> And as for floating-point errors, any programmer that isn't > aware of those issues needs to be writing... I don't even > know. Something that doesn't use floating-point numbers I guess
Application-level networking code. Web, email, DNS, anything like that, you pretty much never see a floating point number, and if you do the precision doesn't matter because it'll be going through sprintf "%0.2d" momentarily.
> If you're like me you probably type normal > text faster than you can write it legibly.
Math notes contain surprisingly little normal text. The most likely place for it to occur is in the description of an upcoming class event, e.g., "Test Thursday, Chapter 7". These words can be abbreviated, e.g., "Thu" for Thursday, but you're still writing multiple letters per word.
In contrast, practically all of the words and phrases used to describe the actual *math* are reduced to standard math notation, which generally runs the ratio in the opposite direction: multiple spoken words per written character (a colon for "such that", an upside-down A for "for all", a backwards E for "there exists", a lowercase epsilon for "is an element of", etc), or at most one character per word (L for "let", wrt for "with respect to", and so on).
I do not see how a computer keyboard could possibly speed up the process of taking math notes. You could set up macros for a few of the symbols, but there aren't enough keys on the keyboard for all of them. Even if you type 120 wpm, a pencil and paper would still be faster for math notes, because you wouldn't have to be doing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Rightclick-Cokebottle gymnastics for all the special characters. A custom input method and/or macros could help with some of it, but you'd have to be able to record new ones on the fly in two seconds every single time your prof uses a symbol you haven't seen before (say, for a new operation in a modern algebra class). New symbols are a *frequent* occurrence in higher math classes. Do you really want to go digging around finding the correct Unicode codepoint every time (if it even exists, which occasionally it won't)?
It's not worth the hassle. Just use a pencil. If you want the notes on the computer, scan them after class.
> Alternatively, learning shorthand might be allow you > to take notes on pen & paper sufficiently fast. I > haven't tried it myself yet but it seems promising.
The math world has its own notation, which functions as a sort of shorthand and works very well for writing the kinds of things you write frequently in math notes. For instance, consider the following assertion:
Let a and b be any two distinct elements of G, such that a is greater than b. For all elements a and b, there exists a third element c, also an element of G, such that c is greater than b and a is greater than c.
In standard math notation that's about 25 characters (not counting whitespace). None of these characters takes significantly longer to write than the G. You can write it faster than you can read it aloud, no fooling.
For taking notes in higher math classes, you've really got to use a pencil and paper. Nothing else is going to let you write complex math notation fast enough, especially when you start getting into modern algebra and using symbols you've never seen on a computer before. (Most of them are technically available in Unicode, but you don't have time to go hunting for obscure codepoints during class.)
Write on paper with a pencil, and then scan your notes onto the computer after class. File the paper copies in a folder until the next time you update your backups; then you can toss them.
> When a person uses the Internet, the user's > actions are no longer in his or her physical home
You know, I'm pretty sure "houses" is only *one* of the four things listed in the amendment. Aren't we also supposed to be secure in our persons, papers, and effects, against unwarranted searches and seizures?
> All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails > or remotely stored documents, are physically stored > on servers owned by an ISP.
If I rent storage space for physical objects, can that space now be searched without a warrant? So a bank safe deposit box, for instance, is fair game for unwarranted searches, merely because I don't personally own it?
I'm really glad this is based on a misreading of the judge's opinion, because if this had been for real, it would be scary. (Not because I'm worried that my stuff will be searched -- I don't really have much to hide, so the fourth amendment isn't particularly dear to me as things go -- but because any government that can treat its own constitution in that flagrant a fashion would likely also ignore my other legal rights, some of which *are* quite dear to me.)
> [Win NT] Supposed to be ported to Alpha as 'Was sold for Alpha' ?
Theoretically was, but have you ever *seen* a copy of it?
I've seen VMS, but I've never seen the Alpha port of NT. I think "offered for sale" might be a better description than "sold", because as near as I can tell, nobody actually bought it.
> I seriously doubt that there is an easy and hard-to-defeat > method that will stop adblocking software(I haven't seen any).
I suppose you could set it up so that the server doesn't send you the main content until after you've already retrieved the advertisements. (This implies the main content has to be in a separate file from the overall web page, which references or embeds both the ads and the content.) This requires some state to be stored on the server as to whether you've received the ads yet or not, but that's not exactly rocket science to code up.
However, that still only forces the advertisements to be *retrieved*. I'm not aware of any reliable way to verify that the user has *looked* at the advertisements.
> To be fair, normal roads are a mixture of twists, turns and hills.
Depends where you live. In Iowa, normal roads are straight and flat and go on and on and on like that, and then they go on and on and on some more, until they asymptotically approach invisibility due to sheer distance (and the fact that the atmosphere is not, in fact, *completely* transparent).
> Some of us don't have a high speed internet > connection to download the iso.
*shrug*. So use wget. (Yes, it's available for Windows.) I once downloaded a set of three Mandrake CDs over a dialup connection. It took a few days, sure, but so does sending things through the mail.
> If things get to the point where peoples' resources are strained, > we'll probably see a major decrease in the popularity of larger, more > costly pets in favor of smaller ones that are easier on the wallet.
If things got really strained (like, third-world subsistence level), we'd do exactly as the article suggests and keep livestock (goats and chickens and whatnot), because you can eat them if the garden has a bad year, or sell them if someone gets sick and needs antibiotics.
But that won't happen on any kind of large scale unless we're facing the real possibility of a food shortage at the societal level. For all the whining about the terrible horrible no good very bad economy, Americans still throw away their body weight in surplus food every week. (We're talking averages here, but that's how macroeconomics works.) In other words, we can afford pets. Maybe we can't afford high-end medical care for our pets, so we might have to let them die if they get cancer or congestive heart failure, but that won't stop people from having pets. If fluffy dies for want of a triple heart bypass, you mourn for a month or so and then you get a new pet. You swear that the new pet is not a replacement for the old one, and you'll never forget the one that died, and it'll never be the same... but you get a new pet all the same, because you can, and because you know cats and dogs don't live as long as humans anyway, and because the reason you had a pet in the first place is because you like having one around.
We can certainly afford to *feed* a pet per household on average, and that's the issue really. People switch from dogs to goats when food is scarce. (Look at rural sub-Saharan Africa if you have any questions about this.) As of October 2009, at least in North America, food is not scarce. Good jobs are scarce, but food is still plentiful. Nom nom nom.
Because if you're writing malware for Linux systems, a virus is not the easiest or most effective way to go. Attaching to system binaries is problematic for a variety of reasons. System binaries can be updated at any time. Changes in their size and signature are easily detectable. Furthermore you have to be root to do it, but you wouldn't install a virus if you're root, because you'd use a rootkit instead in that case. A rootkit is more likely to remain on the system undetected for a longer period of time. There are more reasons, but you get the idea: a virus for Linux doesn't make sense. Some other kind of malware, such as a worm or rootkit, does.
(And if you think Linux servers don't have malware, I have some nice beachfront property in Montana that I can sell you at a great discount.)
> Linux doesn't have malware only because it's > desktop share is next to nothing
On the contrary, there's actually quite a lot of malware out there for Linux systems. This makes sense, because Linux has quite good market share in server space, and servers tend on average to have quite good internet connections and a lot of available system resources and be left turned on all the time, sometimes for months without so much as a reboot. This makes them more *useful* (to malware), on average, than Windows systems.
However, the malware for Linux systems tends not to be viruses in the traditional sense (inserting itself into existing executable files). There are a collection of reasons for this, but they all pretty much boil down to this: that's just not the most effective way to do things on Linux.
> CentOS is great for organizations that use RHEL > but don't need paid support on every server instance.
Okay, yeah, I can see that. If you use RHEL, your people are all going to be familiar with it, so CentOS would be the "stick with what we already know" choice. There's a lot to be said for that.
I'm not in that situation though. The OS we have paid support for does not use an open-source kernel, if you know what I'm saying. So for the servers we don't need paid support for (i.e., most of them) we use Debian. This is not an ideological choice; it's just what we find easiest to manage. And the community support for Debian is as good as for any OS or distribution I've ever had dealings with, and a good deal better than some.
> As long as our cultures pit our people against each other in > competition for money, people will be 'unethical' and exploit each other.
"Lie to a liar, for lies are his trade. Steal from a thief, for that is easy. Beware an honest man." -- Mat Kerbouchard in _The Walking Drum_
It's hard to scam an honest man out of his money, because the usual hooks (personality traits that a scammer uses to manipulate people) are missing. (Exception: a senile person can be scammed out of money even if he's honest, by exploiting his senility. What, you don't remember the deal we made to fix your roof? You owe me sixteen thousand dollars, you old coot, cough it up. But that's a different kind of scam.)
You send a 419 pitch to an honest man, for instance, and all kinds of ethical alarm bells go off. Is this legal? Why is this man so eager to transfer money out of his country secretly? Is he a criminal? If it's stolen money, it would be wrong for me to help him. Should I even talk to him? Maybe I should check with the police and see what they say. If he's stolen that much money, I should definitely talk to the police. On the other hand, if he's for real, wouldn't it be unethical for me to exploit his desperation for personal gain? Even if I help him, I shouldn't accept any money for it or, at least, not more than is warranted for the actual assistance I provide.
Worse (for the scammer), honest people don't feel any need to keep things secret. If I'm not looking to get rich, the motivation to act alone and be the only one in on the deal is gone, or more likely never existed in the first place. Thus, I can freely talk to my friends about it, and the police, and maybe I should even get the local newspaper and radio station involved: if this man's terrible plight is real, people should hear about it... and if he's a criminal, the police in his country need to know what he's doing.
> Even smart people are often stupid outside their area of expertise.
It is my considered opinion that people who only have one area of expertise aren't very smart, no matter how detailed their knowledge may be in that one area.
Granted, everybody has weak subjects here and there. But smart people *know* what their weak subjects are and don't risk much on being right about anything in those subjects. I would never put any money into sports, for instance, because I just plain don't know that much about sports. I wouldn't try to own or manage a sports team, or a stadium, or anything sports related. I wouldn't bet money on the outcome of a sporting event. I wouldn't invest money in sports-related merchandise (even *famous* sports-related merchandise like a Honus Wagner card, because how would I know if it even *resembles* the real thing, much less evaluate its actual authenticity?). And I certainly wouldn't enter into a sports-related business transaction with someone I've never met who contacts me out of the blue.
It takes an incredibly foolish man to reason from "I'm an expert on the appreciation of Serif fonts in Saxon table doilies in the year 1058" through "so obviously I'm smart" and arrive at "so even though I don't know anything about African royalty or high finance or business, I can trust my judgment about these people who have contacted me, whom I've never met, and go ahead and start a financial business relationship with them, without seeking any advice from an expert on the subject."
A smart person wouldn't reason like that. A smart person knows his own limitations and compensates for them when necessary. A smart person would say to himself, "You know, I don't know anything about African royalty, so I should do some checking and inform myself before I deal with these people. There might be some important piece of basic information I should have." A smart person would say, "I don't know that much about business, so I should at least get my colleague from the business department to look over this proposal before I do anything." A smart person would say, "I don't know that much about high finance and transferring millions of dollars overseas, so I should seek advice from someone who does, a banker maybe, before getting involved in such a venture."
> (hell, the entire song is in (very bad) English; they even stole our language.)
They didn't steal the language from us. They got it from the bloody limeys.
Incidentally, so did we.
> Oddly, the yahoozee seem to buy only American after they steal American money
American goods are uber-cool throughout pretty much the entire third world. Buying American stuff is a form of conspicuous consumption, a banner that says, in effect, "I can afford all this, look at me, I'm wealthier than all y'all, ha ha ha."
One notable exception is automobiles. The US makes a lot of cars, but the most popular conspicuously-expensive cars are of European manufacture (Rolls Royce, BMW, Mercedes Benz, etc). Oh, and cigars, of course, come from Cuba.
So if these "yahoozee" are buying American cigars and American luxury cars (e.g., Cadillac) then they might be making a statement about America. Otherwise, they're just making a statement about their own level of affluence.
> Am I the only one who wishes they would hurry up and finish TB 3
Why?
There are approximately six hundred bajillion email clients out there. Half a dozen of them are actually any good, and another thirty are mediocre but still at least as good as Thunderbird. Half a dozen more are not as good as Thunderbird but nonetheless more popular. Heck, there are at least three web-based ones that are so much more popular, more Firefox users use them than use Thunderbird.
Mozilla (and Netscape before it) has always been all about web browser technology, and they mostly do a pretty good job with that, which is important, since there are (excluding ones that use the Mozilla rendering engine) only a handful of other decent browsers out there. I mean, there's Opera and about one other choice (IE, Safari, or Konqueror, depending on platform), and that's pretty much it. So the Mozilla.org browser is *important*. They should focus on that.
The world does *not* need them to also make Yet Another Mail Client. We've got plenty of those, and then some. I think there are more mail clients than there are Tetris clones.
Now, if they could make one that's actually really *good*, in a way that stands out from the crowd, that would be another matter. But Thunderbird is just middle of the pack, nothing particularly special as mail clients go.
> The only major project on a typical distro I can think of > that is owned by the individual contributors is linux.
Off the top of my head? xscreensaver, perl, ruby, cdrtools, vim, joe, fontforge, wesnoth, freeciv,...
And quite aside from that, in the context of an entire distribution, you can view organizations like Sun and the FSF as individual contributors who hold the copyright only on the code that they (or their members or whatever) developed.
You can't put together what I would call an entire working operating system based on the open-source contributions of any one such organization. For example, if you limit yourself to only the code held by the Free Software Foundation, then to the best of my knowledge you've got no GUI, among other things.
So in a very real sense the whole thing is based on code owned by many contributors, although yes, a number of those contributors, including some of the most prominent ones, are companies and organizations.
> it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III. > I doubt most people will ever see it.
MacBeth isn't exactly Hamlet, but that hasn't stopped *it* from being studied. Heck, it gets studied *almost* as much as Hamlet.
Romeo and Juliet is a *far* cry from Hamlet (frankly, by comparison it's drivel), but if anything it's more famous, having been redone and remade *many* more times, and in fact R&J may even be the most famous work of literature[1] ever written in the English language.
As for Richard III, most people haven't seen it.
[1] Excluding music and translations. If you include music, the most famous work ever written in the English language is probably the song Happy Birthday (which has a *weird* copyright history), unless you also include translations, in which case it's the KJV hands down (which as I understand it is in the public domain everywhere in the world except England). But these aren't really fair comparisons for a stage play.
Slashdot Mirror
> And as for floating-point errors, any programmer that isn't ... I don't even
> aware of those issues needs to be writing
> know. Something that doesn't use floating-point numbers I guess
Application-level networking code. Web, email, DNS, anything like that, you pretty much never see a floating point number, and if you do the precision doesn't matter because it'll be going through sprintf "%0.2d" momentarily.
> If you're like me you probably type normal
> text faster than you can write it legibly.
Math notes contain surprisingly little normal text. The most likely place for it to occur is in the description of an upcoming class event, e.g., "Test Thursday, Chapter 7". These words can be abbreviated, e.g., "Thu" for Thursday, but you're still writing multiple letters per word.
In contrast, practically all of the words and phrases used to describe the actual *math* are reduced to standard math notation, which generally runs the ratio in the opposite direction: multiple spoken words per written character (a colon for "such that", an upside-down A for "for all", a backwards E for "there exists", a lowercase epsilon for "is an element of", etc), or at most one character per word (L for "let", wrt for "with respect to", and so on).
I do not see how a computer keyboard could possibly speed up the process of taking math notes. You could set up macros for a few of the symbols, but there aren't enough keys on the keyboard for all of them. Even if you type 120 wpm, a pencil and paper would still be faster for math notes, because you wouldn't have to be doing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-Rightclick-Cokebottle gymnastics for all the special characters. A custom input method and/or macros could help with some of it, but you'd have to be able to record new ones on the fly in two seconds every single time your prof uses a symbol you haven't seen before (say, for a new operation in a modern algebra class). New symbols are a *frequent* occurrence in higher math classes. Do you really want to go digging around finding the correct Unicode codepoint every time (if it even exists, which occasionally it won't)?
It's not worth the hassle. Just use a pencil. If you want the notes on the computer, scan them after class.
> Alternatively, learning shorthand might be allow you
> to take notes on pen & paper sufficiently fast. I
> haven't tried it myself yet but it seems promising.
The math world has its own notation, which functions as a sort of shorthand and works very well for writing the kinds of things you write frequently in math notes. For instance, consider the following assertion:
Let a and b be any two distinct elements of G, such that a is greater than b. For all elements a and b, there exists a third element c, also an element of G, such that c is greater than b and a is greater than c.
In standard math notation that's about 25 characters (not counting whitespace). None of these characters takes significantly longer to write than the G. You can write it faster than you can read it aloud, no fooling.
For taking notes in higher math classes, you've really got to use a pencil and paper. Nothing else is going to let you write complex math notation fast enough, especially when you start getting into modern algebra and using symbols you've never seen on a computer before. (Most of them are technically available in Unicode, but you don't have time to go hunting for obscure codepoints during class.)
Write on paper with a pencil, and then scan your notes onto the computer after class. File the paper copies in a folder until the next time you update your backups; then you can toss them.
> When a person uses the Internet, the user's
> actions are no longer in his or her physical home
You know, I'm pretty sure "houses" is only *one* of the four things listed in the amendment. Aren't we also supposed to be secure in our persons, papers, and effects, against unwarranted searches and seizures?
> All materials stored online, whether they are e-mails
> or remotely stored documents, are physically stored
> on servers owned by an ISP.
If I rent storage space for physical objects, can that space now be searched without a warrant? So a bank safe deposit box, for instance, is fair game for unwarranted searches, merely because I don't personally own it?
I'm really glad this is based on a misreading of the judge's opinion, because if this had been for real, it would be scary. (Not because I'm worried that my stuff will be searched -- I don't really have much to hide, so the fourth amendment isn't particularly dear to me as things go -- but because any government that can treat its own constitution in that flagrant a fashion would likely also ignore my other legal rights, some of which *are* quite dear to me.)
> [Win NT] Supposed to be ported to Alpha as 'Was sold for Alpha' ?
Theoretically was, but have you ever *seen* a copy of it?
I've seen VMS, but I've never seen the Alpha port of NT. I think "offered for sale" might be a better description than "sold", because as near as I can tell, nobody actually bought it.
> I seriously doubt that there is an easy and hard-to-defeat
> method that will stop adblocking software(I haven't seen any).
I suppose you could set it up so that the server doesn't send you the main content until after you've already retrieved the advertisements. (This implies the main content has to be in a separate file from the overall web page, which references or embeds both the ads and the content.) This requires some state to be stored on the server as to whether you've received the ads yet or not, but that's not exactly rocket science to code up.
However, that still only forces the advertisements to be *retrieved*. I'm not aware of any reliable way to verify that the user has *looked* at the advertisements.
> To be fair, normal roads are a mixture of twists, turns and hills.
Depends where you live. In Iowa, normal roads are straight and flat and go on and on and on like that, and then they go on and on and on some more, until they asymptotically approach invisibility due to sheer distance (and the fact that the atmosphere is not, in fact, *completely* transparent).
> You jest, but how do we know it isn't so?
Because, Neanderthals had a larger brain capacity than modern humans. If Congress were full of them, we'd have more intelligent legislation.
(In all seriousness, if you gave a Neanderthal man modern clothing, he could probably go about freely in any modern city without anyone noticing.)
Maybe next they should fix Outlook to send attachments in the standard way, rather than embedding them in .tnef files.
> Some of us don't have a high speed internet
> connection to download the iso.
*shrug*. So use wget. (Yes, it's available for Windows.) I once downloaded a set of three Mandrake CDs over a dialup connection. It took a few days, sure, but so does sending things through the mail.
> If things get to the point where peoples' resources are strained,
> we'll probably see a major decrease in the popularity of larger, more
> costly pets in favor of smaller ones that are easier on the wallet.
If things got really strained (like, third-world subsistence level), we'd do exactly as the article suggests and keep livestock (goats and chickens and whatnot), because you can eat them if the garden has a bad year, or sell them if someone gets sick and needs antibiotics.
But that won't happen on any kind of large scale unless we're facing the real possibility of a food shortage at the societal level. For all the whining about the terrible horrible no good very bad economy, Americans still throw away their body weight in surplus food every week. (We're talking averages here, but that's how macroeconomics works.) In other words, we can afford pets. Maybe we can't afford high-end medical care for our pets, so we might have to let them die if they get cancer or congestive heart failure, but that won't stop people from having pets. If fluffy dies for want of a triple heart bypass, you mourn for a month or so and then you get a new pet. You swear that the new pet is not a replacement for the old one, and you'll never forget the one that died, and it'll never be the same... but you get a new pet all the same, because you can, and because you know cats and dogs don't live as long as humans anyway, and because the reason you had a pet in the first place is because you like having one around.
We can certainly afford to *feed* a pet per household on average, and that's the issue really. People switch from dogs to goats when food is scarce. (Look at rural sub-Saharan Africa if you have any questions about this.) As of October 2009, at least in North America, food is not scarce. Good jobs are scarce, but food is still plentiful. Nom nom nom.
> Then why do linux server not have viruses?
Because if you're writing malware for Linux systems, a virus is not the easiest or most effective way to go. Attaching to system binaries is problematic for a variety of reasons. System binaries can be updated at any time. Changes in their size and signature are easily detectable. Furthermore you have to be root to do it, but you wouldn't install a virus if you're root, because you'd use a rootkit instead in that case. A rootkit is more likely to remain on the system undetected for a longer period of time. There are more reasons, but you get the idea: a virus for Linux doesn't make sense. Some other kind of malware, such as a worm or rootkit, does.
(And if you think Linux servers don't have malware, I have some nice beachfront property in Montana that I can sell you at a great discount.)
> Linux doesn't have malware only because it's
> desktop share is next to nothing
On the contrary, there's actually quite a lot of malware out there for Linux systems. This makes sense, because Linux has quite good market share in server space, and servers tend on average to have quite good internet connections and a lot of available system resources and be left turned on all the time, sometimes for months without so much as a reboot. This makes them more *useful* (to malware), on average, than Windows systems.
However, the malware for Linux systems tends not to be viruses in the traditional sense (inserting itself into existing executable files). There are a collection of reasons for this, but they all pretty much boil down to this: that's just not the most effective way to do things on Linux.
> The code name for the release is simply alphabetical.
...
Is that why it went from W to H to D?
My personal favorite development codename scheme is Gnus.
(ding) Gnus, September Gnus, Red Gnus, Quassia Gnus, Pterodactyl Gnus, Oort Gnus, No Gnus, My Gnus,
> CentOS is great for organizations that use RHEL
> but don't need paid support on every server instance.
Okay, yeah, I can see that. If you use RHEL, your people are all going to be familiar with it, so CentOS would be the "stick with what we already know" choice. There's a lot to be said for that.
I'm not in that situation though. The OS we have paid support for does not use an open-source kernel, if you know what I'm saying. So for the servers we don't need paid support for (i.e., most of them) we use Debian. This is not an ideological choice; it's just what we find easiest to manage. And the community support for Debian is as good as for any OS or distribution I've ever had dealings with, and a good deal better than some.
> I get the advantages of ubuntu on the desktop but on there
> server why would you want to switch from CentOS to Ubuntu?
You wouldn't. On a server you'd use Debian.
HTH.HAND.
> As long as our cultures pit our people against each other in
> competition for money, people will be 'unethical' and exploit each other.
"Lie to a liar, for lies are his trade. Steal from a thief, for that is easy. Beware an honest man." -- Mat Kerbouchard in _The Walking Drum_
It's hard to scam an honest man out of his money, because the usual hooks (personality traits that a scammer uses to manipulate people) are missing. (Exception: a senile person can be scammed out of money even if he's honest, by exploiting his senility. What, you don't remember the deal we made to fix your roof? You owe me sixteen thousand dollars, you old coot, cough it up. But that's a different kind of scam.)
You send a 419 pitch to an honest man, for instance, and all kinds of ethical alarm bells go off. Is this legal? Why is this man so eager to transfer money out of his country secretly? Is he a criminal? If it's stolen money, it would be wrong for me to help him. Should I even talk to him? Maybe I should check with the police and see what they say. If he's stolen that much money, I should definitely talk to the police. On the other hand, if he's for real, wouldn't it be unethical for me to exploit his desperation for personal gain? Even if I help him, I shouldn't accept any money for it or, at least, not more than is warranted for the actual assistance I provide.
Worse (for the scammer), honest people don't feel any need to keep things secret. If I'm not looking to get rich, the motivation to act alone and be the only one in on the deal is gone, or more likely never existed in the first place. Thus, I can freely talk to my friends about it, and the police, and maybe I should even get the local newspaper and radio station involved: if this man's terrible plight is real, people should hear about it... and if he's a criminal, the police in his country need to know what he's doing.
> Even smart people are often stupid outside their area of expertise.
It is my considered opinion that people who only have one area of expertise aren't very smart, no matter how detailed their knowledge may be in that one area.
Granted, everybody has weak subjects here and there. But smart people *know* what their weak subjects are and don't risk much on being right about anything in those subjects. I would never put any money into sports, for instance, because I just plain don't know that much about sports. I wouldn't try to own or manage a sports team, or a stadium, or anything sports related. I wouldn't bet money on the outcome of a sporting event. I wouldn't invest money in sports-related merchandise (even *famous* sports-related merchandise like a Honus Wagner card, because how would I know if it even *resembles* the real thing, much less evaluate its actual authenticity?). And I certainly wouldn't enter into a sports-related business transaction with someone I've never met who contacts me out of the blue.
It takes an incredibly foolish man to reason from "I'm an expert on the appreciation of Serif fonts in Saxon table doilies in the year 1058" through "so obviously I'm smart" and arrive at "so even though I don't know anything about African royalty or high finance or business, I can trust my judgment about these people who have contacted me, whom I've never met, and go ahead and start a financial business relationship with them, without seeking any advice from an expert on the subject."
A smart person wouldn't reason like that. A smart person knows his own limitations and compensates for them when necessary. A smart person would say to himself, "You know, I don't know anything about African royalty, so I should do some checking and inform myself before I deal with these people. There might be some important piece of basic information I should have." A smart person would say, "I don't know that much about business, so I should at least get my colleague from the business department to look over this proposal before I do anything." A smart person would say, "I don't know that much about high finance and transferring millions of dollars overseas, so I should seek advice from someone who does, a banker maybe, before getting involved in such a venture."
> (hell, the entire song is in (very bad) English; they even stole our language.)
They didn't steal the language from us. They got it from the bloody limeys.
Incidentally, so did we.
> Oddly, the yahoozee seem to buy only American after they steal American money
American goods are uber-cool throughout pretty much the entire third world. Buying American stuff is a form of conspicuous consumption, a banner that says, in effect, "I can afford all this, look at me, I'm wealthier than all y'all, ha ha ha."
One notable exception is automobiles. The US makes a lot of cars, but the most popular conspicuously-expensive cars are of European manufacture (Rolls Royce, BMW, Mercedes Benz, etc). Oh, and cigars, of course, come from Cuba.
So if these "yahoozee" are buying American cigars and American luxury cars (e.g., Cadillac) then they might be making a statement about America. Otherwise, they're just making a statement about their own level of affluence.
> Am I the only one who wishes they would hurry up and finish TB 3
Why?
There are approximately six hundred bajillion email clients out there. Half a dozen of them are actually any good, and another thirty are mediocre but still at least as good as Thunderbird. Half a dozen more are not as good as Thunderbird but nonetheless more popular. Heck, there are at least three web-based ones that are so much more popular, more Firefox users use them than use Thunderbird.
Mozilla (and Netscape before it) has always been all about web browser technology, and they mostly do a pretty good job with that, which is important, since there are (excluding ones that use the Mozilla rendering engine) only a handful of other decent browsers out there. I mean, there's Opera and about one other choice (IE, Safari, or Konqueror, depending on platform), and that's pretty much it. So the Mozilla.org browser is *important*. They should focus on that.
The world does *not* need them to also make Yet Another Mail Client. We've got plenty of those, and then some. I think there are more mail clients than there are Tetris clones.
Now, if they could make one that's actually really *good*, in a way that stands out from the crowd, that would be another matter. But Thunderbird is just middle of the pack, nothing particularly special as mail clients go.
> The only major project on a typical distro I can think of
...
> that is owned by the individual contributors is linux.
Off the top of my head?
xscreensaver, perl, ruby, cdrtools, vim, joe, fontforge, wesnoth, freeciv,
And quite aside from that, in the context of an entire distribution, you can view organizations like Sun and the FSF as individual contributors who hold the copyright only on the code that they (or their members or whatever) developed.
You can't put together what I would call an entire working operating system based on the open-source contributions of any one such organization. For example, if you limit yourself to only the code held by the Free Software Foundation, then to the best of my knowledge you've got no GUI, among other things.
So in a very real sense the whole thing is based on code owned by many contributors, although yes, a number of those contributors, including some of the most prominent ones, are companies and organizations.
If we're going to do that, I propose a heavy tax on use of the word "awesome".
> And I don't care where you live, you should always carry a longsword.
I prefer a type II phaser, but maybe that's just me.
I agree about the rope, though. Tremendously useful stuff.
> it's not exactly Hamlet or Richard III.
> I doubt most people will ever see it.
MacBeth isn't exactly Hamlet, but that hasn't stopped *it* from being studied. Heck, it gets studied *almost* as much as Hamlet.
Romeo and Juliet is a *far* cry from Hamlet (frankly, by comparison it's drivel), but if anything it's more famous, having been redone and remade *many* more times, and in fact R&J may even be the most famous work of literature[1] ever written in the English language.
As for Richard III, most people haven't seen it.
[1] Excluding music and translations. If you include music, the most famous work ever written in the English language is probably the song Happy Birthday (which has a *weird* copyright history), unless you also include translations, in which case it's the KJV hands down (which as I understand it is in the public domain everywhere in the world except England). But these aren't really fair comparisons for a stage play.