"A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist."
I take it that you are referring to Harold Pinter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 the last male British writer to win this prize. This comment just shows how little you know about English literature. Pinter is indisputably the greatest living British playwright and in the view of many including myself, who has been seeing his plays since I was a child, the greatest living playwright in the English language. This indeed does qualify him as a leading contender for the prize which he so deservingly won.
The political controversy over the prize arose because while hospitalized by a serious infection he videotaped his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture "Art, Truth & Politics" from a wheelchair. It was a scathing attack on US war of aggression against Iraq. Any suggestion that the award was made for political reasons is both erroneous and unwarranted. The criticisms of Pinter were that he used his award as a vehicle to put forward his political views. But this comes from those whose job it is to viciously denounce anyone who condemns US foreign policy so in fact it is a compliment. What is a public intellectual for but to criticise the wrongdoings of those in power.
We don't have to. Shortly after its foundation the US Congress passed legislation granting immediate automatic accptance of Canada if it requested it. It's about 200 years now and we are still declining it. Maybe its part of Harpers Hidden Agenda if he gets a majority. Who knows what the fat liar would do if he gets one.
Linux is the operating system of the Bolivarian Revolution.
"Canaima is a GNU / Linux distribution based on Debian which is emerging as a solution to meet the needs of end users office of the Venezuelan National Public Administration (APN) and to comply with the presidential decree no. 3.390 sobre el uso de TecnologÃas Libres en la APN. 3390 on the use of Open Technologies in APN."
2) Who on this planet is going to pay for the dubious pleasure of hearing such eardrum-torturing melodies as the intro music to, oh, "Absolutely Fabulous"
Dylan's "Wheels on fire" in a version sung by the fabulous Julie Driscoll - I would.
And then there are all the live sessions from the John Peel show - They are priceless. I still have some low quality mono real audio files of Elastica produced by John and downloaded a good few years ago when the Beeb still mounted them on line. I would live to have them in a good quality lossless format.
I never had any serious, regular problem, in the last year and a half, with Debian Etch or Any Ubuntu release since 6.10 (when i first used it) with flash. The oddball crash happens, but its nothing normal or that I can re-create (in epiphany browser or firefox)
Exactly my experience. I am currently beta testing Flash 10 for Linux on Ubuntu 8.04 32bit. It works great except for one weird new problem. When I have a flashplayer open in Firefox it interferes with the operation of Totem (using Gstreamer) and blocks the playing of videos. There is no problem when running mplayer instead of Totem.
I usually disable java in it myself, since I don't commonly use the apps that need jre. Usually when it comes to databases I aim towards the unix types. Anyone know if OOo's spreadsheet app uses java? BTW I love OOov3; it's beta 2 but pretty damn stable.
OOOo Calc does not use Java unless you embed multimedia stuff. IBM's Symphony does require Java for everything as it is a fork/port of OOo 1 to the Eclipse Rich client platforms API.
And we got cheap personal computing because IBM took the decision to set up a skunkworks to design an open architecture PC - disruptive technology.
Two other examples of IBM's support for radical disruptive tecnologies:
First its behind the scenes pressure to persuade European governments to adopt the ethernet TCP/IP protocol rather the than the telcom controlled X25 protocol which they were planning to. This opened the way for a common infrastructure for the internet worldwide.
The other is of course its decision to support Linux.
Yes, but not only that, this new view is just an hypothesis which has not been experimentally proven. From the article:
"Stanimir Bonev of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and his collaborators describe how they used a supercomputer to calculate the behavior of lithium at pressures above 1.5 million atmospheres and temperatures as high as 3,000 kelvins (about 2,700Â Celsius)"
I write this on my home pc which also doubles up as a quantum chemistry workstation. I run standard quantum chemistry programs both ab initio and semi-empirical such as GAMESS, MPQC and MOPAC.
Currently I have been running them to see how closely the results match experimental data for vibrational and electronic spectra (IR and UV). The closeness of the computational data to experiment varies considerably on the precise computational approach used such as the sophistication of the basis set, whether pertubation theory is used, is configuration interaction taken into account and so on.
The more complex the approach the more numerically intensive it becomes and generally the closer it approaches the experimental data. OK they are using a supercomputer not a pc but you are still faced by limitations on just how much numerical compute you can do. All quantum chemistry calculations, except for those on two particle systems such as the hydrogen atom, are approximations. This is because the many body problem applies to quantum mechanics as much as it does to celestial mechanics.
So until we get experimental confirmation it is just an hypothesis. As a commentator says in the article "more work will need to be done to see if predictions match reality".
I bought a cheap system with a Foxconn motherboard. I deliberately chose it for its mobo spec (945G7MA). I was looking for a system with an onboard intel video chipset as an ideal system to run Ubuntu Feisty (then the current release) on. OK it is shit for Gamers and high spec system builders. But it is perfect for running both Compiz and the molecular modelling software that I use under 3D hardware acceleration using only open source drivers.
The system has proved to be just perfect for me with over a year of use and no problems running Linux only. My system is Windows free and never seen a copy of Windows - I have no need for a legacy operating system.
It has an award BIOS. I haven't checked what I have got my ACPI settings at but it loaded Linux straight away without any problem.
From Ryan the Mighty Chthulu's report on the Ubuntu forums it seems very suspicious. It reminds me of Windows 3.1 and how it was designed to produce spurious error messages if run on DR-DOS. MS payed out $7 million out of court on that one. Unfortunately it went to SCO who had finally ended up owning DR-DOS. There may be a smoking gun somewhere linking MS payments to Foxconn on this. Is there en email out there somewhere that a whistleblower might provide.
I would now be very dubious about buying another Foxconn mobo.
Quantum theory has never been wrong yet and it has been tested at an incredibly precise level. I would be willing to bet that if there is anything wrong with this it either experimental or their interpretation of the theory.
The Liberals are also owned by the RIA's. They too introduced draconian DMCA type legislation but it fell because of the dissolution of the House for elections (this happened twice). The only way the Liberals are likely to vote against it, is if we make enough noise that they see it as an election issue. Hopefully the minority Tory government will have fallen before the final vote on Bill C-61 so it will fall too in the face of the upcoming elections.
Then the whole battle against draconian copyright laws will sart all over again. Remember in Canada, like in the US, politicians are like pork butt futures, they can be bought and sold by the highest bidder.
That sort of reasoning was exactly what lead to countless wars. Hitler and the Germans thought it was their birthright to take Europe. Saddam Hussein thought it was his birthright to take Kuwait. China took Tibet. They considered that justification to kill people and take those countries by force.
Just a little re-edit:
G. W. Bush thought it was his birthright to take Iraq. He considered that justification to kill people and take this country by force.
"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye...."
"Spreadsheets that can't sort data when the cells contain simple calculations are pretty broken"
Sorry, but you are either an idiot or a liar. This statement is false. That Openoffice Calc cannot sort cells containing simple calculations with relative cell references is true. However the same is true for Excel, I just tried it doesn't work there either. Both Calc and Excel (similarily Gnumeric) all work fine when the equations use absolute cell references.
Given the lack of veracity with the above I wouldn't trust anything in your entire post until I tested it myself.
About the best they could do is give them a nice meal and some handshaking.
Or give them a nice job when they are finally out of office. Or alternatively, like with a former Toronto councillor who was chief of finance, they could give them a large envelope filled with money in a car park. Hang on someone already did that to a former PM. Brian Baloney where are you now.
In Canada like in the US politicians can be bought and sold like pork butt futures.
The good thing is the current Canadian Government is running shit scared. They are a minority government they desperately would like to become a majority. So they therefore don't want to alienate anyone and try to pretend that they are human, which is very difficult for them since they are not. They are in fact dangerous neocon agents of a foreign power.
However because of the situation they are in, they are susceptible to public pressure on issues like this. So if we Canadian citizens make enough noise they will back down. Just like they did a few months ago when they first threatened to introduce new legislation on internet file sharing. So to all my fellow Canadians out there, start makeing a lot of noise. Show your outrage!
I think one could argue that internet access is covered by:
d) freedom of association.
In fact I as a proud Canadian am excercising my right to freedom of association right now here on Slashdot. And if any National Traitor like alleged PM Harper tries to take away our freedoms will will hang them from the nearest tree or at least ask the Supreme Court nicely to do it for us.
At anyway file sharing in Canada is legal now. Long live Mr. Justice von Finklestein saviour of our nation.
I too have memories of a Goodyear blimp flying over my school in the seventies. The weird thing was I was sitting in my college room having just finished Michael Moorcock's "Warlord of the Air" a SF novel about an alternate world where airships predominate. I got up and looked out of my window and there was an airship flying past not nore than a few hundred metres away.
I thought was I hallucinating, I looked again and I could see it dumping water ballast, it seemed pretty real. I then recognized it as the Goodyear blimp - there was only one of them in Europe at the time and its visits to England were quite infrequent. It was the first airship I had ever seen.
I saw them quite frequently in London in the eighties when the SkyShip 500 blimp stared doing tourist flights. They used the street I lived in as navigational marker for the route and it was not unusual for me to be walking along and suddenly finding an airship following me down the street.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the Amerikan Gulag
"A couple of years ago they picked some writer in England because he was a leftist."
I take it that you are referring to Harold Pinter who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 the last male British writer to win this prize. This comment just shows how little you know about English literature. Pinter is indisputably the greatest living British playwright and in the view of many including myself, who has been seeing his plays since I was a child, the greatest living playwright in the English language. This indeed does qualify him as a leading contender for the prize which he so deservingly won.
The political controversy over the prize arose because while hospitalized by a serious infection he videotaped his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture "Art, Truth & Politics" from a wheelchair. It was a scathing attack on US war of aggression against Iraq. Any suggestion that the award was made for political reasons is both erroneous and unwarranted. The criticisms of Pinter were that he used his award as a vehicle to put forward his political views. But this comes from those whose job it is to viciously denounce anyone who condemns US foreign policy so in fact it is a compliment. What is a public intellectual for but to criticise the wrongdoings of those in power.
Oh Canada - True North Brave and Free!
"na Venezuela o sistema operativo Canaima (baseado em Linux)"
http://ciberia.aeiou.pt/?st=10098
Linux is the operating system of the Bolivarian Revolution.
"Canaima is a GNU / Linux distribution based on Debian which is emerging as a solution to meet the needs of end users office of the Venezuelan National Public Administration (APN) and to comply with the presidential decree no. 3.390 sobre el uso de TecnologÃas Libres en la APN. 3390 on the use of Open Technologies in APN."
http://canaima.softwarelibre.gob.ve/
2) Who on this planet is going to pay for the dubious pleasure of hearing such eardrum-torturing melodies as the intro music to, oh, "Absolutely Fabulous"
Dylan's "Wheels on fire" in a version sung by the fabulous Julie Driscoll - I would.
And then there are all the live sessions from the John Peel show - They are priceless. I still have some low quality mono real audio files of Elastica produced by John and downloaded a good few years ago when the Beeb still mounted them on line. I would live to have them in a good quality lossless format.
I never had any serious, regular problem, in the last year and a half, with Debian Etch or Any Ubuntu release since 6.10 (when i first used it) with flash. The oddball crash happens, but its nothing normal or that I can re-create (in epiphany browser or firefox)
Exactly my experience. I am currently beta testing Flash 10 for Linux on Ubuntu 8.04 32bit. It works great except for one weird new problem. When I have a flashplayer open in Firefox it interferes with the operation of Totem (using Gstreamer) and blocks the playing of videos. There is no problem when running mplayer instead of Totem.
If you think my view has some merit, you might want to reconsider this statement:
The other is of course its decision to support Linux.
I don't think your view has any merit. For the history of the development of the IBM PC I suggest you read:
Blue Magic The People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer James Chposky and Ted Leonsis Facts on File Publications, New York 1988
When you I have done that I might consider your comments.
OOOo Calc does not use Java unless you embed multimedia stuff. IBM's Symphony does require Java for everything as it is a fork/port of OOo 1 to the Eclipse Rich client platforms API.
Any pubs/restaurants that sell it in the Hamilton area.
And we got cheap personal computing because IBM took the decision to set up a skunkworks to design an open architecture PC - disruptive technology.
Two other examples of IBM's support for radical disruptive tecnologies:
First its behind the scenes pressure to persuade European governments to adopt the ethernet TCP/IP protocol rather the than the telcom controlled X25 protocol which they were planning to. This opened the way for a common infrastructure for the internet worldwide.
The other is of course its decision to support Linux.
"Stanimir Bonev of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada and his collaborators describe how they used a supercomputer to calculate the behavior of lithium at pressures above 1.5 million atmospheres and temperatures as high as 3,000 kelvins (about 2,700Â Celsius)"
I write this on my home pc which also doubles up as a quantum chemistry workstation. I run standard quantum chemistry programs both ab initio and semi-empirical such as GAMESS, MPQC and MOPAC.
Currently I have been running them to see how closely the results match experimental data for vibrational and electronic spectra (IR and UV). The closeness of the computational data to experiment varies considerably on the precise computational approach used such as the sophistication of the basis set, whether pertubation theory is used, is configuration interaction taken into account and so on.
The more complex the approach the more numerically intensive it becomes and generally the closer it approaches the experimental data. OK they are using a supercomputer not a pc but you are still faced by limitations on just how much numerical compute you can do. All quantum chemistry calculations, except for those on two particle systems such as the hydrogen atom, are approximations. This is because the many body problem applies to quantum mechanics as much as it does to celestial mechanics.
So until we get experimental confirmation it is just an hypothesis. As a commentator says in the article "more work will need to be done to see if predictions match reality".
The system has proved to be just perfect for me with over a year of use and no problems running Linux only. My system is Windows free and never seen a copy of Windows - I have no need for a legacy operating system.
It has an award BIOS. I haven't checked what I have got my ACPI settings at but it loaded Linux straight away without any problem.
From Ryan the Mighty Chthulu's report on the Ubuntu forums it seems very suspicious. It reminds me of Windows 3.1 and how it was designed to produce spurious error messages if run on DR-DOS. MS payed out $7 million out of court on that one. Unfortunately it went to SCO who had finally ended up owning DR-DOS. There may be a smoking gun somewhere linking MS payments to Foxconn on this. Is there en email out there somewhere that a whistleblower might provide.
I would now be very dubious about buying another Foxconn mobo.
Well if you ever start a project you know what to call it.
Quantum theory has never been wrong yet and it has been tested at an incredibly precise level. I would be willing to bet that if there is anything wrong with this it either experimental or their interpretation of the theory.
Then the whole battle against draconian copyright laws will sart all over again. Remember in Canada, like in the US, politicians are like pork butt futures, they can be bought and sold by the highest bidder.
If they loose that, they can still take their appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.
Just a little re-edit:
G. W. Bush thought it was his birthright to take Iraq. He considered that justification to kill people and take this country by force.
"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. ..."
"Spreadsheets that can't sort data when the cells contain simple calculations are pretty broken"
Sorry, but you are either an idiot or a liar. This statement is false. That Openoffice Calc cannot sort cells containing simple calculations with relative cell references is true. However the same is true for Excel, I just tried it doesn't work there either. Both Calc and Excel (similarily Gnumeric) all work fine when the equations use absolute cell references.
Given the lack of veracity with the above I wouldn't trust anything in your entire post until I tested it myself.
Sorry it seems like I have attached the parent post to the wrong comment.
Time you learned some physics sonny.
Or give them a nice job when they are finally out of office. Or alternatively, like with a former Toronto councillor who was chief of finance, they could give them a large envelope filled with money in a car park. Hang on someone already did that to a former PM. Brian Baloney where are you now.
In Canada like in the US politicians can be bought and sold like pork butt futures.
However because of the situation they are in, they are susceptible to public pressure on issues like this. So if we Canadian citizens make enough noise they will back down. Just like they did a few months ago when they first threatened to introduce new legislation on internet file sharing. So to all my fellow Canadians out there, start makeing a lot of noise. Show your outrage!
d) freedom of association.
In fact I as a proud Canadian am excercising my right to freedom of association right now here on Slashdot. And if any National Traitor like alleged PM Harper tries to take away our freedoms will will hang them from the nearest tree or at least ask the Supreme Court nicely to do it for us.
At anyway file sharing in Canada is legal now. Long live Mr. Justice von Finklestein saviour of our nation.
I thought was I hallucinating, I looked again and I could see it dumping water ballast, it seemed pretty real. I then recognized it as the Goodyear blimp - there was only one of them in Europe at the time and its visits to England were quite infrequent. It was the first airship I had ever seen.
I saw them quite frequently in London in the eighties when the SkyShip 500 blimp stared doing tourist flights. They used the street I lived in as navigational marker for the route and it was not unusual for me to be walking along and suddenly finding an airship following me down the street.
I agree!