From what I heard, there is only one actual weapon in space right now: it's a pistol aboard the Soyuz escape capsule on the ISS. You never know - might land _way_ off-course.
Personally, I think it would be nice to keep it that way.
Who cares, if you want to watch DVDs? Use nv for watching DVDs on a noncompliant output, and use nvidia for gaming. So you need to restart the X server. How long does that take?
And you're probably using mplayer anyway. You think mplayer honours Macrovision to begin with? As far as the nvidia driver knows it's just displaying ordinary video - the copyprotection crap was cracked long ago.
Item 1: mobile phone with mindboggling bandwidth capabilities.
Item 2: iPod
Item 3: Firewire connection between (1) and (2)
Item 4: complete and utter contempt for copyright law
For that kind of money, I'd want to know that if my good friend Arthur ever threw this thing into a river on prehistoric Earth, I could just fish it out and keep using it. And I'd like it to connect wirelessly to Wikipedia. And I want something n00b-friendly written on the cover: 'Don't Panic' would be nice.
Ah: I misunderstood. So the government is setting a standard rate for programmers to earn, eh? - and taxing based on that, not on the actual rate paid?... Sounds almost, well... communist.
But the subcontracting option stands. Get yourself a business partner in India, a genuine Indian company, and pay them to develop x, y, z for you. They pay the actual programmers, not you. US law doesn't apply there.
To stop this sort of thing legally requires some serious trade barriers, we're talking protectionism all over the place. And as for government-mandated pay levels for various trades, I think the old In Soviet Russia jibe sounds really on-topic right now...
If the money that is being pumped into these outsourced counties is less than the money that is collected from them these outsourced items are a liability to the country and everyone that lives in the country. Morally speaking....
What sort of company is this? It pays its employees more money than it makes from what they produce? I'll tell you what sort of company it is: a doomed one.
You pay your workers LESS than you make from their product! LESS! Business 101, here...
I think if a UK or US company is going to employ people from abroad they should still have to pay tax/ni at UK/US (if the US has an equivalent to NI) rates.
Very well: I'm an Indian programmer who's signed up with Atlantisoft, a company which has hitherto employed Americans and Europeans. Due to the new laws you propose, they must pay their Indian employees in India the same as what they pay their Americans.
I now earn what is, in India, a vast fortune. An idea springs to mind: rather than do my job, I'll hire someone to do it for me at Indian market rates. I'll subcontract. Since I'm an Indian the law you propose doesn't apply: I'm an Indian employer paying an Indian wage to an Indian.
The result being that the person who does the work gets the same low Indian wage, and I'm happy as a clam being a useless middleman skimming a huge sum off the amount the company pays.
You think Indians can't be conniving, exploitative bastards too?
Because they don't contribute their hard-earned money back into our* economy. The money doesn't flow in a circular fashion. Its a one-way flow outbound.
That's not immoral, that's unpatriotic. A very different thing. Personally I think outsourcing to India is the moral thing to do: they need it more. Suppose the wage bill for one American could support five Indians. Assuming for a moment that all men are created equal with the same inalienable rights, which is the better option? Morally speaking?
And why, exactly, is hiring people in other countries immoral?
It's immoral because the job of businesses is not to maximise shareholder value by increasing their cost-effectiveness - their job is to provide a welfare service to Slashdot readers who were laid off after the dot-com crash. Duh.
If you honestly can't see the differences, I feel sorry for you.
True - the difference is enormous. In Soviet Russia, the State owned the industries. Here, the industries own the State. But hey, at least we get to vote on exactly who it is that does what the corporations tell them - and occasionally the winner is the person who got the most votes! Isn't freedom great?
One guy apparently didn't know how to use variables, so he'd embed text boxes on the main form, and set their visibility property to false, and use them to store values.
I did that when I first started with Access; it's what comes of having near-zero knowledge of database theory, VB, programming in general, or anything involved in the whole issue, and learning by trial-and-error and by whatever you can find by googling for info on your problems as they arise. It's ugly, sure, but it works. The nice thing is that you can leave these boxes visible while you're working on it, and see how things are going.
Since I got hold of Getz, Litwin & Gilbert's excellent Access 2000 Developer's Handbook I've been learning to do things properly. Sort of...
And yes, I am aware of the stigma attached to working with this stuff. Unclean, unclean. But it's the tool that's available and I haven't the stomach for arguing with the IT bureaucracy when what we have does, in fact, work:-)
Interesting thread, this, by the way. I'm seeing some other things I'm doing and thinking 'Oh... so how SHOULD I do that, then?' Self-improvement via Slashdot, who'd have thought it?
I started on RH7.0, moved to 7.2 then 7.3, played with Mandrake 9 for a while until I wanted to bite out the eyes of whoever came up with their Satanic automounter - then when I built a new machine I decided to put the new monster CPU to good use and install Gentoo.
Hell of a learning experience. Nice package management system. And you get used to sleeping with fans in the background.
Now, though, I no longer have broadband, and Gentoo on dialup is no longer fun and geeky, it's horrible and masochistic in a Hellraiser sort of way.
Sod it. I'm going over to SuSe 9.1, I think. That's looking _really_ sweet, especially with the recent news from Novell. It would be nice to have a DVD with a few zillion fairly recent packages on...
Also, I tend to doubt that most spammers make as much as they claim. It would be interesting to compare and contrast
the amount of money spammers claim to earn in interviews, when saying something along the lines of 'antis are just jealous' with
the amount of money spammers claim to earn in their filings with the IRS
Yes, I'm sure that the Soviets were using this for day/night observation of Earth's oceans. Or possibly day/night observation of the missile silos in the US. But it's a tough call.
A missile silo doesn't move around much, and it's hard to keep completely secret. The Soviets knew exactly where every one of them was and had several nukes pinpointed on each one.
In the oceans, however, are ships and submarines which also carry nuclear weapons. Ships do move around, and it's relatively easy to keep the movements of a ship at sea secret. The Soviets needed to know where the US was keeping its seaborne nuclear assets, so that they could be eliminated before they could launch in the event of World War 3. In addition to (IIRC) around half of the American arsenal, _all_ the British nukes and most of the French ones are on submarines.
I'd say the Soviets had a damn good reason to be keeping a close eye on the oceans.
If it is God's nature that defines what is good (and, therefore, what is evil), then the definitions of what is good and what is evil are unchanging as well, leading one to believe in an static, objective morality.
It might be reasonable to say that there is a definite 'good', with a clear opposite called 'evil', defined by some referee we call 'God'. As long as God can be relied on to keep silent, we can suppose that our own instinctive ideas of what is right and what is wrong are, perhaps, reflections of this divine mandate, of which we are dimly aware on a spiritual level. IANATheologian, which is perhaps quite obvious at this point:-)
But what happens when God actually turns up and asks us to do something morally repugnant? I have in mind some of the Old Testament atrocities - 'kill everyone in the city', for instance, or 'sacrifice your son to me'. What do we do when our absolute standard demands that we do something that we know perfectly well is monstrous? Some people, I might add, go ahead and do it anyway - as we see almost daily on the news.
I suppose it's possible to have a hypocritical God - who defines the perfect, absolute morality but just like the rest of us fails to live by it - but I doubt that would go down very well.
Well, the annoying thing is... whoever wins this election will be deciding what my country's foreign policy is going to be. Yet I don't get a vote in it. Isn't it great living in a vassal state?
And now, just to rub it in, they're going to pop up their campaign ads at me. Brilliant.
So, is God going to liberate some slaves from Mexico, lead them north by a rather roundabout route and then have them kill all the fat heathen Americans? That would be interesting to see. But I fear that God's chosen instrument for America's destruction is either dead under a million tons of Tora Bora rock or hiding in a cave somewhere in Pakistan... divine retribution will have to wait awhile, it seems.
They've tried to define objective morality within the context of an atheistic worldview. It's no wonder they failed, because you'd have to claim an objective view of reality to claim to know an 'objective morality'.
Even in a theistic worldview there's no good definition of an objective morality. Is it good because God says it, or does God say it because it's good? If the former, then it's just another diktat subject to God's whim - and some of God's historical policy decisions might lead us to question his claim to be a supreme moral authority. If the latter, then we have the same problem as before - we know something is good, but why is it good? What is it, beyond God, that defines good or evil?
Mmm... Maybe I can forgive the US banning Concorde overland, given the noise it made; I was in Reading last summer, shortly before Concorde was grounded, and heard one _hell_ of a roar filling the whole place. Looked up and there it was, coming up out of Heathrow. There must have been a hundred rock bands there and nothing came close for sheer decibels. Bloody beautiful, though. Just the shape of it stinks of speed.
The other killer was probably that it couldn't quite carry the fuel to cross the Pacific. That cut it off from LA - Tokyo, which cut it off from a big moneyspinner...
The article claims travel benefits, going from New York to London in 2 hours.
This is the most tragic thing I've ever read on Slashdot. We USED TO be able to go from New York to London in two hours. It was sixties technology, hacked together by two dying empires looking for some prestige. Now we're looking at a little dart fired off a B-52 and dreaming of flying that fast again someday... What the hell went wrong?
"Opt-In" means that you, or someone claiming to be you, requested that you be put on the list.
'Or someone claiming to be you'? If someone claiming to be me, but not me, enters my email address into Eddie Marin's web form, does that constitute opt-in? Can Eddie Marin then begin sending with impunity until I tell him not to? Ever heard of Nadine?
Returning to the analogy of login: you, or someone claiming to be you, typed your username into a computer. Should the security program say 'That's a perfectly legitimate log-in' and grant access to your files, or should it wait for a password to complete the login by verifying that it really _is_ you?
Logging in to a computer requires that you prove that you are who you claim you are by supplying a password. This does not constitute a second log-in, it constitutes the second half of a complete log-in, without which the process is fatally broken and wide open to abuse. Requiring a password is not double log-in.
Similarly, subscribing to a mailing list requires that you prove that you are who you claim you are by responding to a confirmation message. This does not constitute a second opt-in, it constitutes the second half of a complete opt-in, without which the process is fatally broken and wide open to abuse. Requiring a confirmation is not double opt-in.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think it would be nice to keep it that way.
I can see the inscription on Bill Gates's ring now...
Most of the digging was done from the British end. We use miles, but buy fuel in litres. What this does to a system of units is anyone's guess...
Who cares, if you want to watch DVDs? Use nv for watching DVDs on a noncompliant output, and use nvidia for gaming. So you need to restart the X server. How long does that take?
And you're probably using mplayer anyway. You think mplayer honours Macrovision to begin with? As far as the nvidia driver knows it's just displaying ordinary video - the copyprotection crap was cracked long ago.
Item 2: iPod
Item 3: Firewire connection between (1) and (2)
Item 4: complete and utter contempt for copyright law
Item 5: Profit!
For that kind of money, I'd want to know that if my good friend Arthur ever threw this thing into a river on prehistoric Earth, I could just fish it out and keep using it. And I'd like it to connect wirelessly to Wikipedia. And I want something n00b-friendly written on the cover: 'Don't Panic' would be nice.
But the subcontracting option stands. Get yourself a business partner in India, a genuine Indian company, and pay them to develop x, y, z for you. They pay the actual programmers, not you. US law doesn't apply there.
To stop this sort of thing legally requires some serious trade barriers, we're talking protectionism all over the place. And as for government-mandated pay levels for various trades, I think the old In Soviet Russia jibe sounds really on-topic right now...
What sort of company is this? It pays its employees more money than it makes from what they produce? I'll tell you what sort of company it is: a doomed one.
You pay your workers LESS than you make from their product! LESS! Business 101, here...
Very well: I'm an Indian programmer who's signed up with Atlantisoft, a company which has hitherto employed Americans and Europeans. Due to the new laws you propose, they must pay their Indian employees in India the same as what they pay their Americans.
I now earn what is, in India, a vast fortune. An idea springs to mind: rather than do my job, I'll hire someone to do it for me at Indian market rates. I'll subcontract. Since I'm an Indian the law you propose doesn't apply: I'm an Indian employer paying an Indian wage to an Indian.
The result being that the person who does the work gets the same low Indian wage, and I'm happy as a clam being a useless middleman skimming a huge sum off the amount the company pays.
You think Indians can't be conniving, exploitative bastards too?
That's not immoral, that's unpatriotic. A very different thing. Personally I think outsourcing to India is the moral thing to do: they need it more. Suppose the wage bill for one American could support five Indians. Assuming for a moment that all men are created equal with the same inalienable rights, which is the better option? Morally speaking?
It's immoral because the job of businesses is not to maximise shareholder value by increasing their cost-effectiveness - their job is to provide a welfare service to Slashdot readers who were laid off after the dot-com crash. Duh.
True - the difference is enormous. In Soviet Russia, the State owned the industries. Here, the industries own the State. But hey, at least we get to vote on exactly who it is that does what the corporations tell them - and occasionally the winner is the person who got the most votes! Isn't freedom great?
I did that when I first started with Access; it's what comes of having near-zero knowledge of database theory, VB, programming in general, or anything involved in the whole issue, and learning by trial-and-error and by whatever you can find by googling for info on your problems as they arise. It's ugly, sure, but it works. The nice thing is that you can leave these boxes visible while you're working on it, and see how things are going.
Since I got hold of Getz, Litwin & Gilbert's excellent Access 2000 Developer's Handbook I've been learning to do things properly. Sort of...
And yes, I am aware of the stigma attached to working with this stuff. Unclean, unclean. But it's the tool that's available and I haven't the stomach for arguing with the IT bureaucracy when what we have does, in fact, work :-)
Interesting thread, this, by the way. I'm seeing some other things I'm doing and thinking 'Oh... so how SHOULD I do that, then?' Self-improvement via Slashdot, who'd have thought it?
You're the guy holding the katana, and it's your job to decapitate him before his screams of agony dishonour his death.
Here's your moral dilemma:
Do you just let him die howling like an animal, or do you record it for posterity and post it on P2P?
There are people who are environmentalists because they want to sleep with hippie chicks.
Hell of a learning experience. Nice package management system. And you get used to sleeping with fans in the background.
Now, though, I no longer have broadband, and Gentoo on dialup is no longer fun and geeky, it's horrible and masochistic in a Hellraiser sort of way.
Sod it. I'm going over to SuSe 9.1, I think. That's looking _really_ sweet, especially with the recent news from Novell. It would be nice to have a DVD with a few zillion fairly recent packages on...
the amount of money spammers claim to earn in interviews, when saying something along the lines of 'antis are just jealous'
with
the amount of money spammers claim to earn in their filings with the IRS
It could be very informative.
A missile silo doesn't move around much, and it's hard to keep completely secret. The Soviets knew exactly where every one of them was and had several nukes pinpointed on each one.
In the oceans, however, are ships and submarines which also carry nuclear weapons. Ships do move around, and it's relatively easy to keep the movements of a ship at sea secret. The Soviets needed to know where the US was keeping its seaborne nuclear assets, so that they could be eliminated before they could launch in the event of World War 3. In addition to (IIRC) around half of the American arsenal, _all_ the British nukes and most of the French ones are on submarines.
I'd say the Soviets had a damn good reason to be keeping a close eye on the oceans.
It might be reasonable to say that there is a definite 'good', with a clear opposite called 'evil', defined by some referee we call 'God'. As long as God can be relied on to keep silent, we can suppose that our own instinctive ideas of what is right and what is wrong are, perhaps, reflections of this divine mandate, of which we are dimly aware on a spiritual level. IANATheologian, which is perhaps quite obvious at this point :-)
But what happens when God actually turns up and asks us to do something morally repugnant? I have in mind some of the Old Testament atrocities - 'kill everyone in the city', for instance, or 'sacrifice your son to me'. What do we do when our absolute standard demands that we do something that we know perfectly well is monstrous? Some people, I might add, go ahead and do it anyway - as we see almost daily on the news.
I suppose it's possible to have a hypocritical God - who defines the perfect, absolute morality but just like the rest of us fails to live by it - but I doubt that would go down very well.
And now, just to rub it in, they're going to pop up their campaign ads at me. Brilliant.
So, is God going to liberate some slaves from Mexico, lead them north by a rather roundabout route and then have them kill all the fat heathen Americans? That would be interesting to see. But I fear that God's chosen instrument for America's destruction is either dead under a million tons of Tora Bora rock or hiding in a cave somewhere in Pakistan... divine retribution will have to wait awhile, it seems.
Even in a theistic worldview there's no good definition of an objective morality. Is it good because God says it, or does God say it because it's good? If the former, then it's just another diktat subject to God's whim - and some of God's historical policy decisions might lead us to question his claim to be a supreme moral authority. If the latter, then we have the same problem as before - we know something is good, but why is it good? What is it, beyond God, that defines good or evil?
The other killer was probably that it couldn't quite carry the fuel to cross the Pacific. That cut it off from LA - Tokyo, which cut it off from a big moneyspinner...
This is the most tragic thing I've ever read on Slashdot. We USED TO be able to go from New York to London in two hours. It was sixties technology, hacked together by two dying empires looking for some prestige. Now we're looking at a little dart fired off a B-52 and dreaming of flying that fast again someday... What the hell went wrong?
'Or someone claiming to be you'? If someone claiming to be me, but not me, enters my email address into Eddie Marin's web form, does that constitute opt-in? Can Eddie Marin then begin sending with impunity until I tell him not to? Ever heard of Nadine?
Returning to the analogy of login: you, or someone claiming to be you, typed your username into a computer. Should the security program say 'That's a perfectly legitimate log-in' and grant access to your files, or should it wait for a password to complete the login by verifying that it really _is_ you?
Logging in to a computer requires that you prove that you are who you claim you are by supplying a password. This does not constitute a second log-in, it constitutes the second half of a complete log-in, without which the process is fatally broken and wide open to abuse. Requiring a password is not double log-in.
Similarly, subscribing to a mailing list requires that you prove that you are who you claim you are by responding to a confirmation message. This does not constitute a second opt-in, it constitutes the second half of a complete opt-in, without which the process is fatally broken and wide open to abuse. Requiring a confirmation is not double opt-in.