Building the solar pannel requiers more energy than you get out of it.
No. It doesn't. Please check your facts and stop spewing photovoltaic FUD. Modern photovoltaic panels have a lifetime return of several times the energy required to build them
If your software blatantly disregards well-established standards, that's your lookout.
But that's not even the point in question here.
The problem is Outlook not properly understanding messages received that follow the well-established standard, not about whatever bizzare format it
may send it.
Real wealth can't. Real wealth is the goods and services people need, and the resources to produce it. It can be created (making useful stuff) or destroyed (useful stuff gets broken or wears out), but it can't just evaporate.
But we have confused wealth with currency, which is just a way to quantize and exchance wealth. A man stranded on a desert island with a million dollars in cash (physical or digital), or even a trunk full of gold, is not wealthy; he doesn't need paper or bits or shiny metal, he needs food, beer, lumber, tools, a fast 'net connection.
Currency doesn't evaporate either. But we've confused currency with speculative value - what people will pay for something based not on its usefulness, but on the price they may be able to sell it for later.
And sadly, we've based our economy on speculative value - the question is always, "how are stock prices", not "how well are the wants and needs of people being met"? The two questions have little to do with each other.
To produce a decent looking PDF document for online viewing...
When will people understand that the best dead-trees layout is not the best on-line layout?
Reading PDFs on-screen is pain - whether on a MSWindows, Mac, or Linux screen. It's not a question of fonts, it's a question of resolution, color spaces, and luminosity. At best it's almost as much fun as reading from the screen of a microfilm reader.
...which were the end result of centuries of evoluion in tomb design. The first pyramid to be built successfully is surrounded by ruins of decades of failed attempts.
Here's a more optimistic quote:
"Around computers it is difficult to find the correct unit of time to measure progress. Some cathedrals took a century to complete. Can you imagine the grandeur and scope of a program that would take as long?"
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
Give us time. Meanwhile, be very wary of trusting anything important to software.
Re:The first Slashdot troll post investigation
on
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Troll? That was a high intelligent post.
Which doesn't prevent it from being a troll.
The giveaway is the comparison between/.'s moderation system and government oppression of dissidents. He compared moderators (who express their opinion) to Nazis (who killed people by the millions). That's either trolling, or so dumb as to be indistinguishable.
Godwin's Law as applied to/. would make a "troll", "flamebait", or "clueless" moderation appropriate. Too bad the last doesn't exist.
In HR's eyes, if you give pushback to this simple request, what other trouble will you cause?
How is it a "simple request" for them to ask me to purchase several hundred dollars worth of software in order to communicate with them? (Maybe even new hardware, I don't know if any of the boxes I have would run current versions of MS Windows.)
It's not "pushback" to say, "Sorry, I don't have Microsoft Word. But I can give you a version in the standard formats of ASCII text or HTML version that you can easily import into Word. Or if you prefer, I can send to PDF or PostScript."
This has happened several times and I've I had no trouble. (Of course, I am quite willing to make trouble when necessary...I won't pee in a cup, and I read contracts thoroughly and make them change things I don't like. But I don't think this counts.)
So, don't. I've had no problem with making HTML, plain text, PDF, and Postscript versions available, and saying "Microsoft Word or other proprietary
formats not available. If needed, please import the HTML or plain text version into your software."
It's the 21st century. Having your resume on the web where it can be spidered, searched for, bookmarked, e-mailed, etcetera, is orders of magnitude much more important that having a version in some indecypherable insecure proprietary format meant to provide a mediocre dead-tree printing.
Of course, I brand myself as a Unix geek, and am dealing primarily with Unix shops, which are generally more cluefull about such things. If you're looking for a MCSE job...well, you'll get what you deserve.:-)
...the flat out and
admitted criminal and traitor that we had in the White House the last eight years.
As opposed to the Constitution-subverting criminal scumbag we had before that, or the Constitution-subverting mental incompetent we had before that, or the Constitution-shredding idiotic criminal currently pretending to the office and trying to turn the US into a rogue state? It's been a parade of villians and/or incompetents for decades now. Just proves Douglas Adams' point: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
The people who build/buy these monsters obviously do need an SUV.
Nonsense. SUVs are (for most owners) the grownup equivalent of Brittney Spears albums; a demand created by marketing, not out of any genuine need for the product.
Phillips patents expire in 2002 and 2003, and it would take that long just to get the litigation moving.
Ah, but there's not just a patent issue here, there's a trademark one. I belive that "Compact Disc", "CD", and simliar marks are registered to Phillips. You can't call it a CD without their ok...Phillips could have a lot of fun with that.
...had inserted about 50 1024x768
jpg's and resized them down to about 1" square each. He couldn't figure out why one little presentation would barely run on his laptop...
So Powerpoint was too dumb to properly scale the JPEGs? Why am I not surprised...
(Of course, Powerpoint should have been taken out and shot long ago...I have yet to see a Powerpoint "presentation" with any meaningful content. It's PHB-ware, pure and simple.)
All you have to do is click here and it X-10 ads will never again appear for the next month or so, then just click on it again to reset the cookie.
If all you have to do to get me to stop leaving burn bags of dog crap on your front porch is to ask me, does that make it ok for me to leave those shitbombs until you say otherwise? (With the understanding that I'm free to start up again in a months time unless you keep repeating your request?)
Annoying and rude behavior is not ok even if the offendor agrees to cut it out when asked.
I don't think a normal distribution
is to be assumed here.
I believe intelligence (or at leat IQ) is fit pretty well by a normal "bell curve" distribution.
(Actually IIRC there are slightly more people at the high end than a Gaussian model would predict.)
You can tell the difference between the names of carmakers "General Motors" and "American Motors", right? No confusion? (Even though the latter no longer exists.)
How is "Adobe Illustrator" closer to "KIllustrator" than "General Motors" to "American Motors"?
If someone has a commercial product with one name, and someone else releases a similar product (or even an unsimilar product) that clearly impinges on their trademark...
But nobody is clearly impinging on a trademark.
For example, Adobe does not hold a trademark on the English word "illustrator". They have the mark "Adobe Illustrator". "KIllustrator" is very far away from "Adobe Illustrator"; a drunken first grader could tell the difference.
We only get about a months notice of such close passes anyway and there is no way we're going to be able to get a 'Bruce
Willis and mates' crew up into orbit in 30 days.
We wouldn't be sending any people out there. We'd be sending nukes. Lots of them, hopefully.
Could we lob enough thermonuclear devices at it in thirty days to nudge its orbit? We've still got plenty of warheads,the problem is launch vehicles. How many powerful rockets (something along the power of the Delta II that launched NEAR would be about right, I suppose, though probably built more to the big dumb booster model) could we build in a month if nearly the entire planet's industrial output was devoted to that end?
I don't know. But I think we'd be trying really really hard.
as it would at a minumum screw up our tides royally
I think it would take more than the impact of a 300 meter rock to alter the orbit of the 3,500,000 meter moon. But it would probably make one hell of a flash, kick up a dust cloud, and maybe even make an observable change on the face of the moon (if it hit the side that faces us.) That would be one hell of a motivator to start taking the impact threat seriously...
How come selecting a unit of measure is somehow a government problem?
Because if you and I are using a different definition of an ounce (or a gram), commerce gets all fscked up. Setting standards for weights and measures has been a basic government function for centuries; the power to "fix the standard of weights and measures" is an enumerated power of Congress in the U.S. constitution (Article I, section 8); part of that is decreeing what set of units is standard.
Re:PBS Has Expose' on Chemical Industry Coverups
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 3, Informative
DDT was banned not because it was not safe and effective for humans -- it was tremendously safe and effective. It was
banned because it harmed birds.
If you want more definte results before taking any action, remember that it took hundreds of years for us to understand that cigarette smoking was a cause of cancer. We're just beginning to understand the long-term ecological effects of decades of leaded gasoline use.
These chemicals have only been around for decades. When dealing with chemicals that may linger in the enviroment for many years, the only rational course is to stop putting them in the ecosystem at the first sign of trouble.
Fact: To this day, longevity continues to increase, largely because of chemicals developed to use in farming, medicine, and, believe it or not, industry in general by making manufacturing more productive.
Your apologism for industrial polluters negelects the fact that your garbageman and your plumber have more to do with increasing longevity - really, more of a reduction in youth mortality - than any chemical engineering. You also negelct to condsider that more productive manufacturing isn't a net health benefit when what's produced is useless to health, while the side effects are detrimental.
The most basic requirement for health and longevity is an environment that's not full of crap. Producing stuff that might lengthen the lives of some people (those who can afford it) while pouring crap into the ecosystem we all share (though you'll notice that the crap usually isn't dumped right next to the people who can afford the end product, but instead next to the poor) isn't just stupid, it's criminal.
Time is an issue we rarely incorporate in our designs.
Excellent point. For exmaple, there's growing concern over data stored on "dead media"; enve stuff on readable media can be rendered useless by outdated proprietary file formats.
Some people joked about the Y10k problem a while back, but I think its quite possible that within the next century we'll be building systems with a mission lifetime of thousands of years.
Slashdot Mirror
No. It doesn't. Please check your facts and stop spewing photovoltaic FUD. Modern photovoltaic panels have a lifetime return of several times the energy required to build them
ig-Pay atin-Lay is-way ot-nay at-thay incomprehensible-way of-way a-way ormat-fay. y-Whay e-thay ell-hay an't-cay every-way e-mail-way eader-ray understand-way it-way?
If your software blatantly disregards well-established standards, that's your lookout.
But that's not even the point in question here. The problem is Outlook not properly understanding messages received that follow the well-established standard, not about whatever bizzare format it may send it.
Would that thet were so. Unfortunately, the U.S. patent office believes that algorithms - basic mathematical constructs - are patentable.
Real wealth can't. Real wealth is the goods and services people need, and the resources to produce it. It can be created (making useful stuff) or destroyed (useful stuff gets broken or wears out), but it can't just evaporate.
But we have confused wealth with currency, which is just a way to quantize and exchance wealth. A man stranded on a desert island with a million dollars in cash (physical or digital), or even a trunk full of gold, is not wealthy; he doesn't need paper or bits or shiny metal, he needs food, beer, lumber, tools, a fast 'net connection.
Currency doesn't evaporate either. But we've confused currency with speculative value - what people will pay for something based not on its usefulness, but on the price they may be able to sell it for later.
And sadly, we've based our economy on speculative value - the question is always, "how are stock prices", not "how well are the wants and needs of people being met"? The two questions have little to do with each other.
Not LSD, ketamine. Obviously in the typical NDE there is no ketamine. but there are several other mechanisms in the brain that may produce the effect.
When will people understand that the best dead-trees layout is not the best on-line layout?
Reading PDFs on-screen is pain - whether on a MSWindows, Mac, or Linux screen. It's not a question of fonts, it's a question of resolution, color spaces, and luminosity. At best it's almost as much fun as reading from the screen of a microfilm reader.
Here's a more optimistic quote:
Give us time. Meanwhile, be very wary of trusting anything important to software.
Which doesn't prevent it from being a troll.
The giveaway is the comparison between /.'s moderation system and government oppression of dissidents. He compared moderators (who express their opinion) to Nazis (who killed people by the millions). That's either trolling, or so dumb as to be indistinguishable.
Godwin's Law as applied to /. would make a "troll", "flamebait", or "clueless" moderation appropriate. Too bad the last doesn't exist.
How is it a "simple request" for them to ask me to purchase several hundred dollars worth of software in order to communicate with them? (Maybe even new hardware, I don't know if any of the boxes I have would run current versions of MS Windows.)
It's not "pushback" to say, "Sorry, I don't have Microsoft Word. But I can give you a version in the standard formats of ASCII text or HTML version that you can easily import into Word. Or if you prefer, I can send to PDF or PostScript."
This has happened several times and I've I had no trouble. (Of course, I am quite willing to make trouble when necessary...I won't pee in a cup, and I read contracts thoroughly and make them change things I don't like. But I don't think this counts.)
So, don't. I've had no problem with making HTML, plain text, PDF, and Postscript versions available, and saying "Microsoft Word or other proprietary formats not available. If needed, please import the HTML or plain text version into your software."
It's the 21st century. Having your resume on the web where it can be spidered, searched for, bookmarked, e-mailed, etcetera, is orders of magnitude much more important that having a version in some indecypherable insecure proprietary format meant to provide a mediocre dead-tree printing.
Of course, I brand myself as a Unix geek, and am dealing primarily with Unix shops, which are generally more cluefull about such things. If you're looking for a MCSE job...well, you'll get what you deserve. :-)
As opposed to the Constitution-subverting criminal scumbag we had before that, or the Constitution-subverting mental incompetent we had before that, or the Constitution-shredding idiotic criminal currently pretending to the office and trying to turn the US into a rogue state? It's been a parade of villians and/or incompetents for decades now. Just proves Douglas Adams' point: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Nonsense. SUVs are (for most owners) the grownup equivalent of Brittney Spears albums; a demand created by marketing, not out of any genuine need for the product.
Ah, but there's not just a patent issue here, there's a trademark one. I belive that "Compact Disc", "CD", and simliar marks are registered to Phillips. You can't call it a CD without their ok...Phillips could have a lot of fun with that.
So Powerpoint was too dumb to properly scale the JPEGs? Why am I not surprised...
(Of course, Powerpoint should have been taken out and shot long ago...I have yet to see a Powerpoint "presentation" with any meaningful content. It's PHB-ware, pure and simple.)
If all you have to do to get me to stop leaving burn bags of dog crap on your front porch is to ask me, does that make it ok for me to leave those shitbombs until you say otherwise? (With the understanding that I'm free to start up again in a months time unless you keep repeating your request?)
Annoying and rude behavior is not ok even if the offendor agrees to cut it out when asked.
I think you mean "median".
I believe intelligence (or at leat IQ) is fit pretty well by a normal "bell curve" distribution. (Actually IIRC there are slightly more people at the high end than a Gaussian model would predict.)
No, I'm not joking at all.
You can tell the difference between the names of carmakers "General Motors" and "American Motors", right? No confusion? (Even though the latter no longer exists.)
How is "Adobe Illustrator" closer to "KIllustrator" than "General Motors" to "American Motors"?
I don't think "use a Zener diode" or "get a chunk of radioactive stuff (try a smoke detector) and a Geiger conuter" are classified...
But nobody is clearly impinging on a trademark.
For example, Adobe does not hold a trademark on the English word "illustrator". They have the mark "Adobe Illustrator". "KIllustrator" is very far away from "Adobe Illustrator"; a drunken first grader could tell the difference.
We wouldn't be sending any people out there. We'd be sending nukes. Lots of them, hopefully.
Could we lob enough thermonuclear devices at it in thirty days to nudge its orbit? We've still got plenty of warheads ,the problem is launch vehicles. How many powerful rockets (something along the power of the Delta II that launched NEAR would be about right, I suppose, though probably built more to the big dumb booster model) could we build in a month if nearly the entire planet's industrial output was devoted to that end?
I don't know. But I think we'd be trying really really hard.
What you leave out is more recent information suggesting (not yet proving, admittedly) health risks to humans. The Department of Health and Human Services has determined that DDT may reasonably be anticipated to be a human carcinogen. Its breakdown product DDE is labeled by the EPA as a probable human carcinogen. In mammals DDT is an endocrine disruptor, and has effects on the reproductive and nervous systems.
If you want more definte results before taking any action, remember that it took hundreds of years for us to understand that cigarette smoking was a cause of cancer. We're just beginning to understand the long-term ecological effects of decades of leaded gasoline use.
These chemicals have only been around for decades. When dealing with chemicals that may linger in the enviroment for many years, the only rational course is to stop putting them in the ecosystem at the first sign of trouble.
Your apologism for industrial polluters negelects the fact that your garbageman and your plumber have more to do with increasing longevity - really, more of a reduction in youth mortality - than any chemical engineering. You also negelct to condsider that more productive manufacturing isn't a net health benefit when what's produced is useless to health, while the side effects are detrimental.
The most basic requirement for health and longevity is an environment that's not full of crap. Producing stuff that might lengthen the lives of some people (those who can afford it) while pouring crap into the ecosystem we all share (though you'll notice that the crap usually isn't dumped right next to the people who can afford the end product, but instead next to the poor) isn't just stupid, it's criminal.
Actually, he did, though he had to go though significant annoyance. (The thing had sentimental value.)
Excellent point. For exmaple, there's growing concern over data stored on "dead media"; enve stuff on readable media can be rendered useless by outdated proprietary file formats.
Some people joked about the Y10k problem a while back, but I think its quite possible that within the next century we'll be building systems with a mission lifetime of thousands of years.