But, you do have a point in that using them doesn't push devs to develope cross-platform. But, neither does the small market share making noise.
But he doesn't. It's a bad argument, and it always was.
So, since Win95 is backwards-compatible with Win 3.1 then why would anyone write a Win95 application? Since Windows XP is backwards-compatible with Win95, why would anyone write a Win XP application?
The problem is not that compatibility takes away incentive. The problem is that there is no incentive to begin with: You must first have a better platform to migrate to. And Linux is not yet a better platform for writing games than Windows is.
First, isn't this EXACTLY what Sun did with Java? You can't alter it, you can just see the code for debugging purposes.
Pretty much. But their code (as I understand it) was buildable and not stripped of comments. And at least the Java Community Process, flawed as it is, is somewhat more 'open' than what MS is doing.
But yes, code-wise it's probably going to be pretty much the same. (Although we have yet to see Microsofts license for this stuff. Who knows?)
Second, although Mono programmers should stay away from this source just to be safe, realistically, seeing the source to windows forms wouldn't help them much anyway. Mono isn't using win32 hooks. It's cross platform.
IIRC, Mono uses WineLib for the WinForms stuff, so it's more-or-less the same as coding for windows. (And Wine isn't very cross-platform, although I'm not sure about winelib.) DotGNU is taking a different approach here, though.
This is still a drawback, given that it's a pretty thin wrapper, it just increases the risk that Mono's code already looks a lot like MS code. Which is all the more reason for not wanting to be tainted.
If you went to law school, one would hope that they would've taught you how to build a proper argument.
In your first point, you're attacking a general statement with a particular one. The fact that you know a certain number of people with fringe opinions doesn't say anything about the spectrum of American politics in general.
In your second point, it's at best 'guilt by association' and at worst simply ignorant of how the legal systems in most of Europe actually work. (And of course they do work. If they didn't, they would have been reformed. After all, all European nations are democracies, and it's not like their concept of 'justice' is fundamentally different.)
Apart from that, as an american living in europe (for the last 15 years), and having been around, I would concur with the grandparent poster. The political spectrum of the US is shifted to the right of most of the (democratic) world. In general.
This all depends on the issue. When it comes to moral conservatism, the USA is certainly to the right of most of the western world. Except perhaps parts of Switzerland. Fiscal conservatism is another issue, but I'd put the USA to the right there too. Although it's kind of hard to label the current government as 'fiscally conservative'. I'd classify it as 'South-American-military-junta-style'. (E.g. characterized by low taxes, heavy military spending, big contracts to the friends of those in charge and a whopping foreign debt.)
It doesn't look like this is a "good thing", at all really.
TFA: Now, this is not the MFC model where you'll be able to build it, etc. We're talking about just source and PDBs for debugging.
Okaay. So they're going to let you look at the code, but not build it. With all certainty, modification and redistribution is right out. They just want you to help them with debugging, tainting yourself in the process.
If I were a Mono or DotGNU developer, I wouldn't touch this thing with a ten-foot-pole, lest I taint myself. It's not going to be open-source. It's doesn't seem like it's even going to be buildable or readable.
So unless you like MS so much you're willing to do their work for them for free, finding bugs in this (rather insignificant) part of.NET, it's not worth tainting yourself.
Even Java is better than this. And it's not Open Source either.
You mean like if your electricity needs are constant, you build your power plant? And if you need bottled water in your office every day, you drill a well?
In case you haven't noticed, quite a number of factories do have their own power plants. And the ones which use a lot of water (e.g. breweries, paper mills) have their own water supplies and treatment plants.
What happened to doing your own business and letting professionals handle the rest?
Are you implying that the people working at university computing centers aren't professionals? I wouldn't. I would even count them as experts, since they usually are, or are in close collaboration with the people who do research on clustering techniques.
It's not like Sun expects us to pay through the nose for the processing power. They'd like to cover costs and have a decent margin, but probably nothing unreasonable.
$1 per processor and hour. The department I work at just bought a 440-processor grid for $286k. That means the whole cluster costs what Sun would charge for one month of the equivalent power.
Besides which, as another poster pointed out correctly, it's easier to get grants for funding equipment than it is for funding running costs.
The running costs of this cluster is zero for us. The computer center gets a share of the processing power instead, which they in turn either rent out our use in their own research.
You'd need to evaporate the metal and condense it, which would take a not insignificant amount of energy.
That's not how it's done. I don't think that'd even work, practically.
Metallurgy does things differently. For instance you have to dissolve the metal and use chemical reagents, or if you might be able to use the fact that a certain acid or chemical will dissolve the metal you want, but not the rest (or vice-versa).
But there are also purely metallurgical processes, like the Parkes process, which uses the fact that silver is soluble in molten zinc, but not lead.
The most expensive way of seperating metals is to turn it into a gaseous compound and then centrifuge it. Which is how they do isotope enrichment.
But I've never heard of anyone trying to distill a metal.
Well, you're missing a big point here: That it is practically impossible to teach a beginner a non-mainstream language.
People simply want to learn programming languages they can use in the real world. Saying that "Learning this language will make it easier to learn other languages, which people do use!" is hardly a good motivator.
Sure, maybe if you're teaching comp-sci students, that's a practical way to go, since they expect and are prepared to learn more than one programming language. But there's quite a big number of people learning introductory programming who are not comp-sci students.
I wonder what will happen to this technology. It does seem like it could be useful for a number of applications (university research, for example).
Actually, I think corporate research would be much more of a market. For one, if you have an academic department doing the kind of research which requires heavy computing, then their need is probably going to be pretty constant, and you'll be better off building your own grid. And the ones who don't need that power on a day-to-day basis are usually picking up the slack on the university grids. Academia has a long and established tradition of collaboration and pooling common resources, from telescopes to particle accelerators.
Corporate research is a better target, where you might, for instance, need big computational resources for a certain project or contract, but not on a day-to-day basis.
Re:OSI approval required for open-source licenses?
on
ESR steps down from OSI
·
· Score: 2, Informative
IIRC, OSI was not granted a trademark on the phrase "open source", so anyone can use it for nearly anything.
No, not the OSI, but another organization founded by Bruce Perens, the SPI (Software in the Public Interest). Tradmark #75439502.
Then there was a little scuffle where the OSI wanted the trademark from the SPI, and I think it ended up being abandoned, and now the OSI has their 'certification mark' instead.
But in any case, Perens was the guy who co-founded the OSI and coined the term, and at the very least he has a certain moral right to it.
Why the hell do we need another organization to promote open source. This is getting out of hand. Everyone is trying to be a chairman, CEO, head of board, so they start these unnecessary organizations.
What 'other' organization? The OSI has been around for years. And they were founded by Bruce Perens, who can make the claim of having coined the term 'Open Source'.
If the OSI is an 'unnecessary' organization for promoting open source, then I don't know which one isn't.
You know, I knew a guy who talked like this before. He was a friend and class-mate of mine.
He was always talking about how the immigrants were 'taking over'.
Like you he never could make an argument which stood up, but held onto his belief nonethless.
Like you he started out denying he was a racist, made excuses all the time, saying that he had no problems with immigrants in themselves. But just like your comments, he never had any problems generalizing about them or making false claims.
(Another irony here is that his own mother was foreign-born)
Like you he was a passionate fan of 'law and order'.
After a few years he 'came out', and stopped making excuses for himself, shaved his head and went out and started beating people up.
Today (9 years later), he's a part-time plumber and full-time leader from the neo-nazi National Socialist Front. He hasn't really done a single useful thing in his life. And it's especially sad because he was a smart guy.
If you want to go down that path of ignorance and hate, be my guest. But be honest with yourself about it and get a real short haircut.
You make quite a few assumptions. For instance, immigrants = muslims and muslims = radical islamists.
Perhaps you should get to know some ordinary and representative muslims before you make judgements about muslims or Islam as a whole.
You are taking a group of fringe radicals and applying it to muslims as a whole. That is racist.
Besides, radical islamists aren't taking over anything. That is complete nonsense. They aren't changing any laws, nor are they trying to. How do you propose they'd do it? They're not even 1/1000 of the population anywhere in Europe or the US.
If you want to combat extreme ideologies based on religion, you'd do better to go after the christian fundamentalists. They're far more common, and equally dangerous.
Ok, let's look at that link. First article is a reference to a sensationalist tabloid, Aftonbladet. And the translation is in part exaggerating, and in part simply wrong. For instance, there is no sentence in the article at all corresponding to "It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants." (If you don't belive me, the swedish word for muslim is 'muslim' (unsurprizingly) can you find it in the swedish text?)
The second article is about people moving away from Malmö. The article does not mention muslims at all, and immigrants are only noted in one sentence, which says that 'Immigrant families can rarely afford houses.' (in the context of there being a shortage of apartments and surplus of houses in the city)
In the third story, (which is not an article, but an opinion piece) there is no mention of any "boy of Afghan origin had made plans to blow up his own school". Nor is the part of the city (Rosengård) in question ever referred to as an 'immigrant ghetto', in fact the title of the piece is 'No swedish ghettos'.
I think it's safe to assume the rest follows the same pattern.
Yes, you are a racist. Your sources are racist, and even given that they are obviously biased to posting stories which can be interpreted as anti-muslim or anti-immigrant, they still resort to pure fabrication.
You are not reading that site because you want real factual information, but because you want to reinforce your own warped racist opinions and world view.
Ok, so the poster writes: 'Pure water actually has a high amount of electrical resistance' and to this you respond: 'No it doesn't, it has a non-infinite resistance'.
Since when did 'high amount' equal 'infinite amount'?
The Germans have a word which fits you very well. Besserwisser, which translates as 'faultfinder', 'know-it-all' or 'smart-ass'.
Thank you for making the real (racial) motivation for your argument completely clear. Please name a single Swedish city where the police "no longer have control". I would have thought that widespread anarchy, riots and looting in Scandinavia would have made the news.
Well, I live in Sweden, and it's certainly news to me. I guess I must get out more.;-P
It's worth noting that not only is it complete nonsense, it's also impossible nonsense - Neither the swedish police or government keeps any statistics on race, nationality or religion of criminals.
Is there anybody who think that newspapers should be able to publish ANYTHING? Say, a list of witness protection program participants? The fact that you are a convicted child molestor, complete with picture, even if you're not? Hey, it's "freedom of speech", right?
I think newspapers should be able to publish anything, without prior approval by anyone (except of course, the editor).
The original post did not bring up forwards compatibility. If you managed to read in an expectance of forwards-compatibility into that, then it's no wonder how it 'manages to come up' all the time.
Here's a tip: Stop assuming everyone is an idiot, and you'll find less people are idiots.
The only thing that stood between him and serious prison time (not to mention probably losing all of his friends, family and destroying his career and reputation) was that the criminal who was responsible came forward.
Uh, that and an actual trial and conviction, then. Yes.
You're assuming here that the guy would have been found guilty. Which you would think is a big assumption, given that he in fact was innocent.
Innocent people are put trial every day. It's not a pleasant thing, but it's the only way the system can work, unless we somehow attain police and procecutors who never make mistakes.
But it's not just the procecutors. Courts make mistakes too, which is why you have the right to appeal. Depite all that, innocent people sometimes do get convicted. And that's the real tragedy, although it seems it more often has to do with incompetent defense lawyers (It'd be nice if the state provided people who could stay awake).
But as I said, this was nowhere near a close call.
Are you kidding me? The wrongfully-accused was charged almost immediately, and now this guy fronted up and they're thinking about it?
To engage in pure speculation: A possible situation could be that the fire was started by one of his kids. They would've had access to his card (and typically, kids don't have much cash either). The man's wife allegedly first spotted the fire, which makes me doubt it'd be her.
This would explain both why the procecutor has not decided if they should be charged, and also why they're not providing any identification. Hanging a presumably already troubled kid out to dry in the media wouldn't be very constructive.
Um, you are joking right? Since someone modded this 'insightful', it's hard to tell.
Why is 'grievous' capitalized in your quote? It's not a name, it's an adjective, 'grievous' means 'regretful'.
A single common (albeit not as common in modern english) word hardly qualifies as a 'reference' by any stretch of the imagination. And hardly as an unsubtle one.
But if we were to assume it is a reference to the Bard, what makes you think it's a reference to Julius Ceasar?
It could be "Richard II": Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick, my lord or perhaps: The commons hath he pill'd with grievous taxes..
or "Richard III": By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins.. and also A grievous burden was thy birth to me..
or Sonnet 3: Then can I grieve at grievous foregone..
or "Two Gentlemen of Verona": If lost, why then a grievous labour won..
or "Henry IV": He cannot come, my lord; he is grievous sick.
or "Henry VIII": Heard many grievous, I do say, my lord..
or "Othello":..a noble ship of Venice Hath seen a grievous wreck..
It's a quite common word.
Given that this is a story of the fall of the Republic and the Rise of the Empire, Lucas' literary allusion here seems to have all of the subtlety of a high-speed halfbrick to the cranium.
So, besides the fact that a single word doesn't qualify as a reference, it's also worth noting that the Shakespeare play 'Julius Caesar' isn't 'the story of the fall of the republic and rise of the empire' at all.
"nanoceramic material extracted from a natural stone"? How stupid do you have to be to believe this kind of thing?
Well, while this product is undoubtably a hoax, this particular sentence (weird as it is) is not complete bullshit. Zeolites are a ceramic material, which is a naturally occuring form of rock. (Although synthetic zeolites exist too)
They constitute molecular 'cages' of sizes 5-10 Angstroms, (0.5-1 nm) and are useful for a bunch of applications within chemistry and nanotech (whenever the decide exactly where the border is between these subjects, let me know).
So I don't believe you would need to be awfully stupid to believe that particular sentence. As for the product itself - that's a different story entirely.
You're living in a fantasy-world. Let's pick an industry, say: Pharmaceuticals.
Could you please explain how you propose drug research should be financed without the profits from patents? Making drugs is easy. Researching drugs costs billions.
Which is why there is a market for the Generic drug manfacturers, who make stuff like Aspirin and Ibuprofene which is no longer patented. The competition there is big, and these drugs are only sold at marginal profit. Those who do the actual research recoup those costs during the brief period the patent is valid: 17 years, which is brief because the drug is patented at the conceptual stage. This means about 10-12 years until the thing passes all the steps of development and clinical testing (Which less than 1% of all candidate drugs do).
So what do you propose they do? Who's going to finance the research of new drugs? Academia? The Government?
Well, you could take a sample of naturally occurring carbon and separate its isotopes.
No need for that. Just grab some mined coal. That stuff has been underground for a number of million years and has no C-14 left in it.
From the posts here, I guess it's not so well-known, but radiocarbon dating is pretty much useless for the modern era for exactly this reason: We've been burning so many fossil fuels that we've screwed up the natural ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
But, you do have a point in that using them doesn't push devs to develope cross-platform. But, neither does the small market share making noise.
But he doesn't. It's a bad argument, and it always was.
So, since Win95 is backwards-compatible with Win 3.1 then why would anyone write a Win95 application? Since Windows XP is backwards-compatible with Win95, why would anyone write a Win XP application?
The problem is not that compatibility takes away incentive. The problem is that there is no incentive to begin with: You must first have a better platform to migrate to. And Linux is not yet a better platform for writing games than Windows is.
First, isn't this EXACTLY what Sun did with Java? You can't alter it, you can just see the code for debugging purposes.
Pretty much. But their code (as I understand it) was buildable and not stripped of comments. And at least the Java Community Process, flawed as it is, is somewhat more 'open' than what MS is doing.
But yes, code-wise it's probably going to be pretty much the same.
(Although we have yet to see Microsofts license for this stuff. Who knows?)
Second, although Mono programmers should stay away from this source just to be safe, realistically, seeing the source to windows forms wouldn't help them much anyway. Mono isn't using win32 hooks. It's cross platform.
IIRC, Mono uses WineLib for the WinForms stuff, so it's more-or-less the same as coding for windows. (And Wine isn't very cross-platform, although I'm not sure about winelib.) DotGNU is taking a different approach here, though.
This is still a drawback, given that it's a pretty thin wrapper, it just increases the risk that Mono's code already looks a lot like MS code. Which is all the more reason for not wanting to be tainted.
If you went to law school, one would hope that they would've taught you how to build a proper argument.
In your first point, you're attacking a general statement with a particular one. The fact that you know a certain number of people with fringe opinions doesn't say anything about the spectrum of American politics in general.
In your second point, it's at best 'guilt by association' and at worst simply ignorant of how the legal systems in most of Europe actually work. (And of course they do work. If they didn't, they would have been reformed. After all, all European nations are democracies, and it's not like their concept of 'justice' is fundamentally different.)
Apart from that, as an american living in europe (for the last 15 years), and having been around, I would concur with the grandparent poster. The political spectrum of the US is shifted to the right of most of the (democratic) world. In general.
This all depends on the issue. When it comes to moral conservatism, the USA is certainly to the right of most of the western world. Except perhaps parts of Switzerland. Fiscal conservatism is another issue, but I'd put the USA to the right there too. Although it's kind of hard to label the current government as 'fiscally conservative'. I'd classify it as 'South-American-military-junta-style'.
(E.g. characterized by low taxes, heavy military spending, big contracts to the friends of those in charge and a whopping foreign debt.)
It doesn't look like this is a "good thing", at all really.
.NET, it's not worth tainting yourself.
TFA:
Now, this is not the MFC model where you'll be able to build it, etc. We're talking about just source and PDBs for debugging.
Okaay. So they're going to let you look at the code, but not build it. With all certainty, modification and redistribution is right out. They just want you to help them with debugging, tainting yourself in the process.
If I were a Mono or DotGNU developer, I wouldn't touch this thing with a ten-foot-pole, lest I taint myself. It's not going to be open-source. It's doesn't seem like it's even going to be buildable or readable.
So unless you like MS so much you're willing to do their work for them for free, finding bugs in this (rather insignificant) part of
Even Java is better than this. And it's not Open Source either.
You mean like if your electricity needs are constant, you build your power plant? And if you need bottled water in your office every day, you drill a well?
In case you haven't noticed, quite a number of factories do have their own power plants. And the ones which use a lot of water (e.g. breweries, paper mills) have their own water supplies and treatment plants.
What happened to doing your own business and letting professionals handle the rest?
Are you implying that the people working at university computing centers aren't professionals? I wouldn't. I would even count them as experts, since they usually are, or are in close collaboration with the people who do research on clustering techniques.
It's not like Sun expects us to pay through the nose for the processing power. They'd like to cover costs and have a decent margin, but probably nothing unreasonable.
$1 per processor and hour. The department I work at just bought a 440-processor grid for $286k. That means the whole cluster costs what Sun would charge for one month of the equivalent power.
Besides which, as another poster pointed out correctly, it's easier to get grants for funding equipment than it is for funding running costs.
The running costs of this cluster is zero for us. The computer center gets a share of the processing power instead, which they in turn either rent out our use in their own research.
You'd need to evaporate the metal and condense it, which would take a not insignificant amount of energy.
That's not how it's done. I don't think that'd even work, practically.
Metallurgy does things differently. For instance you have to dissolve the metal and use chemical reagents, or if you might be able to use the fact that a certain acid or chemical will dissolve the metal you want, but not the rest (or vice-versa).
But there are also purely metallurgical processes, like the Parkes process, which uses the fact that silver is soluble in molten zinc, but not lead.
The most expensive way of seperating metals is to turn it into a gaseous compound and then centrifuge it. Which is how they do isotope enrichment.
But I've never heard of anyone trying to distill a metal.
Well, you're missing a big point here: That it is practically impossible to teach a beginner a non-mainstream language.
People simply want to learn programming languages they can use in the real world. Saying that "Learning this language will make it easier to learn other languages, which people do use!" is hardly a good motivator.
Sure, maybe if you're teaching comp-sci students, that's a practical way to go, since they expect and are prepared to learn more than one programming language. But there's quite a big number of people learning introductory programming who are not comp-sci students.
I wonder what will happen to this technology. It does seem like it could be useful for a number of applications (university research, for example).
Actually, I think corporate research would be much more of a market. For one, if you have an academic department doing the kind of research which requires heavy computing, then their need is probably going to be pretty constant, and you'll be better off building your own grid. And the ones who don't need that power on a day-to-day basis are usually picking up the slack on the university grids. Academia has a long and established tradition of collaboration and pooling common resources, from telescopes to particle accelerators.
Corporate research is a better target, where you might, for instance, need big computational resources for a certain project or contract, but not on a day-to-day basis.
IIRC, OSI was not granted a trademark on the phrase "open source", so anyone can use it for nearly anything.
No, not the OSI, but another organization founded by Bruce Perens, the SPI (Software in the Public Interest). Tradmark #75439502.
Then there was a little scuffle where the OSI wanted the trademark from the SPI, and I think it ended up being abandoned, and now the OSI has their 'certification mark' instead.
But in any case, Perens was the guy who co-founded the OSI and coined the term, and at the very least he has a certain moral right to it.
Why the hell do we need another organization to promote open source. This is getting out of hand. Everyone is trying to be a chairman, CEO, head of board, so they start these unnecessary organizations.
What 'other' organization? The OSI has been around for years. And they were founded by Bruce Perens, who can make the claim of having coined the term 'Open Source'.
If the OSI is an 'unnecessary' organization for promoting open source, then I don't know which one isn't.
You know, I knew a guy who talked like this before. He was a friend and class-mate of mine.
He was always talking about how the immigrants were 'taking over'.
Like you he never could make an argument which stood up, but held onto his belief nonethless.
Like you he started out denying he was a racist, made excuses all the time, saying that he had no problems with immigrants in themselves. But just like your comments, he never had any problems generalizing about them or making false claims.
(Another irony here is that his own mother was foreign-born)
Like you he was a passionate fan of 'law and order'.
After a few years he 'came out', and stopped making excuses for himself, shaved his head and went out and started beating people up.
Today (9 years later), he's a part-time plumber and full-time leader from the neo-nazi National Socialist Front. He hasn't really done a single useful thing in his life. And it's especially sad because he was a smart guy.
If you want to go down that path of ignorance and hate, be my guest. But be honest with yourself about it and get a real short haircut.
You make quite a few assumptions. For instance, immigrants = muslims and muslims = radical islamists.
Perhaps you should get to know some ordinary and representative muslims before you make judgements about muslims or Islam as a whole.
You are taking a group of fringe radicals and applying it to muslims as a whole. That is racist.
Besides, radical islamists aren't taking over anything. That is complete nonsense. They aren't changing any laws, nor are they trying to. How do you propose they'd do it? They're not even 1/1000 of the population anywhere in Europe or the US.
If you want to combat extreme ideologies based on religion, you'd do better to go after the christian fundamentalists. They're far more common, and equally dangerous.
Ok, let's look at that link.
First article is a reference to a sensationalist tabloid, Aftonbladet. And the translation is in part exaggerating, and in part simply wrong. For instance, there is no sentence in the article at all corresponding to "It is effectively ruled by violent gangs of Muslim immigrants."
(If you don't belive me, the swedish word for muslim is 'muslim' (unsurprizingly) can you find it in the swedish text?)
The second article is about people moving away from Malmö. The article does not mention muslims at all, and immigrants are only noted in one sentence, which says that 'Immigrant families can rarely afford houses.' (in the context of there being a shortage of apartments and surplus of houses in the city)
In the third story, (which is not an article, but an opinion piece) there is no mention of any "boy of Afghan origin had made plans to blow up his own school". Nor is the part of the city (Rosengård) in question ever referred to as an 'immigrant ghetto', in fact the title of the piece is 'No swedish ghettos'.
I think it's safe to assume the rest follows the same pattern.
Yes, you are a racist. Your sources are racist, and even given that they are obviously biased to posting stories which can be interpreted as anti-muslim or anti-immigrant, they still resort to pure fabrication.
You are not reading that site because you want real factual information, but because you want to reinforce your own warped racist opinions and world view.
Ok, my mistake (/. threading isn't always easy to follow).
But not too far off target, anyway, since there was at least one smart-ass comment in the thread anyway, and they abound on slashdot in general.
Ok, so the poster writes:
'Pure water actually has a high amount of electrical resistance'
and to this you respond:
'No it doesn't, it has a non-infinite resistance'.
Since when did 'high amount' equal 'infinite amount'?
The Germans have a word which fits you very well. Besserwisser, which translates as 'faultfinder', 'know-it-all' or 'smart-ass'.
Thank you for making the real (racial) motivation for your argument completely clear. Please name a single Swedish city where the police "no longer have control". I would have thought that widespread anarchy, riots and looting in Scandinavia would have made the news.
;-P
Well, I live in Sweden, and it's certainly news to me. I guess I must get out more.
It's worth noting that not only is it complete nonsense, it's also impossible nonsense - Neither the swedish police or government keeps any statistics on race, nationality or religion of criminals.
Is there anybody who think that newspapers should be able to publish ANYTHING? Say, a list of witness protection program participants? The fact that you are a convicted child molestor, complete with picture, even if you're not? Hey, it's "freedom of speech", right?
I think newspapers should be able to publish anything, without prior approval by anyone (except of course, the editor).
Who's being bafflingly ignorant?
The original post did not bring up forwards compatibility. If you managed to read in an expectance of forwards-compatibility into that, then it's no wonder how it 'manages to come up' all the time.
Here's a tip: Stop assuming everyone is an idiot, and you'll find less people are idiots.
The only thing that stood between him and serious prison time (not to mention probably losing all of his friends, family and destroying his career and reputation) was that the criminal who was responsible came forward.
Uh, that and an actual trial and conviction, then. Yes.
You're assuming here that the guy would have been found guilty. Which you would think is a big assumption, given that he in fact was innocent.
Innocent people are put trial every day. It's not a pleasant thing, but it's the only way the system can work, unless we somehow attain police and procecutors who never make mistakes.
But it's not just the procecutors. Courts make mistakes too, which is why you have the right to appeal. Depite all that, innocent people sometimes do get convicted. And that's the real tragedy, although it seems it more often has to do with incompetent defense lawyers (It'd be nice if the state provided people who could stay awake).
But as I said, this was nowhere near a close call.
Are you kidding me? The wrongfully-accused was charged almost immediately, and now this guy fronted up and they're thinking about it?
To engage in pure speculation: A possible situation could be that the fire was started by one of his kids. They would've had access to his card (and typically, kids don't have much cash either). The man's wife allegedly first spotted the fire, which makes me doubt it'd be her.
This would explain both why the procecutor has not decided if they should be charged, and also why they're not providing any identification. Hanging a presumably already troubled kid out to dry in the media wouldn't be very constructive.
Um, you are joking right? Since someone modded this 'insightful', it's hard to tell.
..a noble ship of Venice Hath seen a grievous wreck..
Why is 'grievous' capitalized in your quote? It's not a name, it's an adjective, 'grievous' means 'regretful'.
A single common (albeit not as common in modern english) word hardly qualifies as a 'reference' by any stretch of the imagination. And hardly as an unsubtle one.
But if we were to assume it is a reference to the Bard, what makes you think it's a reference to Julius Ceasar?
It could be "Richard II": Old John of Gaunt is grievous sick, my lord or perhaps:
The commons hath he pill'd with grievous taxes..
or "Richard III": By Christ's dear blood shed for our grievous sins.. and also A grievous burden was thy birth to me..
or Sonnet 3: Then can I grieve at grievous foregone..
or "Two Gentlemen of Verona": If lost, why then a grievous labour won..
or "Henry IV": He cannot come, my lord; he is grievous sick.
or "Henry VIII": Heard many grievous, I do say, my lord..
or "Othello":
It's a quite common word.
Given that this is a story of the fall of the Republic and the Rise of the Empire, Lucas' literary allusion here seems to have all of the subtlety of a high-speed halfbrick to the cranium.
So, besides the fact that a single word doesn't qualify as a reference, it's also worth noting that the Shakespeare play 'Julius Caesar' isn't 'the story of the fall of the republic and rise of the empire' at all.
If you can convince the judge that it should be considered a 'public performance', then you could. :-)
"nanoceramic material extracted from a natural stone"? How stupid do you have to be to believe this kind of thing?
Well, while this product is undoubtably a hoax, this particular sentence (weird as it is) is not complete bullshit.
Zeolites are a ceramic material, which is a naturally occuring form of rock. (Although synthetic zeolites exist too)
They constitute molecular 'cages' of sizes 5-10 Angstroms, (0.5-1 nm) and are useful for a bunch of applications within chemistry and nanotech (whenever the decide exactly where the border is between these subjects, let me know).
So I don't believe you would need to be awfully stupid to believe that particular sentence. As for the product itself - that's a different story entirely.
You're living in a fantasy-world. Let's pick an industry, say: Pharmaceuticals.
Could you please explain how you propose drug research should be financed without the profits from patents? Making drugs is easy. Researching drugs costs billions.
Which is why there is a market for the Generic drug manfacturers, who make stuff like Aspirin and Ibuprofene which is no longer patented. The competition there is big, and these drugs are only sold at marginal profit. Those who do the actual research recoup those costs during the brief period the patent is valid: 17 years, which is brief because the drug is patented at the conceptual stage. This means about 10-12 years until the thing passes all the steps of development and clinical testing (Which less than 1% of all candidate drugs do).
So what do you propose they do? Who's going to finance the research of new drugs? Academia? The Government?
Well, you could take a sample of naturally occurring carbon and separate its isotopes.
No need for that. Just grab some mined coal. That stuff has been underground for a number of million years and has no C-14 left in it.
From the posts here, I guess it's not so well-known, but radiocarbon dating is pretty much useless for the modern era for exactly this reason: We've been burning so many fossil fuels that we've screwed up the natural ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere.