A lot of these books have been available online (and easily findable via search engines) for years, courtesy of Project Gutenberg and others. Granted, Google gives them a little higher profile, and maybe they'll be more accessible, but it's not like the publishers of Shakespeare and Stevenson are facing something really new here.
the bible... has been translated so many times it's lost meaning.
It's not the levels of translation that harm the authority of the Bible's meaning, but the levels of transcription. At its worst, the Bible has sometimes been a translation of a translation of a translation, but in recent centuries they've pretty consistently gone back to texts in the original Hebrew and Aramaic to work from, so it's typically just a single level of translation for them to mess up. The greater credibility problem is that most of these original-language texts themselves were centuries removed from the original writings, and (judging from the inconsistencies between them) suffered from revisions and transcription errors.
You're utterly misunderstanding them. Christian fundies don't think that science is "ungodly", and in general a fundie might find science very interesting and edifying. After all, it shows just how bloody clever God is to come up with this stuff. The issue is that they think certain scientific theories are ungodly. They simply want to submit all scientific conclusions to a final "fact check" by a theologian before it's distributed to the public. This last step is definitely un-scientific, but they're not categorically anti-scientific.
I have no idea why Linux became more popular in the first place, considering that there was already BSD and the HURD,
Linux became more popular than the HURD because it was ready and it worked. Linux became more popular than BSD because of combination of factors, including the distaste of some people for the BSD licence (the commercial-forks allowance in particular), and uncertainty about its copyright status while the AT&T suit was still pending.
Ye Olde VMS has a fairly simple and elegant form of revision management built into the file system. It just appends a version number to every file and keeps the X most recent versions*, right there in the directory, each fully accessible. If you specify only the filename (without the version suffix) it uses the latest version. If you bork up a file and want to revert, you just delete the latest version (del httpd.conf;37) and the previous version (httpd.conf;36) becomes the latest one. If you want to compare the current version with the previous version (or the one before that...) just use your favorite diff tool on them. It's a feature that deserves to be borrowed by other OSes.
*X can equal 1 if you want, or you can manually purge older versions.
When I started playing with Linux several years ago, my reaction to the file system was "What were they thinking?" Not in the sense of "that was stupid" but seriously not having a clue what was supposed to be where. I managed to dig up a reference that explained the structure, but it hasn't helped because it doesn't conform to reality.
One of my if-I-had-50-more-hours-a-day-and-knew-how-to-persu ade-people-to-follow-me projects would be to build a more intuitive file structure into *n*x. (Maybe starting with an overlay of symbolic links?) The biggest problem with "/etc" is its name; it should be called "/config" or something like that, rather than implying that it's just a bunch of insignificant leftover stuff that you don't need to worry about. The whole SysV init hierarchy could do with a facelift as well. To say nothing of the dozen *bin directories scattered about the tree. Sure, it was great to be able to wow my new boss with my tech savvy by sitting at a console and typing vi/var/named/foo.bar.zone, adding an A record, and then going/etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart to add a new hostname for our domain, but I don't think it gave her a very good impression of Linux's manageability (compared to say, edit/config/bind/zones/food.bar and/startup/master/bind restart).
Sure,/etc could use some spit and polish, but once you find all those *.conf files, they're really not that difficult to deal with.
You might have a point, except that license is a joke. It's under the BSD license.
Well, that's good, because a restrictive "no whining" clause would mean that the license would be legally problematic (to put it mildly), and definitely not Free.
How the hell are college grads supposed to find a job if they all require previous professional experience?
The same way those people with experience got their first jobs: they took jobs that didn't require it. I didn't take off my cap and gown and walk into a room with raised floors and too much air conditioning. I took a job doing entry level support work. There I learned new real-world skills and gained the kind of professional experience that started to make me qualified for something with more responsibility. And after a while, I gradually got enough responsibility to prove myself. So the next time I applied for a job, I had enough actual experience to get a job that involved some higher-level responsibilities, and as I showed that I had the skills and responsibility for more, I gradually moved into being a system administrator.
My previous job required everyone with my job classification to have CompTIA A+ certification. I didn't have it; I don't have any certs. Instead I have a decade and a half of professional experience and the ability to learn new tech as I use it. I managed to get hired without the cert, with the provision that I'd have to take and pass the test within six months, and they generously offered to pay for it.
Another coworker who'd been hired at the same time studied hard for it, and was very pleased to pass it with a few months to spare. Good for her. But I studiously avoided signing up for it, figuring that any employer who insisted that I get the IT equivalent of a GED, despite my obvious qualifications, was not a place I wanted to stay. So that gave me a six-month deadline to get out of there. 26 weeks later, I was out the door, having found and taken a better job, where they didn't even ask about certs; instead they read my resume and asked me good questions about what I knew.
I considered letting the previous employer pay for that cert test, so I'd have it in my back pocket. But it's something I'd be embarassed to put on my resume, and I feel better knowing that I didn't have to resort to it.
Bob (who spends to much time in the local coffee shop)
Reading The Wall Street Journal, by any chance?
This isn't the "social engineering" boogeyman that fiscal conservatives like to scare Econ students with. It's a business owner looking for a way to run his own business in a way that's consistent with his own values. For example, maybe he puts some value on treating all people equally (i.e. people who come in later should have the same access to seats as the squatters). Maybe he doesn't like the idea (fundamental to your directive) that only people who can afford higher overall prices deserve to be his customers. Regardless, he has his own goals, and you're out of line barking that he should instead follow yours. Not everyone chooses to run their lives according to supply/demand curves to maximise profit. So spare us the sermon from the Church of the Market.
If you think getting ordinary people to use/remember passwords is difficult, getting them to use anything more complicated (which is, inherently, what 2-factor authentication is) is doomed to failure. Not because it will fail to make their systems secure, but because it will fail to make their systems accessible.
If one of the factors a physical key or a rotating passphrase generator, they'll misplace it. If it's a thumbprint, the reader will fail after six months of junior's greasy fingers and it never being cleaned. Et cetera. And home users will not tolerate being locked out of their computer. Nor should they.
This should help existing TiVo subscribers (especially us lifetime-service-buyers) by ensuring TiVo's viability for the coming years, and it should help Comcast subscribers by giving them access to a better DVR. Personally, as long as my stand-alone TiVo retains its current level of hackability, I'm not too concerned about what kind of limits the ComcasTiVo might have.
A lawyer... recommended that programmers *not* read patents. The implication was that "ignorance of the law" mitigated damages.
It isn't so much "ignorance of the law" that provides some protection, but the ability to demonstrate that you were ignorant of the patented invention, because if they can show that you read the patent, that would imply that you ripped off the idea from it.
But if you haven't ever looked at it, you can make your alleged infringement look accidental, which might (in theory) even strike down the patent, by showing that it was obvious to someone familiar with the state of the craft.
They're trying to remove the incentive for slimeballs to generate blog spam, but rendering one particular variety of it ineffective. It may be sisyphean, and ultimately not actually do any good, but that is what they're trying to accomplish.
It might help if the Wikipedia article contained more information to reflect the critical view of online poker. As it is, it's a bit biased, just telling how and why it's become popular... but not much about why it's also become so unpopular.
If any/.er puts in a bid, and that bid turns out not to win, I'd like to formally challenge them to send the CBLDF the money (or a substantial portion thereof) regardless. Or if you prefer a more humanitarian (i.e. less political) charity, send it to ACTOR, or to Comic Relief or some other good cause that Gaiman supports.
After all, if you'd be willing to part with the money in exchange for something as trivial as this, shouldn't the more weighty reasons for these charities themselves be motivation enough?
For that matter, if you balked at the $2k+ current bid, figuring you couldn't possibly bid more than $x... why not send them the $x?
Re:Hi, allow me to introduce myself...
on
Gaiman Naming Auction
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"I'm Gaiman, I write books about boys."
Not just boys, but Anansi boys.
If you're going to make homo jokes, please try to make them as complete as possible.
(For the Brit-challenged: "nancy boy" is slang for an effeminate, presumably homosexual young man. The title of the book is a clever pun... one that many Americans will, sadly, not get.)
Althought I'm pleased that Mr Gaiman has found a way to make lemonade of this patch of writer's block, I'm a bit disturbed at what this means to those of us who look forward to his writing. If he can't think up a better name for a boat than he expects to get from some fanboy who can't even think up better ways to drop a few thousand dollars... that's got to be a Martian-desert-sized dry spell he's facing.
The feedback system at eBay is well named: it's about as informative as feedback in a PA system, and damn near useless. It consists of A) losers giving each other handjobs of hyperbolic praise ("AAA+++++ best eBayer since Jesus!!! hope to do business with him nightly!") hoping to get the same ejaculatory feedback in response, and B) complainers trying hopelessly to besmirch the reputation of both those professional cheats who deserve it and those hapless amateurs who do not.
However, with relativistic doppler you also get a shift due to orbiting sources (I can't remember why though, I think it's because the measuring waves are also affected or something).
Is it because of the gravitational difference between orbit and the surface affecting the local shape of spacetime? I don't think that'd be a significant factor with our twirling webcam.
As for it not being an animation... how many frames do you need for something to be an animation?
You need enough frames to produce the visual illusion of motion. The bare minimum is two frames of the "moving" object. But this sequence includes only one frame of the whirlwind, then another frame in which it's absent, and the illusion of movement simply doesn't happen. What we get instead is the illusion of disappearance. The only objects that actually appear to move in this sequence are the rocks (due to the registration issues).
I'm not saying that the alternating images aren't of use or interesting; they are. I'm just pointing out that "animation" is the wrong word for it. When you show someone a photo of Mom and the kids standing in front of the Grand Canyon, then a photo of just the Grand Canyon so you can see what it looks like without them, we call it a "slide show".
Not only that, it's better than the last two Batman films combined.
I've seen animated GIFs that were better than the last two Batman movies. (Batman Begins, on the other hand...) The key isn't the animation, or even the voice actors, though; it's the script. They started with a plot and characters (simple, but that's what you can do in 10 minutes), storyboarded it all out, wrote some decent dialog, and then added visuals and some talented voices to make it real. But without that story-focused foundation, forget about it.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of these books have been available online (and easily findable via search engines) for years, courtesy of Project Gutenberg and others. Granted, Google gives them a little higher profile, and maybe they'll be more accessible, but it's not like the publishers of Shakespeare and Stevenson are facing something really new here.
It's not the levels of translation that harm the authority of the Bible's meaning, but the levels of transcription. At its worst, the Bible has sometimes been a translation of a translation of a translation, but in recent centuries they've pretty consistently gone back to texts in the original Hebrew and Aramaic to work from, so it's typically just a single level of translation for them to mess up. The greater credibility problem is that most of these original-language texts themselves were centuries removed from the original writings, and (judging from the inconsistencies between them) suffered from revisions and transcription errors.
You're utterly misunderstanding them. Christian fundies don't think that science is "ungodly", and in general a fundie might find science very interesting and edifying. After all, it shows just how bloody clever God is to come up with this stuff. The issue is that they think certain scientific theories are ungodly. They simply want to submit all scientific conclusions to a final "fact check" by a theologian before it's distributed to the public. This last step is definitely un-scientific, but they're not categorically anti-scientific.
Linux became more popular than the HURD because it was ready and it worked. Linux became more popular than BSD because of combination of factors, including the distaste of some people for the BSD licence (the commercial-forks allowance in particular), and uncertainty about its copyright status while the AT&T suit was still pending.
*X can equal 1 if you want, or you can manually purge older versions.
When I started playing with Linux several years ago, my reaction to the file system was "What were they thinking?" Not in the sense of "that was stupid" but seriously not having a clue what was supposed to be where. I managed to dig up a reference that explained the structure, but it hasn't helped because it doesn't conform to reality.
One of my if-I-had-50-more-hours-a-day-and-knew-how-to-persu ade-people-to-follow-me projects would be to build a more intuitive file structure into *n*x. (Maybe starting with an overlay of symbolic links?) The biggest problem with "/etc" is its name; it should be called "/config" or something like that, rather than implying that it's just a bunch of insignificant leftover stuff that you don't need to worry about. The whole SysV init hierarchy could do with a facelift as well. To say nothing of the dozen *bin directories scattered about the tree. Sure, it was great to be able to wow my new boss with my tech savvy by sitting at a console and typing vi /var/named/foo.bar.zone, adding an A record, and then going /etc/rc.d/init.d/named restart to add a new hostname for our domain, but I don't think it gave her a very good impression of Linux's manageability (compared to say, edit /config/bind/zones/food.bar and /startup/master/bind restart).
Sure, /etc could use some spit and polish, but once you find all those *.conf files, they're really not that difficult to deal with.
Well, that's good, because a restrictive "no whining" clause would mean that the license would be legally problematic (to put it mildly), and definitely not Free.
The same way those people with experience got their first jobs: they took jobs that didn't require it. I didn't take off my cap and gown and walk into a room with raised floors and too much air conditioning. I took a job doing entry level support work. There I learned new real-world skills and gained the kind of professional experience that started to make me qualified for something with more responsibility. And after a while, I gradually got enough responsibility to prove myself. So the next time I applied for a job, I had enough actual experience to get a job that involved some higher-level responsibilities, and as I showed that I had the skills and responsibility for more, I gradually moved into being a system administrator.
Another coworker who'd been hired at the same time studied hard for it, and was very pleased to pass it with a few months to spare. Good for her. But I studiously avoided signing up for it, figuring that any employer who insisted that I get the IT equivalent of a GED, despite my obvious qualifications, was not a place I wanted to stay. So that gave me a six-month deadline to get out of there. 26 weeks later, I was out the door, having found and taken a better job, where they didn't even ask about certs; instead they read my resume and asked me good questions about what I knew.
I considered letting the previous employer pay for that cert test, so I'd have it in my back pocket. But it's something I'd be embarassed to put on my resume, and I feel better knowing that I didn't have to resort to it.
Reading The Wall Street Journal, by any chance?
This isn't the "social engineering" boogeyman that fiscal conservatives like to scare Econ students with. It's a business owner looking for a way to run his own business in a way that's consistent with his own values. For example, maybe he puts some value on treating all people equally (i.e. people who come in later should have the same access to seats as the squatters). Maybe he doesn't like the idea (fundamental to your directive) that only people who can afford higher overall prices deserve to be his customers. Regardless, he has his own goals, and you're out of line barking that he should instead follow yours. Not everyone chooses to run their lives according to supply/demand curves to maximise profit. So spare us the sermon from the Church of the Market.
If one of the factors a physical key or a rotating passphrase generator, they'll misplace it. If it's a thumbprint, the reader will fail after six months of junior's greasy fingers and it never being cleaned. Et cetera. And home users will not tolerate being locked out of their computer. Nor should they.
This should help existing TiVo subscribers (especially us lifetime-service-buyers) by ensuring TiVo's viability for the coming years, and it should help Comcast subscribers by giving them access to a better DVR. Personally, as long as my stand-alone TiVo retains its current level of hackability, I'm not too concerned about what kind of limits the ComcasTiVo might have.
I'm already a regular contributor to the CBLDF. How much is none of your business.
A secrecy period like that would make it impossible for other practictioners to challenge unwarranted patents before they get issued.
It isn't so much "ignorance of the law" that provides some protection, but the ability to demonstrate that you were ignorant of the patented invention, because if they can show that you read the patent, that would imply that you ripped off the idea from it.
But if you haven't ever looked at it, you can make your alleged infringement look accidental, which might (in theory) even strike down the patent, by showing that it was obvious to someone familiar with the state of the craft.
I had already started. I was asking for help.
They're trying to remove the incentive for slimeballs to generate blog spam, but rendering one particular variety of it ineffective. It may be sisyphean, and ultimately not actually do any good, but that is what they're trying to accomplish.
It might help if the Wikipedia article contained more information to reflect the critical view of online poker. As it is, it's a bit biased, just telling how and why it's become popular... but not much about why it's also become so unpopular.
After all, if you'd be willing to part with the money in exchange for something as trivial as this, shouldn't the more weighty reasons for these charities themselves be motivation enough?
For that matter, if you balked at the $2k+ current bid, figuring you couldn't possibly bid more than $x... why not send them the $x?
Not just boys, but Anansi boys.
If you're going to make homo jokes, please try to make them as complete as possible.
(For the Brit-challenged: "nancy boy" is slang for an effeminate, presumably homosexual young man. The title of the book is a clever pun... one that many Americans will, sadly, not get.)
Althought I'm pleased that Mr Gaiman has found a way to make lemonade of this patch of writer's block, I'm a bit disturbed at what this means to those of us who look forward to his writing. If he can't think up a better name for a boat than he expects to get from some fanboy who can't even think up better ways to drop a few thousand dollars... that's got to be a Martian-desert-sized dry spell he's facing.
The feedback system at eBay is well named: it's about as informative as feedback in a PA system, and damn near useless. It consists of A) losers giving each other handjobs of hyperbolic praise ("AAA+++++ best eBayer since Jesus!!! hope to do business with him nightly!") hoping to get the same ejaculatory feedback in response, and B) complainers trying hopelessly to besmirch the reputation of both those professional cheats who deserve it and those hapless amateurs who do not.
Is it because of the gravitational difference between orbit and the surface affecting the local shape of spacetime? I don't think that'd be a significant factor with our twirling webcam.
You need enough frames to produce the visual illusion of motion. The bare minimum is two frames of the "moving" object. But this sequence includes only one frame of the whirlwind, then another frame in which it's absent, and the illusion of movement simply doesn't happen. What we get instead is the illusion of disappearance. The only objects that actually appear to move in this sequence are the rocks (due to the registration issues). I'm not saying that the alternating images aren't of use or interesting; they are. I'm just pointing out that "animation" is the wrong word for it. When you show someone a photo of Mom and the kids standing in front of the Grand Canyon, then a photo of just the Grand Canyon so you can see what it looks like without them, we call it a "slide show".
I've seen animated GIFs that were better than the last two Batman movies. (Batman Begins, on the other hand...) The key isn't the animation, or even the voice actors, though; it's the script. They started with a plot and characters (simple, but that's what you can do in 10 minutes), storyboarded it all out, wrote some decent dialog, and then added visuals and some talented voices to make it real. But without that story-focused foundation, forget about it.