Windows *isn't* easy. It's really complicated and difficult. Installing it, even on hardware that is *supported* can be a complete bitch.
On the other hand, *if* you have supported hardware, and a good distro (i.e. Mandrake) Linux is amazingly easy to set up. Most of the complaints I've heard about Linux installs being hard involved semisupported or nonsupported hardware. Nobody says windows install sucks because it won't work on a Sparc.
The windows interface is quite complicated. It's only considered easy to use because so many people learned on it. Do you single click or double click? When? How do I run software? Where did I save/download that file to? Why does this program look diferent from all the others? How do I close it? (Microsoft Media Player, or IE in full screen, or some custom Sound/Video card maker software) What's the registry? How do I change my host name? Why won't my network card work? Which control panel was that again?
Compare this to say, the KDE desktop. Single click only. If you want to run software, it's in the K menu, catigorised for you. Saving files defaults to/home/$user. Most all programs adopt border widgets from KWM, even Non-KDE programs. The only exception that I know of is XMMS. Somehow MP3 players seem to always get away with this, on any platform. There is no registry. Settings can be changed in the control panel, which is a single window. The control panel only effects the KDE desktop enviornment, no deleting your IDE driver by mistake. In a decent Linux distro, if you have supported hardware, it should Just Work(tm).
Even installing software is easier on Linux rpm -i yourapp.rpm (or dpkg -i yourapp.deb, or installpkg yourapp.tgz. No crap with double clicking setup.exe, going through a long wizard, and then probably having to reboot. Most distros even provide a GUI tool that will do the rpm -i for you. Uninstalling is easy as well, and will delete *every* file that the program installed. No DLL hell. (Uhh, I don't know if it's mine, I'll just leave winsomething42.dll in the c:\windows\system directory).
The file system is more transparent. The user doesn't even have to know that there are different drives in the system. It doesn't matter. Spreading the system across multiple drives is easy. With Windows, if you want to put the windows directory on one drive and the program files directory on another, it's downright impossible.
Windows definately isn't easier, it's just more widespread.
Alcohol - plant the entire surface of North America with enough corn to synthesize it, and it won't be enough.
Biodiesel - pollutes just as badly diesel fuel (in terms of particulate matter), and replace the crop requirements in corn for alcohol with the crop soy beans of similar size.
I have difficulty believing that. Do you have any evidence at all to back that up?
As someone who subsists entirely on corn, I feel that my very survival is threatened by this scheme.
The USA has *excess* cropland. The US government currently pays farmers to *not grow* crops, in order to keep the price of crops up. Growing plants to turn into alcohol fuel would not interfere with food production.
All kidding aside, I think we're better off using cropland for food and generating our energy with fission. Fission or giant orbiting arrays of solar panels.
The amount of cropland that lays unused because it's not needed to supply food in the USA is scary. It'd be better if it was put to some use. People still freak out about fission, and it's not especially dangerous. Satilite collected solar power beamed down by microwave can be inherantly *more* dangerous than fission...
Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.
Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes.
Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable - yes.
Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.
Yes, using alcohol or nitrogen to power a car moves the pollution up the line, DUH.
The fact of the matter is, using alcohol *does not* move the polution up the line. All the polution from alcohol as a fuel comes from burning the alcohol, the energy itself is relitively efficient solar power.
It's all pretty simple. One of the main reason I run Linux is so that I can know and understand *everything* that's happening on my system.
Pick up a copy of "Red Hat 6 Unleashed" at your local bookstore. Read it. It gives an extensive overview of the operation of most of a Red Hat Linux system. Other systems are similar.
It doesn't make sense - what happens if the browser displays the page progressively as it's being downloaded, and towards the end, some closing tag is missing (whether because of bad html, a connection problem, etc)? Should the browser erase everything it's rendered so far and say "Oops, sorry, but we can't let you view this page"?
Technically, an XML parser shouldn't parse anything until the entire document has been read. This may be infeasable for web browsers.
Mabie the browsers should pop up a dialog like the following when they encounter non-conformant HTML:
HTML ERROR The author(s) of the web page you are viewing are morons who know less than nothing about designing a website. Their supervisor should fire them immediately. This document isn't even compliant XML. What's this company going to do next? Probably whrite lyk thys, becaws they kant bee bothred to fiand people whew kan spell.
In the conclusion of this trial, the judge made the following statement:
Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic gain. They contend that the advent of new technology should not alter this long established structure.
I believe that he should have immediately followed it by this:
There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are chared with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange dictrine is not supported by statue or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private penefit. That is all.
This second quote comes from Robert A. Heinlien's short story "Life-line" and is one of the most insightful legal quotes I've ever heard.
Actually, the current W3C HTML reccommendation (XHTML 1.0) considers fault tolerance to be a *bug* for a user agent. If it's not well formed XML, the browser should barf.
There is a simple solution to such a problem:
Include OS informaton with the data sent when the game is registered, and require registration to play the game (or to play it multiplayer, whichever would work most cleanly).
Require all users to sign up and get a username/password. Before assigning a username/password to anyone require that they or their parents (if they are under 18) sign a form accepting your non-responsibility for web content.
If weed were legal it could be purchased from reliable sources; it could even be regulated by the FDA. As long as it remains illegal it will be a bigger problem than it ever could be as a legal substance.
If you mean perfectly free, yes. Absolutely. Only not to give up reading the fine print. I just don't want it to be fine. What do I really want? A society based on truth, rather than deception.
And you really think the FTC is going to do anything more than unconstitutionally limiting your rights as a human being?
Have you ever heard the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"? The earth is a small and fragile basket.
I say that at least some of humanity should get off this soggy mudball ASAP, before we get hit by a meteor, or a kilogram of antimater suddenly appears in the earth's core because of a quantom glitch, or whatever.
We already have all the technology, standards, and most of the protocals for a Snow Crash like Multiverse. What we don't have is sufficient bandwith.
Actually, we could build something significantly better than the Snow Crash Multiverse with current standards (i.e. Ditch the major security holes everywhere)
We don't need standing fedral armed forces on the scale that the US now has them.
The US constitution doesn't allow for *any* fedral standing armed forces.
I'll agree that some US national defense is a good plan, but a gigantic standing army supported by a fedral income tax is not appropriate for a republic, and is especially inappropriate and unnessisary for the United States of America. There are all kinds of other good ways of doing it.
I'm a big science fiction fan. This is one of the first movies that I've ever seen that:
Has a decent plot.
Didn't get wrecked by the marketing droids.
Fits into the traditional outer space hard sci-fi genre.
My favorite thing about this movie is the implementation details. (Let's hide the Titan in a field of ice crystals, The main charactor is working on spaceship salvage operation, The bad guys are energy beings, He decides to call the new planet "Planet Bob")
I also really liked the graphics in the movie. It was pretty.
The story was simple but acceptable. It had to be simple, otherwise it wouldn't have fit in a 90 minute movie. But even being simple and short, it showed evidence of there being all kinds of intresting background that there wasn't time to expand upon in the movie. It showed signs that it could be expanded into a good 3-500 page novel.
The things that I didn't like were mostly the standard things that piss me off in every outer space movie I ever see. Spaceships flying like airplanes, All the aliens being humanoid, etc. I really can't complain two much, because no one's ever done it differently.
Jon Katz compares the movie to Star Wars, which isn't even really sci-fi, it's fantasy. He then goes on to complain that it's not funny or scary enough. It wasn't trying to be funny or scary. Eithor would have wrecked this good movie.
Well, at least if people are going to rat on this movie, they should point out any other similar movie done better. I really can't think of one...
Do you know what percentage of the fedral income tax revinue is used for "maintaining the country's infrastructure"?
Do you know what portion of the infrastructure that the US fedral government supports is acutally worth supporting?
To anyone: Name some piece of "nessisary infrastructure" that the fedral government actually supports with the income tax, and I'll give you $5 U.S. if I can't show that one of the following is true: (I'm poor or cheap, so I'll only pay the first person to come up with such an item.)
It's unnessisary.
It's not really supported by the income tax.
It can and should be supported by some other means.
It was supported by something else before the income tax was introduced, and can be supported by that again.
As far as I can tell, the things actually supported by the income tax mostly involve subsidising stuff so that americans don't have to notice the realities of living in a capitolist economy.
Social security is also a crock of shit. The chances of anyone who put money into it getting similar amounts of money back out of it are infintesimal. All it does is supports a socialist welfare state.
The lack of a 4 day workweek is a result of the political and economic systems you are working in.
The particiular form of capitolism used the USA and many other parts of the world today tends to optimise for the wealth of corporate shareholders, not the shortest work week for average workers.
The high taxes and low efficiency of usage in the USA just compound this problem. If there were no income tax and no social security collection, that would straight out allow a 3 or 4 day work week, because everyone would just have more money.
The QPL is a "open source" licence, and it meets the DFSG. A program, like KDE, that links QPL code with GPL code violates the GPL, and is therefore ILLEGAL to distribute.
Slashdot Mirror
When you burn the alcohol, you get polutants. Growing the alchohol and fermenting it are low-pollution activities.
Windows *isn't* easy. It's really complicated and difficult. Installing it, even on hardware that is *supported* can be a complete bitch.
On the other hand, *if* you have supported hardware, and a good distro (i.e. Mandrake) Linux is amazingly easy to set up. Most of the complaints I've heard about Linux installs being hard involved semisupported or nonsupported hardware. Nobody says windows install sucks because it won't work on a Sparc.
The windows interface is quite complicated. It's only considered easy to use because so many people learned on it. Do you single click or double click? When? How do I run software? Where did I save/download that file to? Why does this program look diferent from all the others? How do I close it? (Microsoft Media Player, or IE in full screen, or some custom Sound/Video card maker software) What's the registry? How do I change my host name? Why won't my network card work? Which control panel was that again?
Compare this to say, the KDE desktop. Single click only. If you want to run software, it's in the K menu, catigorised for you. Saving files defaults to /home/$user. Most all programs adopt border widgets from KWM, even Non-KDE programs. The only exception that I know of is XMMS. Somehow MP3 players seem to always get away with this, on any platform. There is no registry. Settings can be changed in the control panel, which is a single window. The control panel only effects the KDE desktop enviornment, no deleting your IDE driver by mistake. In a decent Linux distro, if you have supported hardware, it should Just Work(tm).
Even installing software is easier on Linux rpm -i yourapp.rpm (or dpkg -i yourapp.deb, or installpkg yourapp.tgz. No crap with double clicking setup.exe, going through a long wizard, and then probably having to reboot. Most distros even provide a GUI tool that will do the rpm -i for you. Uninstalling is easy as well, and will delete *every* file that the program installed. No DLL hell. (Uhh, I don't know if it's mine, I'll just leave winsomething42.dll in the c:\windows\system directory).
The file system is more transparent. The user doesn't even have to know that there are different drives in the system. It doesn't matter. Spreading the system across multiple drives is easy. With Windows, if you want to put the windows directory on one drive and the program files directory on another, it's downright impossible.
Windows definately isn't easier, it's just more widespread.
I have difficulty believing that. Do you have any evidence at all to back that up?
The USA has *excess* cropland. The US government currently pays farmers to *not grow* crops, in order to keep the price of crops up. Growing plants to turn into alcohol fuel would not interfere with food production.
The amount of cropland that lays unused because it's not needed to supply food in the USA is scary. It'd be better if it was put to some use. People still freak out about fission, and it's not especially dangerous. Satilite collected solar power beamed down by microwave can be inherantly *more* dangerous than fission...
Gasoline: Polution at car - high. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation - some. Renewable - no.
Liquid Nitrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain - high. Cost to make - high. Polution at creation - yes. Renewable - yes.
Hydrogen: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: med. Cost to make - med. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Electricity: Polution at car - none. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: yes. Renewable - yes.
Alcohol or Biodiesel: Polution at car - med. Cost to transport/obtain: low. Cost to make - low. Polution at creation: no. Renewable - yes.
Organic fuels such as Alchohol or Biodeisel are our best choice until we come up with some cheap/free nonpoluting centralized energy source, like neuclear fusion.
The fact of the matter is, using alcohol *does not* move the polution up the line. All the polution from alcohol as a fuel comes from burning the alcohol, the energy itself is relitively efficient solar power.
Plant corn. Grow corn. Ferment Corn. Burn corn in cars. Everyone wins.
I guess the important bit is to find some useful documentation and actually read it. You have to read all the words on all the pages, in order. =)
It's all pretty simple. One of the main reason I run Linux is so that I can know and understand *everything* that's happening on my system.
Pick up a copy of "Red Hat 6 Unleashed" at your local bookstore. Read it. It gives an extensive overview of the operation of most of a Red Hat Linux system. Other systems are similar.
Technically, an XML parser shouldn't parse anything until the entire document has been read. This may be infeasable for web browsers.
Mabie the browsers should pop up a dialog like the following when they encounter non-conformant HTML:
In the conclusion of this trial, the judge made the following statement:
I believe that he should have immediately followed it by this:
This second quote comes from Robert A. Heinlien's short story "Life-line" and is one of the most insightful legal quotes I've ever heard.
Actually, the current W3C HTML reccommendation (XHTML 1.0) considers fault tolerance to be a *bug* for a user agent. If it's not well formed XML, the browser should barf.
There is a simple solution to such a problem: Include OS informaton with the data sent when the game is registered, and require registration to play the game (or to play it multiplayer, whichever would work most cleanly).
Require all users to sign up and get a username/password. Before assigning a username/password to anyone require that they or their parents (if they are under 18) sign a form accepting your non-responsibility for web content.
If weed were legal it could be purchased from reliable sources; it could even be regulated by the FDA. As long as it remains illegal it will be a bigger problem than it ever could be as a legal substance.
Although he may be getting a fuckload of money for running it, this is still Rob's homepage. If you don't like it -- go make your own.
And you really think the FTC is going to do anything more than unconstitutionally limiting your rights as a human being?
Then you open up stenofs level one, which hides your collection of "Hot babes in bikinis" which you had encrypted to "hide from your wife".
Have you ever heard the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"? The earth is a small and fragile basket.
I say that at least some of humanity should get off this soggy mudball ASAP, before we get hit by a meteor, or a kilogram of antimater suddenly appears in the earth's core because of a quantom glitch, or whatever.
We already have all the technology, standards, and most of the protocals for a Snow Crash like Multiverse. What we don't have is sufficient bandwith.
Actually, we could build something significantly better than the Snow Crash Multiverse with current standards (i.e. Ditch the major security holes everywhere)
We don't need standing fedral armed forces on the scale that the US now has them.
The US constitution doesn't allow for *any* fedral standing armed forces.
I'll agree that some US national defense is a good plan, but a gigantic standing army supported by a fedral income tax is not appropriate for a republic, and is especially inappropriate and unnessisary for the United States of America. There are all kinds of other good ways of doing it.
I'm a big science fiction fan. This is one of the first movies that I've ever seen that:
My favorite thing about this movie is the implementation details. (Let's hide the Titan in a field of ice crystals, The main charactor is working on spaceship salvage operation, The bad guys are energy beings, He decides to call the new planet "Planet Bob")
I also really liked the graphics in the movie. It was pretty.
The story was simple but acceptable. It had to be simple, otherwise it wouldn't have fit in a 90 minute movie. But even being simple and short, it showed evidence of there being all kinds of intresting background that there wasn't time to expand upon in the movie. It showed signs that it could be expanded into a good 3-500 page novel.
The things that I didn't like were mostly the standard things that piss me off in every outer space movie I ever see. Spaceships flying like airplanes, All the aliens being humanoid, etc. I really can't complain two much, because no one's ever done it differently.
Jon Katz compares the movie to Star Wars, which isn't even really sci-fi, it's fantasy. He then goes on to complain that it's not funny or scary enough. It wasn't trying to be funny or scary. Eithor would have wrecked this good movie.
Well, at least if people are going to rat on this movie, they should point out any other similar movie done better. I really can't think of one...
Do you know what percentage of the fedral income tax revinue is used for "maintaining the country's infrastructure"?
Do you know what portion of the infrastructure that the US fedral government supports is acutally worth supporting?
To anyone:
Name some piece of "nessisary infrastructure" that the fedral government actually supports with the income tax, and I'll give you $5 U.S. if I can't show that one of the following is true: (I'm poor or cheap, so I'll only pay the first person to come up with such an item.)
As far as I can tell, the things actually supported by the income tax mostly involve subsidising stuff so that americans don't have to notice the realities of living in a capitolist economy.
Social security is also a crock of shit. The chances of anyone who put money into it getting similar amounts of money back out of it are infintesimal. All it does is supports a socialist welfare state.
The lack of a 4 day workweek is a result of the political and economic systems you are working in.
The particiular form of capitolism used the USA and many other parts of the world today tends to optimise for the wealth of corporate shareholders, not the shortest work week for average workers.
The high taxes and low efficiency of usage in the USA just compound this problem. If there were no income tax and no social security collection, that would straight out allow a 3 or 4 day work week, because everyone would just have more money.
The QPL is a "open source" licence, and it meets the DFSG. A program, like KDE, that links QPL code with GPL code violates the GPL, and is therefore ILLEGAL to distribute.