Voters may get upset if the government is perceived as wasting time and money (two huge short term losses) on the transition to open source, and those politicians backing open source could be shown the door.
But being politicians, they can always play the patriotism card. Buy French. Remember those idiots in US Congress who wanted to boycott French wine and cheese (not to mention Freedom Fries). The French govt can also argue that they need a secure system without any NSA backdoors or remote deactivation from Redmond. And no matter that MS will open their code to them (under NDA), anything could be changed by updates. And that's not even discussing the risks of real hostile crackers.
Europe could have just bought Boeings, but they decided to invest in Airbus. And after years of nurturing finally now they have a mature competing aircraft producer instead of bleeding billions to the US (Seattle again, oddly).
How much preexisting knowledge and skills will cross-over to a Linux installation? Or will that be a "from scratch" issue?
For 98% of people, 98% of their skills. As 98% of office workers just click to open a document, type, and click on a button to format, click on a button to print or email. The support techs are the ones who will have to actually learn anything new; and as they're already using Linux servers, that won't be a stretch for them.
The 2% who have VBA mactros and such will need more hand-holding. But it's certain that an upgrade to Vista would cause a lot of grief for them too.
Yes, I made up the figures. But it's based on my personal observation of what real people in offices do all day.
That's not from the edit summary, that's from Frogbeater's story submission.
I've seen plenty of submitters bitching about how their submission had been butchered. The editors cut and reword them if they feel the urge. And Jamie explicitly said they were just presenting "the facts".
Twenty years ago science told us we're entering an ice age....
NO, it DID NOT. Some newspapers printed stupid stories about that. Not "Science".
Read this for the story of how this myth has propagated and been spread by various "warming sceptics".
Jamie wrote "Slashdot is being accurate here, presenting the facts and allowing you to draw your own conclusions."
Oh really? You say "The producer of 'An Inconvenient Truth' is accusing the National Science Teachers Association of being in the pocket of Big Oil because she can't get preferential treatment for her film."
What "preferential treatment" did she ask for? That's not a fact, not from TFA. This charactersiastion is only in the summary, if not written by you then endorsed by your publishing it. Lots of industry groups supply free "educational" materials to the NSTA, as she points out. Only theirs was rejected. It seems more like an attempt to redress the balance.
I worked for a guy, and the longer I did and the more I learnt about him the more disgusted I got. I wanted to jump ship, but there just wasn't anything around in my line, and having a wife and a toddler made me less cavalier about walking out. But I did protest; and refused to participate in the worst abuses. Such as he never paid our casual workers on time, usually months late after many, many broken promises. So when I had a project that needed such people I just stopped and did something else. He would yell at me to get it done, but when I asked him to guarantee that work I commissioned would be paid, he just changed tack and abused me. Eventually I did find an alternative employer and was glad to be able to leave, but even though I'd blunted some of his abuses I still felt culpable.
You have to admit, that man has some. To cancel such a high-visibility project like this... Wow. Especially while admitted that they were ploys to get elected. Wow. Even while admitting that it was an election-winning campaign, he cuts it.
No bravery. He cut projects of the PREVIOUS government. They had a coup a few months ago, the army appointed the current government. It's traditional to cut the previous administration's pork barrel projects to make room for your own.
Not sure what shows you're watching, but as an example I'm 8 episodes in to season 3 of Grey's Anatomy (via BitTorrent) whereas Channel 7 probably won't start showing Season 3 until March next year
You think you have it tough... in Hong Kong they ran the third season of Six Feet Under a few months ago. Yes, from 2003. So I finally said "fuck it" and started downloading. Also I learnt that indeed Nate does say "Fuck it" quite a lot, which was cut from our aired version, as was a lot of the rumpy-pumpy. Lost; 24; Prison Break all show a few months late and I can wait for them, and not really fussed if I miss them, but I had no hope of Firefly or Deadwood showing up ever. So into the download queue they go. Between downloads and DVDs broadcast is getting a lot less of my time.
Re:You didn't "setup" a VMware virtual Linux box.
on
Fedora Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
Nevertheless, the omission of a space hardly warrants a grammer flame.
More of a spelling flame I'd think. And on that subject, it's "grammar".
One thing that the providers here seem to use often is "Wireless", which describes it just fine, except for the few people that somehow think of "Wireless" as only being "WiFi".
Except "wireless" is what my grandfather called his bakelite cased valve radio.
It gives me a chance to plug my CAPTCHA solution, which will take more than just a few seconds for a 3rd world data entry person to get past.
You ask people to do arithmetic expressed in words. A trivial problem to automate. It works now because it's obscure; if it was widely deployed it would be beaten easily.
That's what the anti-sweatshop people fail to understand. It's not like high-priced lawyer jobs await these people if only they weren't being forced to make shoes for Nike. Working in this sweatshop is literally the best choice they have, often by quite a lot, and you want to . . . take it away from them?
Multinationals play one region off against another to get lower and lower costs. So work is sent where the absolute cheapest labour and no environmental concerns to trouble the businessmen. Without intervention to put a floor under the wages; i.e. a minimum wage as is mandated in most Western countries, the workers will never be paid more than just enough to stay alive. Of course, some more money is spent to bribe relevant officials who make sure any unionists are dealt with. While CEOs and celebrity endorsers earn more than the entire wages of those who actually make the product. The point is the companies could afford to double wages and it would barely affect their bottom line. Nevertheless, they must squeeze the last cent of profit out. Look at the conditions of factory workers during the industrial revolution in the West. Read some Charles Dickens. That's where unbridled capitalism leads, and where it is in the Third World now.
On the other hand, I have to think that if someone makes a recording that can continue to sell for 50+ years, that person deserves some sort of financial reward for it.
The minuscule number of people this applies to are already very rich. And, most likely, like Elvis, dead.
Meanwhile, someone who wanted to collect a bunch of neglected music from the 40s or 50s and clean it up and reissue it can't without spending a fortune on legal fees trying just to locate the heirs of the copyright owners, likely companies that have disappeared or been absorbed long ago. With old recordings going into the public domain, they can have a new audience. If the original artists are still alive, they can only benefit from this. More importantly perhaps society gets to keep more than just the Top-40 hits as part of our cultural legacy.
Right now, copyright begins at the time a work is created, whether it has been published or not.
Depends on what you mean by "creator" and "work". The writer's copyright is protected until he's been dead for 70 years. Only the copyright of a particular recording, which is usually owned by a record company, is so limited. Which is no doubt one reason Paul McCartney is busily releasing "definitive" remixes of Beatles songs.
The purpose of copyright is to encourage creation of new works.
And actually the "50 years" cited is only for the copyright of a specific recording. That probaly belongs to a big media company, not an artist. The writer of the song's copyright goes till at least 70 years AFTER HIS DEATH. So the actual creators are more than well protected. His grandchildren will still be collecting a piece of every sale.
I would prefer it, though, if spammers learned to circumvent captchas automatically... can you imagine what it would mean for OCR?
OCr is pretty good now. I've scanned some books with Abbyy OCR and the error rate was maybe one per page. While that's good enough for most purposes, and maybe even for captchas, it still needs to be proofread if you want to republish.
Problem is that you have not bought something. You've just paid for the right to use it, with restrictions....EULA...
Yes, we know that's what MS wants and put in the EULA. Why is that legally binding if I didn't sign it and only saw it after I'd bought it, as is usually the case? Courts have often nullified such "contracts", even insurance comtracts signed by the insuree, as being unreasonable and unenforcible. I don;t thnk anyone has had hte balls and mosny to get this tested in court.
MS can just say "Unsupported". That's fine; not "Thou Shalt Not".
If they flew in on a dark stormy night I don't think they'd have been spotted. Even if Sauron had radar in Barad-dur, eagles aren't that reflective. The Nazgul seemed to be able to sense the Ring only when someone was wearing it, they walked right past Frodo several times.
Actually what they do these days is that they have found it to be inefficent to seperate all the recyclable stuff at the pickup point of the home and thus ended most programs around the country to give out the recycling bins; majority just toss it all together so it is a waste of resources business wise to distribute those containers.
It works here in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, and many other countries. Are Americans really so lazy and selfish they can't drop their cans in one bin and plastic in another?
I run a filter at the school I work at. I can understand the need to block content for the kids who are our responsibility. Legal issues fall under the government. Why not allow them to block obviously illegal material?
1) Schools, companies, etc, blocking for their users is fine
2) Govt, or monoploy ISPs, blocking for EVERYONE is not. Becasue they'll err on the side of blocking anything that might offend anyone.
3) Trying to "block" objectionable sites from knowledgeable users is impossible, even if you go to the lengths China does. For instance, the hate sites supposedly advocating violence that are the subject of this could easily use an email list, create a forum in any country in the world, use P2P, use a neglected newsgroup, etc, etc. If what they're doing is "obviously illegal", SUE THEM. Lock them up. Don't try to sanitise the entire Internet, it's just impossible. These people are in the USA, not Outer Mongolia. Get the Mounties to call the FBI. Don't dick around with block lists that will just keep school kids busy for a few hours to circumvent.
For "neatness" of epic storytelling, Aragorn should have been the person to destroy the Ring, atoning for the actions of his ancestor Isildur... something tells me that if Tolkien wrote that, LoTR would not have been so interesting or successful.
Was there any reason Gandalf couldn't have whistled up an eagle to carry Frodo to Mount Doom? Aside from ending the story after 10 minutes.
The article mentions needing no more power than is available from an electrical socket.... Assuming you could then also battery power it, you'd have the potential to vandalize any bare metal in public with black marks that are "impossible" to rub off...
Who says it's impossible to rub off? It's a very thin surface treatment. A quick rub with sandpaper should remove it to ordinary metal. And no reason you coudn't paint over it. Actually paint might adhere better to a fuzzy surface like this, when repainting over over an enamel paint job you take the shine off it with some fine sandpaper first.
The treated metal absorbs all incoming radiation, such as microwaves and lasers. Hint: Think "perfect stealth", not only for planes, but for your car as well.
I don't know about that; though Roland mentions it in his typically breathless puff, TFA doesn't. I can understand these nanostructures absorbing light, with wavelengths similar to their scale, but not microwaves, radar, etc. with wavelenghths of centimetres. But absorbing all light is going to make things heat up. It will be emitting more infrared than a "shiny" surfaced vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
But being politicians, they can always play the patriotism card. Buy French. Remember those idiots in US Congress who wanted to boycott French wine and cheese (not to mention Freedom Fries). The French govt can also argue that they need a secure system without any NSA backdoors or remote deactivation from Redmond. And no matter that MS will open their code to them (under NDA), anything could be changed by updates. And that's not even discussing the risks of real hostile crackers.
Europe could have just bought Boeings, but they decided to invest in Airbus. And after years of nurturing finally now they have a mature competing aircraft producer instead of bleeding billions to the US (Seattle again, oddly).
For 98% of people, 98% of their skills. As 98% of office workers just click to open a document, type, and click on a button to format, click on a button to print or email. The support techs are the ones who will have to actually learn anything new; and as they're already using Linux servers, that won't be a stretch for them.
The 2% who have VBA mactros and such will need more hand-holding. But it's certain that an upgrade to Vista would cause a lot of grief for them too.
Yes, I made up the figures. But it's based on my personal observation of what real people in offices do all day.
I've seen plenty of submitters bitching about how their submission had been butchered. The editors cut and reword them if they feel the urge. And Jamie explicitly said they were just presenting "the facts".
NO, it DID NOT. Some newspapers printed stupid stories about that. Not "Science". Read this for the story of how this myth has propagated and been spread by various "warming sceptics".
The Mario movie didn't suck. It was no masterpiece, but it was fun, especially for subteens.
Oh really? You say "The producer of 'An Inconvenient Truth' is accusing the National Science Teachers Association of being in the pocket of Big Oil because she can't get preferential treatment for her film."
What "preferential treatment" did she ask for? That's not a fact, not from TFA. This charactersiastion is only in the summary, if not written by you then endorsed by your publishing it. Lots of industry groups supply free "educational" materials to the NSTA, as she points out. Only theirs was rejected. It seems more like an attempt to redress the balance.
I worked for a guy, and the longer I did and the more I learnt about him the more disgusted I got. I wanted to jump ship, but there just wasn't anything around in my line, and having a wife and a toddler made me less cavalier about walking out. But I did protest; and refused to participate in the worst abuses. Such as he never paid our casual workers on time, usually months late after many, many broken promises. So when I had a project that needed such people I just stopped and did something else. He would yell at me to get it done, but when I asked him to guarantee that work I commissioned would be paid, he just changed tack and abused me. Eventually I did find an alternative employer and was glad to be able to leave, but even though I'd blunted some of his abuses I still felt culpable.
You don't have HBO?
No bravery. He cut projects of the PREVIOUS government. They had a coup a few months ago, the army appointed the current government. It's traditional to cut the previous administration's pork barrel projects to make room for your own.
You think you have it tough... in Hong Kong they ran the third season of Six Feet Under a few months ago. Yes, from 2003. So I finally said "fuck it" and started downloading. Also I learnt that indeed Nate does say "Fuck it" quite a lot, which was cut from our aired version, as was a lot of the rumpy-pumpy. Lost; 24; Prison Break all show a few months late and I can wait for them, and not really fussed if I miss them, but I had no hope of Firefly or Deadwood showing up ever. So into the download queue they go. Between downloads and DVDs broadcast is getting a lot less of my time.
More of a spelling flame I'd think. And on that subject, it's "grammar".
Except "wireless" is what my grandfather called his bakelite cased valve radio.
You ask people to do arithmetic expressed in words. A trivial problem to automate. It works now because it's obscure; if it was widely deployed it would be beaten easily.
Multinationals play one region off against another to get lower and lower costs. So work is sent where the absolute cheapest labour and no environmental concerns to trouble the businessmen. Without intervention to put a floor under the wages; i.e. a minimum wage as is mandated in most Western countries, the workers will never be paid more than just enough to stay alive. Of course, some more money is spent to bribe relevant officials who make sure any unionists are dealt with. While CEOs and celebrity endorsers earn more than the entire wages of those who actually make the product. The point is the companies could afford to double wages and it would barely affect their bottom line. Nevertheless, they must squeeze the last cent of profit out. Look at the conditions of factory workers during the industrial revolution in the West. Read some Charles Dickens. That's where unbridled capitalism leads, and where it is in the Third World now.
The minuscule number of people this applies to are already very rich. And, most likely, like Elvis, dead.
Meanwhile, someone who wanted to collect a bunch of neglected music from the 40s or 50s and clean it up and reissue it can't without spending a fortune on legal fees trying just to locate the heirs of the copyright owners, likely companies that have disappeared or been absorbed long ago. With old recordings going into the public domain, they can have a new audience. If the original artists are still alive, they can only benefit from this. More importantly perhaps society gets to keep more than just the Top-40 hits as part of our cultural legacy.
Depends on what you mean by "creator" and "work". The writer's copyright is protected until he's been dead for 70 years. Only the copyright of a particular recording, which is usually owned by a record company, is so limited. Which is no doubt one reason Paul McCartney is busily releasing "definitive" remixes of Beatles songs.
And actually the "50 years" cited is only for the copyright of a specific recording. That probaly belongs to a big media company, not an artist. The writer of the song's copyright goes till at least 70 years AFTER HIS DEATH. So the actual creators are more than well protected. His grandchildren will still be collecting a piece of every sale.
OCr is pretty good now. I've scanned some books with Abbyy OCR and the error rate was maybe one per page. While that's good enough for most purposes, and maybe even for captchas, it still needs to be proofread if you want to republish.
Yes, we know that's what MS wants and put in the EULA. Why is that legally binding if I didn't sign it and only saw it after I'd bought it, as is usually the case? Courts have often nullified such "contracts", even insurance comtracts signed by the insuree, as being unreasonable and unenforcible. I don;t thnk anyone has had hte balls and mosny to get this tested in court.
MS can just say "Unsupported". That's fine; not "Thou Shalt Not".
If they flew in on a dark stormy night I don't think they'd have been spotted. Even if Sauron had radar in Barad-dur, eagles aren't that reflective. The Nazgul seemed to be able to sense the Ring only when someone was wearing it, they walked right past Frodo several times.
It works here in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, and many other countries. Are Americans really so lazy and selfish they can't drop their cans in one bin and plastic in another?
1) Schools, companies, etc, blocking for their users is fine
2) Govt, or monoploy ISPs, blocking for EVERYONE is not. Becasue they'll err on the side of blocking anything that might offend anyone. 3) Trying to "block" objectionable sites from knowledgeable users is impossible, even if you go to the lengths China does. For instance, the hate sites supposedly advocating violence that are the subject of this could easily use an email list, create a forum in any country in the world, use P2P, use a neglected newsgroup, etc, etc. If what they're doing is "obviously illegal", SUE THEM. Lock them up. Don't try to sanitise the entire Internet, it's just impossible. These people are in the USA, not Outer Mongolia. Get the Mounties to call the FBI. Don't dick around with block lists that will just keep school kids busy for a few hours to circumvent.
Was there any reason Gandalf couldn't have whistled up an eagle to carry Frodo to Mount Doom? Aside from ending the story after 10 minutes.
Who says it's impossible to rub off? It's a very thin surface treatment. A quick rub with sandpaper should remove it to ordinary metal. And no reason you coudn't paint over it. Actually paint might adhere better to a fuzzy surface like this, when repainting over over an enamel paint job you take the shine off it with some fine sandpaper first.
I don't know about that; though Roland mentions it in his typically breathless puff, TFA doesn't. I can understand these nanostructures absorbing light, with wavelengths similar to their scale, but not microwaves, radar, etc. with wavelenghths of centimetres. But absorbing all light is going to make things heat up. It will be emitting more infrared than a "shiny" surfaced vehicle.