The point is, many editors slave away adding content to wikipedia, working hard to adhere to a Neutral Point of View, working hard to add citations, etc, all for free. They enjoy having a space on their own userpages to say what they want, to blow off a little steam.
If they're on Wikipedia to blow off steam, then they're using the wrong website. See the Wikipedia guideline on user pages. Wikipedia isn't a web host, it's a project to create a high quality free online encyclopedia. There are plenty of other neat places on the web for recreational activities. People can still say what they want on their userpages, within reason, but that doesn't extend to abusing the mechanisms of Wikipedia in order to propagate their personal political hobby horses.
That's just the way it is. We have Debian unstable and Debian testing, but people still whine about Debian stable (which *is* exceptionally stable) not being cutting edge. That's because it isn't meant to be, it's only meant to be stable. I wouldn't run a server on any other linux.
The U.S. media do a spectacularly bad job of informing Americans about what is going on in rest of the world.
But he apparently misses the obvious converse, that the world media do a spectacularly bad job of informing the rest of the world what's going on in the U.S.
But that simply isn't true.
Indeed, to give an example, Greg Palast's major broadcasts and writings on the Florida debacle were sometimes published first by the UK media.
The U.S. Presidential race this year comes down to who wins Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. He thinks Kerry will win.
No. This is what he actually says:
"And what's the conclusion? Nobody knows. If we just look at the most recent poll in every state, John Kerry will be elected the 44th President of the United States tomorrow with 298 votes in the electoral college vs. 231 for George Bush, with New Mexico and New Hampshire exact ties. However, even in Bush carries both of these states, Kerry still wins 298 to 240.
"But again, a caution is in order, Kerry's margin is razor thin in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio. Pennsylvania will probably go to Kerry. Ohio is more iffy. Bush won it in 2000 and stands a decent chance of winning it in 2004 although he trails by 2% using the average of the Zogby and Gallup polls taken Oct. 28-31.
"Thus after 4 years of campaigning, more money spent on attack ads than the gross national product of small countries, and an exhausted electorate, what do we have? In the immortal words of Yogi Berra: It's deja vu all over again.
"The whole thing comes down to Florida. where Kerry currently holds a tenuous 48% to 47% lead according to the most recent poll, from Zogby. The reality is that everything depends on turnout, how many voting machines fail, and how much monkey business happens. Oh, yeah. And there are those 10,000 lawyers ready to do what lawyers are trained to do--file lawsuits."
He is an unabashed Kerry supporter, not in and of itself a bad thing, but he is discarding poll results favorable to the President in order to show a Kerry victory. For example he claims to have averaged recent polls in Florida but a Quinnipiac poll from 10/27 thru 10/31 shows an EIGHT point Bush lead. How he ends up with a 2 point Kerry advantage with that in the average I don't know.
You said yourself, the groundwork on the Quinnipiac poll was only completed yesterday.
Even the Miami Herald website article about this Quinnipiac poll result is timestamped by Google News at one hour ago, and the previous Quinnipiac poll (Tanenbaum dates this at Oct 26th) puts Bush and Kerry both on 44%, so earlier Quinnipiac results are not likely to have been significant outliers to the general polling trends in Florida.
In short, give him a chance to update his results.
I was taught algol 68 by Charles Lindsey, and not so long ago I visited his website where he still has a copy of the algol 68s compiler source, although it has suffered from bitrot over the years.
I've been using Debian stable for years on my private boxes, from laptop to server. It works. Why would I need to be running the latest whizzy stuff? It's nice to know that *somebody* is prepared to do that, but give me a stable config, regular security fixes and painless upgrades, and I'm happy.
the first computer designed for business use.
Possibly. I believed the first business actually to use a computer was the Lyons company, which ran its bakeries valuation program on LEO in November, 1951.
Darwin was a professing Christian till the day he died.
This is untrue. For instance, here are Darwin's words, in his diary, on the death of his father in November 1848:
"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished.
"And this is a damnable doctrine."
But he was not quite an atheist. In later life, he wrote in his Autobiography, intended only for the consumption of his family:
"[A] source of conviction in the existence of God... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting... I deserve to be called a theist."
His beliefs wavered constantly, and for this reason he avoided making public statements on his religious beliefs, but reserved his statements to constantly stressing that evolution was compatible with theism.
In his last years, he wrote in his autobiography:
"A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life... only to follow those impulses and instincts... which seem to him the best ones... I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science."
What I liked most about the original was the way it blended stunning action with a subtle philosphical theme about how we percieve reality.
Whilst I found the original movie fun to watch and fully expect to enjoy the others in due course, I really didn't see it as anything more than a rather pretentious action movie. Look at the two main premises:
that computers use humans as a power source. Why? Wouldn't soy beans or yeast be more efficient?
that rather than simply keep humans drugged and unconscious, the computers feed a complex virtual reality to the minds of the humans
This is even lamer than the plot of Speed. How anybody could see philosophical implications in such idiocies is one of the real mysteries of the Matrix phenomenon. The writers simply lifted some of the mumbo jumbo from Californian zen and pumped it into an action movie--it isn't even the first time that has been done.
In Europe TV broadcasted movies and VHS were universally letter-boxed even before 16:9 TVs appeared.
I don't think that this is true, at least in the UK. Some movies were broadcast in letterbox (2001, A Space Odyssey springs to mind) while most were shown in scan-and-pan. Letterbox suits many movies, but some people prefer to maximise the resolution. We don't all have large television screens, and a letterbox movie can be hard on the eyes if you end up squinting to see what's happening in the center of the screen.
I wouldn't like to watch Rear Window or West Side Story without the full screen area, but a Sydney Pollack play, say, or a Woody Allen comedy, might be better if you just zoom in one the character who is speaking. I'm sure others would differ with my preferences, but surely that's the point, it's a matter of taste. Letterbox isn't universally regarded as a better choice for presentation on screens with normal aspect ratios.
If as has been claimed most digital TV broadcasts in the UK are now in widescreen, I may have a look at what the TV shop has, but my past experience of these televisions in stores is that they're left tuned to a conventional channel showing squat, fat, ugly,distorted picture. I would prefer a reversed letterbox so that the normal TV aspect ratio predominates.
Call me cynical, but...
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 1
This is the kind of thing I'd do if I wanted cheap publicity for my computer brand.
Total outlay: one shake-and-bake computer.
The story will get posted to hell and back, and may even make it to some mainstream newspapers.
Maybe the battle of Helm's Deep turns out differently, Denethor throws in his lot with the Uruk Hai? This obsession with 'spoilers' can be taken too far. If people really don't want to know what happens in the movie they shouldn't watch it or read about it.
Not having per-minute fees is good, though that problem for most European users has receded over the years with the advent of pay-per-month unmetered deals.
Low latency is good for gaming. I don't game, but my kids do.
Always-on is a big selling point. Now I don't need to be at home to use my home system. That's worth the small monthly charge to me (it's the equivalent of $40 per month in addition to the cable TV fee I already pay).
Speed pays off for large downloads, too. I have ten times the capacity of a v90 modem (and my up line is several times faster, too), so I no longer have to think about the size of a download.
I just don't see this flying. You can pick up a second-hand palm for about 70$ and it has loads of software.
It's very cheap and easy to teach people to read, all it takes is manpower, and that's an abundant resource in India. English is the main language of commerce and government in India, and overall literacy is 52%, not bad for an agrarian system. Instead of buying this obscenely expensive, battery-hungry computer, illiterate people would be better off clubbing together to pay for a teacher. If they then want a small computer they could do better on price and appropriateness.
Btw, you forgot to mention that Mort was Death's apprentice and losing the Death angle probably wasn't a good idea. Anyway, Pterry himself related that tail so it is probably true.
Terry Pratchett (who still posts to USENET) wrote this in a posting about a film treatment for Mort, back in November, 1992:
The Mort Film:
A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and
European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which wet down
well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said 'Hey, we've
been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centes of
culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a
downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the
consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE
it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys.
Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication
and come back in a hundred years.
Currently, since the amount of money available for making movies in Europe is
about sixpence, the consortium is looking for some more intelligent Americans
in the film business. This may prove difficult.
It could have been worse. I've heard what Good Omens was looking like by the
time Sovereign's option mercifully ran out -- set in America, no Four
Horsemen...oh god.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what we've been doing, and as we recently celebrated the creation of our one-millionth online article, I think we're doing just fine.
If they're on Wikipedia to blow off steam, then they're using the wrong website. See the Wikipedia guideline on user pages. Wikipedia isn't a web host, it's a project to create a high quality free online encyclopedia. There are plenty of other neat places on the web for recreational activities. People can still say what they want on their userpages, within reason, but that doesn't extend to abusing the mechanisms of Wikipedia in order to propagate their personal political hobby horses.
That's just the way it is. We have Debian unstable and Debian testing, but people still whine about Debian stable (which *is* exceptionally stable) not being cutting edge. That's because it isn't meant to be, it's only meant to be stable. I wouldn't run a server on any other linux.
Searched Encarta for 'autofellatio' No results were found for your search in Encarta.
Sure, but Linux is the best washing powder.
But that simply isn't true.
Indeed, to give an example, Greg Palast's major broadcasts and writings on the Florida debacle were sometimes published first by the UK media.
No. This is what he actually says:
"And what's the conclusion? Nobody knows. If we just look at the most recent poll in every state, John Kerry will be elected the 44th President of the United States tomorrow with 298 votes in the electoral college vs. 231 for George Bush, with New Mexico and New Hampshire exact ties. However, even in Bush carries both of these states, Kerry still wins 298 to 240.
"But again, a caution is in order, Kerry's margin is razor thin in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Ohio. Pennsylvania will probably go to Kerry. Ohio is more iffy. Bush won it in 2000 and stands a decent chance of winning it in 2004 although he trails by 2% using the average of the Zogby and Gallup polls taken Oct. 28-31.
"Thus after 4 years of campaigning, more money spent on attack ads than the gross national product of small countries, and an exhausted electorate, what do we have? In the immortal words of Yogi Berra: It's deja vu all over again.
"The whole thing comes down to Florida. where Kerry currently holds a tenuous 48% to 47% lead according to the most recent poll, from Zogby. The reality is that everything depends on turnout, how many voting machines fail, and how much monkey business happens. Oh, yeah. And there are those 10,000 lawyers ready to do what lawyers are trained to do--file lawsuits."
You said yourself, the groundwork on the Quinnipiac poll was only completed yesterday.
Even the Miami Herald website article about this Quinnipiac poll result is timestamped by Google News at one hour ago, and the previous Quinnipiac poll (Tanenbaum dates this at Oct 26th) puts Bush and Kerry both on 44%, so earlier Quinnipiac results are not likely to have been significant outliers to the general polling trends in Florida.
In short, give him a chance to update his results.
Could this be A taste of things to come?
The Sustainable Development Commission is running its consultation exercise online using the open source software package PHPWiki.
Charles Lindsey's algol 68 compiler
I've been using Debian stable for years on my private boxes, from laptop to server. It works. Why would I need to be running the latest whizzy stuff? It's nice to know that *somebody* is prepared to do that, but give me a stable config, regular security fixes and painless upgrades, and I'm happy.
the first computer designed for business use. Possibly. I believed the first business actually to use a computer was the Lyons company, which ran its bakeries valuation program on LEO in November, 1951.
Darwin: A life in science White and Gribbin.
This is untrue. For instance, here are Darwin's words, in his diary, on the death of his father in November 1848:
"I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all of my friends, will be everlasting punished.
"And this is a damnable doctrine."
But he was not quite an atheist. In later life, he wrote in his Autobiography, intended only for the consumption of his family:
"[A] source of conviction in the existence of God ... follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting ... I deserve to be called a theist."
His beliefs wavered constantly, and for this reason he avoided making public statements on his religious beliefs, but reserved his statements to constantly stressing that evolution was compatible with theism.
In his last years, he wrote in his autobiography:
"A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life ... only to follow those impulses and instincts ... which seem to him the best ones ... I believe that I have acted rightly in steadily following and devoting my life to science."
Source of all the above:
Darwin's Diary
Whilst I found the original movie fun to watch and fully expect to enjoy the others in due course, I really didn't see it as anything more than a rather pretentious action movie. Look at the two main premises:
This is even lamer than the plot of Speed. How anybody could see philosophical implications in such idiocies is one of the real mysteries of the Matrix phenomenon. The writers simply lifted some of the mumbo jumbo from Californian zen and pumped it into an action movie--it isn't even the first time that has been done.
I don't think that this is true, at least in the UK. Some movies were broadcast in letterbox (2001, A Space Odyssey springs to mind) while most were shown in scan-and-pan. Letterbox suits many movies, but some people prefer to maximise the resolution. We don't all have large television screens, and a letterbox movie can be hard on the eyes if you end up squinting to see what's happening in the center of the screen.
I wouldn't like to watch Rear Window or West Side Story without the full screen area, but a Sydney Pollack play, say, or a Woody Allen comedy, might be better if you just zoom in one the character who is speaking. I'm sure others would differ with my preferences, but surely that's the point, it's a matter of taste. Letterbox isn't universally regarded as a better choice for presentation on screens with normal aspect ratios.
If as has been claimed most digital TV broadcasts in the UK are now in widescreen, I may have a look at what the TV shop has, but my past experience of these televisions in stores is that they're left tuned to a conventional channel showing squat, fat, ugly,distorted picture. I would prefer a reversed letterbox so that the normal TV aspect ratio predominates.
Total outlay: one shake-and-bake computer.
The story will get posted to hell and back, and may even make it to some mainstream newspapers.
The text of the quoted letter does not seem to bear out your statement. That's misleading. There was no claim in the letter that nothing was wrong.
And that, my friend, is exactly the point of the Second Amendment.
It's intended to destabilize the USA nation? Cool!
Maybe the battle of Helm's Deep turns out differently, Denethor throws in his lot with the Uruk Hai? This obsession with 'spoilers' can be taken too far. If people really don't want to know what happens in the movie they shouldn't watch it or read about it.
You're rather young, aren't you?
Low latency is good for gaming. I don't game, but my kids do.
Always-on is a big selling point. Now I don't need to be at home to use my home system. That's worth the small monthly charge to me (it's the equivalent of $40 per month in addition to the cable TV fee I already pay).
Speed pays off for large downloads, too. I have ten times the capacity of a v90 modem (and my up line is several times faster, too), so I no longer have to think about the size of a download.
It's very cheap and easy to teach people to read, all it takes is manpower, and that's an abundant resource in India. English is the main language of commerce and government in India, and overall literacy is 52%, not bad for an agrarian system. Instead of buying this obscenely expensive, battery-hungry computer, illiterate people would be better off clubbing together to pay for a teacher. If they then want a small computer they could do better on price and appropriateness.
Who needs a virus filter to deal with worms? Just don't permit email clients to execute code.
Century of the Fruitbat Productions...
Terry Pratchett (who still posts to USENET) wrote this in a posting about a film treatment for Mort, back in November, 1992:
The Mort Film:
A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which wet down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said 'Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centes of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton". The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys.
Whereupon, I'm happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years.
Currently, since the amount of money available for making movies in Europe is about sixpence, the consortium is looking for some more intelligent Americans in the film business. This may prove difficult.
It could have been worse. I've heard what Good Omens was looking like by the time Sovereign's option mercifully ran out -- set in America, no Four Horsemen...oh god.