the thing about God is that once you experience Him, you know the truth
What you are basically telling is that "God came to you and told you christianity was the way to go". Well, I obviously can't argue against that (damn!). Still, you have to wonder why an almighty all powerfull God, who (it's in the Bible) want his followers to grow in numbers can't even communicate with something a bit more "multimedia" than a feeling. I like to say that the day a Porshe GTR will appear before my eyes, with Laeticia Casta asking me for marriage inside, I'll gladly convert myself and attend church every sunday:)
The problem with religion is that, if you take a human, raise him in a non-religious environement, 99% of the time he won't develop any religious feeling of any kind. God will never "talk to him". God talks to people who are raised or trained to be religious... which means the feeling of a relationship with God is mostly cultural and environemental, and has probably nothing to do with a the existence of supernatural being...
Christianity (today at least) isn't a corporation, it doesn't have rules or restrictions you have to follow on a daily basis (ala religion).
I disagree with that - christianity is based on the Bible, and there are many rules in there (at least the 10 commandments). As to not being a corporation, it's true, but 99% of christians are following an organisation of some sort. Like most religious people, christians organise themselves into groups. Of course there'll always be "rogue believers" who don't want to join a group, but they are a very tiny minority.
Outside, you see rules and biblical dogmas and doctrines that are highly restricting. But from the inside, that's the freedom - you know why those 'rules' are there.
I see your point - but then, Nazis also qualify to this description, and that doesn't make them nice people or even tolerable people.
They're not there to hinder or restrict, but to help and protect.
Well 2 large religions explicitly forbid eating pork, yet I can lots of pork and still be alive (ok, so much for cholesterol, but I don't think that's the point in the ban;). As religious rules go, most of them are so old they are outdated, and they most of the time go against common sense. And you follow all of this because of a feeling ?
Christians are so looked down on because it's an offensive faith. Most other religions now are becoming tolerant of other religions
Well I think most religions are very offensive, because if they are not then they die out of lack of believers. And it's just logic : if you have the truth, then others are wrong, and who wouldn't fight to make the truth win ? If christians are so offensive in the western world it is because they are big enough to matter, especially in the US which is to christians what Iran is to muslims.
A marriage is a joining, given by God, of a man and woman
Hrrr, that's the half of the story I don't accept. Marriage is between two people - and that's it. That's always a man and a woman (that's a christians dogma), and God isn't involved (unless He shows up in person sometimes at the wedding, which has yet to happen). There are marriage in every human culture, including animist and atheist, so obviously God is not required to love and marry someone.
With God out of the equation, marriage becomes something only personal to the two engaged
Yep, so what's wrong with that ? It's messy enough to handle with only 2 involved people (and a mother in law;).
Matt 5:28 - "Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
This is the part I hate most about christinity : I'm not guilty for something I haven't done ! Therefor, I'm not responsible for my parents mistakes, for Adam and Eve mistakes, or even for the thing I thought about and didn't do in the end. Trying to make me guilty of others mistake is utterly evil. This goes against the most basic definition of justice and fairness. If someone is responsible above everyone else in the universe, it's certainly the creator of the universe, not the poor creature who try to clear up the mess they were born in.
If you think Christian believe the bible just becuase, well, you're right, except you're missing the other half; that we believe it without question because it was written by someone who really knows everything
You make a good point there, except for one thing. The Bible is always right because God wrote it. And you know God wrote it because that's what the Bible says, and the Bible is always right. If you are not one of those engaged into circular logic, then why do you think the Bible is the word of God ? Why isn't "Harry Potter" or "Dune" the real word of God then ? Whichever way you take it, at one point or another, you are basing all your life and moral on something that is quite baseless. Either way "someone said so" or "someone wrote so", but unless God himself came to you and told you the Bible was the one true book, you are only believing what other humans told you (priest, familly, tele-evangelist, whatever).
See it as a PGP signature ring-of-trust. God is the root certificate. If the Bible is not signed by God, and if the signature on it is not signed by God either, then you cannot trust the Bible nor the one who signed it either. For what we know, the Coran and the Talmud are also supposed to be the word of God, and they are sometimes in total opposition to the Bible or each other. There can be only one conclusion : at least 2 of those 3 books are partially or totally wrong, if not the 3 of them ! All 3 books have "serious backers", all 3 of them are very old. All we have in the end are a bunch of people claiming they have a book that God wrote/inspired. None of those 3 groups can show the slightest proof of what they claim. Now why any sensed and healthy human would adhere to one of this group is beyond me. I can understand the need to be religious, but then why picking the christian religion, why this one (with all its quirks) and not another ? Most Christian have never thought about it because they never put their belief into question themselves. And now some of them want to force all of us to live by THEIR moral.
But those who keep thinking about it, or do something about it, are the people who need the help.
I'd agree with that - but then we are not talking about people who cheat on someone physically, but online : no physical contact, usually not even an image or a sound of the other person. Now some people are deeply hurted by the mere knowing that their partner can imagine, for a second, kissing someone else. Some are comfortable with their partners sleeping outside or even having short term affairs. Cheating is not defined by religion or moral, it's defined by the moral contract you have with your partner. Once you go past the line drawned in this contract, then it's cheating. And the line is drawned somewhere different by everyone. Religion should be kept outside the bedroom !
wisdom of someone who was obviously a great moral teacher
Learn from WHO exactly ? Because the Bible has been written by a huge number of contributors, who contradicts themselves. Because it also has been translated and rewritten many times. Oh you meant Christ ? Well I don't think he even wrote a single in it. For what we know, his message might have been "eat brocolies and sleep with lots of women with big boobs" and we will never know.
By openly laughing, however, you lose your right not to be laughed at in return.
As another poster said, no-one ever had this right in the first place. The idea that you can't laugh of a religion (or can't even critisize it) is deeply defended by religious people, because there's nothing more dangerous to a religion than an open debate about its merits and pitfalls. There's a good reason most religion created speech-crime and killed or ostracised people who expressed different views. Religions hate free speech. Whenever there's censorship, you can bet that 90% of the time there's a religion feeling "offended" (read "threathened"). You can read the Bible, you can read the Coran or the Talmud, all of them have very clear explanation about how to handle critics... (and no, it doesn't just involve diplomacy)
Has it occurred to you that perhaps they've considered the alternatives and rejected them
If they have done so, then they can probably come up with a better explanation than "because the Bible say so". Obviously if their only argument is that "the Bible say so", then they haven't even started thinking about it and decided to let the book think for themselves.
This concept can be based on the idea that if you think about something often enough, you're probably going to eventually do it.
Now that is definitely at the root of dictatorship. You don't know how many people have been put into jail, tortured or killed just because they let other people know that they were thinking in a different way. And the justification for such harsh treatement is always "he was thinking about a different political system, so that just shows he was ready to plant bombs and kill children to make a revolution". Those who don't separate thinking and doing are merely placing the barriers of laws into everyone brain, and that is definitely not acceptable.
Beside, thinking is an independant process : you can't control your thoughts. They can show you nice or torrible things, they can lead you to very immoral or weirds concepts. That's the beauty of thinking, that's where creativity and humanity lives. I don't know any human who never though of cheating, beating or killing someone at a point of his life. Does that makes all of us cheaters, killers ? No, that makes us human with a free-will.
Beside, there's no point in being faithfull if you can't even think about being unfaithfull in the first place. There's no merit being good when you can't even THINK about being bad in the first place.
And, for that matter, who are you to ridicule somebody for their religious beliefs, as your post implies?
If you say the earth is flat, I'll laught at you. If you say the earth is flat and that's your religion, I loose my right to laught about it ? I'm sorry, but too many stupidities are protected from criticism under the umbrella of "Religion". Just because it is in someone religion doesn't mean it's not ridiculous anymore...
The concept of "thinking it is as bad as doing it" has been around for longer than the Bible.
Yep, and it's still as facist today as it was before. One should never trust those who restrict your freedom of thinking whatever you want. People should be judged by their acts.
If old books seem stupid, you could try reading, f'rinstance, Robert Heinlein, he held a few of the same beliefs.
ah, I never said old books seem stupid, I said trusting your whole life and beliefs on an old book written by a lot of different people a long long time ago, is a bit of a stretch. Most christian people do this or that because "the Bible says so, and if it is in the Bible, then it is true". What an amazing display of self-thinking and independance !
You could even post on slashdot, for all the world to see, your personal beliefs so that somebody else can take potshots at them because they happen to be based on a book.
True - but not ALL my beliefs come from ONE book. It's not getting ideas from book which is wrong, it is getting ALL your ideas and ALL your beliefs from ONE book, and then stubornly refusing anything not compatible with those ideas because they are against what that one book says.
I like 28 : "we know what you think, who you are, and you are all guilty and shall worship me if you want any hope of saving your miserable life" (booming voice)
No one would ever accept that from anyone, but of course if it is written in a very old book it has to be accepted as the ultime truth...
But toys are dangerous ! That's why Bush and it's right-wing fanatics will put more restrictions on toys, and less restrictions on gun sale/ownership. Guns don't kill people, video-games kill peoples !!!
Palms are VERY overpriced devices. That's the reason why Handspring is selling so many Palm clones, as their organizers are sold with a reasonable profit margin.
Heck just compare : for 20% more than the price of a big Palm Vx (lowres gray scale screen, 8 MB),you can get a Pocket PC device with 32 MB, 65535 screen with a big resolution (240x320), CompactFlash slot, 16 bit stereo sound, etc... Palms are just plain overpriced, but people keep buying because of the brand.
3D driver, as said previously. So far neither AGP or DRM qualify as "3D driver" (you can't call them and ask "draw me a polygon here with this texture"). They are layers used by a 3D driver, but as far as I know OpenGL is not yet integrated into the kernel, and won't be in the future either.
Bah ! Now that Junior is in the white house, everyone knows global warming is a lie invented by comies to subvert the familly-religion-guns values of America. I'm pretty sure those propagating these rumors will be fried somewhere in a Texas prison when the first amendment is dropped.
Railgun is a very old concept invented several decades ago (if not in the 19th century, since the effect itself dates from there). And I'm pretty sure most advanced armies have had at least some prototype of railgun for a long long time.
Yeah, all invented like good old Edison : let others do the work, then steal it and claim you did it yourself. Nice.
Other American variant : offer huge pile of money to foreign scientists (or "get out of jail free" if they are Nazi scientists) and then claim their work to be a pure American success.
it doesn't even come with 3D hardware drivers for it's kernel
Maybe that's becaune support for 3D hardware is, on both Linux and *BSD, a driver the runs along X-Windows and is not compiled in the kernel ?
As for laptops hardware support, again FreeBSD has less hardware support than Linux... but then no-one gives a sh* about PCMCIA or USB support on a server either. What matters is NIC and controler card drivers, and BSD has plenty of them. Trust me, if so many heavy-duty sites and hosting company use FreeBSD and not Linux, there's a reasy for it...
Well the BLOBs let me put all gif and jpeg along with other records in the same database. This has the following advantages :
- it is possible to backup/restore my whole web site with just one single call to mysqldump
- my pics indexing is always consistent, whereas as separate files some images could be erased/renamed/moved and the db not updated (or the opposite, having the db updated but not the files)
- it's cleaner, since things that goes together are stored together and not in 2 very different places
As for BLOBs usefullness, there's also the TEXT type (a BLOB type that is specifically made to handle large texts), on which you can apply WHERE conditions (LIKE "%something%"). Although not fast, it's still usefull:)
Does that mean VARCHAR are also stored outside with just a pointer in the row ? If that's also the case, then 64 KB sounds enough to me then. Char and int fields aren't usually enough to fill 64 KB...
It amuses me that when a "conservative" politician suggests a program to help people, he's a) vilified for being insensitive and impractical and b) accused of having an ulterior motive
That might be because, when they do so, there's always a company or a religious group inderectly benefitting from it. Either conservatives want to help thru subsidizing religious charity organisation, which profit from the occasion to try to make as many converts as possible to their cult, or they help thru buying to a big lobby some stuff and then giving away to poor people. You'd never see a conservative proposing help to poor people if there's not one of its lobby group profiting from it in a way.
Actually you can't trust any dictionnary to give accurate definition of a political word. I could quote an old 70s russian dictionnary about the word "capitalism", and I bet you wouldn't like the definition either ! As another poster said, socialism covers a lot of ground with the only common point being that the state should at heart to help every citizen and balance things out.
worker's incentive to produce, innovate, or take any risk at all is removed
That just shows you think socialism==communism. If you think the above is true, then how do you explain the 1 million+ company creation in the European Union every year ? Or are those people paid by the gov. to start their own business ? There is a striving free-market in countries with socialism ideology, just like there's in the USA. The fact that Germany is the 3 world biggest economy and France the 4th just shows how wrong you are.
the happiest, most optimistic and motivated people are in the US
They are energetic because they can be fired tomorrow without any job security:) Go in the countries themselves and see how people live, don't judge from how "energetic" people are at work. I've been to several places including USA and all over Europe, and I was quite shocked to see some people eating in the US McDonald trash in American back alleys. As to energetic American workers, the one I've worked with mostly reminded me of shiny-happy-people drones bombarded with cheesy commercials every 5 seconds. Not my definition of happyness.
I have also observed that, nearly without exception, people who come to the US from elsewhere, stay in the US. They may complain that this or that is not as good as "back home" but they don't leave.
Yeah, that's the same thing in all developped country. People go there mostly because they want more money. They arrive, get a job, a house, a wife, a dog, 3 kids, a 30 year loan and never go home. Doesn't prove anything. I've been to the US and left because money doesn't buy happyness and the US are not somewhere I would raise my kids. Heck, Ashcroft and Bush alone are a good reasons to flee this place.
How about blob fields ? If you use blobs then you obviously have some kind of large binary object to store, and then 64 KB seems kinda short for it. I use MySQL on my site and store lots of images on the database itself, as this is convenient for backups/restore (one backup saves everything).
And for those who says "don't store images on the DB", I store them here, but I serve them thru a cache, so there's no load on the database.
For some odd reason the UK is taking the worst of US free-market capitalism (big limitations on labor unions, wild deregulation, etc.) and mixing it with the worst of socialism (big brother everywhere). That's another reason I wouldn't live there... this and the terrible food;)
Actually you are probably mixing up socialism and communism. They are not the same thing ! Socialism is a system that takes from both capitalism and communism. The governement assume duties not only for the justice and defense, but also in economic, social and cultural subjects. But it also gives a large place to the private sector and free-market competition.
It's all a matter of balance. You can be an extremist and be total-capitalism (USA) or communism (USSR), or you can try to take the best of both worlds and make something more balanced. As a bad commercial would say, "balance is everything"
The problems in Russia are not from deregulation, but from holes in law and lack of its enforcement, plus corruption.
What's funny with die-hard capitalists is that whenever their beloved system goes wrong, it's never the fault of capitalism, it's always the fault of someone else (mafia/governement/incompetence/etc.). Is it so hard to accept the fact that capitalism is not perfect ? That it is not the ultime answer to mankind problems ? That there might (gasp!) be alternate solutions ? That it is not suited to every culture and country ?
Wouldn't a place to sleep, some food and a job (and training if needed) be more important than surfing the net ? Or was this just a sneaky idea to subsidize Dell ?
Slashdot Mirror
the thing about God is that once you experience Him, you know the truth
:)
;). As religious rules go, most of them are so old they are outdated, and they most of the time go against common sense. And you follow all of this because of a feeling ?
;).
What you are basically telling is that "God came to you and told you christianity was the way to go". Well, I obviously can't argue against that (damn!). Still, you have to wonder why an almighty all powerfull God, who (it's in the Bible) want his followers to grow in numbers can't even communicate with something a bit more "multimedia" than a feeling. I like to say that the day a Porshe GTR will appear before my eyes, with Laeticia Casta asking me for marriage inside, I'll gladly convert myself and attend church every sunday
The problem with religion is that, if you take a human, raise him in a non-religious environement, 99% of the time he won't develop any religious feeling of any kind. God will never "talk to him". God talks to people who are raised or trained to be religious... which means the feeling of a relationship with God is mostly cultural and environemental, and has probably nothing to do with a the existence of supernatural being...
Christianity (today at least) isn't a corporation, it doesn't have rules or restrictions you have to follow on a daily basis (ala religion).
I disagree with that - christianity is based on the Bible, and there are many rules in there (at least the 10 commandments). As to not being a corporation, it's true, but 99% of christians are following an organisation of some sort. Like most religious people, christians organise themselves into groups. Of course there'll always be "rogue believers" who don't want to join a group, but they are a very tiny minority.
Outside, you see rules and biblical dogmas and doctrines that are highly restricting. But from the inside, that's the freedom - you know why those 'rules' are there.
I see your point - but then, Nazis also qualify to this description, and that doesn't make them nice people or even tolerable people.
They're not there to hinder or restrict, but to help and protect.
Well 2 large religions explicitly forbid eating pork, yet I can lots of pork and still be alive (ok, so much for cholesterol, but I don't think that's the point in the ban
Christians are so looked down on because it's an offensive faith. Most other religions now are becoming tolerant of other religions
Well I think most religions are very offensive, because if they are not then they die out of lack of believers. And it's just logic : if you have the truth, then others are wrong, and who wouldn't fight to make the truth win ? If christians are so offensive in the western world it is because they are big enough to matter, especially in the US which is to christians what Iran is to muslims.
A marriage is a joining, given by God, of a man and woman
Hrrr, that's the half of the story I don't accept. Marriage is between two people - and that's it. That's always a man and a woman (that's a christians dogma), and God isn't involved (unless He shows up in person sometimes at the wedding, which has yet to happen). There are marriage in every human culture, including animist and atheist, so obviously God is not required to love and marry someone.
With God out of the equation, marriage becomes something only personal to the two engaged
Yep, so what's wrong with that ? It's messy enough to handle with only 2 involved people (and a mother in law
Matt 5:28 - "Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
This is the part I hate most about christinity : I'm not guilty for something I haven't done ! Therefor, I'm not responsible for my parents mistakes, for Adam and Eve mistakes, or even for the thing I thought about and didn't do in the end. Trying to make me guilty of others mistake is utterly evil. This goes against the most basic definition of justice and fairness. If someone is responsible above everyone else in the universe, it's certainly the creator of the universe, not the poor creature who try to clear up the mess they were born in.
If you think Christian believe the bible just becuase, well, you're right, except you're missing the other half; that we believe it without question because it was written by someone who really knows everything
You make a good point there, except for one thing. The Bible is always right because God wrote it. And you know God wrote it because that's what the Bible says, and the Bible is always right. If you are not one of those engaged into circular logic, then why do you think the Bible is the word of God ? Why isn't "Harry Potter" or "Dune" the real word of God then ? Whichever way you take it, at one point or another, you are basing all your life and moral on something that is quite baseless. Either way "someone said so" or "someone wrote so", but unless God himself came to you and told you the Bible was the one true book, you are only believing what other humans told you (priest, familly, tele-evangelist, whatever).
See it as a PGP signature ring-of-trust. God is the root certificate. If the Bible is not signed by God, and if the signature on it is not signed by God either, then you cannot trust the Bible nor the one who signed it either. For what we know, the Coran and the Talmud are also supposed to be the word of God, and they are sometimes in total opposition to the Bible or each other. There can be only one conclusion : at least 2 of those 3 books are partially or totally wrong, if not the 3 of them ! All 3 books have "serious backers", all 3 of them are very old. All we have in the end are a bunch of people claiming they have a book that God wrote/inspired. None of those 3 groups can show the slightest proof of what they claim. Now why any sensed and healthy human would adhere to one of this group is beyond me. I can understand the need to be religious, but then why picking the christian religion, why this one (with all its quirks) and not another ? Most Christian have never thought about it because they never put their belief into question themselves. And now some of them want to force all of us to live by THEIR moral.
But those who keep thinking about it, or do something about it, are the people who need the help.
I'd agree with that - but then we are not talking about people who cheat on someone physically, but online : no physical contact, usually not even an image or a sound of the other person. Now some people are deeply hurted by the mere knowing that their partner can imagine, for a second, kissing someone else. Some are comfortable with their partners sleeping outside or even having short term affairs. Cheating is not defined by religion or moral, it's defined by the moral contract you have with your partner. Once you go past the line drawned in this contract, then it's cheating. And the line is drawned somewhere different by everyone. Religion should be kept outside the bedroom !
wisdom of someone who was obviously a great moral teacher
Learn from WHO exactly ? Because the Bible has been written by a huge number of contributors, who contradicts themselves. Because it also has been translated and rewritten many times. Oh you meant Christ ? Well I don't think he even wrote a single in it. For what we know, his message might have been "eat brocolies and sleep with lots of women with big boobs" and we will never know.
By openly laughing, however, you lose your right not to be laughed at in return.
As another poster said, no-one ever had this right in the first place. The idea that you can't laugh of a religion (or can't even critisize it) is deeply defended by religious people, because there's nothing more dangerous to a religion than an open debate about its merits and pitfalls. There's a good reason most religion created speech-crime and killed or ostracised people who expressed different views. Religions hate free speech. Whenever there's censorship, you can bet that 90% of the time there's a religion feeling "offended" (read "threathened"). You can read the Bible, you can read the Coran or the Talmud, all of them have very clear explanation about how to handle critics... (and no, it doesn't just involve diplomacy)
Has it occurred to you that perhaps they've considered the alternatives and rejected them
If they have done so, then they can probably come up with a better explanation than "because the Bible say so". Obviously if their only argument is that "the Bible say so", then they haven't even started thinking about it and decided to let the book think for themselves.
This concept can be based on the idea that if you think about something often enough, you're probably going to eventually do it.
Now that is definitely at the root of dictatorship. You don't know how many people have been put into jail, tortured or killed just because they let other people know that they were thinking in a different way. And the justification for such harsh treatement is always "he was thinking about a different political system, so that just shows he was ready to plant bombs and kill children to make a revolution". Those who don't separate thinking and doing are merely placing the barriers of laws into everyone brain, and that is definitely not acceptable.
Beside, thinking is an independant process : you can't control your thoughts. They can show you nice or torrible things, they can lead you to very immoral or weirds concepts. That's the beauty of thinking, that's where creativity and humanity lives. I don't know any human who never though of cheating, beating or killing someone at a point of his life. Does that makes all of us cheaters, killers ? No, that makes us human with a free-will.
Beside, there's no point in being faithfull if you can't even think about being unfaithfull in the first place. There's no merit being good when you can't even THINK about being bad in the first place.
And, for that matter, who are you to ridicule somebody for their religious beliefs, as your post implies?
If you say the earth is flat, I'll laught at you. If you say the earth is flat and that's your religion, I loose my right to laught about it ? I'm sorry, but too many stupidities are protected from criticism under the umbrella of "Religion". Just because it is in someone religion doesn't mean it's not ridiculous anymore...
The concept of "thinking it is as bad as doing it" has been around for longer than the Bible.
Yep, and it's still as facist today as it was before. One should never trust those who restrict your freedom of thinking whatever you want. People should be judged by their acts.
If old books seem stupid, you could try reading, f'rinstance, Robert Heinlein, he held a few of the same beliefs.
ah, I never said old books seem stupid, I said trusting your whole life and beliefs on an old book written by a lot of different people a long long time ago, is a bit of a stretch. Most christian people do this or that because "the Bible says so, and if it is in the Bible, then it is true". What an amazing display of self-thinking and independance !
You could even post on slashdot, for all the world to see, your personal beliefs so that somebody else can take potshots at them because they happen to be based on a book.
True - but not ALL my beliefs come from ONE book. It's not getting ideas from book which is wrong, it is getting ALL your ideas and ALL your beliefs from ONE book, and then stubornly refusing anything not compatible with those ideas because they are against what that one book says.
I like 28 : "we know what you think, who you are, and you are all guilty and shall worship me if you want any hope of saving your miserable life" (booming voice)
No one would ever accept that from anyone, but of course if it is written in a very old book it has to be accepted as the ultime truth...
It is not illegal for a European, Asian or African to stare at a TV playing a US DVD
Except when this is ID4 or a Chuck Norris movie : torture is not allowed even in the US (execution is, but that's another story).
But toys are dangerous ! That's why Bush and it's right-wing fanatics will put more restrictions on toys, and less restrictions on gun sale/ownership. Guns don't kill people, video-games kill peoples !!!
Cheap, tiny handheld computers aimed at teens, with wireless capabilities... I think Lain had a pocket Navi like this, but with color :)
Palms are VERY overpriced devices. That's the reason why Handspring is selling so many Palm clones, as their organizers are sold with a reasonable profit margin.
Heck just compare : for 20% more than the price of a big Palm Vx (lowres gray scale screen, 8 MB),you can get a Pocket PC device with 32 MB, 65535 screen with a big resolution (240x320), CompactFlash slot, 16 bit stereo sound, etc... Palms are just plain overpriced, but people keep buying because of the brand.
3D driver, as said previously. So far neither AGP or DRM qualify as "3D driver" (you can't call them and ask "draw me a polygon here with this texture"). They are layers used by a 3D driver, but as far as I know OpenGL is not yet integrated into the kernel, and won't be in the future either.
Bah ! Now that Junior is in the white house, everyone knows global warming is a lie invented by comies to subvert the familly-religion-guns values of America. I'm pretty sure those propagating these rumors will be fried somewhere in a Texas prison when the first amendment is dropped.
Railgun is a very old concept invented several decades ago (if not in the 19th century, since the effect itself dates from there). And I'm pretty sure most advanced armies have had at least some prototype of railgun for a long long time.
Yeah, all invented like good old Edison : let others do the work, then steal it and claim you did it yourself. Nice.
Other American variant : offer huge pile of money to foreign scientists (or "get out of jail free" if they are Nazi scientists) and then claim their work to be a pure American success.
it doesn't even come with 3D hardware drivers for it's kernel
Maybe that's becaune support for 3D hardware is, on both Linux and *BSD, a driver the runs along X-Windows and is not compiled in the kernel ?
As for laptops hardware support, again FreeBSD has less hardware support than Linux... but then no-one gives a sh* about PCMCIA or USB support on a server either. What matters is NIC and controler card drivers, and BSD has plenty of them. Trust me, if so many heavy-duty sites and hosting company use FreeBSD and not Linux, there's a reasy for it...
Well the BLOBs let me put all gif and jpeg along with other records in the same database. This has the following advantages :
:)
- it is possible to backup/restore my whole web site with just one single call to mysqldump
- my pics indexing is always consistent, whereas as separate files some images could be erased/renamed/moved and the db not updated (or the opposite, having the db updated but not the files)
- it's cleaner, since things that goes together are stored together and not in 2 very different places
As for BLOBs usefullness, there's also the TEXT type (a BLOB type that is specifically made to handle large texts), on which you can apply WHERE conditions (LIKE "%something%"). Although not fast, it's still usefull
Then I guess people will just patch the Secure Audio Path kernel part, then use a dummy audio driver that output to file or digital out.
Does that mean VARCHAR are also stored outside with just a pointer in the row ? If that's also the case, then 64 KB sounds enough to me then. Char and int fields aren't usually enough to fill 64 KB...
It amuses me that when a "conservative" politician suggests a program to help people, he's a) vilified for being insensitive and impractical and b) accused of having an ulterior motive
That might be because, when they do so, there's always a company or a religious group inderectly benefitting from it. Either conservatives want to help thru subsidizing religious charity organisation, which profit from the occasion to try to make as many converts as possible to their cult, or they help thru buying to a big lobby some stuff and then giving away to poor people. You'd never see a conservative proposing help to poor people if there's not one of its lobby group profiting from it in a way.
Source of both definitions
:) Go in the countries themselves and see how people live, don't judge from how "energetic" people are at work. I've been to several places including USA and all over Europe, and I was quite shocked to see some people eating in the US McDonald trash in American back alleys. As to energetic American workers, the one I've worked with mostly reminded me of shiny-happy-people drones bombarded with cheesy commercials every 5 seconds. Not my definition of happyness.
Actually you can't trust any dictionnary to give accurate definition of a political word. I could quote an old 70s russian dictionnary about the word "capitalism", and I bet you wouldn't like the definition either ! As another poster said, socialism covers a lot of ground with the only common point being that the state should at heart to help every citizen and balance things out.
worker's incentive to produce, innovate, or take any risk at all is removed
That just shows you think socialism==communism. If you think the above is true, then how do you explain the 1 million+ company creation in the European Union every year ? Or are those people paid by the gov. to start their own business ? There is a striving free-market in countries with socialism ideology, just like there's in the USA. The fact that Germany is the 3 world biggest economy and France the 4th just shows how wrong you are.
the happiest, most optimistic and motivated people are in the US
They are energetic because they can be fired tomorrow without any job security
I have also observed that, nearly without exception, people who come to the US from elsewhere, stay in the US. They may complain that this or that is not as good as "back home" but they don't leave.
Yeah, that's the same thing in all developped country. People go there mostly because they want more money. They arrive, get a job, a house, a wife, a dog, 3 kids, a 30 year loan and never go home. Doesn't prove anything. I've been to the US and left because money doesn't buy happyness and the US are not somewhere I would raise my kids. Heck, Ashcroft and Bush alone are a good reasons to flee this place.
How about blob fields ? If you use blobs then you obviously have some kind of large binary object to store, and then 64 KB seems kinda short for it. I use MySQL on my site and store lots of images on the database itself, as this is convenient for backups/restore (one backup saves everything).
And for those who says "don't store images on the DB", I store them here, but I serve them thru a cache, so there's no load on the database.
For some odd reason the UK is taking the worst of US free-market capitalism (big limitations on labor unions, wild deregulation, etc.) and mixing it with the worst of socialism (big brother everywhere). That's another reason I wouldn't live there... this and the terrible food ;)
Actually you are probably mixing up socialism and communism. They are not the same thing ! Socialism is a system that takes from both capitalism and communism. The governement assume duties not only for the justice and defense, but also in economic, social and cultural subjects. But it also gives a large place to the private sector and free-market competition.
It's all a matter of balance. You can be an extremist and be total-capitalism (USA) or communism (USSR), or you can try to take the best of both worlds and make something more balanced. As a bad commercial would say, "balance is everything"
The problems in Russia are not from deregulation, but from holes in law and lack of its enforcement, plus corruption.
What's funny with die-hard capitalists is that whenever their beloved system goes wrong, it's never the fault of capitalism, it's always the fault of someone else (mafia/governement/incompetence/etc.). Is it so hard to accept the fact that capitalism is not perfect ? That it is not the ultime answer to mankind problems ? That there might (gasp!) be alternate solutions ? That it is not suited to every culture and country ?
Wouldn't a place to sleep, some food and a job (and training if needed) be more important than surfing the net ? Or was this just a sneaky idea to subsidize Dell ?