, and stayed up there until it was de-orbited by the USSR in February 1991.
It seems as though there has been a fair amount of scientific discovery within the past ten years. We have cloning, we've slowed down light by a considerable margin, and we now know a lot more about deep-space objects and cosmology than ever before--much of it thanks to things like HST and COBE. We also now have blue gallium-nitride lasers, something thought impossible 15 years ago.
In technology, it seems as if there's a breakthrough innovation/paradigm shift every 10-15 years, and everything else is incremental. For instance, we had the transistor in 1947, the IC in 1958, the microprocessor in 1971, and the GUI and Ethernet shortly thereafter (although these weren't commercially available until the '80s). As for paradigms, the '70s brought us personal computers, the '80s the networked graphical systems, and the '90s gave us the mainstream, widespread, ubiquitous Internet. We are probably due for another one, but the world is still adjusting to the Internet as an institution (see previous articles about COngressmen ignoring e-mail for an indication as to how long we still have to go for complete acceptance), and maybe isn't quite ready for a revolutionary new idea beyond the experimental stage.
You think the American Revolution was merely about taxes ? There was a lot more to it than that. Many colonists came to escape religious persecution, and there was threat of an "official religion" being instituted. The government was quartering soldiers in private homes without compensation or respect for privacy and private property. That's just a start. And when the Virginians didn't like it, the government tried to take away their guns. Gosh, you don't like it when the gov't disrespects your privacy, your possessions, and your thoughts, and then they try to take away your means of defending these rights. Sounds familiar.
Yes, the American Revolution was about taxes. Why did you think the Boston Tea Party happened? As for fleeing religious persecution, why did the Pilgrims leave the Netherlands (which has always been known for tolerance, even back then)? Answer: so they set up their own society where they wouldn't have to be tolerant of anybody else who thought differently (look up what the Puritans did to Quakers).
I'm not talking about just the police abusing their power. I'm talking about the entire system going bad. And yes, the Nazis are a perfect example of this. Without their guns, no one had even a small chance of opposing them. But hey! The economy was on the rebound so who cares! Whatever.
Who cares if you're allowed to have guns or not? THe government will always be better armed than you. This made a lot more difference in 1933 when the Nazis took power, but it's becoming more of a moot point with each new advance in military technology. Your Beretta or P99 isn't much good against an M1A1, or a batch of risin.
The US government itself has multiple agencies unconstitutionally equipped to bear arms against its own citizenry. Add to that the numerous state and local agencies. This is wrong and I don't deny that. This is why I vote Constitution , because no other party is working to change this. As another poster said somewhere in this story, US gov't in practice is a far cry from what it is on paper.
Not much argument here. It'd be nice, however, to have a real democracy where more than two parties have a chance of winning any seats (unlike in the US or the UK). This sounds intriguing; I'm going to look up the Constitutional Party. Are they like the Libertarians?
I'm not talking about petty thieves, here. I'm talking about somebody that wants you dead for whatever reason. If he's willing to break that law, I'm sure he can track down a gun (or a simple baseball bat to bash your head with!) if he wants to. An armed victim is a good deterrant.
If somebody wants you dead, and is willing to sacrifice his own life/freedom for it, and the authorities aren't aware of it, nothing will stop him. Not gun-control laws, not cameras, and not the mandatory sentencing or the "three-strikes" laws. However, these cameras will probably help cut down on random, anonymous crimes like robbery and rape.
Ethiopia was colonized by western powers for many years. This imperialist behavior disrupted the natural development of their culture and government. When independence came, the governments that were set up were modeled after those that the imperialists had set up. The system was ill-suited to the culture.
Uhh... no.
Ethiopia was one of the few countries not colonized, due largely to its inhospitable and easily defended terrain. The first time it was taken over in recent memory was in 1935, when Mussolini invaded.
Obligatory "end of the world" post
"And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning
as it were a lamp, and it fell upon a third part of the rivers, and upon the
fountains of waters;
"And the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters
became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made
bitter."
END Obligatory "end of the world" post
I think you're thinking of Chernobyl. (In Ukrainian, Chernobyl == Wormwood; in Russian, Mir == Peace or world)
> - why not go with a system like Canada's? Simple X in a box, hand counted, done in a few hours, no ambiguities, no problems
Not just Canada's. Actually, everywhere else in the world, they do it like that too. It's actually the US that is the exception, not the other way round.
This seems to be a good indication of the US's penchant for exhibiting the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. Other countries are also notorious for this (see France), but the US is one of the worst (maybe it just seems that way because I live here). For instance, how many Americans think Alan Shepard or John Glenn was the first man in space/orbit, and that Sally Ride was the first female in space? We could use other systems, but no, we have to develop our own expensive boondoggle for the sole sake of saying, "Look! We created our own system!"
Our tax dollars at work.. Grrr....
I've worked for three companies that used e-commerce, and two of those were storing the credit cards and user passwords in the databases as plain text. (And this is by no means specific to NT/IIS users. One of the shops was using NT4/IIS, the other, Linux and Apache. The people at the Linux site were using telnet to access the database server remotely, on a default RedHat 6.1 install). Of course, I converted the scripts/databases to use encryption right away, but how many other sites are there that don't know better, and will go on storing everything plaintext until someone owns them?
so, any good books to recommend?
I recommend The Legacy of Chernobyl by Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet microbiologist. If you want a book that looks at Chernobyl from a human standpoint rather than a technical one, this isn't for you, but if you want to know the gory technical details, this is great. It goes into detail about the exact events of 26 April 1986, and also gives quite a bit of background information about the differences between RBMK and modern Western reactors. Be forewarned, though: the author's anti-Soviet biases are quite promiment.