Re:Ahhh...a one Euro coin, not a dollar...
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1
Personally, I think of the $1 coin (and now the $2 coin) as change and more readily spend it... so my spending ends up going up... just to cut down on the weight in my pockets.
I personally don't like carrying around any kind of change so I leave it all at home. Of course, right now I have about $700 in change in my apartment that really needs to find its way back to the bank one of these days. A small roll of twonies is $50!
The Canadian Government should meet some requirements for admittance (respect of human rights, abolishment of death penalty,
The death penalty was abolished in the 1970's, if my information is correct. The only human rights violations are w.r.t. Quebec language policy.
Re:The Euro is fourth-dimensionally foolish
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I think it's a really stupid idea, and will end in tears or war.
Economic integration is a strong factor in preventing wars, not starting them. Why invade another country when you can get its riches merely by trading? After WW2, the elite of the world got together and said "Never again!", and globalism was born.
With 300-million people on board, the EU will be able to go toe-to-toe with the US economy. As a US citizen, you will be mildly effected by this, as the world outside the US has become a little more competitive, and you, reciprocally, a little less so.
In response, the US has joined free-trade zone of the Organization of American States. This zone has a greater population than the (present) euro-zone, though, besides Canada with a relatively small population, the OAS includes mostly third-world and emerging nations with massive debts.
The long-term prospects for the EU are excellent.
Re:The real reason the Euro is BAD NEWS
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
The Euro is an undemocratic currency.
All central bankers are appointed; none are elected. Monetary policy is too important to be subjected to the usual corruptions of pandering to the incoherent will of the ignorant masses.
I'm part of a fun project [wheresgeorge.com]that involves tracking the motion of US currency. I live near (60 miles from) San Francisco--here are the locations the bills I've marked come from, and their relative proportion.
Something similar happens in Canada with U.S. coins, especially with pennies. I'd guess that about 5% of the pennies in circulation in Canada are actually American pennies, with smaller proportions for greater denominations. I'm sure that the banks attempt to filter these coins out, though; after all, they are worth more.
Re:Issues with the euro in day-to-day life
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
* There's no 25 cents coin. Someone tell me why, because I don't understand it. Specially since a coffe here is about 125 pesetas, which is roughly 0.75 euro. We've got 2 and 20 cents coins, but anyway, I don't know why there're no 25 cents coins.
It looks like they went full-tilt with the 1-2-5 paradigm: 0.01, 0.02, 0.05; 0.10, 0.20, 0.50; 1.00, 2.00, 5.00; 10.00, 20.00, 50.00; 100.00, 200.00, 500.00.
Buy anything in America and you get a fist-full of ones.
* As someone already said, the coins are pretty cool:-) A few of them are in two colors, and have a face with a local design and the other with a common european one.
Mozilla binaries are provided for testing purposes.
That seems like a bit of a backward strategy. The people who are most likely to download and run the milestone binaries are people, like me, who are using Mozilla in a production capacity. For this reason, the binary versions should be as heavily optimized as possible. Otherwise, it's unnecessarily slow for me and very poor advertising for the Mozilla project. Most people out there will think that Mozilla is simply slow, and not competitive with IE, never having seen an optimized build.
There should be a special build for people who actually want to run a test version. Most of us will just kill & rerun the program if it gets messed up.
I thought that only New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI where the "Maritime" provinces and Newfoundland [and Labrador] is included with the Maritime provinces in the "Atlantic" provinces.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 2
So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare? Would that be cruel and unusual?
You're right. People should only killed decent and proper with a sniper's bullet.
his baby created billion dollars of wealth (at one point, at least)
That's an interesting statement. It seems to presuppose that the only real kind of "wealth" has a dollar figure and is based on stock prices. The thing about high-tech stock prices is that they are based largely on speculation, especially for emerging industries. High-tech stocks are usually valued at 20 to 50 times their company's annual profits, though, of course, most dot-coms never actually made a profit.
Free and open-source software kind of short-circuit the conventional model of "wealth". For things that aren't given away for free, their real value is measured by the number of people who are willing to pay a certain amount for it, and after the exercise of selling something is carried out, you count up the dollars and see how much "wealth" was involved.
But things that are given away still have value, and there is still a virtual amount of money that all of the Linux users and businesses around the world would be willing to pay for it. There's no good way to count this up, but I have little doubt that it would be in the billions of dollars.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Of course it does.
Some people might think that Bill Gates is less evil because he has donated billions of dollars to charities. Linus has donated billions of dollars worth of "wealth" to the world also.
But then, there's also more to life than just "wealth". Wealth is only a means to achieving a high standard of living. Has Linux improved your standard of living? Has free software? Is there anyone who has ever used the Internet who hasn't made use of free or open-source software?
On the otherhand, 70% of Canadian internet traffic routes through the US, so...
Such as the packets from Rogers@Home and (oxymoronic) AT&T Canada in the twin cities of Ottawa ON and Hull QC. My packets go through Ottawa ON, Toronto ON, Buffalo NY, Hartford CT, Cambridge MA, Chicago IL, Toronto ON, Ottawa ON, and finally Hull QC. Previously, I've had packets going through Palo Alto CA.
If they would just peer in Toronto, my ssh sessions would be ten times as good and the US backbones would be less heavily loaded. Maybe Rogers without the @Home will figure out how to peer with other networks in Canada. Part of @Home's problems ought to be that they needlessly shipped so many packets over half the continent.
Actually, Canada is highly urbanized, even moreso than the US, I think. 13.6-million of 31.0-million Canadians live in six major cities. (19.6-million in 25 cities.)
Also, Canada's population tends to be concentrated on a 200km band along the US border, with the bulk of the northern area being wasteland. (It's not necessarily that they like Americans so much, just that lower latitudes have better climates.) A straight line is a simple topology to match a network to. The US population pattern is more "two-dimensional", making distance a much more expensive problem for network infrastructure.
The real "pirates" run CD factories in East Asia or Central America and make CDs indistinguishable from the originals, 10,000 at a time. "Copy protection" won't even slow those guys down.
Actually, if the real pirates were to offer CDs without copy protection, they would have a superior product to the original. They would then be able to profit more from labelling them as "pirated". The RIAA would then need to start labelling its own CDs with a big red "pirated" stickers, just to fool customers into buying them.
Your whole system is only wide open if you can access the FTP service.
That's not a problem to me, as I would never expose an FTP port to the outside world. The FTP protocol is inherently difficult to secure and it has outlasted its usefulness. For outgoing data, you can just use HTTP. And public access for incoming data just means that you will be hosting gigs of ripped movies and porn. FTP should be filtered at the firewall and made available to trusted hosts only.
He said intelligent civilizations. Ours only counts as ½.
Re:Gravity increasing over time due to space dust
on
Mapping Gravity
·
· Score: 2
Maybe in the time of dinosaurs the earth actually had lighter gravity.
If I am recalling this information correctly, the Earth also had shorter days in the time of the dinosaurs (about 18 hours). (I think that a lot of this extra energy was spent in putting the moon into a higher orbit, which is a consequence of tidal forces.) This means that the Earth was spinning faster making things weigh a little less because of centrifugal force (which, as we all know, isn't actually a force of its own since it is only inertia).
Just because you can do on one computer what took a cluster two years ago, doesn't mean that people like me won't just find more complex problems to do.
Bruce's Law: Every 18 months plus one day, the size of computational problems doubles.
it's cheap labor... but we get that from Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Korea, Taiwan, etc
It's odd that you would include Canada in that list. Canadians do make less money on average, but not the huge amount less than people from the other countries, and 80% of Canadians enjoy a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans. It's quite a scam. What's more important, the raw numbers of currency units that you make, or the quality of life that you enjoy because of it? By your logic, Mexicans are better off than Canadians or Americans because they make so many pesos.
BTW, you might be surprised to learn that although the Canadian dollar is only worth about US$0.62 for foreign exchange, it is worth about US$0.80 for goods purchased in Canada (purchasing power parity).
Re:Wow! I'm underwhelmed.
on
MAME On Xbox
·
· Score: 1
But then you wouldn't be able to stick it to Microsoft for subsidizing your box as a loss leader.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think of the $1 coin (and now the $2 coin) as change and more readily spend it... so my spending ends up going up... just to cut down on the weight in my pockets.
I personally don't like carrying around any kind of change so I leave it all at home. Of course, right now I have about $700 in change in my apartment that really needs to find its way back to the bank one of these days. A small roll of twonies is $50!
Cents are obviously from % or Centime.
One would presume that it ultimately comes from the French word for 100: Cent.
This booger-green money is depressing to look at - well, at least the $3 in my wallet is. If they were prettier, maybe I'd be happier.
Move to Canada. The older money is multi-colored with various images of wildlife, and the newer tens look rather "European" in style.
The Canadian Government should meet some requirements for admittance (respect of human rights, abolishment of death penalty,
The death penalty was abolished in the 1970's, if my information is correct. The only human rights violations are w.r.t. Quebec language policy.
I think it's a really stupid idea, and will end in tears or war.
Economic integration is a strong factor in preventing wars, not starting them. Why invade another country when you can get its riches merely by trading? After WW2, the elite of the world got together and said "Never again!", and globalism was born.
With 300-million people on board, the EU will be able to go toe-to-toe with the US economy. As a US citizen, you will be mildly effected by this, as the world outside the US has become a little more competitive, and you, reciprocally, a little less so.
In response, the US has joined free-trade zone of the Organization of American States. This zone has a greater population than the (present) euro-zone, though, besides Canada with a relatively small population, the OAS includes mostly third-world and emerging nations with massive debts.
The long-term prospects for the EU are excellent.
The Euro is an undemocratic currency.
All central bankers are appointed; none are elected. Monetary policy is too important to be subjected to the usual corruptions of pandering to the incoherent will of the ignorant masses.
I'm part of a fun project [wheresgeorge.com]that involves tracking the motion of US currency. I live near (60 miles from) San Francisco--here are the locations the bills I've marked come from, and their relative proportion.
Something similar happens in Canada with U.S. coins, especially with pennies. I'd guess that about 5% of the pennies in circulation in Canada are actually American pennies, with smaller proportions for greater denominations. I'm sure that the banks attempt to filter these coins out, though; after all, they are worth more.
* There's no 25 cents coin. Someone tell me why, because I don't understand it. Specially since a coffe here is about 125 pesetas, which is roughly 0.75 euro. We've got 2 and 20 cents coins, but anyway, I don't know why there're no 25 cents coins.
:-) A few of them are in two colors, and have a face with a local design and the other with a common european one.
It looks like they went full-tilt with the 1-2-5 paradigm: 0.01, 0.02, 0.05; 0.10, 0.20, 0.50; 1.00, 2.00, 5.00; 10.00, 20.00, 50.00; 100.00, 200.00, 500.00.
Buy anything in America and you get a fist-full of ones.
* As someone already said, the coins are pretty cool
Canada has a bi-metalic $2.00 coin.
Mozilla binaries are provided for testing purposes.
That seems like a bit of a backward strategy. The people who are most likely to download and run the milestone binaries are people, like me, who are using Mozilla in a production capacity. For this reason, the binary versions should be as heavily optimized as possible. Otherwise, it's unnecessarily slow for me and very poor advertising for the Mozilla project. Most people out there will think that Mozilla is simply slow, and not competitive with IE, never having seen an optimized build.
There should be a special build for people who actually want to run a test version. Most of us will just kill & rerun the program if it gets messed up.
Indeed, "MiB" is most likely trademarked by Amblin/Columbia.
f(x) = c * 0
I thought that only New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and PEI where the "Maritime" provinces and Newfoundland [and Labrador] is included with the Maritime provinces in the "Atlantic" provinces.
So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare? Would that be cruel and unusual?
You're right. People should only killed decent and proper with a sniper's bullet.
his baby created billion dollars of wealth (at one point, at least)
That's an interesting statement. It seems to presuppose that the only real kind of "wealth" has a dollar figure and is based on stock prices. The thing about high-tech stock prices is that they are based largely on speculation, especially for emerging industries. High-tech stocks are usually valued at 20 to 50 times their company's annual profits, though, of course, most dot-coms never actually made a profit.
Free and open-source software kind of short-circuit the conventional model of "wealth". For things that aren't given away for free, their real value is measured by the number of people who are willing to pay a certain amount for it, and after the exercise of selling something is carried out, you count up the dollars and see how much "wealth" was involved.
But things that are given away still have value, and there is still a virtual amount of money that all of the Linux users and businesses around the world would be willing to pay for it. There's no good way to count this up, but I have little doubt that it would be in the billions of dollars.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound? Of course it does.
Some people might think that Bill Gates is less evil because he has donated billions of dollars to charities. Linus has donated billions of dollars worth of "wealth" to the world also.
But then, there's also more to life than just "wealth". Wealth is only a means to achieving a high standard of living. Has Linux improved your standard of living? Has free software? Is there anyone who has ever used the Internet who hasn't made use of free or open-source software?
I find that setting aside e-mail that's not actually addressed to me catches a lot of spam.
On the otherhand, 70% of Canadian internet traffic routes through the US, so...
Such as the packets from Rogers@Home and (oxymoronic) AT&T Canada in the twin cities of Ottawa ON and Hull QC. My packets go through Ottawa ON, Toronto ON, Buffalo NY, Hartford CT, Cambridge MA, Chicago IL, Toronto ON, Ottawa ON, and finally Hull QC. Previously, I've had packets going through Palo Alto CA.
If they would just peer in Toronto, my ssh sessions would be ten times as good and the US backbones would be less heavily loaded. Maybe Rogers without the @Home will figure out how to peer with other networks in Canada. Part of @Home's problems ought to be that they needlessly shipped so many packets over half the continent.
Actually, Canada is highly urbanized, even moreso than the US, I think. 13.6-million of 31.0-million Canadians live in six major cities. (19.6-million in 25 cities.)
Also, Canada's population tends to be concentrated on a 200km band along the US border, with the bulk of the northern area being wasteland. (It's not necessarily that they like Americans so much, just that lower latitudes have better climates.) A straight line is a simple topology to match a network to. The US population pattern is more "two-dimensional", making distance a much more expensive problem for network infrastructure.
I can imagine that there's quite a distance between you and the next log house.
What?! Some Canadians have log houses?! And I've been living in an igloo all this time. So much for summertime water damage!
The real "pirates" run CD factories in East Asia or Central America and make CDs indistinguishable from the originals, 10,000 at a time. "Copy protection" won't even slow those guys down.
Actually, if the real pirates were to offer CDs without copy protection, they would have a superior product to the original. They would then be able to profit more from labelling them as "pirated". The RIAA would then need to start labelling its own CDs with a big red "pirated" stickers, just to fool customers into buying them.
Your whole system is only wide open if you can access the FTP service.
That's not a problem to me, as I would never expose an FTP port to the outside world. The FTP protocol is inherently difficult to secure and it has outlasted its usefulness. For outgoing data, you can just use HTTP. And public access for incoming data just means that you will be hosting gigs of ripped movies and porn. FTP should be filtered at the firewall and made available to trusted hosts only.
He said intelligent civilizations. Ours only counts as ½.
Maybe in the time of dinosaurs the earth actually had lighter gravity.
If I am recalling this information correctly, the Earth also had shorter days in the time of the dinosaurs (about 18 hours). (I think that a lot of this extra energy was spent in putting the moon into a higher orbit, which is a consequence of tidal forces.) This means that the Earth was spinning faster making things weigh a little less because of centrifugal force (which, as we all know, isn't actually a force of its own since it is only inertia).
Just because you can do on one computer what took a cluster two years ago, doesn't mean that people like me won't just find more complex problems to do.
Bruce's Law: Every 18 months plus one day, the size of computational problems doubles.
;-)
it's cheap labor... but we get that from Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Korea, Taiwan, etc
It's odd that you would include Canada in that list. Canadians do make less money on average, but not the huge amount less than people from the other countries, and 80% of Canadians enjoy a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans. It's quite a scam. What's more important, the raw numbers of currency units that you make, or the quality of life that you enjoy because of it? By your logic, Mexicans are better off than Canadians or Americans because they make so many pesos.
BTW, you might be surprised to learn that although the Canadian dollar is only worth about US$0.62 for foreign exchange, it is worth about US$0.80 for goods purchased in Canada (purchasing power parity).
But then you wouldn't be able to stick it to Microsoft for subsidizing your box as a loss leader.