no fuel cell system aimed at the mass market take pure hydrogen as an input, mainly because of it's inherent danger (think Hindenburg).
That's because there are no fuel cells aimed at the mass market yet, except alcohol testers, which are anyway not a power source. Hydrogen is not more dangerous than gasoline; it does not concentrate on the ground but escapes high to the sky. You can neither be soaked in hydrogen. It does however have a lower threshold for ignition, but putting things together it is not especially dangerous. Thinking Hindenburg, less than half of crew and passengers actually died. Try find that number in any plane crash with an equivalent amount of flames.
Instead, they take some other compound, like ammonia or hydrides, from which they extract the hydrogen to power the fuel cell. The advantage is that at no point do you have a large enough quantity of hydrogen to cause an explosion.
Wish it were like that, but if they contain the energy, hydrides, ammonia or whatever else can also burn. The idea is mostly to increase volumetric energy density, as hydrogen is very light and going around with a 70-MPa cylinder is somewhat unpractical (though not impossible).
You mean, "exbibyte = 1024 pebibyte". An exabyte is exactly 1000 petabyte.
I used to think this was just fussy, but I am quite tired of guessing which system producers of hard disks/CDROMs/DVD+±×RWs use to figure out if that is enough for my needs.
If the metric system provided tangible benefits rather than just being aesthetically pleasing then the switch would have occurred already.
You assume the best technical solutions always win. As the Betamax/VHS war showed, this is not always the case. The Imperial system has the advantage of being the legacy platform: if no one had ever seen two Office-like suites and were presented OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office (with respective price tag), I have no doubt buyers of Microsoft would be ridiculed as idiots. Yet, MS Office came first and it still leads the market, years after the appearance of a free competitor.
The metric system provides plenty of advantages:
Consistent and coherent, with a clear structure of basic and constructed units;
No weird double-naming for units of the same type, like gallons/fluid ounces; in the case of litres, it's just a dm^3.
Globalisation: the rest of the world (except Liberia and Jamaica, I think) uses metric for everything.
Simple conversion factors: you need only to move the point and/or add zeroes, you do not need multiplication.
Context-independent: for some reason, nutritionists used "great calories", physicists used ergs, chemists "small calories", engineers BTUs. Everybody using the joule and its multiples is much simpler.
Just because Esperanto (or Spanish for that matter) is simpler and less dyslexia-inducing than English, does not mean you can start talking it yourself and expect it to take on. Some decisions have to be taken top-down, or people will just maintain the status quo because they cannot do otherwise.
[The French] absolutely adore standards [...], probably because Napolean was keen on them.
Rather than assuming a cult of Napoleon and the Revolution, I would say they just are better bureaucrats. A lot of US political culture assumes the market "takes care of itself", and is almost ideologically against state intervention, to the point the US are the last country still using medieval units of measure because no one enforces the metric system.
In France (and most other countries in Europe) the government can own large strategic companies (Renault, for example) and that's considered alright; I do not know what US citizens would say if Bush tried to buy Ford for the government for "strategic economic reasons". Frenchmen are mostly fine with the idea of a state intervening directly into the economy.
Now that's true that politicians in charge of the economy can do a lot of bullshit, but so can CEOs (one word, Enron). The French system may be stiffer and less adaptable, but allows top-down decisions to trickle down better.
The only negative is that, in accordance with the immutable rules of French abbreviations, they will want to call it FDO.
Probably FOD, "Format OpenDocument", as OpenDocument is a proper noun.
"You idiots. You are raising a generation of anti-American drones. You've scared them to death of Stranger Danger and kidnapping and dangerous city thugs and drug epidemics and Moslems, and they've become fascistic, giving in to power at every chance. You've made a generation of Good Germans. You've killed us."
Funny thing, the Germans are the people least scared by terrorism in Europe. Even when some terrorist plot on DB trains was foiled some weeks ago, the reaction of most Germans interviewed on TV was "Uh, so what? It's more likely I get killed in a car accident anyway". Anyone who tried arguing with the average Otto should know they are most definitely not like their great-grandfathers, except the usual chunk of dorks every society has.
That is YOUR morality. How dare you impose your morality on someone else?
At what point exactly was it implied that someone would be forced to upgrade to v3 against his will? You don't want it, keep using v2, or v1 for that matter, or BSD or whatever you want. It's the FSF's prerogative to upgrade their licence as they see fit.
There is no reason why someone else can't use GPL'd software to do DRM.
Well, maybe the original author did not want them to.
"preserving freedom" by removing freedom is hypocritical of the FSF.
Now that's a heavy load of bullshit. To guarantee one's freedom in a society you have to remove someone else's. Laws are (nominally at least) intended to guarantee some freedoms at the expense of some others in a way the community deems fair. I do not have the freedom to beat the crap out of you and throw you out of your house because your freedom to live peacefully comes first. I do not have the freedom to park where I want, drive on whichever side of the road I want, keep my loudspeakers' volume at maximum anytime I want (if I have neighbours, who have a freedom to sleep) and so on.
The GPL is a fine balance between the user's rights to use and modify the software and the author's right not to have the code stolen. V3 is a damn fine step in the same good direction. If you do not like it, no one is forcing you.
As it's a reaction product, it is likely to be depleted of energy, so it won't bang. As it is oxidised, it should not react with air again. As it is ionic (Na+ and BO2^-) it is a solid salt. Not sure about solubility in water, but may precipitate at relatively low concentrations since ions are of similar hardness (though not perfectly matching). Would not eat it as anything I know only by a chemical formula, and boron is not especially friendly to life. In short, not more dangerous than things you can probably find in your kitchen or bathroom.
Quantity of hydrogen != quantity of energy, it's the strength/weakness of chemical bonds and how much energy they liberate when they react (usually with oxygen) that counts. Otherwise water would be a great power source.
Aside from that, the 33% is relative to liquid hydrogen, the other one (too lazy to RTFA) likely to gaseous.
As far as I know, no election has ever been won by one vote. So your vote does not count anything. If you want to actually make a difference, you had better participate in the campaign somehow. It's a good thing actually, don't feel like you are wasting your vote because you vote for the independent candidate with no chance to win.
Ever seen the movie The Boondock Saints? It's about two Irish brothers who got sick of so much crime in Manhattan and decided to do something about it. They took out mob leaders, gang leaders, big time drug dealers, killers, rapists, etc. because the Police wouldn't do it. The moral is: Standing by and letting something happen is just as bad as or worse than actually doing it.
A similar real-life story is the first part of the life of Tookie Williams. His conclusion, many years later, was that this idea is bullshit.
I'm afraid I missed the GPLv3 discussion that happened some time ago on Slashdot, so I'm sorry if this question is obvious but... why can't you just compile and run Tivo's code on a general purpose PC? Or hack Tivo's hardware? It looks like the only problem is that Tivo's hardware stops modified code from running on it, why is that a major problem?
The major problem is a future with hardware that stops you from doing what you want with your software. The GPL's spirit is to guard the user's rights, but these can effectively be taken away (not breaching GPLv2) by hardware means. Of course you can compile TiVo's code on a PC, but hacking the machine it may be more complicated than just some soldering. With a decent encryption/signature scheme, it's pretty safe to say it is practically impossible. Now, the problem comes when all PC's will be (say in ten years?) able to run this "trusted computing" thing: you will not be able to compile and use TiVo's code on any machine, because all the machines you can get your hands on will require signatures. I think the FSF is doing well being a bit paranoid about this development before it gets dangerous in any way.
Do you think "creative, non-violent responses" would have been sufficient to end the Holocaust faster than the Holocaust ended all Jews? That's really all this boils down to.
Of course they would. Nazism rose to power because there was no democratic response, other than a few trade unionists, socialists/communists (who were however more intent in fighting each other), a few intellectuals.
Pacifism does not work like a magic wand. If maintained as an attitude for a sufficiently long time, it will avoid getting enemies. Do you think that Nazism came out of nothing, or because Germans are evil? A pacifist attitude in international politics would have prevented it by a long way. Nazism rose to power because Germany had been defeated in World War I (which itself would have been prevented by pacifism), and the world blamed Germany for causing it (an idiotic statement: the reason was "too many cocks in the chickenhouse", everyone was equally culpable). Then uncle Adolf comes along in a demoralised country, and says "it's not your fault, it's the Jews, plutocrats, English, French, communists, gays, gypsies that betrayed the country". This is a very powerful message as that is what people want to hear (well, except those in the named minorities), and obviously he enjoyed an enormous success. If the winning countries had not punished Germany so harshly in the first World War, there would not have been all that frustration that led to Nazism.
To get back to Israel and terrorism, sure they had a bad time fitting in and they don't exacly have the best neighbours. But they have not been nice either, and the amount of hatred generated by episodes like Sabra and Chatila, the Palestinians refugee camps for millions of people displaced from their homes and never allowed to return, "suffocating" Palestinian villages with a network of Israeli-only roads, forcing the population through endless checkpoints that take most of the work day to get through. Bombing civilians in Beirut did not exactly win fans among Arabs (or world opinion for that sake).
But if the British had really wanted to use violence Ghandi would have been dead with all his followers.
If the British did that, they would have had a full-scale revolution. There is no way the colonial army of a 50-million country can suffocate a revolution of half a billion people; neither was it politically viable to assassinate such a charismatic figure as Ghandi after WWII.
Sometimes the only two alternatives are to repond to violence with violence, or to be eradicated.
Let's get rid of a sticky issue: there are no inherently evil people (except psychopaths maybe), just people that found that a way that looks evil for you works for them. Robbers usually come from a social background that gave them few choices (few Harvard graduates turn into street criminals); they calculate that breaking the rules of society is more advantageous for them than respecting them. Whether they are right or wrong in this calculation is of no importance: that's what they think and what they think determines how they act. If social money had been spent on giving them a fair chance in life, with better public schools, unemployement subsidies, welfare state, they would have probably calculated otherwise. And guess what, countries with extensive welfare state do have less crime rate than those with a smaller one.
To get back to the point, unless you are being attacked by sharks/polar bears/anthropofagous bunnies, but people, chances are that life-threatening situation may had been prevented if some more problem-solving-oriented attitude had been taken beforehand. Not that it is (necessarily) your fault, as the war in Lebanon was not the fault of those bombed by Hezbollah rockets, but had Israel avoided escalating the conflict rockets would not have been fired, and the whole thing would still be an issue of prisoner exchange.
This argument keeps surfacing even though it has been debunked time and again. The GPL v3 only requires you to provide the embedded key if it is necessary to run the software. That's the letter and the spirit of the GPL v3. The second discussion draft clearly words out:
The Corresponding Source also includes any encryption or authorization keys necessary to install and/or execute modified versions from source code in the recommended or principal context of use, such that they can implement all the same functionality in the same range of circumstances.
Problem is, after 50+ years, the tactic is getting nowhere.
As long as there will be people who think they do not have another way out than terrorism, there will be terrorists; not really surprising. And terrorism does yield results: Israel is highly dependent on (American) subsidies for its economy, which cannot develop as much as it could if security was not such a concern. I am not excusing anything, but if terrorism did not work no one would do it.
And exactly why is is that, every time Israel kills a kid, it's news. Evertime a terrorist kills 30 kids, it's not just as big a deal?
It seems to me that most news outlet I check report both events. As for the Lebanese conflict, I think they roughly spend 10 times for Lebanese than for Israelis, which corresponds roughly to the death toll.
Why is Israel held to a different standard?
Because it is a nation, a western-style democracy. We do expect criminals to commit, duh, crimes: we all condemn those actions, but we sort of expected that. We do not expect nations to do the same.
It's my hunch that the last 30 years has been more about keeping the "Arab Street" distracted from rebellion, more than protecting their "bretheren".
Now, pointing at the "different guy" as the mortal enemy cause of all evil (be it Jew, Arab, homosexual, Hun, Ainu or whatever) to distract the population from the government's incompetence or malice is such an old technique of staying in power that it would be challenging to find out who used it first. Of course Iran and Saudi Arabia do that. So do the US. Car accidents kill about 42,000 people every year in the US alone: that's fourteen WTC attacks every year, that is more than once every month. Yet, people are scared of terrorists and not of their car. I mean it, your car is way more likely to hurt you than al-Qaeda. Your government is distracting you from this and more important things, such as ballooning national debt (someone will have to pay at some point, and it won't be cheap), violation of human rights (don't think they will leave torture in Guantanamo and Romania if left unchecked), wiretapping policy and many more things that affect you much more than terrorism.
Do you think that you if you buy Windows for 70.000 PCs the cost is 70000*retail prize of windows? Of course not, you call the Microsoft Iberica and get a deal.
I suppose that the region of Extremadura already does that, as any organisation of their size. The 18-million-euro figure is theirs, I suppose they do keep their bills, especially when they are this size.
[...] the man who issued the report [may not have] included also the money spent in training the users and tech support for the change.
They say "total cost", and other than installation (possibly very cheap for networked machines) and retraining there are no other costs in switching to Linux. They also use their own Debian-based distro, so they can tailor it to their own needs.
For the rest you assume ignorance or malice, presenting no factual numbers. I do not think you can seriously get 90% volume discount on Windows, that would be outrageous.
The government has estimated that the total cost of this project was about 190,000 euros, 18 million euros lower than if the schools had purchased Microsoft software.
Good argument for GNU, Linux and open source in general with your boss: cuts your software costs by 98.9%. Finally someone puts an official number on this.
As an Italian I would be honoured to be among Semitic peoples, but we happen to be indoeuropean too.
I agree that anti-semitic is horrifyingly abused, especially by the Israeli government who comprehensibly want to use a strong argument against anyone opposing them exploiting the past history of Europe. But this gradually weakens the racist connotation of the term, and gradually makes it political. The Nazis wanted to kill Jews because their leaders told them the Jews, all Jews, were the root of all evil. Now children hear the word anti-semite applied on people who criticise the bombing of Beirut. A few more years and people will start calling themselves anti-semite in the sense of anti-Israeli-government...
The funny thing, actual anti-semites are immune from all this. I never heard Israel berating Poland, where "genuine", old-style anti-semitism is still in (even though there are no more Jews left, but you don't need a brain to be racist). Not that I am an expert on Poland, but there were a few articles in the news some weeks ago. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is seem as more Israel-friendly than left-wing Romano Prodi, even though Berlusconi was allied to the worst and most hardline fascists in the recent election, including former terrorists, naziskins and holocaust deniers like Luca Romagnoli.
But then again, if the Chinese government wants to arrest a citizen in China they just do it and can find (or make up) a reason for the arrest afterwards.
...See the straw in the Chinese's eye and not the beam in your ass... In America they don't even have to make up something later to deport you to Guantanamo, and in Europe you can be abducted, tortured at a military base, and dumped in some sort of Konzentrationlager in some country not too fussy about human rights.
Start worrying about civil rights in your backyard before you go nitpick on the Chinese. That's the Chinese's problem and it's up to them to solve'em. You solve yours.
Speaking of illegal encryption, guess why Skype is based in Luxembourg and not in the US.
I'm an Italian native speaker. I learnt English and Norwegian to proficient level and French and German.to an acceptable level. I call bullshit on your story.
I would actually disagree. Please let me explain my point of view: my mother language is Italian, which has a very simple orthography (along with a considerably intricate grammar). Among other things, we discarded ph for f, so we write for example filosofia; vowels are actually written the way they are pronounced; and the only serious shortcoming is that accentation on last-but-third syllables is not mandatory. Other languages with good spoken-written-language consistency are Finnish and Spanish (I'm told, not that I actually speak those).
English is a Germanic language with extensive borrowings from French, and has way more vowels than the 5 of the Latin alphabet. Other languages such as German used diacritics to solve the issue, others as Danish use new characters altogether, such as ø, æ, and å. The Latin alphabet was not built for English, and they are not a match.
I deeply dislike English spelling. In fact in my language we don't even have a word for "spelling". That is, we do ("compitare") but no one knows it because it is hidden away in some dictionary page no one ever turns. Why make things more complicated than they are already? Why such a damn bloated system where you have to learn each word's own pronounciation and spelling, when it is so simple to just write the damn word the way you say it? They do that in Spanish, and it has very nice side effects: you can actually reconstruct how people spoke hundreds of years ago. The etymological justification of keeping English spelling the way it is so people will notice common stems is moot: first, people do not notice anyway; second, grasping the etymology of "participate" requires at least some Latin; third, language evolution is not random and a few patterns evolve regularly, so those who are so interested in the etymology will see them anyway.
The point is, just like for my language's dreaded congiuntivo, spelling in English allows to distinguish upper class from lower class. English is the product of a strictly hierarchical, French-influenced society (medieval England), and so are other terribly written languages such as French, Japanese or Chinese. It seems that simplifications were cancelled in Russian because of this factor.
On a more health-related note, I think I read somewhere that dyslexia rates are increased by difficult spelling. I surely never heard of dyslexia in Italy (if any Finn/Spaniard is out there, please fill in about how it is where you are). I am now living in Norway and I heard of some cases of dyslexia, since the locals have some confusing attitudes towards their language (everybody speaks as weird as they wish, but they are supposed to write in one of two forms).
Ceterum penseo, Slashdot posters should get the difference between its and it's right once in a while, with or without reform.
The next step as freedoms diminish is to start reducing the size of the middle class
It's interesting you are actually (consciously or not) quoting Marx. One of his points was that the higher bourgeoisie would accumulate more and more power by pushing the middle classes into the proletariat (and chunks of the US working class are indeed proletarian by definition, having no other asset than their children).
When the higher classes shrink enough and have almost absolute power, they become intellectually sterile, partly because the brain pool is smaller, and partly because they are inherently conservative—it's good to be Tzar.
History showed that all unreasonably conservative societies (defined as "those societies that cannot undertake the necessary steps to adapt to a changing environment") end up very badly (the Norse in Greenland, the Easter Islanders, and so on), even if it takes its time before a major event (a war, an ecological crisis, climate change,...), not necessarily a dramatic and immediate one, delivers the final blow. Read Jared Diamond's book Collapse, it is very instructive in this respect.
At this point, usually revolution happens. The organizers will be probably the remnants of the middle class: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Castro were all born in the middle or middle-upper class, while Stalin was from the proletariat (indeed he took power after the revolution, he did not lead it). Without using too many references to communism, Ghandi, Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon were all from somewhere in the middle class: people who understood the system, but were not getting much out of it, and were therefore able and willing to bring it down.
Marx said that, after the proletariat acquires a class conscience, it will instaurate a dictatorship of the proletariat (that translated into Greek sounds pretty much like "democracy", but that word was hush-hush in the times of Marx). Me, I am afraid that any time the lower classes will be maneuvered by some new puppet master every time. I think Marx missed the point that it does take quite a bit of education to understand a system and turn a riot into a revolution. That's why universities are such hot spots in dictatorships.
For the US, there is still too much to lose and too little to gain from a revolt (in which, remember, your life, not your privacy or your iPod is at stake). Assuming the US are actually going to go this way (which I am a bit skeptical about), the revolution leader might well be the former holder of an outsourced job or a code monkey.
the earth is as hot it is was 400 years ago [...]?
The "400 years" figure is likely because we don't have measurements or reliable extrapolations before 400 years ago. Røemer built the first thermometer in 1701.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because there are no fuel cells aimed at the mass market yet, except alcohol testers, which are anyway not a power source. Hydrogen is not more dangerous than gasoline; it does not concentrate on the ground but escapes high to the sky. You can neither be soaked in hydrogen. It does however have a lower threshold for ignition, but putting things together it is not especially dangerous. Thinking Hindenburg, less than half of crew and passengers actually died. Try find that number in any plane crash with an equivalent amount of flames.
Wish it were like that, but if they contain the energy, hydrides, ammonia or whatever else can also burn. The idea is mostly to increase volumetric energy density, as hydrogen is very light and going around with a 70-MPa cylinder is somewhat unpractical (though not impossible).
You mean, "exbibyte = 1024 pebibyte". An exabyte is exactly 1000 petabyte.
I used to think this was just fussy, but I am quite tired of guessing which system producers of hard disks/CDROMs/DVD+±×RWs use to figure out if that is enough for my needs.
As cynical as you want it to be, but he nailed this one.
That was the sound of a joke about the 51st state flying over your head.
You assume the best technical solutions always win. As the Betamax/VHS war showed, this is not always the case. The Imperial system has the advantage of being the legacy platform: if no one had ever seen two Office-like suites and were presented OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office (with respective price tag), I have no doubt buyers of Microsoft would be ridiculed as idiots. Yet, MS Office came first and it still leads the market, years after the appearance of a free competitor.
The metric system provides plenty of advantages:
Just because Esperanto (or Spanish for that matter) is simpler and less dyslexia-inducing than English, does not mean you can start talking it yourself and expect it to take on. Some decisions have to be taken top-down, or people will just maintain the status quo because they cannot do otherwise.
Rather than assuming a cult of Napoleon and the Revolution, I would say they just are better bureaucrats. A lot of US political culture assumes the market "takes care of itself", and is almost ideologically against state intervention, to the point the US are the last country still using medieval units of measure because no one enforces the metric system.
In France (and most other countries in Europe) the government can own large strategic companies (Renault, for example) and that's considered alright; I do not know what US citizens would say if Bush tried to buy Ford for the government for "strategic economic reasons". Frenchmen are mostly fine with the idea of a state intervening directly into the economy.
Now that's true that politicians in charge of the economy can do a lot of bullshit, but so can CEOs (one word, Enron). The French system may be stiffer and less adaptable, but allows top-down decisions to trickle down better.
Probably FOD, "Format OpenDocument", as OpenDocument is a proper noun.
Funny thing, the Germans are the people least scared by terrorism in Europe. Even when some terrorist plot on DB trains was foiled some weeks ago, the reaction of most Germans interviewed on TV was "Uh, so what? It's more likely I get killed in a car accident anyway". Anyone who tried arguing with the average Otto should know they are most definitely not like their great-grandfathers, except the usual chunk of dorks every society has.
At what point exactly was it implied that someone would be forced to upgrade to v3 against his will? You don't want it, keep using v2, or v1 for that matter, or BSD or whatever you want. It's the FSF's prerogative to upgrade their licence as they see fit.
Well, maybe the original author did not want them to.
Now that's a heavy load of bullshit. To guarantee one's freedom in a society you have to remove someone else's. Laws are (nominally at least) intended to guarantee some freedoms at the expense of some others in a way the community deems fair. I do not have the freedom to beat the crap out of you and throw you out of your house because your freedom to live peacefully comes first. I do not have the freedom to park where I want, drive on whichever side of the road I want, keep my loudspeakers' volume at maximum anytime I want (if I have neighbours, who have a freedom to sleep) and so on.
The GPL is a fine balance between the user's rights to use and modify the software and the author's right not to have the code stolen. V3 is a damn fine step in the same good direction. If you do not like it, no one is forcing you.
As it's a reaction product, it is likely to be depleted of energy, so it won't bang. As it is oxidised, it should not react with air again. As it is ionic (Na+ and BO2^-) it is a solid salt. Not sure about solubility in water, but may precipitate at relatively low concentrations since ions are of similar hardness (though not perfectly matching). Would not eat it as anything I know only by a chemical formula, and boron is not especially friendly to life. In short, not more dangerous than things you can probably find in your kitchen or bathroom.
Quantity of hydrogen != quantity of energy, it's the strength/weakness of chemical bonds and how much energy they liberate when they react (usually with oxygen) that counts. Otherwise water would be a great power source.
Aside from that, the 33% is relative to liquid hydrogen, the other one (too lazy to RTFA) likely to gaseous.
As far as I know, no election has ever been won by one vote. So your vote does not count anything. If you want to actually make a difference, you had better participate in the campaign somehow. It's a good thing actually, don't feel like you are wasting your vote because you vote for the independent candidate with no chance to win.
A similar real-life story is the first part of the life of Tookie Williams. His conclusion, many years later, was that this idea is bullshit.
The major problem is a future with hardware that stops you from doing what you want with your software. The GPL's spirit is to guard the user's rights, but these can effectively be taken away (not breaching GPLv2) by hardware means. Of course you can compile TiVo's code on a PC, but hacking the machine it may be more complicated than just some soldering. With a decent encryption/signature scheme, it's pretty safe to say it is practically impossible. Now, the problem comes when all PC's will be (say in ten years?) able to run this "trusted computing" thing: you will not be able to compile and use TiVo's code on any machine, because all the machines you can get your hands on will require signatures. I think the FSF is doing well being a bit paranoid about this development before it gets dangerous in any way.
Of course they would. Nazism rose to power because there was no democratic response, other than a few trade unionists, socialists/communists (who were however more intent in fighting each other), a few intellectuals.
Pacifism does not work like a magic wand. If maintained as an attitude for a sufficiently long time, it will avoid getting enemies. Do you think that Nazism came out of nothing, or because Germans are evil? A pacifist attitude in international politics would have prevented it by a long way. Nazism rose to power because Germany had been defeated in World War I (which itself would have been prevented by pacifism), and the world blamed Germany for causing it (an idiotic statement: the reason was "too many cocks in the chickenhouse", everyone was equally culpable). Then uncle Adolf comes along in a demoralised country, and says "it's not your fault, it's the Jews, plutocrats, English, French, communists, gays, gypsies that betrayed the country". This is a very powerful message as that is what people want to hear (well, except those in the named minorities), and obviously he enjoyed an enormous success. If the winning countries had not punished Germany so harshly in the first World War, there would not have been all that frustration that led to Nazism.
To get back to Israel and terrorism, sure they had a bad time fitting in and they don't exacly have the best neighbours. But they have not been nice either, and the amount of hatred generated by episodes like Sabra and Chatila, the Palestinians refugee camps for millions of people displaced from their homes and never allowed to return, "suffocating" Palestinian villages with a network of Israeli-only roads, forcing the population through endless checkpoints that take most of the work day to get through. Bombing civilians in Beirut did not exactly win fans among Arabs (or world opinion for that sake).
If the British did that, they would have had a full-scale revolution. There is no way the colonial army of a 50-million country can suffocate a revolution of half a billion people; neither was it politically viable to assassinate such a charismatic figure as Ghandi after WWII.
Let's get rid of a sticky issue: there are no inherently evil people (except psychopaths maybe), just people that found that a way that looks evil for you works for them. Robbers usually come from a social background that gave them few choices (few Harvard graduates turn into street criminals); they calculate that breaking the rules of society is more advantageous for them than respecting them. Whether they are right or wrong in this calculation is of no importance: that's what they think and what they think determines how they act. If social money had been spent on giving them a fair chance in life, with better public schools, unemployement subsidies, welfare state, they would have probably calculated otherwise. And guess what, countries with extensive welfare state do have less crime rate than those with a smaller one.
To get back to the point, unless you are being attacked by sharks/polar bears/anthropofagous bunnies, but people, chances are that life-threatening situation may had been prevented if some more problem-solving-oriented attitude had been taken beforehand. Not that it is (necessarily) your fault, as the war in Lebanon was not the fault of those bombed by Hezbollah rockets, but had Israel avoided escalating the conflict rockets would not have been fired, and the whole thing would still be an issue of prisoner exchange.
This argument keeps surfacing even though it has been debunked time and again. The GPL v3 only requires you to provide the embedded key if it is necessary to run the software. That's the letter and the spirit of the GPL v3. The second discussion draft clearly words out:
As long as there will be people who think they do not have another way out than terrorism, there will be terrorists; not really surprising. And terrorism does yield results: Israel is highly dependent on (American) subsidies for its economy, which cannot develop as much as it could if security was not such a concern. I am not excusing anything, but if terrorism did not work no one would do it.
It seems to me that most news outlet I check report both events. As for the Lebanese conflict, I think they roughly spend 10 times for Lebanese than for Israelis, which corresponds roughly to the death toll.
Because it is a nation, a western-style democracy. We do expect criminals to commit, duh, crimes: we all condemn those actions, but we sort of expected that. We do not expect nations to do the same.
Now, pointing at the "different guy" as the mortal enemy cause of all evil (be it Jew, Arab, homosexual, Hun, Ainu or whatever) to distract the population from the government's incompetence or malice is such an old technique of staying in power that it would be challenging to find out who used it first. Of course Iran and Saudi Arabia do that. So do the US. Car accidents kill about 42,000 people every year in the US alone: that's fourteen WTC attacks every year, that is more than once every month. Yet, people are scared of terrorists and not of their car. I mean it, your car is way more likely to hurt you than al-Qaeda. Your government is distracting you from this and more important things, such as ballooning national debt (someone will have to pay at some point, and it won't be cheap), violation of human rights (don't think they will leave torture in Guantanamo and Romania if left unchecked), wiretapping policy and many more things that affect you much more than terrorism.
I suppose that the region of Extremadura already does that, as any organisation of their size. The 18-million-euro figure is theirs, I suppose they do keep their bills, especially when they are this size.
They say "total cost", and other than installation (possibly very cheap for networked machines) and retraining there are no other costs in switching to Linux. They also use their own Debian-based distro, so they can tailor it to their own needs.
For the rest you assume ignorance or malice, presenting no factual numbers. I do not think you can seriously get 90% volume discount on Windows, that would be outrageous.
Good argument for GNU, Linux and open source in general with your boss: cuts your software costs by 98.9%. Finally someone puts an official number on this.
As an Italian I would be honoured to be among Semitic peoples, but we happen to be indoeuropean too.
I agree that anti-semitic is horrifyingly abused, especially by the Israeli government who comprehensibly want to use a strong argument against anyone opposing them exploiting the past history of Europe. But this gradually weakens the racist connotation of the term, and gradually makes it political. The Nazis wanted to kill Jews because their leaders told them the Jews, all Jews, were the root of all evil. Now children hear the word anti-semite applied on people who criticise the bombing of Beirut. A few more years and people will start calling themselves anti-semite in the sense of anti-Israeli-government...
The funny thing, actual anti-semites are immune from all this. I never heard Israel berating Poland, where "genuine", old-style anti-semitism is still in (even though there are no more Jews left, but you don't need a brain to be racist). Not that I am an expert on Poland, but there were a few articles in the news some weeks ago. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is seem as more Israel-friendly than left-wing Romano Prodi, even though Berlusconi was allied to the worst and most hardline fascists in the recent election, including former terrorists, naziskins and holocaust deniers like Luca Romagnoli.
...See the straw in the Chinese's eye and not the beam in your ass... In America they don't even have to make up something later to deport you to Guantanamo, and in Europe you can be abducted, tortured at a military base, and dumped in some sort of Konzentrationlager in some country not too fussy about human rights.
Start worrying about civil rights in your backyard before you go nitpick on the Chinese. That's the Chinese's problem and it's up to them to solve'em. You solve yours.
Speaking of illegal encryption, guess why Skype is based in Luxembourg and not in the US.
I'm an Italian native speaker. I learnt English and Norwegian to proficient level and French and German.to an acceptable level. I call bullshit on your story.
I would actually disagree. Please let me explain my point of view: my mother language is Italian, which has a very simple orthography (along with a considerably intricate grammar). Among other things, we discarded ph for f, so we write for example filosofia; vowels are actually written the way they are pronounced; and the only serious shortcoming is that accentation on last-but-third syllables is not mandatory. Other languages with good spoken-written-language consistency are Finnish and Spanish (I'm told, not that I actually speak those).
English is a Germanic language with extensive borrowings from French, and has way more vowels than the 5 of the Latin alphabet. Other languages such as German used diacritics to solve the issue, others as Danish use new characters altogether, such as ø, æ, and å. The Latin alphabet was not built for English, and they are not a match.
I deeply dislike English spelling. In fact in my language we don't even have a word for "spelling". That is, we do ("compitare") but no one knows it because it is hidden away in some dictionary page no one ever turns. Why make things more complicated than they are already? Why such a damn bloated system where you have to learn each word's own pronounciation and spelling, when it is so simple to just write the damn word the way you say it? They do that in Spanish, and it has very nice side effects: you can actually reconstruct how people spoke hundreds of years ago. The etymological justification of keeping English spelling the way it is so people will notice common stems is moot: first, people do not notice anyway; second, grasping the etymology of "participate" requires at least some Latin; third, language evolution is not random and a few patterns evolve regularly, so those who are so interested in the etymology will see them anyway.
The point is, just like for my language's dreaded congiuntivo, spelling in English allows to distinguish upper class from lower class. English is the product of a strictly hierarchical, French-influenced society (medieval England), and so are other terribly written languages such as French, Japanese or Chinese. It seems that simplifications were cancelled in Russian because of this factor.
On a more health-related note, I think I read somewhere that dyslexia rates are increased by difficult spelling. I surely never heard of dyslexia in Italy (if any Finn/Spaniard is out there, please fill in about how it is where you are). I am now living in Norway and I heard of some cases of dyslexia, since the locals have some confusing attitudes towards their language (everybody speaks as weird as they wish, but they are supposed to write in one of two forms).
Ceterum penseo, Slashdot posters should get the difference between its and it's right once in a while, with or without reform.
Where's the "-1 Karmawhore piggybacking on a blog plagiarizing an age-old apocryphal Twain script" mod option when you need it?
It's interesting you are actually (consciously or not) quoting Marx. One of his points was that the higher bourgeoisie would accumulate more and more power by pushing the middle classes into the proletariat (and chunks of the US working class are indeed proletarian by definition, having no other asset than their children).
When the higher classes shrink enough and have almost absolute power, they become intellectually sterile, partly because the brain pool is smaller, and partly because they are inherently conservative—it's good to be Tzar.
History showed that all unreasonably conservative societies (defined as "those societies that cannot undertake the necessary steps to adapt to a changing environment") end up very badly (the Norse in Greenland, the Easter Islanders, and so on), even if it takes its time before a major event (a war, an ecological crisis, climate change, ...), not necessarily a dramatic and immediate one, delivers the final blow. Read Jared Diamond's book Collapse, it is very instructive in this respect.
At this point, usually revolution happens. The organizers will be probably the remnants of the middle class: Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Castro were all born in the middle or middle-upper class, while Stalin was from the proletariat (indeed he took power after the revolution, he did not lead it). Without using too many references to communism, Ghandi, Washington, Robespierre, Napoleon were all from somewhere in the middle class: people who understood the system, but were not getting much out of it, and were therefore able and willing to bring it down.
Marx said that, after the proletariat acquires a class conscience, it will instaurate a dictatorship of the proletariat (that translated into Greek sounds pretty much like "democracy", but that word was hush-hush in the times of Marx). Me, I am afraid that any time the lower classes will be maneuvered by some new puppet master every time. I think Marx missed the point that it does take quite a bit of education to understand a system and turn a riot into a revolution. That's why universities are such hot spots in dictatorships.
For the US, there is still too much to lose and too little to gain from a revolt (in which, remember, your life, not your privacy or your iPod is at stake). Assuming the US are actually going to go this way (which I am a bit skeptical about), the revolution leader might well be the former holder of an outsourced job or a code monkey.
The "400 years" figure is likely because we don't have measurements or reliable extrapolations before 400 years ago. Røemer built the first thermometer in 1701.