1. The ya in the Russian is, if I am not mistaken, not pronounced that way after an l. So it's Solaris, not Solyaris. Perhaps a native speaker could clarify this?
Perhaps anybody who's ever studied Russian can clarify this. You're wrong. The 'y' is not strictly pronounced as the 'y' in English, but it indicates a palatization, or 'softening,' of the preceding sound, which sounds a lot like a 'y' after the letter. Anyway, a Russian who speaks English would typically choose to spell it 'Solyaris' rather than 'Solaris.'
Wot a laugh! I think that's something a lot of these (mainly US) punk bands nowadays forget, they all take themselves terribly seriously..IT WAS A LAUGH!:-))
Ah, but it wasn't a laugh for the fans, see? That's why, as this discussion has entirely ignored, punk was reborn around 1980 with a whole new wave of kids who were inspired by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Hardcore in the U.S., Oi! in England, became the new music for and by dead end kids, not put on by art-minded showmen with an eye on their place in history. The kids didn't just have to fight to get records with naughty words into stores, they had to fight for the right to have shows and even walk down the street. The music got more grim and violent as the people that punk rock spoke to took the mic and started talking about real life on the streets, not life on the stage.
The early 80's punk scene is the true predecessor of much of today's punk tradition: Black Flag, Youth Brigade, Minor Threat, the Exploited, the Cockney Rejects, the 4-Skins, Blitz, these bands were a huge turning point in punk rock.
In any case, punk is now fragmented. It's not a single code, it's a whole array of different attitudes, traditions, and styles of dress, from gutterpunk to skate punk to straight-edge to street punk to skinhead. The only thing you'll find running through all of them is a disdain for society's rules and a love for punk rock.
This is not all that unlike what the Puritans and other groups tried to do: move en masse to a place where they were free to live the way they wanted and create a more utopian society.
Too bad it didn't work: they had kids, and their kids didn't behave the way they wanted them to.
Besides, if they do a good job and make the place nice to live in, everyone will want to move there and ruin it.
At least in wealthier nations, I would expect bans on some polutants to go out the window. Coal burning would rise dramatically to generate heat and electricity.
Demand for natural gas would go up. However, I wonder if power consumption would really rise, considering that our peak energy usage in the US is actually during the summer, due to air conditioning.
Let's not forget the automobile situation in the third world. Cars there tend to burn much dirtier, and run on diesel or (!!) leaded gasoline. European manufacturers export cars to Africa if they fail emissions tests in the EU. This is not recycling, precisely, but a way of dumping old or faulty technology on countries at such a discount that they will still buy it.
Actually, I was just reading today in the Chicago Tribune that jobs WERE being created until about the beginning of Dubya's presidency, when the trend reversed and people started losing their jobs.
Yes, I believe in most places in the U.S. there are more jobs being created than destroyed, and that they pay less. Meanwhile, prices are still rising, or at least not falling. If wages are dropping at the same time that prices stay still, it is the same as raising the price, since buying power is decreased. People have to work more than one job or work overtime to maintain a constant buying power. Employment (and thus labor scarcity) doesn't necessarily rise at the same rate that jobs are created if some people are increasing beyond 40 hours a week.
If people are forced to work more and more hours to keep the same standard of living, is that a good thing? For corporate bosses it is, because they're getting more bang for their buck. It's bad for the working people, and probably not good for our economy overall, as spending stagnates when wages drop and when people have less free time.
You seem to assume that cheaper production costs automatically translate into cheaper retail prices. However, today's corporations tend to move to limit competition and avoid lowering prices rather than passing the savings on to the consumer. Only if an upstart competitor arises will they drop prices, often only to raise them back up once the challenger is eliminated. Look at the price of a pair of Nikes; now, tell me how much of the cost is related to their actual production.
This brings me to the next point, which is that the shipping of jobs overseas is a much bigger issue than the replacement of people with computers and machinery. That practice is costing us many more jobs, and it transfers them to people that will be payed less to do the same thing in worse conditions, probably without the right to organize. This movement of jobs often leads to worsening of labor conditions in these other countries, as their governments seek to comply with corporations' demands lest they move on to another, more cooperative third world haven. (U.S. cities and states have a similar problem when they compete to give companies tax breaks.)
Well, actually most of the money is going into to pockets of fat cats. However, that money is no good to them if they don't spend it. The question then becomes how to spend it. The answer is that we create more crappy service jobs in restaurants and other similar businesses to cater to the people that have the extra money to spend. That's why most jobs created in the U.S. these days are low-paying service jobs.
I've been eagerly anticipating support for GTA3. It's what I'll go to once I finish Baldur's Gate 2 until Neverwinter Nights is released (which will probably be in 2004).
Icewind Dale II looks pretty neat, too. I haven't tried it out yet, although I finished BG2 & Throne of Bhaal several months ago.
Yeah, like the U.S. overthrew the government of Afghanistan in the 1980's and installed a much better regime in its place.
Anyway, Africa's biggest problem, the one that's been plaguing them for a few centuries now, is that Europe and the USA will never allow them to rise to the status of economic or military powers, because that threatens our ability to extort their economies. That's why we have driven them into debt in such a way that the Breton Woods institutions have a stranglehold on most of their economies, to take one example.
The same thing happened to Egypt in the 1800s when Europe conspired to keep the country from modernizing, because it posed a threat to colonial interests in Africa. Within a short period of time, Egypt was pushed into a protectorate agreement with the UK, and no African power has emerged since except South Africa. SA was allowed to emerge because it was run by white people, of course, so it wasn't considered a threat.
You seem to be taking the stance that "the ends justify the means." On the other hand, it's been the morally questionable conduct of the US government in our Middle East policy that led to the arming and propping up of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Saudi dictatorship, and Israel. We sell them all arms, watch them kill each other, then shout, "Hey, stop it!" Some foreign policy.
If the US government had listened when many Americans were warning them not to arm bloodthirsty, criminallly-minded people like Hussein and Bin Laden while it was happening, we wouldn't be stuck in this predicament. Now these same people are anti-American, of course. I say Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were anti-American for arming and supporting these assholes.
Does he really care about his own ethnic group? I doubt it. Why should he care about them any more than the rest of the country? However, his own ethnic group undoubtedly includes many of his staunchest political supporters, much like a US president's strongest supporters are typically from his home state. Furthermore, his family (African families are large and include aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) is likely comprised mostly of people of his own ethnic group.
Everyone knows that MySQL is not a good choice for heavy lifting, it's much better for lightweight applications where you have a simple database with lots of SELECTs and not much updating. Get used to it. Why must you force it to fit a different mold as well? The reason many of those features were left out is because they resulted in design decisions that slowed the thing down. And yes, MySQL is faster than any other database, except perhaps Oracle when it's finely tuned, but if you have the time and expertise and money for that, chances are MySQL wasn't the database you wanted anyway.
I've used PostgreSQL, a highly SQL compliant DB, and I've used MySQL. I moved to PGSQL because it was a "real RDBMS." After a while, I ended up going back to MySQL because I wasn't using any of the features that made PostgreSQL more desirable. I was writing a fairly simple WWW application.
Many people don't care about setting up a fancy RDBMS, they just want a few tables that they can easily commit to and select from, like a glorified Berkely DB. What's wrong with that?
Even at those large universities, the only people who had access to email were computer science students or those in some related scientific discipline. Hey, there are STILL professors in the humanities that refuse to use email. (Well, the one that I know for sure does it not because he's afraid of the technology, but because he dislikes students' way of using it to avoid face-to-face communication.) In any case, the fact remains that in 1982 most people had not heard of email. My dad teaches at a large university, and I'm quite sure he hadn't heard of email until the early 90s. What the previous poster should've said, actually, is "a select few large universities, and even then only among more technical disciplines."
As I recall from the appendices to the Lord of the Rings, the two towers referred to in the name are Orthanc and Minas Tirith, not Orthanc and Barad Dur. It doesn't refer to an alliance, just the fact that the action centers around those two locations.
People say that adding sound to the explosions and whatnot makes it more dramatic, but I totally disagree. The silent bits in 2001 were among the most nerve-wracking in any space film. I just don't understand why people insist on going "boom."
Because Star Wars is not a science fiction setting. It is a fantasy world set in "a galaxy far, far away." The movies have never attempted plausible scientific explanations, except with that stupid midichlorian thing -- and really, they shouldn't have bothered! You have to accept that Star Wars is really a story that takes place on earth, but is transferred to a larger and more exciting looking backdrop. Similarly, all of Shakespeare's plays are really about England, even though most take place in Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, etc. You just have to accept that exploring what things would really be like in that setting is not a goal of Star Wars.
You can't really say that any one country won World War 2, any more than you can say that a soccer player won the game because he scored the winning goal (to use a timely example). You could also say that Germany beat themselves by mishandling preparations for the invasion of Britain and launching the invasion of Russia before achieving victory on the western front. Hitler also started the whole war before Italy, his chief ally, was prepared for war. (They were exhausted from their role in the Spanish civil war.) The Russians fought long and hard against Hitler, and undoubtedly their struggle during the darkest days of 1942 to 1944 turned the tide of the war as much as the Battle of Britain.
Of course, that's all the western theater. In the east, Russia did pretty much nothing, it was all the U.S. But then, the defeat of Japan came after the threat of Germany was vanquished. Lastly, the bomb did not win World War 2, it was just a way to end it without continuing to shed the allies' blood. Few questioned that the defeat of Japan was possible at that point, just that it would be costly. (By the way, negotiations with Stalin were underway for the USSR to participate in the invasion of Japan when the bomb went off, from what I can recall.)
This is ridiculous. You're not paying for data at all. You are are paying for the RIGHTS to use this character. It's just like paying a monthly fee for an ISP or cable TV, you're paying for a service, not the information itself, that's why you don't pay proportionally to what you consume. In the case of EverQuest, you pay for the service someone has provided by raising a character to a high level, then handing it off to you.
The University of Bonn has labs full of computers running SuSE. I was there a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how the students liked it, but after a look at the setup it seemed it was probably much easier to administer. Most people only used the lab for the web.
A few things stick out about this guy's commentary which make me think that he's basically a right-wing ideologue. First there's his approval of Bush pulling out of the ABM treaty. There's also his comments on foreign aid, although I actually agree with him that foreign aid was basically destructive. What he doesn't mention about this, is that we actually used foreign aid to further our interests, we were not simply giving handouts. We used food aid as a dumping ground for our surplus, often destroying third world farming economies by driving down food prices. Their governments were left dependent on our handouts, then we started attaching strings. (Bangladesh is an example.) Also, most of our foreign aid has gone to Israel, which is not a "kleptocracy," but they do spend it on weapons, I believe. What really got me, though, is his characterization of Texan independence. Texans did not "choose to associate themselves" with Mexico, they moved into Mexican territory. They were welcome there initially. However, they brought their slaves over, and slavery was illegal in Mexico. Later, Mexico had the power to come to Texas and actually enforce the laws that other Mexicans lived under; that is when Texans revolted.
Of course, there's also his characterization of the UN as a "self-serving collection of dictatorships." The UN's resolutions usually seem to me a pretty accurate reading of the world's opinion on matters. That he doesn't agree with the rest of the world does not mean that other countries are all self-serving dictatorships; particularly hypocritical when he seems to advocate a Hobbesian self-interested outlook to foreign policy. Seems to me that the right wing's problem with the UN is that it's not in their pocket.
In any case, though, the article is an interesting look at some issues of space exploration which have been largely overlooked. I don't see how we'll govern on the surface of Mars -- remember Thomas Paine? Also think about the possibility that an industrial collapse on Earth due to the exhaustion of fossil fuels would leave settlers stranded. What if they survived? There's a science fiction story there...
Learn another language? It's great to learn another language (I've studied several), but what if the second or third language you learned isn't Japanese? You can learn ten languages, but there will still be someplace you can go where you won't speak the language. Then, it's nice to have some kind of translation aid.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps anybody who's ever studied Russian can clarify this. You're wrong. The 'y' is not strictly pronounced as the 'y' in English, but it indicates a palatization, or 'softening,' of the preceding sound, which sounds a lot like a 'y' after the letter. Anyway, a Russian who speaks English would typically choose to spell it 'Solyaris' rather than 'Solaris.'
Check this out then:
unixpunx.org
Wot a laugh! I think that's something a lot of these (mainly US) punk bands nowadays forget, they all take themselves terribly seriously..IT WAS A LAUGH! :-))
Ah, but it wasn't a laugh for the fans, see? That's why, as this discussion has entirely ignored, punk was reborn around 1980 with a whole new wave of kids who were inspired by the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Hardcore in the U.S., Oi! in England, became the new music for and by dead end kids, not put on by art-minded showmen with an eye on their place in history. The kids didn't just have to fight to get records with naughty words into stores, they had to fight for the right to have shows and even walk down the street. The music got more grim and violent as the people that punk rock spoke to took the mic and started talking about real life on the streets, not life on the stage.
The early 80's punk scene is the true predecessor of much of today's punk tradition: Black Flag, Youth Brigade, Minor Threat, the Exploited, the Cockney Rejects, the 4-Skins, Blitz, these bands were a huge turning point in punk rock.
In any case, punk is now fragmented. It's not a single code, it's a whole array of different attitudes, traditions, and styles of dress, from gutterpunk to skate punk to straight-edge to street punk to skinhead. The only thing you'll find running through all of them is a disdain for society's rules and a love for punk rock.
This is not all that unlike what the Puritans and other groups tried to do: move en masse to a place where they were free to live the way they wanted and create a more utopian society.
Too bad it didn't work: they had kids, and their kids didn't behave the way they wanted them to.
Besides, if they do a good job and make the place nice to live in, everyone will want to move there and ruin it.
Demand for natural gas would go up. However, I wonder if power consumption would really rise, considering that our peak energy usage in the US is actually during the summer, due to air conditioning.
Let's not forget the automobile situation in the third world. Cars there tend to burn much dirtier, and run on diesel or (!!) leaded gasoline. European manufacturers export cars to Africa if they fail emissions tests in the EU. This is not recycling, precisely, but a way of dumping old or faulty technology on countries at such a discount that they will still buy it.
Actually, I was just reading today in the Chicago Tribune that jobs WERE being created until about the beginning of Dubya's presidency, when the trend reversed and people started losing their jobs.
Yes, I believe in most places in the U.S. there are more jobs being created than destroyed, and that they pay less. Meanwhile, prices are still rising, or at least not falling. If wages are dropping at the same time that prices stay still, it is the same as raising the price, since buying power is decreased. People have to work more than one job or work overtime to maintain a constant buying power. Employment (and thus labor scarcity) doesn't necessarily rise at the same rate that jobs are created if some people are increasing beyond 40 hours a week.
If people are forced to work more and more hours to keep the same standard of living, is that a good thing? For corporate bosses it is, because they're getting more bang for their buck. It's bad for the working people, and probably not good for our economy overall, as spending stagnates when wages drop and when people have less free time.
You seem to assume that cheaper production costs automatically translate into cheaper retail prices. However, today's corporations tend to move to limit competition and avoid lowering prices rather than passing the savings on to the consumer. Only if an upstart competitor arises will they drop prices, often only to raise them back up once the challenger is eliminated. Look at the price of a pair of Nikes; now, tell me how much of the cost is related to their actual production.
This brings me to the next point, which is that the shipping of jobs overseas is a much bigger issue than the replacement of people with computers and machinery. That practice is costing us many more jobs, and it transfers them to people that will be payed less to do the same thing in worse conditions, probably without the right to organize. This movement of jobs often leads to worsening of labor conditions in these other countries, as their governments seek to comply with corporations' demands lest they move on to another, more cooperative third world haven. (U.S. cities and states have a similar problem when they compete to give companies tax breaks.)
Well, actually most of the money is going into to pockets of fat cats. However, that money is no good to them if they don't spend it. The question then becomes how to spend it. The answer is that we create more crappy service jobs in restaurants and other similar businesses to cater to the people that have the extra money to spend. That's why most jobs created in the U.S. these days are low-paying service jobs.
I've been eagerly anticipating support for GTA3. It's what I'll go to once I finish Baldur's Gate 2 until Neverwinter Nights is released (which will probably be in 2004).
Icewind Dale II looks pretty neat, too. I haven't tried it out yet, although I finished BG2 & Throne of Bhaal several months ago.
"Diablo II, Civ 3, and Unreal Tournament should be enough for anyone"
-- Elbereth, 2002
Do those games run with 640K?
Yeah, like the U.S. overthrew the government of Afghanistan in the 1980's and installed a much better regime in its place.
Anyway, Africa's biggest problem, the one that's been plaguing them for a few centuries now, is that Europe and the USA will never allow them to rise to the status of economic or military powers, because that threatens our ability to extort their economies. That's why we have driven them into debt in such a way that the Breton Woods institutions have a stranglehold on most of their economies, to take one example.
The same thing happened to Egypt in the 1800s when Europe conspired to keep the country from modernizing, because it posed a threat to colonial interests in Africa. Within a short period of time, Egypt was pushed into a protectorate agreement with the UK, and no African power has emerged since except South Africa. SA was allowed to emerge because it was run by white people, of course, so it wasn't considered a threat.
You seem to be taking the stance that "the ends justify the means." On the other hand, it's been the morally questionable conduct of the US government in our Middle East policy that led to the arming and propping up of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, the Saudi dictatorship, and Israel. We sell them all arms, watch them kill each other, then shout, "Hey, stop it!" Some foreign policy.
If the US government had listened when many Americans were warning them not to arm bloodthirsty, criminallly-minded people like Hussein and Bin Laden while it was happening, we wouldn't be stuck in this predicament. Now these same people are anti-American, of course. I say Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were anti-American for arming and supporting these assholes.
Does he really care about his own ethnic group? I doubt it. Why should he care about them any more than the rest of the country? However, his own ethnic group undoubtedly includes many of his staunchest political supporters, much like a US president's strongest supporters are typically from his home state. Furthermore, his family (African families are large and include aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) is likely comprised mostly of people of his own ethnic group.
Everyone knows that MySQL is not a good choice for heavy lifting, it's much better for lightweight applications where you have a simple database with lots of SELECTs and not much updating. Get used to it. Why must you force it to fit a different mold as well? The reason many of those features were left out is because they resulted in design decisions that slowed the thing down. And yes, MySQL is faster than any other database, except perhaps Oracle when it's finely tuned, but if you have the time and expertise and money for that, chances are MySQL wasn't the database you wanted anyway.
I've used PostgreSQL, a highly SQL compliant DB, and I've used MySQL. I moved to PGSQL because it was a "real RDBMS." After a while, I ended up going back to MySQL because I wasn't using any of the features that made PostgreSQL more desirable. I was writing a fairly simple WWW application.
Many people don't care about setting up a fancy RDBMS, they just want a few tables that they can easily commit to and select from, like a glorified Berkely DB. What's wrong with that?
Even at those large universities, the only people who had access to email were computer science students or those in some related scientific discipline. Hey, there are STILL professors in the humanities that refuse to use email. (Well, the one that I know for sure does it not because he's afraid of the technology, but because he dislikes students' way of using it to avoid face-to-face communication.) In any case, the fact remains that in 1982 most people had not heard of email. My dad teaches at a large university, and I'm quite sure he hadn't heard of email until the early 90s. What the previous poster should've said, actually, is "a select few large universities, and even then only among more technical disciplines."
At first it looked like you were talking about a new IDE for writing Python programs ;) Anyone remember Think Pascal?
Hey, I'm glad he made that comment so we could get that second, much better story out of you. That brightened my day.
As I recall from the appendices to the Lord of the Rings, the two towers referred to in the name are Orthanc and Minas Tirith, not Orthanc and Barad Dur. It doesn't refer to an alliance, just the fact that the action centers around those two locations.
People say that adding sound to the explosions and whatnot makes it more dramatic, but I totally disagree. The silent bits in 2001 were among the most nerve-wracking in any space film. I just don't understand why people insist on going "boom."
Because Star Wars is not a science fiction setting. It is a fantasy world set in "a galaxy far, far away." The movies have never attempted plausible scientific explanations, except with that stupid midichlorian thing -- and really, they shouldn't have bothered! You have to accept that Star Wars is really a story that takes place on earth, but is transferred to a larger and more exciting looking backdrop. Similarly, all of Shakespeare's plays are really about England, even though most take place in Italy, Denmark, Cyprus, etc. You just have to accept that exploring what things would really be like in that setting is not a goal of Star Wars.
You can't really say that any one country won World War 2, any more than you can say that a soccer player won the game because he scored the winning goal (to use a timely example). You could also say that Germany beat themselves by mishandling preparations for the invasion of Britain and launching the invasion of Russia before achieving victory on the western front. Hitler also started the whole war before Italy, his chief ally, was prepared for war. (They were exhausted from their role in the Spanish civil war.) The Russians fought long and hard against Hitler, and undoubtedly their struggle during the darkest days of 1942 to 1944 turned the tide of the war as much as the Battle of Britain.
Of course, that's all the western theater. In the east, Russia did pretty much nothing, it was all the U.S. But then, the defeat of Japan came after the threat of Germany was vanquished. Lastly, the bomb did not win World War 2, it was just a way to end it without continuing to shed the allies' blood. Few questioned that the defeat of Japan was possible at that point, just that it would be costly. (By the way, negotiations with Stalin were underway for the USSR to participate in the invasion of Japan when the bomb went off, from what I can recall.)
This is ridiculous. You're not paying for data at all. You are are paying for the RIGHTS to use this character. It's just like paying a monthly fee for an ISP or cable TV, you're paying for a service, not the information itself, that's why you don't pay proportionally to what you consume. In the case of EverQuest, you pay for the service someone has provided by raising a character to a high level, then handing it off to you.
The University of Bonn has labs full of computers running SuSE. I was there a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how the students liked it, but after a look at the setup it seemed it was probably much easier to administer. Most people only used the lab for the web.
A few things stick out about this guy's commentary which make me think that he's basically a right-wing ideologue. First there's his approval of Bush pulling out of the ABM treaty. There's also his comments on foreign aid, although I actually agree with him that foreign aid was basically destructive. What he doesn't mention about this, is that we actually used foreign aid to further our interests, we were not simply giving handouts. We used food aid as a dumping ground for our surplus, often destroying third world farming economies by driving down food prices. Their governments were left dependent on our handouts, then we started attaching strings. (Bangladesh is an example.) Also, most of our foreign aid has gone to Israel, which is not a "kleptocracy," but they do spend it on weapons, I believe. What really got me, though, is his characterization of Texan independence. Texans did not "choose to associate themselves" with Mexico, they moved into Mexican territory. They were welcome there initially. However, they brought their slaves over, and slavery was illegal in Mexico. Later, Mexico had the power to come to Texas and actually enforce the laws that other Mexicans lived under; that is when Texans revolted.
Of course, there's also his characterization of the UN as a "self-serving collection of dictatorships." The UN's resolutions usually seem to me a pretty accurate reading of the world's opinion on matters. That he doesn't agree with the rest of the world does not mean that other countries are all self-serving dictatorships; particularly hypocritical when he seems to advocate a Hobbesian self-interested outlook to foreign policy. Seems to me that the right wing's problem with the UN is that it's not in their pocket.
In any case, though, the article is an interesting look at some issues of space exploration which have been largely overlooked. I don't see how we'll govern on the surface of Mars -- remember Thomas Paine? Also think about the possibility that an industrial collapse on Earth due to the exhaustion of fossil fuels would leave settlers stranded. What if they survived? There's a science fiction story there...
Learn another language? It's great to learn another language (I've studied several), but what if the second or third language you learned isn't Japanese? You can learn ten languages, but there will still be someplace you can go where you won't speak the language. Then, it's nice to have some kind of translation aid.