We are talking about Italy, where the more corrupt you are, the more likely you are to end up in the national government. As an Italian, however, I am positive that no politician will be held accountable for this: our legal system effectively prevents corruption from being prosecuted.
How is that? Well, corruption is still a crime, and politicians have not yet managed to make investigations discretionary—any report on illegal activities still must be investigated, no matter the opinion of the prosecutors; this is a good thing because the politicians cannot tell prosecutors what to do. However, at the same time, Italy is unique in that we have a system with three degrees of appeal that are almost always granted, and statutory terms that continue running during the trial.
So, what do criminal politicians do? They remove all the funding they can from the judiciary. Italy's judiciary system is in a condition in which they actually lack paper and toner for printers, not to mention judiciary police being short on petrol. Add in a lot of legislation designed to slow down trials on crimes likely to be committed by politicians, note that complete trials may take a decade while statutory terms are much shorter, and and you can be sure that no person with enough money in their pockets to pay for lawyers will ever land in jail, unless they did something particularly heavy and/or lost support among their caste.
Our prime minister has used this trick a few times already, some of which after having changed the law in order to shorten statutory terms.
"Measured in seconds. Less is better." That would be fewer.
Or maybe "less" was referred to "time", as "measured" is, in which case it is perfectly fine.
Grammar nazis asside, [...]
Es ist Zeit für Rache!
Is there more default software in Windows 7? Windows 7 is a DVD, isn't Ubuntu still on a CD?
Ubuntu comes on DVD as well, but yes it is usually a CD. Windows has just more crud, not "more software". Ubuntu even includes Office software in the default install. Anyway, if we account for the time spent on installing additional software, I think Windows would come much worse out of it.
(and see if it's slower, due to Java?)
Ok, I'm a C++ guy and I will not easily pass an occasion to throw a jab at Java, but this is plain silly. Most of anything you do in an Office suit is not going to use the machine's full power for extended periods of time. If it is noticeably slower, it is because of sloppy programming, not language limitations. Language limitations of Java may come out with numeric code, not with GUIs.
Web browsing, including using Silverlight and installing plugins and everything.
Silverlight? Who cares about that? Who uses it? How would that be a benchmark? There isn't even an official Linux version! You could just as well ask how fast is Microsoft Bob on Linux.
(And don't bother replying about the GIMP until it has proper CMYK support.)
What if I reply about Krita? They do claim support for CMYK colorspace, though I don't know whether that's good enough of an implementation compared to Adobe products.
Second world: Soviet Union and direct allies (Warsaw pact).
Third world: underdeveloped countries, including China as it did not stay an ally of the USSR for long (in case you are too young: it was actually an ally of the US in the cold war).
Fourth world: newly developed former third-world countries (Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia), which usually got rich finding oil under their asses and keeping foreigners from stealing it.
This is a cold-war-era classification, but "third world" has become such a common way of saying "poor country" that it stuck. However, Mao Zedong had its own classification, in which China was still in the third world:
First world: the superpowers, i.e. USA and USSR;
Second world: the superpowers' satellites, i.e. most of Europe, South America, Africa, and Oceania;
Third world: independent countries, among which China.
Not having a KDE 4 version of Amarok for example is terrible.
Amarok is an extragear program, i.e. one (like K3b, digiKam or Kile) that has its own release schedule. It is not the responsibility of the KDE devs to look after Amarok; there are Amarok devs for that.
That said, you can use the old version of Amarok on the new KDE. You just need the kdelibs from KDE 3.5, which Amarok uses, and when it starts it will go in the KDE4 systray.
And yes, I am using Amarok 1.4.1 on KDE 4.1.4 in this very moment.
I think there are laws in Germany (and all of the EU) that state that when you buy something over the Internet, you can return the product within a few weeks (at least 2) if you are not satisfied. Google for Widerrufrecht.
If they did not tell her of this possibility, they are hosed. Not sure what are the penalties for not telling the customers about it, but they must be pretty stiff since every time I order something (yes I live in Germany) I get lots of information about it.
Any Person, regardless of rank or position, found by a State Supreme Court, State Legislature, or the Supreme Court of the United States to be committing acts in violation of this Constitution shall be charged with treason, with appropriate penalties as determined by the Congress.
Hi, this is Congress. We implemented your amendment tonight, and from now on whoever violates the constitution will have to skip dessert for a whole week.
Fine, then call it "conspiracy against the Constitution", "betrayal of the democratic order", "attempted coup d'etat". The GP's point is that anti-constitutional conduct by the government should be harshly punished.
It's actually quite extraordinary. We have now created symbols that can represent simple meanings cross-culturally and cross-linguistically, [...]
Ahem, the Chinese have been using that for millennia now. The Japanese Kanji and the Korean Hanja are ripoffs of the Chinese Hanzi, and, whereas pronunciation and even syntax are different, the meanings are retained, just like in the case of smileys. I'll let you into a secret: in foreign countries we actually do the same for numbers: e.g. "Rocky V" is pronounced "Rocky fem/fuenf/cinque", not always "Rocky five", depending on language, because our digits work just like Hanzi ideograms, or smileys. So it's hardly something new.
This is, consequently, why I think English has ended up being a global language - because it's so absurdly flexible.
It has more to do with the military and economic dominance of the US. In the 1800 and up to WWII French had the role of English. Being flexible is no advantage at all for a learner, who has to learn what is the difference between "forbidden" and "verboten", or between "royal", "regal" and "kingly", whereas other languages have just one word. In my experience (I speak Italian as a mother language, English, Norwegian and German) the kind of flexibility you talk about is actually a major hindrance (or an obstacle?). In any case, get ready to learn Mandarin.
When's the last time French decided it was ok to add a word?
Osama bin Laden is on the Moon, that's why we can't find him! Let's go get him boys!
Saddam is building weapons of mass destruction on Mars, we have recon pictures! We must send an expedition there!
The ISS is a kiddie porn haven! We must build the new Ares or we cannot send our astronauts there to bring democracy! Why, why won't you think of the children?
If NASA is underfunded, the terrorists win!
If we do not have a permanent space presence, The Pirate Bay could establish a permanent server on a satellite! We must protect our artists!
How about letting Halliburton provide astronaut meals to NASA, at a bargain $1,000,000 a ration?
True patriots support their country's rockets! There's the flag on 'em! You are not unpatriotic, are you?
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz. The one and only book about math that I ever read without ever being bored nor puzzled, and I actually learned something at the end of it.
So you're saying that if we were to take nuclear waste and dump it into smokestacks so that it got dispersed all over the country that the entire problem would be solved?
If you could guarantee that the waste would actually stay in the air long enough, and could distribute it through all the smokestacks in the country, well yes. The reason you cannot do it is that it would be prohibitively expensive (and controversial) compared to just burying the problem.
Yeah right. Could you maybe drop a few names of those "luminaries"? Because I still have to see a climatologist in his right mind contesting global warming. And don't give me that crap about them looking for funding, if they had been greedy they would have taken an MBA, run a bank into the ground and got a bailout.
coal power actually results in more radioactive waste being released into the environment than nuclear power. The population effective dose equivalent from radiation from coal plants is 100 times as much as nuclear plants.
Concentration concentration concentration. If those "100 times" (extensive) are spread over a large area, being released by smokestacks all over the country, they will hardly increase the level of background radiation (intensive) significantly. Nuclear waste, however, can reach radiation levels (intensive) that can be harmful to life, something coal power would never be able to.
This argument is being parroted over and over by nuclear supporters, and is just as silly as saying that people absorb much more background radiation from natural sources than from nuclear (or coal) power plants, which is just as true and just as misleading.
What happens if you "forget" the key? Like this: "Your honour, I once experimented with encryption, but could not understand how it worked. The files must be leftovers of that installation. I never used them and they must be empty." How can they prove you are lying, short of breaking the encryption and finding the evidence?
What next, a breathalyser for paedophiles? Murderers? Terrorists? Why does not the UK police use that money to train their people or hire new specialists instead of trying to build a perpetuum mobile? Any criminal worth spending this project's money on is savvy enough to fully encrypt his hard disk. If they are so dumb not to encrypt compromising data, any cop with a few hours of training could find it. So what is this project really aiming at?
I'm a High School teacher and would be very uneasy about putting bootable linux CDs into the hands of teenage boys on the school network.
Why? How could they boot an OS from a CD? The BIOS is locked by password and will only boot from the hard disk. Without that password, you cannot boot anything else than the installed system.
Think - what if a student used advanced access to delete a whole year's coursework?
How could they possibly do that? That material is writable only by the teacher or teachers' group. Students have no access to that.
schools don't have the money to bring in the level of security experts we need to protect against the kids.
You only have to password-protect the BIOS, set file permissions, and lock the door to the server room. If you are a teacher you can figure out that much. Scratch that, who sold computers to your school has likely already done this for you.
The point being, is the software really free or is there a hidden charge associated with it?
If someone gives you a Ferrari for free, you still have to pay for gas. Is it really free?
If someone pays you a beer, you still have to drink it, digest it, and piss it. How much time will you use on this? And what if that beer makes you intoxicated? Is that beer really free? Most people enjoy drinking beer, but that is an opportunity cost: you fill your stomach with half a liter of liquid and you will not be able to eat as much for some time. Do you factor this in the definition of free?
If you get laid for free, the woman will probably want to be satisfied. It is implied that if you do not satisfy her you won't be enough of a man, and feel like crap. Is sex with non-prostituting women really free?
Oh, and one other point - how do you know if your Linux Kernel is authentic? For example, if an angry employee adds code to the kernel to cause everything to crash when they are gone how do you tell?
MD5 hashes & cryptographic signatures, and anyway no user can write system files. Time bombs can be set in any OS by any sysadmin worth his money.
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We are talking about Italy, where the more corrupt you are, the more likely you are to end up in the national government. As an Italian, however, I am positive that no politician will be held accountable for this: our legal system effectively prevents corruption from being prosecuted.
How is that? Well, corruption is still a crime, and politicians have not yet managed to make investigations discretionary—any report on illegal activities still must be investigated, no matter the opinion of the prosecutors; this is a good thing because the politicians cannot tell prosecutors what to do. However, at the same time, Italy is unique in that we have a system with three degrees of appeal that are almost always granted, and statutory terms that continue running during the trial.
So, what do criminal politicians do? They remove all the funding they can from the judiciary. Italy's judiciary system is in a condition in which they actually lack paper and toner for printers, not to mention judiciary police being short on petrol. Add in a lot of legislation designed to slow down trials on crimes likely to be committed by politicians, note that complete trials may take a decade while statutory terms are much shorter, and and you can be sure that no person with enough money in their pockets to pay for lawyers will ever land in jail, unless they did something particularly heavy and/or lost support among their caste.
Our prime minister has used this trick a few times already, some of which after having changed the law in order to shorten statutory terms.
Or maybe "less" was referred to "time", as "measured" is, in which case it is perfectly fine.
Es ist Zeit für Rache!
Ubuntu comes on DVD as well, but yes it is usually a CD. Windows has just more crud, not "more software". Ubuntu even includes Office software in the default install. Anyway, if we account for the time spent on installing additional software, I think Windows would come much worse out of it.
Ok, I'm a C++ guy and I will not easily pass an occasion to throw a jab at Java, but this is plain silly. Most of anything you do in an Office suit is not going to use the machine's full power for extended periods of time. If it is noticeably slower, it is because of sloppy programming, not language limitations. Language limitations of Java may come out with numeric code, not with GUIs.
Silverlight? Who cares about that? Who uses it? How would that be a benchmark? There isn't even an official Linux version! You could just as well ask how fast is Microsoft Bob on Linux.
Corrected that for you.
What if I reply about Krita? They do claim support for CMYK colorspace, though I don't know whether that's good enough of an implementation compared to Adobe products.
This is a cold-war-era classification, but "third world" has become such a common way of saying "poor country" that it stuck. However, Mao Zedong had its own classification, in which China was still in the third world:
Amarok is an extragear program, i.e. one (like K3b, digiKam or Kile) that has its own release schedule. It is not the responsibility of the KDE devs to look after Amarok; there are Amarok devs for that.
That said, you can use the old version of Amarok on the new KDE. You just need the kdelibs from KDE 3.5, which Amarok uses, and when it starts it will go in the KDE4 systray.
And yes, I am using Amarok 1.4.1 on KDE 4.1.4 in this very moment.
Mi parolas esperanton, diabla malsentemulo!
As Obama is sworn in, I will swear out loud because I will lose teh intarwebs...
You need a heat source at a temperature higher than the environment first.
That would be soyuzy .
I think there are laws in Germany (and all of the EU) that state that when you buy something over the Internet, you can return the product within a few weeks (at least 2) if you are not satisfied. Google for Widerrufrecht.
If they did not tell her of this possibility, they are hosed. Not sure what are the penalties for not telling the customers about it, but they must be pretty stiff since every time I order something (yes I live in Germany) I get lots of information about it.
Hi, this is Congress. We implemented your amendment tonight, and from now on whoever violates the constitution will have to skip dessert for a whole week.
Fine, then call it "conspiracy against the Constitution", "betrayal of the democratic order", "attempted coup d'etat". The GP's point is that anti-constitutional conduct by the government should be harshly punished.
... so first we have a president whose second name is Hussein, and now Muslims are bringing freedom to America?
Ahem, the Chinese have been using that for millennia now. The Japanese Kanji and the Korean Hanja are ripoffs of the Chinese Hanzi, and, whereas pronunciation and even syntax are different, the meanings are retained, just like in the case of smileys. I'll let you into a secret: in foreign countries we actually do the same for numbers: e.g. "Rocky V" is pronounced "Rocky fem/fuenf/cinque", not always "Rocky five", depending on language, because our digits work just like Hanzi ideograms, or smileys. So it's hardly something new.
Agree with the rest of your post, but...
It has more to do with the military and economic dominance of the US. In the 1800 and up to WWII French had the role of English. Being flexible is no advantage at all for a learner, who has to learn what is the difference between "forbidden" and "verboten", or between "royal", "regal" and "kingly", whereas other languages have just one word. In my experience (I speak Italian as a mother language, English, Norwegian and German) the kind of flexibility you talk about is actually a major hindrance (or an obstacle?). In any case, get ready to learn Mandarin.
I think it was 2003, and the word was courriel.
Ok, let's give it a shot:
And the trump card...
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz. The one and only book about math that I ever read without ever being bored nor puzzled, and I actually learned something at the end of it.
If you could guarantee that the waste would actually stay in the air long enough, and could distribute it through all the smokestacks in the country, well yes. The reason you cannot do it is that it would be prohibitively expensive (and controversial) compared to just burying the problem.
Yeah right. Could you maybe drop a few names of those "luminaries"? Because I still have to see a climatologist in his right mind contesting global warming. And don't give me that crap about them looking for funding, if they had been greedy they would have taken an MBA, run a bank into the ground and got a bailout.
Concentration concentration concentration. If those "100 times" (extensive) are spread over a large area, being released by smokestacks all over the country, they will hardly increase the level of background radiation (intensive) significantly. Nuclear waste, however, can reach radiation levels (intensive) that can be harmful to life, something coal power would never be able to.
This argument is being parroted over and over by nuclear supporters, and is just as silly as saying that people absorb much more background radiation from natural sources than from nuclear (or coal) power plants, which is just as true and just as misleading.
What happens if you "forget" the key? Like this: "Your honour, I once experimented with encryption, but could not understand how it worked. The files must be leftovers of that installation. I never used them and they must be empty." How can they prove you are lying, short of breaking the encryption and finding the evidence?
What next, a breathalyser for paedophiles? Murderers? Terrorists? Why does not the UK police use that money to train their people or hire new specialists instead of trying to build a perpetuum mobile? Any criminal worth spending this project's money on is savvy enough to fully encrypt his hard disk. If they are so dumb not to encrypt compromising data, any cop with a few hours of training could find it. So what is this project really aiming at?
Why? How could they boot an OS from a CD? The BIOS is locked by password and will only boot from the hard disk. Without that password, you cannot boot anything else than the installed system.
How could they possibly do that? That material is writable only by the teacher or teachers' group. Students have no access to that.
You only have to password-protect the BIOS, set file permissions, and lock the door to the server room. If you are a teacher you can figure out that much. Scratch that, who sold computers to your school has likely already done this for you.
MD5 hashes & cryptographic signatures, and anyway no user can write system files. Time bombs can be set in any OS by any sysadmin worth his money.