I was referring to a little bit less direct input of nuclear fusion power into the water cycle -- the big yellow fusion-powered light in the big blue room tends to heat the surface of the water to the point that evaporation into open air is possible.
1. Maybe NZ was inhabited by birds and mammals at one time, the lot of them got wiped out, and birds repopulated it from beyond water by island hopping but mammals didn't swim as far as the birds could fly. Maybe this one mouse fossil is from just before the catastrophe.
2. Maybe it really was eaten elsewhere and was part of a dropping.
3. Maybe only a few mammals that didn't make the evolutionary cut ever got onto NZ, and they died out before the big explosion in mammal evolution started.
4. Maybe a swallow from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" carried this there in its talons like a coconut.
5. Maybe the jaw is from some kind of early bat -- it's a mammal, yet it does what birds do, like flying and eating insects and fruits. I'm not sure a bat could make it to NZ from anywhere, nor that any bats evolved by that point. It's probably as feasiable an explanation as #4 until there's a reason to believe otherwise.
One possibility is that this thing and all like it were already as dead as it is now. It's difficult for your offspring to evolve if you don't survive long enough to produce offspring.
What I'd really like to know is why they didn't just offer to pay a huge amount for an ad on Dean's site rather than badgering him with threats of a frivolous lawsuit. Problem solved, since they'd be getting traffic via his rank.
If a person beats another person for coercive purposes, that's illegal. If a person makes a threat of physical violence in order to get someone to change their behavior, that's illegal. If a person files a frivolous lawsuit that can be illegal. When is it going to be illegal to threaten suits with absolutely no ground behind them? It's coercion. The suit would be frivolous. Using a threat of a frivolous or grounds-less lawsuit for coercion should be illegal, just as using threat of violence is illegal. Lawsuits are only tools for legitimate claims on legitimate grounds, and any sort of blackmail or attorney chest-beating should be punishable.
Anyone who deals in designing or hosting web sites professionally as a service to other companies will tell you there are plenty of idiots doing business online.
Why would compatibility under Linux be a surprise?
If I write a well-behaved program for Solaris, NetBSD, plan9 or OS X doe you think it's easier to get that running under Linux or Windows? If I put an OS on my machine with a 3Com, Linksys, or Intel network card and have to provide a driver disk, am I more likely installing a version of Linux or a version of Windows? If I write a program in Perl on Solaris, NetBSD, OS X, or plan9 am I going to have more or fewer issues getting it to behave as expected on Windows?
Seriously, people, just because some vendors put out hardware with drivers for one specific version of Windows included doesn't mean that Windows itself is anything special for compatibility purposes. That's the hardware vendor catering to the OS -- not all versions of Windows, but just the one the driver happens to be for. It's Microsoft catering to your needs. Ever try to throw a spare 10Mbit ISA NIC into a machine for a couple of hours under XP, only to find out that the newest driver for it under Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and that driver doesn't work with XP? Ever try to run any Token Ring networking under XP?
Windows compatibility is not what you seem to think it is. Just because you happen to buy all your junk peripherals around the same time as your OS doesn't mean your OS works with as wide a range of peripherals as the other options out there.
Sure, most versions of Linux may take a while to have a driver for your $3 modem or your $5 NIC. Enthusiast gaming video cards that only get used to their potential by the latest Windows games anyway might not have decent (if any) working drivers under Linux for a while after launch. Most versions of Linux, though, support a lot more devices than all versions of Windows combined do out of the box. Additional drivers from hardware manufacturers will make the one or two versions of Windows each device is targeted at work with that device while the Linux driver is developed as an afterthought or by a third party. That's not a virtue of Windows. It's a lackluster but quite understandable decision by the hardware manufacturer to choose the profits associated with higher margins rather than the pride and high regard among techies associated with broader development and support costs.
You can say that component and peripheral manufacturers should focus only on profit or that they should focus more on pride, customer loyalty, corporate image, or whatever. When it comes down to it, though, most companies are organized exclusively for purposes of turning a profit. No matter what you make of human values and corporate values, that's a whole societal issue that goes beyond the scope of just Linux, BSD, Solaris, plan9, or whatever drivers.
Sorry, but that had to be done. Of course, I would be very surprised if someone didn't get NetBSD running on anything resembling a semi-modern x86-based system within a week. NetBSD is about portability and code correctness. A vanilla x86 with common peripherals, emulated or not, doesn't seem very exotic a place to which to port.
Nobody claimed that "New for nerds" or "Stuff that matters" is "Fair and Balanced". Last I checked, Rupert Murdoch had yet to buy OSTG.
OTOH, does OpenSuse 10.2 really matter to/. readers right now, after all the MS-Novell news we just had? Did that not cover "the upcoming OpenSuse 10.2" enough for you? That is to ask, is it really news?
Do you think people reading/. really want to run out and buy MS Linux 1.0 -- err, "Open"Suse 10.2 as much as they want to know about the progress of actual open software? That is it really more relevant than the story of Firefox 3 alpha, "Gran Paradiso"?
BTW, I'm posting this from Firefox 3 alpha, but not from "Open"Suse 10.2 -- actually, I'm on Windows XP right now, but a Mandriva 2006 box sits next to me, and I'm hopping onto it when I get done with/. for the morning. It'll probably have the alpha on it this afternoon, especially since Firefox 2.0 makes the colors on KDE 3.4 a little odd using my current video driver. I'm hoping Gran Paradiso fixes that.
So for my take, Gran Paradiso is more newsworthy, newer information, and more relevant than OpenSuse 10.2 altogether. I use Mandriva, Ubuntu, Windows XP, and OS X at home and Mandriva and XP at work. I use Firefox on all of them. I have a feeling I'm not alone in the fact tht I don't use OpenSuse yet I use Firefox. So why is it that OpenSuse would be more relevant, exactly?
The Windows 9x family of OSes doesn't have NTFS. FAT16 and FAT32 do not have file access restrictions. It doesn't have effective registry access controls. A stock install of any Win9x doesn't authenticate users. Win9x allows any user's account to alter the startup of the system to include memory-resident programs that run at startup or when any user logs in. If you're really interested in security, you are not running a stock Win9x platform. Not just viruses and bugs are at issue, but design decisions too.
As for full DOS support, there's always DOSbox, multiboot solutions galore, VMware, and -- get this, this one may sound crazy -- old hardware with DOS on it.
People worried about security updates for their browser shouldn't be using operating systems that get no security updates -- namely, Windows 95 and Windows 98.
There are a number of security issues in your OS that no browser can smooth over.
On the other hand, Mandriva 2006, Ubuntu 6, Xandros 3, NetBSD, and Mac OS X 10.2 all run reasonably well on 500Mhz systems with 256MB of RAM (albeit OS X on a 500Mhz Mac instead of a PC). I haven't run Solaris, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD much recently, but I'd bet you could get at least Solaris and OpenBSD to run comfortably on that type of system, too. Other than OS X, all of these are available for free (as in beer) download. Some do have commercial versions with more support. OS X generally comes with the hardware that runs it, although a 500Mhz system probably originally came with OS 9 instead.
If you really want old, I have a 386sx 16Mhz laptop with 5MB of RAM and an 80MB HD running SmallLinux with Links. Perhaps I should complain that there's no support for OpenGL 2.0 on my system or something...
I seem to remember from my sixth-grade science project that pure water doesn't split using electrolysis very well because it's too good an insulator. The research I did (in the 1980's) suggested that out of household chemicals easily available to me, I could add either vinegar or table salt to get the process to operate faster. After trying some different levels of each, I chose to add a little of both to the water in my final demonstration.
If you're concerned about putting a little metal into the oceans, perhaps floating oil rigs, submarines, torpedoes, and deep mineral mine runoff should be targets before anodes and cathodes on electrolysis equipment. The oil and agricultural chemicals we're putting in the water now are pretty bad, too. If your alternative fuel is alcohol, then count on more agricultural chemicals allegedly causing infertility, learning disorders, and other health problems downstream.
If we make hydrogen from seawater, then burn the hydrogen, then we're making clean, desalinated water. That can be used for drinking water, irrigation, or whatever. If it's released into the atmosphere, it'll become clouds and rain -- at a faster rate than through natural evaporation. As for how we use the hydrogen once we have it in sufficient quantities, sustainable hydrogen fusion in traditional local and regional centralized power plants may be a future option.
Nuclear fusion has already been used for thousands of years to desalinate seawater for irrigation -- it's called the water cycle.
It's not really human-centric, although the idea of "claim" is human-centric or animal-centric I suppose. The real weakness in it I see looking back is that it's integer-centric, since you can't really have 1/10 of a person claiming anything other than space and scavengers.
How many empty 10" rubber balloons does it take to raise your rock with mass m1 in 1g at one atmosphere? That's right, an infinite number of balloons that have zero lifting power cannot lift even the lightest stone. Now, start putting helium in those balloons, and the number of balloons actually matters. That's still a bit integer-specific if you don't allow for variances in the balloons or the filling of them, because half a balloon won't hold helium. You can, however, find a different balloon somewhere that has half the volume, or fill one to 3/4 of its total volume. You could also just count 0.5 or 0.0001 or whatever of the last balloon as surplus. Enough balloons able to lift their own weight (yes, weight is just as relevant as mass in this particular scenario) pus even a little more can lift a really heavy rock, but an infinite number of balloons without any lifting ability at all still can't lift anything.
What is needed is a precedence for those two rules.
1. 0/x gives 0. 2. if x != 0, x/x gives 1
That way, 0/0 = 0, 1/1 = 1, 2/2 = 1... Which makes practical sense. The series looks like (... 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1...), which makes some sense, because 0 is after all, special.
That still doesn't provide for a general x/0 solution. Given the above, we'd still be at (... ?, ?, ?, 0, ?, ?, ?...) for the series x/0 and the point of TFA is x/0 altogether.
Since x/0 == 1/0 * x we must define 1/0 in order to define x/0. How do you define 1/0 ?:
a. Is 1/0 part of x/0 -- then we must define x/0 to define x/0 -- a circular problem. b. Is 1/0 an arbitrary exception to x/0 -- if so, is that by arbitrary definition? What would it be defined to be? c. Is 1/0 a fuzzy set of [0...1] or [0...x] or maybe [0...+inf] -- if so, does it collapse into an integer/real/imaginary/complex or something when observed, like a quantum state?
That's the problem as I see it. I'm not a mathematician, but this issue fascinates me and I've read and thought about it quite a bit (yes, I know that's geeky even by/. standards).
Time for a word problem... Okay, imagine you walk down the street and find a $10 bill on the sidewalk. Currently, that $10 is divided by zero -- no one owns any part of it. How do we solve the problem in the real world? Well, if you're walking alone, you do what we call claiming it, which is adding 1 to the denominator. So it's 10/1, yielding you $10. If you and a friend are walking together and decide to share the bounty, that's 10/2, yielding you $5. If nobody ever claims that $10, where's the value? The whole $10 is useless until there's a claim on it. So before it is seen in the street, it's worth $0 to everyone (no matter how many people there are that haven't seen it -- up to an infinite number of people that haven't claimed it have zero value out of it). Once someone sees it, it's worth $10/x, with x being the number of people splitting the claim.
If you skimmed that, you might ask, "10/0 == 0 * +inf ??? What is 0 * +inf ??? is that 0 ???" _But_, we don't count he people who _don't_ claim it, just like we didn't for 10/1. The number of people who don't claim it still get 0 no matter whether someone has claimed it or not. Maybe it's 10/0 == [0...10] ?
Reasoning from the money example, I'm tempted towards the following ideas, but I wouldn't claim this is really my philosophical stance on the idea. It's just musings. The $10 on the street is really not worth anything to anyone until it is claimed. But is that the same as zero? Is the lack of a divisor really the lack of value? The $10 bill is still worth a total of $10, but it's not worth that _to_ anyone until it is claimed. It's like there really is a quantum set/fuzzy set here of [0...10], and the condition of its collapse is that there must be a non-zero denominator. If someone needs $10, and people step forward to chip in towards that need, that's a negative $10. So -10/2 (two people share the cost) is -5 (they each chip in $5). Until the debt is covered, it's -10/0 which is -10/0 == [0...-10]. So that leads me to say it's really x/0 = [0...x] and not anything to do with absolute values. Is saying that x/0 = [0...x] the same as saying it's undefined? Or is calling it a superposition of all number from 0 to x that is waiting for a denominator to collapse a definition in itself? I'm not comfortable making that call, even just playing around with the concept. I don't have the math background to try to prove these intuitions and musings, but it'd be fun to see someone work on it.
1. demolish your house 2. build a tall A-frame house with a roof/side facing the Equator 3. solar panel that roof/side 4. prof... err... save some money on electric bills
Seriously, when are people going to realize that allowing telecommuting for desk monkeys is the most sensible way for the information-heavy economies of the world to conserve power? Right now, to get to work and do my job there, I have to shovel snow, melt ice (with salt that had to be mined from somewhere), start a car, drive it to the office, have enough space (heated and lit) for me at the office for me to work, where they shovel snow (with a tractor) and melt ice to make the parking lot safe and accessible. If I worked from home, the space for my part of the office building could be used for agriculture, power generation, housing for the poor, or whatever. How many millions of times over could one office space be saved by letting a salesperson, programmer, engineer, or whatever work from space they're already paying for?
Sure, a conference room would still be needed for meetings, but several small companies can share those or rent them on an as-needed basis. Large companies already have those besides the cubicle farms they're paying everyone to occupy.
Printing more money has proven in the past to be inflationary, and that it would be makes sense. While a little bit of inflation is the friend of of the working man, a lot of it at once is bad for everybody. A balance might be struck there that does indeed help, but it can't be taken to extremes.
One of the biggest problems with the U.S. economy is the whole Information Economy idea. Yes, computers and networks and the right kinds of software make work much more efficient. No, having enough computers, software, and networks will not make any real work get done if we're not making anything in the first place. We're making intellectual property investments protected by U.S. laws, spending our money from that on Chinese goods, and seeing the money spent in China spent on counterfeit Chinese versions of our U.S. software, movies, music, and whatever else. Meanwhile, China is not being punished but is officially enjoying "Normal Trade Relations". China, of course, is only one example, but is the biggest example. Unless counterfeit goods can be stifled, manufacturing is still the answer to long-term stability and prosperity.
The U.S. has always been a manufacturing powerhouse, and it still is. The US does not have the kind of manufacturing leadership role it could though because it's cheaper in the short term to outsource labor or to build whole American-owned factories in China, India, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or any number of other countries than to streamline manufacturing processes and automate factories in the U.S. for long-term prosperity. One of the biggest reasons for this is health-care costs in the U.S. -- GM and Ford, for example, have health care for current and retired workers as one of their biggest line items in their budgets.
In 2004, GM reported its liabilities for retiree health benefits alone to exceed $61,000,000,000 USD. That's 2004 dollars unadjusted for inflation, as far as I can tell. Compare that to New Zealand's 2005 estimated GDP of $101,685,000,000 USD. Maybe compare it against the 2005 GDP of Latvia at $29,214,000,000 USD. It's not hard to see that unfettered lawsuits against doctors, huge inefficiencies in health care, huge drugs costs, and other things are damaging the bottom line for big manufacturers in the U.S. at all. How to best solve the health care issue may not be clear, but that it needs to be solved should be like plate glass to anyone concerned.
The summary says it'll be a plug-in. Even if OOo doesn't take the contribution, which I don't think it should given the recent MSNovell debacle, I'd still hardly call distributing a plug-in that the core project doesn't distribute a fork. Now, if they decided to put the code into the main tree of their version, that might be a fork. If they made ClosedXML the default, that'd definitely be a fork.
Sounds like Chicago tollbooths, really. How much sooner would the six-lane wide roads around Chicago be paid for if the fourteen-lane wide manned tollbooths weren't constantly being repaired and upgraded? Indiana, Kansas, and Pennsylvania at least all have at least some tollways where you get a ticket when you enter and pay according to mileage when you exit. Not Chicago. You could have to stop and pay six or seven tolls in a twenty-mile stretch depending on your route. Every toll plaza is wider than the main road, has booths and enforcement hardware, and has human workers present. It's a government works project more than revenue to pay for the roads.
Most of those IRS agents could become useful contributors to the economy if the IRS was about 90% smaller. Think about how much more in taxes there could be if we had that many more productive workers paying taxes instead of being paid from them.
The Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee has in fact said that only when real money is made from playing a game or from selling virtual assets is there a taxable event in the real world.
There's no such thing as a Linden Dollar in the real world, either. It's a game. The Matrix may have you, but I do not believe that Monopoly money is taxable in U.S. currency.
A retail store doesn't pay sales taxes on items sitting on the shelves. There's no sales tax until there's a sale. If I build a bookcase in my home for my own use, I'm not taxed on the possibility that I'll sell it. Income is only taxed as income once it's received as... income.
So why in the world would anyone stand for being taxed for doing well in a game? You're paying taxes on your real income, then you're paying for the sign-up kit, paying taxes on the sign-up kit, then you're paying taxes on the network access needed to play, (I'll ignore the full cost of network access since one hopefully uses their connection for other things too), then you're paying taxes on the subscription, using your unpaid time to have fun in the game world, then they want to tax you because you play the game well?
So someone's mind is actually spinning, "Must... level.. playing... field... in... computer... games..."? Someone get Vonnegut on the phone, Harrison Bergeron's just been spotted playing Anarchy Online.
Firstly, an economic model is about economics. If you make profit the only scale on which you measure your self-worth then that's your own malfunction. Social skills, freedom, happiness, sex, wildflowers, raising children, working at something you love to do, and just about everything else in life are tangentially related to profit at most.
The U.S.S.R. wasn't capitalist, and its government was pretty damned self-serving. P.R.China is officially not capitalist, and their government is pretty damned self-serving. Canada and many European countries are capitalist with socialist leanings, and yet don't get the flack the U.S. does about being self-serving.
The U.S. tried to stay out of both WWI and WWII. We tried to be neutral. We tried not to put our noses in other people's business. What happened? Zimmerman happened. The Lusitania happened. Pearl Harbor happened. We rebuilt Germany and Japan. We set them on the road to peace.
So, we tried to help people who wanted help. South Korea. South Vietnam. The Contras. The Mujahadeen (sp?). Lebanon. Bosnia, per the U.N. Somalia, per the U.N. Kuwait, per the U.N. again. Saudi Arabia, by request of that country's government. What happened? The the Beirut USMC barracks got bombed. The WTC got bombed. The U.S.S. Cole got attacked. The WTC got attacked again and was destroyed. The Pentagon was attacked. Four planefuls of people were murdered as part of those attacks in addition to those at the targets. You know what Beirut, the Cole, the WTC, the Pentagon, our embassies, the trains in Spain, the tubes in London, and the the planes hijacked for murder have in common? They were all destroyed because countries like the U.S., Spain, and the U.K. believe in helping the people in other countries when they are asked. The very so-called freedom fighters that we helped escape Soviet occupation in Afghanistan turned right around and attacked us for being on Saudi soil when the Saudi government asked us to be there.
Israeli civilians get blown up all the time because their military accidentally kills a few innocent people when they take out rocket-firing militia men. This despite the fact that Israel is trying to give the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. Israel is forcing its own citizens to move because it wants to give land it took legally in a war in which it was invaded to people who support the destruction of Israel. One of the biggest popular excuses for hating the U.S. right now is that the U.S. supports the very right of Israel to exist. If being so interested in preserving another country which itself is willing to give up part of its land to likely enemies is self-serving, then your vocabulary must come from some language other than English.
Just because you believe Marx was a grand guy, don't go and degrade everything in the world that has ever touched money.
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I was referring to a little bit less direct input of nuclear fusion power into the water cycle -- the big yellow fusion-powered light in the big blue room tends to heat the surface of the water to the point that evaporation into open air is possible.
Just a very few possibilities:
1. Maybe NZ was inhabited by birds and mammals at one time, the lot of them got wiped out, and birds repopulated it from beyond water by island hopping but mammals didn't swim as far as the birds could fly. Maybe this one mouse fossil is from just before the catastrophe.
2. Maybe it really was eaten elsewhere and was part of a dropping.
3. Maybe only a few mammals that didn't make the evolutionary cut ever got onto NZ, and they died out before the big explosion in mammal evolution started.
4. Maybe a swallow from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" carried this there in its talons like a coconut.
5. Maybe the jaw is from some kind of early bat -- it's a mammal, yet it does what birds do, like flying and eating insects and fruits. I'm not sure a bat could make it to NZ from anywhere, nor that any bats evolved by that point. It's probably as feasiable an explanation as #4 until there's a reason to believe otherwise.
One possibility is that this thing and all like it were already as dead as it is now. It's difficult for your offspring to evolve if you don't survive long enough to produce offspring.
What I'd really like to know is why they didn't just offer to pay a huge amount for an ad on Dean's site rather than badgering him with threats of a frivolous lawsuit. Problem solved, since they'd be getting traffic via his rank.
If a person beats another person for coercive purposes, that's illegal. If a person makes a threat of physical violence in order to get someone to change their behavior, that's illegal. If a person files a frivolous lawsuit that can be illegal. When is it going to be illegal to threaten suits with absolutely no ground behind them? It's coercion. The suit would be frivolous. Using a threat of a frivolous or grounds-less lawsuit for coercion should be illegal, just as using threat of violence is illegal. Lawsuits are only tools for legitimate claims on legitimate grounds, and any sort of blackmail or attorney chest-beating should be punishable.
Anyone who deals in designing or hosting web sites professionally as a service to other companies will tell you there are plenty of idiots doing business online.
Why would compatibility under Linux be a surprise?
If I write a well-behaved program for Solaris, NetBSD, plan9 or OS X doe you think it's easier to get that running under Linux or Windows? If I put an OS on my machine with a 3Com, Linksys, or Intel network card and have to provide a driver disk, am I more likely installing a version of Linux or a version of Windows? If I write a program in Perl on Solaris, NetBSD, OS X, or plan9 am I going to have more or fewer issues getting it to behave as expected on Windows?
Seriously, people, just because some vendors put out hardware with drivers for one specific version of Windows included doesn't mean that Windows itself is anything special for compatibility purposes. That's the hardware vendor catering to the OS -- not all versions of Windows, but just the one the driver happens to be for. It's Microsoft catering to your needs. Ever try to throw a spare 10Mbit ISA NIC into a machine for a couple of hours under XP, only to find out that the newest driver for it under Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and that driver doesn't work with XP? Ever try to run any Token Ring networking under XP?
Windows compatibility is not what you seem to think it is. Just because you happen to buy all your junk peripherals around the same time as your OS doesn't mean your OS works with as wide a range of peripherals as the other options out there.
Sure, most versions of Linux may take a while to have a driver for your $3 modem or your $5 NIC. Enthusiast gaming video cards that only get used to their potential by the latest Windows games anyway might not have decent (if any) working drivers under Linux for a while after launch. Most versions of Linux, though, support a lot more devices than all versions of Windows combined do out of the box. Additional drivers from hardware manufacturers will make the one or two versions of Windows each device is targeted at work with that device while the Linux driver is developed as an afterthought or by a third party. That's not a virtue of Windows. It's a lackluster but quite understandable decision by the hardware manufacturer to choose the profits associated with higher margins rather than the pride and high regard among techies associated with broader development and support costs.
You can say that component and peripheral manufacturers should focus only on profit or that they should focus more on pride, customer loyalty, corporate image, or whatever. When it comes down to it, though, most companies are organized exclusively for purposes of turning a profit. No matter what you make of human values and corporate values, that's a whole societal issue that goes beyond the scope of just Linux, BSD, Solaris, plan9, or whatever drivers.
Of course it runs NetBSD!
Sorry, but that had to be done. Of course, I would be very surprised if someone didn't get NetBSD running on anything resembling a semi-modern x86-based system within a week. NetBSD is about portability and code correctness. A vanilla x86 with common peripherals, emulated or not, doesn't seem very exotic a place to which to port.
Nobody claimed that "New for nerds" or "Stuff that matters" is "Fair and Balanced". Last I checked, Rupert Murdoch had yet to buy OSTG.
/. readers right now, after all the MS-Novell news we just had? Did that not cover "the upcoming OpenSuse 10.2" enough for you? That is to ask, is it really news?
/. really want to run out and buy MS Linux 1.0 -- err, "Open"Suse 10.2 as much as they want to know about the progress of actual open software? That is it really more relevant than the story of Firefox 3 alpha, "Gran Paradiso"?
/. for the morning. It'll probably have the alpha on it this afternoon, especially since Firefox 2.0 makes the colors on KDE 3.4 a little odd using my current video driver. I'm hoping Gran Paradiso fixes that.
OTOH, does OpenSuse 10.2 really matter to
Do you think people reading
BTW, I'm posting this from Firefox 3 alpha, but not from "Open"Suse 10.2 -- actually, I'm on Windows XP right now, but a Mandriva 2006 box sits next to me, and I'm hopping onto it when I get done with
So for my take, Gran Paradiso is more newsworthy, newer information, and more relevant than OpenSuse 10.2 altogether. I use Mandriva, Ubuntu, Windows XP, and OS X at home and Mandriva and XP at work. I use Firefox on all of them. I have a feeling I'm not alone in the fact tht I don't use OpenSuse yet I use Firefox. So why is it that OpenSuse would be more relevant, exactly?
The Windows 9x family of OSes doesn't have NTFS. FAT16 and FAT32 do not have file access restrictions. It doesn't have effective registry access controls. A stock install of any Win9x doesn't authenticate users. Win9x allows any user's account to alter the startup of the system to include memory-resident programs that run at startup or when any user logs in. If you're really interested in security, you are not running a stock Win9x platform. Not just viruses and bugs are at issue, but design decisions too.
As for full DOS support, there's always DOSbox, multiboot solutions galore, VMware, and -- get this, this one may sound crazy -- old hardware with DOS on it.
Maybe Canonical should step up and offer MySQL support on Ubuntu.
People worried about security updates for their browser shouldn't be using operating systems that get no security updates -- namely, Windows 95 and Windows 98.
There are a number of security issues in your OS that no browser can smooth over.
On the other hand, Mandriva 2006, Ubuntu 6, Xandros 3, NetBSD, and Mac OS X 10.2 all run reasonably well on 500Mhz systems with 256MB of RAM (albeit OS X on a 500Mhz Mac instead of a PC). I haven't run Solaris, OpenBSD, or FreeBSD much recently, but I'd bet you could get at least Solaris and OpenBSD to run comfortably on that type of system, too. Other than OS X, all of these are available for free (as in beer) download. Some do have commercial versions with more support. OS X generally comes with the hardware that runs it, although a 500Mhz system probably originally came with OS 9 instead.
If you really want old, I have a 386sx 16Mhz laptop with 5MB of RAM and an 80MB HD running SmallLinux with Links. Perhaps I should complain that there's no support for OpenGL 2.0 on my system or something...
I seem to remember from my sixth-grade science project that pure water doesn't split using electrolysis very well because it's too good an insulator. The research I did (in the 1980's) suggested that out of household chemicals easily available to me, I could add either vinegar or table salt to get the process to operate faster. After trying some different levels of each, I chose to add a little of both to the water in my final demonstration.
If you're concerned about putting a little metal into the oceans, perhaps floating oil rigs, submarines, torpedoes, and deep mineral mine runoff should be targets before anodes and cathodes on electrolysis equipment. The oil and agricultural chemicals we're putting in the water now are pretty bad, too. If your alternative fuel is alcohol, then count on more agricultural chemicals allegedly causing infertility, learning disorders, and other health problems downstream.
If we make hydrogen from seawater, then burn the hydrogen, then we're making clean, desalinated water. That can be used for drinking water, irrigation, or whatever. If it's released into the atmosphere, it'll become clouds and rain -- at a faster rate than through natural evaporation. As for how we use the hydrogen once we have it in sufficient quantities, sustainable hydrogen fusion in traditional local and regional centralized power plants may be a future option.
Nuclear fusion has already been used for thousands of years to desalinate seawater for irrigation -- it's called the water cycle.
It's not really human-centric, although the idea of "claim" is human-centric or animal-centric I suppose. The real weakness in it I see looking back is that it's integer-centric, since you can't really have 1/10 of a person claiming anything other than space and scavengers.
How many empty 10" rubber balloons does it take to raise your rock with mass m1 in 1g at one atmosphere? That's right, an infinite number of balloons that have zero lifting power cannot lift even the lightest stone. Now, start putting helium in those balloons, and the number of balloons actually matters. That's still a bit integer-specific if you don't allow for variances in the balloons or the filling of them, because half a balloon won't hold helium. You can, however, find a different balloon somewhere that has half the volume, or fill one to 3/4 of its total volume. You could also just count 0.5 or 0.0001 or whatever of the last balloon as surplus. Enough balloons able to lift their own weight (yes, weight is just as relevant as mass in this particular scenario) pus even a little more can lift a really heavy rock, but an infinite number of balloons without any lifting ability at all still can't lift anything.
What is needed is a precedence for those two rules.
...), which makes some sense, because 0 is after all, special.
...) for the series x/0 and the point of TFA is x/0 altogether.
/. standards).
1. 0/x gives 0.
2. if x != 0, x/x gives 1
That way, 0/0 = 0, 1/1 = 1, 2/2 = 1... Which makes practical sense. The series looks like (... 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1
That still doesn't provide for a general x/0 solution. Given the above, we'd still be at (... ?, ?, ?, 0, ?, ?, ?
Since x/0 == 1/0 * x we must define 1/0 in order to define x/0. How do you define 1/0 ?:
a. Is 1/0 part of x/0 -- then we must define x/0 to define x/0 -- a circular problem.
b. Is 1/0 an arbitrary exception to x/0 -- if so, is that by arbitrary definition? What would it be defined to be?
c. Is 1/0 a fuzzy set of [0...1] or [0...x] or maybe [0...+inf] -- if so, does it collapse into an integer/real/imaginary/complex or something when observed, like a quantum state?
That's the problem as I see it. I'm not a mathematician, but this issue fascinates me and I've read and thought about it quite a bit (yes, I know that's geeky even by
Time for a word problem... Okay, imagine you walk down the street and find a $10 bill on the sidewalk. Currently, that $10 is divided by zero -- no one owns any part of it. How do we solve the problem in the real world? Well, if you're walking alone, you do what we call claiming it, which is adding 1 to the denominator. So it's 10/1, yielding you $10. If you and a friend are walking together and decide to share the bounty, that's 10/2, yielding you $5. If nobody ever claims that $10, where's the value? The whole $10 is useless until there's a claim on it. So before it is seen in the street, it's worth $0 to everyone (no matter how many people there are that haven't seen it -- up to an infinite number of people that haven't claimed it have zero value out of it). Once someone sees it, it's worth $10/x, with x being the number of people splitting the claim.
If you skimmed that, you might ask, "10/0 == 0 * +inf ??? What is 0 * +inf ??? is that 0 ???" _But_, we don't count he people who _don't_ claim it, just like we didn't for 10/1. The number of people who don't claim it still get 0 no matter whether someone has claimed it or not. Maybe it's 10/0 == [0...10] ?
Reasoning from the money example, I'm tempted towards the following ideas, but I wouldn't claim this is really my philosophical stance on the idea. It's just musings. The $10 on the street is really not worth anything to anyone until it is claimed. But is that the same as zero? Is the lack of a divisor really the lack of value? The $10 bill is still worth a total of $10, but it's not worth that _to_ anyone until it is claimed. It's like there really is a quantum set/fuzzy set here of [0...10], and the condition of its collapse is that there must be a non-zero denominator. If someone needs $10, and people step forward to chip in towards that need, that's a negative $10. So -10/2 (two people share the cost) is -5 (they each chip in $5). Until the debt is covered, it's -10/0 which is -10/0 == [0...-10]. So that leads me to say it's really x/0 = [0...x] and not anything to do with absolute values. Is saying that x/0 = [0...x] the same as saying it's undefined? Or is calling it a superposition of all number from 0 to x that is waiting for a denominator to collapse a definition in itself? I'm not comfortable making that call, even just playing around with the concept. I don't have the math background to try to prove these intuitions and musings, but it'd be fun to see someone work on it.
1. demolish your house
2. build a tall A-frame house with a roof/side facing the Equator
3. solar panel that roof/side
4. prof... err... save some money on electric bills
Seriously, when are people going to realize that allowing telecommuting for desk monkeys is the most sensible way for the information-heavy economies of the world to conserve power? Right now, to get to work and do my job there, I have to shovel snow, melt ice (with salt that had to be mined from somewhere), start a car, drive it to the office, have enough space (heated and lit) for me at the office for me to work, where they shovel snow (with a tractor) and melt ice to make the parking lot safe and accessible. If I worked from home, the space for my part of the office building could be used for agriculture, power generation, housing for the poor, or whatever. How many millions of times over could one office space be saved by letting a salesperson, programmer, engineer, or whatever work from space they're already paying for?
Sure, a conference room would still be needed for meetings, but several small companies can share those or rent them on an as-needed basis. Large companies already have those besides the cubicle farms they're paying everyone to occupy.
Printing more money has proven in the past to be inflationary, and that it would be makes sense. While a little bit of inflation is the friend of of the working man, a lot of it at once is bad for everybody. A balance might be struck there that does indeed help, but it can't be taken to extremes.
One of the biggest problems with the U.S. economy is the whole Information Economy idea. Yes, computers and networks and the right kinds of software make work much more efficient. No, having enough computers, software, and networks will not make any real work get done if we're not making anything in the first place. We're making intellectual property investments protected by U.S. laws, spending our money from that on Chinese goods, and seeing the money spent in China spent on counterfeit Chinese versions of our U.S. software, movies, music, and whatever else. Meanwhile, China is not being punished but is officially enjoying "Normal Trade Relations". China, of course, is only one example, but is the biggest example. Unless counterfeit goods can be stifled, manufacturing is still the answer to long-term stability and prosperity.
The U.S. has always been a manufacturing powerhouse, and it still is. The US does not have the kind of manufacturing leadership role it could though because it's cheaper in the short term to outsource labor or to build whole American-owned factories in China, India, Guatemala, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, or any number of other countries than to streamline manufacturing processes and automate factories in the U.S. for long-term prosperity. One of the biggest reasons for this is health-care costs in the U.S. -- GM and Ford, for example, have health care for current and retired workers as one of their biggest line items in their budgets.
In 2004, GM reported its liabilities for retiree health benefits alone to exceed $61,000,000,000 USD. That's 2004 dollars unadjusted for inflation, as far as I can tell. Compare that to New Zealand's 2005 estimated GDP of $101,685,000,000 USD. Maybe compare it against the 2005 GDP of Latvia at $29,214,000,000 USD. It's not hard to see that unfettered lawsuits against doctors, huge inefficiencies in health care, huge drugs costs, and other things are damaging the bottom line for big manufacturers in the U.S. at all. How to best solve the health care issue may not be clear, but that it needs to be solved should be like plate glass to anyone concerned.
The summary says it'll be a plug-in. Even if OOo doesn't take the contribution, which I don't think it should given the recent MSNovell debacle, I'd still hardly call distributing a plug-in that the core project doesn't distribute a fork. Now, if they decided to put the code into the main tree of their version, that might be a fork. If they made ClosedXML the default, that'd definitely be a fork.
Sounds like Chicago tollbooths, really. How much sooner would the six-lane wide roads around Chicago be paid for if the fourteen-lane wide manned tollbooths weren't constantly being repaired and upgraded? Indiana, Kansas, and Pennsylvania at least all have at least some tollways where you get a ticket when you enter and pay according to mileage when you exit. Not Chicago. You could have to stop and pay six or seven tolls in a twenty-mile stretch depending on your route. Every toll plaza is wider than the main road, has booths and enforcement hardware, and has human workers present. It's a government works project more than revenue to pay for the roads.
Most of those IRS agents could become useful contributors to the economy if the IRS was about 90% smaller. Think about how much more in taxes there could be if we had that many more productive workers paying taxes instead of being paid from them.
The Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee agrees with you.
The Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee has in fact said that only when real money is made from playing a game or from selling virtual assets is there a taxable event in the real world.
/. story
See his press release, which predates this
The Chairman of the JEC said exactly that, actually. On the 17th of October.
There's no such thing as a Linden Dollar in the real world, either. It's a game. The Matrix may have you, but I do not believe that Monopoly money is taxable in U.S. currency.
A retail store doesn't pay sales taxes on items sitting on the shelves. There's no sales tax until there's a sale. If I build a bookcase in my home for my own use, I'm not taxed on the possibility that I'll sell it. Income is only taxed as income once it's received as... income.
So why in the world would anyone stand for being taxed for doing well in a game? You're paying taxes on your real income, then you're paying for the sign-up kit, paying taxes on the sign-up kit, then you're paying taxes on the network access needed to play, (I'll ignore the full cost of network access since one hopefully uses their connection for other things too), then you're paying taxes on the subscription, using your unpaid time to have fun in the game world, then they want to tax you because you play the game well?
So someone's mind is actually spinning, "Must... level.. playing... field... in... computer... games..."? Someone get Vonnegut on the phone, Harrison Bergeron's just been spotted playing Anarchy Online.
People are thinking about the other side of the equation -- blind people get paid in money, too.
I call bullshit.
Firstly, an economic model is about economics. If you make profit the only scale on which you measure your self-worth then that's your own malfunction. Social skills, freedom, happiness, sex, wildflowers, raising children, working at something you love to do, and just about everything else in life are tangentially related to profit at most.
The U.S.S.R. wasn't capitalist, and its government was pretty damned self-serving. P.R.China is officially not capitalist, and their government is pretty damned self-serving. Canada and many European countries are capitalist with socialist leanings, and yet don't get the flack the U.S. does about being self-serving.
The U.S. tried to stay out of both WWI and WWII. We tried to be neutral. We tried not to put our noses in other people's business. What happened? Zimmerman happened. The Lusitania happened. Pearl Harbor happened. We rebuilt Germany and Japan. We set them on the road to peace.
So, we tried to help people who wanted help. South Korea. South Vietnam. The Contras. The Mujahadeen (sp?). Lebanon. Bosnia, per the U.N. Somalia, per the U.N. Kuwait, per the U.N. again. Saudi Arabia, by request of that country's government. What happened? The the Beirut USMC barracks got bombed. The WTC got bombed. The U.S.S. Cole got attacked. The WTC got attacked again and was destroyed. The Pentagon was attacked. Four planefuls of people were murdered as part of those attacks in addition to those at the targets. You know what Beirut, the Cole, the WTC, the Pentagon, our embassies, the trains in Spain, the tubes in London, and the the planes hijacked for murder have in common? They were all destroyed because countries like the U.S., Spain, and the U.K. believe in helping the people in other countries when they are asked. The very so-called freedom fighters that we helped escape Soviet occupation in Afghanistan turned right around and attacked us for being on Saudi soil when the Saudi government asked us to be there.
Israeli civilians get blown up all the time because their military accidentally kills a few innocent people when they take out rocket-firing militia men. This despite the fact that Israel is trying to give the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. Israel is forcing its own citizens to move because it wants to give land it took legally in a war in which it was invaded to people who support the destruction of Israel. One of the biggest popular excuses for hating the U.S. right now is that the U.S. supports the very right of Israel to exist. If being so interested in preserving another country which itself is willing to give up part of its land to likely enemies is self-serving, then your vocabulary must come from some language other than English.
Just because you believe Marx was a grand guy, don't go and degrade everything in the world that has ever touched money.