Ten years ago plus one day (missed the twentieth anniversary by one day). It was the only time in his life [er, umm, yeah, life] his timing wasn't exquisite. Stupid cancer...
When companies like Adobe and Microsoft have software behemoths that so completely dominate their sectors that they exclude most other competition, the last (and perhaps greatest) source of competition the company has is itself; in order to remain profitable from year to year, new products must be sold to replace the ones currently installed. The problem is, most of the installed software is good enough for the current task (which is why it was bought and installed in the first place).
Enter the bugs. The foremost reason for why people replace their current versions with new ones is that the new ones promise to fix the bugs of the old ones. This means that if the company fixes all the bugs in its product before releasing it, it will have nothing to fix for the next version and it'll be forced to make some real (and costly) innovations. Of course, the new version will introduce its own new bugs, but that fact won't be apparent until after the product has been paid for.
Asking for there not to be bugs is like asking MS not to make the next version of MSWord use a new and incompatible file format so as to force users to upgrade and spend more money.
A) General public/media think it's just dirt. B) Scientists and engineers play with dirt every day. C) Made from small, re-usable molecules that plug together. D) There's lots of dirt to go around and everyone can build mudpies together. E) No rules other than physics and making sure mommy doesn't spank you when you come home dirty. F) Who would want to play with dirt instead of earning money for their proprietary bricks?
The states are denied suffrage in the senate by having the senators directly elected by citizens of the United States. Yes these citizens are also citizens of their respective states, but here they are acting solely as citizens of the federal government and don't necessarily keep their states' interests in mind when voting. Never mind that each state is equal in having its suffrage revoked.
This is not just only of forensic importance. If congress proposes legislation that restricts states directly (as in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority), the states no longer have any say in the matter. The only check upon federal abrogation of the principles of federalism is in the Supreme Court, which is a federally appointed and chartered body.
The US government is divided into three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. Of these, only the legislative branch is directly elected by the citizens (and only half, the House, is constitutionally so; the 17th amendment is likely unconstitutional since it varies the representation of the states in spite of the terms of article V). Most of the executive branch is appointed, and the President is indirectly elected via the electoral college system. The judicial branch is appointed via a combination of the president and the senate.
Ultimately, if the general citizenry becomes informed and active, the government gets an overhaul (and slowly so, since so much of the government is appointed/elected indirectly); until that remote condition is met, no progress will be made. That possibility becomes even more remote when you start to account for things like all the gerrymandering with the districts (the supreme court has held that it is a proper constitutional purpose for drawing districts to help incumbants remain in power).
In stock values, differences of less than an sixteenth of a dollar aren't particularly meaningful. Allowing them to exist is just begging for more churn which only lines brokers' pockets and causes more daytraders' suicides. At least that's my prejudice.
The point is that it's stupid to try to fit everything onto one scale, because different tasks have different "convenient" numbers associated with them. A parsec is intrinsically useful as a unit of distance, owing to the nature of how far the earth is from the sun and some simple mathematics. The gravitational field at the surface of the earth is a certain value independent of how convenient a parsec is as a unit of distance. Atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth is what it is independent of the above. Either you do your calculations in multiples of these units or you end up having to do them relative to some funny constant in your standard system.
As for the celsius scale, you do boil water, but that's beside the point. Most of your daily life (weather) with the celsius scale is dealing with the thirty degrees above and below zero. There are two problems with this: One, you have to deal with negative temperature values in normal situations (instead of extreme situations) and two, each degree of celsius is 5/9 of a degree Fahrenheit. This means to get the same amount of accuracy, you're throwing decimals around. It's unnecessary. And you still haven't eliminated the fact that to get to the really important (scientific) constant, absolute zero, you have to deal with an additional ~273.15 degrees. You can't win, so resign yourself to using one universal but often innappropriate scale for everything, or use lots of appropriate but often incompatible scales on an individual basis. For most science, the former is a better bet. For most daily activities, the latter is a better bet.
It's an idiom (albeit non-standard), and idioms always trump grammar. That idiom is particularly indicative of the dialect of a certain generation of Americans. Mister youse needn't be so spry concernin questions arty.
The English system is focused on the idea that humans only want to / can deal with multiples of two or three things comfortably. Therefore, each class of jobs gets its own particular unit of measurement. It's one philosophy, and it's the one that ultimately wins out with human nature. It is much easier to imagine and understand what it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is to say "I am one hundred and eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight meters tall". Combine that with the fact that most people misuse kilograms as a unit of force, and we're all better off using pounds or stones anyway.
The English units of volumes are done in binary (and a couple, like tablespoons, in ternary). One foot equals twelve inches and one gross equals 144 objects because these are useful numbers: lots of other numbers divide them. Humans don't do floating point arithmatic with great ease. Use a system that bumps everything up into integers.
Ten has always been a stupid choice for the base of a number system. The Babylonians had a much better idea with base 60; look at all the numbers that evenly divide into 60 (and look at our system of time and try to think whether it would be better if we only had 10 "hours" in the day instead of 24 or 100 "minutes" instead of 60.
The convenient thing about the metric system is that it is focused on the idea of orders of magnitude, and since lots of science is also concerned with orders of magnitude, that makes the metric system appropriate for scientific applications. The problem with using the metric system in our normal daily existence is that most humans only have to deal with one or maybe two orders of magnitude as they go about their day. For the few instances where that stops being true, using a different system of units wouldn't kill anyone.
Why does the celsius scale define 100 to be the boiling point of water at one atmosphere? Because it's a convenient constant and lots of laboratory conditions are done near that temperature. But notice how it's done in terms of 1 atm and not 1000 pascals or some such power of 10. There exist these fundamental constants in nature, and lots of them don't have anything to do with each other. Yes we can measure charges in units of coulombs, but since most of nature is constructed in multiples of the electron charge, you still have factors of 1.6x10^-19 in your equations. You're not eliminating complexity; you're just pushing it around. No system of units will eliminate all of this kind of complexity. You might as well use units that are convenient for humans.
The Fahrenheit scale uses (aproximately) the normal human body temperature as 100. Since most real world temperatures (like weather) are done around this temperature and above 0 (the temperature of salted ice), the Fahrenheit scale is a more convenient scale for human life. An analogy: it's like the differene between using an analog car speedometer that goes between 0 and 85 or one that goes between 0 and 140 mph. Since most of your driving is done between 0 and 60, and rarely if ever above 80, all that part of the scale above 80 is just wasted and it squeezes the part we care about into a smaller space that complicates interpolation and other visual interpretation of the value displayed.
It ranks right up there with the prostate as one of the fundamental ways in which humans are "designed". We should've been built with 12 fingers instead of 10. We'd all be much better off.
Re:Oh, well that changes everything
on
Dear Mr. Straw
·
· Score: 1
(Yes, I'm American) I would suspect not, at least not officially. I am a citizen of a constitutional government of constitutionally limited powers. He is the subject of an omnipotent and unbridled parliamentary government. There are things that my governmetn cannot constitutionally do to me (like strip me of my citizenship, see Trop v. Dulles). His government is completely sovereign over every aspect of his life and his affairs with others. There is still officially a monarch at the head of his government, and that monarch has a non-zero amount of actual power.
These are very different relationships.
Oh, well that changes everything
on
Dear Mr. Straw
·
· Score: 1
Just because government calls it something new doesn't mean it is. Words have meaning independent of their official use in propaganda. I suspect your relation to your government is fundamentally the same relationship it would've been before they "got rid of the 'British Subject' bit" and you're only fooling yourself to think otherwise.
at least with the Torah...
on
Dear Mr. Straw
·
· Score: 2
The consensus seems to be that digital representations of the words are not actually the words in the same way that analog ink-based writings are the actual words. Your point remains valid, though.
For all you know, G-d might have some way of looking at things that doesn't involve bouncing light off them. If we figure out such a way, then we'll have made some progress.
It's a tax on the poor but hopeful. The only way a system of government (or insurrance/etc.) works is by taking from those who have and giving to those who have not. You can't tax the poor to give to the poor. (Well, you can, but you're an idiot.) It reminds me of all those stockholder lawsuits. (Please, I will pay you lots of money to reach into one of my pockets, extract some money, and put it into my other pocket! I pay cash!)
But I suppose people will be morons anyway, and at least this way it's the authoritative mob and not the common mob that's running the show and taking the proceeds.
But really, have you seen all the stupid ads on TV for the lottery these days? As if people aren't already stupid and uneducated, as if we have to encourage them further to commit mass lunacy? And funded at taxpayer's expense?
At least we have it written into our constitution that a congressional term must elapse before the new salaries take effect. If the voters don't like it, then they can exercise their opinion and vote the offenders out of office.
As in "Everyone get on your knees and service Microsoft"? Seriously, MS has historically made lots of attempts to try to distance itself from Intel. This time it may happen, but only because Intel, in Linux, has found a replacement for MS.
Just have a privately-disclosed email address for the proper betatesters to email to. Ignore everything else. It's not that hard, and it's irrelelvant to whether Corel is violating the GPL as it appears to be doing.
There have been some efforts to expand laws to include depictions of minors having sex regardless of whether it could be demonstrated that they were actually minors. Such efforts have failed and are unconstitutional besides.
maybe they'll enforce the death penalty they've recently been trying to pass for minors. The Philippines is really a scary place when it comes to such things. One of the difinitive cruel&unusual punishment cases in US constitutional law came out of the Philippines (Weems v. US: a man charged with forgery was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor and perpetual surveilance and curtailment of other rights). This is the same place where a man was executed even though the President issued a last-minute reprieve, because the phone lines were busy and his call couldn't go through.
The second amendment is about keeping the general populace armed both to deter tyranny on the part of government and also to provide a pool of individuals to raise a militia from so as to provide for the common defence. Just because the government misclassifies crypto as a munition doesn't mean it actually is one or has anything to do with an armed citizenry.
You might have more luck trying to locate your right to crypto in the unenumerated substantive-due-process right to privacy, although good luck trying to find some courts to agree with you. The fourth and fifth amendments are also good places to try.
There are about 5 or so versions being bandied about. One of them is one we'd like passed. Several of them propose draconian restrictions and regulations. This is the way of congress.
Slashdot Mirror
It was posted by an anonymous coward. Thus it starts at score=0.
Ten years ago plus one day (missed the twentieth anniversary by one day). It was the only time in his life [er, umm, yeah, life] his timing wasn't exquisite. Stupid cancer...
When companies like Adobe and Microsoft have software behemoths that so completely dominate their sectors that they exclude most other competition, the last (and perhaps greatest) source of competition the company has is itself; in order to remain profitable from year to year, new products must be sold to replace the ones currently installed. The problem is, most of the installed software is good enough for the current task (which is why it was bought and installed in the first place).
Enter the bugs. The foremost reason for why people replace their current versions with new ones is that the new ones promise to fix the bugs of the old ones. This means that if the company fixes all the bugs in its product before releasing it, it will have nothing to fix for the next version and it'll be forced to make some real (and costly) innovations. Of course, the new version will introduce its own new bugs, but that fact won't be apparent until after the product has been paid for.
Asking for there not to be bugs is like asking MS not to make the next version of MSWord use a new and incompatible file format so as to force users to upgrade and spend more money.
A) General public/media think it's just dirt.
B) Scientists and engineers play with dirt every day.
C) Made from small, re-usable molecules that plug together.
D) There's lots of dirt to go around and everyone can build mudpies together.
E) No rules other than physics and making sure mommy doesn't spank you when you come home dirty.
F) Who would want to play with dirt instead of earning money for their proprietary bricks?
The states are denied suffrage in the senate by having the senators directly elected by citizens of the United States. Yes these citizens are also citizens of their respective states, but here they are acting solely as citizens of the federal government and don't necessarily keep their states' interests in mind when voting. Never mind that each state is equal in having its suffrage revoked.
This is not just only of forensic importance. If congress proposes legislation that restricts states directly (as in Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority), the states no longer have any say in the matter. The only check upon federal abrogation of the principles of federalism is in the Supreme Court, which is a federally appointed and chartered body.
The US government is divided into three branches: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. Of these, only the legislative branch is directly elected by the citizens (and only half, the House, is constitutionally so; the 17th amendment is likely unconstitutional since it varies the representation of the states in spite of the terms of article V). Most of the executive branch is appointed, and the President is indirectly elected via the electoral college system. The judicial branch is appointed via a combination of the president and the senate.
Ultimately, if the general citizenry becomes informed and active, the government gets an overhaul (and slowly so, since so much of the government is appointed/elected indirectly); until that remote condition is met, no progress will be made. That possibility becomes even more remote when you start to account for things like all the gerrymandering with the districts (the supreme court has held that it is a proper constitutional purpose for drawing districts to help incumbants remain in power).
In stock values, differences of less than an sixteenth of a dollar aren't particularly meaningful. Allowing them to exist is just begging for more churn which only lines brokers' pockets and causes more daytraders' suicides. At least that's my prejudice.
The point is that it's stupid to try to fit everything onto one scale, because different tasks have different "convenient" numbers associated with them. A parsec is intrinsically useful as a unit of distance, owing to the nature of how far the earth is from the sun and some simple mathematics. The gravitational field at the surface of the earth is a certain value independent of how convenient a parsec is as a unit of distance. Atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth is what it is independent of the above. Either you do your calculations in multiples of these units or you end up having to do them relative to some funny constant in your standard system.
As for the celsius scale, you do boil water, but that's beside the point. Most of your daily life (weather) with the celsius scale is dealing with the thirty degrees above and below zero. There are two problems with this: One, you have to deal with negative temperature values in normal situations (instead of extreme situations) and two, each degree of celsius is 5/9 of a degree Fahrenheit. This means to get the same amount of accuracy, you're throwing decimals around. It's unnecessary. And you still haven't eliminated the fact that to get to the really important (scientific) constant, absolute zero, you have to deal with an additional ~273.15 degrees. You can't win, so resign yourself to using one universal but often innappropriate scale for everything, or use lots of appropriate but often incompatible scales on an individual basis. For most science, the former is a better bet. For most daily activities, the latter is a better bet.
XVIII
mr youse needn't be so spry
concernin questions arty
each has his tastes but as for i
i likes a certain party
gimme the he-man's solid bliss
for youse ideas i'll match youse
a pretty girl who naked is
is worth a million statues
- e. e. cummings
It's an idiom (albeit non-standard), and idioms always trump grammar. That idiom is particularly indicative of the dialect of a certain generation of Americans. Mister youse needn't be so spry concernin questions arty.
The English system is focused on the idea that humans only want to / can deal with multiples of two or three things comfortably. Therefore, each class of jobs gets its own particular unit of measurement. It's one philosophy, and it's the one that ultimately wins out with human nature. It is much easier to imagine and understand what it means to say "I am six feet tall" than it is to say "I am one hundred and eighty three centimeters tall" or "I am one point eight meters tall". Combine that with the fact that most people misuse kilograms as a unit of force, and we're all better off using pounds or stones anyway.
The English units of volumes are done in binary (and a couple, like tablespoons, in ternary). One foot equals twelve inches and one gross equals 144 objects because these are useful numbers: lots of other numbers divide them. Humans don't do floating point arithmatic with great ease. Use a system that bumps everything up into integers.
Ten has always been a stupid choice for the base of a number system. The Babylonians had a much better idea with base 60; look at all the numbers that evenly divide into 60 (and look at our system of time and try to think whether it would be better if we only had 10 "hours" in the day instead of 24 or 100 "minutes" instead of 60.
The convenient thing about the metric system is that it is focused on the idea of orders of magnitude, and since lots of science is also concerned with orders of magnitude, that makes the metric system appropriate for scientific applications. The problem with using the metric system in our normal daily existence is that most humans only have to deal with one or maybe two orders of magnitude as they go about their day. For the few instances where that stops being true, using a different system of units wouldn't kill anyone.
Why does the celsius scale define 100 to be the boiling point of water at one atmosphere? Because it's a convenient constant and lots of laboratory conditions are done near that temperature. But notice how it's done in terms of 1 atm and not 1000 pascals or some such power of 10. There exist these fundamental constants in nature, and lots of them don't have anything to do with each other. Yes we can measure charges in units of coulombs, but since most of nature is constructed in multiples of the electron charge, you still have factors of 1.6x10^-19 in your equations. You're not eliminating complexity; you're just pushing it around. No system of units will eliminate all of this kind of complexity. You might as well use units that are convenient for humans.
The Fahrenheit scale uses (aproximately) the normal human body temperature as 100. Since most real world temperatures (like weather) are done around this temperature and above 0 (the temperature of salted ice), the Fahrenheit scale is a more convenient scale for human life. An analogy: it's like the differene between using an analog car speedometer that goes between 0 and 85 or one that goes between 0 and 140 mph. Since most of your driving is done between 0 and 60, and rarely if ever above 80, all that part of the scale above 80 is just wasted and it squeezes the part we care about into a smaller space that complicates interpolation and other visual interpretation of the value displayed.
It ranks right up there with the prostate as one of the fundamental ways in which humans are "designed". We should've been built with 12 fingers instead of 10. We'd all be much better off.
(Yes, I'm American)
I would suspect not, at least not officially. I am a citizen of a constitutional government of constitutionally limited powers. He is the subject of an omnipotent and unbridled parliamentary government. There are things that my governmetn cannot constitutionally do to me (like strip me of my citizenship, see Trop v. Dulles). His government is completely sovereign over every aspect of his life and his affairs with others. There is still officially a monarch at the head of his government, and that monarch has a non-zero amount of actual power.
These are very different relationships.
Just because government calls it something new doesn't mean it is. Words have meaning independent of their official use in propaganda. I suspect your relation to your government is fundamentally the same relationship it would've been before they "got rid of the 'British Subject' bit" and you're only fooling yourself to think otherwise.
The consensus seems to be that digital representations of the words are not actually the words in the same way that analog ink-based writings are the actual words. Your point remains valid, though.
For all you know, G-d might have some way of looking at things that doesn't involve bouncing light off them. If we figure out such a way, then we'll have made some progress.
It's a tax on the poor but hopeful. The only way a system of government (or insurrance/etc.) works is by taking from those who have and giving to those who have not. You can't tax the poor to give to the poor. (Well, you can, but you're an idiot.) It reminds me of all those stockholder lawsuits. (Please, I will pay you lots of money to reach into one of my pockets, extract some money, and put it into my other pocket! I pay cash!)
But I suppose people will be morons anyway, and at least this way it's the authoritative mob and not the common mob that's running the show and taking the proceeds.
But really, have you seen all the stupid ads on TV for the lottery these days? As if people aren't already stupid and uneducated, as if we have to encourage them further to commit mass lunacy? And funded at taxpayer's expense?
It's a stupid, stupid world out there.
Like the subject says.
They let you run ypchsh and they do let you run passwd. In fact, that's what they tell you to do once you get your temporary password.
At least we have it written into our constitution that a congressional term must elapse before the new salaries take effect. If the voters don't like it, then they can exercise their opinion and vote the offenders out of office.
As in "Everyone get on your knees and service Microsoft"? Seriously, MS has historically made lots of attempts to try to distance itself from Intel. This time it may happen, but only because Intel, in Linux, has found a replacement for MS.
Just have a privately-disclosed email address for the proper betatesters to email to. Ignore everything else. It's not that hard, and it's irrelelvant to whether Corel is violating the GPL as it appears to be doing.
There have been some efforts to expand laws to include depictions of minors having sex regardless of whether it could be demonstrated that they were actually minors. Such efforts have failed and are unconstitutional besides.
maybe they'll enforce the death penalty they've recently been trying to pass for minors. The Philippines is really a scary place when it comes to such things. One of the difinitive cruel&unusual punishment cases in US constitutional law came out of the Philippines (Weems v. US: a man charged with forgery was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor and perpetual surveilance and curtailment of other rights). This is the same place where a man was executed even though the President issued a last-minute reprieve, because the phone lines were busy and his call couldn't go through.
The second amendment is about keeping the general populace armed both to deter tyranny on the part of government and also to provide a pool of individuals to raise a militia from so as to provide for the common defence. Just because the government misclassifies crypto as a munition doesn't mean it actually is one or has anything to do with an armed citizenry.
You might have more luck trying to locate your right to crypto in the unenumerated substantive-due-process right to privacy, although good luck trying to find some courts to agree with you. The fourth and fifth amendments are also good places to try.
There are about 5 or so versions being bandied about. One of them is one we'd like passed. Several of them propose draconian restrictions and regulations. This is the way of congress.