This is cowardice, pure and simple. I think we need legilative improvements to protect our freedom of expression. And communication. This includes protecting ISP's from at least some kinds of legal responsibility for their contents - Common Carrier (see Wikipedia) seems a suitable model.
Defending Civil Liberties has never been more important. It's so good to see at least _some_ individuals standing up for this.
"The problem is that religion is inherently *irrational*."
Actually, Buddhism is rational. It describes how emotions arise, how to deal with them and gives the tools to do so. People use these tools, and it works.
Islam, on the other hand...
I've been reading the Islamic scriptures (Quran, Sirat), and am surprised how anyone can pass this off as.. religious? Not only is the level of logic (pah!) and writing vastly inferior to the Bible, the acts described therein (war, plunder, killing, rape, paedophilia, slave trade, genocide against Jews ("Why does this shit always happen to us"), targeted assassinations etc.) so utterly criminal that Islam really shouldn't be recognized as a religion before it clearly asserts that this is *not* a proper example for human behaviour.
The thing about the images in Wikipedia is important. Islam is trying to force its myriad collection of arcane and senseless laws upon us everywhere, and this is but a small step in that direction. That the Wikipedia editors are standing up to this is good and important.
It'll probably be confusing what 'damage' is going to happen.
The classic Forman movie "One flew over the Cookoo's nest" did a *LOT* of damage to the psyciatric system, at least in Denmark. Institutions were percieved as making the inmates more nuts, not less, and many of those were simply abolished over the last decades, leaving the mentally ill to live in the normal society and being expected to take care of many basic things themselves. The result, unfortunately, is not a decline in mental illness. What we have instead is an increase in crimes committed by these people, damaging both themselves and their victims in the process.
Taking movies for 'documentation' is risky. There are professionals our there, without an agenda to entertain or cause scandal, and they are generally better informed than some movie-instructing wise-guy.
A friend and I (we both know our nuclear physics) watched the theoretical section in the beginning, pausing at every tricky spot to analyze the details, and decided that the theory is sound.
One particular advantage this device has over the JET/ITER designs is that it immediately accelerates all nuclei to the energy level (some 500 keV) needed for fusion. The torus designs heat a lot of nuclei to a level where the fastest nuclei reach this level and have a reasonable probability of colliding. That takes a lot more energy and engineering to hold such great amounts of plasma.
The pure beauty of his approach using a static electric field to both accelerate the ions and keep the plasma in confinement already makes this a work of art - even if it would turn out not to be commercially viable for whatever reason.
As for him just giving up on funding, I give him the benefit of doubt. He's a scientist, not a fundraiser, and it's hard to convince bureaucrats to do anything risky. He's delivered the science, the prototypes and has described it in patents. Now it's up to someone else to pick up the lead and continue into the real engineering of his. It's true that the Iraq war eats up budgets like crazy (that war might qualify for the 'Stupidity of the Century' award, once we get that far). It also delayed reinforcement of the New Orleans dikes.
MeThinks that either some corporate investor (Google is not a bad idea) or some non-US country will pick this up and do the practical work. $200 million is peanuts in this context. It's what you'll pay for a new stretch of motorway, a large concert hall, ship or whatever the local or federal government decides to build this week. Even if there was just one in a hundred % chance that this will work, it should be tried and tested.
That looks like something an updated device driver could deal with..?
But if it causes trouble for playback on PC's, I'll most certainly prefer a ripped copy.
You'll definately want to use MPEG2 Variable Bitrate encoding. That's a two-pass encode, it takes its time, but the result is worth it. I managed to get more than two hours of lecture recordings on one 4.7 GB DVD, with perfectly fine quality. Your 1½ hour should fit well. Since you have 1/3 less playtime than I had, you could increase the average bitrate (or the audio bitrate) to maximize quality.
I used Ulead DVD authoring products - Movie Factory for simple stuff, DVD Workshop for complex. They both did a fine job of encoding, and would do so today as well. It's a couple years ago, and even better products may be on the market now, haven't followed it closely.
My impression is that TV is losing out to the computer itself, especially for the elite who'd otherwise be early adaptors. Want to follow the latest news on, say, Israel? Go online. Want to find documentation that contradicts the Big Media stories? Dig in online. Have documentation to undermine the Hizbollah stories? Post it, and the world may even react.
The combination of Internet _and_ the traditional newspapers is making TV irrelevant for me. Sure, it makes sense to watch the news occasionally, but that's it. To watch a movie I pull out a DVD from the shelf. Real movies are usually much better than the never-ending TV series. We have more channels and more entertainment on TV than ever, but that only makes the good stuff harder to find. Or, quite likely, there is less good stuff than before, because many of the viewers are gone, and the in-depth documentaries are getting ratings so low it's not worth producing them.
While a killer surround system makes sense for watching movies, I find no use for a media PC. Only if it'd also take care of the actual watching so I wouldn't have to waste time on that (thanks D.A.:)
Even if Linus's place on the list was meant as a compliment, I still think it's incorrect. Linus definitely DOES matter.
Yes. He's this wonderful piece of unshakeable honesty in the center of a hurricane of commercial interest. He does a wonderful job of holding things together in his inimitable personal style.
Yet, even if he (god forbid!) got hit by a brick tomorrow, Linux wouldn't be handicapped much. It's the best of both worlds:)
To favor people because of their gender, not skill or motivation? It's like hiring on grounds of ethniticity or skin colour, something you do when the focus on qualifications is faltering.
On the other hand, I'm always in favor of more women in my environment:)
I have asked my boss several times if we could skip testing on Win98, and due to our polls, his reply is still 'No'. It's still something like 5-10% of our readership, which means 5000 -> 10.000 people. That's an awful lot of unhappy people to handle on the phone...
I'm editing a computer magazine CD, and must say I'm very content with AVG Free Edition. Some years ago they had problems keeping their update servers running, and there was a case of a botched upgrade, but for the last two years the product has been working flawlessly. It's unintrusive and reasonably lean, does what most people need (including POP3 scanning and automatic updates), and it's free (as in beer, of course). We occassionally receive offers from the competing companies, but when we compare, AVG Free does what we need in better style. Free is only for strictly private use - no charities or similar pass that test.
The storm of Office 11, WinNT 6.0 and other super surprises? Myself, I believe they're just silent, and can be ignored for a while. Please post an article when something interesting happens...
It's not only the hardware producers who create obstacles. In the realm of wireless, where Linux has notoriously bad support, the FCC blocks the release of driver code as open source.
Why?
Because, being a software controlled radio, having an open source driver would permit many tricks banned by the FCC - like using unlicensed frequency bands, monitoring military traffic etc.
How many times have people written about some new device that's going to be THE iPod killer?
Lots, of course, to little effect. More will come The Apple Advantage is that they have a solid reputation for doing the 'Just works' thing and getting it right. That they seem to have some very able designers doesn't hurt, either. Showing off a brand new iPod is plain attractive:)
My take is that the iPod reaches a market segment that cares less about features/capacity for the money and more about having the cool-factor, and the fact the the iPod is so well designed that it never (well, as perceived...) lets you down.
I think that if Jesus had bit a bit more like Muhammad (ie, a millitary and political leader) he might have gotten a better reception when he claimed to be the Messiah.
That's interesting. The Jews expected that, and Satan (or was that really Judas?) tempted Jesus to do just that. My brother quoted an esoteric scripture stating that if Jesus rejected being a political leader, people would turn against him. Which is sortof what happened.
All speculation of course, but just wonder if he had accepted that challenge...? Would have been an extremely interesting twist of history. Jesus (IMO) had the compassion to become a great leader, had he bothered to get his hands dirty. Then perhaps there'd be no opening for Mohammad to set his bloody precedents, either.
I don't know why the word "Islamic" is attached to this article. The religion of the inventor had nothing to do with these inventions.
I also believe it should be 'In spite of Islam' instead. Most of the inventions are either borrowed from other cultures (like numerals), invented by people who happened to live in the contries they conqurored, or done by single individuals not reaching the masses. If you look at the Islamic countries today, it is very clear that they do not permit science, reason and open debate to flourish. While a thousand (and one) may sound like a lot, great western inventors like Thomas Edison came up with similar numbers over a much shorter stretch of time.
Just like terrorism isn't "Islamic"
But on the record of Islam and terrorism, that's a different story. It is named 'Islamic terrorism' because the purpetrators draw on Islam and the will of Allah to blow up people. As long as the islamic countries, organisations and leaders do not systematically denounce terrorism, it is reasonable to assume the two are connected.
As Salman Rushdie recently pointed out in Jyllands-Posten, we have quite a challenge on our hands. Attributing a thousand inventions to Islam is to give this quite reactionary religion undeserved credit.
While setting up mousetraps in my house some years ago, I made a surprising discovery: Cheese sucks for bait! Raisins, nuts and other more natural food goes down much better.
I'm wondering where the urban myth about mice & cheese originated. It certainly doesn't fit with Danich mice. Possibly the myth could have originated from mice taking a bite or two from the cheese, then running away with a bad taste in the mouth trying to find something they would eat up completely, like nuts etc.
There's a very easy fix for this problem: Remove the '.' from the file name, and the checker won't guess that it's an executable. Recepient puts the '.' back in, and you're all set. Works like a charm.
Linux ain't Unix. It doesn't have the Open Group Unix certification (and probably evolves too rapid for that anyway), and has other sources of inspiration than Unix, like Plan 9.
That for most intents and purposes it acts like a 'Better Unix than Unix' is another matter (see also.sig:) But you're getting a lot more flexibility with Linux, because you can build the kernel and a distribution any way that fits your purpose. I think it makes sense to distinguish old school Unix from GNU/Linux. it shows Linux' billion-$ entrenchment in the enterprise, and a really nice growth rate - in the paid-for installations alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Network Solutions have absolutely no objections against hosting the worst of objectionable material in existence. Guess who hosts .. Hesbollah.org?
http://avideditor.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/us-hizbolla-yes-wilders-no/
This is cowardice, pure and simple. I think we need legilative improvements to protect our freedom of expression. And communication. This includes protecting ISP's from at least some kinds of legal responsibility for their contents - Common Carrier (see Wikipedia) seems a suitable model.
Defending Civil Liberties has never been more important. It's so good to see at least _some_ individuals standing up for this.
"The problem is that religion is inherently *irrational*." Actually, Buddhism is rational. It describes how emotions arise, how to deal with them and gives the tools to do so. People use these tools, and it works. Islam, on the other hand... I've been reading the Islamic scriptures (Quran, Sirat), and am surprised how anyone can pass this off as .. religious? Not only is the level of logic (pah!) and writing vastly inferior to the Bible, the acts described therein (war, plunder, killing, rape, paedophilia, slave trade, genocide against Jews ("Why does this shit always happen to us"), targeted assassinations etc.) so utterly criminal that Islam really shouldn't be recognized as a religion before it clearly asserts that this is *not* a proper example for human behaviour.
The thing about the images in Wikipedia is important. Islam is trying to force its myriad collection of arcane and senseless laws upon us everywhere, and this is but a small step in that direction. That the Wikipedia editors are standing up to this is good and important.
It'll probably be confusing what 'damage' is going to happen. The classic Forman movie "One flew over the Cookoo's nest" did a *LOT* of damage to the psyciatric system, at least in Denmark. Institutions were percieved as making the inmates more nuts, not less, and many of those were simply abolished over the last decades, leaving the mentally ill to live in the normal society and being expected to take care of many basic things themselves. The result, unfortunately, is not a decline in mental illness. What we have instead is an increase in crimes committed by these people, damaging both themselves and their victims in the process. Taking movies for 'documentation' is risky. There are professionals our there, without an agenda to entertain or cause scandal, and they are generally better informed than some movie-instructing wise-guy.
Might it cover GNumeric as well? It has copied every feature from Excel - I even remember the announcement when the implementation was complete.
A friend and I (we both know our nuclear physics) watched the theoretical section in the beginning, pausing at every tricky spot to analyze the details, and decided that the theory is sound.
One particular advantage this device has over the JET/ITER designs is that it immediately accelerates all nuclei to the energy level (some 500 keV) needed for fusion. The torus designs heat a lot of nuclei to a level where the fastest nuclei reach this level and have a reasonable probability of colliding. That takes a lot more energy and engineering to hold such great amounts of plasma.
The pure beauty of his approach using a static electric field to both accelerate the ions and keep the plasma in confinement already makes this a work of art - even if it would turn out not to be commercially viable for whatever reason.
As for him just giving up on funding, I give him the benefit of doubt. He's a scientist, not a fundraiser, and it's hard to convince bureaucrats to do anything risky. He's delivered the science, the prototypes and has described it in patents. Now it's up to someone else to pick up the lead and continue into the real engineering of his. It's true that the Iraq war eats up budgets like crazy (that war might qualify for the 'Stupidity of the Century' award, once we get that far). It also delayed reinforcement of the New Orleans dikes.
MeThinks that either some corporate investor (Google is not a bad idea) or some non-US country will pick this up and do the practical work. $200 million is peanuts in this context. It's what you'll pay for a new stretch of motorway, a large concert hall, ship or whatever the local or federal government decides to build this week. Even if there was just one in a hundred % chance that this will work, it should be tried and tested.
That looks like something an updated device driver could deal with..? But if it causes trouble for playback on PC's, I'll most certainly prefer a ripped copy.
Strange. In my book, Alpha means feature complete, beta means most things should be workable, and RC means that bugs are hard to find.
Looks like Windows Update will be the saving grace of Vista...
But it turns out they're putting *Windows* first?
Wold is strange...
You'll definately want to use MPEG2 Variable Bitrate encoding. That's a two-pass encode, it takes its time, but the result is worth it. I managed to get more than two hours of lecture recordings on one 4.7 GB DVD, with perfectly fine quality. Your 1½ hour should fit well. Since you have 1/3 less playtime than I had, you could increase the average bitrate (or the audio bitrate) to maximize quality.
I used Ulead DVD authoring products - Movie Factory for simple stuff, DVD Workshop for complex. They both did a fine job of encoding, and would do so today as well. It's a couple years ago, and even better products may be on the market now, haven't followed it closely.
Good luck!
My impression is that TV is losing out to the computer itself, especially for the elite who'd otherwise be early adaptors. Want to follow the latest news on, say, Israel? Go online. Want to find documentation that contradicts the Big Media stories? Dig in online. Have documentation to undermine the Hizbollah stories? Post it, and the world may even react. The combination of Internet _and_ the traditional newspapers is making TV irrelevant for me. Sure, it makes sense to watch the news occasionally, but that's it. To watch a movie I pull out a DVD from the shelf. Real movies are usually much better than the never-ending TV series. We have more channels and more entertainment on TV than ever, but that only makes the good stuff harder to find. Or, quite likely, there is less good stuff than before, because many of the viewers are gone, and the in-depth documentaries are getting ratings so low it's not worth producing them. While a killer surround system makes sense for watching movies, I find no use for a media PC. Only if it'd also take care of the actual watching so I wouldn't have to waste time on that (thanks D.A. :)
Yes. He's this wonderful piece of unshakeable honesty in the center of a hurricane of commercial interest. He does a wonderful job of holding things together in his inimitable personal style.
Yet, even if he (god forbid!) got hit by a brick tomorrow, Linux wouldn't be handicapped much. It's the best of both worlds :)
On the other hand, I'm always in favor of more women in my environment :)
I have asked my boss several times if we could skip testing on Win98, and due to our polls, his reply is still 'No'. It's still something like 5-10% of our readership, which means 5000 -> 10.000 people. That's an awful lot of unhappy people to handle on the phone...
I beg to differ. In Denmark, approx. 25 % of our electricity comes from windmills.
Unfortunately we've hit a point of diminishing returns, due to the simple fact that the wind is not always available...
What's the problem with monoliths, that they are supposed to be less marketable? Ever since 1968, Monoliths have been doing great!
The storm of Office 11, WinNT 6.0 and other super surprises? Myself, I believe they're just silent, and can be ignored for a while. Please post an article when something interesting happens...
Why?
Because, being a software controlled radio, having an open source driver would permit many tricks banned by the FCC - like using unlicensed frequency bands, monitoring military traffic etc.
No easy solution in sight.
Lots, of course, to little effect. More will come The Apple Advantage is that they have a solid reputation for doing the 'Just works' thing and getting it right. That they seem to have some very able designers doesn't hurt, either. Showing off a brand new iPod is plain attractive :)
My take is that the iPod reaches a market segment that cares less about features/capacity for the money and more about having the cool-factor, and the fact the the iPod is so well designed that it never (well, as perceived...) lets you down.
OTOH, on a day like this, Everything you know is wrong.
That's interesting. The Jews expected that, and Satan (or was that really Judas?) tempted Jesus to do just that. My brother quoted an esoteric scripture stating that if Jesus rejected being a political leader, people would turn against him. Which is sortof what happened.
All speculation of course, but just wonder if he had accepted that challenge...? Would have been an extremely interesting twist of history. Jesus (IMO) had the compassion to become a great leader, had he bothered to get his hands dirty. Then perhaps there'd be no opening for Mohammad to set his bloody precedents, either.
OK, that was pretty hypothetical :)
I also believe it should be 'In spite of Islam' instead. Most of the inventions are either borrowed from other cultures (like numerals), invented by people who happened to live in the contries they conqurored, or done by single individuals not reaching the masses. If you look at the Islamic countries today, it is very clear that they do not permit science, reason and open debate to flourish. While a thousand (and one) may sound like a lot, great western inventors like Thomas Edison came up with similar numbers over a much shorter stretch of time.
Just like terrorism isn't "Islamic"
But on the record of Islam and terrorism, that's a different story. It is named 'Islamic terrorism' because the purpetrators draw on Islam and the will of Allah to blow up people. As long as the islamic countries, organisations and leaders do not systematically denounce terrorism, it is reasonable to assume the two are connected.
As Salman Rushdie recently pointed out in Jyllands-Posten, we have quite a challenge on our hands. Attributing a thousand inventions to Islam is to give this quite reactionary religion undeserved credit.
I'm wondering where the urban myth about mice & cheese originated. It certainly doesn't fit with Danich mice. Possibly the myth could have originated from mice taking a bite or two from the cheese, then running away with a bad taste in the mouth trying to find something they would eat up completely, like nuts etc.
There's a very easy fix for this problem: Remove the '.' from the file name, and the checker won't guess that it's an executable. Recepient puts the '.' back in, and you're all set. Works like a charm.
Linux ain't Unix. It doesn't have the Open Group Unix certification (and probably evolves too rapid for that anyway), and has other sources of inspiration than Unix, like Plan 9.
That for most intents and purposes it acts like a 'Better Unix than Unix' is another matter (see also