The Chernobyl power plant was built near a lake on the Pripyat river. Why do you think they would have put a nuclear power plant there if there was no water?
Anyway, I hardly think the Chernobyl accident was caused by running out of water in their resevoir. No amount of water in the world could have prevented it because they had their pumps off anyway.
Back in primary school we were given Fresnel lens of about half that size (still obscenely huge) as souvenirs by a short sighted tour guide. Needless to say they were confiscated immediately by the teachers so they would not be used during the course of the excursion. The problem is that they were redistributed on our first day back home, back in a sleepy drought riddled town in western New South Wales, Australia.
Lucky the fire on the oval was able to be contained, otherwise I would have lost more than my Fresnel lens.
One of these actions is violent, causes fear and despair and is condoned by the Saudi royal family, and the other one is violent, causes fear and despair and is condoned by the Saudi royal family.
The British Empire (just like the current American Empire and the Roman and the Persian of the past) got so great by realising that subtle distinction.
Although having paper with a 2^0.5 aspect ratio is by far the most practical solution it is not the most aesthetic solution. Photos and slides use an aspect ratio that is not used by any other type of paper. That ratio is (1 + 5^0.5) / 2 or approximately 1.61803399.
This number is otherwise known as the "golden ratio", it was discovered back in classical Greece and it was known to be the most aesthetically pleasing of all ratios. The Parthenon in Athens was built so that its length and width were dictated by this ratio, it was also used by many Renaissance artists to draw the human body so it seems "perfect".
It is impossible of cause to prove mathematically that this ratio is the best looking of all irrational numbers any more than it is possible to prove mathematically who is the most attractive human, however it's endurance seems to suggest that it has some base to it. It has links with Fibonacci numbers, it also is encountered when drawing regular pentagrams and decagons.
Due to the aesthetically pleasing nature of this ratio I think it would be fairly cool to have a series of paper sizes based on this ratio for artistic uses, rather than the practical but bland "A" series or the fairly pointless American and Canadian series.
I care and I _still_ don't know the basic differences between Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, SuSe, Mandrake, Slackware, et cetera.
All you need to do is you just pick a distro at random and become religiously attached to it.
That way you can work out the differences easily by only installing a single distro. If you use distro x, and seek to compare it with distro y using criterion F where F C then you only need to consider two different situations:
if F(x) > F(y) then F is valid therefore x > y for all C.
if F(y) > F(x) then F is an issue only for hopeless n00bs. This implies that n00bs(y) > n00bs(x) therefore x > y for all C
As an example: I have hardly ever used SuSe, yet I use gentoo therefore I can tell you the following:
Since SuSe has worse package management than gentoo, package management can be used to measure the entire worth of a distribution. Therefore gentoo is better than SuSe.
Since Suse has a better installer than gentoo, I know for a fact that since I was able to survive without it that this must be a function only useful for n00bs, posers and grandmas. Since I don't respect the judgment of these people, I can safely assume that not only is this installer supremacy irrelevant, it also proves that the users of SuSe are halfwits and therefore have also made a bad judgment about their distribution choice, ergo gentoo is better than SuSe.
This principle can be modified slightly for use in politics, car brands, football teams, religions, ethnic groups and even music. It is a great technique for the times when one needs to know a lot without having to learn a lot. 9/10 distro choices are based on this method, why shouldn't your next one be to!
P.s. despite my jokes made about the mentality of gentoo users, it really is cool provided you know what you are doing. If you feel like a challenge then give it a try!
Are you refering to the Steve Jobs that is the CEO of Apple who is currently grilling playfair or Steve Jobs that is the CEO of Pixar, one of the many organisations that is a member of the MPAA.
Personally I think Steve Jobs has chosen his camp and is too entrenched in it to bridge anything. You will probably get more help from Bill Gates, at least he doesn't run a movie studio too.
Australia is a long way from either Brazil or Japan and a hell of a long distance from Germany or the US.
I guess having none of these evil distro guys is another reason why Australia kicks arse.
Though the most popular distro down here seems to be Debian, and I can't see them getting involved for some reason.
It is Gnome. I think the very fact that you did not know this is why PJ and others have a complaint.
As for the whole slogans thing and the expectation of martyrdom, I think you will find that the average hacker spends far more time developing a better product than typing slogans and arguing ideology, I know I do.
But do you think more people would put their effort into developing a free project if there was no ideological reason to do so? Do you think many developers give a damn about whether self confessed "selfish bastards" may be offended with their ideology?
When given a valuable product for nothing it is polite that you show a little gratitude. That does not necessarily mean torturing yourself over supporting it. However that may include a little sympathy towards the developers. I think you have taken the right option by steering clear of Gnu/Linux because you are unable to meet these expectations.
Most Free software developers care about two things. Keeping people who appreciate their software happy, and making more people appreciate their software. This means hopefully to accommodate the second desire they will eventually make it easier for the masses to use. Making it suited for people who seem devoted to not appreciating it will never be a concern, so any improvements you see will be wholly coincidental.
Seriously, if you had a hundred dollars and you wanted to give it away (which is a small fraction of what Free software developers effectively do), would you give it to Ingvar Kamprad who isn't going to care or would you give it to some homeless guy who is really going to enjoy it?
Funny, I allways thought that the 80386 was a 32 bit machine, I thought it was actually the first *86 to have has the EAX register and the STOSD instruction (but strangely not the STOD instruction)
Well, if you don't have the source and the binary you got is for an old 386, then you're stuck. Te cool thing with java is that already bytecode compiled code can be optimised on the fly
Correct me if I am wrong, but since this argument is about the initial choice of language, isn't the argument about whether it is a waste of users clock cycles to write things in java that is to be put to immediate use? Not whether old things written in java will be better than native code without recompilation.
When someone writes a new program, the question of how well it would run if this person was in fact not writing this program and only had an obsolete copy lying around is fairly irrelevant when they choose the language that they will use.
Your argument is like a jockey saying: "well, I have a three year old tortoise and a three year old thoroughbred horse. But hypothetically if I didn't have them and I had a 50 year old horse and tortoise, the tortoise would be faster because the horse would be dead. Therefore I should probably race on my tortoise at the track today.
Canada's counterproductive approach to fighting terrorism is the reason that Canada was hit by the worlds most famous terrorist act in 2001 and the United States remained untouched. It is also the reason why we hear of Canadian citizens being killed abroad by angry extremists almost every day while the united states suffers almost no casualties abroad.
Careless apathy is why station bombings happen regually in careless soft countries like France, but never happen in organised, proactive countries like Spain. It is why lazy New Zealand tourists are targeted in nightclub bombings while tourists from careful countries like Australia are completely spared.
Next time you see the World Trade Center towering over the manhattan horizon, smile and salute the exemplary united states foreign and domestic policy that prevented those towers from suffering the same tragic fate as the CN tower.
This will pay for itself the day we catch some pissed off terrorist coming in to go to flight school
This is an excelent idea because if someone is both a foreign citizen and wanting to learn how to fly then they must be a terrorist. There cannot be any other explanation.
Men at Work's hit song "Down Under" was performed at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Olympic games. Of cause I found that ceremony terribly anticlimactic and frankly nauseating, but surely some foreigners who were too drunk/stoned/tired/bored to turn it off sat through it. It involved some weird cube being played with while the song was on or something if I remember correctly.
Also, I am pretty sure that it was on the soundtrack to "Coming to America" with Eddie Murphy, who knows why, maybe Zamunda is in the southern hemisphere (as is most of Africa I guess).
While we are on the topic of Africa, has anyone noticed how the Caldera logo (although clearly a stylised C) looks like a globe, centered on the worlds most financially ruined continent? (irrelevant, possibly offensive but nonetheless ominous).
And now I mention Olympics. This isn't the first time some dirty scoundrels from Utah have used dishonest tactics to manipulate an institution that was set up to promote peace, love and fair play is it?
Although I largly agree with your point, I think your examples are fairly facile. For a start these are products, marketed towards women wholly to make money rather than to solve social injustices and the like. For a start, special-K (the cereal type) tastes great despite the fact that it is not engineered for my male nutiritional needs (although it is not like my standard breakfast of froot loops is either). T.v. for "women" is a type of broadcasting that networks do because it is cheap and its pulpy sap is soaked up by the 80% of female kind who cannot destinguish bad television, this is much like the 80% of males that thought "the fast and the furious" was a good movie. I see no problem with the Rogain ad either. Pattern baldness in women is like breast cancer in men, rare, but when one has it, it is awkward.
I agree with you, post feminist gender roles are nothing but an il-defined, inconsistant, paradoxical mess. But one cannot progress from the old ideal of giving women protection but no power to the new ideal of giving them power but no protection without an intermediate step of pure chaos where they seem to be granted whatever the hell they want. But these are just consumer products and what do you care if some corperate executypes want to cash in on the fact that women buy stuff?
I don't think that was meant by accurate, all the grandparent poster meant that the predictions are done in a precise method with careful plotting and calculation, not that the results are accurate.
Astrology is one of the stupidist beliefs out there, but the methodical way that serious astrologers observe the positions of the planets in the constelations of the eliptical (a.k.a. the zodiac) cannot be faulted in most cases. Astrology's weakness lies wholly in its assumptions that planet positions effect anything on earth except the tides. Astrology is false, but very accurate, they are two seperate issues.
By the way, if you dislike Astrology as much as I do you may like this page by the very popular (and very manly) maddox.
The problem with this is that there is allready a precedent for this kind of thing. The Australian high court has allready made a ruling that something is published on the internet where it is read. This was part of a libel case where an American jornalist with a company that had dealings in Australia made some unprovable and allegedly slanderous allegations towards an Austrailan over the internet as part of his companies publications.
That said the issues are subtley but still substantially different. Libel is a civil issue, facilitation of piracy is criminal. International treaties handle these cases differently (and quite often not at all), it would have not been possible to sue that jornelist if his paper had no dealings in Australia as if I remember correctly Australian defamation laws are not recognised by America because of the differnces in laws and to a lesser extend the differences in culture. Only the Australian arm of that company could be sued.
But even if the crime was ruled to have been commited in America, as is possible extradition may not be possible. This is because nomatter where a crime was commited, if a sovereign nation does not recognise those crimes or recognises them to a lesser extent (as is the case here) then deportation may be conditional or even impossible.
Personally I don't see a deportation happening, the backlash that would occur when an Australian is sent to a foreign land that he has never set foot on before, to stand before a foreign jury to answer to foreign crimes for an action that was alledged to occur in the man's own home, in his own country would be sickening to most Australians or anyone with a sence of national identity, even if they are not Australian. There is a strong undercurrent of hostility towards the US flowing around Australia's youth and left wing. No judge would be willing to make this man a martr to Australian nationalism. Australia is one of the only countrys never to have had any wars or bloody revolutions, nobody would risk making this sacrifice to appease a foreign power if it meant a remote possibilty that thousends of angry young people with a newfound nationalistic furver could be storming the high court, parlement house, the US embassy and pine gap.
One also has to consider that a legal system that would entitle a foreign power to snatch away citizens for breaking laws of another nation into a distant land where they have never been is harldy soverign. Even if he is not crushed by homocidal revolutionarys, any judge that allows this extradition will surely be relinquising his own power to those overseas. This is completely contrary to human nature, let alone the nature of one ambitious enough to become a high court justice.
But let me say this. If this extradition is allowed, whosoever allows this man has commited nothing wrong in his own country to be taken to a foreign land as a prisoner, shall have fire and chaos thown down on him or her by either their power being snatched away by the American judituary or their life being snatched away by hostile revolutionarys. If they act in the wrong way, their own actions shall not go unlamented.
Ah, evidently the albinoblacksheep guys have never heard of the battle of Austerlitz, the battle of the Pyrimids or the battle of Verdun (I use victory in a loose sence).
If the tax department lost its records and could not assess tax it would have only a few options:
Reconduct its tax evaluation at HUUUGE expense, forcing employers to resubmit records, forcing taxpayers to resubmit tax forms and exponentially increasing audits to make sure that noone takes advantage of the chaos.
Institute a desperate taxation scheme such as skimming off bank balances or taxing all transactions with a flat rate or similar crude methods that would cause investor panic and be sure to send the country's ecconomy into chaos.
Forget about tax this year and let the country slip into anarchy and dissorder.
Personally, I don't think you would like what would happen if the taxation office lost all its files. If the tax office works smoothly then they can minimise inconvenience.
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Anyway, I hardly think the Chernobyl accident was caused by running out of water in their resevoir. No amount of water in the world could have prevented it because they had their pumps off anyway.
Lucky the fire on the oval was able to be contained, otherwise I would have lost more than my Fresnel lens.
One of these actions is violent, causes fear and despair and is condoned by the Saudi royal family, and the other one is violent, causes fear and despair and is condoned by the Saudi royal family.
The British Empire (just like the current American Empire and the Roman and the Persian of the past) got so great by realising that subtle distinction.
This number is otherwise known as the "golden ratio", it was discovered back in classical Greece and it was known to be the most aesthetically pleasing of all ratios. The Parthenon in Athens was built so that its length and width were dictated by this ratio, it was also used by many Renaissance artists to draw the human body so it seems "perfect".
It is impossible of cause to prove mathematically that this ratio is the best looking of all irrational numbers any more than it is possible to prove mathematically who is the most attractive human, however it's endurance seems to suggest that it has some base to it. It has links with Fibonacci numbers, it also is encountered when drawing regular pentagrams and decagons.
Due to the aesthetically pleasing nature of this ratio I think it would be fairly cool to have a series of paper sizes based on this ratio for artistic uses, rather than the practical but bland "A" series or the fairly pointless American and Canadian series.
Also, creating another platform to solve the problem of having too many different platforms is hardly a clever solution is it?
Thirdly, aiming for full compatibility with multiple known weaknesses is hardly the best way to remove the issue of legacy systems.
All you need to do is you just pick a distro at random and become religiously attached to it.
That way you can work out the differences easily by only installing a single distro. If you use distro x, and seek to compare it with distro y using criterion F where F C then you only need to consider two different situations:
if F(x) > F(y) then F is valid therefore x > y for all C.
if F(y) > F(x) then F is an issue only for hopeless n00bs. This implies that n00bs(y) > n00bs(x) therefore x > y for all C
As an example: I have hardly ever used SuSe, yet I use gentoo therefore I can tell you the following:
Since SuSe has worse package management than gentoo, package management can be used to measure the entire worth of a distribution. Therefore gentoo is better than SuSe.
Since Suse has a better installer than gentoo, I know for a fact that since I was able to survive without it that this must be a function only useful for n00bs, posers and grandmas. Since I don't respect the judgment of these people, I can safely assume that not only is this installer supremacy irrelevant, it also proves that the users of SuSe are halfwits and therefore have also made a bad judgment about their distribution choice, ergo gentoo is better than SuSe.
This principle can be modified slightly for use in politics, car brands, football teams, religions, ethnic groups and even music. It is a great technique for the times when one needs to know a lot without having to learn a lot. 9/10 distro choices are based on this method, why shouldn't your next one be to!
P.s. despite my jokes made about the mentality of gentoo users, it really is cool provided you know what you are doing. If you feel like a challenge then give it a try!
That said, the FTA is EVIL and must be stopped.
Are you refering to the Steve Jobs that is the CEO of Apple who is currently grilling playfair or Steve Jobs that is the CEO of Pixar, one of the many organisations that is a member of the MPAA.
Personally I think Steve Jobs has chosen his camp and is too entrenched in it to bridge anything. You will probably get more help from Bill Gates, at least he doesn't run a movie studio too.
Australia is a long way from either Brazil or Japan and a hell of a long distance from Germany or the US.
I guess having none of these evil distro guys is another reason why Australia kicks arse. Though the most popular distro down here seems to be Debian, and I can't see them getting involved for some reason.
As for the whole slogans thing and the expectation of martyrdom, I think you will find that the average hacker spends far more time developing a better product than typing slogans and arguing ideology, I know I do.
But do you think more people would put their effort into developing a free project if there was no ideological reason to do so? Do you think many developers give a damn about whether self confessed "selfish bastards" may be offended with their ideology?
When given a valuable product for nothing it is polite that you show a little gratitude. That does not necessarily mean torturing yourself over supporting it. However that may include a little sympathy towards the developers. I think you have taken the right option by steering clear of Gnu/Linux because you are unable to meet these expectations.
Most Free software developers care about two things. Keeping people who appreciate their software happy, and making more people appreciate their software. This means hopefully to accommodate the second desire they will eventually make it easier for the masses to use. Making it suited for people who seem devoted to not appreciating it will never be a concern, so any improvements you see will be wholly coincidental.
Seriously, if you had a hundred dollars and you wanted to give it away (which is a small fraction of what Free software developers effectively do), would you give it to Ingvar Kamprad who isn't going to care or would you give it to some homeless guy who is really going to enjoy it?
A seedy Tokyo streetcourner could work just as well as step two of that sequence.
Funny, I allways thought that the 80386 was a 32 bit machine, I thought it was actually the first *86 to have has the EAX register and the STOSD instruction (but strangely not the STOD instruction)
When someone writes a new program, the question of how well it would run if this person was in fact not writing this program and only had an obsolete copy lying around is fairly irrelevant when they choose the language that they will use.
Your argument is like a jockey saying: "well, I have a three year old tortoise and a three year old thoroughbred horse. But hypothetically if I didn't have them and I had a 50 year old horse and tortoise, the tortoise would be faster because the horse would be dead. Therefore I should probably race on my tortoise at the track today.
Careless apathy is why station bombings happen regually in careless soft countries like France, but never happen in organised, proactive countries like Spain. It is why lazy New Zealand tourists are targeted in nightclub bombings while tourists from careful countries like Australia are completely spared.
Next time you see the World Trade Center towering over the manhattan horizon, smile and salute the exemplary united states foreign and domestic policy that prevented those towers from suffering the same tragic fate as the CN tower.
This is an excelent idea because if someone is both a foreign citizen and wanting to learn how to fly then they must be a terrorist. There cannot be any other explanation.
Also, I am pretty sure that it was on the soundtrack to "Coming to America" with Eddie Murphy, who knows why, maybe Zamunda is in the southern hemisphere (as is most of Africa I guess).
While we are on the topic of Africa, has anyone noticed how the Caldera logo (although clearly a stylised C) looks like a globe, centered on the worlds most financially ruined continent? (irrelevant, possibly offensive but nonetheless ominous).
And now I mention Olympics. This isn't the first time some dirty scoundrels from Utah have used dishonest tactics to manipulate an institution that was set up to promote peace, love and fair play is it?
Are you referring to a racketeering or an extortion countersuit?
I agree with you, post feminist gender roles are nothing but an il-defined, inconsistant, paradoxical mess. But one cannot progress from the old ideal of giving women protection but no power to the new ideal of giving them power but no protection without an intermediate step of pure chaos where they seem to be granted whatever the hell they want. But these are just consumer products and what do you care if some corperate executypes want to cash in on the fact that women buy stuff?
GtkNotebook for the most part. It seems to work well.
Astrology is one of the stupidist beliefs out there, but the methodical way that serious astrologers observe the positions of the planets in the constelations of the eliptical (a.k.a. the zodiac) cannot be faulted in most cases. Astrology's weakness lies wholly in its assumptions that planet positions effect anything on earth except the tides. Astrology is false, but very accurate, they are two seperate issues.
By the way, if you dislike Astrology as much as I do you may like this page by the very popular (and very manly) maddox.
That said the issues are subtley but still substantially different. Libel is a civil issue, facilitation of piracy is criminal. International treaties handle these cases differently (and quite often not at all), it would have not been possible to sue that jornelist if his paper had no dealings in Australia as if I remember correctly Australian defamation laws are not recognised by America because of the differnces in laws and to a lesser extend the differences in culture. Only the Australian arm of that company could be sued.
But even if the crime was ruled to have been commited in America, as is possible extradition may not be possible. This is because nomatter where a crime was commited, if a sovereign nation does not recognise those crimes or recognises them to a lesser extent (as is the case here) then deportation may be conditional or even impossible.
Personally I don't see a deportation happening, the backlash that would occur when an Australian is sent to a foreign land that he has never set foot on before, to stand before a foreign jury to answer to foreign crimes for an action that was alledged to occur in the man's own home, in his own country would be sickening to most Australians or anyone with a sence of national identity, even if they are not Australian. There is a strong undercurrent of hostility towards the US flowing around Australia's youth and left wing. No judge would be willing to make this man a martr to Australian nationalism. Australia is one of the only countrys never to have had any wars or bloody revolutions, nobody would risk making this sacrifice to appease a foreign power if it meant a remote possibilty that thousends of angry young people with a newfound nationalistic furver could be storming the high court, parlement house, the US embassy and pine gap.
One also has to consider that a legal system that would entitle a foreign power to snatch away citizens for breaking laws of another nation into a distant land where they have never been is harldy soverign. Even if he is not crushed by homocidal revolutionarys, any judge that allows this extradition will surely be relinquising his own power to those overseas. This is completely contrary to human nature, let alone the nature of one ambitious enough to become a high court justice.
But let me say this. If this extradition is allowed, whosoever allows this man has commited nothing wrong in his own country to be taken to a foreign land as a prisoner, shall have fire and chaos thown down on him or her by either their power being snatched away by the American judituary or their life being snatched away by hostile revolutionarys. If they act in the wrong way, their own actions shall not go unlamented.
With the way things are going now, we will be lucky to see even IPv6 used regually by then.
Why no red dwarf?
P.s. I am not French.
Reconduct its tax evaluation at HUUUGE expense, forcing employers to resubmit records, forcing taxpayers to resubmit tax forms and exponentially increasing audits to make sure that noone takes advantage of the chaos.
Institute a desperate taxation scheme such as skimming off bank balances or taxing all transactions with a flat rate or similar crude methods that would cause investor panic and be sure to send the country's ecconomy into chaos.
Forget about tax this year and let the country slip into anarchy and dissorder.
Personally, I don't think you would like what would happen if the taxation office lost all its files. If the tax office works smoothly then they can minimise inconvenience.