Tetris and Minesweeper may be NP Hard, but that doesn't mean a computer program can't beat a human player. Heck, the reaction time alone would make a computer player WAY better at Tetris than a human. Chess is NP Hard under the rules printed on the inside of the lid of most cheap chess sets ("Hoyle rules" -- there are no limits on stuff like how many turns you can go without a capture or pawn move), but computers still easily thrash all but the best human grandmasters.
The category for games that computers aren't smart enough to play as well as a human is "AI Complete". Stuff like Freeciv and Wesnoth, where strategy is subjective, are MUCH harder to write decent AI for than Tetris and Minesweeper.
> One thing I was REALLY glad to see in 2.x was the pervasive unicode support
Oh, was that new in 2.x?
At the time, I wasn't doing anything that required Unicode, so I didn't notice any changes there. All the foreign languages I'd studied up to that point had small alphabets or abjads and so were easily supportable using nothing but ASCII characters and transliterative fonts.
But yeah, I'm using Unicode now (studying Japanese, presumably because I'm some kind of glutton for pain or something), so that's good.
> and the decent anti-aliased font support.
That's Gnome's doing? I was under the impression that was an X.org improvement. Some spiffy new rendering extension called xftt, or something like that.
Actually, I'm leaning toward a custom session consisting of sawfish and gnome-panel. Most of the actually *useful* features of Gnome can be had just by running the panel (and individual apps launched as needed, though the terminal is the only Gnome-branded app I use very much) in conjunction with another window manager. I'm not sure I need the rest of Gnome. And unlike most of Gnome 1.x, sawfish has been maintained and still works just fine with modern stuff.
Setting up a custom desktop session is surprisingly easy. You only have to edit a couple of files...
> Nautilus was so terrible initially that I made several efforts at replacing it with gmc.
I used to just chmod ugo-x `which nautilus`
Over the years, as hardware has gotten better and other software has increased its requirements, Nautilus no longer seems like such an extremely terrible waste of system resources. I mean, it still seems kind of silly to leave the file manager running 100% of the time just to draw wallpaper and desktop icons, but whatever. With all the other software I'm running, it's a drop in the bucket these days.
I'm still not really fond of it, though. Truth be told, I do most of my file management on the command line. It's just easier. All the handy shortcuts (like tab completion and wildcards) don't work so well in a GUI file manager.
> > the ability to use the file manager as a web browser > Wait, does GNOME even have that?
It was at one time purported to be one of the major "selling points" of Nautilus (over more traditional file managers like gmc), but upon closer inspection it appears to have been removed at some point since, probably because nobody was using it.
I never noticed its removal, probably because I never used it either.
So that particular complaint is obsolete.
> On the other hand, KDE has had that for years
Yeah, I know about Konqueror: "What do you mean you want to upgrade your web browser without upgrading your entire desktop environment? Modern websites you say? Bah! And don't even think about reporting any bugs in the CSS handling if you're running the latest bleeding-edge dev build. What do you mean you don't want to run bleeding-edge dev builds of your whole desktop environment? All the core devs are doing it, so you should too!"
As a web developer, I am not particularly fond of Konqueror.
> As for most of the rest of your complaints, I can't feel much sympathy. > When I plug in a USB hard drive, I like that a notification pops up.
Don't get me wrong: I don't care what happens by default. I just want the ability to turn it off.
> There is plumbing for you to control what happens; right there in the popup > dialog you can choose what you want it to do, and then choose "always do this".
Nice theory, but in practice it doesn't work. You still get bothered again next time.
> things like Bonobo will be completely gone
Can't say I'll be sorry to see that go.
(What does bonobo even *do*, besides complicate the dependency tree?)
Two years would definitely be too short. It's not unusual for it to take longer than, after first publication, that for a writer to really get noticed. The term should be long enough that the writer is still getting royalties from the first book while he's finishing up the second book. That way society can support professional writers, who get paid for the books they write and that's their job.
We can't support that career for everyone who thinks they want to be a writer, obviously. Nobody would ever do anything else, and that would be bad, and most of the books that would be written wouldn't be worth printing. But the people who write books that people actually want to read should be able to spend their time doing so, and not have to work a day job to support themselves. For this to work, the royalties coming in from the previous book need to keep flowing at least until the next book is ready to hit the market, and that's a bare minimum.
And yeah, I know two years would be overkill for someone like Nora Roberts, who can write an entire series of four books in a quarter of a year, and within six months everyone who's going to buy them has already done so, but most writers aren't like that. Even five years would be shaving it pretty thin, by the time you take into account several rounds of editing and so on. There are some authors who write very good books, but take several years to write each one. Their books tend to be of higher quality, and I think this should be encouraged.
Seven years *might* be long enough. Might not. I'm not certain. But I *am* sure it would be much too radical a reversal to actually get through Congress, starting from where we are today.
Thus, I favor a reduction to somewhere in the neighborhood of "fifty years from first publication", with a grandfather clause covering things that have already been published before the bill is passed. Not because I don't think that's really still too long, but because I think it's what we might potentially have a prayer of a chance of actually convincing Congress to consider doing, given enough lobbying and pressure. Call it "living in the real world" if you will.
Of course, we could start by lobbying for a restoration of the original 28-year term, and reserve backing down to 50 years as a negotiation tactic...
Fullerines are manmade. It's normal for manmade things to have complex structures and patterns. It would only be surprising it it arose naturally without human intervention.
Personally I liked Gnome 1.x a good deal better than I like the 2.x series.
Except for gnome-terminal. The newer versions of gnome-terminal are better.
But everything else is worse. More dependencies that shouldn't be necessary, worse performance, more emphasis on completely pointless features like the ability to use the file manager as a web browser (WHY would I EVER want that?) but fewer *useful* features (like, the ability to have an always-on-top panel of a particular size in a particular position, which was great for stuff like having a clock just to the left of where the minimize button was on maximized windows), more gratuitous bug-the-user annoyances (like dialog boxes asking you stupid questions and/or unasked-for windows popping up voluntarily every time you connect a USB device or insert a disc), more undesirably arcane Windows-esque stuff (like gconf), more effort required to get the theme the way you like it, and some things you just plain *can't* do, or I have not figured out how (like, changing the icons on the built-in feature buttons on the panel for things like logging out; in 1.x this was as easy as changing the icon on an app launcher).
If Gnome 1.4 were compatible with modern software (both directions: modern versions of the software it requires, like libraries, and, going the other way, modern versions of applications), I'd still be using it. It was good. I have no idea why they decided to screw it up so much. Gnome 2.x comes across as a bad sequel or a poor remake. It is inferior in nearly every respect.
I can't say I'm very excited at the prospect of Gnome 3.0. What features are they going to take away now, the foot menu and the ability to have a clock on the panel? And what are they going to add? A useless 3D "walk through" filesystem animation like in Jurassic Park, which activates automatically every time a filesystem is mounted? Fixed-size desktop-bound "gadgets", like in Windows Seven, which are strictly inferior to panel applets in every way? Take your time, guys, take your time. I'm in no hurry to upgrade.
Hexagonal crystals are also not unusual, for similar reasons.
What would be weird would be a naturally occurring repeating pattern of different shapes, e.g., a soccerball-like repeating mixture of pentagons and hexagons, or a pattern of octagons that each adjoin another octagon on the north, south, east, and west edges, with squares (angled at 45 degrees) filling the gaps between the ne, sw, se, and nw edges, and bonus points if adjoining octagons are different colors while the ones across squares from eachother are the same color. Show me THAT occurring naturally, and I'll stand there with my jaw hanging open staring at it in wonderment.
The word "disaster" usually refers to things that are accidental and/or beyond our control, and wholly without benefit. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, the 1929 stock market crash, that sort of thing.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of war. That's a different category.
And it is worth noting that Japan (unlike, say, the USA) entered said war very much on purpose. Well, when you deliberately pick a fight, sometimes you get hurt. And when the person you pick a fight with is five times your size, you ought to *expect* to get hurt. I mean, come on, what do you THINK is going to happen?
I would use the word "unfortunate" to describe what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, probably in a construction like "It was unfortunate that the government of Japan insisted on waiting for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before finally agreeing to let the war end, when it was obvious to anyone who was paying a modicum of attention that the outcome had been a foregone conclusion since early May at the latest."
You're looking at the back of the sign. From the front it reads GOTEL (approximately; the characters are cyrillic, but those are their closest Latin equivalents; the last symbol, which looks a little like a b, has no phonetic value of its own). My instinct says "gotel" is probably a cognate for the English word "hotel", but that's a guess.
> The researchers would have been better off using a loud, unexpected > noise (dropping a heavy book on the floor behind the subject
You can do much better than that.
If you want to use sound to introduce stress into a person's life, you *start* by introducing a crying infant that cannot be comforted (e.g., because it's undergoing severe nicotine withdrawal after being borne by a chain-smoker mom) into the situation. Most people are unable to completely tune out the sound of a crying infant, even when there's absolutely nothing they can do about it, so it creates more stress the longer it goes on. Bring them into a room decorated like a nursery, with a baby bed and everything; give them the kid and a diaper bag (containing a bottle and a rattle as well as diapers and wipes and stuff), indicate that you're coming "right back", and leave them for about four hours. (Position yourself behind locked doors and vacate the accessible areas of the building, so they can't find anyone else to hand off the baby to.) Stress is guaranteed. (Just be sure you monitor the situation so you can intervene if the stress becomes an all-out rage. You don't want them to *kill* the kid.)
If the subject is a computer geek, the warning signs of failing computer components can also induce stress. The sound of a floppy drive trying over and over again to read a bad sector, the intermittent rattling grind of a dying CPU fan, the clicking sounds a dying hard drive makes, images of small children inserting foreign objects into slot-load CD drives, the smell of magic smoke, the unmistakable sound of a CRT going out for the last time, a video clip of a clueless user fumbling around and spilling his beverage into the case of a running computer,...
I'm told the sound of someone hyperventilating through a harmonica also works.
Sorry, I have a habit of thinking in terms of powers of two, rather than powers of ten. Something I picked up as a result of minoring in computer science, probably. Two binary magnitudes up from the current price would be a little over nine bucks, or three binary magnitudes up would be a bit more than eighteen. That's what I meant.
I didn't mean to imply multiple decimal magnitudes. That would be a rather more profound price hike.
> Also, voters are too worried about giving up votes to the other side to vote for a 3rd party.
Bingo. You're making my point for me.
The conservatives are *terrified* of voting for any party other than the GOP, for fear that the Evil Satanic Liberal Democrats will take over and commit all manner of unconscionable atrocities. They'll turn is into a socialist state given half a chance. We CANNOT let that happen. Heck, they have at this moment had control for less than two years and are already well on their way to socializing medicine.
The liberals are even *more* afraid of voting for any party other than the Democrats, for fear that the Evil Fundamentalist Republicans will take over and, you know, make everybody go to church, or ban pornography, or pass an anti-abortion constitutional amendment, or something. It doesn't bear thinking about.
And why are those prospects so terrifying to the respective sides? Because the nation is politically polarized, like I said. This isn't *a* reason why we have a two-party system. It's *the* reason, or the only one that matters. Take away everything else about the US political system, and this still remains. Our demographics are just inherently that way.
> But you're going to come up with Libertarian, conservative, and > liberal as parties? wtf. You have to know some of the 3rd party > names. If you can't think of them, you have no basis in this argument.
I did give names to a couple of specific examples upthread (Bull Moose, Dixiecrat), but in any event the names of the parties fundamentally aren't important, and they change from decade to decade anyway.
You want more party names?
How about Tory, Whig, Federalist, Anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian (also called Democratic, Republican, or Democratic-Republican), National Republican, (Jacksonian) Democrat, Whig, Constitutional Union, Republican (GOP), Populist, Progressive, States Rights Democrat, Prohibition, and Reform. While we're at it, how about some minor and/or short-lived ones like Free Soil, Liberty, Socialist, Nullifier, Anti-Masonic, American Party, American Independent, Liberal Republican, Greenback, Union, Union Labor, Labor, Northern Democrat, Southern Democrat, and Green. Is that a long enough list of names for you? Party names come and go all the time.
The constituencies, however, are fundamentally made up of the same building blocks. For example, the Federalist party's constituency lived mostly in the big cities and urban areas and favored a number of changes and reforms; their opponents, the Jeffersonians, had the support of the rural areas and opposed these changes. Does this sound familiar? It should. There you have today's Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Or, in more general terms, which will still apply after the next round of name changes, we can just call them the liberals and the conservatives.
Because that's really the issue that divides us. And it divides us into two groups.
There are some fields of endeavor where it is long-established standard practice that every student must complete an unpaid internship (usually paying tuition for the privilege) as part of their education, before they can graduate and be licensed. Student teaching is a good example of this. You can't get a degree in education without doing it. There are other fields that do the same thing.
But these are cases where the student is closely and directly supervised, individually, full time, by a licensed professional for the entire duration, and it's an important part of the student's education. Often the college's Field Experience Coordinator (or whoever) has to expend considerable time and effort finding enough supervising professionals to allow all of the students to complete the program. Requiring the workplace to pay the student in such cases would certainly mean fewer students would be able to complete their program of study, and it makes NO sense for the college to pay the student for the privilege of educating them. I think these kinds of internships should be left alone. Getting a good education costs you time and money. That's normal and expected.
But when a company seeks out interns on its own (not through an agreement with the school), and the interns are graduates and would be qualified to do paid work, and the internship is not required for licensing, that's a different situation. Inexperienced graduates may feel that they "need" to do an internship in order to bulk up their resume, but that's a social pressure that only applies so long as "everyone else is doing it". If it's not part of the intern's formal education, I tend to think they should probably be paid. (Though, yeah, non-profits would obviously have different rules, since they can accept volunteer labor in general.)
> It is as simple as going from the EU to the US. There may > be areas that look the same, and then you see someone > walking with a gun and you know it is not.
Umm, yeah. Gullible foreigners who have never been here think Americans carry guns everywhere all the time. As best I can tell, this idea comes from the movies. Here's a free tip: the movies are fiction.
I've lived in the US for more than three decades, in five towns in three different states, and in all that time I saw a firearm in person *once*. It was an antique rifle (WWI-era IIRC) that the owner wanted to identify in order to establish whether it would have any monetary value to a collector if he were to sell it. I've never seen a loaded firearm, except in movies.
Police offiers don't even carry weapons under normal circumstances. They carry flashlights and/or walkie-talkies. They have access to firearms, I'm sure, if they should happen to need them for some reason, but they don't carry them when they're doing normal day-to-day things like issuing speeding tickets. (I suppose in the big cities they probably carry them more often. But most of the population of the US lives in small towns. The big cities are, if anything, more similar to Europe, culturally.)
Yes, I've known plenty of people who own hunting rifles, but they generally only get them out when they go hunting, and I've never had the inclination to go, so I've never had occasion to see the guns.
While we're at it, Americans aren't all so skinny you can see their ribs, either.
> What makes you think there would be no viable third party?
Which demographic would be its constituency?
Moderates? They're only about 10% of the population overall, perhaps up to 20% in some of the swing states, but nowhere near 30% anywhere. The party would not be viable, in the sense of being able to consistently get candidates elected, and would fade into obscurity, rapidly.
Libertarians? There are even fewer of those than there are moderates, and on top of that they can't agree on enough to want to vote for the same candidate.
Conservatives? If it took hold, it would displace the GOP.
Liberals? If it gained mindshare, it would displace the Democratic party.
There's room for the occasional one-trick-pony party (Dixiecrat, Bull Moose, etc), but only for one or two elections, and then people remember that they care about other issues as well.
Other countries have multiple viable parties because other countries have a different population breakdown. US politics is heavily dominated by the question of liberal versus conservative, because almost all of the voters identify into one of those two categories and, importantly, the split is roughly even.
If it were an 80/20 split for instance, the 80% side could support multiple parties. But it's not 80/20. It's closer to 50/40 (with moderates and undecideds making up the remainder), and the gulf between the two ideologies is LARGE. If either party splits, the other party that didn't split wins, and the people from the splinter party panic: "Oh, no, now the really EVIL party won! Disaster! We should have stuck with the party we used to vote for, even if they weren't ideal." Even if both parties split at once, so that there are four (as indeed happened once in the middle of the nineteenth century), two of them rapidly become inconsequential and soon there are two major parties again.
The names of the two parties have changed several times, and which one is which on the political spectrum has changed as well (the Republican party was at one time the liberal party, and the Democratic party was the conservative one), but when it shakes out you always end up with one liberal party and one conservative party, because the political parties represent the voting public, and roughly half of the voting public are *considerably* more liberal than most of the rest.
Saying that it's that way because of the electoral college is getting the cause and effect backwards. We were roughly evenly divided into two parties, one conservative and one liberal, before the revolution (let alone the current constitution and the electoral college). The electoral college was set up the way it is, and needed to be set up the way it is, *because* we're a natural two-party system.
> Because if 7-bit ASCII is good enough for America, it ought to be good enough for everybody!
In a language with high-level data types, a string can be automagically promoted to and stored in UTF-4096 (or whatever the heck size we're up to these days) if and when it contains any super-large ginormous characters from the Additional Supplementary Auxiliary Superfluous Multi-Para-Meta-Lingual Plane where they put the encodings for all three hundred and eighty-seven trillion ancient Iconian glyphs, or whatever it is you're using.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth, strings that happen to only have reasonably short characters in them can be stored in something a trifle more compact. This can and should happen automatically, with no change in the program code. It's no harder for the language developers than setting things up so that numbers like 2^4984987 can be represented in a data type that can hold them while numbers like 13 are still represented in a normal-sized integer. Or making arrays and strings automatically resize themselves as needed. Or any of the other data-type magic that high-level languages do behind the scenes.
In practice an eight-bit charset is generally used as the default internal representation rather than ASCII, because the advantages of byte-alignment outweigh the one bit that could otherwise be saved per character. (I do know of one ultra-memory-conscious platform that actually uses a 6-bit encoding for most text, with a trigger character to switch "alphabets" to get at any other characters that are needed occasionally, but that's a truly extreme case, and it wouldn't be practical for most purposes.)
If you're going to allow running in a vm to count, then clearly the ultimate in portability is the z-machine, which will allow the same program binary, unmodified, to run on (among other things) Linux, BSD, or any other Unix-like OS, any version of Windows since 2.0, any version of Mac since System 6, VMS, DOS, BeOS, RISC-OS, Amiga, the Apple// series, the Commodore 64, the TRS80, the BBC micro, Tenex, TOPS-20, Multics, ITS, PalmOS, Nintendo Gameboy, AS/400, and certain brands of pocket calculators, plus Emacs. Java isn't even playing in the same ballpark.
> Guy creates functionality I've been using in Java for 8 years
Meh. Eight years? All we're talking about here is basic source-code compatibility across platforms. That's been around since the seventies, as long as you don't need to do anything inherently platform-specific.
Let me know when somebody gets *binary* compatibility across all the major platforms, without using a vm. THAT would be worth reading an article about.
Songbird is the name of a small cleaning service that my employer hires to come in three nights a week and clean our building. I believe they have three employees altogether. HTH.HAND.
Why we should care that they don't support Linux is beyond me, though.
One supposes, if there is any sanity in our legal system AT ALL, that information so gathered would never be admissible in court.
But if the idea was to use it to figure out stuff like which previously trusted CIA employee shouldn't have further access to classified information, or should be deliberately fed misinformation, during the cold war, I suspect a lot of people would have been pretty okay with that.
> A bachelor's degree isn't a fast-track to get > into a career, it's a period of academic study.
Absolutely agreed.
> You really have no business claiming that you completed > four years of post-secondary study without some basic > understanding of math-
Not all post-secondary schools are liberal arts colleges. Vocational/technical training *is* also a valid thing. Not the *same* thing, but a valid thing. I mean, the world DOES need diesel mechanics and so on. That's not what I personally wanted to do, but that doesn't mean it's no good for anybody.
> and calculus is really, really basic.
Basic in the sense of being a basis for what follows, yeah. Calculus is foundational to pretty much all college-level math. You can't take *squat* for math in college until you've had a couple of semesters of calculus. It's just required. And all serious college science programs require some math. Saying "I want to major in math or science, but I don't want to take calculus" is like saying "I want to learn to enjoy Asian cuisine, but I don't want to eat any rice." It doesn't make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Tetris and Minesweeper may be NP Hard, but that doesn't mean a computer program can't beat a human player. Heck, the reaction time alone would make a computer player WAY better at Tetris than a human. Chess is NP Hard under the rules printed on the inside of the lid of most cheap chess sets ("Hoyle rules" -- there are no limits on stuff like how many turns you can go without a capture or pawn move), but computers still easily thrash all but the best human grandmasters.
The category for games that computers aren't smart enough to play as well as a human is "AI Complete". Stuff like Freeciv and Wesnoth, where strategy is subjective, are MUCH harder to write decent AI for than Tetris and Minesweeper.
> One thing I was REALLY glad to see in 2.x was the pervasive unicode support
Oh, was that new in 2.x?
At the time, I wasn't doing anything that required Unicode, so I didn't notice any changes there. All the foreign languages I'd studied up to that point had small alphabets or abjads and so were easily supportable using nothing but ASCII characters and transliterative fonts.
But yeah, I'm using Unicode now (studying Japanese, presumably because I'm some kind of glutton for pain or something), so that's good.
> and the decent anti-aliased font support.
That's Gnome's doing? I was under the impression that was an X.org improvement. Some spiffy new rendering extension called xftt, or something like that.
> So, try one of the smaller desktops.
Actually, I'm leaning toward a custom session consisting of sawfish and gnome-panel. Most of the actually *useful* features of Gnome can be had just by running the panel (and individual apps launched as needed, though the terminal is the only Gnome-branded app I use very much) in conjunction with another window manager. I'm not sure I need the rest of Gnome. And unlike most of Gnome 1.x, sawfish has been maintained and still works just fine with modern stuff.
Setting up a custom desktop session is surprisingly easy. You only have to edit a couple of files...
> Nautilus was so terrible initially that I made several efforts at replacing it with gmc.
I used to just chmod ugo-x `which nautilus`
Over the years, as hardware has gotten better and other software has increased its requirements, Nautilus no longer seems like such an extremely terrible waste of system resources. I mean, it still seems kind of silly to leave the file manager running 100% of the time just to draw wallpaper and desktop icons, but whatever. With all the other software I'm running, it's a drop in the bucket these days.
I'm still not really fond of it, though. Truth be told, I do most of my file management on the command line. It's just easier. All the handy shortcuts (like tab completion and wildcards) don't work so well in a GUI file manager.
> > the ability to use the file manager as a web browser
> Wait, does GNOME even have that?
It was at one time purported to be one of the major "selling points" of Nautilus (over more traditional file managers like gmc), but upon closer inspection it appears to have been removed at some point since, probably because nobody was using it.
I never noticed its removal, probably because I never used it either.
So that particular complaint is obsolete.
> On the other hand, KDE has had that for years
Yeah, I know about Konqueror: "What do you mean you want to upgrade your web browser without upgrading your entire desktop environment? Modern websites you say? Bah! And don't even think about reporting any bugs in the CSS handling if you're running the latest bleeding-edge dev build. What do you mean you don't want to run bleeding-edge dev builds of your whole desktop environment? All the core devs are doing it, so you should too!"
As a web developer, I am not particularly fond of Konqueror.
> As for most of the rest of your complaints, I can't feel much sympathy.
> When I plug in a USB hard drive, I like that a notification pops up.
Don't get me wrong: I don't care what happens by default. I just want the ability to turn it off.
> There is plumbing for you to control what happens; right there in the popup
> dialog you can choose what you want it to do, and then choose "always do this".
Nice theory, but in practice it doesn't work. You still get bothered again next time.
> things like Bonobo will be completely gone
Can't say I'll be sorry to see that go.
(What does bonobo even *do*, besides complicate the dependency tree?)
Two years would definitely be too short. It's not unusual for it to take longer than, after first publication, that for a writer to really get noticed. The term should be long enough that the writer is still getting royalties from the first book while he's finishing up the second book. That way society can support professional writers, who get paid for the books they write and that's their job.
We can't support that career for everyone who thinks they want to be a writer, obviously. Nobody would ever do anything else, and that would be bad, and most of the books that would be written wouldn't be worth printing. But the people who write books that people actually want to read should be able to spend their time doing so, and not have to work a day job to support themselves. For this to work, the royalties coming in from the previous book need to keep flowing at least until the next book is ready to hit the market, and that's a bare minimum.
And yeah, I know two years would be overkill for someone like Nora Roberts, who can write an entire series of four books in a quarter of a year, and within six months everyone who's going to buy them has already done so, but most writers aren't like that. Even five years would be shaving it pretty thin, by the time you take into account several rounds of editing and so on. There are some authors who write very good books, but take several years to write each one. Their books tend to be of higher quality, and I think this should be encouraged.
Seven years *might* be long enough. Might not. I'm not certain. But I *am* sure it would be much too radical a reversal to actually get through Congress, starting from where we are today.
Thus, I favor a reduction to somewhere in the neighborhood of "fifty years from first publication", with a grandfather clause covering things that have already been published before the bill is passed. Not because I don't think that's really still too long, but because I think it's what we might potentially have a prayer of a chance of actually convincing Congress to consider doing, given enough lobbying and pressure. Call it "living in the real world" if you will.
Of course, we could start by lobbying for a restoration of the original 28-year term, and reserve backing down to 50 years as a negotiation tactic...
Fullerines are manmade. It's normal for manmade things to have complex structures and patterns. It would only be surprising it it arose naturally without human intervention.
Not the same, that's for sure.
Personally I liked Gnome 1.x a good deal better than I like the 2.x series.
Except for gnome-terminal. The newer versions of gnome-terminal are better.
But everything else is worse. More dependencies that shouldn't be necessary, worse performance, more emphasis on completely pointless features like the ability to use the file manager as a web browser (WHY would I EVER want that?) but fewer *useful* features (like, the ability to have an always-on-top panel of a particular size in a particular position, which was great for stuff like having a clock just to the left of where the minimize button was on maximized windows), more gratuitous bug-the-user annoyances (like dialog boxes asking you stupid questions and/or unasked-for windows popping up voluntarily every time you connect a USB device or insert a disc), more undesirably arcane Windows-esque stuff (like gconf), more effort required to get the theme the way you like it, and some things you just plain *can't* do, or I have not figured out how (like, changing the icons on the built-in feature buttons on the panel for things like logging out; in 1.x this was as easy as changing the icon on an app launcher).
If Gnome 1.4 were compatible with modern software (both directions: modern versions of the software it requires, like libraries, and, going the other way, modern versions of applications), I'd still be using it. It was good. I have no idea why they decided to screw it up so much. Gnome 2.x comes across as a bad sequel or a poor remake. It is inferior in nearly every respect.
I can't say I'm very excited at the prospect of Gnome 3.0. What features are they going to take away now, the foot menu and the ability to have a clock on the panel? And what are they going to add? A useless 3D "walk through" filesystem animation like in Jurassic Park, which activates automatically every time a filesystem is mounted? Fixed-size desktop-bound "gadgets", like in Windows Seven, which are strictly inferior to panel applets in every way? Take your time, guys, take your time. I'm in no hurry to upgrade.
Hexagonal crystals are also not unusual, for similar reasons.
What would be weird would be a naturally occurring repeating pattern of different shapes, e.g., a soccerball-like repeating mixture of pentagons and hexagons, or a pattern of octagons that each adjoin another octagon on the north, south, east, and west edges, with squares (angled at 45 degrees) filling the gaps between the ne, sw, se, and nw edges, and bonus points if adjoining octagons are different colors while the ones across squares from eachother are the same color. Show me THAT occurring naturally, and I'll stand there with my jaw hanging open staring at it in wonderment.
The word "disaster" usually refers to things that are accidental and/or beyond our control, and wholly without benefit. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, the 1929 stock market crash, that sort of thing.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was an act of war. That's a different category.
And it is worth noting that Japan (unlike, say, the USA) entered said war very much on purpose. Well, when you deliberately pick a fight, sometimes you get hurt. And when the person you pick a fight with is five times your size, you ought to *expect* to get hurt. I mean, come on, what do you THINK is going to happen?
I would use the word "unfortunate" to describe what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, probably in a construction like "It was unfortunate that the government of Japan insisted on waiting for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki before finally agreeing to let the war end, when it was obvious to anyone who was paying a modicum of attention that the outcome had been a foregone conclusion since early May at the latest."
You're looking at the back of the sign. From the front it reads GOTEL (approximately; the characters are cyrillic, but those are their closest Latin equivalents; the last symbol, which looks a little like a b, has no phonetic value of its own). My instinct says "gotel" is probably a cognate for the English word "hotel", but that's a guess.
> The researchers would have been better off using a loud, unexpected
...
> noise (dropping a heavy book on the floor behind the subject
You can do much better than that.
If you want to use sound to introduce stress into a person's life, you *start* by introducing a crying infant that cannot be comforted (e.g., because it's undergoing severe nicotine withdrawal after being borne by a chain-smoker mom) into the situation. Most people are unable to completely tune out the sound of a crying infant, even when there's absolutely nothing they can do about it, so it creates more stress the longer it goes on. Bring them into a room decorated like a nursery, with a baby bed and everything; give them the kid and a diaper bag (containing a bottle and a rattle as well as diapers and wipes and stuff), indicate that you're coming "right back", and leave them for about four hours. (Position yourself behind locked doors and vacate the accessible areas of the building, so they can't find anyone else to hand off the baby to.) Stress is guaranteed. (Just be sure you monitor the situation so you can intervene if the stress becomes an all-out rage. You don't want them to *kill* the kid.)
If the subject is a computer geek, the warning signs of failing computer components can also induce stress. The sound of a floppy drive trying over and over again to read a bad sector, the intermittent rattling grind of a dying CPU fan, the clicking sounds a dying hard drive makes, images of small children inserting foreign objects into slot-load CD drives, the smell of magic smoke, the unmistakable sound of a CRT going out for the last time, a video clip of a clueless user fumbling around and spilling his beverage into the case of a running computer,
I'm told the sound of someone hyperventilating through a harmonica also works.
Sorry, I have a habit of thinking in terms of powers of two, rather than powers of ten. Something I picked up as a result of minoring in computer science, probably. Two binary magnitudes up from the current price would be a little over nine bucks, or three binary magnitudes up would be a bit more than eighteen. That's what I meant.
I didn't mean to imply multiple decimal magnitudes. That would be a rather more profound price hike.
> Also, voters are too worried about giving up votes to the other side to vote for a 3rd party.
Bingo. You're making my point for me.
The conservatives are *terrified* of voting for any party other than the GOP, for fear that the Evil Satanic Liberal Democrats will take over and commit all manner of unconscionable atrocities. They'll turn is into a socialist state given half a chance. We CANNOT let that happen. Heck, they have at this moment had control for less than two years and are already well on their way to socializing medicine.
The liberals are even *more* afraid of voting for any party other than the Democrats, for fear that the Evil Fundamentalist Republicans will take over and, you know, make everybody go to church, or ban pornography, or pass an anti-abortion constitutional amendment, or something. It doesn't bear thinking about.
And why are those prospects so terrifying to the respective sides? Because the nation is politically polarized, like I said. This isn't *a* reason why we have a two-party system. It's *the* reason, or the only one that matters. Take away everything else about the US political system, and this still remains. Our demographics are just inherently that way.
> But you're going to come up with Libertarian, conservative, and
> liberal as parties? wtf. You have to know some of the 3rd party
> names. If you can't think of them, you have no basis in this argument.
I did give names to a couple of specific examples upthread (Bull Moose, Dixiecrat), but in any event the names of the parties fundamentally aren't important, and they change from decade to decade anyway.
You want more party names?
How about Tory, Whig, Federalist, Anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian (also called Democratic, Republican, or Democratic-Republican), National Republican, (Jacksonian) Democrat, Whig, Constitutional Union, Republican (GOP), Populist, Progressive, States Rights Democrat, Prohibition, and Reform. While we're at it, how about some minor and/or short-lived ones like Free Soil, Liberty, Socialist, Nullifier, Anti-Masonic, American Party, American Independent, Liberal Republican, Greenback, Union, Union Labor, Labor, Northern Democrat, Southern Democrat, and Green. Is that a long enough list of names for you? Party names come and go all the time.
The constituencies, however, are fundamentally made up of the same building blocks. For example, the Federalist party's constituency lived mostly in the big cities and urban areas and favored a number of changes and reforms; their opponents, the Jeffersonians, had the support of the rural areas and opposed these changes. Does this sound familiar? It should. There you have today's Democratic and Republican parties, respectively. Or, in more general terms, which will still apply after the next round of name changes, we can just call them the liberals and the conservatives.
Because that's really the issue that divides us. And it divides us into two groups.
> On cloudy days, you use electric lighting.
Cloudy days, as opposed to what? Cloudy nights? What other kind of day is there?
Yes, I'm from Ohio, why do you ask?
It depends.
There are some fields of endeavor where it is long-established standard practice that every student must complete an unpaid internship (usually paying tuition for the privilege) as part of their education, before they can graduate and be licensed. Student teaching is a good example of this. You can't get a degree in education without doing it. There are other fields that do the same thing.
But these are cases where the student is closely and directly supervised, individually, full time, by a licensed professional for the entire duration, and it's an important part of the student's education. Often the college's Field Experience Coordinator (or whoever) has to expend considerable time and effort finding enough supervising professionals to allow all of the students to complete the program. Requiring the workplace to pay the student in such cases would certainly mean fewer students would be able to complete their program of study, and it makes NO sense for the college to pay the student for the privilege of educating them. I think these kinds of internships should be left alone. Getting a good education costs you time and money. That's normal and expected.
But when a company seeks out interns on its own (not through an agreement with the school), and the interns are graduates and would be qualified to do paid work, and the internship is not required for licensing, that's a different situation. Inexperienced graduates may feel that they "need" to do an internship in order to bulk up their resume, but that's a social pressure that only applies so long as "everyone else is doing it". If it's not part of the intern's formal education, I tend to think they should probably be paid. (Though, yeah, non-profits would obviously have different rules, since they can accept volunteer labor in general.)
> It is as simple as going from the EU to the US. There may
> be areas that look the same, and then you see someone
> walking with a gun and you know it is not.
Umm, yeah. Gullible foreigners who have never been here think Americans carry guns everywhere all the time. As best I can tell, this idea comes from the movies. Here's a free tip: the movies are fiction.
I've lived in the US for more than three decades, in five towns in three different states, and in all that time I saw a firearm in person *once*. It was an antique rifle (WWI-era IIRC) that the owner wanted to identify in order to establish whether it would have any monetary value to a collector if he were to sell it. I've never seen a loaded firearm, except in movies.
Police offiers don't even carry weapons under normal circumstances. They carry flashlights and/or walkie-talkies. They have access to firearms, I'm sure, if they should happen to need them for some reason, but they don't carry them when they're doing normal day-to-day things like issuing speeding tickets. (I suppose in the big cities they probably carry them more often. But most of the population of the US lives in small towns. The big cities are, if anything, more similar to Europe, culturally.)
Yes, I've known plenty of people who own hunting rifles, but they generally only get them out when they go hunting, and I've never had the inclination to go, so I've never had occasion to see the guns.
While we're at it, Americans aren't all so skinny you can see their ribs, either.
> What makes you think there would be no viable third party?
Which demographic would be its constituency?
Moderates? They're only about 10% of the population overall, perhaps up to 20% in some of the swing states, but nowhere near 30% anywhere. The party would not be viable, in the sense of being able to consistently get candidates elected, and would fade into obscurity, rapidly.
Libertarians? There are even fewer of those than there are moderates, and on top of that they can't agree on enough to want to vote for the same candidate.
Conservatives? If it took hold, it would displace the GOP.
Liberals? If it gained mindshare, it would displace the Democratic party.
There's room for the occasional one-trick-pony party (Dixiecrat, Bull Moose, etc), but only for one or two elections, and then people remember that they care about other issues as well.
Other countries have multiple viable parties because other countries have a different population breakdown. US politics is heavily dominated by the question of liberal versus conservative, because almost all of the voters identify into one of those two categories and, importantly, the split is roughly even.
If it were an 80/20 split for instance, the 80% side could support multiple parties. But it's not 80/20. It's closer to 50/40 (with moderates and undecideds making up the remainder), and the gulf between the two ideologies is LARGE. If either party splits, the other party that didn't split wins, and the people from the splinter party panic: "Oh, no, now the really EVIL party won! Disaster! We should have stuck with the party we used to vote for, even if they weren't ideal." Even if both parties split at once, so that there are four (as indeed happened once in the middle of the nineteenth century), two of them rapidly become inconsequential and soon there are two major parties again.
The names of the two parties have changed several times, and which one is which on the political spectrum has changed as well (the Republican party was at one time the liberal party, and the Democratic party was the conservative one), but when it shakes out you always end up with one liberal party and one conservative party, because the political parties represent the voting public, and roughly half of the voting public are *considerably* more liberal than most of the rest.
Saying that it's that way because of the electoral college is getting the cause and effect backwards. We were roughly evenly divided into two parties, one conservative and one liberal, before the revolution (let alone the current constitution and the electoral college). The electoral college was set up the way it is, and needed to be set up the way it is, *because* we're a natural two-party system.
> Because if 7-bit ASCII is good enough for America, it ought to be good enough for everybody!
In a language with high-level data types, a string can be automagically promoted to and stored in UTF-4096 (or whatever the heck size we're up to these days) if and when it contains any super-large ginormous characters from the Additional Supplementary Auxiliary Superfluous Multi-Para-Meta-Lingual Plane where they put the encodings for all three hundred and eighty-seven trillion ancient Iconian glyphs, or whatever it is you're using.
Meanwhile, back here on Earth, strings that happen to only have reasonably short characters in them can be stored in something a trifle more compact. This can and should happen automatically, with no change in the program code. It's no harder for the language developers than setting things up so that numbers like 2^4984987 can be represented in a data type that can hold them while numbers like 13 are still represented in a normal-sized integer. Or making arrays and strings automatically resize themselves as needed. Or any of the other data-type magic that high-level languages do behind the scenes.
In practice an eight-bit charset is generally used as the default internal representation rather than ASCII, because the advantages of byte-alignment outweigh the one bit that could otherwise be saved per character. (I do know of one ultra-memory-conscious platform that actually uses a 6-bit encoding for most text, with a trigger character to switch "alphabets" to get at any other characters that are needed occasionally, but that's a truly extreme case, and it wouldn't be practical for most purposes.)
Java uses a vm. That's basically cheating.
// series, the Commodore 64, the TRS80, the BBC micro, Tenex, TOPS-20, Multics, ITS, PalmOS, Nintendo Gameboy, AS/400, and certain brands of pocket calculators, plus Emacs. Java isn't even playing in the same ballpark.
If you're going to allow running in a vm to count, then clearly the ultimate in portability is the z-machine, which will allow the same program binary, unmodified, to run on (among other things) Linux, BSD, or any other Unix-like OS, any version of Windows since 2.0, any version of Mac since System 6, VMS, DOS, BeOS, RISC-OS, Amiga, the Apple
> The only people who like it are enterprises and developers
I would have said enterprises and developers' managers, but what's one one word and a small punctuation mark among friends?
> Guy creates functionality I've been using in Java for 8 years
Meh. Eight years? All we're talking about here is basic source-code compatibility across platforms. That's been around since the seventies, as long as you don't need to do anything inherently platform-specific.
Let me know when somebody gets *binary* compatibility across all the major platforms, without using a vm. THAT would be worth reading an article about.
Songbird is the name of a small cleaning service that my employer hires to come in three nights a week and clean our building. I believe they have three employees altogether. HTH.HAND.
Why we should care that they don't support Linux is beyond me, though.
One supposes, if there is any sanity in our legal system AT ALL, that information so gathered would never be admissible in court.
But if the idea was to use it to figure out stuff like which previously trusted CIA employee shouldn't have further access to classified information, or should be deliberately fed misinformation, during the cold war, I suspect a lot of people would have been pretty okay with that.
> A bachelor's degree isn't a fast-track to get
> into a career, it's a period of academic study.
Absolutely agreed.
> You really have no business claiming that you completed
> four years of post-secondary study without some basic
> understanding of math-
Not all post-secondary schools are liberal arts colleges. Vocational/technical training *is* also a valid thing. Not the *same* thing, but a valid thing. I mean, the world DOES need diesel mechanics and so on. That's not what I personally wanted to do, but that doesn't mean it's no good for anybody.
> and calculus is really, really basic.
Basic in the sense of being a basis for what follows, yeah. Calculus is foundational to pretty much all college-level math. You can't take *squat* for math in college until you've had a couple of semesters of calculus. It's just required. And all serious college science programs require some math. Saying "I want to major in math or science, but I don't want to take calculus" is like saying "I want to learn to enjoy Asian cuisine, but I don't want to eat any rice." It doesn't make sense.