But the Japanese market no longer has the importance it once had. The Xbox did absolutely abyssmal there but has nevertheless sold about the same number of units as the Gamecube. And even now the US and especially the European markets are nowhere near the saturation of the Japanese.
(as an aside I know someone who used to do this for most FPS games for PC, damned if I know why).
You're not dead in the water if you need your second hand for something different (e.g. to drink something or if you need to press a key you can't reach without moving your hand one of the F-keys or the higher numbers come to mind)
The Commission is not elected. It's designated. It's a thrice-removed form of indirect representation, if you prefer
That's why one of my proposals was a commission elected by the people (the constitution has him/her elected by the parliament which should be enough for most as it is the way the heads of government are elected in most of Europe)
I see you favor less control, hence less accountability of EU commissars and regulatory bodies.
No I don't, I think "we need less influence of the national governments on the EU level" which is something completely different. In fact one of the things preventing more accountability of EU institutions is the struggle of national governments to keep their influence. If you have a fair and open system you can't do the kind of deals the council likes so much (Another positive point of the constitution is that council meetings have to be public - well most of them anyways - which would also help in this case).
The main problem of the EU is that it's bureaucratic apparatus is undemocratic, it's democratic institutions powerless and the national governments who would have the power to change that have no incentive to correct the problems because it would reduce their stranglehold on EU policy.
Removing said pressure is not going to change the success rate of voter-hostile lobbyism. But it will remove one of the last incentives for straight behavior.
I hope you understand now that I don't want to remove that pressure I want to replace it with pressure by accountible representatives (because they are elected) loyal more to the EU than the council who don't have a interest in making the EU a scapegoat for unpopular decisions in the member States (GM food is a good example)
Moreover, this is not the only example of the EU bureaucrats pushing a decision in spite of the opposition of the Parliament or the will of (ha ha) us poor taxpaying sods.
This "EU bureaucrats" are representatives of the governments of the member states. If you want to blame somebody blame the idiots you elected.
The same in your story. The people of the EU elected their governments and therefore their foreign ministers who decided to cave in.
Everything absolutely democratical here it just shows that we need less influence of the national governments on the EU level (i.e. more power to the EP and an elected commission) which the constitution wanted to do but the national governments objected half the proposals and the rest won't get through when the constitution is stopped in the British referendum (if the UK actually votes in favor I'm prince Charles)
They're elected just like every national government.
I don't know who "they" are but they're not necessarily elected. But all the people who matter especially in the patent nightmare are (the parliament is elected directly, the council consists of the elected national governments and the commission is appointed by the council and if our British friends are unhappy that the parliament hasn't enough power or that the commission isn't elected by the people, well it was their government that has blocked any reforms in that direction for decades)
And you know what? I believe him, I believe him not because I think he's more trustworthy than the NRA or because I think that he doesn't have an agenda, it's because of this paragraph in his reply:
"Well, guess what. Total number of lawsuits to date against me or my film by the NRA? NONE. That's right, zero. And don't forget for a second that if they could have shut this film down on a technicality they would have. But they didn't and they can't ? because the film is factually solid and above reproach. In fact, we have not been sued by any individual or group over the statements made in "Bowling for Columbine?" Why is that? Because everything we say is true ? and the things that are our opinion, we say so and leave it up to the viewer to decide if our point of view is correct or not for each of them."
If he'd been sued it would have been a major news event especially after the Academy Awards and I've heard nothing about any lawsuit
Actually it's useless against ballistic missiles as it is targeted against small tactical missiles and rockets. Which makes this project actually *useful*
I'm not concerned about some 3rd World dictator launching ICBMs because most dictators value their life and when they start launching nukes they'll be wiped off the face of the planet within 30min.
It makes only sense to attack a target with nuclear weapons if you're
Immune to retaliation (not possible as long as there are 10000s of nukes around - not in the next 30-40 years at least)
Don't value your life and want to die for the cause (then most likely you won't have the infrastructure for ICBMs)
Sure that the attack can't be traced back to you (which makes it useless in most cases because the reason for WMDs is to make a point, you don't make a point if you can't tell your enemy that you just made a point)
The most dangerous scenario would be b) but both b) and c) wouldn't be carried out with a ICBM because it's easier, cheaper and less dangerous (if you aren't one of the major nuclear powers the chance that your ICBM actually hits its target are slim at best) to put your nuke in a container ship it to the US (only a very, very small fraction of the millions of cargo containers entering the US each day are checked) drive it via truck to the city of your joice and kaboom.
Billions of $ are spend to build a system with a very limited usefullness (it's highly specialized completely overengineered for other purposes and it's actual use is confined to a very unlikely scenario with much greater risks being ignored) while there's no money for basic armor upgrades for the troops in Iraq
Now after a long off-topic rant against ballistic missile defense (not completely off-topic as many here don't seem to get the difference) I wanted to say that I think this system is a very good idea. One of the problems today is that with all the Stingers and rocket launchers floating around you can do major damage with a hand-held weapon there's almost no defense against. It is small enough that it's normally impossible to spot the shooter before he's shot. With a system like that if it reacts fast enough to stop such weapons you could guard airports, strategic places in Iraq, Afghanistan, embassies and of course most of Israel
I think he should be punished but I also think that there are some victims (e.g. the UK Coast Guard) which really should know better.
Tomorrow the government lays off all prison guards. Of course it's still a crime to escape from prison but the fscking imbeciles in the government are responsible too.
I don't know the whole story but AFAIK the coast guard lost critical systems because they didn't follow basic security policies (use Windows Update to get critical fixes).
It's like blaming that guy who shot the Archduke for WWI. Did he commit murder? Of course he did. 10mio?
The former is rather noticeable, while the later is the reason we put an embargo on computing technology to certain countries.
Even worse, you need accurate data on previous explosions for valid simulations. The French ran a whole new series of tests to get it. Stealing the data from one of the existing nuclear powers should be as difficult as simply stealing a working nuke.
On the other hand if you've got enough plutonium/u-235 it is possible to build a bomb which should be working even with slight deviations from the optimum
I'd take mandatory id over surveillance cameras any day. With the id I have at least some control over who gets the information and I can't imagine that any government would go through the troubles of tracking my movements by hand when cameras are so much faster and easier.
Great, searched there and read a) that the help is grossly outdated (yeah, I noticed that) and b) that the way to do it in Opera is to edit cookie sites by hand. Wow, I feel so nostalgic
All I want is cookie management a la Mozilla or Konqueror but what I get is the most confusing and complicated control ever created.
e.g. I have set the browser to "ask before accepting cookies" in all browsers I want to see a dialog where I can block all further cookies from that site or accept the cookie respectively.
Now I open a new page with Opera, it displays the dialog a drop-down set on the wrong entry (as Opera doesn't default to the last option chosen as the other two) I then change it to "refuse cookies from this domain". The next time I open the page I get the same cookie alert and then choose "refuse third party cookies from this domain", the next time "refuse third party cookies from this server" and if I'm very, very lucky I only have to choose one last time ("refuse cookies from this server") before being able to surfe this specific site in peace.
How the fsck can I tell opera that I don't want any cookies that page tries to set?
I love Opera, it has some great features but if you need anything more than accepting all cookies and deleting them on exit you're screwed
3) Regarding vietnam and to a lesser extent serbia (and somalia, etc.), the old saying is true: We didn't lose, we left. The US won the vast majority of battles in vietnam, and left for political/public concensus reasons.
To quote Clausewitz:
"War is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."
What was the goal of the US in Vietnam? Stabilizing the South Vietnamese government, preventing a communist Vietnam for fear of a "domino effect" in South-East Asia.
And the goal of the North Vietnamese/Vietcong?
No US in Vietnam and "liberating" the South from the imperialist enemy.
That's wrong. Both were long after the war was won on non-military targets of no strategic value. In the case of Dresden they first bombed all other cities in the region to concentrate as many refugees as possible in one city just to see the amount of damage possible.
We shouldn't forget Tokyo btw. It was the worst bombing of the war with over 125,000 deaths in one night, about the same as both atomic bombs combined with not even 1/10th of the strategic effect
You believe, I'm guessing, that it becomes a human being at some arbitrary point in it's development?
What about brain activity? We use brain activity to determine the death of a person why not use it also to determine whether he/she's still "dead" or already "alive".
From a user-interface POV the only way is a new DE with all the features of KDE but a GNOME-compatibility-interface which removes most of them. (No trolling here, just stating the facts)
But to avoid the problem of having all necessary libs twice you have to create one unified architecture and that can only be GTK (LGPL - *the* major advantage of GTK over QT).
I can't see that happening. So we'll have the RH approach again which won't be able to achieve both goals and will cripple one of the DEs while trying. Even worse while the apps will look similar the will behave fundamentally different and therefore alienate users. (Many Windows apps are different from the rest of the bunch but problems normally occur where you expect them to work like the rest)
From the article: "It *could* allow surprise raids on teenagers in the middle of the night by private security firms on the flimsiest of evidence; -- *or alternatively*, such operations *could* be allowed only in the most exceptional conditions, only by official authorities, and only on the basis of the highest standards of evidence." (I did the emphasizing)
In other words no reason to panic but time to write your MP why a stricter interpretation of the directive is in his/her best interest
Personally I think the whole patent is rubbish. But your post contains too many "we *could* do that"s for my taste.
The whole point of a patent is that everyone *could* have done it but noone thought of it.
More specifically:
8. Doesn't seem to talk about sticky windows but about having a window which is on one desktop appear in the taskbar on the other desktops and when someone clicks on the taskbar button of the app the window opens on the current desktop and is removed from the original.
The taskbar in KDE behaves differently (if you choose to see all windows from all desktops KDE switches to the desktop the window is on when selecting it) and I can't remember how GNOME handled it but I assume the same way because otherwise it would have been copied by the rest of the Linux desktops.
12 describes buttons for the different desktops. Most Linux desktops have them, most also combines them with small previews of the corresponding desktops (enlightenment more elaborate than anyone else afaik)
11 describes a button (the preview button mentioned in my original post) which displays screenshots of all the different virtual screens (as the enlightenment pager) but
after pressing a button (which could be rather convenient)
fullscreen (some people I know do it by having the pagers take up one whole virtual desktop which they only use for desktop switching)
realtime updates (at least it's implied by using the term "scaled desktop" - that would also be very nice in enlightenment for fast computers)
I'm against software patents because "inventions" tend to be evolutionary and the points I listed (if they are correct I don't claim to be infallible =) are imho too small to be patent worthy. But afaik they are new and I don't know any examples of prior art with the button in KDE coming closest (you click a button for a bigger preview)
which part of "(a preview button is on one of the variants)" is so hard to understand?
I'm using enlightenment for years now and I've never found that preview button thingy on its pagers.
You know why? Because it doesn't exist. What you're talking about is the pager. noone fscking disputes that most Linux WMs have had it for years now (hell, I've been using fvwm since 94 and enlightenment since the 0.15 days), the question was whether M$ invented some new functions. A preview button for a larger pager being one of them (AIS KDE afaik has had it since 3.0 - I don't know when it entered KDE CVS and whether that was before or after the MS patent application)
I said that I hadn't read the article and I'd have no problem being modded down for clueless talk (although it'd be rather harsh, noone -not even the editors- reads the articles =) but seeing your even more clueless reply being modded up seems to indicate that the mods simply had no idea what they were doing.
Although comparing worldwide
grosses makes more sense it's nevertheless interesting to compare the unadjusted
and adjusted domestic figures. Better and better tech means the number of high quality sci-fi and fantasy movies is going up and people like it.
I didn't read the article (hey, it's/.) but if it is what I think it is, KDE had it since 3.0 Feel free to correct me if unlike me you actually know what you're talking about =)
Slashdot Mirror
But the Japanese market no longer has the importance it once had. The Xbox did absolutely abyssmal there but has nevertheless sold about the same number of units as the Gamecube. And even now the US and especially the European markets are nowhere near the saturation of the Japanese.
You're not dead in the water if you need your second hand for something different (e.g. to drink something or if you need to press a key you can't reach without moving your hand one of the F-keys or the higher numbers come to mind)
That's why one of my proposals was a commission elected by the people (the constitution has him/her elected by the parliament which should be enough for most as it is the way the heads of government are elected in most of Europe)
I see you favor less control, hence less accountability of EU commissars and regulatory bodies.
No I don't, I think "we need less influence of the national governments on the EU level" which is something completely different. In fact one of the things preventing more accountability of EU institutions is the struggle of national governments to keep their influence. If you have a fair and open system you can't do the kind of deals the council likes so much (Another positive point of the constitution is that council meetings have to be public - well most of them anyways - which would also help in this case).
The main problem of the EU is that it's bureaucratic apparatus is undemocratic, it's democratic institutions powerless and the national governments who would have the power to change that have no incentive to correct the problems because it would reduce their stranglehold on EU policy.
Removing said pressure is not going to change the success rate of voter-hostile lobbyism. But it will remove one of the last incentives for straight behavior.
I hope you understand now that I don't want to remove that pressure I want to replace it with pressure by accountible representatives (because they are elected) loyal more to the EU than the council who don't have a interest in making the EU a scapegoat for unpopular decisions in the member States (GM food is a good example)
This "EU bureaucrats" are representatives of the governments of the member states. If you want to blame somebody blame the idiots you elected.
The same in your story. The people of the EU elected their governments and therefore their foreign ministers who decided to cave in.
Everything absolutely democratical here it just shows that we need less influence of the national governments on the EU level (i.e. more power to the EP and an elected commission) which the constitution wanted to do but the national governments objected half the proposals and the rest won't get through when the constitution is stopped in the British referendum (if the UK actually votes in favor I'm prince Charles)
As someone already mentioned, gif doesn't have fricking transparency so what do you lose by converting your gifs to png?
I don't know who "they" are but they're not necessarily elected. But all the people who matter especially in the patent nightmare are
(the parliament is elected directly, the council consists of the elected national governments and the commission is appointed by the council and if our British friends are unhappy that the parliament hasn't enough power or that the commission isn't elected by the people, well it was their government that has blocked any reforms in that direction for decades)
"Well, guess what. Total number of lawsuits to date against me or my film by the NRA? NONE. That's right, zero. And don't forget for a second that if they could have shut this film down on a technicality they would have. But they didn't and they can't ? because the film is factually solid and above reproach. In fact, we have not been sued by any individual or group over the statements made in "Bowling for Columbine?" Why is that? Because everything we say is true ? and the things that are our opinion, we say so and leave it up to the viewer to decide if our point of view is correct or not for each of them."
If he'd been sued it would have been a major news event especially after the Academy Awards and I've heard nothing about any lawsuit
I'm not concerned about some 3rd World dictator launching ICBMs because most dictators value their life and when they start launching nukes they'll be wiped off the face of the planet within 30min.
It makes only sense to attack a target with nuclear weapons if you're
The most dangerous scenario would be b) but both b) and c) wouldn't be carried out with a ICBM because it's easier, cheaper and less dangerous (if you aren't one of the major nuclear powers the chance that your ICBM actually hits its target are slim at best) to put your nuke in a container ship it to the US (only a very, very small fraction of the millions of cargo containers entering the US each day are checked) drive it via truck to the city of your joice and kaboom.
Billions of $ are spend to build a system with a very limited usefullness (it's highly specialized completely overengineered for other purposes and it's actual use is confined to a very unlikely scenario with much greater risks being ignored) while there's no money for basic armor upgrades for the troops in Iraq
Now after a long off-topic rant against ballistic missile defense (not completely off-topic as many here don't seem to get the difference) I wanted to say that I think this system is a very good idea. One of the problems today is that with all the Stingers and rocket launchers floating around you can do major damage with a hand-held weapon there's almost no defense against. It is small enough that it's normally impossible to spot the shooter before he's shot. With a system like that if it reacts fast enough to stop such weapons you could guard airports, strategic places in Iraq, Afghanistan, embassies and of course most of Israel
Tomorrow the government lays off all prison guards. Of course it's still a crime to escape from prison but the fscking imbeciles in the government are responsible too.
I don't know the whole story but AFAIK the coast guard lost critical systems because they didn't follow basic security policies (use Windows Update to get critical fixes).
It's like blaming that guy who shot the Archduke for WWI. Did he commit murder? Of course he did. 10mio?
Even worse, you need accurate data on previous explosions for valid simulations. The French ran a whole new series of tests to get it. Stealing the data from one of the existing nuclear powers should be as difficult as simply stealing a working nuke.
On the other hand if you've got enough plutonium/u-235 it is possible to build a bomb which should be working even with slight deviations from the optimum
oh yeah (beware, goatse ahead =)
I'd take mandatory id over surveillance cameras any day. With the id I have at least some control over who gets the information and I can't imagine that any government would go through the troubles of tracking my movements by hand when cameras are so much faster and easier.
Great, searched there and read a) that the help is grossly outdated (yeah, I noticed that) and b) that the way to do it in Opera is to edit cookie sites by hand. Wow, I feel so nostalgic
All I want is cookie management a la Mozilla or Konqueror but what I get is the most confusing and complicated control ever created.
e.g. I have set the browser to "ask before accepting cookies" in all browsers I want to see a dialog where I can block all further cookies from that site or accept the cookie respectively.
Now I open a new page with Opera, it displays the dialog a drop-down set on the wrong entry (as Opera doesn't default to the last option chosen as the other two) I then change it to "refuse cookies from this domain". The next time I open the page I get the same cookie alert and then choose "refuse third party cookies from this domain", the next time "refuse third party cookies from this server" and if I'm very, very lucky I only have to choose one last time ("refuse cookies from this server") before being able to surfe this specific site in peace.
How the fsck can I tell opera that I don't want any cookies that page tries to set?
I love Opera, it has some great features but if you need anything more than accepting all cookies and deleting them on exit you're screwed
To quote Clausewitz: "War is . . . an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."
What was the goal of the US in Vietnam?
Stabilizing the South Vietnamese government, preventing a communist Vietnam for fear of a "domino effect" in South-East Asia.
And the goal of the North Vietnamese/Vietcong?
No US in Vietnam and "liberating" the South from the imperialist enemy.
yeah, definitely a draw
First thing he did was accidently posting his root-pw in a irc channel with 2600 users. Damn fine password it was =)
We shouldn't forget Tokyo btw. It was the worst bombing of the war with over 125,000 deaths in one night, about the same as both atomic bombs combined with not even 1/10th of the strategic effect
What about brain activity? We use brain activity to determine the death of a person why not use it also to determine whether he/she's still "dead" or already "alive".
From a user-interface POV the only way is a new DE with all the features of KDE but a GNOME-compatibility-interface which removes most of them. (No trolling here, just stating the facts)
But to avoid the problem of having all necessary libs twice you have to create one unified architecture and that can only be GTK (LGPL - *the* major advantage of GTK over QT).
I can't see that happening. So we'll have the RH approach again which won't be able to achieve both goals and will cripple one of the DEs while trying. Even worse while the apps will look similar the will behave fundamentally different and therefore alienate users. (Many Windows apps are different from the rest of the bunch but problems normally occur where you expect them to work like the rest)
They use the last GPL-compatible fork until someone finds a permanent solution
"It *could* allow surprise raids on teenagers in the middle of the night by private security firms on the flimsiest of evidence; -- *or alternatively*, such operations *could* be allowed only in the most exceptional conditions, only by official authorities, and only on the basis of the highest standards of evidence." (I did the emphasizing)
In other words no reason to panic but time to write your MP why a stricter interpretation of the directive is in his/her best interest
The whole point of a patent is that everyone *could* have done it but noone thought of it.
More specifically:
8. Doesn't seem to talk about sticky windows but about having a window which is on one desktop appear in the taskbar on the other desktops and when someone clicks on the taskbar button of the app the window opens on the current desktop and is removed from the original.
The taskbar in KDE behaves differently (if you choose to see all windows from all desktops KDE switches to the desktop the window is on when selecting it) and I can't remember how GNOME handled it but I assume the same way because otherwise it would have been copied by the rest of the Linux desktops.
12 describes buttons for the different desktops. Most Linux desktops have them, most also combines them with small previews of the corresponding desktops (enlightenment more elaborate than anyone else afaik)
11 describes a button (the preview button mentioned in my original post) which displays screenshots of all the different virtual screens (as the enlightenment pager) but
- after pressing a button (which could be rather convenient)
- fullscreen (some people I know do it by having the pagers take up one whole virtual desktop which they only use for desktop switching)
- realtime updates (at least it's implied by using the term "scaled desktop" - that would also be very nice in enlightenment for fast computers)
I'm against software patents because "inventions" tend to be evolutionary and the points I listed (if they are correct I don't claim to be infallible =) are imho too small to be patent worthy. But afaik they are new and I don't know any examples of prior art with the button in KDE coming closest (you click a button for a bigger preview)I'm using enlightenment for years now and I've never found that preview button thingy on its pagers.
You know why? Because it doesn't exist. What you're talking about is the pager. noone fscking disputes that most Linux WMs have had it for years now (hell, I've been using fvwm since 94 and enlightenment since the 0.15 days), the question was whether M$ invented some new functions. A preview button for a larger pager being one of them (AIS KDE afaik has had it since 3.0 - I don't know when it entered KDE CVS and whether that was before or after the MS patent application)
I said that I hadn't read the article and I'd have no problem being modded down for clueless talk (although it'd be rather harsh, noone -not even the editors- reads the articles =) but seeing your even more clueless reply being modded up seems to indicate that the mods simply had no idea what they were doing.
You simply gotta love /.
total: $271.0
domestic: $10.1 (3.7%)
overseas: $260.9 (96.3%)
The geek in me crinches =)
And to make this posting a bit less off-topic:
domestic grosses adjusted for inflation
Although comparing worldwide grosses makes more sense it's nevertheless interesting to compare the unadjusted and adjusted domestic figures. Better and better tech means the number of high quality sci-fi and fantasy movies is going up and people like it.
Glorious times ahead guys =P
I didn't read the article (hey, it's /.) but if it is what I think it is, KDE had it since 3.0
Feel free to correct me if unlike me you actually know what you're talking about =)