Iraq had the ability to manufacturer chemical, biological, and nuclear arms
I think everyone else in the world, including your government, is of the opinion that this is not the case, so don't accuse me of being uniformed, or ignorant.
he could have singlehandedly walked all over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and more if he chose to do so
Didn't he already try that? I think it's perfectly clear that he couldn't do that at all.
So, despite your inability to understand how Hussein could indirectly damage the U.S., he sure had the ability to do so.
Any country in the world could indirectly damage the US if they really wanted to. What stops this from happening is that it's not worth it.
Again, you completely misunderstand the subtlety involved here
Not at all. In fact it's not very subtle. But what Hussein was foremost interested in, like all dictators, was staying in power. If he sold weapons to Al Quaeda which were used against the US and the CIA got wind of it, what would happen? There is no way he could be certain that a spy wouldn't find out about it.
Sure, I'll just head down to the corner Nuke-R-Us store and pick up a 20 kiloton thermonuclear device
I was talking about chemical/biological weapons. Many of these can quite easily be produced if you have the know-how, including ricin and sarin (remember the tokyo subway?). The chances of a terrorist managing to procure transport and smuggle a nuke into the US are negligible.
anti-anything-that-isn't-puritanical-Muslim
No, they're just against America and it's allies. You don't see them attacking Hindus, do you? Perhaps you should read a little and learn to understand their real motives, instead of just listenning to political rhetoric.
I suppose you'll now argue that Hitler was justified in attacking Poland because Poland was allied with Britain and France
Actually that's pre-emption you're talking about. That was what I was arguing against. I presume, then, that I've convinced you that the doctrine of pre-emption is stupid. Or are you just interested in flaming?
the only practical way to fight it is to pre-emptively seek it out and destroy it no matter where it's at
It amazes me how readily so many people accept the doctrine of pre-emption. Are you all insane? Realistically, Iraq was not in any way a threat to America or any other western power. Even if they did have biological/chemical weapons which they were prepared to supply to terrorists, the risks of american intelligence finding out and retaliating wouldn't be worth the meagre political gains of seeing america attacked. And from the terrorists point of view, it's much easier to manufacture weapons using equipment bought on the open market in america than it is to smuggle it in.
Before you go singing the praises of pre-emption, consider this: America has always had the power to level afganistan to the ground; was Al Qaeda justified in launching a pre-emptive strike on America?
Psion blew it when they got out of the handheld market
Rubbish. Psion got out of the handheld market because they were flogging a dead horse. It was a good business decision, even if it is mourned by everyone who has ever owned a psion handheld, myself included. In the end, they couldn't compete on volume with palm and pocket pc, largely because of inferior marketing.
Many people are predicting the iminent death of consumer PDAs in favour of smartphones, an area which psion is unlikely to be competitive in. Focusing on industrial handhelds is a much better idea, because quality is far more important than irrelevant features, the profit margins are higher and selling in bulk to companies is much easier than selling to consumers
As for selling symbian, it depends on whether they can generate more income from investing their cash windfall than they could get from symbian royalties. Time will tell, but I suspect the Psion management are in a far better position to judge this than you or me.
How can privatizing fix anything dealing with the space program? The folks with wads of cash don't invest in anything "new" until they can see a market for it.
I remember reading about a study a few years ago which claimed that mining asteroids for valuable rare minerals would be cheaper than mining on Earth. To summarise, while on Earth the actual mining is cheap, the prospecting costs a small fortune, as it is largely a matter of educated guess work following extremely expensive surveying, generally satellite based, and hit or miss excavating - often in remote locations.
In contrast, minerals can be identified in space using a telescope and a mass spectrometer, but the actual mining is phenomenally expensive. Whether the study included the R and D overheads in developing space mining technology, I don't know, but don't dismiss space exploration outright as uneconomic.
A van full of hard drives. OK, it's probably not applicable, but you didn't mention your latency requirements;-) Might look good in your report as evidence of "thinking outside the box", though.
You mean apart from China, India, Europe and Russia. Maybe you mean economically or militarily, but this is likely to change once someone develops the capability to exploit resources in space. Remember the story of the hare and the tortoise?
Maybe Apple can do this because they have a standardized directory structure, but what can be easier than dragging an app package to the Applications folder?
The Apple way rocks, the directory structure doesn't matter: you can execute any properly written application from anywhere. There are 2 problems with this in linux. Firstly, most applications are written with full path names in the code for files they reference. Secondly, linux applications are built around a wide range of supporting libraries, few of which are standard to all distributions - this means either huge packages, or a dependency resolution mechanism, like apt.
A linux distribution which wanted to do this would have to firstly pick a core set of standard libraries, then port all the applications they wanted to support.
Initial cost is insignificant compared to administration, support, training, etc. Many companies have a significant investment in windows infrastructure with custom software, experienced administrators, etc for whom switching to OSS would take years to pay off, if it did at all. In short, while the windows TCO claims are laughable, it's not obvious at all that linux saves money.
The fact that any inertial frame of reference can be regarded as equally valid does not begin with Einstein, it's fundamental to the way all physics is done.
That's not true at all. For a long time, it was assumed that there was a fundamental frame of reference around which all things could be measured (often referred to as "the distant stars"). All the laws of classical physics are equally consistent with this theory (as is special relativity, if you think about it). I'm sure this was debated before Einstein, but I'm also pretty sure Einstein was the first to settle the matter.
You get to kick back and relax, get free coffe and biscuits, chat with people you don't normally see, and pretend your doing something important without actually doing the slightest bit of work.
Even better are foreign trips, which are the same, but you get an all expenses paid holiday to boot. And all this while earning a salary. It almost makes me want to become a manager.
Is that 120 db pulse every 5 seconds really going to do anything to a giant thundercloud, which for one probably buffers the sound
120db is the sound measured on the ground next to the device. The sound is almost certainly focused upwards, which means it will be significantly louder above the device. As for the cloud absorbing the sound, well that's how it works.
Because once the crime has been committed, it's too late. Whether the criminal is caught or not, and no matter what kind of punishment he receives, the victim will still have been a victim of the crime. Solving crimes doesn't do much othert than give the victim a feeling that justice has been done. Prison, on the whole, does not stop people from reoffending, so the only way to reduce crime on the whole is detterence. And surveillance cameras are not essential in solving crimes, just useful. Unless, of course, you look similar to a criminal and were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because you look like the guy on the camera you get arrested.
Probably not, since that would make producing 1 cd cost three times the normal. Now they are just spending 1 or 2 euros for the two blank cd-r discs, which really isn't that much
Normal CDs cost next to nothing. They are much cheaper than recordable CDs. The main cost is in setting up the process, so there are economies of scale - printing 3 times as many CDs will be much less than 3 times as expensive. The only way they would be saving money is if they are shipping their album on CDR, in which case they save the burning time. The real reason is that this is a publicity stunt, and wouldn't work if they just shipped 3 CDs - people would just think they are paying 3 times as much as it's worth. And they wouldn't get publicised on slashdot.
Buy DateBk5 for Palm. It costs USD 25, and has all the features you need and more, trust me.:-)
Given that the raison d'etre of Palm devices is as a PIM, should you really have to buy extra software in order for it to be a good PIM? That's just my point - the PalmOS software isn't very good.
On PalmOS, there is only one place to put files (since there is no directories and no file hierarchy), so you can't mess up in that department on a Palm
Not true. On most devices there is the internal memory, and memory cards. If I transfer a document from memory to my memory stick, it can no longer be read. You make a good point about the simplicity being an advantage, but in this case, the right thing to do would be to combine both internal and external memory into one virtual directory, wouldn't it?
Epoc doesn't suffer from any of the the problems you mention, despite being much more complicated, flexible and powerful. I don't find PalmOS in any way easier to use, the opposite in fact, because due to the lack of functionality, many things are very difficult.
I can only assume people sing the praises of PalmOS so much, because they have never used anything better.
I have to say, I can't agree with you less. I recently bought a Clie, and while the hardware design is great (apart from the speaker being way to quiet), the OS (4) is rubbish. It has all the PIM features you need, but absolutely no integration - you can't for example set a time on a ToDo item and have it appear in the diary, or set an alarm for it. There is no way to sync the address book with a phone over irda. It doesn't use any open file formats. The filesystem is brain-dead. There is no multitasking.
My last PDA was a psion, and it was orders of magnitude better. As well as really good PIM software, it had a lightweight database, which was superb for keeping scraps of information, like passport number - you can replicate this functionality with palm OS, but only by using memo, and searching the entire filesystem. There is built in phone syncing. There is a good selection of software. The development tools are great, and as a result there is loads of quality third party software.
Maybe PalmOS 5 and 6 are better, but I don't see why people keep saying that palms are great PIMs, because they don't offer that much over a paper diary IMO. The only thing I find the Clie is notably good for is music, games and ebooks. Everything else is pretty mediocre.
Slashdot Mirror
I think everyone else in the world, including your government, is of the opinion that this is not the case, so don't accuse me of being uniformed, or ignorant.
he could have singlehandedly walked all over Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and more if he chose to do so
Didn't he already try that? I think it's perfectly clear that he couldn't do that at all.
So, despite your inability to understand how Hussein could indirectly damage the U.S., he sure had the ability to do so.
Any country in the world could indirectly damage the US if they really wanted to. What stops this from happening is that it's not worth it.
Again, you completely misunderstand the subtlety involved here
Not at all. In fact it's not very subtle. But what Hussein was foremost interested in, like all dictators, was staying in power. If he sold weapons to Al Quaeda which were used against the US and the CIA got wind of it, what would happen? There is no way he could be certain that a spy wouldn't find out about it.
Sure, I'll just head down to the corner Nuke-R-Us store and pick up a 20 kiloton thermonuclear device
I was talking about chemical/biological weapons. Many of these can quite easily be produced if you have the know-how, including ricin and sarin (remember the tokyo subway?). The chances of a terrorist managing to procure transport and smuggle a nuke into the US are negligible.
anti-anything-that-isn't-puritanical-Muslim
No, they're just against America and it's allies. You don't see them attacking Hindus, do you? Perhaps you should read a little and learn to understand their real motives, instead of just listenning to political rhetoric.
I suppose you'll now argue that Hitler was justified in attacking Poland because Poland was allied with Britain and France
Actually that's pre-emption you're talking about. That was what I was arguing against. I presume, then, that I've convinced you that the doctrine of pre-emption is stupid. Or are you just interested in flaming?
No, technology is supposed to sell. Sad but true.
It amazes me how readily so many people accept the doctrine of pre-emption. Are you all insane? Realistically, Iraq was not in any way a threat to America or any other western power. Even if they did have biological/chemical weapons which they were prepared to supply to terrorists, the risks of american intelligence finding out and retaliating wouldn't be worth the meagre political gains of seeing america attacked. And from the terrorists point of view, it's much easier to manufacture weapons using equipment bought on the open market in america than it is to smuggle it in.
Before you go singing the praises of pre-emption, consider this: America has always had the power to level afganistan to the ground; was Al Qaeda justified in launching a pre-emptive strike on America?
Rubbish. Psion got out of the handheld market because they were flogging a dead horse. It was a good business decision, even if it is mourned by everyone who has ever owned a psion handheld, myself included. In the end, they couldn't compete on volume with palm and pocket pc, largely because of inferior marketing.
Many people are predicting the iminent death of consumer PDAs in favour of smartphones, an area which psion is unlikely to be competitive in. Focusing on industrial handhelds is a much better idea, because quality is far more important than irrelevant features, the profit margins are higher and selling in bulk to companies is much easier than selling to consumers
As for selling symbian, it depends on whether they can generate more income from investing their cash windfall than they could get from symbian royalties. Time will tell, but I suspect the Psion management are in a far better position to judge this than you or me.
I remember reading about a study a few years ago which claimed that mining asteroids for valuable rare minerals would be cheaper than mining on Earth. To summarise, while on Earth the actual mining is cheap, the prospecting costs a small fortune, as it is largely a matter of educated guess work following extremely expensive surveying, generally satellite based, and hit or miss excavating - often in remote locations.
In contrast, minerals can be identified in space using a telescope and a mass spectrometer, but the actual mining is phenomenally expensive. Whether the study included the R and D overheads in developing space mining technology, I don't know, but don't dismiss space exploration outright as uneconomic.
A van full of hard drives. OK, it's probably not applicable, but you didn't mention your latency requirements ;-) Might look good in your report as evidence of "thinking outside the box", though.
You mean apart from China, India, Europe and Russia. Maybe you mean economically or militarily, but this is likely to change once someone develops the capability to exploit resources in space. Remember the story of the hare and the tortoise?
The Apple way rocks, the directory structure doesn't matter: you can execute any properly written application from anywhere. There are 2 problems with this in linux. Firstly, most applications are written with full path names in the code for files they reference. Secondly, linux applications are built around a wide range of supporting libraries, few of which are standard to all distributions - this means either huge packages, or a dependency resolution mechanism, like apt.
A linux distribution which wanted to do this would have to firstly pick a core set of standard libraries, then port all the applications they wanted to support.
This system will appreciated by certain people from Glasgow
Initial cost is insignificant compared to administration, support, training, etc. Many companies have a significant investment in windows infrastructure with custom software, experienced administrators, etc for whom switching to OSS would take years to pay off, if it did at all. In short, while the windows TCO claims are laughable, it's not obvious at all that linux saves money.
It's a good job the pictures aren't coming back with a blue tint, or lynch mobs would be turning up at NASA HQ.
This is a BIOS problem. If you can get the BIOS to register your the DVD-rom as a boot device, it should work, otherwise no boot CD will work.
That's not true at all. For a long time, it was assumed that there was a fundamental frame of reference around which all things could be measured (often referred to as "the distant stars"). All the laws of classical physics are equally consistent with this theory (as is special relativity, if you think about it). I'm sure this was debated before Einstein, but I'm also pretty sure Einstein was the first to settle the matter.
Even better are foreign trips, which are the same, but you get an all expenses paid holiday to boot. And all this while earning a salary. It almost makes me want to become a manager.
120db is the sound measured on the ground next to the device. The sound is almost certainly focused upwards, which means it will be significantly louder above the device. As for the cloud absorbing the sound, well that's how it works.
Don't be mean - he's probably from eastern Europe
Because once the crime has been committed, it's too late. Whether the criminal is caught or not, and no matter what kind of punishment he receives, the victim will still have been a victim of the crime. Solving crimes doesn't do much othert than give the victim a feeling that justice has been done. Prison, on the whole, does not stop people from reoffending, so the only way to reduce crime on the whole is detterence. And surveillance cameras are not essential in solving crimes, just useful. Unless, of course, you look similar to a criminal and were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because you look like the guy on the camera you get arrested.
No, you'll probably only use a small fraction of what you learned in the real world, maybe even nothing.
Normal CDs cost next to nothing. They are much cheaper than recordable CDs. The main cost is in setting up the process, so there are economies of scale - printing 3 times as many CDs will be much less than 3 times as expensive. The only way they would be saving money is if they are shipping their album on CDR, in which case they save the burning time. The real reason is that this is a publicity stunt, and wouldn't work if they just shipped 3 CDs - people would just think they are paying 3 times as much as it's worth. And they wouldn't get publicised on slashdot.
Given that the raison d'etre of Palm devices is as a PIM, should you really have to buy extra software in order for it to be a good PIM? That's just my point - the PalmOS software isn't very good.
On PalmOS, there is only one place to put files (since there is no directories and no file hierarchy), so you can't mess up in that department on a Palm
Not true. On most devices there is the internal memory, and memory cards. If I transfer a document from memory to my memory stick, it can no longer be read. You make a good point about the simplicity being an advantage, but in this case, the right thing to do would be to combine both internal and external memory into one virtual directory, wouldn't it?
Epoc doesn't suffer from any of the the problems you mention, despite being much more complicated, flexible and powerful. I don't find PalmOS in any way easier to use, the opposite in fact, because due to the lack of functionality, many things are very difficult.
I can only assume people sing the praises of PalmOS so much, because they have never used anything better.
I have to say, I can't agree with you less. I recently bought a Clie, and while the hardware design is great (apart from the speaker being way to quiet), the OS (4) is rubbish. It has all the PIM features you need, but absolutely no integration - you can't for example set a time on a ToDo item and have it appear in the diary, or set an alarm for it. There is no way to sync the address book with a phone over irda. It doesn't use any open file formats. The filesystem is brain-dead. There is no multitasking.
My last PDA was a psion, and it was orders of magnitude better. As well as really good PIM software, it had a lightweight database, which was superb for keeping scraps of information, like passport number - you can replicate this functionality with palm OS, but only by using memo, and searching the entire filesystem. There is built in phone syncing. There is a good selection of software. The development tools are great, and as a result there is loads of quality third party software.
Maybe PalmOS 5 and 6 are better, but I don't see why people keep saying that palms are great PIMs, because they don't offer that much over a paper diary IMO. The only thing I find the Clie is notably good for is music, games and ebooks. Everything else is pretty mediocre.
Phew, that feels better.
0.3% of 6378km is ~20km. But I think that what's really alarming is that the trend has suddenly reversed and has shown such a big change since 1997.
You mean like this guy
Screw that! Someone write a mydoom variant which targets the BBC. That'll teach them to bad mouth linux zealots.
Producing sperm from monkeys is easy, you just have to massage their...erm, never mind.