I just bought a 12" iBook as my new laptop, which I guess makes me a switcher (except that I don't take dope like in their ads). Apple has me absolutely sold on their hardware: Clean, light, beautifully designed, great battery life, and, as a most welcome change from x86 laptops, absolutely silent. There are a few annoying things, of course (the single mouse button and lack of a line-in jack, for example), but if you are looking for a new portable, I suggest you take a serious look at the iBook.
Mac OS X is another story. I've been using it exclusively now for a few weeks while I'm waiting for the new version of Yellow Dog Linux to come out, and after all the hype, I am somewhat underwhelmed. Even when you consider that part of the "Steve's Way" philosophy is not to confuse the user with options, lots of things are missing. Mail doesn't have TLS (I use Thunderbird), and once you get tired of the cute effects, you find you can't turn most of them off (windows won't just close, they always have to have an "effect"). Mac OS X is cute and flashy, but when you want to settle down for serious work, I'm afraid KDE does it better.
And this is where I think Apple has lots of untapped market potential. There is a enormous frustration among Linux users about the lack of a good portable platform for the penguin -- I for one will never buy another Toshiba, for example -- and Apple can deliver. Just a little help here and there, and they could probably get establish their iBooks / Powerbooks as the portable platform of choice for the increasing number of Linux users.
And then because of the coming of World Domination (c), they would never have to worry about profits, and we would never have to read these articles again.
Anybody who things that computer games are brainless hasn't watched the face on somebody who has never played Civilization or Call to Power before and is having the rules explained to them. Yeah, its just a simple little game, sort of like Scrabble...
Germany already has such laws, and the ISPs have been screaming about the costs ever since. The government's reaction: Tough. If you don't like it , go sell Bratwurst instead.
The sick thing about all Internet wiretapping is that when asked why this is required, the cops always just say "child pornography", and everybody rolls over; the media has created the impression that about every second byte transmitted has something to do with child porn. Between our War on Terrorism (With an Occasional Aside for Oil) and child porn Internet hysteria, we have two beautiful excuses to slowly rip up the Bill of Rights, piece by piece.
This is too little, too late from Intel: I have already bought an iBook instead of the IBM ThinkPad I had been considering -- and yes, the Centrino driver problem was high on my list of reasons to switch to an Apple platform. So far (two weeks), no problems, very happy, love my little white box. Can't wait for the next version of Yellow Dog Linux to come out.
Stupid of Intel to wait so long, stupid of companies like IBM to let them drag their feet: Other vendors have pretty portables, too. If things stay as cool as they are, I'll be sticking with Apple as a hardware base for Linux.
Reading this YADAX (yet another discussion about X) here and problems with same, I remembered that a while ago a bunch of people set out to write a replacement, first called "Berlin", later Fresco. But the "latest news" on their web page is about ten months old. Is Fresco dead or just resting after a prolonged squawk?
So why should anyone in their right mind want to run Linux on a Mac, unless (s)he is a masochist?
After thinking about it some more, let me add a more general answer to my
first quick one about virtual desktops: Linux gives you room to grow.
Apple has one -- admittedly good -- way, "The Steve Way", which is optically pleasing and nice for beginning users or people who don't want to do more than surf and answer an email or two. However, once you are more familiar with the computer, once you want to go beyond what you know, you are stuck: The Steve Way leaves no room for growth (unless you use third-party add-ons, which in the Apple universe are as often as not amazingly expensive commercial shareware programs), because there is one and only one path on The Steve Way. Apple assumes you will stay at the same skill level that you were when you started out, and that you are unable to learn.
Your average Mac OS X users does seem happy with this -- see the answers I got to my first post about users being easily confused. Some of us, however, are not: The Linux desktop KDE will let you use only one mouse button and turn off virtual screens (to stick with the most obvious examples) if you feel that your users are not ready for them, giving you the Mac OS X level. However, once they feel they are more secure, you can enable those features and let them be more productive, or more of an individual -- they get a choice.
Apple is a lot of things, most of them good, but not very many of them are about having a choice.
Don't get me wrong: I have in fact just ordered a new 12" iBook, and I recommend Apples to anybody who just wants their machine to work. But personally, I'm going to dual boot with Linux ASAP. Some of us just outgrow the The Steve Way.
"Shareware". Nice, but that was not what I am talking about -- of course there are add ons to OS X for virtual desktops, just like there are for Windows. I was talking about the shipped system, where Linux desktops such as KDE or Gnome have the feature by default.
Adjusting to OS X is hard for people who believe that the OS shouldn't be targeted at the least capable user anymore -- this is 2004, after all, not 1980. People grow up with computers. They can cope with their mouse having more than one button. They are -- on average (!) -- not stupid.
Re:What's Joss going to do now?
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WB Cancels Angel
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· Score: 1
In a year and a half, he's gone from having 3 shows on television (Firefly, Buffy, Angel) to none.
I think this is part of the problem: Trying to do too much at once. Season 7 of "Buffy" just had the stink all over it of a show that its creator couldn't be bothered to care about any more, and yes, I'm still upset about that.
Reminds me of "Star Trek": You get too many things going at once, and none of them turn out to be any good anymore...
No virtual desktops. It is completely beyond me why such a simple feature is missing; clever as Expose might be, it is just a crutch for missing virtual desktops.
It ends by describing the pain of the developer[s] in seeing their title pirated: "It was a dagger in the hearts of guys who worked 12 to 14 hours a day [on Halo]... We're on an emotional high, and it all comes crashing down."
Maybe I don't understand the motivation of these guys, but wouldn't your aim be to make the best game possible? Wouldn't you feel a certain pride that it is so good that people are actually stealing it? Don't get me wrong, I'd be pissed, too, but if they are only doing it for the money, maybe they should look for a job where they can get more of it for less work.
So they'll begin to outsource to some other, cheaper, country.
Yes, some nice totalitarian place like China or even better Burma, where we don't have to worry about wages because we can just decide by law that this isn't a problem. China might have a partial free economy, but they still have de facto slave labor any time they want it; and Burma doesn't even pretend. Just teach them how to program, and nobody can go lower, anywhere, ever. "Will code for food" is exactly what we're talking about, maybe even "Will code to stay alive".
This is the reason why nobody is even thinking about touching the Burmese government, a really, really ugly piece of work that is right up there with the so-called "Axis of Evil" members: The country is too important for the world economy. When Iraq is finally a happy democracy, the Iranian women wear hot pants on the streets of Teheran, and North Korea's baseball league is beating the crap out of Japan's, Burmas children will still be making our footballs and sneakers sixteen hours a day.
Imagine if everyone on earth was able to combine their resources and technology with no political, religious, or cultural boundries. I reel at the idea of what we could accomplish if everyone was united to one idea.
You didn't mean it this way, I know, but that kind of uniformity is just what our good friend Osama bin Laden is aiming for: Once God (his), one Nation (his), one Vision (his). No thanks, even if it is "mine" instead of "his". Maybe 150+ countries are a bit much, but a world government concentrates power in a way that makes me nervous -- ask your average German or Brit what they think of the European Union, and you'll see what I mean.
Since Europe said no to pure software patents (despite the stupid headline of the Slashdot posting), does this mean that only IE in the U.S. would be affected?
I have always said: The psycho American legal system is turning out more and more of a liability. Wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the last act of the Soviet Union was to establish the patent office...then again, in the Soviet Union, the patent office...
I have a fantastic pen I got for my birthday a few years ago that has a cushioned grip -- some sort of silicon fluid. I usually get pressure problems quickly when writing, but with this pen, no such thing.
Ah, the name, yes. I was afraid you were going to ask. "Senso" or something to that effect...
... about some great new surprising feature, it was Master of Orion 3's Harvester race. Man, and what a great game that turned out to be.
Common, people, this isn't a film or a novel. If they are unwilling to discuss the concept with the gaming public at large, it sounds very much like their afraid it is going to be a shitty idea. If they believe in the multiplayer mode, they'd be screaming it from the rooftops to build up suspense.
Oh yes Sir! The finest politicians money can
buy! The guy with the most bucks wins.
Er, no. You are thinking of the U.S. legal system. In the political system, you need a certain amount of money, but after a that level is reached, it can go either way.
You, Sir, are a troll, and an Anonymous Coward to boot, but I've got some time on my hands, and there are some missunderstandings here that could spread.
First, "democracy" and "republic" are technical terms here. A democracy gives the population and enormous share in saying things. A republic has a limited participation. For example, the U.S. lets you elect judges, something that is unheard of in most of Europe. You can elect police chiefs in some parts of the country, etc., etc. In Europe, only the Swiss come close to have this kind of freedom, and it is true I should have pointed this out.
The best example is the death penalty [for the record: I am against it]. The reason why Europe doesn't have the death penalty while some U.S. states do is not because the Europeans are morally superior, but because they are not allowed any say on the matter. Basically, the governments of France and Germany and Italy are telling the population: We don't care if you want to kill criminals, you ain't going to get it, because we are a republic and you don't get to decide these sort of things. In the U.S., as a democracy, people do get to decide, and in some places they decide they want the death penalty.
The U.S. did in fact start off as a republic, which is why there are a lot of quotes to that effect like the Pledge. For example, the original blueprint for Senate is basically the same model as Germany's Bundesrat today: The states decide who gets to sit. But the U.S. has evolved into a democracy: The members of the U.S. Senate are elected by the people today. Is this a good thing? Good question. Look at California.
Anyway, note that I didn't say that republics are less free than democracies or that the people there have less rights than other countries -- given the laws passed in the U.S. after 9/11, there is no way any an American could say such a thing (a right to privacy, anyone? A trip to Guantanamo?).
What you can do in the U.S. system far better than in any European one I know of is throw the bastards out. Because U.S. politicians are elected as people, if you don't like the guy, he is gone in six years max. Most European politicians are elected via their party; if you want to get rid of them, you have vote for a completely different party. If he is high up in the party, you probably won't even get him out that way as long as the party isn't thrown out of parliament completely. Fat chance. Pity the Europeans: When they watch their news at night, they know that they will probably be seing those same faces for the rest of their lives, and there is not a damn thing they can do against it.
This is what my last line refered to: The population in the U.S. could have a far greater influence on policy than possible in Europe -- if they wanted to, and so they could get a lot changed.
Sadly, Americans don't go to elections that often, and so we end up where we are today.
(I realize that my subject line might sound cynical to those out of work; sorry for that.)
There is actually an entire movement of people that have discovered this.
There is at least an entire continent that has discovered this: Europe. Industrialized nations all of them, the top nations on all quality of life rankings, little violence, though a bit crowded. Now check the
hours they work. Now realize that, by law, they have weeks and weeks
of vacation time -- if I remember correctly, it is 20 days by federal law
for Germany. You have 35 hour work weeks in a lot of places. You have paid
maternity leave and sick leave. You can't be fired at the drop of a hat.
Why does this work? You don't buy every piece of crap that some ad throws
in your face. Consumer spending is two-thirds of the U.S. economy. In
Germany (to stick with the example), it is about one third. You don't pay your CEOs so much money that a company's pay chart has to have a logarithmic scale: Read up on what the Daimler managers at DaimlerChrysler get and what the Chrysler managers get. Try to explain -- with a straight face -- why some Chrysler manager who couldn't keep his company from being de facto swallowed gets more money than they guy who is now his boss.
It used to be that the U.S. economists pointed to all of this and said,
yeah, sure, you have universal medical care while we have children who
can't get antibiotics, you are home with your families while we
are putting in more hours than the Japanese, and you are getting tan on
Spain's beaches five weeks out of every year while we don't dare take those pitiful few days of vacation we have. But your unemployment is high and not coming down.
Well, guess what: This is basically going to be a jobless recovery. Maybe
some of Europe's prices can't compete with the U.S., but nobody can compete
with India, and even India can't compete with China, or
government-sponsored slave labor in Burma. Your job is ending up in Asia just like everybody else's. And do you really think that it is going to come back in our lifetime? Fool.
Tell me again why you are spending all that time at work while those
Europeans are at home after 35 hours and playing with their children. What is the justification? More to the point, what is wrong with you? Why are you supporting, maybe even defending this system instead of trying to change it?
Remember when Tyler Durden told you that you are not your job?
Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need.
Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what
they really don't need.
Fight Club, book (which this quote is from) and film, are so hated by the establishment not because of the violence, but because the CEOs and
such ilk are deathly afraid that the American middle class will figure out that it isn't worth it -- that the Europeans (though politically they might be loathsome cowards), might have the right idea here. That you don't need to by the latest gadget,
follow the newest fad, buy the newest gizmo. They might decide that quality of life is more important than blowing their paycheck on crap just to keep the GDP up by one more decimal point. They might decide they don't want to be bombarded with ads morning, noon, and night.
They might not want to make their carreers the center of their lives anymore. They might not want to define themselves by the job they have. They might not be content anymore to start living only after they have stopped working.
It's you choice, really. The U.S. is just about the only real democracy on the planet (ironically, all of those Europeans are living in republics). You can change the system, and get this country's priorities straight -- once you have gotten yours straight.
Finally, somebody in the U.S. has the sense to stop pretending that spam is a technological problem. I do not get any repeat any spam from German companies because unsolicited ads of any form are simply banned. This is the way to go.
It should not be legal to make money with somebody elses resources without their permission. It's that simple, folks.
He can't pull any more profits out of Germany. Australia, Austria, and Poland are lining up to gag him in their countries. Red Hat's trying to do the same in the U.S. Of course, none of this matters much as long as no court decisions are reached within the next 3 quarters.
Which again proves the point that a large part of this problem is the slow, outdated, 18th century U.S. legal system that lets SCO get away with this crap for just about ever. Any other country, they get bitch slapped by the first court that takes a look at their "facts"...more and more, the American legal system is becomming a liability.
It is beyond me why anybody would want to pay that amount of money for a Thin Client -- unless of course they can play tax games this way. The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) would seem to blow this out of the water. At LinuxWorld in San Francisco the LTSP project picked up an award for "Best Open Source Project", and for good reason.
Instead of going to HP, go out and get yourself a AMD K-6 or something similar, 64 MByte of RAM, and good graphics card from Ebay. If you have money to spend, spend it on a good monitor -- get DVI if you can, the difference to VGA is spectacular. Now, install the LTSP software.
I have one of these setups at home and it is beautiful. When I want to use the terminal, I hit the on switch, when I'm done, I log off and turn it off. There is no hard disk, no great heat source that requires big loud fans, and once it is set up, zero maintainance.
Ah well, there is one born every minute, as they say, and HP probably has all kinds of old hardware they're getting rid of this way, too...
Sorry if I seem cynical, but democracy only works if more than half the population makes intelligent decisions.
Which in fact is why in fact the U.S. was supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. It should be noted at this time that in fact most so-called democracies are really republics (almost all of Europe, in fact), and that in this case, their legal systems are doing a far better job of stopping SCO's rampage in its tracks.
The U.S. has slowly been turned into a democracy against the wishes of the founding fathers; judge for yourself if this is really a good thing.
...to see at least one feature: The ice cap at the (uh) South Pole. I have a rather inexpensive, no-name type that my wife bought me on sale -- no frills like counterweights or what the real ones have, and it shakes like crazy when you try to focus -- but after spending about half an hour fumbling along in the darkness at three in the morning, there it was. Beautiful.
One poster mentioned software for star gazing. Go with kstars by Jason Harris et al. Cool graphics, neat features, and the next version will control your telescope for you (if your telescope supports this, of course, unless your computer has SkyNet support). Part of the KDE desktop.
What fooling around with telescopes has taught me is how unbelievably limited our general education is. Consider yourself well educated? Well then. Go out and look up at the Moon tonight -- you've seen it hundreds, thousands of times, right? Now name the features. Which is the Sea of Tranquility? Where is Tycho (now that is really easy)? Even worse are the stars: Yes, you can find the Polar Star (Australians and Neu Zealanders are excused), but then? Name ten stars, any ten stars.
If you are anything like me, you know the different classes of Quake II monsters better than the Moon. Somewhere, somehow, that bothers me; but then maybe I've just been staying up too late at night...
Because of its insanely high temperature, the coffee was a real danger.
Water -- which I'm told McDonald's coffee is mostly made out of -- does not get much hotter than 100 deg C, because that is where it has its so-called "boiling point". After that, it is called "steam" and can't be packaged in cups, because it is what we call a "gas". So the liquid in question was most certainly not hot enough to be "capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle", as you claim, though you probably could get second degree burns. Liquid lead will go through you like, well, hot lead, but water-based beverages? Nah.
The basic legal problem is a different one anyway (and this is where we get back on topic): The U.S. legal system assumes you are a moron, where every other legal system on the planet assumes you are of normal intelligence. So you get to sue people for stuff in the U.S. that would be laughed out of a lawyer's office in the rest of the world, let alone out of court. The anger people feel with this example is not how hot the coffee really was, but that this case made it to court at all.
This is the same situation as with SCO: The German courts have already told SCO to put up or shut up (and boy, did they shut up quick), whereas the U.S. legal system still has its finger up their past the second knuckle.
The U.S. has an 18th Century anachronistic legal system that just doesn't work anymore, and in a country where every politician is a lawyer (or an actor), that isn't going to change. The rest of the world have every right to make fun of us.
...and why everybody here is swooning, this is what you have to know about Dennis M. Ritchie:
C was originally designed for and implemented on the UNIX operating system on the DEC PDP-11, by Dennis Ritchie.
This line is from a book Ritchie and this other fellow Brian W. Kernighan wrote in 1978 called The C Programming Language. Historically, it is an important book for computing the same way that the Canterbury Tales by Chaucer are for the English language.
Think of it as SCO running around and saying they have some cool piece of legal reasoning, and somebody points out hat it was actually first formulated by Moses. Or some mathematician comes along and says he discovered something really neat about triangles and lines and then somebody points out Pythagoras did it first. Or a pharmaceutical company is claiming the invented a certain drug, just to be told that it was first used by Paracelsus.
Yeah, it's that big. And even if this turns out to mean jack in the legal world, having SCO claiming they created something that goes back to the inventor of the C language itself is something that even the propular press can understand is bull. From a PR point of view, this is not shooting yourself in the foot anymore, it is taking your legs of with a BFG9000.
This is in fact German, though it does sound somewhat strange. Die Sinne are in fact the senses, and loeschen is to delete or clear. The oe is really a umlaut (two dots above the vowel), but I can't get Slashdot's US-centric rendering machine to display it. What is usually a sign of correct German is when the transcription of the umlaut is done correctly like this, which is rare enough -- compare all of the ubergeeks who should really all be uebergeeks. Also, it is not California uber alles, but Kalifornien ueber alles. But I think Mr. Schwarzenegger will get that right.
Anyway. The "s" in the middle of the word is a Fugen-s that connects word parts the same way a dash does; usually, if you use a dash, you don't need an "s", though the rules can be complicated. In theory, you have a legal noun now (das Loeschen), but you probably would say die Sinnesloeschung instead. It isn't exactly wrong this way, but is sounds strange.
If they had wanted a cool name, they should have gone for Sinneserloeschung, which is more poetic (IMHO) and implies that the senses slowly die. Or, of course, there is always Sinnestod, the "death of the senses" -- I'd have gone with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X is another story. I've been using it exclusively now for a few weeks while I'm waiting for the new version of Yellow Dog Linux to come out, and after all the hype, I am somewhat underwhelmed. Even when you consider that part of the "Steve's Way" philosophy is not to confuse the user with options, lots of things are missing. Mail doesn't have TLS (I use Thunderbird), and once you get tired of the cute effects, you find you can't turn most of them off (windows won't just close, they always have to have an "effect"). Mac OS X is cute and flashy, but when you want to settle down for serious work, I'm afraid KDE does it better.
And this is where I think Apple has lots of untapped market potential. There is a enormous frustration among Linux users about the lack of a good portable platform for the penguin -- I for one will never buy another Toshiba, for example -- and Apple can deliver. Just a little help here and there, and they could probably get establish their iBooks / Powerbooks as the portable platform of choice for the increasing number of Linux users.
And then because of the coming of World Domination (c), they would never have to worry about profits, and we would never have to read these articles again.
The sick thing about all Internet wiretapping is that when asked why this is required, the cops always just say "child pornography", and everybody rolls over; the media has created the impression that about every second byte transmitted has something to do with child porn. Between our War on Terrorism (With an Occasional Aside for Oil) and child porn Internet hysteria, we have two beautiful excuses to slowly rip up the Bill of Rights, piece by piece.
Here comes the next shred.
Stupid of Intel to wait so long, stupid of companies like IBM to let them drag their feet: Other vendors have pretty portables, too. If things stay as cool as they are, I'll be sticking with Apple as a hardware base for Linux.
Reading this YADAX (yet another discussion about X) here and problems with same, I remembered that a while ago a bunch of people set out to write a replacement, first called "Berlin", later Fresco. But the "latest news" on their web page is about ten months old. Is Fresco dead or just resting after a prolonged squawk?
After thinking about it some more, let me add a more general answer to my first quick one about virtual desktops: Linux gives you room to grow.
Apple has one -- admittedly good -- way, "The Steve Way", which is optically pleasing and nice for beginning users or people who don't want to do more than surf and answer an email or two. However, once you are more familiar with the computer, once you want to go beyond what you know, you are stuck: The Steve Way leaves no room for growth (unless you use third-party add-ons, which in the Apple universe are as often as not amazingly expensive commercial shareware programs), because there is one and only one path on The Steve Way. Apple assumes you will stay at the same skill level that you were when you started out, and that you are unable to learn.
Your average Mac OS X users does seem happy with this -- see the answers I got to my first post about users being easily confused. Some of us, however, are not: The Linux desktop KDE will let you use only one mouse button and turn off virtual screens (to stick with the most obvious examples) if you feel that your users are not ready for them, giving you the Mac OS X level. However, once they feel they are more secure, you can enable those features and let them be more productive, or more of an individual -- they get a choice.
Apple is a lot of things, most of them good, but not very many of them are about having a choice.
Don't get me wrong: I have in fact just ordered a new 12" iBook, and I recommend Apples to anybody who just wants their machine to work. But personally, I'm going to dual boot with Linux ASAP. Some of us just outgrow the The Steve Way.
Adjusting to OS X is hard for people who believe that the OS shouldn't be targeted at the least capable user anymore -- this is 2004, after all, not 1980. People grow up with computers. They can cope with their mouse having more than one button. They are -- on average (!) -- not stupid.
I think this is part of the problem: Trying to do too much at once. Season 7 of "Buffy" just had the stink all over it of a show that its creator couldn't be bothered to care about any more, and yes, I'm still upset about that.
Reminds me of "Star Trek": You get too many things going at once, and none of them turn out to be any good anymore...
No virtual desktops. It is completely beyond me why such a simple feature is missing; clever as Expose might be, it is just a crutch for missing virtual desktops.
Maybe I don't understand the motivation of these guys, but wouldn't your aim be to make the best game possible? Wouldn't you feel a certain pride that it is so good that people are actually stealing it? Don't get me wrong, I'd be pissed, too, but if they are only doing it for the money, maybe they should look for a job where they can get more of it for less work.
Yes, some nice totalitarian place like China or even better Burma, where we don't have to worry about wages because we can just decide by law that this isn't a problem. China might have a partial free economy, but they still have de facto slave labor any time they want it; and Burma doesn't even pretend. Just teach them how to program, and nobody can go lower, anywhere, ever. "Will code for food" is exactly what we're talking about, maybe even "Will code to stay alive".
This is the reason why nobody is even thinking about touching the Burmese government, a really, really ugly piece of work that is right up there with the so-called "Axis of Evil" members: The country is too important for the world economy. When Iraq is finally a happy democracy, the Iranian women wear hot pants on the streets of Teheran, and North Korea's baseball league is beating the crap out of Japan's, Burmas children will still be making our footballs and sneakers sixteen hours a day.
You didn't mean it this way, I know, but that kind of uniformity is just what our good friend Osama bin Laden is aiming for: Once God (his), one Nation (his), one Vision (his). No thanks, even if it is "mine" instead of "his". Maybe 150+ countries are a bit much, but a world government concentrates power in a way that makes me nervous -- ask your average German or Brit what they think of the European Union, and you'll see what I mean.
I have always said: The psycho American legal system is turning out more and more of a liability. Wouldn't surprise me if it turned out that the last act of the Soviet Union was to establish the patent office...then again, in the Soviet Union, the patent office...
Ah, the name, yes. I was afraid you were going to ask. "Senso" or something to that effect...
Common, people, this isn't a film or a novel. If they are unwilling to discuss the concept with the gaming public at large, it sounds very much like their afraid it is going to be a shitty idea. If they believe in the multiplayer mode, they'd be screaming it from the rooftops to build up suspense.
This doesn't sound good at all.
Er, no. You are thinking of the U.S. legal system. In the political system, you need a certain amount of money, but after a that level is reached, it can go either way.
You, Sir, are a troll, and an Anonymous Coward to boot, but I've got some time on my hands, and there are some missunderstandings here that could spread.
First, "democracy" and "republic" are technical terms here. A democracy gives the population and enormous share in saying things. A republic has a limited participation. For example, the U.S. lets you elect judges, something that is unheard of in most of Europe. You can elect police chiefs in some parts of the country, etc., etc. In Europe, only the Swiss come close to have this kind of freedom, and it is true I should have pointed this out.
The best example is the death penalty [for the record: I am against it]. The reason why Europe doesn't have the death penalty while some U.S. states do is not because the Europeans are morally superior, but because they are not allowed any say on the matter. Basically, the governments of France and Germany and Italy are telling the population: We don't care if you want to kill criminals, you ain't going to get it, because we are a republic and you don't get to decide these sort of things. In the U.S., as a democracy, people do get to decide, and in some places they decide they want the death penalty.
The U.S. did in fact start off as a republic, which is why there are a lot of quotes to that effect like the Pledge. For example, the original blueprint for Senate is basically the same model as Germany's Bundesrat today: The states decide who gets to sit. But the U.S. has evolved into a democracy: The members of the U.S. Senate are elected by the people today. Is this a good thing? Good question. Look at California.
Anyway, note that I didn't say that republics are less free than democracies or that the people there have less rights than other countries -- given the laws passed in the U.S. after 9/11, there is no way any an American could say such a thing (a right to privacy, anyone? A trip to Guantanamo?).
What you can do in the U.S. system far better than in any European one I know of is throw the bastards out. Because U.S. politicians are elected as people, if you don't like the guy, he is gone in six years max. Most European politicians are elected via their party; if you want to get rid of them, you have vote for a completely different party. If he is high up in the party, you probably won't even get him out that way as long as the party isn't thrown out of parliament completely. Fat chance. Pity the Europeans: When they watch their news at night, they know that they will probably be seing those same faces for the rest of their lives, and there is not a damn thing they can do against it.
This is what my last line refered to: The population in the U.S. could have a far greater influence on policy than possible in Europe -- if they wanted to, and so they could get a lot changed.
Sadly, Americans don't go to elections that often, and so we end up where we are today.
There is actually an entire movement of people that have discovered this.
There is at least an entire continent that has discovered this: Europe. Industrialized nations all of them, the top nations on all quality of life rankings, little violence, though a bit crowded. Now check the hours they work. Now realize that, by law, they have weeks and weeks of vacation time -- if I remember correctly, it is 20 days by federal law for Germany. You have 35 hour work weeks in a lot of places. You have paid maternity leave and sick leave. You can't be fired at the drop of a hat.
Why does this work? You don't buy every piece of crap that some ad throws in your face. Consumer spending is two-thirds of the U.S. economy. In Germany (to stick with the example), it is about one third. You don't pay your CEOs so much money that a company's pay chart has to have a logarithmic scale: Read up on what the Daimler managers at DaimlerChrysler get and what the Chrysler managers get. Try to explain -- with a straight face -- why some Chrysler manager who couldn't keep his company from being de facto swallowed gets more money than they guy who is now his boss.
It used to be that the U.S. economists pointed to all of this and said, yeah, sure, you have universal medical care while we have children who can't get antibiotics, you are home with your families while we are putting in more hours than the Japanese, and you are getting tan on Spain's beaches five weeks out of every year while we don't dare take those pitiful few days of vacation we have. But your unemployment is high and not coming down.
Well, guess what: This is basically going to be a jobless recovery. Maybe some of Europe's prices can't compete with the U.S., but nobody can compete with India, and even India can't compete with China, or government-sponsored slave labor in Burma. Your job is ending up in Asia just like everybody else's. And do you really think that it is going to come back in our lifetime? Fool.
Tell me again why you are spending all that time at work while those Europeans are at home after 35 hours and playing with their children. What is the justification? More to the point, what is wrong with you? Why are you supporting, maybe even defending this system instead of trying to change it?
Remember when Tyler Durden told you that you are not your job?
Fight Club, book (which this quote is from) and film, are so hated by the establishment not because of the violence, but because the CEOs and such ilk are deathly afraid that the American middle class will figure out that it isn't worth it -- that the Europeans (though politically they might be loathsome cowards), might have the right idea here. That you don't need to by the latest gadget, follow the newest fad, buy the newest gizmo. They might decide that quality of life is more important than blowing their paycheck on crap just to keep the GDP up by one more decimal point. They might decide they don't want to be bombarded with ads morning, noon, and night.They might not want to make their carreers the center of their lives anymore. They might not want to define themselves by the job they have. They might not be content anymore to start living only after they have stopped working.
It's you choice, really. The U.S. is just about the only real democracy on the planet (ironically, all of those Europeans are living in republics). You can change the system, and get this country's priorities straight -- once you have gotten yours straight.
It should not be legal to make money with somebody elses resources without their permission. It's that simple, folks.
Which again proves the point that a large part of this problem is the slow, outdated, 18th century U.S. legal system that lets SCO get away with this crap for just about ever. Any other country, they get bitch slapped by the first court that takes a look at their "facts"...more and more, the American legal system is becomming a liability.
Instead of going to HP, go out and get yourself a AMD K-6 or something similar, 64 MByte of RAM, and good graphics card from Ebay. If you have money to spend, spend it on a good monitor -- get DVI if you can, the difference to VGA is spectacular. Now, install the LTSP software.
I have one of these setups at home and it is beautiful. When I want to use the terminal, I hit the on switch, when I'm done, I log off and turn it off. There is no hard disk, no great heat source that requires big loud fans, and once it is set up, zero maintainance.
Ah well, there is one born every minute, as they say, and HP probably has all kinds of old hardware they're getting rid of this way, too...
Which in fact is why in fact the U.S. was supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. It should be noted at this time that in fact most so-called democracies are really republics (almost all of Europe, in fact), and that in this case, their legal systems are doing a far better job of stopping SCO's rampage in its tracks.
The U.S. has slowly been turned into a democracy against the wishes of the founding fathers; judge for yourself if this is really a good thing.
One poster mentioned software for star gazing. Go with kstars by Jason Harris et al. Cool graphics, neat features, and the next version will control your telescope for you (if your telescope supports this, of course, unless your computer has SkyNet support). Part of the KDE desktop.
What fooling around with telescopes has taught me is how unbelievably limited our general education is. Consider yourself well educated? Well then. Go out and look up at the Moon tonight -- you've seen it hundreds, thousands of times, right? Now name the features. Which is the Sea of Tranquility? Where is Tycho (now that is really easy)? Even worse are the stars: Yes, you can find the Polar Star (Australians and Neu Zealanders are excused), but then? Name ten stars, any ten stars.
If you are anything like me, you know the different classes of Quake II monsters better than the Moon. Somewhere, somehow, that bothers me; but then maybe I've just been staying up too late at night...
Water -- which I'm told McDonald's coffee is mostly made out of -- does not get much hotter than 100 deg C, because that is where it has its so-called "boiling point". After that, it is called "steam" and can't be packaged in cups, because it is what we call a "gas". So the liquid in question was most certainly not hot enough to be "capable of almost instantaneous destruction of skin, flesh and muscle", as you claim, though you probably could get second degree burns. Liquid lead will go through you like, well, hot lead, but water-based beverages? Nah.
The basic legal problem is a different one anyway (and this is where we get back on topic): The U.S. legal system assumes you are a moron, where every other legal system on the planet assumes you are of normal intelligence. So you get to sue people for stuff in the U.S. that would be laughed out of a lawyer's office in the rest of the world, let alone out of court. The anger people feel with this example is not how hot the coffee really was, but that this case made it to court at all.
This is the same situation as with SCO: The German courts have already told SCO to put up or shut up (and boy, did they shut up quick), whereas the U.S. legal system still has its finger up their past the second knuckle.
The U.S. has an 18th Century anachronistic legal system that just doesn't work anymore, and in a country where every politician is a lawyer (or an actor), that isn't going to change. The rest of the world have every right to make fun of us.
More coffee, anyone?
Think of it as SCO running around and saying they have some cool piece of legal reasoning, and somebody points out hat it was actually first formulated by Moses. Or some mathematician comes along and says he discovered something really neat about triangles and lines and then somebody points out Pythagoras did it first. Or a pharmaceutical company is claiming the invented a certain drug, just to be told that it was first used by Paracelsus.
Yeah, it's that big. And even if this turns out to mean jack in the legal world, having SCO claiming they created something that goes back to the inventor of the C language itself is something that even the propular press can understand is bull. From a PR point of view, this is not shooting yourself in the foot anymore, it is taking your legs of with a BFG9000.
Anyway. The "s" in the middle of the word is a Fugen-s that connects word parts the same way a dash does; usually, if you use a dash, you don't need an "s", though the rules can be complicated. In theory, you have a legal noun now (das Loeschen), but you probably would say die Sinnesloeschung instead. It isn't exactly wrong this way, but is sounds strange.
If they had wanted a cool name, they should have gone for Sinneserloeschung, which is more poetic (IMHO) and implies that the senses slowly die. Or, of course, there is always Sinnestod, the "death of the senses" -- I'd have gone with that.