det er ikke bare Sverige... Operation Clambake in the Netherlands has suffered similar legal attack, and Scientology gets tax-free status in the US. Only Germany seems to take the problem seriously.
PS. Anyone know why all those Hollywood "stars" are suckered in?
Dunno but they apparently pay large sums of money to go and study on a boat riddled with blue asbestos, so I guess they are genuinely brainwashed... see here. They're quite dangerous IMHO though - how many people got involved with Scientology because of being John Travolta fans and also in the midst of a personal crisis?
those install scripts [...] do work, and work well - but the mix of bash, perl and sed is an unholy concoction that could stand replacing. Python can do the work of all three in a way that is readable and maintainable.
Debian scripts aren't supposed to use bash, but I guess you meant bourne shell which is a subset so I'll stop being pedantic. Yeah, I'm sure Python could. So could perl. So could sh. Debian is a democracy and script-writers largely do what they want - unless a majority of developers think something's important enough to force everyone to conform to it (things like file system layout, for example).
Right... Let's start basing our scientific decisions based upon the way a Hollywood B movie works.
Why not? Or at least, why not at least *consider* the ideas being explored? After all, y'ain't gonna see all the possible consequences of altering an ecosystem unless you use your imagination.
Anyway, writers like Arthur C Clarke actually lucidly probed the science of space exploration way before science as a whole agreed it to be possible.
Not saying scientific method should be abandoned - but for a brainstorming sesh, a film is as good a source as any, and the more the merrier.
You're right! Anytime something violent exists in nature, it must be the fault of evil scientists!
't ain't what the original poster said. The poster was saying we have to be very cautious about "letting genies out of bottles", i.e. doing things which are very hard to reverse. Cross-breeding bees and/or introducing them to a new habitat is an example of this.
Don't see how this can be read as saying "scientists are evil". It just says that releasing new organisms is a lot more irreversible than, say, releasing new tax policies.
Here, here. I'm all in favour of limited use of DDT where it is the best thing to do.
What I'm not in favour of is a situation where most of the research into the safety of DDT (and other stuff) is conducted by people who have a vested interest in sales of pesticides. The level of objective fact available about chemical industry products is far too low - and that's one reason why a fair few consumers are going for a "mistrust everybody and my body is an organic temple" approach.
Bit more truly independent research would go a long way.
They only forced them not to remove the IE icon on the desktop, not to avoid installing NS as well.
Yes, but as the finding of fact says, most OEMs would rather not have more icons there than necessary, cos they then get phone calls from confused users. So "you've gotta have IE" means, very likely, that "you won't install Netscape".
IF programmers want to "prove" that computer languages are like any other language used by people, then I would not show them this code. Now that I think of it- don't ever show any Perl!
See Tom's object-oriented tutorial for an example of clear perl writing. Perl is quite like a natural language. You *can* write obfuscated perl. But then again, you *can* write obfuscated English. Try this one:
The horse raced past the barn fell
Perfectly valid English, but almost impossible to read. Conversely, English can be very clear - and so can perl.
Once the UNIX customers have replaced their UNIX hardware with PCs running Linux, it will be that much easier to convince them to replace Linux with NT.
I don't follow the logic - do you mean because the hardware is already there? I don't see that NT is any more familiar to a Linux user than to a UNIX user.
Microsoft never browbeat Netscape into the ground. They just had a better browser. Plain and simple.
Why don't you read the relevant section of Judge Jackson's finding of fact? Among the things they did were to *force* computer vendors to leave the IE icon on the Windows desktop, even if they didn't want to. They excluded Netscape from the most profitable sections of the market. When you have a monopoly, that is illegal.
I hate it when people misconstrue facts to make it sound like MS did dsomthing bad when it comes to Netscape
Hmmm. IHBT IAHAND I think. At least, you don't appear to have read the finding of fact. You may disagree with the conclusions but you can hardly say that it "misconstrues facts".
Sorry, I should have added this: The US, and the Falklands for that matter, were not considered actually *part* of the UK, only colonies. Hence UK law did not necessarily apply there. Sealand could only be claimed as part of England proper.
The UK has _no_ history of good international behaviour.
When the US declared independence, it was much weaker than the UK. The reason it managed to survive is because it managed to make enough powerful friends. If Sealand can do the same, they may survive. Remember, if the British government were to claim that Sealand is British, then it is bound by domestic law and so it just takes a few rich people to mount a legal challenge to slow the whole thing down.
Yebbut, the UK and the US do not recognise Taiwan (although the US did till 1971). Anyone who believes the Chinese Government that Taiwan is just a "renegade province" is crazy. Taiwan is the country with the 14th highest international trade volume in the world.
Since the 1987 expansion of Britain's territorial limits, Sealand has been within the our sea boundaries.
Yebbut at the same time as that happened, Sealand expanded its sea boundaries. If you don't think that is valid per se, then Dover belongs to France.
That sounds like nonsense to me. For one thing: when has it stopped the US before?
True, but the US has a long history of flouting international agreements like this. (I'm not trolling, there's lots wrong with my country too). For example, it is in favour of a World Court to police things like human rights - but only if Americans would be exempt from prosecution. (Ok, so the president would probably be tried for helping to execute people on flimsy evidence after unfair trials, but hey).
Let's face it, if Britain decided to use force, do you seriously think anyone is going to give a damn?
That's an interesting question. I'd be intrigued to know the answer. Conceivably, lots of small places might give a damn. I wonder what the Scottish Nationalist Party would have to say about it. Since courts rule in this country, a well-presented legal challenge could make it hard for the government to do anything.
Hmmm..., not *all* websites are small. Think about the Avis, American Airlines, or Best Western websites.
I agree they may be pretty critical to the companies involved. But no, that's not "vast" amounts of data, in the sense of significant fractions of a Terrabyte. And not high volume either, compared to what a computer is capable of. I once attended a talk given by an Excalibur representative (in about 1999). He claimed they'd worked with the fifth busiest website in the world at the time, and that it never had more than 4 simultaneous TCP/IP connections going. That ain't busy compared to something like a central sales-logging database in a big supermarket in a big country.
National language support enables developers to design applications with respect to the native language of the users.
I'm not an expert here. I have no experience with I18N solutions in Oracle, but knowing what I do about Oracle as a technology and as a company, I can confidently say that Oracle has best-of-breed solutions in this area. But, PostgreSQL, with it's world-wide development model, is probably not as far behind as you might think.
Is there anything more to this than correct support of Unicode (+ maybe various other national charsets)? I'm having difficulty seeing what a Chinese user would want that an English user wouldn't, besides the ability to use Unicode/Big5/GB/etc..
*All* modern DBs support Unicode, from MS to MySQL to Postgres to Oracle to DB2. But even if one didn't, as long as it supported ISO 8859-1 you could just use UTF-8. Sure, you'd have to multiply your field lengths by 3 to be on the safe side (or 6 if your users want to write Egyptian Hieroglyphics or Klingon), but it would work.
Unless you can levitate rocks with your mind, while doing a one-handed handstand, with a muppet balanced on your foot, then claiming "Jedi" as a religon is false infomation, regardless of its validity otherwise.
Dunno - just cos you believe in the Jedi religion, doesn't mean you're actually any good at it -- or do all Christians have to be able to do the 5 loaves and 2 fishes trick ?:-)
There's places where all these wonderful OS applications don't work nearly as well as a proprietary solution and databases is definitely one of those places.
Hmmm. There are reports that PostgreSQL v7 matches Oracle at its own benchmarks, but that these benchmarks can't be published cos of a clause in the license for Oracle. So yeah, a free license isn't nearly as good for marketing as one which allows you to ban publication of benchmarks.
BTW, I wasn't saying that you should use Postgres over MySQL, I'm sure you can make that decision for yourself! I'm just saying that ODBC<->Unix worked fine for me, and you may well find it equally hassle-free.
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det er ikke bare Sverige ... Operation Clambake in the Netherlands has suffered similar legal attack, and Scientology gets tax-free status in the US. Only Germany seems to take the problem seriously.
Dunno but they apparently pay large sums of money to go and study on a boat riddled with blue asbestos, so I guess they are genuinely brainwashedWhy not? Or at least, why not at least *consider* the ideas being explored? After all, y'ain't gonna see all the possible consequences of altering an ecosystem unless you use your imagination.
Anyway, writers like Arthur C Clarke actually lucidly probed the science of space exploration way before science as a whole agreed it to be possible.
Not saying scientific method should be abandoned - but for a brainstorming sesh, a film is as good a source as any, and the more the merrier.
't ain't what the original poster said. The poster was saying we have to be very cautious about "letting genies out of bottles", i.e. doing things which are very hard to reverse. Cross-breeding bees and/or introducing them to a new habitat is an example of this.
Don't see how this can be read as saying "scientists are evil". It just says that releasing new organisms is a lot more irreversible than, say, releasing new tax policies.
Here, here. I'm all in favour of limited use of DDT where it is the best thing to do.
What I'm not in favour of is a situation where most of the research into the safety of DDT (and other stuff) is conducted by people who have a vested interest in sales of pesticides. The level of objective fact available about chemical industry products is far too low - and that's one reason why a fair few consumers are going for a "mistrust everybody and my body is an organic temple" approach.
Bit more truly independent research would go a long way.
Bugger, my brain seems to have seized up on that one. "The students the reporters the police arrested interviewed laughed" is what I meant to say.
The students the reporters arrested interviewed laughed.
See Tom's object-oriented tutorial for an example of clear perl writing. Perl is quite like a natural language. You *can* write obfuscated perl. But then again, you *can* write obfuscated English. Try this one:
Perfectly valid English, but almost impossible to read. Conversely, English can be very clear - and so can perl.Sorry, I should have added this: The US, and the Falklands for that matter, were not considered actually *part* of the UK, only colonies. Hence UK law did not necessarily apply there. Sealand could only be claimed as part of England proper.
True, but the US has a long history of flouting international agreements like this. (I'm not trolling, there's lots wrong with my country too). For example, it is in favour of a World Court to police things like human rights - but only if Americans would be exempt from prosecution. (Ok, so the president would probably be tried for helping to execute people on flimsy evidence after unfair trials, but hey).
That's an interesting question. I'd be intrigued to know the answer. Conceivably, lots of small places might give a damn. I wonder what the Scottish Nationalist Party would have to say about it. Since courts rule in this country, a well-presented legal challenge could make it hard for the government to do anything.Well either, since they'd only be running the drinks machine.
Is there anything more to this than correct support of Unicode (+ maybe various other national charsets)? I'm having difficulty seeing what a Chinese user would want that an English user wouldn't, besides the ability to use Unicode/Big5/GB/etc..
*All* modern DBs support Unicode, from MS to MySQL to Postgres to Oracle to DB2. But even if one didn't, as long as it supported ISO 8859-1 you could just use UTF-8. Sure, you'd have to multiply your field lengths by 3 to be on the safe side (or 6 if your users want to write Egyptian Hieroglyphics or Klingon), but it would work.
You _don't_ want to keep trolling.
BTW, I wasn't saying that you should use Postgres over MySQL, I'm sure you can make that decision for yourself! I'm just saying that ODBC<->Unix worked fine for me, and you may well find it equally hassle-free.