If you are actually passing, you're not tailgating. Tailgating is when you (metaphorically) glue the front end of your vehicle to the tail of the one in front of you and refuse to budge. It's dangerous, and in most states it's illegal, but it's also unaccountably popular.
I try to get tailgaters to just pass me, I do. I always slow down when there's one on my tail, because it's just plain not safe to go full highway speeds with someone that close to your bumper. However, most tailgaters won't pass unless you slow down at *least* 10mph, often 20, and in some cases you practically have to stop. Apparently there's some really weird psychological thing going on where they feel like they're going fast as long as they're close to the car in front of them, or something. I don't fully understand it, but it's extremely annoying.
Bear in mind, most of our Windows licenses are OEM. The way our budget works, computers come out of the same fund as furniture (it's always been that way...), and the decision to purchase them is made individually. The extra expense of a site-license for stuff like you're talking about would be... I'd never get that approved.
I suppose if you work in Fortune 500 then our twenty or so Windows systems would seem like a "handful" to you, but I find myself doing a reinstall on one or another of them every month or so, and it typically eats one full shift and a good part of another. That adds up after a while. The Linux systems don't need reinstall as often and are easier to do, take less total time and are more hands-off. But our ILS won't run on Linux, so we can't use it for systems that need that.
I really only want one bumper sticker. It needs to be mostly blank (white, probably), with a short sentence printed in a contrasting color (such as black), in about a nine-point font. It should read, "I brake for tailgaters."
On second thought, what I really want is circuitry with a proximity detector that monitors my speed and flashes my brake lights and an audible warning if the vehicle behind me is too close.
Hmmm... Okay, on third thought, what I really want is to stay off the stupid road. It's safer.
> Windows doesn't have a bullet-proof install method. It's not bad
Yes, it is bad. It's a royal pain, as everyone who supports even a handful of Windows systems knows.
What's really bad, though, is the pain of installing all your application software, one stupid package at a time, after the OS is up and running. If your users need anything much beyond Solitaire and WordPad, it can take an entire shift, sometimes more, just to bring a single workstation up to a usable state. And you can't just set it going and walk away. You have to hold its hand the whole time, because of all the stupid dialog boxes.
Honestly, even something like dselect would be a significant improvement.
Even after extended support ends, you may still be able to get the _existing_ updates. They won't make any more, but that doesn't _necessarily_ imply they'll stop serving the existing ones. For instance, the update feature in Windows 98 SE actually still works, once you upgrade to a sufficiently recent version of IE. This comes in handy when you have to do a reinstall on an old legacy system for whatever reason; you can't exactly bring it up to the present, but you can at least get it back to where it was before the problem that necessitated the reinstall. (Well, you can after you somehow manage to get the drivers for the ethernet card installed, that is, which you typically have to download from the internet, for a system without a working ethernet card. Fun little dance, that. I keep a CD around that has a generic driver on it for making USB mass storage devices work on Windows 98.)
You take really big pieces of ASCII art, and print them in text mode on a 9-pin wide-carriage dot matrix printer, preferably on the green-and-white striped trackfeed paper. You have to cut the artwork into columns first, because it's several pages wide. You don't have to worry about how tall it is, though, because of the continuous feed. Anyway, then you piece the pages back together side-by-side with masking tape on the back, and hang it up on the wall with blobs of yellow sticky tack.
Ideally, the ASCII art should depict inherently geeky things. A portrait of Spock would be good, or an enormous mandelbrot fractal that fills the whole wall, or maybe a schematic of an FPGA...
If you need something different for on another wall, a transcript of a game of Zork would be good.
> None of which leave me either informed or interested in how many ml per fl.oz .
So ask Google. Nobody uses ml for anything within three (maybe even four) thousand miles[1] of here, so I don't have a very clear idea of how large one is. We didn't even use ml in my physics or chemistry classes, because we used SI (so, for volume we mostly dealt with cubic cm and/or cubic meters, depending on context).
I can tell you that a two-litre pop bottle holds just a little more than two quarts, probably somewhere between 65 and 75 ounces, give or take, depending on exactly how close to the lid you fill it. The two-litre bottle is pretty much the *only* exposure I've ever had to litres. I have a better feel for the mol than the millilitre, and it's been seventeen years since I took that chemistry class in high school.
I actually rather like SI for its simplicity, but I intensely dislike metric with all its superfluous gratuitous annoying unnecessary stupid pointless prefixes. I'm okay with cm and kg, but when you start throwing in hecilitres and decograms I don't want anything to do with it.
[1] A mile is somewhat larger than one kilometer, but less than two km, IIRC. HTH.HAND.
McCain doesn't have to do anything to blow this election, and can't do anything to win it. He only got the nomination because it's an unwinnable election for the GOP, and any potential good candidates had the good sense to stay clear of it. You can see the same thing, in reverse, on the Dem side: the race between Hillary and Obama went on so long, because it was clear that the nomination was the whole enchillada for a Dem candidate this year. Winning the nomination, against Hillary, was the difficult part, the thing Obama had to worry about. Once he got past that, winning the national election is relatively easy.
Personally, I'm kind of hoping Obama will spend most of his term putting in a lot of public appearances and giving a lot of speeches. He's really good at that stuff, better than Reagan, even.
What we *need*, economically speaking, is for the federal budget to be balanced, but I'll be quite shocked if Obama manages that, somewhat surprised if he even seriously attempts it.
> I don't know what a fluid ounce is in either country
In the U.S., a fluid ounce is the volume that, if you had that amount of distilled water, would weigh one avoirdupois ounce (i.e., one sixteenth of a pound) under standard conditions (earth gravity sea level blah blah blah). There are eight ounces in a cup, sixteen in a pint, thirty-two in a quart. The most common beverage sizes (at restaurants and so forth) are 12 oz, 21 oz, 32 oz.
Most Americans know about how much a litre is -- err, well, more specifically, most Americans know how much *two* litres is, because pop (carbonated soft drink) is commonly sold in two-litre bottles. (It's also commonly sold in 12-oz cans, which come in packs of 12 and 24.) However, I don't know of *anything* else that's commonly measured in litres in the U.S. The scientific and medical communities use cubic centimeters. Milk and gas (i.e., petrol) are sold in gallons, fruit juice in quarts or gallons, canned fruit and such in cans with their volume marked in ounces.
> Eleven percent of Americans surveyed in a recent survey commissioned by the > Brennan Center for Justice do not have government-issued photo ID
There are three kinds of lies. Among other extremely basic mistakes that the study makes, which are obvious after only a brief perusal, it does not include any controls and implicitly assumes that correlation implies causation. The people who did the study were pushing an agenda, not trying to find out the truth.
> Now since the real goal is to disenfranchise certain groups, you might be interested to know > * Women are more than twice as likely than men not to have a drivers' license. > * One of every five senior women does not have a license.
*I* don't have a driver's license, but what does that have to do with anything? Not having a driver's license is not at all the same as not having ID. I have half a dozen different forms of ID, at least four of which are government-issued, and one of those is photo ID. (This last is the one I show people when they ask to see my driver's license. It's not a license to drive, and it says so right on it, but it looks kind of similar, and nobody ever bats an eye.) I pretty much *have* to have ID -- we all do -- because you can't function in our society without it.
And I don't mean it's not *convenient*. Remember, I don't have a driver's license. I don't need that. I live in a small city, and I can walk anywhere I need to go. It's cheaper than maintaining a car. But ID is... much more necessary. And much less expensive. And much more universal.
Without ID, you can't do anything. You can't get a job, can't open a bank account, can't write a check at most businesses, can't cash or even deposit a government check (e.g., a tax refund), can't get a library card and take books out from the public library. You'd pretty much have to be Amish -- or permanently bedridden.
I'll also note that you seem to be arguing against requiring government-issued photo ID. That's a straw man, because it's not what we were saying at all. While I'm not actually *against* requiring that, I also don't think it's necessary. The other poster and I were not arguing in favor of such a stringent requirement; we were only saying that ID should be required, something beyond the voter simply stating his name. We weren't nearly that specific about what kinds of ID should be acceptable. Personally I'd be fine with accepting a combo of birth certificate and social security card (just for example) in lieu of state photo ID or a driver's license.
But I do think some kind of ID should be required, because none at all makes fraudulent voting *WAY* too easy. (And I don't just mean voting in the name of dead people. There are other ways to vote repeatedly that would be much harder to detect under the current system where we just give a name and vote as that person.)
> When you sign your name, if you look at the fine print on the page, you are signing to verify under > penalty of law that you are who you say you are. And when you print your address, if you look at the > fine print, by printing it you are certifying that's where you live.
Yes, but what actually prevents someone from certifying it inaccurately?
> Because you had to sign a voter registration card at some point in the past in order to be in that > roster, your signature is on file somewhere, and should anyone have a question about the votes in > your precinct, the signatures in the roster book could be compared to the voter signatures on file.
And just exactly how similar does it have to look? Have you ever watched how people sign their names in this country? Most folks' signatures never quite look the same twice. How are you going to tell the ones that are merely sloppy and careless from the ones that are fraudulent?
> As I've explained elsewhere, ID's are not required because historically, that's been used as > a primary way to disenfranchise voters.
Historically, maybe, but how would that work now? ID is *way* more universal than voter registration. Among people old enough to vote and in good enough physical shape to potentially get to the polling location, not having ID is *extraordinarily* rare, way down in the 0.00mumble% range. (As far as people who can't get to the poll, what's required to vote absentee is another discussion entirely.)
I work at a public library. We require adults to have not just ID, but *photo* ID, *plus* proof of address, to get a library card. (For minors without ID, we require them to be accompanied by a parent who has ID, but for voting that would be a non-issue, because the minimum age is 18 last I checked.) To my knowledge, we've never run into a case where an adult couldn't come up with photo ID. We get people who complain about having to trot out to their car and bring it back, and *occasionally* people who have to go home and get it, because they didn't expect to need it. But that's an expectations issue. We also occasionally get people who _just_ moved into the community and don't have proof of address yet, but they do have ID. (The question of whether people should vote in the old location or the new location if they move on or around election day is an interesting one, but it doesn't really have much bearing on whether ID is required, and in any case the important thing is that they only vote in one of those locations, not both.)
If the only parts it didn't make were stuff I could easily and cheaply pick up at the hardware store, like nuts and bolts, the "self-replicating" claim would be somewhat less annoying. But it needs motors and circuit boards and stuff, which are not so convenient to obtain.
The other annoying thing is, you can't build one unless you have access to a rapid prototyping machine. For most of the world that's an unsolveable bootstrapping problem. If they had plans for a version you could make out of nothing but ordinary hardware-store parts, that would be much more exciting to me, even if the raw materials cost more, and even if it couldn't replicate *any* of its own parts.
> create a factory that makes *any commodity of choice*, and keeps itself > working indefinitely using just the raw materials, and energy. That is, > repairs/rebuilds machines if they break, does maintenance, etc.... > Perhaps all the required technology to do this already exists, but we're > still a long way from putting all those parts together.
The individual technologies exist, but making factories actually work this way would be inefficient and uneconomic.
Incidentally, the defense against this attack is to go ahead and clone Tasty Profitable Banana, but *also* put some R&D effort into finding other potentially commercially viable varieties and developing a knowledge base on how best to cultivate them and so forth. That way you make the larger profit now (by selling TPB), *and* you are prepared. This puts the competitor, who was banking on being able to wipe you out with blight, back in the position of *not* being able to do so, which means he may as well clone Tasty Profitable Banana (in addition to his variety-cultivating) and compete with you on equal footing. Everyone can continue to sell TPB, but everyone also has something else to resort to if a TPB blight comes around. Everyone wins, and the only major cost is a few R&D dollars. A certain amount of R&D spending is always advisable anyway, so.
> If everyone else is cloning Tasty Profitable Banana, and you don't, you go out of business > because either your bananas aren't Tasty or your bananas aren't Profitable. Therefore there's > a penalty for maintaining variation, and the only potential benefit -- not having your whole > crop wiped out by a blight -- isn't something you can bet on.
Apparently you are not familiar with the Law of Successful Gambling: never make a bet unless you know you can win. There are two ways to know you can win: by something you know, or by something you do. The first is the easier to pull off, but only when the opportunity presents itself. The other party has to be betting in ignorance, unaware of certain facts that make his wager untenable.
The second way is the one that seems more applicable here: if your competitor is cloning Tasty Profitable Banana, and your business is built around a larger number of (or hardier) cultivars, you don't just *hope* for a blight: you *arrange* one. This is widely considered unethical, but that won't necessarily stop a company from doing it.
(I'm not saying that's what's happened with the Panama-disease strain that attacks Cavendish. I don't know that there's any major company in the position to benefit significantly in this instance. The people who introduced Goldfinger, for instance, also grow and profit from Cavendish on a large scale, and there's some real doubt as to whether they could sell Goldfinger to the most lucrative Cavendish markets (Europe and the US) even if Cavendish goes away, so they seem an unlikely culprit.)
Yes, but with apples there are dozens of commercially viable and widely-grown cultivars. Grimes, for instance, are significantly different from Yellow D. Jonathan are *very* different from Mac. I'm not going to turn this post into a ramble about apple cultivars, but there are lots of them.
With bananas there are perhaps half a dozen widely-grown and potentially commercially viable cultivars, most of which have not gained widespread consumer acceptance. Around here you can really only buy two varieties (the longer straighter ones that are lighter yellow when ripe and the shorter more regularly curved ones that are a darker yellow when ripe), and despite the obvious differences I think they're both variants of Cavendish.
There's probably more variation _overall_ in bananas, but almost all of the varieties are not worth cultivating on any significant scale, either because they're not hardy enough or because there's no market for their fruit.
> Is it technically possible to design a system that is immune to buffer overruns or, by > default, fails safe, as in not allowing any old code to walk all over the address space.
I don't know about "immune" in the absolute sense, but there are certainly things you can do. Writing everything (_everything_, including low-level system libraries) in a very-high-level language that dynamically resizes/reallocates buffers as necessary (e.g., integers automatically promote to bigints if they overflow, writing past the end of a string causes a longer string buffer to be allocated automatically, and so on) would help, but of course that has performance implications. It's less absurd to contemplate that now than it would have been twenty years ago, but it would still mean everything would have to be written that way from the ground up, and legacy code could only be run via virtualization and would not receive the same kind of protection. Taint checking is even better, but again you're now talking about writing everything in a VHLL, so performance is going to be an issue.
Address randomization and NX also help. Not as much as the aforementioned technologies, but OTOH they also have rather less impact on performance.
> like only being able to operate on one layer at a time
You know, that would actually be... useful. Occasionally. And the rest of the time, it wouldn't actively get in the way of anything important. That would actually be a worthwhile improvement.
This is very different from the usual criticisms of Gimp, which mostly either complain about ways in which it's actively better (e.g., not being MDI) or whine about not having a bogus "CMYK mode" so that artists who ought to know enough about color spaces to understand why this isn't possible can *pretend* that what they're seeing on the screen will actually come out looking the same on paper. (Yeah, that'd work in a fantasy universe. Can we also get a mode that shows on the screen what it will look like printed on glossy paper, colored paper, textured paper,... How about a lamination mode? Meh.)
Being able to operate on multiple layers, while it certainly shouldn't be the default mode of operation and should probably have a UI specifically designed to avoid accidental selection, would actually be a nice capability to have from time to time. I'd probably only use it once every six months, but on those occasions it could be really handy.
> > When can I get windows vista for firefox? > It's not likely to be available for firefox, but soon you will be able to run it within emacs.
Running in Emacs, though, you wouldn't really need most of Vista, because Emacs is already better. Emacs already has good file management facilities, a better mailreader than the one that comes with Vista, and a better and more flexible sidebar. The minibuffer is a more than merely adequate substitute for Vista's much-lauded Start Search feature, and Vista doesn't even have anything like the modeline. Emacs also comes with rather a lot more applications out of the box than Vista, including more games.
The really big difference, though, is in window-management paradigm. Emacs does its window management at three levels: what Vista calls "windows" are called buffers in Emacs. Then there are pane-like things (which Emacs calls windows), which are more like the windows in the ion window manager, in that they don't overlap. And then there are frames in Emacs, which are similar to the virtual desktops in Gnome and KDE; typically you switch between these frames with Alt-tab. Vista does not have three levels of window management.
Also, Vista only has a single-entry clipboard, instead of a proper kill ring. And it doesn't have built-in regular expression support. And cmd.exe is much less powerful than eshell. I could go on, but you get the idea.
What does Vista have that you'd *want* in Emacs? DRM?
I think development time was the bigger issue. It would have taken years to implement all those features. If Microsoft had insisted on holding up the release of Vista for every one of them, it wouldn't have come out until several years later than originally projected.
Yes, and that ought to be obvious, but I'm afraid sometimes people get them confused and use it's for the possessive by analogy with nouns.
I've also seen "your's" occasionally, which for some reason doesn't bother me as much as switching "your" with "you're". I haven't yet seen me's. I've seen I's and they's, but not as possessives. (The uses of those that I've seen were contractions for "I is" and "they is", respectively, subject-verb agreement rules notwithstanding).
I'm just waiting for people to start putting apostrophes in possessive personal pronouns: her's, hi's, it's... Oh, wait, they already do that last one.
> the second most well-known compiler compiler, Terence Parr's Antlr
I was pretty sure the two best-known compiler compilers were yacc and bison, though I couldn't have told you which one is the most well-known and which one the second-most well-known these days. (I know which is older and which is newer... but that isn't necessarily the same thing.) I've never heard of Terence Parr's Antlr before. (I _have_ heard of PGE, but only because I read Perl-related news occasionally.)
> This is News for Nerds. Surely the analogy should be to Erdos numbers, not Kevin Bacon.
If you don't understand why Kevin Bacon was chosen, you haven't been around the internet long enough. The Oracle of Kevin Bacon was one of the first major dorky memes on the world wide web, back when Yahoo was still on akebono. The only major meme I can think of that's been on the web longer is putting fractal images on your home page.
Slashdot Mirror
If only it were so easy.
If you are actually passing, you're not tailgating. Tailgating is when you (metaphorically) glue the front end of your vehicle to the tail of the one in front of you and refuse to budge. It's dangerous, and in most states it's illegal, but it's also unaccountably popular.
I try to get tailgaters to just pass me, I do. I always slow down when there's one on my tail, because it's just plain not safe to go full highway speeds with someone that close to your bumper. However, most tailgaters won't pass unless you slow down at *least* 10mph, often 20, and in some cases you practically have to stop. Apparently there's some really weird psychological thing going on where they feel like they're going fast as long as they're close to the car in front of them, or something. I don't fully understand it, but it's extremely annoying.
Bear in mind, most of our Windows licenses are OEM. The way our budget works, computers come out of the same fund as furniture (it's always been that way...), and the decision to purchase them is made individually. The extra expense of a site-license for stuff like you're talking about would be... I'd never get that approved.
I suppose if you work in Fortune 500 then our twenty or so Windows systems would seem like a "handful" to you, but I find myself doing a reinstall on one or another of them every month or so, and it typically eats one full shift and a good part of another. That adds up after a while. The Linux systems don't need reinstall as often and are easier to do, take less total time and are more hands-off. But our ILS won't run on Linux, so we can't use it for systems that need that.
Indeed.
I really only want one bumper sticker. It needs to be mostly blank (white, probably), with a short sentence printed in a contrasting color (such as black), in about a nine-point font. It should read, "I brake for tailgaters."
On second thought, what I really want is circuitry with a proximity detector that monitors my speed and flashes my brake lights and an audible warning if the vehicle behind me is too close.
Hmmm... Okay, on third thought, what I really want is to stay off the stupid road. It's safer.
> Windows doesn't have a bullet-proof install method. It's not bad
Yes, it is bad. It's a royal pain, as everyone who supports even a handful of Windows systems knows.
What's really bad, though, is the pain of installing all your application software, one stupid package at a time, after the OS is up and running. If your users need anything much beyond Solitaire and WordPad, it can take an entire shift, sometimes more, just to bring a single workstation up to a usable state. And you can't just set it going and walk away. You have to hold its hand the whole time, because of all the stupid dialog boxes.
Honestly, even something like dselect would be a significant improvement.
Even after extended support ends, you may still be able to get the _existing_ updates. They won't make any more, but that doesn't _necessarily_ imply they'll stop serving the existing ones. For instance, the update feature in Windows 98 SE actually still works, once you upgrade to a sufficiently recent version of IE. This comes in handy when you have to do a reinstall on an old legacy system for whatever reason; you can't exactly bring it up to the present, but you can at least get it back to where it was before the problem that necessitated the reinstall. (Well, you can after you somehow manage to get the drivers for the ethernet card installed, that is, which you typically have to download from the internet, for a system without a working ethernet card. Fun little dance, that. I keep a CD around that has a generic driver on it for making USB mass storage devices work on Windows 98.)
You take really big pieces of ASCII art, and print them in text mode on a 9-pin wide-carriage dot matrix printer, preferably on the green-and-white striped trackfeed paper. You have to cut the artwork into columns first, because it's several pages wide. You don't have to worry about how tall it is, though, because of the continuous feed. Anyway, then you piece the pages back together side-by-side with masking tape on the back, and hang it up on the wall with blobs of yellow sticky tack.
Ideally, the ASCII art should depict inherently geeky things. A portrait of Spock would be good, or an enormous mandelbrot fractal that fills the whole wall, or maybe a schematic of an FPGA...
If you need something different for on another wall, a transcript of a game of Zork would be good.
> None of which leave me either informed or interested in how many ml per fl.oz .
So ask Google. Nobody uses ml for anything within three (maybe even four) thousand miles[1] of here, so I don't have a very clear idea of how large one is. We didn't even use ml in my physics or chemistry classes, because we used SI (so, for volume we mostly dealt with cubic cm and/or cubic meters, depending on context).
I can tell you that a two-litre pop bottle holds just a little more than two quarts, probably somewhere between 65 and 75 ounces, give or take, depending on exactly how close to the lid you fill it. The two-litre bottle is pretty much the *only* exposure I've ever had to litres. I have a better feel for the mol than the millilitre, and it's been seventeen years since I took that chemistry class in high school.
I actually rather like SI for its simplicity, but I intensely dislike metric with all its superfluous gratuitous annoying unnecessary stupid pointless prefixes. I'm okay with cm and kg, but when you start throwing in hecilitres and decograms I don't want anything to do with it.
[1] A mile is somewhat larger than one kilometer, but less than two km, IIRC. HTH.HAND.
McCain doesn't have to do anything to blow this election, and can't do anything to win it. He only got the nomination because it's an unwinnable election for the GOP, and any potential good candidates had the good sense to stay clear of it. You can see the same thing, in reverse, on the Dem side: the race between Hillary and Obama went on so long, because it was clear that the nomination was the whole enchillada for a Dem candidate this year. Winning the nomination, against Hillary, was the difficult part, the thing Obama had to worry about. Once he got past that, winning the national election is relatively easy.
Personally, I'm kind of hoping Obama will spend most of his term putting in a lot of public appearances and giving a lot of speeches. He's really good at that stuff, better than Reagan, even.
What we *need*, economically speaking, is for the federal budget to be balanced, but I'll be quite shocked if Obama manages that, somewhat surprised if he even seriously attempts it.
> I don't know what a fluid ounce is in either country
In the U.S., a fluid ounce is the volume that, if you had that amount of distilled water, would weigh one avoirdupois ounce (i.e., one sixteenth of a pound) under standard conditions (earth gravity sea level blah blah blah). There are eight ounces in a cup, sixteen in a pint, thirty-two in a quart. The most common beverage sizes (at restaurants and so forth) are 12 oz, 21 oz, 32 oz.
Most Americans know about how much a litre is -- err, well, more specifically, most Americans know how much *two* litres is, because pop (carbonated soft drink) is commonly sold in two-litre bottles. (It's also commonly sold in 12-oz cans, which come in packs of 12 and 24.) However, I don't know of *anything* else that's commonly measured in litres in the U.S. The scientific and medical communities use cubic centimeters. Milk and gas (i.e., petrol) are sold in gallons, fruit juice in quarts or gallons, canned fruit and such in cans with their volume marked in ounces.
> Eleven percent of Americans surveyed in a recent survey commissioned by the
> Brennan Center for Justice do not have government-issued photo ID
There are three kinds of lies. Among other extremely basic mistakes that the study makes, which are obvious after only a brief perusal, it does not include any controls and implicitly assumes that correlation implies causation. The people who did the study were pushing an agenda, not trying to find out the truth.
> Now since the real goal is to disenfranchise certain groups, you might be interested to know
> * Women are more than twice as likely than men not to have a drivers' license.
> * One of every five senior women does not have a license.
*I* don't have a driver's license, but what does that have to do with anything? Not having a driver's license is not at all the same as not having ID. I have half a dozen different forms of ID, at least four of which are government-issued, and one of those is photo ID. (This last is the one I show people when they ask to see my driver's license. It's not a license to drive, and it says so right on it, but it looks kind of similar, and nobody ever bats an eye.) I pretty much *have* to have ID -- we all do -- because you can't function in our society without it.
And I don't mean it's not *convenient*. Remember, I don't have a driver's license. I don't need that. I live in a small city, and I can walk anywhere I need to go. It's cheaper than maintaining a car. But ID is... much more necessary. And much less expensive. And much more universal.
Without ID, you can't do anything. You can't get a job, can't open a bank account, can't write a check at most businesses, can't cash or even deposit a government check (e.g., a tax refund), can't get a library card and take books out from the public library. You'd pretty much have to be Amish -- or permanently bedridden.
I'll also note that you seem to be arguing against requiring government-issued photo ID. That's a straw man, because it's not what we were saying at all. While I'm not actually *against* requiring that, I also don't think it's necessary. The other poster and I were not arguing in favor of such a stringent requirement; we were only saying that ID should be required, something beyond the voter simply stating his name. We weren't nearly that specific about what kinds of ID should be acceptable. Personally I'd be fine with accepting a combo of birth certificate and social security card (just for example) in lieu of state photo ID or a driver's license.
But I do think some kind of ID should be required, because none at all makes fraudulent voting *WAY* too easy. (And I don't just mean voting in the name of dead people. There are other ways to vote repeatedly that would be much harder to detect under the current system where we just give a name and vote as that person.)
> When you sign your name, if you look at the fine print on the page, you are signing to verify under
> penalty of law that you are who you say you are. And when you print your address, if you look at the
> fine print, by printing it you are certifying that's where you live.
Yes, but what actually prevents someone from certifying it inaccurately?
> Because you had to sign a voter registration card at some point in the past in order to be in that
> roster, your signature is on file somewhere, and should anyone have a question about the votes in
> your precinct, the signatures in the roster book could be compared to the voter signatures on file.
And just exactly how similar does it have to look? Have you ever watched how people sign their names in this country? Most folks' signatures never quite look the same twice. How are you going to tell the ones that are merely sloppy and careless from the ones that are fraudulent?
> As I've explained elsewhere, ID's are not required because historically, that's been used as
> a primary way to disenfranchise voters.
Historically, maybe, but how would that work now? ID is *way* more universal than voter registration. Among people old enough to vote and in good enough physical shape to potentially get to the polling location, not having ID is *extraordinarily* rare, way down in the 0.00mumble% range. (As far as people who can't get to the poll, what's required to vote absentee is another discussion entirely.)
I work at a public library. We require adults to have not just ID, but *photo* ID, *plus* proof of address, to get a library card. (For minors without ID, we require them to be accompanied by a parent who has ID, but for voting that would be a non-issue, because the minimum age is 18 last I checked.) To my knowledge, we've never run into a case where an adult couldn't come up with photo ID. We get people who complain about having to trot out to their car and bring it back, and *occasionally* people who have to go home and get it, because they didn't expect to need it. But that's an expectations issue. We also occasionally get people who _just_ moved into the community and don't have proof of address yet, but they do have ID. (The question of whether people should vote in the old location or the new location if they move on or around election day is an interesting one, but it doesn't really have much bearing on whether ID is required, and in any case the important thing is that they only vote in one of those locations, not both.)
> Zen is total bullshit. When you realize that fact, you have mastered Zen.
The Zen that cannot embrace dualism is not the true Zen.
HTH.HAND.
If the only parts it didn't make were stuff I could easily and cheaply pick up at the hardware store, like nuts and bolts, the "self-replicating" claim would be somewhat less annoying. But it needs motors and circuit boards and stuff, which are not so convenient to obtain.
The other annoying thing is, you can't build one unless you have access to a rapid prototyping machine. For most of the world that's an unsolveable bootstrapping problem. If they had plans for a version you could make out of nothing but ordinary hardware-store parts, that would be much more exciting to me, even if the raw materials cost more, and even if it couldn't replicate *any* of its own parts.
> create a factory that makes *any commodity of choice*, and keeps itself ...
> working indefinitely using just the raw materials, and energy. That is,
> repairs/rebuilds machines if they break, does maintenance, etc.
> Perhaps all the required technology to do this already exists, but we're
> still a long way from putting all those parts together.
The individual technologies exist, but making factories actually work this way would be inefficient and uneconomic.
Incidentally, the defense against this attack is to go ahead and clone Tasty Profitable Banana, but *also* put some R&D effort into finding other potentially commercially viable varieties and developing a knowledge base on how best to cultivate them and so forth. That way you make the larger profit now (by selling TPB), *and* you are prepared. This puts the competitor, who was banking on being able to wipe you out with blight, back in the position of *not* being able to do so, which means he may as well clone Tasty Profitable Banana (in addition to his variety-cultivating) and compete with you on equal footing. Everyone can continue to sell TPB, but everyone also has something else to resort to if a TPB blight comes around. Everyone wins, and the only major cost is a few R&D dollars. A certain amount of R&D spending is always advisable anyway, so.
> If everyone else is cloning Tasty Profitable Banana, and you don't, you go out of business
> because either your bananas aren't Tasty or your bananas aren't Profitable. Therefore there's
> a penalty for maintaining variation, and the only potential benefit -- not having your whole
> crop wiped out by a blight -- isn't something you can bet on.
Apparently you are not familiar with the Law of Successful Gambling: never make a bet unless you know you can win. There are two ways to know you can win: by something you know, or by something you do. The first is the easier to pull off, but only when the opportunity presents itself. The other party has to be betting in ignorance, unaware of certain facts that make his wager untenable.
The second way is the one that seems more applicable here: if your competitor is cloning Tasty Profitable Banana, and your business is built around a larger number of (or hardier) cultivars, you don't just *hope* for a blight: you *arrange* one. This is widely considered unethical, but that won't necessarily stop a company from doing it.
(I'm not saying that's what's happened with the Panama-disease strain that attacks Cavendish. I don't know that there's any major company in the position to benefit significantly in this instance. The people who introduced Goldfinger, for instance, also grow and profit from Cavendish on a large scale, and there's some real doubt as to whether they could sell Goldfinger to the most lucrative Cavendish markets (Europe and the US) even if Cavendish goes away, so they seem an unlikely culprit.)
Yes, but with apples there are dozens of commercially viable and widely-grown cultivars. Grimes, for instance, are significantly different from Yellow D. Jonathan are *very* different from Mac. I'm not going to turn this post into a ramble about apple cultivars, but there are lots of them.
With bananas there are perhaps half a dozen widely-grown and potentially commercially viable cultivars, most of which have not gained widespread consumer acceptance. Around here you can really only buy two varieties (the longer straighter ones that are lighter yellow when ripe and the shorter more regularly curved ones that are a darker yellow when ripe), and despite the obvious differences I think they're both variants of Cavendish.
There's probably more variation _overall_ in bananas, but almost all of the varieties are not worth cultivating on any significant scale, either because they're not hardy enough or because there's no market for their fruit.
> Is it technically possible to design a system that is immune to buffer overruns or, by
> default, fails safe, as in not allowing any old code to walk all over the address space.
I don't know about "immune" in the absolute sense, but there are certainly things you can do. Writing everything (_everything_, including low-level system libraries) in a very-high-level language that dynamically resizes/reallocates buffers as necessary (e.g., integers automatically promote to bigints if they overflow, writing past the end of a string causes a longer string buffer to be allocated automatically, and so on) would help, but of course that has performance implications. It's less absurd to contemplate that now than it would have been twenty years ago, but it would still mean everything would have to be written that way from the ground up, and legacy code could only be run via virtualization and would not receive the same kind of protection. Taint checking is even better, but again you're now talking about writing everything in a VHLL, so performance is going to be an issue.
Address randomization and NX also help. Not as much as the aforementioned technologies, but OTOH they also have rather less impact on performance.
Tradeoffs. Security is all about tradeoffs.
> like only being able to operate on one layer at a time
... How about a lamination mode? Meh.)
You know, that would actually be... useful. Occasionally. And the rest of the time, it wouldn't actively get in the way of anything important. That would actually be a worthwhile improvement.
This is very different from the usual criticisms of Gimp, which mostly either complain about ways in which it's actively better (e.g., not being MDI) or whine about not having a bogus "CMYK mode" so that artists who ought to know enough about color spaces to understand why this isn't possible can *pretend* that what they're seeing on the screen will actually come out looking the same on paper. (Yeah, that'd work in a fantasy universe. Can we also get a mode that shows on the screen what it will look like printed on glossy paper, colored paper, textured paper,
Being able to operate on multiple layers, while it certainly shouldn't be the default mode of operation and should probably have a UI specifically designed to avoid accidental selection, would actually be a nice capability to have from time to time. I'd probably only use it once every six months, but on those occasions it could be really handy.
> > When can I get windows vista for firefox?
> It's not likely to be available for firefox, but soon you will be able to run it within emacs.
Running in Emacs, though, you wouldn't really need most of Vista, because Emacs is already better. Emacs already has good file management facilities, a better mailreader than the one that comes with Vista, and a better and more flexible sidebar. The minibuffer is a more than merely adequate substitute for Vista's much-lauded Start Search feature, and Vista doesn't even have anything like the modeline. Emacs also comes with rather a lot more applications out of the box than Vista, including more games.
The really big difference, though, is in window-management paradigm. Emacs does its window management at three levels: what Vista calls "windows" are called buffers in Emacs. Then there are pane-like things (which Emacs calls windows), which are more like the windows in the ion window manager, in that they don't overlap. And then there are frames in Emacs, which are similar to the virtual desktops in Gnome and KDE; typically you switch between these frames with Alt-tab. Vista does not have three levels of window management.
Also, Vista only has a single-entry clipboard, instead of a proper kill ring. And it doesn't have built-in regular expression support. And cmd.exe is much less powerful than eshell. I could go on, but you get the idea.
What does Vista have that you'd *want* in Emacs? DRM?
I think development time was the bigger issue. It would have taken years to implement all those features. If Microsoft had insisted on holding up the release of Vista for every one of them, it wouldn't have come out until several years later than originally projected.
</deadpan>
Yes, and that ought to be obvious, but I'm afraid sometimes people get them confused and use it's for the possessive by analogy with nouns.
I've also seen "your's" occasionally, which for some reason doesn't bother me as much as switching "your" with "you're". I haven't yet seen me's. I've seen I's and they's, but not as possessives. (The uses of those that I've seen were contractions for "I is" and "they is", respectively, subject-verb agreement rules notwithstanding).
I'm just waiting for people to start putting apostrophes in possessive personal pronouns: her's, hi's, it's... Oh, wait, they already do that last one.
> the second most well-known compiler compiler, Terence Parr's Antlr
I was pretty sure the two best-known compiler compilers were yacc and bison, though I couldn't have told you which one is the most well-known and which one the second-most well-known these days. (I know which is older and which is newer... but that isn't necessarily the same thing.) I've never heard of Terence Parr's Antlr before. (I _have_ heard of PGE, but only because I read Perl-related news occasionally.)
> This is News for Nerds. Surely the analogy should be to Erdos numbers, not Kevin Bacon.
If you don't understand why Kevin Bacon was chosen, you haven't been around the internet long enough. The Oracle of Kevin Bacon was one of the first major dorky memes on the world wide web, back when Yahoo was still on akebono. The only major meme I can think of that's been on the web longer is putting fractal images on your home page.