Several thoughts, first I've known several people who are addicted to drugs and have relatively ruined their lives to this point. Some of them have plenty of time to turn around their lives. Drug addition is something there is treatment for that is successful in a lot of cases. People in the past and have in fact recovered from drug addiction. To the best of my knowledge Huntington's has no such thing. As someone who comes from a long and proud line of alcoholics, drug abusers, and in general people who suffer from some type of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder of some type or another, I can assure you that merely because I'm genetically predisposed to be a drug addict or alcoholic, I have managed through will power managed to avoid such things. I understand it's something I can never experiment with unless I want my life to spin out of control. I'm lucky, and others aren't so lucky that they never realize that if they start, they might never be able to stop. Not that I'm not sympathetic with drug addicts or their plight, but I'd say that someone with a 100% terminal genetic disorder is in a completely different category. Drug addiction and alcoholism can and have been overcome and managed on a regular basis. For some drug addicts, it might be that they are 100% incapable of recovery from their addiction, but I'd say that there's an abundance of statistical evidence to show that a significant portions of drug addicts can and do overcome their addictions.
Now, once you have flashed it, you can use additional channel space that is normally unavailable to use as it is reserved bandwidth. I forget which channel ID it is, channel 14 I think is not normally accessible in the USA. Change to that channel and most of your interference should go away from other competing devices.
Nice to see someone recommend you break the FCC rules (which I believe puts you in violation of a Federal Law)... *Sigh*. The FCC for all it's problem does actually do the frequency splits for a real honest to god good reason. Everything above 11 is outside the USA frequency range, you use 14, because that puts you the furthest away (which leaves you less overlap with 11, each channel overlaps with the next 4 or 5 channels). As to what is usable where, see this page from Cisco. What the parent is recommended is an FCC violation, probably punishable by a fine. Not sure if it's punishable by jail time. In general, what you'd like to do is actually work with the people in the area to work out a workable system. While this local optimization might work for you, if everyone does it, it's a problem. Along with the fact that it will cause problems for whoever actually is using the licensed equipment in that frequency range. First figure out if you have crappy equipment, or figure out if you have the wireless spectrum in your area is just flooded. If it is, work as a with the folks you live near to mitigate this. They are flooding your network, you are flooding theirs. Set up one network, setup multiple networks and coordinate channel usage. Get everyone to tone down their power settings (thus the signal won't go through walls). As several others have suggested, use directional antennas. Use a different technology to for single room access and use wired for long haul.
Sure, it would probably be Debian-based with a little rebranding
I've never seen anyone misspell RedHat so badly...
I'm fairly sure Dell isn't going to base their Linux off of a non-commercially supported Linux. Call it a hunch, Dell will want someone to call or do the heavy lifting for them just so they don't have to have all that talent in house. Just like neither Oracle nor IBM include any non-Commercial Linux on their list of supported platforms. Heck, IBM and Oracle include what I think of as small players ahead of Debian. Or at least they used to, probably because I'm U.S. centric, TurboLinux and Connectiva always seemed like smallish distro's. I believe they are/were large in Asia and South America.
It's not their hearng that is the problem. It's the fact that they are focusing on something other then the surroundings while walking in front of traffic. All that said, I agree with the posters who say, either they have the right of way or they don't. All other details are irrelevant.
Kirby
Re:Dependency Rejection
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Or better yet, ship a "minimal dependency library". That has all of the minimal sets of dependencies inside of it (either of real code or replacement code). Thus if you are using "Apache Commons Lang" already, it'll pick and use that. If not, you can use the drop in replacement code.
Hmmm, I'll have to talk with my number theory professor for the details. He's the one who told me that Wiles attacked the problem for a long, long time and at some point gave up his original approach because he realized that for precisely the reason that his original approach couldn't solve it was precisely the reason the new one could. Maybe he didn't switch at as basic a level as I thought.
Hmmm, I'd always been told that Gauss was the first to prove the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Ah, Wikipedia says that the first full and correct proof was by Gauss, while Euclid had "essentially" proved it.
You're correct, that is a misstatement on my part, I meant that it was highly unlikely, not a double negative that I did write.
Oddly enough, lots of people are unhappy with Wiles's method. I believe a number of people are attempting to prove it using a purely number theory approach. What Wiles ended up proving was a vastly stronger statement, the result for Fermat's was a corollary (I also think that Wiles became an expert in Elliptical functions specifically to make this proof, he started in a different area according to what I'd been told). I wouldn't be shocked if several more simple and straight forward proofs come out in my lifetime. For a long time the proof for the fundamental law of arithmetic stood unproven. Now it's a standard proof in every number theory book. As I recall, I had to do it for a test.
I believe his point isn't that you're not doing work, but rather that scheduling pondering is impossible. Otherwise give me a fairly firm estimate of when you will either prove P = NP, or that you can prove that P < NP. Logical deduction isn't precisely the same as "resolving the unknown". One doesn't provide a time table for when the Twin Prime conjecture will be solved. I can apply logic deduction to lots of problems, but I can't necessarily provide a firm estimate of when I'll find the solution to a problem.
Any time you provide an estimate of the time it will take to do anything in "problem solving", you are using statistical conjecture about how long you think it should taken given that you've solved other similar issues. How long will it take me to resolve a logic puzzle. How long will it take to construct a proof to show something? You think logically on those, but you don't provide a schedule. If you tell me, I'm going to give you 30 different distance, rate, time story problems that are geared for a high school freshmen, I can tell you that I'll be done in about an hour. If you tell me that you'd like me to prove Fermat's last theorem without using reference material. I know it's true, and I know that I can't provide a schedule for it. It's highly unlikely that if I took the rest of my life I couldn't do it. Both require deduction and logical thought. One is an entirely different scale then the other.
When working in the unknown, you can't provide a schedule. Otherwise, you'd be working either in the known, or very close to the edge of known.
Last time I checked, there are approximately 5-10 major distros. The vendors have to do their due diligence on any kernel. It's not like RedHat picks a kernel and sits on it for several years. Cherry picking fixes isn't tons of fun, but it's not impossible and if the bugs don't affect anyone why exactly do they need to be fixed again? It's not like those people don't communicate or you can't work with them if you choose to. SuSE and RedHat guys talks. SuSE and Gentoo talk. Having everyone attempt to stabilize their trees independently is insane... that's why I'm saying everyone attempting to do their own is crazy. But attempting to make one group of folks stabilize one tree for the whole world is at least as insane.
Pretty much everybody else bases their kernel sources off of one of those 10-20 trees (counting major kernel developers that maintain reasonable stable trees). There are no free lunches RedHat and SUSE get free engineering and major movement forward. To aquire that they take on QA and stabilization work. More importantly they get to pick when they suffer their pain. Attempting to state that the developers have to absorb all that and never allow anything that isn't stable and tested out the door is insane, we just left that madness. It wasn't stable then anyways, and pretending that you can merely engineer your way towards perfect software that is moving as fast as Linux currently does is ignoring reality. They get to pick what they feel has the most stable base to move to. It's an engineering decision. The forward advancements that Linux is making make moving forward worth the effort and expense of stabilizing a version every 18 months or so.
In terms of Solaris or OpenBSD, vote with your feet. Move towards them and let the people who have figured out a way to deal with the pains you describe do it. Linux works, because it works... That sounds like a tautology, but it's true. What they are doing works for them. By nearly all accounts, everyone is much happier with the current model then the disaster that was the 2.2 to 2.4 transition. It took forever, and when you finally got it wasn't stable until the vendors did their vendor thing to it. I ran the gambit of kernels between 1.3 and 2.4... 2.6 is a much nicer program to be on...
The 2.6 kernel is moving forward and getting major developments out into the hands as broad a set of people as possible. It's a thing of beauty.
Don't take this the wrong way, but your complaint sounds a lot like the story about a patient and a doctor:
"Doctor, when I do this, it hurts", and the doctor replies, "Well don't do that".
I mean, if you are following bleeding edge kernels, and complaining that they aren't as stable as you'd like. Why not just follow a vendors kernel? If you use or install "many thousands", you are either maintaining your own de-facto distribution or you are using someone else's distribution. Vendor's do exactly the work you want done on your behalf.
I patiently wait for my vendor kernel, which might be 10 point releases behind integrate bug fixes and then upgrade in a year or two to a much newer point release (I think RedHat has used 2.6.9 and/or 2.9.13 in recent memory)... Incrementing a different number wouldn't really make any difference anyways. At that point it's all semantics, if you know the rules of the game, it's not hard to tell what's dangerous as an upgrade and what's not.
It's not like 2.4.13 (or whatever one in the 2.4 series that introduced series disk corruption) was safe merely because it was a point release... They are safe because somebody took it out back and beat on the kernel for a while and it didn't cause any problems. If you upgrade without proper testing and it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.
What provision disallows coins but not paper money? To the best of my knowledge, only the Federal Gov't is allowed to establish "fiat money".
Two points, first you made it seem like there is some legal nicities that a city or state can follow to print money, like the Federal Gov't. You mention specifically, "one to one dollar value". There is no such law (cite it if I'm wrong, I'd be interested to learn of such a thing). Neither states, nor cities have that priviledge. The Federal Gov't does have such a priviledge under the Constitution (cite included above).
Second, this saying that cities or states are "allowed" to print money under this definition is silly. Using this definition of money, absolutely anybody is allowed to print "money". This isn't a priviledge or a right that a city or a state has, it's something anyone could do. If I chose to make "Kirby-bucks", I could do it as an individual. Would they have much value... no, but it wouldn't land me in jail. Heck, a lot of malls do nearly exactly this with their gift certificates that work at any store in the mall. It's currency that only works inside the mall, and generally you never receive cash back. Best Buy does it on returns. Heck, Sony does it with Playstations as you can use those as currency in a used game store.
My issue wasn't that a local currency couldn't or doesn't exist (they naturally occur in a lot of contexts, favors in the mob could be viewed that way). Mine was specifically that there is no provision under US law for anyone but Federal Gov't to coin or print money legally. Your statements that seem to imply a provision for it lead me to believe one of us is in error. Stating what I believed to be accurate seemed the most efficient way to flush out citations of facts. I believe you to be in error, hence my reply. It'd be nice to find out if I was in error, but the constitution was fairly clear on this point.
There was a single argument discussing the finer points of the legal issues, and thing pointed out the practical issues and the differenes between the theory and the practice money. What you are describing is essentially "scrip". Look it up in Wikipedia for an interesting discussion.
I believe anything over $100.00 in pennies is the legal limit in the court case. Not accepting change in general in considered discrimination against the poor.
Depending on how you interpret the defintion of "money" you might have a point. When I said "money" I meant things that a business in the US must accept as payment. There is no gov't entity besides the Federal Government appointed folks who are allowed to print money that must be accepted as payment by everyone in the U.S.
I said that it's completely legal for a group to decide amongst themselves to exchange two things for each other (I could wash your car if you fix my computer, if one of them happens to involve little IOU notes of some type so be it). What I said, is "If a city or state government attempted to force a business to accept something as legal tender, the Federal Gov't would shut them down". Flooz was completely legal. If the State of Arizona attempted to force business to accept flooz, or would only accept tax debts paid in flooz the Federal Gov't would take them to Federal Court and crush them with a fairly straightforward argument.
As far as what is or isn't legal tender, the $20 bill in my wallet says right on it, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So I'm reasonable confident that printed bills are in fact legal tender. I'm also sure that any state that attempted to print such a thing on a piece of paper they printed would find themselves in a whole lot of trouble. It is one of the few rights the Federal gov't retained for itself.
What'd I screw up about the barter system? I'm fairly sure bartering is when folks agree to exchange things of value. Weather they be legal tender, things or services, it's bartering. I specifically mentioned that these local currencies are legal, but it's completely voluntary that anyone participate in it. If you have a debt to me, if you hand me "LETS Money.", I can laugh at you. If you hand me US Dollars, I have to accept them (assuming I'm in the US).
Those are not legal tender, and it is in fact illegal for anyone except for the Federal Gov't to print money. It was a total disaster when it was allowed to happen under the Articles of Confederation. It was one of the significant changes that was made when the gov't was re-formed under the constitution. Under the Articles of Confederation, state gov'ts used to have banks print notes, the state of NY in fact had a $3 bill for instance (despite the rarely said "That's as fake as a $3 bill"). If a city or state decided to force businesses to accept those local currencies, the Feds would shut it down in an instant. The fact that they have a mutual arrangement where everyone agrees to exchange things of value is completely legal (it's essentially bartering, which is completely legal). Don't confuse that with it being legal for a city or state to print legal tender.
I forget the legal term for it, but I believe a judge can set aside a jury verdict also. It's also leaving the judge open to review, and is likely to be grounds for a mistrial, retrial or appeal (whatever the appropriate legal term is). So it works both ways.
These folks sure act like it's been illegal for a while now. In terms of cutting up a US coin and sell it for more, it's illegal, but not often enforced. Just like Speed Limit laws where it's illegal to drive faster then a particular speed, but is flaunted regularly.
For the most part, I agree with the rest of what you are saying. SuSE will continue to be extremely relevant as long as they continue to employ high-profile Open Source developers, and their developers continue to contributed valuable code that is accepted by upstream providers. That is the sign that SuSE is in serious trouble. Wake me when they lose the developers, or the upstream providers refuse to work with them because they are employed by SuSE. Until then, this is all just hot air moving about.
Ironically, I've found a lack of comments to be fairly easy to resolve with a technical solution. Checkstyle is very handy for reminding people they forgot comments. Periodically, you still have to remind people that writing nonsensical text to get it past the automated tools is a really good way irritate the crap out of your co-workers.
Generally I've found most everyone has started to comment reasonable well once Javadocs starting getting generated regularly and people found them useful.
Maybe, maybe not... Depending on how the licensing agreement is structured, they could do something similar to RedHat's support agreement where the agreement is completely separate. They could give you indemnity insurance along with your copy of suse. So they would still be in the same kind of trouble that everyone else is, and you get the same rights, but you can't pass long the indemnity insurance freely. But if they don't arrange it properly, they would be in violation.
Kirby
Whoever wrote the head line should learn about implications, and to stop adding meaning that isn't there. The article is fairly specific:
Being happy and confident about doing mathematics does not imply compentency in mathematics. In fact, they have a reverse correlation (not to being confused with causality).
There is not a sentiment of "being good at math makes you exhibit anti-social behavior", or anything of the type in the article.
What you mean those of use still running the last of the 1.2 series aren't running Linux... I knew there was a reason not to trust that new fangled stuff they've been adding to my perfectly fine kernel... *grin*.
I long for the days of yore when 1.2 was the kernel of choice. It was an easier time, I could actually understand most of the kernel config options back then...
I'm absolutely confident that insurance industry would never use that type of reasoning. You'll have to cite that. They would use statistical evidence to show that the amount of risk they are accepting is just lower based on your statistical category. Just in case anybody ever reads this, you are an idiot to not pay for the accident if you can afford it. The increased insurance premiums will generally cost you more then merely paying for the accident (there is a tipping point, but for me $2500 is probably within the smart to just pay it range). If at any point a Doctor's bill is involved, call your insurance. I'd pay the $2500 out of pocket off my $500 or $1000 deductible. The increase in my rates over the 2-5 years it'd take to fall off my insurance would probably cost me more even accounting for inflation and interest.
Ironically, the credit score in insurance isn't about being a better or worse driver. It's about who is more likely to file a "$2,500" when you back into someone else's care in a parking lot. People with good credit will probably pay that themselves, where as someone with bad credit is less likely.
For better or worse, that is statistically proveable with relative ease. In that particular case, the ability to manage debt and the ability to absorb the risk without involving your insurance company is what the better rate is for. Given that someone with a high credit score is unlikely to pass that risk on to the insurance company, an argument can be made that it is in fact correct and accurate to not force them to pay the higher premium.
I'm not sure I agree with the practice (I benefit from it, so I'm biased), but from an actuarial/statistical point of view it is accurate.
I'd argue that the rules about "its" and "it's" is in fact arbitrary and silly. It's precisely crap that in the grand scheme of things I don't care about. I don't get to see where the apostrophe is when it's spoken to me, and I can figure it out via context. I've heard of that book. It sounds amusing by all accounts.
I can't spell worth a damn because nothing in English resembles consistent. There are 10 exceptions to every rule. I really don't care about "who" or "whom". My favorite part about English is that if you go back far enough in time, words that end in "-ed" to make them past tense are in fact "irregular". As new verbs have been added, they all use "-ed" as their conjugation. Which is why so many really old words conjugations are so complex (see "to be", and "to slay" as primary examples).
While I try not to write run on sentences, and I try not to butcher the spelling too badly. I don't get too worked up about "its", "were", and "your". I don't even know the rules on "further vs. farther", "who vs. whom", or what the hell a dangling participle is. It's abundantly clear to me that English is a series of a rules followed by the exceptions and weird special cases. In the grand scheme of things, I didn't learn them as a small child. I can effectively communicate my ideas well in person and writing.
If English grammer rules could be written in BNF and didn't have silly rules that aren't applied differently depending on what century the decision was made in, I would guess that Geeks would be a lot more responsive to being more grammatically correct. I find English and all of the silly rules to be really irritating. If they were coherent and could be compactly written (and more importantly be unambigious, things like where commas go is different depending on which "standard" you are following).
Besides, if you've never seen geeks argue about where curly brackes "{}" go in C/C++/Java you've missed out.
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Several thoughts, first I've known several people who are addicted to drugs and have relatively ruined their lives to this point. Some of them have plenty of time to turn around their lives. Drug addition is something there is treatment for that is successful in a lot of cases. People in the past and have in fact recovered from drug addiction. To the best of my knowledge Huntington's has no such thing. As someone who comes from a long and proud line of alcoholics, drug abusers, and in general people who suffer from some type of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder of some type or another, I can assure you that merely because I'm genetically predisposed to be a drug addict or alcoholic, I have managed through will power managed to avoid such things. I understand it's something I can never experiment with unless I want my life to spin out of control. I'm lucky, and others aren't so lucky that they never realize that if they start, they might never be able to stop. Not that I'm not sympathetic with drug addicts or their plight, but I'd say that someone with a 100% terminal genetic disorder is in a completely different category. Drug addiction and alcoholism can and have been overcome and managed on a regular basis. For some drug addicts, it might be that they are 100% incapable of recovery from their addiction, but I'd say that there's an abundance of statistical evidence to show that a significant portions of drug addicts can and do overcome their addictions.
Kirby
Nice to see someone recommend you break the FCC rules (which I believe puts you in violation of a Federal Law)... *Sigh*. The FCC for all it's problem does actually do the frequency splits for a real honest to god good reason. Everything above 11 is outside the USA frequency range, you use 14, because that puts you the furthest away (which leaves you less overlap with 11, each channel overlaps with the next 4 or 5 channels). As to what is usable where, see this page from Cisco. What the parent is recommended is an FCC violation, probably punishable by a fine. Not sure if it's punishable by jail time. In general, what you'd like to do is actually work with the people in the area to work out a workable system. While this local optimization might work for you, if everyone does it, it's a problem. Along with the fact that it will cause problems for whoever actually is using the licensed equipment in that frequency range. First figure out if you have crappy equipment, or figure out if you have the wireless spectrum in your area is just flooded. If it is, work as a with the folks you live near to mitigate this. They are flooding your network, you are flooding theirs. Set up one network, setup multiple networks and coordinate channel usage. Get everyone to tone down their power settings (thus the signal won't go through walls). As several others have suggested, use directional antennas. Use a different technology to for single room access and use wired for long haul.
Kirby
I've never seen anyone misspell RedHat so badly...
I'm fairly sure Dell isn't going to base their Linux off of a non-commercially supported Linux. Call it a hunch, Dell will want someone to call or do the heavy lifting for them just so they don't have to have all that talent in house. Just like neither Oracle nor IBM include any non-Commercial Linux on their list of supported platforms. Heck, IBM and Oracle include what I think of as small players ahead of Debian. Or at least they used to, probably because I'm U.S. centric, TurboLinux and Connectiva always seemed like smallish distro's. I believe they are/were large in Asia and South America.
Kirby
It's not their hearng that is the problem. It's the fact that they are focusing on something other then the surroundings while walking in front of traffic. All that said, I agree with the posters who say, either they have the right of way or they don't. All other details are irrelevant.
Kirby
Kirby
Hmmm, I'll have to talk with my number theory professor for the details. He's the one who told me that Wiles attacked the problem for a long, long time and at some point gave up his original approach because he realized that for precisely the reason that his original approach couldn't solve it was precisely the reason the new one could. Maybe he didn't switch at as basic a level as I thought.
Hmmm, I'd always been told that Gauss was the first to prove the fundamental theorem of arithmetic. Ah, Wikipedia says that the first full and correct proof was by Gauss, while Euclid had "essentially" proved it.
Kirby
You're correct, that is a misstatement on my part, I meant that it was highly unlikely, not a double negative that I did write.
Oddly enough, lots of people are unhappy with Wiles's method. I believe a number of people are attempting to prove it using a purely number theory approach. What Wiles ended up proving was a vastly stronger statement, the result for Fermat's was a corollary (I also think that Wiles became an expert in Elliptical functions specifically to make this proof, he started in a different area according to what I'd been told). I wouldn't be shocked if several more simple and straight forward proofs come out in my lifetime. For a long time the proof for the fundamental law of arithmetic stood unproven. Now it's a standard proof in every number theory book. As I recall, I had to do it for a test.
Kirby
I believe his point isn't that you're not doing work, but rather that scheduling pondering is impossible. Otherwise give me a fairly firm estimate of when you will either prove P = NP, or that you can prove that P < NP. Logical deduction isn't precisely the same as "resolving the unknown". One doesn't provide a time table for when the Twin Prime conjecture will be solved. I can apply logic deduction to lots of problems, but I can't necessarily provide a firm estimate of when I'll find the solution to a problem.
Any time you provide an estimate of the time it will take to do anything in "problem solving", you are using statistical conjecture about how long you think it should taken given that you've solved other similar issues. How long will it take me to resolve a logic puzzle. How long will it take to construct a proof to show something? You think logically on those, but you don't provide a schedule. If you tell me, I'm going to give you 30 different distance, rate, time story problems that are geared for a high school freshmen, I can tell you that I'll be done in about an hour. If you tell me that you'd like me to prove Fermat's last theorem without using reference material. I know it's true, and I know that I can't provide a schedule for it. It's highly unlikely that if I took the rest of my life I couldn't do it. Both require deduction and logical thought. One is an entirely different scale then the other.
When working in the unknown, you can't provide a schedule. Otherwise, you'd be working either in the known, or very close to the edge of known.
KirbyLast time I checked, there are approximately 5-10 major distros. The vendors have to do their due diligence on any kernel. It's not like RedHat picks a kernel and sits on it for several years. Cherry picking fixes isn't tons of fun, but it's not impossible and if the bugs don't affect anyone why exactly do they need to be fixed again? It's not like those people don't communicate or you can't work with them if you choose to. SuSE and RedHat guys talks. SuSE and Gentoo talk. Having everyone attempt to stabilize their trees independently is insane... that's why I'm saying everyone attempting to do their own is crazy. But attempting to make one group of folks stabilize one tree for the whole world is at least as insane.
Pretty much everybody else bases their kernel sources off of one of those 10-20 trees (counting major kernel developers that maintain reasonable stable trees). There are no free lunches RedHat and SUSE get free engineering and major movement forward. To aquire that they take on QA and stabilization work. More importantly they get to pick when they suffer their pain. Attempting to state that the developers have to absorb all that and never allow anything that isn't stable and tested out the door is insane, we just left that madness. It wasn't stable then anyways, and pretending that you can merely engineer your way towards perfect software that is moving as fast as Linux currently does is ignoring reality. They get to pick what they feel has the most stable base to move to. It's an engineering decision. The forward advancements that Linux is making make moving forward worth the effort and expense of stabilizing a version every 18 months or so.
In terms of Solaris or OpenBSD, vote with your feet. Move towards them and let the people who have figured out a way to deal with the pains you describe do it. Linux works, because it works... That sounds like a tautology, but it's true. What they are doing works for them. By nearly all accounts, everyone is much happier with the current model then the disaster that was the 2.2 to 2.4 transition. It took forever, and when you finally got it wasn't stable until the vendors did their vendor thing to it. I ran the gambit of kernels between 1.3 and 2.4... 2.6 is a much nicer program to be on...
The 2.6 kernel is moving forward and getting major developments out into the hands as broad a set of people as possible. It's a thing of beauty.
Kirby
Don't take this the wrong way, but your complaint sounds a lot like the story about a patient and a doctor:
"Doctor, when I do this, it hurts", and the doctor replies, "Well don't do that".
I mean, if you are following bleeding edge kernels, and complaining that they aren't as stable as you'd like. Why not just follow a vendors kernel? If you use or install "many thousands", you are either maintaining your own de-facto distribution or you are using someone else's distribution. Vendor's do exactly the work you want done on your behalf.
I patiently wait for my vendor kernel, which might be 10 point releases behind integrate bug fixes and then upgrade in a year or two to a much newer point release (I think RedHat has used 2.6.9 and/or 2.9.13 in recent memory)... Incrementing a different number wouldn't really make any difference anyways. At that point it's all semantics, if you know the rules of the game, it's not hard to tell what's dangerous as an upgrade and what's not.
It's not like 2.4.13 (or whatever one in the 2.4 series that introduced series disk corruption) was safe merely because it was a point release... They are safe because somebody took it out back and beat on the kernel for a while and it didn't cause any problems. If you upgrade without proper testing and it breaks, you get to keep the pieces.
Kirby
What provision disallows coins but not paper money? To the best of my knowledge, only the Federal Gov't is allowed to establish "fiat money".
Two points, first you made it seem like there is some legal nicities that a city or state can follow to print money, like the Federal Gov't. You mention specifically, "one to one dollar value". There is no such law (cite it if I'm wrong, I'd be interested to learn of such a thing). Neither states, nor cities have that priviledge. The Federal Gov't does have such a priviledge under the Constitution (cite included above).
Second, this saying that cities or states are "allowed" to print money under this definition is silly. Using this definition of money, absolutely anybody is allowed to print "money". This isn't a priviledge or a right that a city or a state has, it's something anyone could do. If I chose to make "Kirby-bucks", I could do it as an individual. Would they have much value... no, but it wouldn't land me in jail. Heck, a lot of malls do nearly exactly this with their gift certificates that work at any store in the mall. It's currency that only works inside the mall, and generally you never receive cash back. Best Buy does it on returns. Heck, Sony does it with Playstations as you can use those as currency in a used game store.
My issue wasn't that a local currency couldn't or doesn't exist (they naturally occur in a lot of contexts, favors in the mob could be viewed that way). Mine was specifically that there is no provision under US law for anyone but Federal Gov't to coin or print money legally. Your statements that seem to imply a provision for it lead me to believe one of us is in error. Stating what I believed to be accurate seemed the most efficient way to flush out citations of facts. I believe you to be in error, hence my reply. It'd be nice to find out if I was in error, but the constitution was fairly clear on this point.
There was a single argument discussing the finer points of the legal issues, and thing pointed out the practical issues and the differenes between the theory and the practice money. What you are describing is essentially "scrip". Look it up in Wikipedia for an interesting discussion.
Kirby
Kirby
I said that it's completely legal for a group to decide amongst themselves to exchange two things for each other (I could wash your car if you fix my computer, if one of them happens to involve little IOU notes of some type so be it). What I said, is "If a city or state government attempted to force a business to accept something as legal tender, the Federal Gov't would shut them down". Flooz was completely legal. If the State of Arizona attempted to force business to accept flooz, or would only accept tax debts paid in flooz the Federal Gov't would take them to Federal Court and crush them with a fairly straightforward argument.
As far as what is or isn't legal tender, the $20 bill in my wallet says right on it, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private". So I'm reasonable confident that printed bills are in fact legal tender. I'm also sure that any state that attempted to print such a thing on a piece of paper they printed would find themselves in a whole lot of trouble. It is one of the few rights the Federal gov't retained for itself.
What'd I screw up about the barter system? I'm fairly sure bartering is when folks agree to exchange things of value. Weather they be legal tender, things or services, it's bartering. I specifically mentioned that these local currencies are legal, but it's completely voluntary that anyone participate in it. If you have a debt to me, if you hand me "LETS Money.", I can laugh at you. If you hand me US Dollars, I have to accept them (assuming I'm in the US).
Kirby
Those are not legal tender, and it is in fact illegal for anyone except for the Federal Gov't to print money. It was a total disaster when it was allowed to happen under the Articles of Confederation. It was one of the significant changes that was made when the gov't was re-formed under the constitution. Under the Articles of Confederation, state gov'ts used to have banks print notes, the state of NY in fact had a $3 bill for instance (despite the rarely said "That's as fake as a $3 bill"). If a city or state decided to force businesses to accept those local currencies, the Feds would shut it down in an instant. The fact that they have a mutual arrangement where everyone agrees to exchange things of value is completely legal (it's essentially bartering, which is completely legal). Don't confuse that with it being legal for a city or state to print legal tender.
Kirby
Kirby
These folks sure act like it's been illegal for a while now. In terms of cutting up a US coin and sell it for more, it's illegal, but not often enforced. Just like Speed Limit laws where it's illegal to drive faster then a particular speed, but is flaunted regularly.
Kirby
See: http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html#Copying
For the most part, I agree with the rest of what you are saying. SuSE will continue to be extremely relevant as long as they continue to employ high-profile Open Source developers, and their developers continue to contributed valuable code that is accepted by upstream providers. That is the sign that SuSE is in serious trouble. Wake me when they lose the developers, or the upstream providers refuse to work with them because they are employed by SuSE. Until then, this is all just hot air moving about.
Kirby
Generally I've found most everyone has started to comment reasonable well once Javadocs starting getting generated regularly and people found them useful.
Kirby
Maybe, maybe not... Depending on how the licensing agreement is structured, they could do something similar to RedHat's support agreement where the agreement is completely separate. They could give you indemnity insurance along with your copy of suse. So they would still be in the same kind of trouble that everyone else is, and you get the same rights, but you can't pass long the indemnity insurance freely. But if they don't arrange it properly, they would be in violation. Kirby
Being happy and confident about doing mathematics does not imply compentency in mathematics. In fact, they have a reverse correlation (not to being confused with causality).
There is not a sentiment of "being good at math makes you exhibit anti-social behavior", or anything of the type in the article.
Kirby
I long for the days of yore when 1.2 was the kernel of choice. It was an easier time, I could actually understand most of the kernel config options back then...
Kirby
Kirby
For better or worse, that is statistically proveable with relative ease. In that particular case, the ability to manage debt and the ability to absorb the risk without involving your insurance company is what the better rate is for. Given that someone with a high credit score is unlikely to pass that risk on to the insurance company, an argument can be made that it is in fact correct and accurate to not force them to pay the higher premium.
I'm not sure I agree with the practice (I benefit from it, so I'm biased), but from an actuarial/statistical point of view it is accurate.
Kirby
I can't spell worth a damn because nothing in English resembles consistent. There are 10 exceptions to every rule. I really don't care about "who" or "whom". My favorite part about English is that if you go back far enough in time, words that end in "-ed" to make them past tense are in fact "irregular". As new verbs have been added, they all use "-ed" as their conjugation. Which is why so many really old words conjugations are so complex (see "to be", and "to slay" as primary examples).
While I try not to write run on sentences, and I try not to butcher the spelling too badly. I don't get too worked up about "its", "were", and "your". I don't even know the rules on "further vs. farther", "who vs. whom", or what the hell a dangling participle is. It's abundantly clear to me that English is a series of a rules followed by the exceptions and weird special cases. In the grand scheme of things, I didn't learn them as a small child. I can effectively communicate my ideas well in person and writing.
Kirby
Besides, if you've never seen geeks argue about where curly brackes "{}" go in C/C++/Java you've missed out.
Kirby