I disagree completely. Currently because of the limited number of stations, each station has to try to cater to an extremely wide range of people. This is what creates the homogenized music.
Cable television has improved television because it can create specialized stations like Discovery, MTV, SciFi, Comedy Channel, etc., none of which could survive as a broadcast channel. The limiting factor for cable tv is that producing TV shows is very expensive, so they end up playing mostly reruns.
Satellite radio however delivers content which is much, much cheaper to produce. Music can be broadcast freely, and talk and news shows are extremely cheap.
With satellite radio, a single company will be able to produce a suite of radio stations which will appeal to a wide range of tastes and interests. If the bandwidth is sufficiently cheap, you can expect a satellite radio provider to give you everything from standard Top 40 music and news stations to All-Zydeco-All-The-Time and Falsetto-Japanese-Pop.
For a peek into what this will probably look like, check out net-radio offerings like spinner.com.
Most importantly is India which makes up about half of the world's left-hand drivers.
Of course left and right would be about tied if not for China.
But if you want to see something really crazy, go to Burma where they drive on the right, but their steering wheels are also on the right (cars are imported from Thailand and Japan.) The drivers can't see around the car in front of them when they want to pass, so they just start honking and slowly moving into potentially oncoming traffic. And drivers coming the other direction also always honk whenever they pass a car going the other direction. Exciting stuff!
Why is too many GUI toolkits a bad thing, but half a dozen RDBMS providers is consumer choice?
The different RDBMS's are, in theory, different implementations which all support the SQL standard. In practice there are different levels of compliance and different proprietary extensions such as built-in functions and stored procedure languages, but having SQL bind them together is a great strength.
Are you saying this is a good thing or a bad thing? Certainly at least for non-unique indexes you want to be able to have an index on the rows that do have data. Queries which use the index should should still be speedy.
For unique indexes it's another matter. Oracle allows unique indexes on nullable columns which is pretty bogus since it doesn't ensure uniqueness.
They've mentioned in interviews that they were concerned about the QT licensing.
If I were a commercial company deciding which desktop to promote, it would be an easy decision. It's in their interests to support a desktop that is more friendly to closed-source development.
Getting stuck behind a Solaris terminal is always painful, especially for the full year I spent contracting at Sun.
While I'm sure there are plenty of experienced CDE/Openlook users who are used to the interface and have it fully tweaked, I can't imagine a new user preferring it over gnome.
It's also fun to be back in the mainstream, using a product that is actually being improved. If you've got anything on your CDE wishlist, you're going to be waiting a long time.
Now if I could just replace the oddly-mapped Sun keyboard...
I've looked all over for free X servers and haven't found any that work well. And they're all extremely difficult to get up and running.
There's a few demoware ones out there which you can try out if you can handle the nags.
WinaXe from Labtam Finland works great but costs $90. I use the demo version occasionally (download from http://www.labf.com/) and will probably buy it one of these days.
Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built
Check out the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton (decommissioned in 1997):
http://www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/tftr.html
-Bruce
Re:Oh you good Americans, please allow us ur own p
on
FRG on W2K: No CoS
·
· Score: 1
Anyways German courts have decided Scientology is not a religion. I tend to agree.
And why should a government or a court (or you) ever be in a position to decide what is a religion? Why do they need government recognition at all? They can get their tax breaks by being a nonprofit organization. Schools and the military can allow time for anyone who wants to pray.
That said, there's no question that Scientology *is* a religion. It might be a crappy one, or one you don't like, or one that has characteristics of a cult, but it certainly a religion.
To steal a couple of definitions from dictionary.com:
"A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader."
"A cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
They did this through one of their members, an american congressman
I just did a search and found Howard Coble and Carlos Moorhead, members of the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property both wrote letters to the Swedish Parliament on this matter. Which one of them is a Scientologist? Both?
Do you have *any* evidence of this or was this something you heard from a friend of a friend?
I'm no fan of these guys, but look at who's getting modded up in this discussion.
- An anonymous supposed former member comparing them to Nazis and Amway
- An anonymous critic who thinks the CoS corrupted up his root nfs key
- An anonymous coward saying "I don't remember this for sure, but I think..." and "Trust me" in the same paragraph.
Is it possible that these people are genuine and truly have been intimidated by the CoS? Yes. Is it possible that these people are embellishing their stories? Yes. Are they in any way useful or informative? No.
If you're looking for at reasonable criticism of the church and its tactics (with evidence, wow!), go to www.xenu.net and the many other sites which have somehow managed to stay up despite the overwhelming power of the Scientology Secret Police.
UK has about 60 million people so they've got about 30% online.
The US has about 275 million people, so they've got about 50% online.
Plus, I don't have any statistics for this, but I've read that people in the US spend much more time online per user because we generally pay a flat fee of about $20/month or less for unlimited access.
Give me a break, the title 'Socialist' can mean very different things. Of course the Nazis were the 'National Socialist' party, so they must all be like that, right?
There are a good many stable democracies in the world that are currently run by center-left parties, calling themselves 'socialist'.
Unfortunately, linguistically the economic policies get mixed up with the social and political policies which don't necessarily have to go together. If I was naming this stuff I'd call it:
Economics
- Capitalism: an economic policy espousing competative production and private ownership.
- Communism: an economic policy favoring centralized production and collective ownership.
Social policy
- Social Darwinism (better word?): a social policy believing that people are responsible for their own welfare with no governmental assistance.
- Socialism: a social policy which espouses that a government has some responsibility for the welfare of its people.
Politics
- Democracy: a political policy where people vote for the laws which govern them either directly or indirectly through their representatives.
- Authoritarianism: a political policy in which those in power make all political decisions.
That way you could make the following kinds of statements:
- The USSR was a communist, socialist, authoritarian state.
- China today is a mixed capitalist/communist economy, with a socialist social policy and a mostly authoritarian political structure.
- Germany has a capitalist economy a moderately socialist social policy and a democratic political structure.
Unfortunately, today all three of the above are called socialist, even though Germany virtually nothing in common with the USSR.
Are there any other native English countries I'm forgetting? Maybe a few, but not enough to make up for the 189.4 million difference. Besides Canada's halfway in between anyway.
As for people learning it as a second language, I don't think you can say that they learn it specifically British or American. The spellings tend to be British but the pronunciations are much closer to American, especially in Holland and Scandanavia. A popular theory is that it's due to their large exposure to American movies and television. (though former British colonies do have more of a British bent.)
I've never noticed this. But if it's true, perhaps this is due the the wide access to the internet in America? In most countries, internet access is much more expensive and usage is far lower, most people with access being fairly well educated.
From http://cyberatlas.internet.com/, the US 43% of the world's internet users with 135.7 million, the UK has 17.9 million.
If you want to criticize something Americans are truly bad at, try geography.
In this way, it could be argued (not that I neccessarily am) that the computers/internet/web are partially responsible for the gradual degradation of English as a whole - because it encourages inhomogeneity in the use of both forms.
Hmmm. I don't really buy it. Okay so now you unfortunately write color instead of colour, it's a minor spelling error in your country. Get a localized spell checker.
Besides who says there's any real English standard to 'degrade'. English is a dynamic language, all we can demand is that the accepted standard move slow enough for us to keep up.
Anyway, for me coding is a separate mode of thought from writing. Even though I'm coding SQL all day, when I'm asking someone to get something at the store I don't write:
SELECT beer
FROM microbrew_selections
WHERE size = sixpack
AND cost
-Bruce
Slashdot Mirror
I don't eat it much anymore, however, because of its fat content.
You should try Spam Lite!.
-Bruce
Imagine an internet where you need a Microsoft OS in order to check your bank balance online.
-Bruce
Perhaps you mean referendi?
Certainly not! He probably means referendums, or maybe referenda.
-Bruce
Regular radio sucks, and this will suck worse.
I disagree completely. Currently because of the limited number of stations, each station has to try to cater to an extremely wide range of people. This is what creates the homogenized music.
Cable television has improved television because it can create specialized stations like Discovery, MTV, SciFi, Comedy Channel, etc., none of which could survive as a broadcast channel. The limiting factor for cable tv is that producing TV shows is very expensive, so they end up playing mostly reruns.
Satellite radio however delivers content which is much, much cheaper to produce. Music can be broadcast freely, and talk and news shows are extremely cheap.
With satellite radio, a single company will be able to produce a suite of radio stations which will appeal to a wide range of tastes and interests. If the bandwidth is sufficiently cheap, you can expect a satellite radio provider to give you everything from standard Top 40 music and news stations to All-Zydeco-All-The-Time and Falsetto-Japanese-Pop.
For a peek into what this will probably look like, check out net-radio offerings like spinner.com.
-Bruce
Check out the "XFree86 Font Deuglification HOWTO"
It led to an huge improvement the fonts on my desktop.
-Bruce
Seems like energy taxes could take care of that problem pretty well.
-Bruce
Most importantly is India which makes up about half of the world's left-hand drivers.
Of course left and right would be about tied if not for China.
But if you want to see something really crazy, go to Burma where they drive on the right, but their steering wheels are also on the right (cars are imported from Thailand and Japan.) The drivers can't see around the car in front of them when they want to pass, so they just start honking and slowly moving into potentially oncoming traffic. And drivers coming the other direction also always honk whenever they pass a car going the other direction. Exciting stuff!
-Bruce
Sorry, i meant that England is the only EUROPEAN contry with left-side traffic
Ireland too.
-Bruce
Why is too many GUI toolkits a bad thing, but half a dozen RDBMS providers is consumer choice?
The different RDBMS's are, in theory, different implementations which all support the SQL standard. In practice there are different levels of compliance and different proprietary extensions such as built-in functions and stored procedure languages, but having SQL bind them together is a great strength.
-Bruce
It helped me make my X-windows usable!
-Bruce
You've been reading too much Tom Clancy.
That book was absurd, Iran and Iraq join forces, ha!
-Bruce
It allows NULL in indexed columns!
Are you saying this is a good thing or a bad thing? Certainly at least for non-unique indexes you want to be able to have an index on the rows that do have data. Queries which use the index should should still be speedy.
For unique indexes it's another matter. Oracle allows unique indexes on nullable columns which is pretty bogus since it doesn't ensure uniqueness.
-Bruce
They've mentioned in interviews that they were concerned about the QT licensing.
If I were a commercial company deciding which desktop to promote, it would be an easy decision. It's in their interests to support a desktop that is more friendly to closed-source development.
-Bruce
Amen!
Getting stuck behind a Solaris terminal is always painful, especially for the full year I spent contracting at Sun.
While I'm sure there are plenty of experienced CDE/Openlook users who are used to the interface and have it fully tweaked, I can't imagine a new user preferring it over gnome.
It's also fun to be back in the mainstream, using a product that is actually being improved. If you've got anything on your CDE wishlist, you're going to be waiting a long time.
Now if I could just replace the oddly-mapped Sun keyboard...
-Bruce
I've looked all over for free X servers and haven't found any that work well. And they're all extremely difficult to get up and running.
There's a few demoware ones out there which you can try out if you can handle the nags.
WinaXe from Labtam Finland works great but costs $90. I use the demo version occasionally (download from http://www.labf.com/) and will probably buy it one of these days.
-Bruce
And don't forget how the Christians bombed the Olympic park in Atlanta.
d ol ph.htm
http://www.fbi.gov/mostwant/topten/fugitives/ru
"The Arabs" refers to a race of people. To hold the race accountable for the murders in Munich in 1972 is ignorant and offensive.
-Bruce
Since no fusion power plant has ever been designed, much less built
Check out the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton (decommissioned in 1997):
http://www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/tftr.html
-Bruce
Anyways German courts have decided Scientology is not a religion. I tend to agree.
And why should a government or a court (or you) ever be in a position to decide what is a religion? Why do they need government recognition at all? They can get their tax breaks by being a nonprofit organization. Schools and the military can allow time for anyone who wants to pray.
That said, there's no question that Scientology *is* a religion. It might be a crappy one, or one you don't like, or one that has characteristics of a cult, but it certainly a religion.
To steal a couple of definitions from dictionary.com:
"A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader."
"A cause, a principle, or an activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion."
Seems to fit Scientology pretty damn well!
-Bruce
They did this through one of their members, an american congressman
I just did a search and found Howard Coble and Carlos Moorhead, members of the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property both wrote letters to the Swedish Parliament on this matter. Which one of them is a Scientologist? Both?
Do you have *any* evidence of this or was this something you heard from a friend of a friend?
I'm no fan of these guys, but look at who's getting modded up in this discussion.
- An anonymous supposed former member comparing them to Nazis and Amway
- An anonymous critic who thinks the CoS corrupted up his root nfs key
- An anonymous coward saying "I don't remember this for sure, but I think..." and "Trust me" in the same paragraph.
Is it possible that these people are genuine and truly have been intimidated by the CoS? Yes. Is it possible that these people are embellishing their stories? Yes. Are they in any way useful or informative? No.
If you're looking for at reasonable criticism of the church and its tactics (with evidence, wow!), go to www.xenu.net and the many other sites which have somehow managed to stay up despite the overwhelming power of the Scientology Secret Police.
-Bruce
UK has about 60 million people so they've got about 30% online.
The US has about 275 million people, so they've got about 50% online.
Plus, I don't have any statistics for this, but I've read that people in the US spend much more time online per user because we generally pay a flat fee of about $20/month or less for unlimited access.
Cheers!
-Bruce
Give me a break, the title 'Socialist' can mean very different things. Of course the Nazis were the 'National Socialist' party, so they must all be like that, right?
There are a good many stable democracies in the world that are currently run by center-left parties, calling themselves 'socialist'.
Unfortunately, linguistically the economic policies get mixed up with the social and political policies which don't necessarily have to go together. If I was naming this stuff I'd call it:
Economics
- Capitalism: an economic policy espousing competative production and private ownership.
- Communism: an economic policy favoring centralized production and collective ownership.
Social policy
- Social Darwinism (better word?): a social policy believing that people are responsible for their own welfare with no governmental assistance.
- Socialism: a social policy which espouses that a government has some responsibility for the welfare of its people.
Politics
- Democracy: a political policy where people vote for the laws which govern them either directly or indirectly through their representatives.
- Authoritarianism: a political policy in which those in power make all political decisions.
That way you could make the following kinds of statements:
- The USSR was a communist, socialist, authoritarian state.
- China today is a mixed capitalist/communist economy, with a socialist social policy and a mostly authoritarian political structure.
- Germany has a capitalist economy a moderately socialist social policy and a democratic political structure.
Unfortunately, today all three of the above are called socialist, even though Germany virtually nothing in common with the USSR.
-Bruce
Exsqueeze me?
UK...........59.5
Ireland.......3.8
Canada.......31.3
Australia....19.1
New.Zealand...3.8
-----------------
.............86.2
US..........275.6
Are there any other native English countries I'm forgetting? Maybe a few, but not enough to make up for the 189.4 million difference. Besides Canada's halfway in between anyway.
As for people learning it as a second language, I don't think you can say that they learn it specifically British or American. The spellings tend to be British but the pronunciations are much closer to American, especially in Holland and Scandanavia. A popular theory is that it's due to their large exposure to American movies and television. (though former British colonies do have more of a British bent.)
-Bruce
Un autre: maintenant!
I've never noticed this. But if it's true, perhaps this is due the the wide access to the internet in America? In most countries, internet access is much more expensive and usage is far lower, most people with access being fairly well educated.
From http://cyberatlas.internet.com/, the US 43% of the world's internet users with 135.7 million, the UK has 17.9 million.
If you want to criticize something Americans are truly bad at, try geography.
-Bruce
In this way, it could be argued (not that I neccessarily am) that the computers/internet/web are partially responsible for the gradual degradation of English as a whole - because it encourages inhomogeneity in the use of both forms.
Hmmm. I don't really buy it. Okay so now you unfortunately write color instead of colour, it's a minor spelling error in your country. Get a localized spell checker.
Besides who says there's any real English standard to 'degrade'. English is a dynamic language, all we can demand is that the accepted standard move slow enough for us to keep up.
Anyway, for me coding is a separate mode of thought from writing. Even though I'm coding SQL all day, when I'm asking someone to get something at the store I don't write:
SELECT beer
FROM microbrew_selections
WHERE size = sixpack
AND cost
-Bruce