Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others"
That being the case, the skill of the artist's programming and selection of input for the program (by choosing spam instead of, say, joke forwards or urban legend forwards) has resulted in the creation of an aesthetic, though virtual, object.
Is that like "if you have nothing to hide, you won't object to surveillance"?
No, not at all.
The "If you have nothing to hide..." canard is based on a presumption that random investigations, searches, seizures, and other bits of invasive behaviour should be the norm without probable cause.
Decisions have to be made up front as to what is the relationship between "name" and "last name" (people have a name, which has a last name, yet companies have names that typically don't have a last name.
Never mind company names; names of persons can be extremely difficult to parse. That which we call a "last" name is usually better described as a "family" name. Consider the following names:
John Smith
Wu Xue Jen
Juan Carlos Jimenez Garcia
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., PhD
All four of these names hae a thing that we would colloquially call a last name (referring to the family name), but only in the first case is it literally the last term in the person's name.
In the Chinese case (second item on the list), the family name is first. This lady's name is Xue, and her whole family's names begin with Wu. Further confusing the issue, she may, in migrating, "romanise" her name and go by Xue Jen Wu, or she may adopt a western name and go by something like Janet Wu or Jenny Wu or whatever strikes her fancy. It can be very difficult in this context to (a) determine which name is the family name, and (b) correctly determine that Wu Xue Jen, Xue Jen Wu and Janet Wu are all the same person (or not).
In the hispanic case (third example on my list above), the family name is second to last. Garcia is his mother's maiden name. Binomially, he would be known as Juan Jiminez. This can be more difficult to detect if he doesn't use his middle name, but does use his materno e.g. Juan Jiminez Garcia. You are left to figure out whether Garcia is his family name and Jiminez is his middle name, or whether Jiminez is his family name and Garcia is his materno.
All of this is without addressing prefixes (Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss. Dr. Rev. etc), suffixes (I, II, III, Jr., Sr., etc.) or credentials (PhD, DDS, MD, DVM, PE, BSEE, BSCS, BTA, etc), which, of course, are why my fourth, and very well-known, example is there. And don't forget, of course, that "I" and "Sr." must be considered the same, and that "II" and "Jr." must be considered the same, since some who find themselves with stuck such a name (as I am) may switch back and forth as the spirit moves them.
I have two solutions to this, neither is wonderful.
First, you can redundantly record the person's whole name, along with a "goes_by" and "surname" field, e.g. Mr. Jiminez in my example above might be listed as: ('Juan Carlos Jiminez Garcia', 'Juan', 'Jiminez') to indicate that his family name is "Jiminez" and he goes by "Juan" (could also be very useful with Richard, Michael, David, etc, who might go by Rick, Ricky, Rich, Richie, Dick, Dickie, Mike, Mikey, Mickey, Dave, Davey, as well as being useful for people who go by their middle name)
The other option is to list the whole name as an array, and use indices to indicate which are the first and last name, e.g. ({'Juan', 'Carlos', 'Jiminez', 'Garcia'}, 1, 3). This uses less stoage space, but will likely be more difficult to search and less flexible.
For instance, take a look at a typical edition of Cosmopolitan magazine . . . The publishing house makes so much money off the advertisements, that they could pay people just to accept the magazine yet, it still has a price tag . . . The Advertisement Firms insist they maintain a cover price, becuase they feel people will not take the publication seriously
There is a counter-example, though.
Many metro areas have a free newspaper. In Rochester, NY, it's City; in Albany, NY, it's Metroland; in Toronto, Ont, it's Eye (IIRC); you get the idea. While not as revered (and certainly not as frequent) as the daily papers, they do get picked up and read, and the advertisements get seen. It doesn't take a cover price to accomplish this.
Back to the matter at hand, I won't buy it. I never even heard of it until this posting on Slashdot. Linux has name recognition. BSD has less so, but it has it. Windows has mad name recognition. Even DOS has a better chance of selling, by virtue of having name recognition. I don't think SkyOS will sell.
About the only thing that would piss off the management worse would be doing something really stupid and getting a 600MW alternator kicked out of the grid and having to spin it back up and sync it back in.
Generators are brought on and off line all the time, based on market conditions. It is not as big of a pain as you make it out to be.
What is a pain is having the grid itself go down, because it leaves you with nothing to sync to. Only a relative handful of power stations have the capacity to start without something to sync to. Such facilities are called "black start". In the event of a wide-spread outage (think midwest/northeast 2003), the restoration of power has to start at the black start facilities and work its way out, with the most difficult part being synchronising any islanded areas that multiple generators, to the rest of the grid.
Forgetting about all the traffic, stoplights, hills, etc. which eat fuel that you don't hit on the interstate, are we?
No, we haven't. Instead, we have actually tried it.
Want numbers? The car I last measured this on was a 1998 Subaru Impreza OS, 2.2L, naturally aspirated, 4 speed automatic, all-wheel-drive. EPA rating is 22/34 MPG. Typical real-world in-town mileage (on my work commute) was 18 MPG. Round trip Albany to Rochester via I-90, travelling an average speed of 70 MPH nets 32 MPG. Round trip Albany to Rochester via US-20, travelling an average speed of 45 MPH nets 36 MPG.
I have since replaced this car with a more efficient one, but I haven't made the trip to Rochester with it yet, so I can't tell you how well my newer car does on that trip, but it gets 29-32 MPG in town.
People are replacing dead TVs with HDs, but not running out to buy HDs
History backs this up, too.
I was born in 1970. I remember black and white TVs. Want to know why? We had one. Our primary TV was a 21" black and white Zenith. I remember it when it was brand new in 1978 (obviously, its predecessor was also black and white). Yes, all the broadcasts were in colour at this point, and colour TVs were readily available, but for Joe Six-Pack (my dad), black and white was good enough.
My grandparents, on the other hand, had a colour TV for as far back as I can remember.
The first colour TV entered our house in 1984, when I bought it after a year of scrimping and saving. It cost me $289, which, I think, normalised to 2006 dollars is about $684-$845 (assuming 4%-5% annual inflation). That could get you an HD set today. It was, however, a high-end TV, with a cutting-edge feature on it: composite video jacks, which I used for my computer.
My dad finally bought a (terrible quality) colour TV for the living room in 1987. It never displayed a clear picture, but he seemed happy with it.
Now you just don't find black and white TVs much, not even portable ones (this is not to say that I miss them; I don't).
So the way I see it, standard def and high def now play the roles that were previously played by black and white and colour. Colour wasn't as important in the 70's and 80's as it might now appear. It was bleeding edge technology back then, as HD is now. It's had half a decade; give it about a decade more and it will become ubiquitous.
In areas around Albany and Buffalo, I-90 is, indeed, free. In Albany, I-90 and I-87 meet, and I-87 is toll from there south until you get close to NYC.
I ride the eastern free portion of I-90 every day to and from work.
On another note, I find that I use less fuel when crossing the state on US-20 than on I-90. The only way I can figure that you would use more fuel is that you must have been driving with one foot on each pedal. Yes, the time can be a killer if you are in a hurry, but the scenery is very much worth it if you are not in a hurry.
I have also found an exception. I-890 and NY-5 from Schenectady to Amsterdam is faster than I-90, despite lights and lower speed limit (55 vs. 65). I don't exactly know why this is, but I've driven from Schenectady to Utica enough times to have a good sample set to prove it (I used to have a custmer in Utica which I typically visited three times a week).
Hey, if the guy who brought the world Lotus Notes thinks Microsoft need to simplify their software, things are worse than - no, correction - almost exactly as bad as I thought.
No kidding! Anyone who is stuck, even as an end-user, using Lotus notes understands this all too well.
Lotus notes is ueber complex, tries to be a do-everything application, is slow, is bulky, and is unergonomic.
Science is not in the business of proving things. Science is in the business of disproving things. You come up with a hypothesis and start trying to disprove it. When it survives peer review and attempts at disproof for a while, the hypothesis becomes a theory. When it continues to survive, it becomes a law. Nowhere, though, is any hypothesis, theory or law conclusively proven. It is not how science works.
Global warming has not been disproven, it is therefore still in play. Those who attempt to discredit it by claiming it is not proven are correct in their claim, but incorrect in their discredit. Where is the experimental evidence that indicates that the theory is wrong?
On another note, Canada Free Press, from looking at the rest of the site, appears to be an extreme right-wing rag. You may hold a different opinion, of course, but that is mine.
Notice the guy says 3/4 here. Notice how he then goes on to criticise only MySQL and PHP. So what was the third item he was going to criticise, Apache or Linux (either would seem strange)? Seems to me he hasn't even finished his own rant.
From TFA:
I'm quite opposed to using MySQL and PHP, and I'm none too fond of Apache. Anyone who knows me or happens into a conversation with me about development quickly learns of my distaste for these particular projects. To be fair, Apache is the least problematic of the three and if there were no alternatives, I'd use it without a lot of complaint.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't this be in the Won't-someone-please-think-of-the-children department?
I disagree.
Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others"
That being the case, the skill of the artist's programming and selection of input for the program (by choosing spam instead of, say, joke forwards or urban legend forwards) has resulted in the creation of an aesthetic, though virtual, object.
What about it?
Is that like "if you have nothing to hide, you won't object to surveillance"?
No, not at all.
The "If you have nothing to hide..." canard is based on a presumption that random investigations, searches, seizures, and other bits of invasive behaviour should be the norm without probable cause.
This case has probable cause.
Decisions have to be made up front as to what is the relationship between "name" and "last name" (people have a name, which has a last name, yet companies have names that typically don't have a last name.
Never mind company names; names of persons can be extremely difficult to parse. That which we call a "last" name is usually better described as a "family" name. Consider the following names:
All four of these names hae a thing that we would colloquially call a last name (referring to the family name), but only in the first case is it literally the last term in the person's name.
In the Chinese case (second item on the list), the family name is first. This lady's name is Xue, and her whole family's names begin with Wu. Further confusing the issue, she may, in migrating, "romanise" her name and go by Xue Jen Wu, or she may adopt a western name and go by something like Janet Wu or Jenny Wu or whatever strikes her fancy. It can be very difficult in this context to (a) determine which name is the family name, and (b) correctly determine that Wu Xue Jen, Xue Jen Wu and Janet Wu are all the same person (or not).
In the hispanic case (third example on my list above), the family name is second to last. Garcia is his mother's maiden name. Binomially, he would be known as Juan Jiminez. This can be more difficult to detect if he doesn't use his middle name, but does use his materno e.g. Juan Jiminez Garcia. You are left to figure out whether Garcia is his family name and Jiminez is his middle name, or whether Jiminez is his family name and Garcia is his materno.
All of this is without addressing prefixes (Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss. Dr. Rev. etc), suffixes (I, II, III, Jr., Sr., etc.) or credentials (PhD, DDS, MD, DVM, PE, BSEE, BSCS, BTA, etc), which, of course, are why my fourth, and very well-known, example is there. And don't forget, of course, that "I" and "Sr." must be considered the same, and that "II" and "Jr." must be considered the same, since some who find themselves with stuck such a name (as I am) may switch back and forth as the spirit moves them.
I have two solutions to this, neither is wonderful.
First, you can redundantly record the person's whole name, along with a "goes_by" and "surname" field, e.g. Mr. Jiminez in my example above might be listed as: ('Juan Carlos Jiminez Garcia', 'Juan', 'Jiminez') to indicate that his family name is "Jiminez" and he goes by "Juan" (could also be very useful with Richard, Michael, David, etc, who might go by Rick, Ricky, Rich, Richie, Dick, Dickie, Mike, Mikey, Mickey, Dave, Davey, as well as being useful for people who go by their middle name)
The other option is to list the whole name as an array, and use indices to indicate which are the first and last name, e.g. ({'Juan', 'Carlos', 'Jiminez', 'Garcia'}, 1, 3). This uses less stoage space, but will likely be more difficult to search and less flexible.
I believe that this is an example of coming full circle
Mi pensas, cxu "fikugxi" ne estas pli tawga vorto? :P
Jes, sed "fikugxu"? Mi ne scias. Posible "fikugxegacxu"? :-)
That last one makes me want to say "Gesundheit" (try saying it out loud).
You might as well tell the world "Earth's official language is now officially Esperanto, so fuck you". The effect would be about the same.
La lingvo oficiala da tero estas Esperanton, tial fiku vin!
For instance, take a look at a typical edition of Cosmopolitan magazine . . . The publishing house makes so much money off the advertisements, that they could pay people just to accept the magazine yet, it still has a price tag . . . The Advertisement Firms insist they maintain a cover price, becuase they feel people will not take the publication seriously
There is a counter-example, though.
Many metro areas have a free newspaper. In Rochester, NY, it's City; in Albany, NY, it's Metroland; in Toronto, Ont, it's Eye (IIRC); you get the idea. While not as revered (and certainly not as frequent) as the daily papers, they do get picked up and read, and the advertisements get seen. It doesn't take a cover price to accomplish this.
Back to the matter at hand, I won't buy it. I never even heard of it until this posting on Slashdot. Linux has name recognition. BSD has less so, but it has it. Windows has mad name recognition. Even DOS has a better chance of selling, by virtue of having name recognition. I don't think SkyOS will sell.
About the only thing that would piss off the management worse would be doing something really stupid and getting a 600MW alternator kicked out of the grid and having to spin it back up and sync it back in.
Generators are brought on and off line all the time, based on market conditions. It is not as big of a pain as you make it out to be.
What is a pain is having the grid itself go down, because it leaves you with nothing to sync to. Only a relative handful of power stations have the capacity to start without something to sync to. Such facilities are called "black start". In the event of a wide-spread outage (think midwest/northeast 2003), the restoration of power has to start at the black start facilities and work its way out, with the most difficult part being synchronising any islanded areas that multiple generators, to the rest of the grid.
Forgetting about all the traffic, stoplights, hills, etc. which eat fuel that you don't hit on the interstate, are we?
No, we haven't. Instead, we have actually tried it.
Want numbers? The car I last measured this on was a 1998 Subaru Impreza OS, 2.2L, naturally aspirated, 4 speed automatic, all-wheel-drive. EPA rating is 22/34 MPG. Typical real-world in-town mileage (on my work commute) was 18 MPG. Round trip Albany to Rochester via I-90, travelling an average speed of 70 MPH nets 32 MPG. Round trip Albany to Rochester via US-20, travelling an average speed of 45 MPH nets 36 MPG.
I have since replaced this car with a more efficient one, but I haven't made the trip to Rochester with it yet, so I can't tell you how well my newer car does on that trip, but it gets 29-32 MPG in town.
People are replacing dead TVs with HDs, but not running out to buy HDs
History backs this up, too.
I was born in 1970. I remember black and white TVs. Want to know why? We had one. Our primary TV was a 21" black and white Zenith. I remember it when it was brand new in 1978 (obviously, its predecessor was also black and white). Yes, all the broadcasts were in colour at this point, and colour TVs were readily available, but for Joe Six-Pack (my dad), black and white was good enough.
My grandparents, on the other hand, had a colour TV for as far back as I can remember.
The first colour TV entered our house in 1984, when I bought it after a year of scrimping and saving. It cost me $289, which, I think, normalised to 2006 dollars is about $684-$845 (assuming 4%-5% annual inflation). That could get you an HD set today. It was, however, a high-end TV, with a cutting-edge feature on it: composite video jacks, which I used for my computer.
My dad finally bought a (terrible quality) colour TV for the living room in 1987. It never displayed a clear picture, but he seemed happy with it.
Now you just don't find black and white TVs much, not even portable ones (this is not to say that I miss them; I don't).
So the way I see it, standard def and high def now play the roles that were previously played by black and white and colour. Colour wasn't as important in the 70's and 80's as it might now appear. It was bleeding edge technology back then, as HD is now. It's had half a decade; give it about a decade more and it will become ubiquitous.
They did a bang-up job choosing which quadraphonic record format would win
That particular blunder is largely irrelevant now that we have 5.1 channel SACD and DVD-audio in the market place.
Oh, wait....
I'm still trying to figure out why "putting in the max value you mean to pay as soon as possible" is not the optimal strategy.
Quite simply, just because you are willing to pay $X for soemthing doesn't mean you shouldn't by it for $Y (where $Y
In areas around Albany and Buffalo, I-90 is, indeed, free. In Albany, I-90 and I-87 meet, and I-87 is toll from there south until you get close to NYC.
I ride the eastern free portion of I-90 every day to and from work.
On another note, I find that I use less fuel when crossing the state on US-20 than on I-90. The only way I can figure that you would use more fuel is that you must have been driving with one foot on each pedal. Yes, the time can be a killer if you are in a hurry, but the scenery is very much worth it if you are not in a hurry.
I have also found an exception. I-890 and NY-5 from Schenectady to Amsterdam is faster than I-90, despite lights and lower speed limit (55 vs. 65). I don't exactly know why this is, but I've driven from Schenectady to Utica enough times to have a good sample set to prove it (I used to have a custmer in Utica which I typically visited three times a week).
Get a couple of Dell laptops...
...with hot swappable components...
Make sure they have firewire...
Don't forget to get one with a burner...
Of course, I'll probably draw some fire for these suggestions....
So seriously, what's the difference?
No difference. Since the data are available for purchase by just anybody, though, it's more of a data whorehouse than a data warehouse.
Neat! When can I get one, then?
Note the sarcasm impaired: I do not recommend the action implied above, nor do I intend to carry it out.
Hey, if the guy who brought the world Lotus Notes thinks Microsoft need to simplify their software, things are worse than - no, correction - almost exactly as bad as I thought.
No kidding! Anyone who is stuck, even as an end-user, using Lotus notes understands this all too well.
Lotus notes is ueber complex, tries to be a do-everything application, is slow, is bulky, and is unergonomic.
Science is not in the business of proving things. Science is in the business of disproving things. You come up with a hypothesis and start trying to disprove it. When it survives peer review and attempts at disproof for a while, the hypothesis becomes a theory. When it continues to survive, it becomes a law. Nowhere, though, is any hypothesis, theory or law conclusively proven. It is not how science works.
Global warming has not been disproven, it is therefore still in play. Those who attempt to discredit it by claiming it is not proven are correct in their claim, but incorrect in their discredit. Where is the experimental evidence that indicates that the theory is wrong?
On another note, Canada Free Press, from looking at the rest of the site, appears to be an extreme right-wing rag. You may hold a different opinion, of course, but that is mine.
Maybe they should break the deadlock over Pluto by playing one (1) game of Rock, Paper Scissors.
The TZero name is already taken. Anyway, I'd much rather have this TZero.
In this context, HD does not stand for High Definition; it stands for Hybrid Digital.
Notice the guy says 3/4 here. Notice how he then goes on to criticise only MySQL and PHP. So what was the third item he was going to criticise, Apache or Linux (either would seem strange)? Seems to me he hasn't even finished his own rant.
From TFA:
I'm quite opposed to using MySQL and PHP, and I'm none too fond of Apache. Anyone who knows me or happens into a conversation with me about development quickly learns of my distaste for these particular projects. To be fair, Apache is the least problematic of the three and if there were no alternatives, I'd use it without a lot of complaint.
Things like this make me wonder if democracy really is any better.
I don't know. I don't think anyone has ever created a democracy that stayed taht way.