Well preferably, it would be filled with a brick wall, but it doesn't always work out that way. And if it wasn't bat, it could have just as easily been a car. And three feet (including the door) won't protect you from that.
Not in the fact that this particular lunatic owns, and is ready to point a gun at somebody's head.
So if he has just smashed his head in with a baseball bat, that would be better? Or perhaps the problem is that things that can be used to kill (cars, rat poison, blenders, etc.) can be bought by anyone in the US, including lunatics and...heaven forbid...gamers.
All types of political groups will try to spin this story to shift blame to whatever it is they're trying to ban. Video games, guns, violent movies, trench coats, whatever. The fact of the matter is that the blame lies with one and only one person...the idiot who decided to use a gun to win an argument.
...at least he didn't shoot the guy. I mean, if videogames make you want to kill people, wouldn't this guy just have come back from his car shooting first and asking questions later?
Of course, it could also be that he just didn't want to lose points for shooting civilians.
, the soldiers can play racing games or sports games, which are okay I guess, but still not optimal for relaxation.
How many times have you seen football players playing Madden on G4 or TechTV? If people love what they do, they'll want to do it all the time. It doesn't matter if it's football or sweep and clear operations in urban terrain.
With the dizzying array of routers available for purchase, I've often been befuddled by the sheer number of choices that I have when buying new equipment. Which one is better? Why is this router $10 less than this other one when they appear to do the same thing? Which manufacturer should I trust with my data? With razon thin profit margins, and fierce competition in the IT hardware industry, such choices have become extremely difficult.
It's comforting to to know that Belkin has recognized my problem, and has stepped forward in an effort to solve it. They make it so much easier by saying...
"If It's Belkin, You Don't Want It!"(tm)
Thank you Belkin. With your new forward-thinking "Don't Buy Our Stuff" policy, I will be sure to stay on the lookout for other products that you offer, so that they can assist me in making difficult purchasing choices even easier.
It might, except for students that don't run Windows.
Oh wait...you mean those crazy linux people. Right. That's true, but those people are left-wing commie pirates and there's no stopping them anyway, so what does that matter?
At my company we use WikiWiki for documenting everything from internal code management procedures to HR policies. It works great.
However, I work at a pretty small company. I don't think that a WikiWiki site would serve the needs of 5000 employees, simply because you don't get the "personal responsibility factor" check and balance for making changes to the Wiki. I can see it now....Fred in accounting says that we all get 20 weeks off a year! Horray!
It's been my experience that plot holes + bad movie made by someone who should know better can sometimes mean that the director's vision was comprimised by someone at the studio. This could very well be the case with Revolutions.
I mean, it's not like this movie snuck up on the Wachowski brothers. I'm sure they had it all planned out, probably with an ending closer to "The English Patient" than "Terminator 3". Then some studio executive comes along and says "You can't kill Neo! He's the main character!" (or something along those lines), and all of the sudden your carefully crafted plotline is chucked out the window and all the groundwork you've laid up to to this point is not only useless, it's contradictory.
Now, just like any other good conspiracy theory, I have no evidence of this other than my own intuition. I haven't even seen the movie yet, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen;-)
At least there's no Jar-Jar in this movie...Right?!?
SAN FRANCISCO--Rescue workers are still searching frantically for any signs of unwasted time in the wreckage of high-school student Jeremy Fanshaw's life, following a devastating Quake game that claimed an estimated 500 hours of his time. "Ordinarily, a game of this magnitude would destroy 40 to 50 hours," Red Cross worker Linda Wallis-Hupford said. "But, tragically, Jeremy went back to play the game from the beginning, then he started playing at harder and harder skill levels, and, eventually, he downloaded software that let him create his own levels and skins." As rescue efforts continue, experts are warning of a possible Quake II disaster that could last even longer, with more stunning graphics.
If the Vietnameese government can't enfore the licensing terms of propritary software, why would they enfore the GPL or any other Open Source license?
The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...something that you vaugely enforce in order to appease trade policy negotiators from 1st world countries. Switching to "Open Source" won't fix that problem.
Or at least, they did have all of this until the US bombed the crap out of the infrastructure and power plants prior to invading - and now extremists keep blowing up all the power lines whenever they get them repaired.
Why can't you talk to your computer? Sounds like a good idea, right? Hell, it's a star trek fanatasy come true for 90% of the geeks out there. So why can't you?
The answer is not because the technology is not good enough. Speech command software has come a long way, and in most situations, with the right microphone, it can be very realiable...if you talk clearly.
The problem is that people don't naturally talk clearly. They repeat themselves, add in lots of "ummm"s and "errr"s and "like"s, and generally speak in ways that only another human could symantically understand. Because of this, using a keyboard or mouse to communicate with a computer is always going to me a more effecient mechanism.
Think about it...which is faster: Saying (in a clear, even tone) "Select the 3rd item in the list" or just clicking on it. Even in ideal environments using buttons on a PDA is going to faster and more reliable than voice command.
The only reason humans can use speech to effciently communicate with each other is that along with speech comes tone, body language, and symantic context that conveys as much (if not more) information than the vocal message itself. Computers cannot pick up on those kinds of things.
I seriously doubt that anyone will make extensive use of this feature.
My point is not that Hydrogen is more dangerous than Gasoline. My point is that Gasoline powered cars have 100 years of product testing behind them to find all the common faults and problems associated with having a big tank of flammable hydrocarbons in your car.
With safety issues, it's not the stuff that you know about that gets you, it's the stuff you don't know. And right now, Hydrogen powered cars are a big unknown.
"The only long-term solution to this connected set of problems is to reduce the world's reliance on oil. Achieving this once seemed pie-in-the-sky. No longer. Hydrogen fuel cells are at last becoming a viable alternative."
Oh fantastic! I just zip right on down to the Ford dealership and pick myself up a Hydrogen powered car. Then I can go to the nearest gas station and fill it up with liquid Hyrdogen. I'm sure it'll be cheaper than the $1.40 a gallon I paid to fill up my car this morning.
Lets get real here, people. Nobody knows for sure if fuel cell cars will actually work in the marketplace. There are lots of hurdles to overcome like safety issues (New for 2005! The Buick Hindenburg XT!), distribution and production issues for Hydrogen, not to mention the fact that fuel cells may be a tough sell to consumers as long as they can buy gas at a reasonable price.
Fuel cells may be a good idea...they may be a fantastic idea. Or they could be the next Segway. A wait and see attitude is more prudent here before we go throwing out 100 years worth of research and development on the internal combustion engine.
Environmental policy is, by it's very nature (pun!), ineffecient. Pollution is one of those rare problems that cannot be solved by a competitive free market. It's extremely difficult for people to "vote with thier dollars" for whatever company creates the least amount of long term negative environmental impact. Firstly, because that kind of thing is difficult to print on a label. Secondly, because nobody knows what the long term effects of what we do really is. So you have to dictate from the top.
But autocracy breeds corruption. And when you have to base your policy on "what if" and "just in case" and not, for example, 5000 years of careful scientific observation, the possibility for corruption becomes much more than a possibility. Corruption and waste run rampant in any system that is based more on faith and arguments from authority than on science because oversight and public scruitiny become extremely difficult, and environmental policy is no different.
Don't get me wrong. We need these laws...otherwise we go back to the days of rivers being so polluted that they catch on fire. But unless some serious and objective long-term study is done in all areas of environmental science, the solutions will always be very sub-optimal and may not, in fact, do anything to protect the long term health of the planet.
"PHP can use the database as the back-end session store."
and
"The ideal multi-server model is a pod architecture, where the router round-robins each of the machines and there is only a minimal session store in the database."
are pretty tough assumptions to swallow. Storing session state in a database only works when you have a small amount of session state to store. Otherwise the database quickly becomes the bottleneck for any operation you need to perform. The alternative is that you have to have your session state distribuited in a cluster, which is something that, AFAIK, you cannot do in PHP. You can, however, do it Java. In fact, some of things that JBoss is trying to do will make session replication across a cluster fairly easy.
PHP can be very useful. I think PHP as a view layer sitting on top of a a J2EE controller and object model would be a wonderful idea. But to say "PHP scales as well as Java" is a huge oversimplification of the extremely complex problem that is enterprise computing.
If you're using Windows, all your spare CPU cycles are already being used. Open up the task manager and look for a process called "System Idle Process". Notice the CPU usage. Using SETI@home (or folding@home) is a much more productive use of those CPU cycle, so compute away!
Is anyone actually verifying this? Or are we just trusting the Chineese government that they have a man in space. I mean, is someone from a non-government controlled media outlet going to watch this guy land and climb out of the capsule?
Seriously, if you think the Apollo moon landing conspiracies are bad...
I've had two 21" monitors for my system at work, and it's made me much more productive. One of the main benefits is that I can debug rendering code much easier because I don't have to switch back and forth between the editor and the application (triggering extra repaints that screw up the codepath I'm trying to debug).
Also, it lets me put my editor (JBuilder, in most cases) on one monitor, and have a UML diagram, a specification, or a bug report, etc...on the other. And considering I was able to add the extra monitor for 300, it's totally worth it.
It's just like the mafia. If you're making money, they want a peice. Even if you're not, they still had better get thier cut...or else. The only reason the Internet hasn't been taxes thus far is because it'd be too hard to enforce.
Powerful people expect everyone else to provide for them, and they always get more than they give. The only difference is that the government tells you what they're going to steal up front.
One thing I've noticed is that many organizations and countries have been switching to open source software just because it's not Microsoft. They're sick and tired of Microsoft's ruthless and illegal business practices, and quite frankly I don't blame them.
The problem is that OSS is not the golden hammer solution to every problem. Some systems are better off being built using propritary software, especially when you need someone who will "just fix it" if it breaks, or has a whole suite of solutions that work together. Unfortunately, Microsoft's violation of anti-trust law has ensured that there are few, if any, viable propritary alternatives to many software products (i.e. desktop operating systems). The result is that our options are limited to choices which, in some cases, are far less than optimal.
Microsoft's business tactics may be driving people to open source, but if open source is not the answer to your problem, that is not a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well preferably, it would be filled with a brick wall, but it doesn't always work out that way. And if it wasn't bat, it could have just as easily been a car. And three feet (including the door) won't protect you from that.
True, but then again, a bat doesn't have a safety...
Not in the fact that this particular lunatic owns, and is ready to point a gun at somebody's head.
So if he has just smashed his head in with a baseball bat, that would be better? Or perhaps the problem is that things that can be used to kill (cars, rat poison, blenders, etc.) can be bought by anyone in the US, including lunatics and...heaven forbid...gamers.
All types of political groups will try to spin this story to shift blame to whatever it is they're trying to ban. Video games, guns, violent movies, trench coats, whatever. The fact of the matter is that the blame lies with one and only one person...the idiot who decided to use a gun to win an argument.
...at least he didn't shoot the guy. I mean, if videogames make you want to kill people, wouldn't this guy just have come back from his car shooting first and asking questions later?
Of course, it could also be that he just didn't want to lose points for shooting civilians.
, the soldiers can play racing games or sports games, which are okay I guess, but still not optimal for relaxation.
How many times have you seen football players playing Madden on G4 or TechTV? If people love what they do, they'll want to do it all the time. It doesn't matter if it's football or sweep and clear operations in urban terrain.
With the dizzying array of routers available for purchase, I've often been befuddled by the sheer number of choices that I have when buying new equipment. Which one is better? Why is this router $10 less than this other one when they appear to do the same thing? Which manufacturer should I trust with my data? With razon thin profit margins, and fierce competition in the IT hardware industry, such choices have become extremely difficult.
It's comforting to to know that Belkin has recognized my problem, and has stepped forward in an effort to solve it. They make it so much easier by saying...
"If It's Belkin, You Don't Want It!"(tm)
Thank you Belkin. With your new forward-thinking "Don't Buy Our Stuff" policy, I will be sure to stay on the lookout for other products that you offer, so that they can assist me in making difficult purchasing choices even easier.
It might, except for students that don't run Windows.
Oh wait...you mean those crazy linux people. Right. That's true, but those people are left-wing commie pirates and there's no stopping them anyway, so what does that matter?
Try JSPWiki. That's what I use. It took me a grand total of 5 minutes to set up.
At my company we use WikiWiki for documenting everything from internal code management procedures to HR policies. It works great.
However, I work at a pretty small company. I don't think that a WikiWiki site would serve the needs of 5000 employees, simply because you don't get the "personal responsibility factor" check and balance for making changes to the Wiki. I can see it now....Fred in accounting says that we all get 20 weeks off a year! Horray!
It's been my experience that plot holes + bad movie made by someone who should know better can sometimes mean that the director's vision was comprimised by someone at the studio. This could very well be the case with Revolutions.
;-)
I mean, it's not like this movie snuck up on the Wachowski brothers. I'm sure they had it all planned out, probably with an ending closer to "The English Patient" than "Terminator 3". Then some studio executive comes along and says "You can't kill Neo! He's the main character!" (or something along those lines), and all of the sudden your carefully crafted plotline is chucked out the window and all the groundwork you've laid up to to this point is not only useless, it's contradictory.
Now, just like any other good conspiracy theory, I have no evidence of this other than my own intuition. I haven't even seen the movie yet, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen
At least there's no Jar-Jar in this movie...Right?!?
"Quake Claims 500 Hours"
SAN FRANCISCO--Rescue workers are still searching frantically for any signs of unwasted time in the wreckage of high-school student Jeremy Fanshaw's life, following a devastating Quake game that claimed an estimated 500 hours of his time. "Ordinarily, a game of this magnitude would destroy 40 to 50 hours," Red Cross worker Linda Wallis-Hupford said. "But, tragically, Jeremy went back to play the game from the beginning, then he started playing at harder and harder skill levels, and, eventually, he downloaded software that let him create his own levels and skins." As rescue efforts continue, experts are warning of a possible Quake II disaster that could last even longer, with more stunning graphics.
taken from The Onion
If the Vietnameese government can't enfore the licensing terms of propritary software, why would they enfore the GPL or any other Open Source license?
The real problem in Vietnam (and most other countries run by communist, oligarchical governments) is that IP laws are treated as optional...something that you vaugely enforce in order to appease trade policy negotiators from 1st world countries. Switching to "Open Source" won't fix that problem.
Or at least, they did have all of this until the US bombed the crap out of the infrastructure and power plants prior to invading - and now extremists keep blowing up all the power lines whenever they get them repaired.
Actually, power in Iraq is back to pre-war levels.
Why can't you talk to your computer? Sounds like a good idea, right? Hell, it's a star trek fanatasy come true for 90% of the geeks out there. So why can't you?
The answer is not because the technology is not good enough. Speech command software has come a long way, and in most situations, with the right microphone, it can be very realiable...if you talk clearly.
The problem is that people don't naturally talk clearly. They repeat themselves, add in lots of "ummm"s and "errr"s and "like"s, and generally speak in ways that only another human could symantically understand. Because of this, using a keyboard or mouse to communicate with a computer is always going to me a more effecient mechanism.
Think about it...which is faster: Saying (in a clear, even tone) "Select the 3rd item in the list" or just clicking on it. Even in ideal environments using buttons on a PDA is going to faster and more reliable than voice command.
The only reason humans can use speech to effciently communicate with each other is that along with speech comes tone, body language, and symantic context that conveys as much (if not more) information than the vocal message itself. Computers cannot pick up on those kinds of things.
I seriously doubt that anyone will make extensive use of this feature.
...it's all made by the lowest bidder. And by that criterion, Linux is the clear choice.
My point is not that Hydrogen is more dangerous than Gasoline. My point is that Gasoline powered cars have 100 years of product testing behind them to find all the common faults and problems associated with having a big tank of flammable hydrocarbons in your car.
With safety issues, it's not the stuff that you know about that gets you, it's the stuff you don't know. And right now, Hydrogen powered cars are a big unknown.
"The only long-term solution to this connected set of problems is to reduce the world's reliance on oil. Achieving this once seemed pie-in-the-sky. No longer. Hydrogen fuel cells are at last becoming a viable alternative."
Oh fantastic! I just zip right on down to the Ford dealership and pick myself up a Hydrogen powered car. Then I can go to the nearest gas station and fill it up with liquid Hyrdogen. I'm sure it'll be cheaper than the $1.40 a gallon I paid to fill up my car this morning.
Lets get real here, people. Nobody knows for sure if fuel cell cars will actually work in the marketplace. There are lots of hurdles to overcome like safety issues (New for 2005! The Buick Hindenburg XT!), distribution and production issues for Hydrogen, not to mention the fact that fuel cells may be a tough sell to consumers as long as they can buy gas at a reasonable price.
Fuel cells may be a good idea...they may be a fantastic idea. Or they could be the next Segway. A wait and see attitude is more prudent here before we go throwing out 100 years worth of research and development on the internal combustion engine.
Environmental policy is, by it's very nature (pun!), ineffecient. Pollution is one of those rare problems that cannot be solved by a competitive free market. It's extremely difficult for people to "vote with thier dollars" for whatever company creates the least amount of long term negative environmental impact. Firstly, because that kind of thing is difficult to print on a label. Secondly, because nobody knows what the long term effects of what we do really is. So you have to dictate from the top.
But autocracy breeds corruption. And when you have to base your policy on "what if" and "just in case" and not, for example, 5000 years of careful scientific observation, the possibility for corruption becomes much more than a possibility. Corruption and waste run rampant in any system that is based more on faith and arguments from authority than on science because oversight and public scruitiny become extremely difficult, and environmental policy is no different.
Don't get me wrong. We need these laws...otherwise we go back to the days of rivers being so polluted that they catch on fire. But unless some serious and objective long-term study is done in all areas of environmental science, the solutions will always be very sub-optimal and may not, in fact, do anything to protect the long term health of the planet.
...then yes, it does. However:
"PHP can use the database as the back-end session store."
and
"The ideal multi-server model is a pod architecture, where the router round-robins each of the machines and there is only a minimal session store in the database."
are pretty tough assumptions to swallow. Storing session state in a database only works when you have a small amount of session state to store. Otherwise the database quickly becomes the bottleneck for any operation you need to perform. The alternative is that you have to have your session state distribuited in a cluster, which is something that, AFAIK, you cannot do in PHP. You can, however, do it Java. In fact, some of things that JBoss is trying to do will make session replication across a cluster fairly easy.
PHP can be very useful. I think PHP as a view layer sitting on top of a a J2EE controller and object model would be a wonderful idea. But to say "PHP scales as well as Java" is a huge oversimplification of the extremely complex problem that is enterprise computing.
If you're using Windows, all your spare CPU cycles are already being used. Open up the task manager and look for a process called "System Idle Process". Notice the CPU usage. Using SETI@home (or folding@home) is a much more productive use of those CPU cycle, so compute away!
Is anyone actually verifying this? Or are we just trusting the Chineese government that they have a man in space. I mean, is someone from a non-government controlled media outlet going to watch this guy land and climb out of the capsule?
Seriously, if you think the Apollo moon landing conspiracies are bad...
I've had two 21" monitors for my system at work, and it's made me much more productive. One of the main benefits is that I can debug rendering code much easier because I don't have to switch back and forth between the editor and the application (triggering extra repaints that screw up the codepath I'm trying to debug).
Also, it lets me put my editor (JBuilder, in most cases) on one monitor, and have a UML diagram, a specification, or a bug report, etc...on the other. And considering I was able to add the extra monitor for 300, it's totally worth it.
It's just like the mafia. If you're making money, they want a peice. Even if you're not, they still had better get thier cut...or else. The only reason the Internet hasn't been taxes thus far is because it'd be too hard to enforce.
Powerful people expect everyone else to provide for them, and they always get more than they give. The only difference is that the government tells you what they're going to steal up front.
One thing I've noticed is that many organizations and countries have been switching to open source software just because it's not Microsoft. They're sick and tired of Microsoft's ruthless and illegal business practices, and quite frankly I don't blame them.
The problem is that OSS is not the golden hammer solution to every problem. Some systems are better off being built using propritary software, especially when you need someone who will "just fix it" if it breaks, or has a whole suite of solutions that work together. Unfortunately, Microsoft's violation of anti-trust law has ensured that there are few, if any, viable propritary alternatives to many software products (i.e. desktop operating systems). The result is that our options are limited to choices which, in some cases, are far less than optimal.
Microsoft's business tactics may be driving people to open source, but if open source is not the answer to your problem, that is not a good thing.
If someone tosses their empty Jolt Cola can in my trashcan while it's sitting on the lawn to be picked up, is that tresspassing?
This is just dumb. Who has an expectation of privacy with their trash?!