Well, then perhaps you clarify things for me then. Before making my first post, I checked wikipedia just in case, and got this:
To be a Catholic nun, one must live in a convent, cloister, or monastery; belong to an order in which the members eventually take the solemn vows; and recite the Liturgy of the Hours or other prayers together with her community.
Nuns are restricted from leaving the cloister, though some may engage in teaching or other vocational work depending on the strictness of enforcement, which is up to the monastery itself. Visitors are not allowed into the monastery to freely associate with nuns. In essence, the work of a nun is within the confines of her monastery, while the work of a sister is in the greater world. Both sisters and nuns are addressed as "Sister".
Many Sisters are no longer teachers and nurses. More Sisters continue to choose vocations in Law, publishing,AIDS ministry, and many other things in mainstream society.
To me this implies that a nun's access to the real world may not exist at all, and if it does may be quite limited. Their primary duty would be to a monastery, and if they get to work in a soup kitchen it's because the monastery itself allows it, and that sisters and not nuns are the ones that undertake large amounts of social work.
That may not be a massive amount of 'Good' by whatever metric you want to use. Its still more good that I know the nuns in question have done then say... you.
How are you so sure of that? Did you hack into Santa's computer and get to see my good and bad lists?
Also, RobotRunAmok's post implied that they do good deeds on a regular basis. Considering my understanding of that they live in isolation and as such whatever they do doesn't really affect society, it seems to be perfectly fair to me to ask what kind of social good they do. Note that I don't think there's anything really wrong with separating yourself from society and quietly living out the rest of your days. I just don't think there's anything very commendable in it either. It's neutral, neither it does any harm nor it contributes anything.
Also nowhere did I imply that I think I'm a bigger contributor to society, sheesh. I'm asking a question, not doing a comparison of who earned how many points.
That I would consider a good thing indeed, so long that they don't follow Mother Theresa's footsteps.
All I've read about her makes her considerably more evil than good in my view. She expressed a very bizarre love for poverty. Not for poor people and their problems, but poverty. As in she seems to have believed that being in a seriously screwed up situation of abject poverty is a good and virtuous thing, and that her task is to sort of bask in that atmosphere without trying to fix it.
A quote of hers that expresses this view is: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."
From what I've read, her care consisted mostly of prayer, offered no real help, medicine, painkillers, and involved reuse of syringes, when she was getting tons of donations that would have allowed her to do much better. People who were curable were just let to lie in a bed without painkiller or any real assistance. That's not good, that's greatly harmful. And combined with the amount of donations she failed to use use for helping people, and that seem to have ended up in a bank account at the Vatican, makes her greatly evil in my view.
Then there's the whole railing against birth control thing, but even where she could have helped in a way that wouldn't have conflicted with her religion, she still did a really horrible job.
I hope that if there are any nuns trying to help that they do what she should have actually been doing, helping people, instead of what she did.
Just one of these women does more real, genuine capital 'G' Good in a week than a land-fill of snarky Internet tough guys like you will do in your entire life.
Such as?
Honest question, no intention of trolling. It's my understanding that nuns largely remove themselves from normal society, and as such don't really do much good in the way I understand it.
Note that as an atheist my definition of "good", especially with a "capital G" doesn't include religious functions that don't benefit the society outside their environment, such as praying, singing and baking cookies to sustain themselves.
You have 0.25 drops per 4 bucket group average, or 1 bucket with 1 drop and 3 with none, which averages to 0.25. Both images are really equivalent. You could scale down the second one, or scale up the first one and get the same result.
And none of those options will result in a good picture.
First reason is that if you're shooting in the darkness, there's got to be a source of light somewhere. If you shoot with a slow enough exposure to get some details in the shadows, it's nearly certain that something will get blown out. For instance, any light sources, and those are usually present on night pictures. You'll have street lights, car lights, establishment lighting, or something of the sort in the picture. Unless you shoot a landscape in the moonlight the light levels are pretty much guaranteed to be very uneven. And to deal with that you need good dynamic range.
The second reason is that the sensor is noisy by itself, and that makes the bottom of the bucket a somewhat fuzzy thing. You'll also have to amplify that to see it at all, and with a low dynamic range every light will turn into an ugly sphere of pure white, while dark details will have a lot of noise.
Think of a sensor like a bucket. Let's say it has a capacity for 256 drops. If your scene is lit in such a way that some buckets would overflow while others had just a few drops in them, that's when you have a dynamic range problem. You solve that by either having buckets that can hold more drops (which is why a DSLR has much more range than a cell phone), or by taking multiple exposures (HDR).
But I don't think you can post-process a high resolution image into a lower one with more dynamic range. Think of actual buckets. If you take a very shallow bucket and leave it in a storm for a minute to try to measure the amount of rain, and it overflows, then getting 3 buckets more of the same size isn't going to help you any. You'll just have 4 buckets that will overflow in the same amount of time. Connecting the buckets together won't help you either, as you still can store the same amount of water per square meter as before.
How many people here realize that while there are lots of GPL-compatible licenses, the GPL is compatible with no other licenses? Not even newer versions of itself unless you specifically grant it, which GNU strongly encourages. The LGPL is slightly better... it's compatible with the same version GPL; LGPLv2 to GPLv2 and LGPLv3 to GPLv3.
Me for instance?
Look, I choose the GPL for my software very intentionally. It does things in a certain way to achieve a certain outcome, and there are tradeoffs with that, which I'm willing to live with.
And that applies equally to every other open source project that isn't under the BSD/MIT license. Including the Linux kernel, GNU userland, Apache web server, XFree86, X.org, KDE, GNOME, Firefox web browser... you get the point.
Right. Because being a rewording of the WTFPL isn't really what the GPL tries to do.
Anyway. You're trying to say "It's the GPL's fault that Linux doesn't have ZFS right now". But that's not true. It doesn't matter what Linux is licensed under, because I don't think Sun would be stupid enough to just give that to a competitor for free. If Linux's license was different, Sun would simply have choosen something else that would be unsuitable for integration.
I think if everything was the same, except Linux was BSD licensed, there are two likely possibilities: Either ZFS would have been GPL licensed, which in theory is BSD compatible, but which in practice a BSD project wouldn't accept, or there would be no source release at all.
The BSD is ideal in regards to integrating things licensed under it into other software. But it doesn't work that way in the opposite direction, because the very reason you license something under the BSD is that you think people should do whatever the hell they want to with it. And that mindset conflicts with accepting a change that would mean adding a restriction on the usage of the entire project.
BSD works a bit like type O blood. Anybody can accept it. But it will only accept transfusions from its own type.
I don't see how would this favor MS. For IBM, it made sense as IBM is a services company and works in their favor.
For Microsoft, their business is in selling software, and everybody else is a competitor. In the case of Open Source, a very annoying competitor they can't get rid of easily.
They can start by ending all the funny business with software patents. That would be a first step, but I doubt very much it'll happen. Much more likely that there's some kind of trap here.
This is slightly off topic, but there's a certain form of irony here.
Licensing issues is the reason that Linux has no ZFS support.
True. But what's the reason for that?
In the words of Danese Cooper, who is no longer with Sun, one of the reasons for basing the CDDL on the Mozilla license was that the Mozilla license is GPL-incompatible. Cooper stated, at the 6th annual Debian conference, that the engineers who had written the Solaris kernel requested that the license of OpenSolaris be GPL-incompatible. "Mozilla was selected partially because it is GPL incompatible. That was part of the design when they released OpenSolaris. [...] the engineers who wrote Solaris [...] had some biases about how it should be released, and you have to respect that".
IMO it's most likely that there was an explicit intention of being Linux incompatible as well (meaning, not just because it happens to be GPL licensed). After all, why would Sun give such a gift to its greatest competitor? I think that it doesn't really matter what Linux was licensed under, the license for ZFS would be guaranteed to be incompatible with it anyway.
No, seriously, you are forbidden by the license to re-license GPL code under non-GPL licenses, even if they are stricter... see sections 1, 2, 6, and 10 of the GPLv2.
That's kind of the point of it, yes. I'm not sure what you mean by "stricter" here though. Additional restrictions, like for instance non-commercial usage only would bring it closer to a proprietary license, which is entirely against the intent of it. If you mean things like the AGPL, it would be very difficult to figure out which additional restrictions would be allowable due to favouring what the GPL tries to accomplish, and which wouldn't due to going counter to it, and write some sort of rule that would allow the former but not the later.
The ZFS issues? The term for this is "hoist by your own petard."
Nope. The term for this is "hoist by Sun's very intentional decision to make it be that way".
After all, if Sun were all about complete freedom they would have went with a BSD license. It would have been very easy and they wouldn't have needed to spend time on making yet another license. There must be a reason why that wasn't suitable.
Something interesting that happens as a consequence of other properties.
For instance, gliders and Turing completeness in Conway's Game of Life are an emergent property that's a consequence of the rules. The game wasn't designed for it. There's nowhere in the rules where a glider was explicitly coded in. It's something that emerged as a consequence of the rules.
This is interesting, because often the things that emerge are not obvious and things you wouldn't have coded in explicitly. It's also potentially less complex.
Suppose you wanted to simulate a human brain. You could take the approach of looking at human brains and try to come up with some general rules that describe how brains work. You'd have to explicitly code for various quirks of human perception. No matter how hard you try it will lack something.
On the other hand, if you could just build an exact physical simulator, you could create a virtual fertilized ovum copying a real one atom by atom, then see how it divides and ends up creating a human brain. If you get the simulation right everything else will happen as a consequence without having to code for it explicitly. You won't have any place where the more accurate perception we have of the green color, or the time we take to process what we see is explicitly coded. Those things will naturally exist as a consequence of the virtual genetics and behavior of virtual atoms.
You can find a perfectly PG ad that would have embarrassing implications to any observers quite easily.
For instance, with anime:
If you try to project an image of being a cultured man, you probably don't want billboards suggest you would be interested in gory things like Elfen Lied, Fist of the North Star or Ninja Scroll.
If to your friends you try to appear like a "real man", you probably won't like seeing an ad for things like Ponyo and Chi's Sweet Home.
If you know crazy religious people of the kind that have an issue with Harry Potter because it's "witchcraft", ads for Slayers or Fullmetal Alchemist could be a problem.
Perhaps you'd rather not admit to being a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z who collects all available material on it.
And so on. Particularly in the realm of music and movies there's hardly anything guaranteed to be safe. To some people, knowing you like anime by Studio Ghibli just implies you like watching the classics. To others it means you're a creepy nerd who's failed to grow up and still watches kids' cartoons.
The problem with targeted ads is that they can be creepy, inappropiate and unaware of context.
For example, imagine you're walking on the street with your friend/boss/old fashined grandmother. Suppose you're into manga/anime. Would you want a billboard to switch to an ad for Miyuki-chan in Wonderland due to your past purchase of the Chobits manga?
There are lots of things for which you'd really hate to see a targeted billboard ad for in the presence of the wrong people, or any people at all. Just for instance: certain kinds of anime/manga (or anime/manga at all, if you're unlucky to be stuck with people convinced that it's all tentacle porn), hygiene products (buy our incontienence pads!), the wrong kinds of magazines or games, music by an artist you'd rather people not know you listen to, and so on.
Be careful with what you wish for. There is no guarantee the advertiser will make any effort not to display anything that could be embarrassing, and even if they try there's no guarantee that they'll succeed. I got a few rather odd recommendations from Amazon and am rather glad they don't pop up on the street at just the wrong moment.
That should be fixed eventually. With the switch to kernel modesetting (already happening) there shouldn't be any need for X to mess directly with hardware anymore, and without that it should run just fine without root privileges.
Maybe the specific usage of the word "pause" is new-ish, but the concept has been there as far back as I can remember, from before I or anybody I knew even knew what the Internet was.
So long you were playing with people who weren't jerks, you could always request for people to wait a minute while you tie your shoelaces or whatever.
Shock protection (unless there's some development I'm not aware of) measures acceleration and parks the drive's heads if the acceleration is too much, in case that acceleration means the laptop is about to hit the floor. It's a good idea, but the application is limited. It's excellent when you drop the laptop, but it won't do you any good if you give the laptop a good jolt without any warning.
I killed my laptop's drive once by turning around in an office chair, and hitting the laptop with the chair's back. Drive immediately started making weird noises, and I spent all night copying stuff off it. The acceleration sensors are completely useless for something like that, since there's no way for it to guess an impact might be coming.
For your first question, not just us. Crows have demonstrated the ability to bend a piece of wire to make a hook from it, and then use it as a hook. Also, according to another slashdot poster can figure out dragging frozen food under an idling car's tail pipe.
As scripture says "we were created in his image". You seem to have the order backwards ; )
No, it's exactly the reverse: we create our gods in our image.
Read some mythology. Greeks had gods for everything they cared about, like war and love. Chinese heaven and hell has an organization matching that of China of the time, down to having provinces, ministers, and they had gods of specific activities like writing. And so on.
A. iPhone users tend to have less stable relationships, and go through more partners.
B. iPhone users inflate what they report more than the users of other phones, for instance because they're more concerned with looking good.
C. The set of iPhone users heavily intersects with the set of people who follow fashion trends and buys expensive gadgets, clothes, perfume, etc as a part of their strategy to attract people of the appropiate sex. Such people are very actively looking for partners, and as a result have more of them on average.
The iPhone seems to have a sort of "fashion accessory" status that other phones, even more expensive ones, don't have.
D. Combination of the above.
In any case, I doubt very much an iPhone is a ticket to getting more sex. If you're a huge nerd, getting an iPhone won't make you less of one, and you still will prove to be quite unattractive to most people the moment you open your mouth. It's more likely that it's the reverse: you already know how to attract potential partners, and the iPhone is a small part of the strategy that includes fashionable clothes, well groomed hair, appropiate manners and so on.
Have you considered how unlikely it is to have a creator that fits us so well?
The abrahamic deity fits the people even better than we are fit for this planet. People live in deserts and on the poles, but the abrahamic god is interestinly only concerned with things that are near his people and the local culture. When he wants people to go somewhere or conquest some country it's never around the globe or on the poles. He's deeply concerned with things that concern the population at that time and place. He refers a lot to pigs and sheep, but not to polar bears, penguins or dinousaurs.
His motivations turn out to be remarkably compatible with the people as well. The things he wants people to do are things they are familiar with and can perform. His personality is remarkably human-like as well. He just happens not to be a chtulhu-like abomination, or a trickster god. However nasty he may be at times, he can be pleased at least for a time. He happens to want to set us on the right path, instead of just messing with us or obliterating us all and making something more to his liking in our place.
glxgears isn't a benchmark. Its only point is to verify that "yep, 3D acceleration is working" on a very basic level. And even that isn't working that well now that it's possible to run it at high speeds in software.
Eh. Sun intentionally chose the license to be GPL incompatible.
And it's quite likely that their explicit intention was to be Linux incompatible as well. Should it have been licensed under some other terms, the license for ZFS would likely have been chosen to be incompatible with that. For instance, if Linux was BSD licensed, Sun could have just released ZFS under the GPL. While in theory it's perfectly compatible, in practice a BSD project will refuse GPL patches.
Which really makes sense, as Linux has been replacing Solaris in lots of places, and I imagine Sun didn't want to help them with that.
Micorosft runs a Certificate Authority. This has a public and private key. The public key is part of a Windows install. They use the private key is kept safely somewhere at MS, and used to sign certificates for other companies like Realtek.
Then at install time, there is a check: this driver is signed by the Realtek key, which itself is signed by the Microsoft key. Therefore it's trusted, and it's okay to install.
For revocation, MS will public a revocation list somewhere, which the installer hopefully fetches before giving the go ahead, to make sure Micorosft hasn't changed their mind on that signature.
Well, you could get it built in Norway, where 98% of power is hydro, or in France, where most is nuclear. That will account for powering the factories.
That leaves out the cars, which is an area that needs improvement, but is doable given some time and effort.
Getting off fossil fuels can be done, by using them to bootstrap different technology. You start by usng whatever is available to make solar panels. Then you make a solar panel factory powered by solar panels. Then you replace the vehicles with electric ones, charged from solar (for instance). And so on. Eventually you can achieve producing a solar panel in a fully carbon neutral way, from the extraction of the materials to the delivery to the customer.
Just because at this point in time making a solar panel involves fossil fuels doesn't mean that's somehow a requirement.
It seems that you object to taxation in general. Regardless of anything the grandparent does, your money is then already being "stolen at gunpoint".
I suggest you move to Somalia or some other such place where you can be free from government thugs. Though of course then there won't be a government to stop somebody else's thugs from showing up, so you'll probably end up paying somebody's thugs all the same.
I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
I think you've not looked at the Gulf of Mexico lately? That's just one thing that went wrong. Really if we wanted to for some reason it'd be most trivial for humanity to blow up a few dozen rigs. I'll leave it to you to imagine what the results would be like.
For yet another one, look at how much it costs to obtain 1kg of black caviar. In Russia it's currently illegal to sell and available only on the black market at $600/kg, and apparently for about $7000/kg elsewhere. Why? Because the sea isn't infinite, and there is indeed such a thing as overfishing.
For some more, look at the Sidoarjo mud flow, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl. Those are evidence that we're at a point where we can easily drastically change city sized areas of land. Now of course this sort of thing generally doesn't work to our advantage, which is why we try to avoid having things like that happen. But if there was a reason for it, I'm quite sure we could flatten the Everest as well, we certainly have the means.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then perhaps you clarify things for me then. Before making my first post, I checked wikipedia just in case, and got this:
To me this implies that a nun's access to the real world may not exist at all, and if it does may be quite limited. Their primary duty would be to a monastery, and if they get to work in a soup kitchen it's because the monastery itself allows it, and that sisters and not nuns are the ones that undertake large amounts of social work.
So, given your experience, is the explanation on Wikipedia accurate?
How are you so sure of that? Did you hack into Santa's computer and get to see my good and bad lists?
Also, RobotRunAmok's post implied that they do good deeds on a regular basis. Considering my understanding of that they live in isolation and as such whatever they do doesn't really affect society, it seems to be perfectly fair to me to ask what kind of social good they do. Note that I don't think there's anything really wrong with separating yourself from society and quietly living out the rest of your days. I just don't think there's anything very commendable in it either. It's neutral, neither it does any harm nor it contributes anything.
Also nowhere did I imply that I think I'm a bigger contributor to society, sheesh. I'm asking a question, not doing a comparison of who earned how many points.
That I would consider a good thing indeed, so long that they don't follow Mother Theresa's footsteps.
All I've read about her makes her considerably more evil than good in my view. She expressed a very bizarre love for poverty. Not for poor people and their problems, but poverty. As in she seems to have believed that being in a seriously screwed up situation of abject poverty is a good and virtuous thing, and that her task is to sort of bask in that atmosphere without trying to fix it.
A quote of hers that expresses this view is: "I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people."
From what I've read, her care consisted mostly of prayer, offered no real help, medicine, painkillers, and involved reuse of syringes, when she was getting tons of donations that would have allowed her to do much better. People who were curable were just let to lie in a bed without painkiller or any real assistance. That's not good, that's greatly harmful. And combined with the amount of donations she failed to use use for helping people, and that seem to have ended up in a bank account at the Vatican, makes her greatly evil in my view.
Then there's the whole railing against birth control thing, but even where she could have helped in a way that wouldn't have conflicted with her religion, she still did a really horrible job.
I hope that if there are any nuns trying to help that they do what she should have actually been doing, helping people, instead of what she did.
Such as?
Honest question, no intention of trolling. It's my understanding that nuns largely remove themselves from normal society, and as such don't really do much good in the way I understand it.
Note that as an atheist my definition of "good", especially with a "capital G" doesn't include religious functions that don't benefit the society outside their environment, such as praying, singing and baking cookies to sustain themselves.
No, it's just as noisy.
You have 0.25 drops per 4 bucket group average, or 1 bucket with 1 drop and 3 with none, which averages to 0.25. Both images are really equivalent. You could scale down the second one, or scale up the first one and get the same result.
And none of those options will result in a good picture.
First reason is that if you're shooting in the darkness, there's got to be a source of light somewhere. If you shoot with a slow enough exposure to get some details in the shadows, it's nearly certain that something will get blown out. For instance, any light sources, and those are usually present on night pictures. You'll have street lights, car lights, establishment lighting, or something of the sort in the picture. Unless you shoot a landscape in the moonlight the light levels are pretty much guaranteed to be very uneven. And to deal with that you need good dynamic range.
The second reason is that the sensor is noisy by itself, and that makes the bottom of the bucket a somewhat fuzzy thing. You'll also have to amplify that to see it at all, and with a low dynamic range every light will turn into an ugly sphere of pure white, while dark details will have a lot of noise.
I don't think that would really work.
Think of a sensor like a bucket. Let's say it has a capacity for 256 drops. If your scene is lit in such a way that some buckets would overflow while others had just a few drops in them, that's when you have a dynamic range problem. You solve that by either having buckets that can hold more drops (which is why a DSLR has much more range than a cell phone), or by taking multiple exposures (HDR).
But I don't think you can post-process a high resolution image into a lower one with more dynamic range. Think of actual buckets. If you take a very shallow bucket and leave it in a storm for a minute to try to measure the amount of rain, and it overflows, then getting 3 buckets more of the same size isn't going to help you any. You'll just have 4 buckets that will overflow in the same amount of time. Connecting the buckets together won't help you either, as you still can store the same amount of water per square meter as before.
Me for instance?
Look, I choose the GPL for my software very intentionally. It does things in a certain way to achieve a certain outcome, and there are tradeoffs with that, which I'm willing to live with.
Right. Because being a rewording of the WTFPL isn't really what the GPL tries to do.
Anyway. You're trying to say "It's the GPL's fault that Linux doesn't have ZFS right now". But that's not true. It doesn't matter what Linux is licensed under, because I don't think Sun would be stupid enough to just give that to a competitor for free. If Linux's license was different, Sun would simply have choosen something else that would be unsuitable for integration.
I think if everything was the same, except Linux was BSD licensed, there are two likely possibilities: Either ZFS would have been GPL licensed, which in theory is BSD compatible, but which in practice a BSD project wouldn't accept, or there would be no source release at all.
The BSD is ideal in regards to integrating things licensed under it into other software. But it doesn't work that way in the opposite direction, because the very reason you license something under the BSD is that you think people should do whatever the hell they want to with it. And that mindset conflicts with accepting a change that would mean adding a restriction on the usage of the entire project.
BSD works a bit like type O blood. Anybody can accept it. But it will only accept transfusions from its own type.
I don't see how would this favor MS. For IBM, it made sense as IBM is a services company and works in their favor.
For Microsoft, their business is in selling software, and everybody else is a competitor. In the case of Open Source, a very annoying competitor they can't get rid of easily.
They can start by ending all the funny business with software patents. That would be a first step, but I doubt very much it'll happen. Much more likely that there's some kind of trap here.
True. But what's the reason for that?
Quoted from wikipedia, original source for the quote.
IMO it's most likely that there was an explicit intention of being Linux incompatible as well (meaning, not just because it happens to be GPL licensed). After all, why would Sun give such a gift to its greatest competitor? I think that it doesn't really matter what Linux was licensed under, the license for ZFS would be guaranteed to be incompatible with it anyway.
That's kind of the point of it, yes. I'm not sure what you mean by "stricter" here though. Additional restrictions, like for instance non-commercial usage only would bring it closer to a proprietary license, which is entirely against the intent of it. If you mean things like the AGPL, it would be very difficult to figure out which additional restrictions would be allowable due to favouring what the GPL tries to accomplish, and which wouldn't due to going counter to it, and write some sort of rule that would allow the former but not the later.
Nope. The term for this is "hoist by Sun's very intentional decision to make it be that way".
After all, if Sun were all about complete freedom they would have went with a BSD license. It would have been very easy and they wouldn't have needed to spend time on making yet another license. There must be a reason why that wasn't suitable.
Something interesting that happens as a consequence of other properties.
For instance, gliders and Turing completeness in Conway's Game of Life are an emergent property that's a consequence of the rules. The game wasn't designed for it. There's nowhere in the rules where a glider was explicitly coded in. It's something that emerged as a consequence of the rules.
This is interesting, because often the things that emerge are not obvious and things you wouldn't have coded in explicitly. It's also potentially less complex.
Suppose you wanted to simulate a human brain. You could take the approach of looking at human brains and try to come up with some general rules that describe how brains work. You'd have to explicitly code for various quirks of human perception. No matter how hard you try it will lack something.
On the other hand, if you could just build an exact physical simulator, you could create a virtual fertilized ovum copying a real one atom by atom, then see how it divides and ends up creating a human brain. If you get the simulation right everything else will happen as a consequence without having to code for it explicitly. You won't have any place where the more accurate perception we have of the green color, or the time we take to process what we see is explicitly coded. Those things will naturally exist as a consequence of the virtual genetics and behavior of virtual atoms.
You can find a perfectly PG ad that would have embarrassing implications to any observers quite easily.
For instance, with anime:
If you try to project an image of being a cultured man, you probably don't want billboards suggest you would be interested in gory things like Elfen Lied, Fist of the North Star or Ninja Scroll.
If to your friends you try to appear like a "real man", you probably won't like seeing an ad for things like Ponyo and Chi's Sweet Home.
If you know crazy religious people of the kind that have an issue with Harry Potter because it's "witchcraft", ads for Slayers or Fullmetal Alchemist could be a problem.
Perhaps you'd rather not admit to being a huge fan of Dragon Ball Z who collects all available material on it.
And so on. Particularly in the realm of music and movies there's hardly anything guaranteed to be safe. To some people, knowing you like anime by Studio Ghibli just implies you like watching the classics. To others it means you're a creepy nerd who's failed to grow up and still watches kids' cartoons.
Are you sure?
The problem with targeted ads is that they can be creepy, inappropiate and unaware of context.
For example, imagine you're walking on the street with your friend/boss/old fashined grandmother. Suppose you're into manga/anime. Would you want a billboard to switch to an ad for Miyuki-chan in Wonderland due to your past purchase of the Chobits manga?
There are lots of things for which you'd really hate to see a targeted billboard ad for in the presence of the wrong people, or any people at all. Just for instance: certain kinds of anime/manga (or anime/manga at all, if you're unlucky to be stuck with people convinced that it's all tentacle porn), hygiene products (buy our incontienence pads!), the wrong kinds of magazines or games, music by an artist you'd rather people not know you listen to, and so on.
Be careful with what you wish for. There is no guarantee the advertiser will make any effort not to display anything that could be embarrassing, and even if they try there's no guarantee that they'll succeed. I got a few rather odd recommendations from Amazon and am rather glad they don't pop up on the street at just the wrong moment.
That should be fixed eventually. With the switch to kernel modesetting (already happening) there shouldn't be any need for X to mess directly with hardware anymore, and without that it should run just fine without root privileges.
Maybe the specific usage of the word "pause" is new-ish, but the concept has been there as far back as I can remember, from before I or anybody I knew even knew what the Internet was.
So long you were playing with people who weren't jerks, you could always request for people to wait a minute while you tie your shoelaces or whatever.
Not as robust as you might think.
Shock protection (unless there's some development I'm not aware of) measures acceleration and parks the drive's heads if the acceleration is too much, in case that acceleration means the laptop is about to hit the floor. It's a good idea, but the application is limited. It's excellent when you drop the laptop, but it won't do you any good if you give the laptop a good jolt without any warning.
I killed my laptop's drive once by turning around in an office chair, and hitting the laptop with the chair's back. Drive immediately started making weird noises, and I spent all night copying stuff off it. The acceleration sensors are completely useless for something like that, since there's no way for it to guess an impact might be coming.
For your first question, not just us. Crows have demonstrated the ability to bend a piece of wire to make a hook from it, and then use it as a hook. Also, according to another slashdot poster can figure out dragging frozen food under an idling car's tail pipe.
No, it's exactly the reverse: we create our gods in our image.
Read some mythology. Greeks had gods for everything they cared about, like war and love. Chinese heaven and hell has an organization matching that of China of the time, down to having provinces, ministers, and they had gods of specific activities like writing. And so on.
A. iPhone users tend to have less stable relationships, and go through more partners.
B. iPhone users inflate what they report more than the users of other phones, for instance because they're more concerned with looking good.
C. The set of iPhone users heavily intersects with the set of people who follow fashion trends and buys expensive gadgets, clothes, perfume, etc as a part of their strategy to attract people of the appropiate sex. Such people are very actively looking for partners, and as a result have more of them on average.
The iPhone seems to have a sort of "fashion accessory" status that other phones, even more expensive ones, don't have.
D. Combination of the above.
In any case, I doubt very much an iPhone is a ticket to getting more sex. If you're a huge nerd, getting an iPhone won't make you less of one, and you still will prove to be quite unattractive to most people the moment you open your mouth. It's more likely that it's the reverse: you already know how to attract potential partners, and the iPhone is a small part of the strategy that includes fashionable clothes, well groomed hair, appropiate manners and so on.
Have you considered how unlikely it is to have a creator that fits us so well?
The abrahamic deity fits the people even better than we are fit for this planet. People live in deserts and on the poles, but the abrahamic god is interestinly only concerned with things that are near his people and the local culture. When he wants people to go somewhere or conquest some country it's never around the globe or on the poles. He's deeply concerned with things that concern the population at that time and place. He refers a lot to pigs and sheep, but not to polar bears, penguins or dinousaurs.
His motivations turn out to be remarkably compatible with the people as well. The things he wants people to do are things they are familiar with and can perform. His personality is remarkably human-like as well. He just happens not to be a chtulhu-like abomination, or a trickster god. However nasty he may be at times, he can be pleased at least for a time. He happens to want to set us on the right path, instead of just messing with us or obliterating us all and making something more to his liking in our place.
Isn't that quite amazing as well?
glxgears isn't a benchmark. Its only point is to verify that "yep, 3D acceleration is working" on a very basic level. And even that isn't working that well now that it's possible to run it at high speeds in software.
Eh. Sun intentionally chose the license to be GPL incompatible.
And it's quite likely that their explicit intention was to be Linux incompatible as well. Should it have been licensed under some other terms, the license for ZFS would likely have been chosen to be incompatible with that. For instance, if Linux was BSD licensed, Sun could have just released ZFS under the GPL. While in theory it's perfectly compatible, in practice a BSD project will refuse GPL patches.
Which really makes sense, as Linux has been replacing Solaris in lots of places, and I imagine Sun didn't want to help them with that.
Certificates don't work like that.
Micorosft runs a Certificate Authority. This has a public and private key. The public key is part of a Windows install. They use the private key is kept safely somewhere at MS, and used to sign certificates for other companies like Realtek.
Then at install time, there is a check: this driver is signed by the Realtek key, which itself is signed by the Microsoft key. Therefore it's trusted, and it's okay to install.
For revocation, MS will public a revocation list somewhere, which the installer hopefully fetches before giving the go ahead, to make sure Micorosft hasn't changed their mind on that signature.
Well, you could get it built in Norway, where 98% of power is hydro, or in France, where most is nuclear. That will account for powering the factories.
That leaves out the cars, which is an area that needs improvement, but is doable given some time and effort.
Getting off fossil fuels can be done, by using them to bootstrap different technology. You start by usng whatever is available to make solar panels. Then you make a solar panel factory powered by solar panels. Then you replace the vehicles with electric ones, charged from solar (for instance). And so on. Eventually you can achieve producing a solar panel in a fully carbon neutral way, from the extraction of the materials to the delivery to the customer.
Just because at this point in time making a solar panel involves fossil fuels doesn't mean that's somehow a requirement.
It seems that you object to taxation in general. Regardless of anything the grandparent does, your money is then already being "stolen at gunpoint".
I suggest you move to Somalia or some other such place where you can be free from government thugs. Though of course then there won't be a government to stop somebody else's thugs from showing up, so you'll probably end up paying somebody's thugs all the same.
I think you've not looked at the Gulf of Mexico lately? That's just one thing that went wrong. Really if we wanted to for some reason it'd be most trivial for humanity to blow up a few dozen rigs. I'll leave it to you to imagine what the results would be like.
For another example, see the dust bowl.
For yet another one, look at how much it costs to obtain 1kg of black caviar. In Russia it's currently illegal to sell and available only on the black market at $600/kg, and apparently for about $7000/kg elsewhere. Why? Because the sea isn't infinite, and there is indeed such a thing as overfishing.
For some more, look at the Sidoarjo mud flow, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl. Those are evidence that we're at a point where we can easily drastically change city sized areas of land. Now of course this sort of thing generally doesn't work to our advantage, which is why we try to avoid having things like that happen. But if there was a reason for it, I'm quite sure we could flatten the Everest as well, we certainly have the means.