... but not less violence, nor less deaths in general. Japan, for example, has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, as well as one of the highest suicide rates. According to recorded statistics, if we assume accuracy, the US is well below the global average homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people, at 4.8. One thing I noted from the aforementioned chart, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between presence/absence of strict gun laws and homicide rates.
Citing "less gun deaths" in countries with strict gun laws is like citing "low auto-accident rates" in Nambia - complete non sequitur.
While the US is well below the global average, it's worth noting that it's well above the average in most of europe. The global average is skewed high due to high murder rates in Africa and South America. From the link you provided: US: 4.8 UK: 1.2 Germany: 0.8 France: 1.1 Spain: 0.8 Norway: 0.6 Finland: 2.2 Greece: 1.5
How much of that difference is gun control laws in these countries and how much is cultural differences is a question to which I don't have an answer. But please, let's compare apples to apples. Being "better than Namibia" (17.2) isn't good enough for me.
I heard that. This is precisely why I just killed my eve account. I'd have loved to go find a corner of nowhere in that universe, set up a remote mining/manufacturing op, and make trade runs into empire space. WITHOUT having to join some enormous PvP oriented alliance to do so. Joining that sort of alliance (to which I would no doubt have to pay "protection money" for the privilege) completely destroys the feeling I wanted to get out of eve - being my own master out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a few of my friends to hold off the (NPC) pirates and looters.
I know someone is going to respond saying "You can do that," but be realistic. A small corporation, not affiliated with one of the larger alliances has zero chance of surviving in 0.0 (the lawless part of space, where most of the high value minerals are to be found). There is *no* unexplored/unclaimed space in eve. Somebody claims to "own" every part of the universe. And for every group claiming to "own" a piece of the universe, there are other groups that contest it. If you want to just go visit systems that you personally haven't seen, you have to dodge overzealous gangs of alliance gank squads constantly hunting you for being in "their" space. Even if you're in a tiny, lame little frigate that obviously poses no threat to anyone.
I know Eve was designed to be a game all about corporate warfare and such. And I find the social aspects there kind of interesting. If my preferred form of PvP wasn't *economic* PvP, I'd probably love it. I just see what Eve is, and that it *could* be so much more, and have to walk away disappointed.
I could go on about how the attitude of corporate warfare for the sake of warfare in Eve destroys the sense of immersion, but I'll save that rant for another day. I'll watch the updates and see how the game changes. I'm not hopeful though - I think the devs and a large amount of the player base is generally happy with the way the game works. Maybe the fraction of non-PvP fans will grow large enough that they'll do something. Time (and the market) will tell.
This is a better argument FOR commercial set top boxes than against them, exactly because consumers won't put up with that kind of failure rate. The only reason we put up with them when they're provided by the cable company is that the cable company absorbs all the costs and hassle of fixing the things and getting replacements. We might not like the failure rate, but if we want digital content, it's the cable provider's box or nothing.
Take away the provider's effective monopoly on set top box choice, and competition between manufacturers will finally push the quality of these boxes into the range of "tolerable." It'll also allow DVR manufacturers like TiVo to compete on a more even playing field.
RTCW is a superb game multiplayer, but it stinks singleplayer.
Uh, we must have been playing different games. RTCW is the best single player shooter I've played in years. I've played through the single player game several times, and enjoy it each time through. It was the first game in a long time that was able to make me jump in my seat when something lunged out at me on the catacomb levels.
Not only the mood was great, but there was a lot of fun to be had going through missions in stealth mode using silenced weapons only (and many levels where that was the only choice).
I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the single player as much as the multiplayer - they are admittedly two very different games. I got a huge kick out of the multiplayer right up until the point where everybody decided it would be a great idea to panzerfaust spam every respawn they could find on a nearly continuous basis.
Getting back on topic, I'm looking forward to giving enemy territory a try, and somewhat dissapointed that they couldn't get a decent single player game out of it. But hey, free game.:)
IB stands for International Baccalaureate. I'm sorry you didn't get much from the program (if indeed you were part of it), or from Advanced Placement classes. Most of that depends on your teachers, I'm sorry to say. It takes a really outstanding book to make a class interesting if the teachers suck.
I got an IB diploma when I graduated high school, and took a number of AP classes as well. For the most part, I had excellent teachers, and learned how to study in high school, instead of in college like most of my peers. I was thoroughly prepared for college (Georgia Tech) when I enrolled. In fact, I was able to skip most 1000 and 2000 level classes based on my IB and AP test scores. I breezed through the first quarter and a half of organic chemistry, based on what I had already learned in high school. (I took the higher level chemistry option.)
Don't blame the program, the curriculum, or (getting back on topic) the books, when the blame usually belongs completely in meat-space. That would be teachers who don't know how to teach, don't teach to the curriculum, and just generally don't care, and students who don't know how to study, don't want to learn, and could care less.
How many here took a science or math class in primary school or high school taught by somebody you addressed as "Coach"? I'm sure a small fraction of them made great teachers, but the remainder did us all a great disservice.
That said, the MegaRAC-G2 sounds similar to what you want. It's not really a KVM switch (although you might see one from us in the future), but it is a great remote access card. It does very fast video redirection (10-15 fps) of the server's native display - which means it works on the console, in bios, in X, Windows, whatever. It redirects the client's keyboard/mouse activity, and even cdrom and floppy drives if you want.
It does a lot of other cool stuff too, check out the website: http://www.ami.com/megarac/
Oh yeah, and the card runs linux, and requires no drivers on the server.:)
...and try to understand the driver, or write your own.
It is essential to have a good spec. For comodity microcontrollers, the manufacturer will usually make the spec available. Read the spec. Understand the spec. Then think about your driver, or read through the existing driver and figure out how what the code does twiddles the control lines just right.
There's a kind of art to understanding these hardware specs, and it takes a bit of practice. Try starting with something like a serial bus controller, or something else that's well understood.
And get yourself a copy of the Linux Device Drivers book, it's worth the cost. Or read it online from oreilley.com. For many devices, you can find information about that device in linux/Documentation about how the driver works and/or how to write clients for the driver.
As you come to understand the driver, comment the bits that drove you nuts. Submit the commented driver to the driver's maintainer. If you watch on the lkml, you'll ocassionally see somebody submit a comments-only patch. YOU COULD BE THAT SOMEBODY!
Ever since the beginnings of AI research, researchers have been saying that the processing power needed to make it a reality is just around the corner. Well, we've turned those corners many many times, and still no self-aware computers. Lots of AI researchers are beginning to think that processing power is not the problem, and are looking into other avenues of research.
Improved processing power is not always the answer. On conventional hardware, there are some algorithms that will never be practical for any but the most trivial applications. It doesn't matter if they run 100 million times faster than they do now, we're still talking about multiples of the age of the universe.
This babble is coming to a point, really. The point is that using sub-optimal techniques on faster processors is not a general purpose solution for all computing problems. The point is that faster processors does not create the required intelligence to DESIGN solutions to computing problems. Any good programmer will tell you the hardest, most time consuming, and most important phase of software development is design. Design requires a degree of intelligence that I don't think will be emulated in computers any time real soon. If you disagree, then point me at some AI research that indicates otherwise.
It's certainly possible that at some point (I doubt 2015), RAD tools will develop to the point that all the designer has to do is put the spec together properly, and it will generate all that code for you. Does that mean fewer programmers? Yes. Does it mean only a handful in existence? No. And the ones who would be eliminated are those who can't design, and we'll be better off without them.
Consider also that in the 60s era of mainframe computers, there were very few such computers in exitence. They required so many programmers to support because nearly everything that ran on them was written by hand for very specific, special purposes.
Now there are billions and billions of computers out there in various places, and sure, the programmer to computer ratio is low. But I would attribute that more to mass production of computers that all use the same software (IE identical brake controllers on thousands and thousands of cars), rather than the industry needing fewer programmers to get their jobs done.
When I was taking some of the early 2000 level CS classes at tech back in '95-96 or so, we were warned from the beginning that they had a cheat-finder script or utility of some kind that they used. IIRC, it was not just a character by character comparison, but used some kind of percent similarity method.
If any current/former gatech TAs/profs want to correct me/add to this, please do...
While it is true that he hated allegory, and did not intend for LotR to be considered an allegory of anything, he did acknowledge that it was applicable to all of those things and more, and that this was intentional. There's a wonderful quote on the subject which I can't remember in full detail (maybe another poster can), which went something along the lines of:
There is a difference between allegory and applicability. The latter exists in the mind of the reader, and the former is forced upon the reader by the author.
So if you want to draw parallels between LotR and the nuclear arms race, go right ahead with Tolkien's blessing. Just don't suggest he intentionally wrote LotR to parallel it.
Bombadil was entirely cut from the script. It's not that he was in the script, and the scenes cut, it's that the entire segment was cut to make the movie shorter, and more palatable to the audience (without delving into even more of the huge backstory that most of tolkien's work has).
interesting though that, considering they're using FreeBSD, they didn't include AppleTalk support (easily available via the ports tree). It may be that with the advent of OS X, they think NFS is enough for the entire non-Win32 universe.
Not at all. AFP and NCP support are on the way, and will be supported in future versions.
So this is just BSD on a flash rom? Or is this all integrated into the Bios, so you just power the machine on and configure?
Yes and no. The machine powers on and the OS loads from an IDE flash rom. The system has a default IP and you configure everything through a web browser. The flash is 32MB.
I could do the same thing with a cdrom, burn everything onto CDROM, boot cdrom, and not touch the harddrives.
You could, but you'd have to have a CDROM drive in the thing, which takes up valuable space in a 1U or even 3U rackmount server. Also, flash roms have no moving parts, which means one less thing to fail on a machine that needs to run 24/7/365. Also, the flash image can be updated automatically, without opening the box, via FTP. And of course, if you made it yourself, you'd be missing all of the custom hardware in there that does health/disk monitoring/alerting, etc, etc.
Short version: This is a lot more than justFreeBSD on a flashrom.
You know, for the most part, you're right. However, there are a few things you're overlooking...
For example, not everybody lives in a large city. To go with your NPR example, not every city or region has an NPR affiliate within radio range. And every NPR affiliate plays a different selection of NPR programs. When I lived up in chicago, I used to love listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on WBEZ. It's a fun news quiz show. When I moved to Atlanta, I discovered that the NPR affiliate near me didn't play WWDTM. Not to worry, if I need my fix I can go to npr.org and listen to the Real Audio streams of the show, and even go into the archives and listen to older programs.
The stuff that has mass-market appeal you can hear everywhere. For music, that means Britney and whatever other crap is playing right now, and for news and talk, it means All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Marketplace, maybe Talk of the Nation, and a few others. For other things, there might be only a few (or even just one!) station(s) around the country that carry them.
So even without adding original internet-only content, streaming radio stations can still be a success by making local content available anywhere.
Rumors have also circulated that all three LOTR movies are filmed at the same time.
It's not a rumor - it's a well known fact, at least to anyone who has been following the progress of the filming. All three movies were shot in one long marathon filming in New Zealand. Director Peter Jackson decided to do it all at once because it would be cheaper, and easier to get all the actors involved for one long shoot than for three shorter ones, spread out across 3-5 years.
Principal photography for all three movies is now complete, but there will be touchup work to be done as editing takes place before the release of each of the following films.
I'm sure there are loads of good links that make note of the fact that all three were shot at once, but I'm too lazy to do more than point to the
FAQ at TORN
As Moon has no atmosphere, the satellites and spacecrafts could be build easily (no messing with cleanrooms, no out-gassing problems) over there from local raw materials.
Spacecraft and satellites are built in cleanrooms not to protect against atmosphere, but to protect against dust and dirt contamination. Dust and dirt will be a part of every human settlement, by virtue of skin flakes and hair if not due to dust and regolith from the lunar surface. So we'll still be building things in cleanrooms for now.
Clarification: GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, which means you can link proprietary code with the GTK+ libraries without releasing the entire application under the GPL. This is more desirable in many ways for businesses who want to create nice graphical linux applications, but who don't want to GPL their software. This is the same reason glibc is LGPL.
We might like for companies to GPL all of their code, but many of them won't, and will instead use other toolkits (Motif...shudder) that don't integrate as well with your desktop if that is their only other option.
There is no greater good. What is good for you is not good for everybody else. Shooting an assailant is good for you, but not for him or his family. Not that I wouldn't blow the jerk's head off, but the myth of the greater good should be addressed anyway.
Of course, there are many times when it is neccessary to defend yourself with violence, and I'm all in favor of that.
But as far as guns go, you're statistically much more likely to shoot yourself, family, or a friend, than an attacker. Drawing a weapon on an attacker makes it more likely that they'll respond with deadly force. Most of the people who attack you just want your wallet, they don't want to kill you. The ones that want to kill you, will probably do it whether or not you have a gun. They have the advantage of surprise, having the weapon out and ready to fire, and are probably hard enough to not hesitate to pull the trigger. Most (not all, of course) non-psychotics will be too frightened in that situation to respond quickly enough without fumbling to get out of it alive.
I'm sure many people have saved themselves against attackers using their guns. I'm willing to bet that a whole lot more people have been killed as a result of provoking an attacker or in an accident at home.
I'm not saying that guns should be outlawed - that's foolish, and wouldn't work in any case. I'm just saying that if you're looking to improve your personal safety, there are better choices. Martial arts, for instance. It's much harder for your kid to accidentally pick up your fist and beat himself to death with it.;) Additionally, it teaches the mentality of combat, which is a big obstacle for people unfamiliar with combative situations.
Far from a perfect solution, but hey, we don't live in a perfect world.
Yes, but writing programs in java ( as unpleasant as it is ) doesn't cause respiratory distress, smog, or acid rain. Efficiency is not always better, but there are much bigger, more important issues here than efficiency. Fossil fuels have *no* serious long term prospects, and their widespread use is damaging the environment.
And here's the bush administration, cutting alternative energy research while increasing our commitment to fossil fuels. Where, do you suppose, are his priorities...
There's really no need for the public library to be a place where one can go to look at breasts. It's more about not allowing access to sites that are using the bare breasts out of a context in which a bare breast is acceptable. Breast cancer
I would have no objection to a filter which could filter out ONLY porn, and nothing else. Unfortunately, there is no such filter in existence, and I find it doubtful that one can be created. The solution which is being reccommended would filter out a great deal of legitimate research content - and not just content that has something to do with objectionable body parts - it's amazing some of the random sites that get blocked by filtering software. Check out some of the previous slashdot articles on the subject for firsthand examples of sites which have been blocked.
The part of this that scares me the most isn't the sites that are blocked accidentally - it's the sites that are blocked intentionally because of their political views. Sites like aclu.org, or peacefire, with a strong anti-censorship message, and sites that espouse radical or unconventional political views. That's moving into the realm of thought control, and it scares the Creeping Bejeesus(tm) out of me.
We are in agreement about not wanting the government to be the ones to decide what is and is not unacceptable material. I also do not trust corporations to do so. In fact, the only person I trust to filter material for myself or my child, is me. Beyond that, it's government or business forcing their own views or the views of the loudest protestors down my throat, and I won't accept that.
The comment I made about bad parenting wasn't aimed at the whole porn thing - it was aimed more at the attitude many people have of assigning the blame somewhere else. In the vein of blaming violent video games and computer use for warping childrens' minds. Oh, it must be that nasty internet, all the perverts/wackos/goths hang out there! And too much quake! And anything else which puts the blame on somebody else besides me for not noticing or doing something about radical emotional and behavioral changes in my child!
I understand the desire to want to do SOMETHING to protect your child when he/she is away from you, but I just don't think this is an acceptable answer. The best answer right now is to do your best to instill a sense of right and wrong in your kids, and nurture their decision making skills so that they can separate the sludge that makes up most of the internet from the occasional pearls of information.
Slashdot Mirror
... but not less violence, nor less deaths in general. Japan, for example, has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, as well as one of the highest suicide rates. According to recorded statistics, if we assume accuracy, the US is well below the global average homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 people, at 4.8. One thing I noted from the aforementioned chart, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between presence/absence of strict gun laws and homicide rates.
Citing "less gun deaths" in countries with strict gun laws is like citing "low auto-accident rates" in Nambia - complete non sequitur.
While the US is well below the global average, it's worth noting that it's well above the average in most of europe. The global average is skewed high due to high murder rates in Africa and South America. From the link you provided:
US: 4.8
UK: 1.2
Germany: 0.8
France: 1.1
Spain: 0.8
Norway: 0.6
Finland: 2.2
Greece: 1.5
How much of that difference is gun control laws in these countries and how much is cultural differences is a question to which I don't have an answer. But please, let's compare apples to apples. Being "better than Namibia" (17.2) isn't good enough for me.
So...we CAN or CANNOT violate causality in its light cone? I can't remember. I feel like we need a giant stone tablet or something to remind us...
In chess, there are no psychic commandos shooting nuclear bombs.
I heard that. This is precisely why I just killed my eve account. I'd have loved to go find a corner of nowhere in that universe, set up a remote mining/manufacturing op, and make trade runs into empire space. WITHOUT having to join some enormous PvP oriented alliance to do so. Joining that sort of alliance (to which I would no doubt have to pay "protection money" for the privilege) completely destroys the feeling I wanted to get out of eve - being my own master out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a few of my friends to hold off the (NPC) pirates and looters.
I know someone is going to respond saying "You can do that," but be realistic. A small corporation, not affiliated with one of the larger alliances has zero chance of surviving in 0.0 (the lawless part of space, where most of the high value minerals are to be found). There is *no* unexplored/unclaimed space in eve. Somebody claims to "own" every part of the universe. And for every group claiming to "own" a piece of the universe, there are other groups that contest it. If you want to just go visit systems that you personally haven't seen, you have to dodge overzealous gangs of alliance gank squads constantly hunting you for being in "their" space. Even if you're in a tiny, lame little frigate that obviously poses no threat to anyone.
I know Eve was designed to be a game all about corporate warfare and such. And I find the social aspects there kind of interesting. If my preferred form of PvP wasn't *economic* PvP, I'd probably love it. I just see what Eve is, and that it *could* be so much more, and have to walk away disappointed.
I could go on about how the attitude of corporate warfare for the sake of warfare in Eve destroys the sense of immersion, but I'll save that rant for another day. I'll watch the updates and see how the game changes. I'm not hopeful though - I think the devs and a large amount of the player base is generally happy with the way the game works. Maybe the fraction of non-PvP fans will grow large enough that they'll do something. Time (and the market) will tell.
This is a better argument FOR commercial set top boxes than against them, exactly because consumers won't put up with that kind of failure rate. The only reason we put up with them when they're provided by the cable company is that the cable company absorbs all the costs and hassle of fixing the things and getting replacements. We might not like the failure rate, but if we want digital content, it's the cable provider's box or nothing.
Take away the provider's effective monopoly on set top box choice, and competition between manufacturers will finally push the quality of these boxes into the range of "tolerable." It'll also allow DVR manufacturers like TiVo to compete on a more even playing field.
RTCW is a superb game multiplayer, but it stinks singleplayer.
:)
Uh, we must have been playing different games. RTCW is the best single player shooter I've played in years. I've played through the single player game several times, and enjoy it each time through. It was the first game in a long time that was able to make me jump in my seat when something lunged out at me on the catacomb levels. Not only the mood was great, but there was a lot of fun to be had going through missions in stealth mode using silenced weapons only (and many levels where that was the only choice).
I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the single player as much as the multiplayer - they are admittedly two very different games. I got a huge kick out of the multiplayer right up until the point where everybody decided it would be a great idea to panzerfaust spam every respawn they could find on a nearly continuous basis.
Getting back on topic, I'm looking forward to giving enemy territory a try, and somewhat dissapointed that they couldn't get a decent single player game out of it. But hey, free game.
IB stands for International Baccalaureate. I'm sorry you didn't get much from the program (if indeed you were part of it), or from Advanced Placement classes. Most of that depends on your teachers, I'm sorry to say. It takes a really outstanding book to make a class interesting if the teachers suck.
I got an IB diploma when I graduated high school, and took a number of AP classes as well. For the most part, I had excellent teachers, and learned how to study in high school, instead of in college like most of my peers. I was thoroughly prepared for college (Georgia Tech) when I enrolled. In fact, I was able to skip most 1000 and 2000 level classes based on my IB and AP test scores. I breezed through the first quarter and a half of organic chemistry, based on what I had already learned in high school. (I took the higher level chemistry option.)
Don't blame the program, the curriculum, or (getting back on topic) the books, when the blame usually belongs completely in meat-space. That would be teachers who don't know how to teach, don't teach to the curriculum, and just generally don't care, and students who don't know how to study, don't want to learn, and could care less.
How many here took a science or math class in primary school or high school taught by somebody you addressed as "Coach"? I'm sure a small fraction of them made great teachers, but the remainder did us all a great disservice.
Disclaimer: I work for AMI on the MegaRAC-G2
:)
That said, the MegaRAC-G2 sounds similar to what you want. It's not really a KVM switch (although you might see one from us in the future), but it is a great remote access card. It does very fast video redirection (10-15 fps) of the server's native display - which means it works on the console, in bios, in X, Windows, whatever. It redirects the client's keyboard/mouse activity, and even cdrom and floppy drives if you want.
It does a lot of other cool stuff too, check out the website: http://www.ami.com/megarac/
Oh yeah, and the card runs linux, and requires no drivers on the server.
...and try to understand the driver, or write your own.
It is essential to have a good spec. For comodity microcontrollers, the manufacturer will usually make the spec available. Read the spec. Understand the spec. Then think about your driver, or read through the existing driver and figure out how what the code does twiddles the control lines just right.
There's a kind of art to understanding these hardware specs, and it takes a bit of practice. Try starting with something like a serial bus controller, or something else that's well understood.
And get yourself a copy of the Linux Device Drivers book, it's worth the cost. Or read it online from oreilley.com. For many devices, you can find information about that device in linux/Documentation about how the driver works and/or how to write clients for the driver.
As you come to understand the driver, comment the bits that drove you nuts. Submit the commented driver to the driver's maintainer. If you watch on the lkml, you'll ocassionally see somebody submit a comments-only patch. YOU COULD BE THAT SOMEBODY!
Ever since the beginnings of AI research, researchers have been saying that the processing power needed to make it a reality is just around the corner. Well, we've turned those corners many many times, and still no self-aware computers. Lots of AI researchers are beginning to think that processing power is not the problem, and are looking into other avenues of research.
Improved processing power is not always the answer. On conventional hardware, there are some algorithms that will never be practical for any but the most trivial applications. It doesn't matter if they run 100 million times faster than they do now, we're still talking about multiples of the age of the universe.
This babble is coming to a point, really. The point is that using sub-optimal techniques on faster processors is not a general purpose solution for all computing problems. The point is that faster processors does not create the required intelligence to DESIGN solutions to computing problems. Any good programmer will tell you the hardest, most time consuming, and most important phase of software development is design. Design requires a degree of intelligence that I don't think will be emulated in computers any time real soon. If you disagree, then point me at some AI research that indicates otherwise.
It's certainly possible that at some point (I doubt 2015), RAD tools will develop to the point that all the designer has to do is put the spec together properly, and it will generate all that code for you. Does that mean fewer programmers? Yes. Does it mean only a handful in existence? No. And the ones who would be eliminated are those who can't design, and we'll be better off without them.
Consider also that in the 60s era of mainframe computers, there were very few such computers in exitence. They required so many programmers to support because nearly everything that ran on them was written by hand for very specific, special purposes.
Now there are billions and billions of computers out there in various places, and sure, the programmer to computer ratio is low. But I would attribute that more to mass production of computers that all use the same software (IE identical brake controllers on thousands and thousands of cars), rather than the industry needing fewer programmers to get their jobs done.
When I was taking some of the early 2000 level CS classes at tech back in '95-96 or so, we were warned from the beginning that they had a cheat-finder script or utility of some kind that they used. IIRC, it was not just a character by character comparison, but used some kind of percent similarity method.
If any current/former gatech TAs/profs want to correct me/add to this, please do...
While it is true that he hated allegory, and did not intend for LotR to be considered an allegory of anything, he did acknowledge that it was applicable to all of those things and more, and that this was intentional. There's a wonderful quote on the subject which I can't remember in full detail (maybe another poster can), which went something along the lines of:
There is a difference between allegory and applicability. The latter exists in the mind of the reader, and the former is forced upon the reader by the author.
So if you want to draw parallels between LotR and the nuclear arms race, go right ahead with Tolkien's blessing. Just don't suggest he intentionally wrote LotR to parallel it.
The correct spelling is "die Fledermaus", and as other posters have pointed out, it means "the bat" in german. I also was dissapointed that his name was changed as well. I suspect it was changed to something more easily understood by most viewers...probably not a whole lot of the target audience are fans of the operas of Johann Strauss or speak german. The American Maid --> Captain Liberty thing has got me beat. American Maid was much funnier in my opinion. Perhaps they thought "American Maid" was too sexist for prime time?
Bombadil was entirely cut from the script. It's not that he was in the script, and the scenes cut, it's that the entire segment was cut to make the movie shorter, and more palatable to the audience (without delving into even more of the huge backstory that most of tolkien's work has).
Not at all. AFP and NCP support are on the way, and will be supported in future versions.
Yes and no. The machine powers on and the OS loads from an IDE flash rom. The system has a default IP and you configure everything through a web browser. The flash is 32MB.
I could do the same thing with a cdrom, burn everything onto CDROM, boot cdrom, and not touch the harddrives.You could, but you'd have to have a CDROM drive in the thing, which takes up valuable space in a 1U or even 3U rackmount server. Also, flash roms have no moving parts, which means one less thing to fail on a machine that needs to run 24/7/365. Also, the flash image can be updated automatically, without opening the box, via FTP. And of course, if you made it yourself, you'd be missing all of the custom hardware in there that does health/disk monitoring/alerting, etc, etc.
Short version: This is a lot more than justFreeBSD on a flashrom.
You know, for the most part, you're right. However, there are a few things you're overlooking...
For example, not everybody lives in a large city. To go with your NPR example, not every city or region has an NPR affiliate within radio range. And every NPR affiliate plays a different selection of NPR programs. When I lived up in chicago, I used to love listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me on WBEZ. It's a fun news quiz show. When I moved to Atlanta, I discovered that the NPR affiliate near me didn't play WWDTM. Not to worry, if I need my fix I can go to npr.org and listen to the Real Audio streams of the show, and even go into the archives and listen to older programs.
The stuff that has mass-market appeal you can hear everywhere. For music, that means Britney and whatever other crap is playing right now, and for news and talk, it means All Things Considered, Fresh Air, Marketplace, maybe Talk of the Nation, and a few others. For other things, there might be only a few (or even just one!) station(s) around the country that carry them.
So even without adding original internet-only content, streaming radio stations can still be a success by making local content available anywhere.
It's not a rumor - it's a well known fact, at least to anyone who has been following the progress of the filming. All three movies were shot in one long marathon filming in New Zealand. Director Peter Jackson decided to do it all at once because it would be cheaper, and easier to get all the actors involved for one long shoot than for three shorter ones, spread out across 3-5 years.
Principal photography for all three movies is now complete, but there will be touchup work to be done as editing takes place before the release of each of the following films.
I'm sure there are loads of good links that make note of the fact that all three were shot at once, but I'm too lazy to do more than point to the FAQ at TORN
Spacecraft and satellites are built in cleanrooms not to protect against atmosphere, but to protect against dust and dirt contamination. Dust and dirt will be a part of every human settlement, by virtue of skin flakes and hair if not due to dust and regolith from the lunar surface. So we'll still be building things in cleanrooms for now.
Actually, Qt is GPL. GTK is not.
Clarification: GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, which means you can link proprietary code with the GTK+ libraries without releasing the entire application under the GPL. This is more desirable in many ways for businesses who want to create nice graphical linux applications, but who don't want to GPL their software. This is the same reason glibc is LGPL.
We might like for companies to GPL all of their code, but many of them won't, and will instead use other toolkits (Motif...shudder) that don't integrate as well with your desktop if that is their only other option.
I agree with you on most points. A few things...
;) Additionally, it teaches the mentality of combat, which is a big obstacle for people unfamiliar with combative situations.
There is no greater good. What is good for you is not good for everybody else. Shooting an assailant is good for you, but not for him or his family. Not that I wouldn't blow the jerk's head off, but the myth of the greater good should be addressed anyway.
Of course, there are many times when it is neccessary to defend yourself with violence, and I'm all in favor of that.
But as far as guns go, you're statistically much more likely to shoot yourself, family, or a friend, than an attacker. Drawing a weapon on an attacker makes it more likely that they'll respond with deadly force. Most of the people who attack you just want your wallet, they don't want to kill you. The ones that want to kill you, will probably do it whether or not you have a gun. They have the advantage of surprise, having the weapon out and ready to fire, and are probably hard enough to not hesitate to pull the trigger. Most (not all, of course) non-psychotics will be too frightened in that situation to respond quickly enough without fumbling to get out of it alive.
I'm sure many people have saved themselves against attackers using their guns. I'm willing to bet that a whole lot more people have been killed as a result of provoking an attacker or in an accident at home.
I'm not saying that guns should be outlawed - that's foolish, and wouldn't work in any case. I'm just saying that if you're looking to improve your personal safety, there are better choices. Martial arts, for instance. It's much harder for your kid to accidentally pick up your fist and beat himself to death with it.
Far from a perfect solution, but hey, we don't live in a perfect world.
Andrew
Yes, but writing programs in java ( as unpleasant as it is ) doesn't cause respiratory distress, smog, or acid rain. Efficiency is not always better, but there are much bigger, more important issues here than efficiency. Fossil fuels have *no* serious long term prospects, and their widespread use is damaging the environment.
And here's the bush administration, cutting alternative energy research while increasing our commitment to fossil fuels. Where, do you suppose, are his priorities...
I listen to Marketplace every day, it's a great program. But it's on PRI, Public Radio International, not NPR.
There's really no need for the public library to be a place where one can go to look at breasts. It's more about not allowing access to sites that are using the bare breasts out of a context in which a bare breast is acceptable. Breast cancer
I would have no objection to a filter which could filter out ONLY porn, and nothing else. Unfortunately, there is no such filter in existence, and I find it doubtful that one can be created. The solution which is being reccommended would filter out a great deal of legitimate research content - and not just content that has something to do with objectionable body parts - it's amazing some of the random sites that get blocked by filtering software. Check out some of the previous slashdot articles on the subject for firsthand examples of sites which have been blocked.
The part of this that scares me the most isn't the sites that are blocked accidentally - it's the sites that are blocked intentionally because of their political views. Sites like aclu.org, or peacefire, with a strong anti-censorship message, and sites that espouse radical or unconventional political views. That's moving into the realm of thought control, and it scares the Creeping Bejeesus(tm) out of me.
We are in agreement about not wanting the government to be the ones to decide what is and is not unacceptable material. I also do not trust corporations to do so. In fact, the only person I trust to filter material for myself or my child, is me. Beyond that, it's government or business forcing their own views or the views of the loudest protestors down my throat, and I won't accept that.
The comment I made about bad parenting wasn't aimed at the whole porn thing - it was aimed more at the attitude many people have of assigning the blame somewhere else. In the vein of blaming violent video games and computer use for warping childrens' minds. Oh, it must be that nasty internet, all the perverts/wackos/goths hang out there! And too much quake! And anything else which puts the blame on somebody else besides me for not noticing or doing something about radical emotional and behavioral changes in my child!
I understand the desire to want to do SOMETHING to protect your child when he/she is away from you, but I just don't think this is an acceptable answer. The best answer right now is to do your best to instill a sense of right and wrong in your kids, and nurture their decision making skills so that they can separate the sludge that makes up most of the internet from the occasional pearls of information.