Windows API is also much faster than X-Windows because the model used is closer to how hardware-graphic accelerator works. X-Windows is too abstract and was designed when most hardware had a simple framebuffer...
Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products.
That's because THERE IS a governement. Trust me, without a governement, it would be long since Microsoft had got Linus and RMS shot down and forced every linux zealot into forced labor (like maintaining some ugly Cobol legacy code). The governement is the counter-power to corporations. You remove it, they do what they want. Libertarians seem to believe that you can have a country with no one making the big dicisions. Well, I'm sorry, but if it is not the governement heads, then it's gonna be AOL-Time-Warner-Microsoft. And unlike a giant corporation, everyone is a "shareholder" of the governement with equal weight (that's what elections are for).
Government pays for programs with taxes, which they collect from everybody, including your sweet old grandma.
Nope, my old grandma pay no taxes at all (yeah there's VAT, but that's pro-rata what you buy, not a fixed sum), because unlike a corporation, a governement is concerned about justice. On the other hand, a corporation doesn't give shit about how poor you are, if you can't pay the price for their doctor, then you can go die in the streets.
would I be willing to shoot my grandmother over this
Again no - she doesn't pay any taxes. The military budget increase could make her pay more or not. Or a health-care budget increase could also help her save money and afford a longer and better life. That's why I vote for the guys would will put the budget I support. Not being a MS shareholder (or not rich enough shareolder to matter), I can't force them to lower the MS product prices. You can only change corporations policies if you are rich. You can change gov. policies if you are over 18. Much more democratic !
As it should be. Nobody else owns the company, so why should anybody else have a say in who they are trying to please?
Definitely agree - but then don't let those corporation run your life and take the place of the governement. They are only interested in you because you have money (if you have not, they'll let you die in the snow). A governement is interested in you because you are a citizen, rich or poor.
Ever heard of "separation of powers" ? That's why the president isn't the only one taking decisions. A law cannot be passed if hundreds of elected people don't agree to it, from the senate to the president. And even once a law is passed, it can still be stopped thru the constistution. In a democracy, one or two people can't pass an evil law all by themselves.
Only the government can bust into you house (legally) waving guns.
Well someone has to have this power, or else criminals would be all free to do what they want unpunished. So who can have this power ?
- your neighbours (you know, the couch-potaty guy next door that is also a NRA and KKK affiliate). Obviously this is the anarchist favorite, but we all know what happen when a group of angry people decide to make justice by themselves.
- a corporation, whose only obligation is to turn profit (but would you really want Microsoft to have the right to come to your house and arrest you ?)
- a governement, bound by laws and a consitution
Obviously no one likes to be busted in his house, but if it has to happen it's better if the guys doing it are not doing it because it will bring profits to shareholders. Believe me, you are safer in the hands of the cops than in the hands of any corporation private militia. Corporations don't give a shit about your civil rights. A democratic governement has at least to pretend to respect them. Big difference.
Except that someone has to do the work, and if it's not the governement it's the corporations. As bad as politicians are, they are still elected by all citizens, and there are lot of safegards and counter-prowers in the gov. With corporations, the CEO is only choosen by stockholders and doesn't care about pleasing anyone else. There are also very little safegards.
So it's either facing a governement that might be corrupt, or facing some mega-corporations that are corrupt from the start as they clearly here for the money. Between two evils, I'd rather pick the lesser one.
. Furthermore, the 1.5GHz P4's thermal diode throttles the part to effectively 750Mhz as soon as power consumption exceeds 54.7W. Without this limitation, a P4's maximum consumption would be 72.9 watts, similar to a 1.33 GHz Athlon's 73 watts.
Yep, but I'd rather have a chip slow down a bit when overheating than melt like Athlons do. AMD managed to make use power hungry/heat generator chips, yet didn't even think about emebedding a thermal diode and protection like all P3 and P4 have. Results ? Lots of burned Athlon at 1 Ghz and more.
Yeah. Now go ask Doubleclick what they know about you... oh wait, they won't tell you ? could it be that you are WRONG ? what are you gonna do ? sue ? Isn't that asking the help of a civil servant from the governement ? I thought big boys like you didn't need no stink'in governement...
Don't code in C/C++. Use a language that has a minimum of type/boundaries/pointers enforcement. Use Pascal for low level programming like C/C++ does, now with Kylix being available there's no reason to deal with all the ugly pointers of C.
Secondly, the Directive provides that rightholders either voluntarily or by way of agreements with other parties have to provide those who would benefit from a particular exception e.g. schools, libraries in the case of teaching, with the means to do so.
Which means that the MPAA has to give schools and libraries access to a DeCSS program of some sort. This could lead to interesting thing:)
According to the Webzine transfert.net, this is just a PR stunt from Shimomura. The thing was discovered in november 2000 by Renaud Deraison, who makes the Nessus security checking program. This is a very minor problem, as only someone able to spoof IP 10.0.0.138 can try to use the exploit. Deraison updated his Nessus program to check for the flaw but didn't make a securitu alert because he didn't think it was worth it.
Now Shimomura, 4 months later, decided he could make some quick bucks with the idea and told about it to a few people, then to the press and CERT. A normal security alert goes to the manufacturer first (to give him a chance to make a patch) and then to the CERT. Obviously Shimomura is a lamer trying to claim his someone else work and make some fame out of a minor event and the medias ignorance.
So were are you hosting your multi-gigabyte/day site ?
Provided your site doesn't exceed the cap-bandwidth (which, at 2 GB/day, is quite high for 99.9% of the sites out there), the Quickserve are very very cheap with all you inside (rented hardware, support and reliable power/connection).
Anyone find a really good and cheap dedicated hosting provider?
Go to www.quickserve.com (Pair Networks dedicated servers). For 249 $ you can rent a Duron box with 30 GB disk, 2 GB/day bandwidth and support. It's a FreeBSD only company, and usually you don't have root access (that's the price to pay for free REAL & quality support).
They have a very high availability rate (well over 99.9%), they're the largest independant hosting company. I've been their customer for 3 years and never had the idea of going away !
MacOS X doesn't need Linus. It's not like Linus is the world's only capable kernel Unix hacker out there. There are plenty of people capable of developping MacOS X as a good OS (heck there're even plenty of them to develop *BSD, Solaris, QNX or BeOS).
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 1
Only at around 4 degrees C. All bets are off for different temperatures, and it has to be 100% pure. If you have to be that precise, I don't see the point in linking them.
You don't see the point ? I see it : if I have to carry around 5 bottles of 1 liter of milk, I can say I have to carry around 5 kg with an excellent precision (less than 1% error, if you don't count the bottle packaging). Don't need complicated computing to go from here to there : just need to change the unit. Nothing else can be easier.
Multiples of 10 are fine if you only want to deal with decimals. But how do you write out a third of a kilometer?
1/3 kg if you need precision, or 1.33.. (depending on the required precision). I thought fractions were part of the math teaching in school in US...
Then you are trying to force the universe into your base 10 system, instead of adjusting your system to the universe.
And how are the English units more adjusted to the universe ? Are you counting in base Pi or something along that line ? You are just using a bunch of various centuries old units that don't fit together. They are fine all by themselves but as soon as you need to convert, it's a mess, because no one took care of making them relevent to each other.
By that argument, then, we should use a system that is based on SEAwater, not pure water. And what's the freezing point of seawater? 0 degrees Farenheit.
Again you are wrong. The water from the Dead sea doesn't freeze at 0 degree fahrenheit. There's not one sea water but different sea water with various degree of salinity and other components (including microscopie algae). Basic a unit on this soup is stupid. On the other hand there's only one kind of pure water.
The easiest way to get 100% pure water is to make it from pure hydrogen and oxygen. And if you already have the hydrogen handy
So ?
And, on the other hand, while not all that abundant on Earth, hydrogen is hands-down the most common substance in the universe. So shouldn't we be using it by your own arguments?
No - unless you leave on a hydrogen cloud somewhere in the galaxy. Humans will (for a long time) still leave in oxygen and water based environement. Basing their liquid units on water makes sense.
...filtration device set up to get perfectly pure water. At least Farenheit lets you go down to the beach to get your water.
...and again get incorrect results, as there's not one kind of sea water.
So 32.2 is an inherently more difficult number to learn than 9.86? 14.7 is more difficult than 101325? 93 million harder than 149 million? 2.997 E 8 is worse than 9.835 E 8? 491.67 makes less sense than 273.15?
That's not the point. The point is that all distance/mass metric units convert between each other flawlessly with only the move of a comma. English units require a multiplication/division by a constant for EVERY unit change. So you need to learn all those constants.
By using measurement systems that include more primes as divisors (even if it's just the addition of 3), you're giving yourself more room to manuever in which to state a measurement with precision instead of an approximate decimal
If you want precision use fractions. Nothing can replace them, not even your old English units. If you can leave with a degree of error, then use a base 10 : it's very easy to learn and use (just a comma to move). Why would you bother with a bunch of incompatible units that needs odd constant to switch from one to the other ? just because some of them are divided by 3 ? Following you logic, we should all count in base 84 because it's a multiple of 1,2,3,4,6 and 7 ? That's silly. Besides, even with your English units you still count in base 10 anyway, so you could as well use units that are 10 multiplies of other units.
Knowing that the meter was originally based on the circumference of the Earth as measured along the line of longitude through Paris, France does almost nothing for me.
That's the only point I'll concede you. But I don't think it's a high price to pay if that means you can just convert units without a calculator.
Re:Ha! Metric unit of mass is still a chunk of met
on
Uncle Sam's Funhouse
·
· Score: 5
Metric could've been built on English units and used kilofeet, millislugs, etc.
Buzzzz. Wrong. Thanks for playing !
The metric system is linked : a liter of pure water weights exactly 1 kilogram... woud you care to remind us of how many ounces weight a gallon of water exactly ?
A mile may be 5280 feet but that quantity divides EVENLY... A km is 1000m and divides evenly
Yep, but I'd rather use units that have less multiples but have 100 as one of them that a unit that have more multiples but only ones like "176 or 165" like your miles. How often do you count in base 176 exactly ?
Water is just another liquid.
No - it's the raw liquid most commonly available on earth, and almost the only one. Liquid hydrogen or nitrogen is not easy to find, neither is raw mercury. Only a fucked up mind would base it's unit system on another liquid than water. Or someone who lives on Jupiter (hint : you don't).
If you wanted a universal constant for temperature, why did Centigrade scale not at least use absolute zero as one anchor point?
There's some sense to this but :
- absolute 0 temp has only been known quite recently, and by the time it was found temp. units were firmly established worlwide. There was not time to wait for the (possible) discovery of absolute 0
- centigrades are based on freezing and boiling point of pure water at sea level. That's a unit fairly easy to understand for anyone on earth, as long as you know how to make a fire and have an idea of what ice looks like.
Sure English units are fucked. At least we admit it. But it learns just as easy as anything else.
No it doesn't. Really.
It evenly divides better by everyday numbers.
If you consider (I quote you) 33, 40, 44, 48, 55, 60, 66, 80, 88, 96, 110, 120, 132, 160, 165, 176, 220, 240, 264, 330, 352, 440, 480, 528, 660, 880, 1056, 1320, 1760, 2640, 5280 as everyday numbers, then maybe. But my everyday number is 10. Mastering multiplication/division by 10 is all you need to manipulate ALL metric units. You can use your fingers for all of them. Can't be easier than that.
Well it's probably out there : the MS intranet FTPs was frequentyly accessed by warez dudes who got their beta, alpha and MS source-code there. There are probably now some home-FTP servers or DCC servers that carry the Windows source code (although it musn't be a very popular download : no one has days to spend downloading gigabyte of C source code and then rebuild Windows (if you can figure how to do it) when you can have nice binaries everywhere).
Well it would have to be a country who doesn't care about diplomacy at all... do Cuba or Irak have an embassy ? Only them would be willing to piss of the US and do that.
There is an important group of BSD users: ISP ! A big amount of ISP use FreeBSD because it is fast, rock stable and clean. A big FreeBSD using ISP is a more important user than a 1000 Linux zealots... or 10000 Win98 mouse pushers.
Yeah, I just wish someone would port Freeciv (www.freeciv.org) to Windows CE. The source is there too, there's already a win32 port available, and frankly, being able to play Civilization everywhere would be the greatest thing in the world next to sex !!!
Have you ever seen the effect of a godless society.
Hum yeah, western Europe ? Much less violence than in the land-of-the-biggot USA. And as far as I know there aren't any school shooting in Russia either...
Ha! Wait, you're seeing it right now. As America moves further and futher away from God
Seing how Bush is prez and Aschroft is where he is, I'd say America gets more religious every year.
you will see more school shootings
The stats say they are less and less, but I guess you don't know how to read either...
and you will see the morons in this country scratching their heads and saying "gawsh, guess we need more gun control".
Well, the country with the most school-shooting is also the one with the most gun/capita. Coincidence ? It's hard to kill 20 people in 10 minutes with just a kitchen knife.
some people actually believe in something.
Yeah, some believe in a huge pile of bullshit and then try to force it down the throat of those who don't believe the same. I've seen what's happen when religion is controlling the country (Iran or Afghanistan anyone ?) so let's get it out of here as soon as possible.
Under the leadership of the French? Maybe the Brits or the Germans, but the French? They haven't made any waves in civilization since the 1800's, except as Germany's punching bag.
Well then I guess the invention of radioactivity, the cinema and a bazillion of other stuff just don't count in your definition of "civilization". But then I guess you are probably leaving in a cave anyway...
I actually think the EU is one of the smaller economic areas, in comparison to the US or to the Asias;
Nope - the EU market is bigger than USA, both in population and in GNP. Of course if you add USA+Canada+Mexico, this might change, but then, USA+Canada+Mexico aren't united the same as the EU countries are. As for Japan+Taïwan+South Korea, they are way behind the two other behemoth.
do you remeber Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea? They form a formidable engineering and technology quartet, with India rising quickly too.
The problem is, India is NOT part of the Asian block. I know for a fact that Chinese don't like Indian very much ("hate" would be a more adequate word), and I'm sure Indian have the same feelings in return. India and China will be both superpowers of their own, but definitely not together. Not in our lifetime at least.
I hope the US becomes a great force in this global govt, by assimilating and adapting all the relevent cultural forces and movements into itself,
I sure hope not - there are enough ugly McDonald's and KFC around the world today. And don't get me started on this loosy Hollywood "culture". One "Independance Day" movie is enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows API is also much faster than X-Windows because the model used is closer to how hardware-graphic accelerator works. X-Windows is too abstract and was designed when most hardware had a simple framebuffer...
Disney and Microsoft can't force me to use their products.
That's because THERE IS a governement. Trust me, without a governement, it would be long since Microsoft had got Linus and RMS shot down and forced every linux zealot into forced labor (like maintaining some ugly Cobol legacy code). The governement is the counter-power to corporations. You remove it, they do what they want. Libertarians seem to believe that you can have a country with no one making the big dicisions. Well, I'm sorry, but if it is not the governement heads, then it's gonna be AOL-Time-Warner-Microsoft. And unlike a giant corporation, everyone is a "shareholder" of the governement with equal weight (that's what elections are for).
Government pays for programs with taxes, which they collect from everybody, including your sweet old grandma.
Nope, my old grandma pay no taxes at all (yeah there's VAT, but that's pro-rata what you buy, not a fixed sum), because unlike a corporation, a governement is concerned about justice. On the other hand, a corporation doesn't give shit about how poor you are, if you can't pay the price for their doctor, then you can go die in the streets.
would I be willing to shoot my grandmother over this
Again no - she doesn't pay any taxes. The military budget increase could make her pay more or not. Or a health-care budget increase could also help her save money and afford a longer and better life. That's why I vote for the guys would will put the budget I support. Not being a MS shareholder (or not rich enough shareolder to matter), I can't force them to lower the MS product prices. You can only change corporations policies if you are rich. You can change gov. policies if you are over 18. Much more democratic !
As it should be. Nobody else owns the company, so why should anybody else have a say in who they are trying to please?
Definitely agree - but then don't let those corporation run your life and take the place of the governement. They are only interested in you because you have money (if you have not, they'll let you die in the snow). A governement is interested in you because you are a citizen, rich or poor.
What do you mean there are safeguards
Ever heard of "separation of powers" ? That's why the president isn't the only one taking decisions. A law cannot be passed if hundreds of elected people don't agree to it, from the senate to the president. And even once a law is passed, it can still be stopped thru the constistution. In a democracy, one or two people can't pass an evil law all by themselves.
Only the government can bust into you house (legally) waving guns.
Well someone has to have this power, or else criminals would be all free to do what they want unpunished. So who can have this power ?
- your neighbours (you know, the couch-potaty guy next door that is also a NRA and KKK affiliate). Obviously this is the anarchist favorite, but we all know what happen when a group of angry people decide to make justice by themselves.
- a corporation, whose only obligation is to turn profit (but would you really want Microsoft to have the right to come to your house and arrest you ?)
- a governement, bound by laws and a consitution
Obviously no one likes to be busted in his house, but if it has to happen it's better if the guys doing it are not doing it because it will bring profits to shareholders. Believe me, you are safer in the hands of the cops than in the hands of any corporation private militia. Corporations don't give a shit about your civil rights. A democratic governement has at least to pretend to respect them. Big difference.
Except that someone has to do the work, and if it's not the governement it's the corporations. As bad as politicians are, they are still elected by all citizens, and there are lot of safegards and counter-prowers in the gov. With corporations, the CEO is only choosen by stockholders and doesn't care about pleasing anyone else. There are also very little safegards.
So it's either facing a governement that might be corrupt, or facing some mega-corporations that are corrupt from the start as they clearly here for the money. Between two evils, I'd rather pick the lesser one.
. Furthermore, the 1.5GHz P4's thermal diode throttles the part to effectively 750Mhz as soon as power consumption exceeds 54.7W. Without this limitation, a P4's maximum consumption would be 72.9 watts, similar to a 1.33 GHz Athlon's 73 watts.
Yep, but I'd rather have a chip slow down a bit when overheating than melt like Athlons do. AMD managed to make use power hungry/heat generator chips, yet didn't even think about emebedding a thermal diode and protection like all P3 and P4 have. Results ? Lots of burned Athlon at 1 Ghz and more.
Yeah. Now go ask Doubleclick what they know about you... oh wait, they won't tell you ? could it be that you are WRONG ? what are you gonna do ? sue ? Isn't that asking the help of a civil servant from the governement ? I thought big boys like you didn't need no stink'in governement...
Don't code in C/C++. Use a language that has a minimum of type/boundaries/pointers enforcement. Use Pascal for low level programming like C/C++ does, now with Kylix being available there's no reason to deal with all the ugly pointers of C.
Secondly, the Directive provides that rightholders either voluntarily or by way of agreements with other parties have to provide those who would benefit from a particular exception e.g. schools, libraries in the case of teaching, with the means to do so.
:)
Which means that the MPAA has to give schools and libraries access to a DeCSS program of some sort. This could lead to interesting thing
According to the Webzine transfert.net, this is just a PR stunt from Shimomura. The thing was discovered in november 2000 by Renaud Deraison, who makes the Nessus security checking program. This is a very minor problem, as only someone able to spoof IP 10.0.0.138 can try to use the exploit. Deraison updated his Nessus program to check for the flaw but didn't make a securitu alert because he didn't think it was worth it.
Now Shimomura, 4 months later, decided he could make some quick bucks with the idea and told about it to a few people, then to the press and CERT. A normal security alert goes to the manufacturer first (to give him a chance to make a patch) and then to the CERT. Obviously Shimomura is a lamer trying to claim his someone else work and make some fame out of a minor event and the medias ignorance.
So were are you hosting your multi-gigabyte/day site ?
Provided your site doesn't exceed the cap-bandwidth (which, at 2 GB/day, is quite high for 99.9% of the sites out there), the Quickserve are very very cheap with all you inside (rented hardware, support and reliable power/connection).
Anyone find a really good and cheap dedicated hosting provider?
Go to www.quickserve.com (Pair Networks dedicated servers). For 249 $ you can rent a Duron box with 30 GB disk, 2 GB/day bandwidth and support. It's a FreeBSD only company, and usually you don't have root access (that's the price to pay for free REAL & quality support).
They have a very high availability rate (well over 99.9%), they're the largest independant hosting company. I've been their customer for 3 years and never had the idea of going away !
MacOS X doesn't need Linus. It's not like Linus is the world's only capable kernel Unix hacker out there. There are plenty of people capable of developping MacOS X as a good OS (heck there're even plenty of them to develop *BSD, Solaris, QNX or BeOS).
Only at around 4 degrees C. All bets are off for different temperatures, and it has to be 100% pure. If you have to be that precise, I don't see the point in linking them.
...filtration device set up to get perfectly pure water. At least Farenheit lets you go down to the beach to get your water.
You don't see the point ? I see it : if I have to carry around 5 bottles of 1 liter of milk, I can say I have to carry around 5 kg with an excellent precision (less than 1% error, if you don't count the bottle packaging). Don't need complicated computing to go from here to there : just need to change the unit. Nothing else can be easier.
Multiples of 10 are fine if you only want to deal with decimals. But how do you write out a third of a kilometer?
1/3 kg if you need precision, or 1.33.. (depending on the required precision). I thought fractions were part of the math teaching in school in US...
Then you are trying to force the universe into your base 10 system, instead of adjusting your system to the universe.
And how are the English units more adjusted to the universe ? Are you counting in base Pi or something along that line ? You are just using a bunch of various centuries old units that don't fit together. They are fine all by themselves but as soon as you need to convert, it's a mess, because no one took care of making them relevent to each other.
By that argument, then, we should use a system that is based on SEAwater, not pure water. And what's the freezing point of seawater? 0 degrees Farenheit.
Again you are wrong. The water from the Dead sea doesn't freeze at 0 degree fahrenheit. There's not one sea water but different sea water with various degree of salinity and other components (including microscopie algae). Basic a unit on this soup is stupid. On the other hand there's only one kind of pure water.
The easiest way to get 100% pure water is to make it from pure hydrogen and oxygen. And if you already have the hydrogen handy
So ?
And, on the other hand, while not all that abundant on Earth, hydrogen is hands-down the most common substance in the universe. So shouldn't we be using it by your own arguments?
No - unless you leave on a hydrogen cloud somewhere in the galaxy. Humans will (for a long time) still leave in oxygen and water based environement. Basing their liquid units on water makes sense.
...and again get incorrect results, as there's not one kind of sea water.
So 32.2 is an inherently more difficult number to learn than 9.86? 14.7 is more difficult than 101325? 93 million harder than 149 million? 2.997 E 8 is worse than 9.835 E 8? 491.67 makes less sense than 273.15?
That's not the point. The point is that all distance/mass metric units convert between each other flawlessly with only the move of a comma. English units require a multiplication/division by a constant for EVERY unit change. So you need to learn all those constants.
By using measurement systems that include more primes as divisors (even if it's just the addition of 3), you're giving yourself more room to manuever in which to state a measurement with precision instead of an approximate decimal
If you want precision use fractions. Nothing can replace them, not even your old English units. If you can leave with a degree of error, then use a base 10 : it's very easy to learn and use (just a comma to move). Why would you bother with a bunch of incompatible units that needs odd constant to switch from one to the other ? just because some of them are divided by 3 ? Following you logic, we should all count in base 84 because it's a multiple of 1,2,3,4,6 and 7 ? That's silly. Besides, even with your English units you still count in base 10 anyway, so you could as well use units that are 10 multiplies of other units.
Knowing that the meter was originally based on the circumference of the Earth as measured along the line of longitude through Paris, France does almost nothing for me.
That's the only point I'll concede you. But I don't think it's a high price to pay if that means you can just convert units without a calculator.
Metric could've been built on English units and used kilofeet, millislugs, etc.
Buzzzz. Wrong. Thanks for playing !
The metric system is linked : a liter of pure water weights exactly 1 kilogram... woud you care to remind us of how many ounces weight a gallon of water exactly ?
A mile may be 5280 feet but that quantity divides EVENLY... A km is 1000m and divides evenly
Yep, but I'd rather use units that have less multiples but have 100 as one of them that a unit that have more multiples but only ones like "176 or 165" like your miles. How often do you count in base 176 exactly ?
Water is just another liquid.
No - it's the raw liquid most commonly available on earth, and almost the only one. Liquid hydrogen or nitrogen is not easy to find, neither is raw mercury. Only a fucked up mind would base it's unit system on another liquid than water. Or someone who lives on Jupiter (hint : you don't).
If you wanted a universal constant for temperature, why did Centigrade scale not at least use absolute zero as one anchor point?
There's some sense to this but :
- absolute 0 temp has only been known quite recently, and by the time it was found temp. units were firmly established worlwide. There was not time to wait for the (possible) discovery of absolute 0
- centigrades are based on freezing and boiling point of pure water at sea level. That's a unit fairly easy to understand for anyone on earth, as long as you know how to make a fire and have an idea of what ice looks like.
Sure English units are fucked. At least we admit it. But it learns just as easy as anything else.
No it doesn't. Really.
It evenly divides better by everyday numbers.
If you consider (I quote you) 33, 40, 44, 48, 55, 60, 66, 80, 88, 96, 110, 120, 132, 160, 165, 176, 220, 240, 264, 330, 352, 440, 480, 528, 660, 880, 1056, 1320, 1760, 2640, 5280 as everyday numbers, then maybe. But my everyday number is 10. Mastering multiplication/division by 10 is all you need to manipulate ALL metric units. You can use your fingers for all of them. Can't be easier than that.
Don't forget the companies who get access to the source against an NDA. I would be very surprice if there are never a leak here and there !
Well it's probably out there : the MS intranet FTPs was frequentyly accessed by warez dudes who got their beta, alpha and MS source-code there. There are probably now some home-FTP servers or DCC servers that carry the Windows source code (although it musn't be a very popular download : no one has days to spend downloading gigabyte of C source code and then rebuild Windows (if you can figure how to do it) when you can have nice binaries everywhere).
Well it would have to be a country who doesn't care about diplomacy at all... do Cuba or Irak have an embassy ? Only them would be willing to piss of the US and do that.
There is an important group of BSD users: ISP ! A big amount of ISP use FreeBSD because it is fast, rock stable and clean. A big FreeBSD using ISP is a more important user than a 1000 Linux zealots... or 10000 Win98 mouse pushers.
Yeah, I just wish someone would port Freeciv (www.freeciv.org) to Windows CE. The source is there too, there's already a win32 port available, and frankly, being able to play Civilization everywhere would be the greatest thing in the world next to sex !!!
Err, according to the respectable Webster dictionnary :
invent :
1 - discover, find
2 - to devise by thinking : fabricate
3 - to produce
Hence usage 1, although somewhat archaic, is correct. Marie Curie indeed invented radiocativity.
(sarcasm)Or most of western Europe. And we know how terrible and miserable life is in France, Germany or Sweden...(/sarcasm)
What a bunch of crap far-right bullshit !
Have you ever seen the effect of a godless society.
Hum yeah, western Europe ? Much less violence than in the land-of-the-biggot USA. And as far as I know there aren't any school shooting in Russia either...
Ha! Wait, you're seeing it right now. As America moves further and futher away from God
Seing how Bush is prez and Aschroft is where he is, I'd say America gets more religious every year.
you will see more school shootings
The stats say they are less and less, but I guess you don't know how to read either...
and you will see the morons in this country scratching their heads and saying "gawsh, guess we need more gun control".
Well, the country with the most school-shooting is also the one with the most gun/capita. Coincidence ? It's hard to kill 20 people in 10 minutes with just a kitchen knife.
some people actually believe in something.
Yeah, some believe in a huge pile of bullshit and then try to force it down the throat of those who don't believe the same. I've seen what's happen when religion is controlling the country (Iran or Afghanistan anyone ?) so let's get it out of here as soon as possible.
Go back to the dark ages where you belong. It's the 21st century, and the Inquisition and which burning you lust for is a bit outdated.
Under the leadership of the French? Maybe the Brits or the Germans, but the French? They haven't made any waves in civilization since the 1800's, except as Germany's punching bag.
Well then I guess the invention of radioactivity, the cinema and a bazillion of other stuff just don't count in your definition of "civilization". But then I guess you are probably leaving in a cave anyway...
I actually think the EU is one of the smaller economic areas, in comparison to the US or to the Asias;
Nope - the EU market is bigger than USA, both in population and in GNP. Of course if you add USA+Canada+Mexico, this might change, but then, USA+Canada+Mexico aren't united the same as the EU countries are. As for Japan+Taïwan+South Korea, they are way behind the two other behemoth.
do you remeber Japan, Taiwan, China, and Korea? They form a formidable engineering and technology quartet, with India rising quickly too.
The problem is, India is NOT part of the Asian block. I know for a fact that Chinese don't like Indian very much ("hate" would be a more adequate word), and I'm sure Indian have the same feelings in return. India and China will be both superpowers of their own, but definitely not together. Not in our lifetime at least.
I hope the US becomes a great force in this global govt, by assimilating and adapting all the relevent cultural forces and movements into itself,
I sure hope not - there are enough ugly McDonald's and KFC around the world today. And don't get me started on this loosy Hollywood "culture". One "Independance Day" movie is enough.