But do you think that scandals such as Enron/Worldcom occur because there isn't enough regulation, or because there's so much regulation that 'dubious accounting practices' become the norm?
Ok. Let me try to follow the rationale. 'Dubious accounting practices' occur because of the regulations which try to make said practices illegal? So, if there were no regulations, they would not occur? I don't get it, help me out here.
Under a free market, the inefficient tend to get eliminated, replaced, by the efficeient. Corruption is almost by definition inefficient, so corruption tends to get weeded out.
Hello? Corruption is inefficient for _the_system_. But it is very efficient for the parties participating in it. They have a real (economic) interest to participate in it (otherwise, they obviously wouldn't have). And will surely continue to do so, for as long as it is in their interest.
Since the society has a clear interest of stopping corruption, I don't see any other way of achieving that than by making corruption illegal. In other words, regulate the market.
It's the same with every type of regulation. Would the companies care about the ecology if it wasn't for regulation? How about labour conditions? Of course not. Companies have a single mission, to create profits for the owners. Ecology, labour standards, safety practices, all eat into profits, and thus companies are required to avoid it, unless illegal.
Yes, maybe in some fictional future world populated by highly moral people with a commanding sense of justice, regulation would not be necessary, but in the world we live in, it is essential.
don't know about the rest of you, but when I try to download something from a bit torrent source, it takes several hours over a DSL modem.
Maybe your incoming BT ports are firewalled? BitTorrent can work on a firewalled connection, but it works much faster when you can accept incoming connections from other clients (on ports 6881-6889, depending on client).
Anyway, for reasons pointed by others, BT can't be used for streaming, a different p2p protocol would have to be written for that. And even then, you couldn't have real live shows because p2p by definition implies that you can have a different number of clients between you and the seeder.
That being said, BT+RSS could be the solution today, for all other non-live shows. Of course, they would have to be free (as in beer), or incorporate some kind of DRM in the files.
the (US) Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons.
Well, shouldn't at this point the rest of the world start thinking about pre-emptively striking the US? I mean, they are openly and actively developing WMDs! These are no 'weapons related programs' (as some other countries got invaded for), this is the real thing! And even more powerful than nuclear technology!
People are allowed to watch what they want, even if you do NOT like it.
Nope, people are allowed to watch what the networks feed them. They think that they want to watch it simply because it's there and there's nothing else on. Look up 'prolefeed'.
We generally run Linux in my house, but my six year old daughter has a couple of computer games, and one of our machines is dual-boot; pretty much all that that copy of Windows is used for is her games. Guess what? The games only work if I make my six year old an administrator.
As a producer of children computer games, I have encountered those problems. Most are solved by a couple of registry/security policy edits. Try enabling 'Restrict CD-ROM Access to locally logged-on user only' in Local Security Policy (found in administrative tools). That should cure a lot of them.
Careful assignment of permissions to ceratin files/directories would probably take care of others. Check out www.sysinternals.com for tools which can help you track down what the program is trying to open and what it fails to do.
As a limited user? Hopefully none. Otherwise, what would be the point of being a limited user?
so you think, install as admin then run as limited, or power users, well doesnt work cuz the program is only accessable to admim.
Bullshit. The situation is _exactly_ the same as on Linux. If you try to run/write/read in a directory you don't have the permission for, you can't. OMG, what a surprise. If you have a brain-dead program that insists on writing in 'program files' directory, instead of users home directory (note the _exact_ same situation as on Linux) where by design it should, you have two solutions: elevate your priviledges, or assign the user permissions on the directory. It's a simple as that.
Dude, don't confuse your ignorance of the system with the system being broken.
so, before windows can lock up, app's have to be coded to run in a secure enviroment.
Wow! Imagine that! The conclusion that Windows are shite obviously follows, right? Whereas on Linux you can do whatever you want, have the right to run/read/write from and to wherever you want and still everything magically works, right?
Re:Tariffs make things BETTER, not worse
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Our government has a mandate to promote the general welfare of the AMERICAN people, not all people world-wide.
Yeah. And the US should probably reinstate slavery, right? It would be a great boon for the AMERICAN people, as it has been in the past. The economy would probably soar, fuck the dim-witted africans whose governments failed to protect them! While we're at it, it's probably also OK to carpet bomb the entire middle east and then when all people are dead (hence, no terrorists) you can take the oil without problems and probably ensure another 50 or so years of prosperity. Hey, it's good for the AMERICAN people, and that's what the US government should be thinking about, right?
I'm deliberately exaggerating here, but when you establish 'us, only us, and fuck the rest' principle it follows from it quite nicely.
The sooner the general americal public gets that we are all living on the same planet and share the same fate, the better.
The real kicker in all of this would be if you consider yourself a religious person.
Re:Tariffs make things BETTER, not worse
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
We Americans have a right to protect our jobs. And we have the means to do so.
I'm really having trouble understanding how can someone defend import tariffs, and point to works of Noam Chomsky, all in the same post...
Tariffs do make things worse, but only for the upper income group. For the average working person, tariffs are good.
Yup. Tell that to third world cotton growers (hundreds of thousands of them), whose lives are held hostage by a couple of thousand of US cotton growers for which the US government keeps the sky high import tariffs. Or to the african cattle herders who live on less money _monthly_ than an european _cow_ receives from the government _daily_! Yeah, all good and fine.
The western powers would like to have their cake and eat it too. When they export high value industrial goods into the third world, they demand free trade and no tariffs. But, when those same third world countries try to leverage their position by importing cheap agricultural goods and offering cheap labor, out comes the 'protect our workers' rethoric, and import tariffs. Hypocrisy, anyone?
Capitalism is fine, but only to the extent that it benefits us, right?
I'm having a hard time taking you seriously, but I'll bite.
RedHat, Debian and others are collections of Open Source Software, conveniently distributed as a single package. How can you (or why should you) guarantee software that you don't even produce?
Does that matter? They exist in order to produce profits for their owners, same as MS. If MS should be held accountable for the SW they use to make profits, why should Linux companies be given a break? They didn't produce it? Well, they sure as hell charge real dollars for supporting it.
Like I said, other engineers have to give up some of their profits to pay out when things go wrong.
You're getting it wrong. Other engineers have to pay for the _damages_ caused by their shoddy work. Profit or no profit, it doesn't enter into the problem. They are obliged to guarantee for thier work by the state, or they get their licences revoked. Architect that designs a building is held liable for the work, wether he got paid for it or not.
I really don't see the rationale for SW to be any different. It's either all or nothing. Then again, I clearly see the rationale for not giving any guarantees. If they were supposed to be given, not a lot of SW would get produced.
Surely that's why Micro$oft have been allowed to make so much money.
Micro$oft? Before trying to single them out, could you point to any open source, free, LInux or whatever other company/product/programmers that do offer guarantees for their work? I'm sure RedHat, Debian and others don't. I've yet to see to a SourceForge project that does. What exactly are blaming M$ for?
I'd like to know exactly why you believe Steam is evil?
Forces downloads on me. Hundreds of MB of downloads. Whenever it feels like it. Sits in my tray monitoring stuff (what I play, when I play, who I play with, where I play, and reports it). Can, on a whim, ban me from playing a game I legally bought. Turns my machine into a p2p server. Can install stuff without warning.
And that's just in this version. Can I be sure what the next incarnation will do? Maybe it will monitor if I go to www.suprnova.com and then ban me from playing? Maybe it will dislike me having CD emulators/copiers? And I won't know until it happens, because it will simply 'update itself' whenever Valve tells it to.
The fact that you can't pirate games anymore?
No, the fact that I don't control my machine anymore. And I sure as hell don't trust Valve, or any other big corporation to control it (yeah, I run M$, spare me the spiel). Because, as it has been proven time and time again, corporations don't care about your interest, they care about extracting money from you. Think about that one.
Furthermore, what if this happens to be a great success? Will that mean that in the future I will have to have a dozen of such applications running on my machine, one for every game company whose games I play? Yeah, that's surely going be a positive thing.
I myself am looking to be a future game developer, the less compeition, the more publishers look for unique games.
FWIW, I am a present game developer. Unless you work for Valve, Steam definitely isn't going to be a helping hand to other developers.
How would Valve be harmed by giving in on this issue? How would the consumers be harmed?
Consumers? No harm (mostly benefits, actually). Valve? All the difference in the world.
Steam is, if you haven't noticed, Valve's way of getting rid of publishers/distributors altogether. If they can release the game simply by p2p-ing it to the buyers there is no need for deals with publishers. And publishers take in _most_ of the money you plunk down besides the cash register in the 'brick and mortar' store. So, their incentive is clear.
Now, being forced to DL 200+MB whenever Valve releases a newer version/patch/DRM/whatever in order to continue playing the game is just an added bonus. And complete control over the installed games, forever, is just icing on the cake.
Yeah, I think Steam is evil in the same sense the Real Player is (was?) evil. I wish it to fail, badly.
That being said...
/me starts up Steam to play a game of Day Of Defeat...
Because programming is in principle the _only_ engineering profession in the world that offers _no_ guarantee whatsoever for it's work. Not Microsoft, not Linux, not ISVs, noone. If the software burns your house, kills your dog and rapes your sister, well, tough. You should've known better than to use software.
Every SW licence I ever saw explicitly says so. At best you can expect to get back what you paid for the SW, and stop using it. Damages? Forget it.
Ain't it grand to be a programmer?:-)
p.s. Yes, some SW applications (medical, for example) offer some sort of guarantee, but at a price that would render computers unusable for the general public.
Re:There's a reason for two parties -
on
Open the Debates
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The reason we have two political parties is to foster the middle path.
Yeah, a great idea, indeed. But, why stop there? Two party system still allows for some dissent and fragmentation! I think that a clearly superior system would be a ONE PARTY system! Then the nation would be united all the time, no dissenting views, no confision, no tiresome politicking!
That's definitely the way to go, right? One nation, one party, one leader? Hmmm... Sounds vaguely familiar...
Kevin talked about how he was like, "uh, yeah... sure... it's your movie, man" and the guy was just all freaky over getting this huge spider into the flick.
Well, spiders _are_ the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom, you know.
Why can't LaTeX be fully WYSIWYG? That would make me drop Microsoft Office in a heartbeat:)
Simply because writing a LaTeX document is actually nothing more than writing a program, in this case the script for the 'rendering engine'.
WYSIWYG would require the LaTeX document to be compiled and executed to generate the display, so the code would have to compile correctly after each keystroke, or after each command. And you simply cannot write a non-trivial program which can compile and execute after each new command entered.
Everything we do is moving towards real-time visualisation of computer work, from databases to computer modelling.
Well, not programming. There is no WYSIWYG programming environment that I know of, and being a developer, I can't say that I need it. Writing programs involves writing complex blocks of code that that don't make sense, or don't do anything useful (and somethines do something undesirable) until comtplete. The need to 'see what you get' is definitely not that frequent, and when it arises, it's not that hard to hit 'compile&run'. Same with LaTeX.
BTW, my gf is a math teacher, and does all her papers (tests and stuff) in LaTeX. She picked it up in college, and since then wouldn't touch Word with a 10 foot pole. A true LaTeX zealot.:-)
The bottom line is that this was not caused by an improper design - as it was used for some 30 years before and since the accident...
Actually, it _was_ an improper design, since it made such a scenario possible. The reason for such design is the fact that the reactor had a secondary function, which is to supply the military with the bomb materials. Which mandated certain design choces which made the plant less safe.
Modern, commercial nuclear plants make such a scenario impossible.
Why can't we have computers monitoring absolutely everything?
I would be very uncomfortable with such a design. Ultimate human control must be present at all times. You simply cannot be sure the computers won't fail.
I've read that most institutional investors are staying far, far away from this one - that's pretty telling, in my eyes.
On the other hand, the word is that institutions wanted Google IPO to fail, badly. Google shunned the whole establishment, which was used to the 'traditional' IPO process which allows seleceted bankers, their friends and bussiness in the loop to make a killing on major IPO offerings. Depriving them of serious income is expected to cause some bad blood.
I wouldn't altogether rule out that interpretation also.
Adobe Acrobat has always been a Windows-3.1-esque piece of junk; it's probably the only modern viewer-style application that noticeably pauses between page flips.
Dude, Acrobat Reader 4.05 is where it's at. Loads instantly, has no plugins or shit, displays every PDF in existance. Set it to continuous page view and you're set. Every version after that is just more bloat and crud.
We enjoy -real- violence and -real- sport, it is nearly instinctive.
Ummm... Movies? Last time I checked, they were mostly not real life, and mostly enjoyed by large audiences.
The draw of sports is not whether they are real or not, it's the competition, the winners and losers, the skill of beating the other guy. I'm sure you've noticed that 'wrestling' shows you have over there in the US. Surely you don't think that is real.
The basic point holding games from becoming a spectator sport is the difficulty of presenting them in a way that would be exciting and understandable to non-gamers. Which, I must admit still has some way to go.
That's horseshit. If it were true humans would never have been able to form tribes, much less nations, as any gathering would inevitably and swiftly fall to internecine bloodshed.
Yes. Unless the tribe helps protect you as individual from the other tribes, or large prey animals. Same as nations.
Even with the existance nations, you still do have animosity within it. In every country you will find animosity between different parts of the country (south-north, east-west). In every part of the country you will find animosity between different towns. In the town you find animosity between different parts of it. You can drill right down to animosity between brothers and sisters.
We're still years away from digital cameras with higher resolution than film. That may also be impossible; film is about as high resolution as you can get already.
Years away? In principle, that means exactly the same as if they were available today. I'm willing to wait. Besides, what is the resolution of DVD?
As for using blender for special effects? Please, get real.
Again, today. In a few years? Well...
Digital cameras require as complex lighting as film cameras do, unless you want your finished product to look like crap, amateur hour, home movie quality camcorder work.
Well, you can dismiss 'Dogma' (Lars von Trier's cannons of filmmaking) as arty bullshit, but it shows that you _can_ make arguably professional movies with just the natural lighting.
You don't expect EVERYONE to work for free on films, do you?
No, but sure as hell I don't expect or condone the lead in the movie to be paid $xx million dollars. The theatres of the world are filled with actors who don't get paid that much in their whole career, and still can act so much better than most of the 'stars'. The sooner the 'stars' are out of a job, the better, IMHO. The same goes for all the other talent involved in the making of movies.
Thus, if the costs of making a movie can be brought down to something comparable to producing a stage play, the whole game changes. For the better, IMHO.
Same answer if you have a black hole with the mass of an asteroid.
How would something with the mass of an asteroid become a singularity in the first place? Don't you need something an order or two of magnitude more massive than the Sun to curve the space enough to form a singularity?
Slashdot Mirror
But do you think that scandals such as Enron/Worldcom occur because there isn't enough regulation, or because there's so much regulation that 'dubious accounting practices' become the norm?
Ok. Let me try to follow the rationale. 'Dubious accounting practices' occur because of the regulations which try to make said practices illegal? So, if there were no regulations, they would not occur? I don't get it, help me out here.
Under a free market, the inefficient tend to get eliminated, replaced, by the efficeient. Corruption is almost by definition inefficient, so corruption tends to get weeded out.
Hello? Corruption is inefficient for _the_system_. But it is very efficient for the parties participating in it. They have a real (economic) interest to participate in it (otherwise, they obviously wouldn't have). And will surely continue to do so, for as long as it is in their interest.
Since the society has a clear interest of stopping corruption, I don't see any other way of achieving that than by making corruption illegal. In other words, regulate the market.
It's the same with every type of regulation. Would the companies care about the ecology if it wasn't for regulation? How about labour conditions? Of course not. Companies have a single mission, to create profits for the owners. Ecology, labour standards, safety practices, all eat into profits, and thus companies are required to avoid it, unless illegal.
Yes, maybe in some fictional future world populated by highly moral people with a commanding sense of justice, regulation would not be necessary, but in the world we live in, it is essential.
don't know about the rest of you, but when I try to download something from a bit torrent source, it takes several hours over a DSL modem.
Maybe your incoming BT ports are firewalled? BitTorrent can work on a firewalled connection, but it works much faster when you can accept incoming connections from other clients (on ports 6881-6889, depending on client).
Anyway, for reasons pointed by others, BT can't be used for streaming, a different p2p protocol would have to be written for that. And even then, you couldn't have real live shows because p2p by definition implies that you can have a different number of clients between you and the seeder.
That being said, BT+RSS could be the solution today, for all other non-live shows. Of course, they would have to be free (as in beer), or incorporate some kind of DRM in the files.
the (US) Air Force is actively pursuing antimatter weapons.
Well, shouldn't at this point the rest of the world start thinking about pre-emptively striking the US? I mean, they are openly and actively developing WMDs! These are no 'weapons related programs' (as some other countries got invaded for), this is the real thing! And even more powerful than nuclear technology!
Time to act is NOW!
Do we need any more proof this is a type 13 planet in it's final stages?
:-)
I don't know. What is a type 13 planet?
No, seriously, could you clarify the reference?
People are allowed to watch what they want, even if you do NOT like it.
Nope, people are allowed to watch what the networks feed them. They think that they want to watch it simply because it's there and there's nothing else on. Look up 'prolefeed'.
We generally run Linux in my house, but my six year old daughter has a couple of computer games, and one of our machines is dual-boot; pretty much all that that copy of Windows is used for is her games. Guess what? The games only work if I make my six year old an administrator.
As a producer of children computer games, I have encountered those problems. Most are solved by a couple of registry/security policy edits. Try enabling 'Restrict CD-ROM Access to locally logged-on user only' in Local Security Policy (found in administrative tools). That should cure a lot of them.
Careful assignment of permissions to ceratin files/directories would probably take care of others. Check out www.sysinternals.com for tools which can help you track down what the program is trying to open and what it fails to do.
Yeah, that's all well and good - except for the fact that Windows sets up users by default as administrators
Pray tell, when was the last time you installed an windows box and set up users on it?
Ok, I'll bite.
How many programs can you install?
As a limited user? Hopefully none. Otherwise, what would be the point of being a limited user?
so you think, install as admin then run as limited, or power users, well doesnt work cuz the program is only accessable to admim.
Bullshit. The situation is _exactly_ the same as on Linux. If you try to run/write/read in a directory you don't have the permission for, you can't. OMG, what a surprise. If you have a brain-dead program that insists on writing in 'program files' directory, instead of users home directory (note the _exact_ same situation as on Linux) where by design it should, you have two solutions: elevate your priviledges, or assign the user permissions on the directory. It's a simple as that.
Dude, don't confuse your ignorance of the system with the system being broken.
so, before windows can lock up, app's have to be coded to run in a secure enviroment.
Wow! Imagine that! The conclusion that Windows are shite obviously follows, right? Whereas on Linux you can do whatever you want, have the right to run/read/write from and to wherever you want and still everything magically works, right?
Our government has a mandate to promote the general welfare of the AMERICAN people, not all people world-wide.
Yeah. And the US should probably reinstate slavery, right? It would be a great boon for the AMERICAN people, as it has been in the past. The economy would probably soar, fuck the dim-witted africans whose governments failed to protect them! While we're at it, it's probably also OK to carpet bomb the entire middle east and then when all people are dead (hence, no terrorists) you can take the oil without problems and probably ensure another 50 or so years of prosperity. Hey, it's good for the AMERICAN people, and that's what the US government should be thinking about, right?
I'm deliberately exaggerating here, but when you establish 'us, only us, and fuck the rest' principle it follows from it quite nicely.
The sooner the general americal public gets that we are all living on the same planet and share the same fate, the better.
The real kicker in all of this would be if you consider yourself a religious person.
We Americans have a right to protect our jobs. And we have the means to do so.
I'm really having trouble understanding how can someone defend import tariffs, and point to works of Noam Chomsky, all in the same post...
Tariffs do make things worse, but only for the upper income group. For the average working person, tariffs are good.
Yup. Tell that to third world cotton growers (hundreds of thousands of them), whose lives are held hostage by a couple of thousand of US cotton growers for which the US government keeps the sky high import tariffs. Or to the african cattle herders who live on less money _monthly_ than an european _cow_ receives from the government _daily_! Yeah, all good and fine.
The western powers would like to have their cake and eat it too. When they export high value industrial goods into the third world, they demand free trade and no tariffs. But, when those same third world countries try to leverage their position by importing cheap agricultural goods and offering cheap labor, out comes the 'protect our workers' rethoric, and import tariffs. Hypocrisy, anyone?
Capitalism is fine, but only to the extent that it benefits us, right?
I'm having a hard time taking you seriously, but I'll bite.
RedHat, Debian and others are collections of Open Source Software, conveniently distributed as a single package. How can you (or why should you) guarantee software that you don't even produce?
Does that matter? They exist in order to produce profits for their owners, same as MS. If MS should be held accountable for the SW they use to make profits, why should Linux companies be given a break? They didn't produce it? Well, they sure as hell charge real dollars for supporting it.
Like I said, other engineers have to give up some of their profits to pay out when things go wrong.
You're getting it wrong. Other engineers have to pay for the _damages_ caused by their shoddy work. Profit or no profit, it doesn't enter into the problem. They are obliged to guarantee for thier work by the state, or they get their licences revoked. Architect that designs a building is held liable for the work, wether he got paid for it or not.
I really don't see the rationale for SW to be any different. It's either all or nothing. Then again, I clearly see the rationale for not giving any guarantees. If they were supposed to be given, not a lot of SW would get produced.
Surely that's why Micro$oft have been allowed to make so much money.
Micro$oft? Before trying to single them out, could you point to any open source, free, LInux or whatever other company/product/programmers that do offer guarantees for their work? I'm sure RedHat, Debian and others don't. I've yet to see to a SourceForge project that does. What exactly are blaming M$ for?
I'd like to know exactly why you believe Steam is evil?
Forces downloads on me. Hundreds of MB of downloads. Whenever it feels like it. Sits in my tray monitoring stuff (what I play, when I play, who I play with, where I play, and reports it). Can, on a whim, ban me from playing a game I legally bought. Turns my machine into a p2p server. Can install stuff without warning.
And that's just in this version. Can I be sure what the next incarnation will do? Maybe it will monitor if I go to www.suprnova.com and then ban me from playing? Maybe it will dislike me having CD emulators/copiers? And I won't know until it happens, because it will simply 'update itself' whenever Valve tells it to.
The fact that you can't pirate games anymore?
No, the fact that I don't control my machine anymore. And I sure as hell don't trust Valve, or any other big corporation to control it (yeah, I run M$, spare me the spiel). Because, as it has been proven time and time again, corporations don't care about your interest, they care about extracting money from you. Think about that one.
Furthermore, what if this happens to be a great success? Will that mean that in the future I will have to have a dozen of such applications running on my machine, one for every game company whose games I play? Yeah, that's surely going be a positive thing.
I myself am looking to be a future game developer, the less compeition, the more publishers look for unique games.
FWIW, I am a present game developer. Unless you work for Valve, Steam definitely isn't going to be a helping hand to other developers.
How would Valve be harmed by giving in on this issue? How would the consumers be harmed?
Consumers? No harm (mostly benefits, actually). Valve? All the difference in the world.
Steam is, if you haven't noticed, Valve's way of getting rid of publishers/distributors altogether. If they can release the game simply by p2p-ing it to the buyers there is no need for deals with publishers. And publishers take in _most_ of the money you plunk down besides the cash register in the 'brick and mortar' store. So, their incentive is clear.
Now, being forced to DL 200+MB whenever Valve releases a newer version/patch/DRM/whatever in order to continue playing the game is just an added bonus. And complete control over the installed games, forever, is just icing on the cake.
Yeah, I think Steam is evil in the same sense the Real Player is (was?) evil. I wish it to fail, badly.
That being said...
/me starts up Steam to play a game of Day Of Defeat...
Why doesn't someone sue Microsoft?
:-)
Because programming is in principle the _only_ engineering profession in the world that offers _no_ guarantee whatsoever for it's work. Not Microsoft, not Linux, not ISVs, noone. If the software burns your house, kills your dog and rapes your sister, well, tough. You should've known better than to use software.
Every SW licence I ever saw explicitly says so. At best you can expect to get back what you paid for the SW, and stop using it. Damages? Forget it.
Ain't it grand to be a programmer?
p.s. Yes, some SW applications (medical, for example) offer some sort of guarantee, but at a price that would render computers unusable for the general public.
The reason we have two political parties is to foster the middle path.
Yeah, a great idea, indeed. But, why stop there? Two party system still allows for some dissent and fragmentation! I think that a clearly superior system would be a ONE PARTY system! Then the nation would be united all the time, no dissenting views, no confision, no tiresome politicking!
That's definitely the way to go, right? One nation, one party, one leader? Hmmm... Sounds vaguely familiar...
Kevin talked about how he was like, "uh, yeah... sure... it's your movie, man" and the guy was just all freaky over getting this huge spider into the flick.
:-))
Well, spiders _are_ the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom, you know.
(Sorry, just watched the DVD last night
Why can't LaTeX be fully WYSIWYG? That would make me drop Microsoft Office in a heartbeat :)
:-)
Simply because writing a LaTeX document is actually nothing more than writing a program, in this case the script for the 'rendering engine'.
WYSIWYG would require the LaTeX document to be compiled and executed to generate the display, so the code would have to compile correctly after each keystroke, or after each command. And you simply cannot write a non-trivial program which can compile and execute after each new command entered.
Everything we do is moving towards real-time visualisation of computer work, from databases to computer modelling.
Well, not programming. There is no WYSIWYG programming environment that I know of, and being a developer, I can't say that I need it. Writing programs involves writing complex blocks of code that that don't make sense, or don't do anything useful (and somethines do something undesirable) until comtplete. The need to 'see what you get' is definitely not that frequent, and when it arises, it's not that hard to hit 'compile&run'. Same with LaTeX.
BTW, my gf is a math teacher, and does all her papers (tests and stuff) in LaTeX. She picked it up in college, and since then wouldn't touch Word with a 10 foot pole. A true LaTeX zealot.
The bottom line is that this was not caused by an improper design - as it was used for some 30 years before and since the accident...
Actually, it _was_ an improper design, since it made such a scenario possible. The reason for such design is the fact that the reactor had a secondary function, which is to supply the military with the bomb materials. Which mandated certain design choces which made the plant less safe.
Modern, commercial nuclear plants make such a scenario impossible.
Why can't we have computers monitoring absolutely everything?
I would be very uncomfortable with such a design. Ultimate human control must be present at all times. You simply cannot be sure the computers won't fail.
I've read that most institutional investors are staying far, far away from this one - that's pretty telling, in my eyes.
On the other hand, the word is that institutions wanted Google IPO to fail, badly. Google shunned the whole establishment, which was used to the 'traditional' IPO process which allows seleceted bankers, their friends and bussiness in the loop to make a killing on major IPO offerings. Depriving them of serious income is expected to cause some bad blood.
I wouldn't altogether rule out that interpretation also.
Adobe Acrobat has always been a Windows-3.1-esque piece of junk; it's probably the only modern viewer-style application that noticeably pauses between page flips.
Dude, Acrobat Reader 4.05 is where it's at. Loads instantly, has no plugins or shit, displays every PDF in existance. Set it to continuous page view and you're set. Every version after that is just more bloat and crud.
We enjoy -real- violence and -real- sport, it is nearly instinctive.
Ummm... Movies? Last time I checked, they were mostly not real life, and mostly enjoyed by large audiences.
The draw of sports is not whether they are real or not, it's the competition, the winners and losers, the skill of beating the other guy. I'm sure you've noticed that 'wrestling' shows you have over there in the US. Surely you don't think that is real.
The basic point holding games from becoming a spectator sport is the difficulty of presenting them in a way that would be exciting and understandable to non-gamers. Which, I must admit still has some way to go.
That's horseshit. If it were true humans would never have been able to form tribes, much less nations, as any gathering would inevitably and swiftly fall to internecine bloodshed.
:-)
Yes. Unless the tribe helps protect you as individual from the other tribes, or large prey animals. Same as nations.
Even with the existance nations, you still do have animosity within it. In every country you will find animosity between different parts of the country (south-north, east-west). In every part of the country you will find animosity between different towns. In the town you find animosity between different parts of it. You can drill right down to animosity between brothers and sisters.
So, yeah, humans are rotten.
We're still years away from digital cameras with higher resolution than film. That may also be impossible; film is about as high resolution as you can get already.
Years away? In principle, that means exactly the same as if they were available today. I'm willing to wait. Besides, what is the resolution of DVD?
As for using blender for special effects? Please, get real.
Again, today. In a few years? Well...
Digital cameras require as complex lighting as film cameras do, unless you want your finished product to look like crap, amateur hour, home movie quality camcorder work.
Well, you can dismiss 'Dogma' (Lars von Trier's cannons of filmmaking) as arty bullshit, but it shows that you _can_ make arguably professional movies with just the natural lighting.
You don't expect EVERYONE to work for free on films, do you?
No, but sure as hell I don't expect or condone the lead in the movie to be paid $xx million dollars. The theatres of the world are filled with actors who don't get paid that much in their whole career, and still can act so much better than most of the 'stars'. The sooner the 'stars' are out of a job, the better, IMHO. The same goes for all the other talent involved in the making of movies.
Thus, if the costs of making a movie can be brought down to something comparable to producing a stage play, the whole game changes. For the better, IMHO.
Same answer if you have a black hole with the mass of an asteroid.
How would something with the mass of an asteroid become a singularity in the first place? Don't you need something an order or two of magnitude more massive than the Sun to curve the space enough to form a singularity?
Or am I missing something completely here?