The thing about that is, if someone's being beaten up and you step in and help them, the police will probably arrest YOU for assauling the poor criminals. If you don't step in, the police will probably just let them go. Believe me I've seen it happen before.
Your house gets broken into? Ring up the police, they say they're busy. Attack the intruders, six police cars are round in 10 minutes. The police are interested in looking after the welfare of criminals, nothing else. If we want to stop crime we have to do it ourselves.
The problem with KDE is, even if its usability is fine, it's all thrown out the window as soon as you open non-KDE apps, because in their infinite wisdom, open source programmers decided to divide programs up into groups, each group having completely different interfaces and settings. For example if you set up a theme in KDE, and you open a program which uses gtk, your theme doesn't work. The same goes for running QT programs under gnome. What genius decided that was a good idea? Surely the apps should use the same toolkit for a consistent interface? This also means that taskbar applets are incompatible, so either effort is duplicated, or you can only use half of the applets available.
Also KDE is cluttered and messy. Even simple dialog boxes seem to be over 1200 pixels wide. There's no excuse for this at all, I dread to think what it would be like using KDE with 1024x768, half of the options would be off the screen. It seems that the KDE developers all have giant resolutions and think everyone else does as well. And the start menu is about half a mile high. The categories of applications are flooded with near-identical programs, and things like Open Office don't appear at all so you have to launch it from the command line.
The best thing Linux could do to improve the user experience is to stop having ten million toolkits and environments and have a STANDARD CONSISTENT INTERFACE! Programs which don't use the settings you've chosen should be the exception, not the rule.
It's funny how slashdot doesn't care about labourers being put out of work, but you can't hear yourself think for the screeching and bawling when IT jobs are outsourced. How is that not progress? Is there not other work available for the programmers? It seems that it's OK for people to lose their jobs as long as they're not American computer programmers.
That's terrible logic. Because we haven't seen something, it can't happen? We have seen things go faster than the speed of light, if perhaps not large objects. At one point we hadn't seen subatomic particles, is that proof that they didn't exist?
it's not arrogance, man. It's called SCIENCE.
Believing in something which has not been proven IS arrogance. No scientist wants to admit that his understand of the universe isn't complete. Until we have a unified theory of everything, it's just guesswork.
It's easy to earn a private pilot's rating in most countries for less than USD 5000. I suspect most of us have spent that much or more on a laptop at one time or another.
This must be the funniest thing ever written on the Internet. Two sentences, two massive errors.
Because nothing, nothing, has ever been seen to travel faster than the speed of light.
10,000BC: Nothing has ever been seen to travel over the far ridge.
500AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel past the edge of the known world.
1400AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel over the Atlantic.
1900AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel into space.
2000AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel faster than light.
It's amazes me how arrogant people are today, that they think their current understanding of the universe is perfect and unfallible, despite how little we know about it.
If Newton's laws can be broken, why can't Einsteins? It's never been proved that faster than light travel is impossible, and it never can be.
I dunno, in Star Trek they seemed to fight a lot, against alien races, so it's no different than today, but on a larger scale. Granted, the fights generally weren't very interesting but that's because of poor script writing, i.e. 45 minutes of build-up to a conflict then they decide not to fight after all.
Another problem with Star Trek that means it fails as science-fiction, is that all the potentially-interesting issues surrounding space travel are not even approached:
Space travel limited by the speed of light? Plot-deviced away by 'warp drives'.
The effects of zero-gravity on the human body? Gravity generators.
The effects of different gravities and atmospheres on planets? All planets have earth gravity and atmosphere.
The issue of growing food in space to survive? Magic replicators.
Problems of people on the ship not getting on when kept together for years in claustrophobic conditions? The crew on Star Trek have had their emotions removed. It's a wonder Data wants to experience emotions, because no-one else does.
Communication issues with aliens which have completely different languages and cultures? Magic translators.
Escaping from dangerous situations? Not too hard with teleporter.
Faults with the ship? Anything can be solved with 'treknobabble' made up as they go along.
Mental problems due to being stuck on a spaceship? Well I refer to the previously-mentioned issue of the crew not having emotions, so they're not really being human beings but carboard cutouts. Also they have the holodeck as the ultimate plot device for writers with no ideas.
The enterprise is like a giant luxurious lounge in space. No danger, no problems, anything remotely interesting about space travel has been 'solved'.
As a result, all they do is sit about for 45 minutes 'philosophising' about some insignificant issue, until it's magically solved in the last minute and they all live happily ever after. I put 'philosophising' in quotation marks because it's really simplistic and waffly. The script isn't very tight, they spend about 15 minutes on a 2 minute conversation, repeating themselves over and over again. I suppose this covers up the fact that the writers didn't really have many ideas.
The only sci-fi we have these days are things like 'Firefly', which as far as I'm aware doesn't really have any science in it, but is more like a western in space. I looked at the imdb photo gallery, but just saw a bunch of character pictures, nothing of the sets or the space ships, so it may as well have been Dawson's creek. I'll reserve judgement until they show it in the UK.
(Note: spoiler follows) Also we have Doctor Who where every situation is resolved with some deus ex machina which gets more unbelievable every week. And quite literally in the last episode, as Rose turns into God, arrives on the space station in the tardis (a 'machine'), brings people back to life and dissolves all the daleks. I can't think of a bigger anti-climax.
In reply to "Open source isn't the be-all end all.":
>With Linux, yes it is. If you don't care about open-source then use something else.
What? I don't recall Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux), saying that the whole point of Linux is to run entirely open source software. Perhaps you can find a quote, either from Torvalds or from the kernal copyright licence that says you're not supposed to use any non-open-source software on Linux.
The way I see it, Linux was created to be a decent Unix-alternative, the fact that it's open source is a bonus. Who are you to tell people what operating system to use because they don't follow your ideology. I could equally say that if you don't want binary-only Nvidia drivers then use another graphics card.
Idealism means seeing the bigger picture and foregoing fleeting fancies in the pursuit of long-term success.
What bigger picture is this? Are you saying that using your hardware is a 'fleeting fancy'? Where is the long-term success in having your hardware non-operative? Perhaps you think that Nvidia will open the source of their drivers if enough open-source zealots use 640x480 16 colours because they won't install the closed-source drivers.
If you're too short-sighted to understand that then perhaps Linux is not for you.
Repeat after me: (This also goes for the zealots who modded your hilariously close-minded rant to +4)
LINUX IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM, NOT A RELIGION. IT'S A MEANS TO AN END THAT MAKES YOUR WEB BROWSER AND EMAIL WORK, THE WORLD DOES NOT REVOLVE AROUND IT.
The story wasn't necessarily the problem, the problems involved the lazy directing, the poor editing, the awful acting, the terrible dialogue, the bland score, the over-use of special effects, and all sorts of other things involving synonyms for 'bad'. A good director can make an average story into a great film, a bad direction can make a great story into a crap film. Lucas is a bad director. With him at the helm, the films were never going to be anything other than medeocre. But that's what happens when success and money come to someone with no talent.
Yeah I suppose that could be done with a giant space-tube to form a sort of syphon system, as long as Venus is higher up than Mars. Although I'd hate to be the man on Mars who has to suck on the tube to get it going...
Why would you want to live on an asteroid? For all the work of hollowing out cubic mile after cubic mile of iron asteroid, you could build a proper space station. The advantage of this is that then you could put the space station somewhere people want to live, rather than in an asteroid belt in the middle of nowhere.
Why ask questions to which no-one knows the answers? By all probability, time-travel is impossible, and if it is possible then no-one knows anything about it. This whole discussion is just guessing and imagination.
What happened to the days when people did REAL science rather than hypothetical science?
When you are doing a bid do having a conference after winnign one do you sit down and say,
Yeah, we can code that fucking system no problem. I mean shit man it may be hard as shit but we can meet that deadline. What we need to know is why the fuck did you want that in there. Can't we just get rid of this shit and move this over here. Fuck man, it makes more sense.
I don't think so.
Er, yes? Why wouldn't you say that, other than the grammatical errors which are probably because you can't speak English properly.
How on earth is going on a plane difficult??? All you're doing is sitting down. You can sleep, drink brews, read, it's easy. If you want difficult, try a 12 hour night shift in a freezing cold factory lugging crap about in the rain, on a rock hard floor that wrecks your feet. Half a day sat down on a nice comfortable chair? I'd take that any day.
I don't know about that, I saw the first Spiderman film, and I can't say it was very good. Like a comic book, but on film. Cartoonish villains, direction-less plot, a poor choice of lead actor, but then I suppose it's bad form to criticise a children's film, it's probably entertaining for its target audience (under 10s). I don't think it did too well commercially, but that doesn't really mean much.
Of course, we wouldn't want anything about technology or science in science-fiction, would we? It might confuse the masses who don't know what kilograms or photons are.
If this Firefly doesn't have any 'technobabble', and is just about the characters, then it's not really sci-fi, it's just a soap in space, so you can't expect it to appeal to the Star Trek crowd any more than Friends or Buffy the Vampire Slayer would, so why mention it in the same breath?
Although Star Trek is actually crap. The science and technology are never explored, just 'particle of the week', the acting is below awful, the plots are recycled (what is it with American shows that need 3000 episodes even though they only have about 6 plots?), the dialogue is stale, and there's no drama or tension or anything.
I haven't seen Firefly (I'm in the UK), so is that 'good acting and writing' as in, actual good acting and writing, or the sort that is excused as good by nerds who just like it because it's set in space and has space ships and stuff? I'm wary of opinions on this site, as I've seen people here say that Star Trek TNG had good acting and writing...
Why bother putting good content into your website? Google's spider doesn't have AI, it doesn't know what a good site is and what a bade site is, just how many people link to it. Content is irrelevent to ranking, all that counts is popularity. Google is merely a popularity contest. No wonder all the hollow, worthless commercial sites are at the top of the rankings.
Perhaps instead of spending their time getting paid Slashvertisements, and hiring legions of PHDs, Google should spend some time IMPROVING THEIR ALGORITHM. That's the thing they're missing. With all the aborted beta services, endless advertising, non-stop hype and stock-market profiteering, they're forgetting the one thing that made them popular in the first place: the algorithms. That's what they should be working on, not some permanently-beta hackneyed web service that survives entirely on a bubble of hype.
Of course, the nationality of a chef rigidly defines the food he can cook. It's not like a chef from France can cook anything other than stereotypically 'French' food. And it's not like Indian food isn't drenched in oil and cooked and spiced beyond all recognition. And the Greek don't have a reputation for being greasy at all. Sweaty lamb kebabs? Unheard of in Greece.
And I don't think vegetarians would qualify for space-travel. The low gravity environment is harsh enough on the body, but a low-protein diet would lead to terrible muscle wastage.
As for lard, it's the Americans you're thinking of. Burger King anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
The thing about that is, if someone's being beaten up and you step in and help them, the police will probably arrest YOU for assauling the poor criminals. If you don't step in, the police will probably just let them go. Believe me I've seen it happen before.
Your house gets broken into? Ring up the police, they say they're busy. Attack the intruders, six police cars are round in 10 minutes. The police are interested in looking after the welfare of criminals, nothing else. If we want to stop crime we have to do it ourselves.
The problem with KDE is, even if its usability is fine, it's all thrown out the window as soon as you open non-KDE apps, because in their infinite wisdom, open source programmers decided to divide programs up into groups, each group having completely different interfaces and settings. For example if you set up a theme in KDE, and you open a program which uses gtk, your theme doesn't work. The same goes for running QT programs under gnome. What genius decided that was a good idea? Surely the apps should use the same toolkit for a consistent interface? This also means that taskbar applets are incompatible, so either effort is duplicated, or you can only use half of the applets available.
Also KDE is cluttered and messy. Even simple dialog boxes seem to be over 1200 pixels wide. There's no excuse for this at all, I dread to think what it would be like using KDE with 1024x768, half of the options would be off the screen. It seems that the KDE developers all have giant resolutions and think everyone else does as well. And the start menu is about half a mile high. The categories of applications are flooded with near-identical programs, and things like Open Office don't appear at all so you have to launch it from the command line.
The best thing Linux could do to improve the user experience is to stop having ten million toolkits and environments and have a STANDARD CONSISTENT INTERFACE! Programs which don't use the settings you've chosen should be the exception, not the rule.
I disagree, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
It's funny how slashdot doesn't care about labourers being put out of work, but you can't hear yourself think for the screeching and bawling when IT jobs are outsourced. How is that not progress? Is there not other work available for the programmers? It seems that it's OK for people to lose their jobs as long as they're not American computer programmers.
And in that situation, out of the original 20 guys with hammers, only one of them still has a job. What happens to the other 19?
That's terrible logic. Because we haven't seen something, it can't happen? We have seen things go faster than the speed of light, if perhaps not large objects. At one point we hadn't seen subatomic particles, is that proof that they didn't exist?
it's not arrogance, man. It's called SCIENCE.
Believing in something which has not been proven IS arrogance. No scientist wants to admit that his understand of the universe isn't complete. Until we have a unified theory of everything, it's just guesswork.
It's easy to earn a private pilot's rating in most countries for less than USD 5000. I suspect most of us have spent that much or more on a laptop at one time or another.
This must be the funniest thing ever written on the Internet. Two sentences, two massive errors.
Aviation is nothing to do with nature, no more than driving is to do with nature. Flying is just a hobby for rich people.
I'm sorry, but in what universe does 'Les Miserables' count as a fun story?
Because nothing, nothing, has ever been seen to travel faster than the speed of light.
10,000BC: Nothing has ever been seen to travel over the far ridge.
500AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel past the edge of the known world.
1400AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel over the Atlantic.
1900AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel into space.
2000AD: Nothing has ever been seen to travel faster than light.
It's amazes me how arrogant people are today, that they think their current understanding of the universe is perfect and unfallible, despite how little we know about it.
If Newton's laws can be broken, why can't Einsteins? It's never been proved that faster than light travel is impossible, and it never can be.
Another problem with Star Trek that means it fails as science-fiction, is that all the potentially-interesting issues surrounding space travel are not even approached:
The enterprise is like a giant luxurious lounge in space. No danger, no problems, anything remotely interesting about space travel has been 'solved'.
As a result, all they do is sit about for 45 minutes 'philosophising' about some insignificant issue, until it's magically solved in the last minute and they all live happily ever after. I put 'philosophising' in quotation marks because it's really simplistic and waffly. The script isn't very tight, they spend about 15 minutes on a 2 minute conversation, repeating themselves over and over again. I suppose this covers up the fact that the writers didn't really have many ideas.
The only sci-fi we have these days are things like 'Firefly', which as far as I'm aware doesn't really have any science in it, but is more like a western in space. I looked at the imdb photo gallery, but just saw a bunch of character pictures, nothing of the sets or the space ships, so it may as well have been Dawson's creek. I'll reserve judgement until they show it in the UK.
(Note: spoiler follows)
Also we have Doctor Who where every situation is resolved with some deus ex machina which gets more unbelievable every week. And quite literally in the last episode, as Rose turns into God, arrives on the space station in the tardis (a 'machine'), brings people back to life and dissolves all the daleks. I can't think of a bigger anti-climax.
Except neither looks good. One consists of uncoordinating garish colours, and the other has a rubber face.
In reply to "Open source isn't the be-all end all.":
>With Linux, yes it is. If you don't care about open-source then use something else.
What? I don't recall Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux), saying that the whole point of Linux is to run entirely open source software. Perhaps you can find a quote, either from Torvalds or from the kernal copyright licence that says you're not supposed to use any non-open-source software on Linux.
The way I see it, Linux was created to be a decent Unix-alternative, the fact that it's open source is a bonus. Who are you to tell people what operating system to use because they don't follow your ideology. I could equally say that if you don't want binary-only Nvidia drivers then use another graphics card.
Idealism means seeing the bigger picture and foregoing fleeting fancies in the pursuit of long-term success.
What bigger picture is this? Are you saying that using your hardware is a 'fleeting fancy'? Where is the long-term success in having your hardware non-operative? Perhaps you think that Nvidia will open the source of their drivers if enough open-source zealots use 640x480 16 colours because they won't install the closed-source drivers.
If you're too short-sighted to understand that then perhaps Linux is not for you.
Repeat after me: (This also goes for the zealots who modded your hilariously close-minded rant to +4)
LINUX IS AN OPERATING SYSTEM, NOT A RELIGION. IT'S A MEANS TO AN END THAT MAKES YOUR WEB BROWSER AND EMAIL WORK, THE WORLD DOES NOT REVOLVE AROUND IT.
The story wasn't necessarily the problem, the problems involved the lazy directing, the poor editing, the awful acting, the terrible dialogue, the bland score, the over-use of special effects, and all sorts of other things involving synonyms for 'bad'. A good director can make an average story into a great film, a bad direction can make a great story into a crap film. Lucas is a bad director. With him at the helm, the films were never going to be anything other than medeocre. But that's what happens when success and money come to someone with no talent.
Yeah I suppose that could be done with a giant space-tube to form a sort of syphon system, as long as Venus is higher up than Mars. Although I'd hate to be the man on Mars who has to suck on the tube to get it going...
Why would you want to live on an asteroid? For all the work of hollowing out cubic mile after cubic mile of iron asteroid, you could build a proper space station. The advantage of this is that then you could put the space station somewhere people want to live, rather than in an asteroid belt in the middle of nowhere.
Why ask questions to which no-one knows the answers? By all probability, time-travel is impossible, and if it is possible then no-one knows anything about it. This whole discussion is just guessing and imagination.
What happened to the days when people did REAL science rather than hypothetical science?
When you are doing a bid do having a conference after winnign one do you sit down and say,
Yeah, we can code that fucking system no problem. I mean shit man it may be hard as shit but we can meet that deadline. What we need to know is why the fuck did you want that in there. Can't we just get rid of this shit and move this over here. Fuck man, it makes more sense.
I don't think so.
Er, yes? Why wouldn't you say that, other than the grammatical errors which are probably because you can't speak English properly.
Bittorrent's no use to me, I only have 56k. And I don't like watching TV on the computer (or DVDs), the picture is always jerky.
How on earth is going on a plane difficult??? All you're doing is sitting down. You can sleep, drink brews, read, it's easy. If you want difficult, try a 12 hour night shift in a freezing cold factory lugging crap about in the rain, on a rock hard floor that wrecks your feet. Half a day sat down on a nice comfortable chair? I'd take that any day.
I don't know about that, I saw the first Spiderman film, and I can't say it was very good. Like a comic book, but on film. Cartoonish villains, direction-less plot, a poor choice of lead actor, but then I suppose it's bad form to criticise a children's film, it's probably entertaining for its target audience (under 10s). I don't think it did too well commercially, but that doesn't really mean much.
Of course, we wouldn't want anything about technology or science in science-fiction, would we? It might confuse the masses who don't know what kilograms or photons are.
If this Firefly doesn't have any 'technobabble', and is just about the characters, then it's not really sci-fi, it's just a soap in space, so you can't expect it to appeal to the Star Trek crowd any more than Friends or Buffy the Vampire Slayer would, so why mention it in the same breath?
Although Star Trek is actually crap. The science and technology are never explored, just 'particle of the week', the acting is below awful, the plots are recycled (what is it with American shows that need 3000 episodes even though they only have about 6 plots?), the dialogue is stale, and there's no drama or tension or anything.
I haven't seen Firefly (I'm in the UK), so is that 'good acting and writing' as in, actual good acting and writing, or the sort that is excused as good by nerds who just like it because it's set in space and has space ships and stuff? I'm wary of opinions on this site, as I've seen people here say that Star Trek TNG had good acting and writing...
Why bother putting good content into your website? Google's spider doesn't have AI, it doesn't know what a good site is and what a bade site is, just how many people link to it. Content is irrelevent to ranking, all that counts is popularity. Google is merely a popularity contest. No wonder all the hollow, worthless commercial sites are at the top of the rankings.
Perhaps instead of spending their time getting paid Slashvertisements, and hiring legions of PHDs, Google should spend some time IMPROVING THEIR ALGORITHM. That's the thing they're missing. With all the aborted beta services, endless advertising, non-stop hype and stock-market profiteering, they're forgetting the one thing that made them popular in the first place: the algorithms. That's what they should be working on, not some permanently-beta hackneyed web service that survives entirely on a bubble of hype.
Of course, the nationality of a chef rigidly defines the food he can cook. It's not like a chef from France can cook anything other than stereotypically 'French' food. And it's not like Indian food isn't drenched in oil and cooked and spiced beyond all recognition. And the Greek don't have a reputation for being greasy at all. Sweaty lamb kebabs? Unheard of in Greece.
And I don't think vegetarians would qualify for space-travel. The low gravity environment is harsh enough on the body, but a low-protein diet would lead to terrible muscle wastage.
As for lard, it's the Americans you're thinking of. Burger King anyone?