It's not just getting connected in the sticks, it's connecting the urban areas that are separated by the sticks. If you can get great coverage in LA and New York, but you can't connect LA to New York, then you've lost a lot of what I'm trying to accomplish.
What djinni? (I hate the garage-door-opener-manufacturer-bastardized spelling of that word, so forgive the pedantry)
Are you referring to the freedom of communication provided by the internet? You still do that at the whim of your ISP. Without AOL Time Warner's approval, I wouldn't be able to access the internet to talk with you about our endangered freedom. They can still shut us down. The internet is owned by a few large corporations who aren't going to go against the government just to ensure their customers' freedoms.
Grass-roots WiFi networks seem to me to be the only hope for a truly free communication network at this point. Unless there is a massive change in the mindsets of the government and their corporate sponsors toward respect for free speech and privacy, and away from treating citizens as criminals, the internet is only going to get more tied down.
Yet whenever I start thinking about this, I stop at Wyoming. For a WiFi internet to work, you'll need a huge number of connections to ensure sufficient capacity and reliability. That's not so hard in, say, New England. Wyoming is a different matter. Along Interstate 84 (or is it 80? The two meet in Salt Lake City, and I forget which is which) you'll only find signs of civilization (a truck stop and a few houses) every 60 miles. Even with the ability to bridge those gaps, you still don't have the density of connections you need. I pick on Wyoming, but really all the mountain states have this same problem.
I'd hate to see the WiFi grow only to the point of localized community networks that can't talk to each other. Not because community networks are bad, but because the global reach of the internet is one of the reasons it's so cool.
Which, if you forget about Wyoming for a second, makes the Atlantic and the Pacific much bigger obstacles.:)
My question then becomes, at what point does the President decide that it's simply easier to arrange for the 'accidental' deaths (after, as needed, interrogation using methods which would be widely hailed as illegal) of 'national security risks' than go through the bother of detaining them?
How do you know that this isn't already the case?
Seriously. If they never have to produce the person, then how would you know that "detained" wasn't a euphamism for "shot and buried in the desert"?
This is insane. There is a tremendous record of abuses of police and government powers even when those powers are covered by close judicial scrutiny. Now people want to give them even more power, but without the review, and actually buy that there won't be far worse abuse? No, I don't buy it. People who support this know what it will result in, and are either glad or don't care.
The point that keeps running through my mind is that you must be able to add tensile strength by design where it doesn't exist otherwise. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems there are many real world examples where this is true.
You're wrong.
Fundamentally, you cannot "add" tensile strength to a material through geometry. You can create a structure that spreads load out, but you cannot make the components of that structure capable of bearing more weight.
Think of a single steel I-beam in your tower. Sitting verticaly, there is only so much weight that you can put on top of the I-beam. Nothing can change that, as it is a fundamental property of the material. All you can do is distribute the weight among other I-beams, so each beam has to hold up less. This is true for each horizontal cross-section of the tower. A good geometry provides even load distribution while minimizing the amount of material used (to reduce the weight lower sections have to support).
BTW, notice that an I-beam itself is such a geometry. The shape resists bending and twisting, but with less material than a solid rectangular beam.
I have no idea what the ideal geometry is, as I'm not a civil engineer. But I do know that no geometry can make steel stronger than steel, and thus eventually you're going to have to start making your base wider to support the weight above it, and to get to 60,000 km you'll have to have a ridiculously wide base (assuming that you could create a geometry that spread the load out over the entire base).
Its more like what I would have them NOT do -- whine and preted G.W. Bush isn't President. It is the whining and sour grapes that gets to me.
True. But what gets to me is people acting like everything in the election was on the up-and-up. It stunk, and all the "The President elect's brother did what he was supposed to" doesn't change that.
The system needs reformed -- not the Electoral College, but rather the campaign funding and campaigning laws in general. Also, the press needs to act better. STOP CALLING ELECTIONS ad just report the returns! Many States have multiple time zones, and people are still voting. Stop exit polling!
I disagree that the Electoral College doesn't need reform, but I disklike it when minorities are silenced. But that's such a far cry, I don't really worry about it too much. Your other comments I agree with. It's ridiculous how by the time Oregon goes to vote the news stations are telling them it doesn't matter because it's been decided. Must do wonders for voter turn out!
There are RULES to an election -- including deadlines and not trying to have the counters use ESP to guess what people intended.
But isn't that exactly what they did? I remember them declaring a victor. Since the recounts were stopped, how did they know except through ESP? Or is it ESP when you look at a single ballot but not when you decide for an entire state?
The "Butterfly Ballot" was chosen by an experienced DEMOCRAT; used successfully, without incident, in several other areas of the country; was published beforehand in the local newspaper; passed a review of BOTH parties without challenge.
Nevertheless, it was still a problem. The Corsair was once considered road-worthy. The butterfly ballot was a bad implementation, and will hopefully go away.
Multiple rehandlings of paper punch ballots damage the ballots, skewing the actual vote. More recounts would have meat more UNCOUNTED votes as the ballots would have been damaged beyond proper use.
So thus we stop trying? That's not exactly a great answer. I guess I'd like my "representative" democracy to actually bother to figure out what I wanted. If that means delaying the results until they figure it out, so be it.
"More People Voted For Gore". Actually, I think the majority of Americans DIDN'T VOTE AT ALL!
Actually, those sentences are not in contradiction.
For those that DID vote, this ISN'T A PURE DEMOCRACY aka MOB RULE.
No, instead it's a Republic aka RULE BY ELITE CLASS.
This is a Republic, and the electoral system is much harder to manipulate than pure majority vote.
Theoretically and practically false. Theoretically, it takes fewer votes to turn a state than the entire country. Turning a single state can turn the entire election, greatly amplifying the effect of the small number of stuffed votes. Practically, Florida was much closer than the nation as a whole (in terms of absolute ballots), but Florida still decided the nation. If Oregon and New Mexico had been landslides, Florida still would have decided the nation.
GET OVER IT! Both major political parties (Democrats & Republicans) are lying, sniviling, cheating, vote-whoring, ballot-stuffing scum.
You're right, but what's your point? That we shouldn't care that our President was "elected" under highly suspicious and quite broken circumstances? The whole situation was a complete cluster-fuck regardless of who won, and our election process was turned into a farce. The fact that the cluster-fucking was in favor of the brother of the governor of the state in question, whose appointed (yay Elites!) judges were the ones who decided when the cluster-fucking was over and the winner decided may raise my hackles even more, but it's not like I'd think everything was cool if Gore (or Nader!) won.
Don't like it? Look at the maps where the votes were close (Oregon, Iowa, Florida, etc.) and organize voter education, registration and participation there. There IS another election coming up...
Thus you tacitly recognize another major failing of the electoral college, also implicitly acknowledged by the candidates: Only the swing states matter.
maybe you live in one of those places, but I don't feel like traveling 2500 miles just to encourage someone else to cast a meaningful vote.
Check out http://www.lp.org/ [lp.org] for an alternative to the 2-party bullshit.
Try coming to Texas and being a Libertarian, if you want to feel what banging your head against a wall is like. You say being a republic prevents mob rule, but the fact is that not a single one of the minority votes in Texas (or any of the non-swing states) mattered at all. The electoral college takes a minority and turns it into nothing. And thus the 2-party system locks itself in.
This is just even more justification to persecute the war- shouldn't we clean up our own mistakes?
If your method of cleaning up mistakes is to blow the shit out of the victims of that mistake, then remind me never to call you when my plumbing is fouled up.:P
The other genre I do miss is the graphical adventure. I don't know why these aren't more popular. Maybe because they were made too difficult of many people to play? I think that must be the reason. Stupid puzzle of ridiculous complexity will turn all but the most hard core off to these types of games.
And it's not like the puzzles were actually hard, it's that they made no sense. You couldn't use normal reasoning to solve the puzzles. Like in King's Quest Something, you had to defeat a snarling yeti by throwing a pie at it. Would that be your first choice of anti-yeti weapon? Probably not, but in the game instead of wiping the stupid pie off its face and then eating you, the yeti inexplicably falls off a cliff. Apparently I missed the clue about how yetis lack inner ears, and thus depend on sight for their sense of balance.
Thankfully I'm having trouble remembering more examples (enough of my brain's capacity is used up by video game trivia), but that's pretty typical, especially of the Sierra games. You can't actually -figure out- the puzzles, so they all degenerate into trying to use every item you have on everything on the screen until you stumble upon whatever random thing the game designer wanted you to do.
Bleh. Good ridance to those. Say what you will about Myst -- at least its puzzles you could actually figure out instead of "oh, I'll hold this tiny rabbit's foot out at chest level so the blind guy with huge hands will think I'm a fucking rabbit".
The question was - is Linux taking more market share away from Unix or Windows. In what way does asking people who already use Linux answer that question?
Um... Directly?
Who else would you ask to find out where people are moving to Linux from? In order to answer the question "where did you move to Linux from", they have to already have moved to Linux, no?
I really can't see what your question is. You want to know if people are moving to Linux from Unix or from Windows. So you ask people who moved to Linux if they moved from Unix or Windows. Sounds pretty simple to me.
You could ask people who curretly use Unix or Windows what they plan to do, but that's only useful for future projections, not for seeing the source of current market share shifts. You don't find out how many people are doctors by surveying high school students on their future plans, do you?
It's no fault of your own. You just show some people a coffee mug, and they'll tell you right to your face "thats not a coffee mug".
Of course since the beginning the Admnistration has been telling us that they have a coffee cup, it's definitely a coffee cup, and we all should believe that it's a coffee cup... But no, now that you ask, you can't see the coffee cup right now. It's there though, really!
I've seen this stated several times, but I can't see how this is true. Where does this theory come from? Where does this statistic come from?
Well, if you believe the stories about the percentage of Americans who couldn't identify Canada on a globe, then you shouldn't find it hard to believe that many Americans don't know that Iraq and Afghanistan are actually different places.:)
Re:"Bush's War" at ends with "The War On Terror"
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If 3000 people die and someone cheers, then the people cheering should be shot in the back of the head while his family watches.
I disagree, because then we'd have to shoot all the people who cheered when Bush announced we were at war, and I'm pretty sure not all of them deserve to be shot. Maybe when George said "We've gone to war" someone thought he said "We've gone too far" and cheered for that, but then we went and shot him... It'd be a big mess.
Apart from the free (speech/beer whatever) source/ closed source propoganda what has linux to offer a average customer (read non-geek) that windows doesn't ?
Well, I don't really need any more than that. And once educated on the issue, a lot of non-geeks don't either. There are a lot of people who base their purchasing decisions on exactly that kind of thing. You think only geeks are privacy-conscious? Try telling people that WinXP makes you agree to let MS search and alter your hard drive, and see how much they value MS's promise to only use that for voluntary updates.
If its all about choice, then what will prevent customers from choosing windows in future, even if hypothetically speaking the customer is able to buy a no pre-installed OS pc.?
Assume you can get whatever operating system you want pre-installed, otherwise that makes the question kinda pointless (people will pick Windows because they can get it pre-installed). But nothing will -prevent- them from picking windows. Certainly people will. But once there -is- choice, then what's to prevent them from picking Linux?
I know that linux distros include much more than a bare bone OS, but do the customers really care ?
I think so. I think they'll care when they realize that the $100 for the XP upgrade doesn't come with Office. And people who think FreeCell and Minesweeper are pretty cool go apeshit over the games that come with Linux distros.:)
Basically, they might not care -now-, because they don't know. People aren't used to getting like 3 disks crammed with applications with their operating system, but once they are, doesn't it seem like they'd like that?
One of THE MOST important things for linux to succeed in desktop is to get the OEM manifactures out from the microsoft's clutches.
I agree. The only advantages MS has are by virtue of its entrenchment -- consumer software and hardware vendors target Windows first. Until then, the folks who'd run Linux "except (I need to use Photoshop | UT2003 runs like ass on my Raedon | my scanner won't work, period )" will be beyond reach.
The pay is good (damn good for an intern - about twice what I earned as a student engineer on a vaguely similar scheme in the UK).
How many years of college did you have when you went for this internship? Most places with formal internship programs will increase the pay as you get more schooling. The article says they pay "as much as $25 an hour". I made that much when I had a bachelor's degree and was working on my masters, and half that much when I was a sophomore. Not even Microsoft is going to give $25/hour to someone with Introduction to Programming as their only relevent coursework. So unless you were a graduate student when you went on your internship, don't think it's an equal comparison.
A lot of large tech companies have good paying internships with flexible hours and other bonuses. Intel pays as much as MS, and you're eligible for profit sharing as well. I think AMD gives interns profit sharing, but that's purely theoretical at this point.;) At IBM, the engineers were complaining because after working a few hours of overtime the inters were making as much as the engineers.
Working for a company which actually seems to care about you is a very fulfilling experience.
Adequate pay and flexible hours do not a caring company make. Intel has basically the same benefits in their intership program, but at the end of the day you're a well-compensated cog in the giant corporate machine. Flexible hours sounds great until you realize that there is a lot of pressure to use that to stretch the amount of time you're at work. Does it matter that much that you can come in at 11 when you're expected to work fifty or sixty hours a week without extra pay? But they don't mention that in the article, do they?
There's more to a company than their compensation. I've never gotten the impression from ex-MS employees I've run into that they actually care. Then again, most were similar to me -- though not exactly Free Software Hippies, they also didn't think MS was the paragon of software quality and moral business practices. I guess I knew one guy who liked his job there, but he did idolize Bill Gates (which is kinda like a young boxer idolizing Don King).
My point basically is that good benefits don't mean it's a good place to work in other ways. That's one of the best reasons to do an intership. Getting paid well while you're there is just a perk.:)
Re:I would think that this would depend on one thi
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The Space Elevator
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If the ribbon severed, say at 100 km, it would react to "inertial drag"( probably the wrong term) and spread out in the path of Earth's rotation, thus spreading across a large area of the equator.
You're talking about how the farther-out parts are moving faster, and as they fall toward earth that would mean they are no longer geosynchronous and would whip around, right? That's an issue, but I don't think it'd be that bad since the atmosphere would slow it down.
Of course if it severed at 100km, then only 100km would be coming down (the rest would fly off into space), which isn't a large area at all. Put the base 100km away from population centers (or trade routes, I guess), and there isn't any concern.
Also, you wouldn't really need to worry about more than that falling anyway. Anything that fell from above 100km would burn up in the atmosphere.
Atmospheric drag would effect this but I'm guessing that the material is heat resistant so wouldn't we see a red hot "whip" slam down?
At about 7kg/km, it isn't going to be "slamming down" anywhere. I think that's the key to understanding the safety issues -- the thing may be big, but it isn't heavy at all. Imagine a 100km feather, then imagine something much less dense.
Because of that, I think the whole falling issue is moot. With that kind of density, any horizontal motion would be slowed by air drag very quickly. In fact, I'd bet wind would do more to spread out the range over which it falls than the inertial effect. It'll kinda drift down and you'll have a big pile of carbon.
Re:I would think that this would depend on one thi
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The Space Elevator
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But I imagine it would come back down. How much debris would we be talking about? How far away from it's orginal anchor spot would it get before it came down? How much of it could we expect to burn up?
It'd be a meter wide, a few tens of thousands of kilometers long, and a micron thick. That's 10^-6 meters. It probably wouldn't fall so much as flutter.
The idea of a carbon nanotube ribbon space elevator has been on/. before, and the theory in the last article was that the ribbon would break up into tiny nano-chunks. The exact environmental impact would probably have to be studied more, but it wouldn't be anything like 40,000 km of steel cable falling from the sky.
For example, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, is based on manga, which is far more detailed than a feature film can possibly be given time constraints.
True enough, though in this case I think it was pulled off well. The movie focused on only a small part of the manga (instead of trying to cram the entire epic into 2 hours, like Akira). Instead he took a reasonable portion of the story and re-tooled it into a stand-alone piece that was in a number of ways better than the manga. The manga doesn't really take off until the second book, but the movie took the events of the first book and made them more powerful.
So I think the original poster was right -- Miyazaki does create his work specifically for his medium, and I think Nausicaa (both movie and manga) exemplify this.
It's things like this that make Free Software zealots look like idiots in the eyes of the public.
Yeah, because not distributing software for people who don't comply with the terms of the license under which they recieved the source code that they are using sure is idiotic zealotry!
Patents are often compared to a weapons-race, where companies have no choice but to create patents as a measure of self-defense.
In fact, I've had patent attorneys tell me that this is -exactly- what patents are. The purpose of a large patent portfolio is not to protect your "intellectual property", but to cover such a wide base that anyone who has technology you want or whose patents you might be violating is assured of violating at least one of your patents.
"Patents protect the small and independent inventors from having their ideas stolen by large corporations," I've heard said. Bullshit. So you've invented a method to increase ADSL range and bandwidth ten-fold? Well, your website on which you try to attract licensees uses HYPERLINKS, so don't go trying to sue BT when they steal your idea.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just getting connected in the sticks, it's connecting the urban areas that are separated by the sticks. If you can get great coverage in LA and New York, but you can't connect LA to New York, then you've lost a lot of what I'm trying to accomplish.
The genie is well and truly out of the bottle.
What djinni? (I hate the garage-door-opener-manufacturer-bastardized spelling of that word, so forgive the pedantry)
Are you referring to the freedom of communication provided by the internet? You still do that at the whim of your ISP. Without AOL Time Warner's approval, I wouldn't be able to access the internet to talk with you about our endangered freedom. They can still shut us down. The internet is owned by a few large corporations who aren't going to go against the government just to ensure their customers' freedoms.
Grass-roots WiFi networks seem to me to be the only hope for a truly free communication network at this point. Unless there is a massive change in the mindsets of the government and their corporate sponsors toward respect for free speech and privacy, and away from treating citizens as criminals, the internet is only going to get more tied down.
:)
Yet whenever I start thinking about this, I stop at Wyoming. For a WiFi internet to work, you'll need a huge number of connections to ensure sufficient capacity and reliability. That's not so hard in, say, New England. Wyoming is a different matter. Along Interstate 84 (or is it 80? The two meet in Salt Lake City, and I forget which is which) you'll only find signs of civilization (a truck stop and a few houses) every 60 miles. Even with the ability to bridge those gaps, you still don't have the density of connections you need. I pick on Wyoming, but really all the mountain states have this same problem.
I'd hate to see the WiFi grow only to the point of localized community networks that can't talk to each other. Not because community networks are bad, but because the global reach of the internet is one of the reasons it's so cool.
Which, if you forget about Wyoming for a second, makes the Atlantic and the Pacific much bigger obstacles.
My question then becomes, at what point does the President decide that it's simply easier to arrange for the 'accidental' deaths (after, as needed, interrogation using methods which would be widely hailed as illegal) of 'national security risks' than go through the bother of detaining them?
How do you know that this isn't already the case?
Seriously. If they never have to produce the person, then how would you know that "detained" wasn't a euphamism for "shot and buried in the desert"?
This is insane. There is a tremendous record of abuses of police and government powers even when those powers are covered by close judicial scrutiny. Now people want to give them even more power, but without the review, and actually buy that there won't be far worse abuse? No, I don't buy it. People who support this know what it will result in, and are either glad or don't care.
The point that keeps running through my mind is that you must be able to add tensile strength by design where it doesn't exist otherwise. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems there are many real world examples where this is true.
You're wrong.
Fundamentally, you cannot "add" tensile strength to a material through geometry. You can create a structure that spreads load out, but you cannot make the components of that structure capable of bearing more weight.
Think of a single steel I-beam in your tower. Sitting verticaly, there is only so much weight that you can put on top of the I-beam. Nothing can change that, as it is a fundamental property of the material. All you can do is distribute the weight among other I-beams, so each beam has to hold up less. This is true for each horizontal cross-section of the tower. A good geometry provides even load distribution while minimizing the amount of material used (to reduce the weight lower sections have to support).
BTW, notice that an I-beam itself is such a geometry. The shape resists bending and twisting, but with less material than a solid rectangular beam.
I have no idea what the ideal geometry is, as I'm not a civil engineer. But I do know that no geometry can make steel stronger than steel, and thus eventually you're going to have to start making your base wider to support the weight above it, and to get to 60,000 km you'll have to have a ridiculously wide base (assuming that you could create a geometry that spread the load out over the entire base).
Same thing with hanging, only more obvious.
Or perhaps you were referring to the Chevrolet Corvair of Unsafe At Any Speed fame.
:)
Perhaps.
Its more like what I would have them NOT do -- whine and preted G.W. Bush isn't President. It is the whining and sour grapes that gets to me.
True. But what gets to me is people acting like everything in the election was on the up-and-up. It stunk, and all the "The President elect's brother did what he was supposed to" doesn't change that.
The system needs reformed -- not the Electoral College, but rather the campaign funding and campaigning laws in general. Also, the press needs to act better. STOP CALLING ELECTIONS ad just report the returns! Many States have multiple time zones, and people are still voting. Stop exit polling!
I disagree that the Electoral College doesn't need reform, but I disklike it when minorities are silenced. But that's such a far cry, I don't really worry about it too much. Your other comments I agree with. It's ridiculous how by the time Oregon goes to vote the news stations are telling them it doesn't matter because it's been decided. Must do wonders for voter turn out!
There are RULES to an election -- including deadlines and not trying to have the counters use ESP to guess what people intended.
But isn't that exactly what they did? I remember them declaring a victor. Since the recounts were stopped, how did they know except through ESP? Or is it ESP when you look at a single ballot but not when you decide for an entire state?
The "Butterfly Ballot" was chosen by an experienced DEMOCRAT; used successfully, without incident, in several other areas of the country; was published beforehand in the local newspaper; passed a review of BOTH parties without challenge.
Nevertheless, it was still a problem. The Corsair was once considered road-worthy. The butterfly ballot was a bad implementation, and will hopefully go away.
Multiple rehandlings of paper punch ballots damage the ballots, skewing the actual vote. More recounts would have meat more UNCOUNTED votes as the ballots would have been damaged beyond proper use.
So thus we stop trying? That's not exactly a great answer. I guess I'd like my "representative" democracy to actually bother to figure out what I wanted. If that means delaying the results until they figure it out, so be it.
"More People Voted For Gore". Actually, I think the majority of Americans DIDN'T VOTE AT ALL!
Actually, those sentences are not in contradiction.
For those that DID vote, this ISN'T A PURE DEMOCRACY aka MOB RULE.
No, instead it's a Republic aka RULE BY ELITE CLASS.
This is a Republic, and the electoral system is much harder to manipulate than pure majority vote.
Theoretically and practically false. Theoretically, it takes fewer votes to turn a state than the entire country. Turning a single state can turn the entire election, greatly amplifying the effect of the small number of stuffed votes. Practically, Florida was much closer than the nation as a whole (in terms of absolute ballots), but Florida still decided the nation. If Oregon and New Mexico had been landslides, Florida still would have decided the nation.
GET OVER IT! Both major political parties (Democrats & Republicans) are lying, sniviling, cheating, vote-whoring, ballot-stuffing scum.
You're right, but what's your point? That we shouldn't care that our President was "elected" under highly suspicious and quite broken circumstances? The whole situation was a complete cluster-fuck regardless of who won, and our election process was turned into a farce. The fact that the cluster-fucking was in favor of the brother of the governor of the state in question, whose appointed (yay Elites!) judges were the ones who decided when the cluster-fucking was over and the winner decided may raise my hackles even more, but it's not like I'd think everything was cool if Gore (or Nader!) won.
Don't like it? Look at the maps where the votes were close (Oregon, Iowa, Florida, etc.) and organize voter education, registration and participation there. There IS another election coming up...
Thus you tacitly recognize another major failing of the electoral college, also implicitly acknowledged by the candidates: Only the swing states matter.
maybe you live in one of those places, but I don't feel like traveling 2500 miles just to encourage someone else to cast a meaningful vote.
Check out http://www.lp.org/ [lp.org] for an alternative to the 2-party bullshit.
Try coming to Texas and being a Libertarian, if you want to feel what banging your head against a wall is like. You say being a republic prevents mob rule, but the fact is that not a single one of the minority votes in Texas (or any of the non-swing states) mattered at all. The electoral college takes a minority and turns it into nothing. And thus the 2-party system locks itself in.
This is just even more justification to persecute the war- shouldn't we clean up our own mistakes?
:P
If your method of cleaning up mistakes is to blow the shit out of the victims of that mistake, then remind me never to call you when my plumbing is fouled up.
The other genre I do miss is the graphical adventure. I don't know why these aren't more popular. Maybe because they were made too difficult of many people to play? I think that must be the reason. Stupid puzzle of ridiculous complexity will turn all but the most hard core off to these types of games.
And it's not like the puzzles were actually hard, it's that they made no sense. You couldn't use normal reasoning to solve the puzzles. Like in King's Quest Something, you had to defeat a snarling yeti by throwing a pie at it. Would that be your first choice of anti-yeti weapon? Probably not, but in the game instead of wiping the stupid pie off its face and then eating you, the yeti inexplicably falls off a cliff. Apparently I missed the clue about how yetis lack inner ears, and thus depend on sight for their sense of balance.
Thankfully I'm having trouble remembering more examples (enough of my brain's capacity is used up by video game trivia), but that's pretty typical, especially of the Sierra games. You can't actually -figure out- the puzzles, so they all degenerate into trying to use every item you have on everything on the screen until you stumble upon whatever random thing the game designer wanted you to do.
Bleh. Good ridance to those. Say what you will about Myst -- at least its puzzles you could actually figure out instead of "oh, I'll hold this tiny rabbit's foot out at chest level so the blind guy with huge hands will think I'm a fucking rabbit".
The question was - is Linux taking more market share away from Unix or Windows. In what way does asking people who already use Linux answer that question?
Um... Directly?
Who else would you ask to find out where people are moving to Linux from? In order to answer the question "where did you move to Linux from", they have to already have moved to Linux, no?
I really can't see what your question is. You want to know if people are moving to Linux from Unix or from Windows. So you ask people who moved to Linux if they moved from Unix or Windows. Sounds pretty simple to me.
You could ask people who curretly use Unix or Windows what they plan to do, but that's only useful for future projections, not for seeing the source of current market share shifts. You don't find out how many people are doctors by surveying high school students on their future plans, do you?
It's no fault of your own. You just show some people a coffee mug, and they'll tell you right to your face "thats not a coffee mug".
Of course since the beginning the Admnistration has been telling us that they have a coffee cup, it's definitely a coffee cup, and we all should believe that it's a coffee cup... But no, now that you ask, you can't see the coffee cup right now. It's there though, really!
I've seen this stated several times, but I can't see how this is true. Where does this theory come from? Where does this statistic come from?
:)
Well, if you believe the stories about the percentage of Americans who couldn't identify Canada on a globe, then you shouldn't find it hard to believe that many Americans don't know that Iraq and Afghanistan are actually different places.
If 3000 people die and someone cheers, then the people cheering should be shot in the back of the head while his family watches.
I disagree, because then we'd have to shoot all the people who cheered when Bush announced we were at war, and I'm pretty sure not all of them deserve to be shot. Maybe when George said "We've gone to war" someone thought he said "We've gone too far" and cheered for that, but then we went and shot him... It'd be a big mess.
Apart from the free (speech/beer whatever) source/ closed source propoganda what has linux to offer a average customer (read non-geek) that windows doesn't ?
:)
Well, I don't really need any more than that. And once educated on the issue, a lot of non-geeks don't either. There are a lot of people who base their purchasing decisions on exactly that kind of thing. You think only geeks are privacy-conscious? Try telling people that WinXP makes you agree to let MS search and alter your hard drive, and see how much they value MS's promise to only use that for voluntary updates.
If its all about choice, then what will prevent customers from choosing windows in future, even if hypothetically speaking the customer is able to buy a no pre-installed OS pc.?
Assume you can get whatever operating system you want pre-installed, otherwise that makes the question kinda pointless (people will pick Windows because they can get it pre-installed). But nothing will -prevent- them from picking windows. Certainly people will. But once there -is- choice, then what's to prevent them from picking Linux?
I know that linux distros include much more than a bare bone OS, but do the customers really care ?
I think so. I think they'll care when they realize that the $100 for the XP upgrade doesn't come with Office. And people who think FreeCell and Minesweeper are pretty cool go apeshit over the games that come with Linux distros.
Basically, they might not care -now-, because they don't know. People aren't used to getting like 3 disks crammed with applications with their operating system, but once they are, doesn't it seem like they'd like that?
One of THE MOST important things for linux to succeed in desktop is to get the OEM manifactures out from the microsoft's clutches.
I agree. The only advantages MS has are by virtue of its entrenchment -- consumer software and hardware vendors target Windows first. Until then, the folks who'd run Linux "except (I need to use Photoshop | UT2003 runs like ass on my Raedon | my scanner won't work, period )" will be beyond reach.
You tell them "I'm a computer programmer at Microsoft", they probably won't be able to keep their hands off you.
:)
It's with a fairly high confidence factor that I say I think you've never experimentally verified this.
The pay is good (damn good for an intern - about twice what I earned as a student engineer on a vaguely similar scheme in the UK).
;) At IBM, the engineers were complaining because after working a few hours of overtime the inters were making as much as the engineers.
:)
How many years of college did you have when you went for this internship? Most places with formal internship programs will increase the pay as you get more schooling. The article says they pay "as much as $25 an hour". I made that much when I had a bachelor's degree and was working on my masters, and half that much when I was a sophomore. Not even Microsoft is going to give $25/hour to someone with Introduction to Programming as their only relevent coursework. So unless you were a graduate student when you went on your internship, don't think it's an equal comparison.
A lot of large tech companies have good paying internships with flexible hours and other bonuses. Intel pays as much as MS, and you're eligible for profit sharing as well. I think AMD gives interns profit sharing, but that's purely theoretical at this point.
Working for a company which actually seems to care about you is a very fulfilling experience.
Adequate pay and flexible hours do not a caring company make. Intel has basically the same benefits in their intership program, but at the end of the day you're a well-compensated cog in the giant corporate machine. Flexible hours sounds great until you realize that there is a lot of pressure to use that to stretch the amount of time you're at work. Does it matter that much that you can come in at 11 when you're expected to work fifty or sixty hours a week without extra pay? But they don't mention that in the article, do they?
There's more to a company than their compensation. I've never gotten the impression from ex-MS employees I've run into that they actually care. Then again, most were similar to me -- though not exactly Free Software Hippies, they also didn't think MS was the paragon of software quality and moral business practices. I guess I knew one guy who liked his job there, but he did idolize Bill Gates (which is kinda like a young boxer idolizing Don King).
My point basically is that good benefits don't mean it's a good place to work in other ways. That's one of the best reasons to do an intership. Getting paid well while you're there is just a perk.
If the ribbon severed, say at 100 km, it would react to "inertial drag"( probably the wrong term) and spread out in the path of Earth's rotation, thus spreading across a large area of the equator.
You're talking about how the farther-out parts are moving faster, and as they fall toward earth that would mean they are no longer geosynchronous and would whip around, right? That's an issue, but I don't think it'd be that bad since the atmosphere would slow it down.
Of course if it severed at 100km, then only 100km would be coming down (the rest would fly off into space), which isn't a large area at all. Put the base 100km away from population centers (or trade routes, I guess), and there isn't any concern.
Also, you wouldn't really need to worry about more than that falling anyway. Anything that fell from above 100km would burn up in the atmosphere.
Atmospheric drag would effect this but I'm guessing that the material is heat resistant so wouldn't we see a red hot "whip" slam down?
At about 7kg/km, it isn't going to be "slamming down" anywhere. I think that's the key to understanding the safety issues -- the thing may be big, but it isn't heavy at all. Imagine a 100km feather, then imagine something much less dense.
Because of that, I think the whole falling issue is moot. With that kind of density, any horizontal motion would be slowed by air drag very quickly. In fact, I'd bet wind would do more to spread out the range over which it falls than the inertial effect. It'll kinda drift down and you'll have a big pile of carbon.
But I imagine it would come back down. How much debris would we be talking about? How far away from it's orginal anchor spot would it get before it came down? How much of it could we expect to burn up?
/. before, and the theory in the last article was that the ribbon would break up into tiny nano-chunks. The exact environmental impact would probably have to be studied more, but it wouldn't be anything like 40,000 km of steel cable falling from the sky.
It'd be a meter wide, a few tens of thousands of kilometers long, and a micron thick. That's 10^-6 meters. It probably wouldn't fall so much as flutter.
The idea of a carbon nanotube ribbon space elevator has been on
if America is a racist nation, why do third world peoples flock here?
You know, I bet all the vaguely-Arab-looking Americans that were attacked shortly after 9/11 were asking themselves the same thing.
The software isn't, strictly speaking, being distributed, the phone is.
Is the software on the phone? Is the phone being distributed? Then, strictly speaking, the software is being distributed.
I'm not selling cocaine, Officer! I'm selling small plastic bags which happen to contain cocaine!
For example, Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind, is based on manga, which is far more detailed than a feature film can possibly be given time constraints.
True enough, though in this case I think it was pulled off well. The movie focused on only a small part of the manga (instead of trying to cram the entire epic into 2 hours, like Akira). Instead he took a reasonable portion of the story and re-tooled it into a stand-alone piece that was in a number of ways better than the manga. The manga doesn't really take off until the second book, but the movie took the events of the first book and made them more powerful.
So I think the original poster was right -- Miyazaki does create his work specifically for his medium, and I think Nausicaa (both movie and manga) exemplify this.
Irony is saying something in such a way as to mean the opposite.
No, that's sarcasm, which is just one form of irony.
Even Gary (Doonesbury) Trudeau doesn't seem to know the meaning of irony when he uses the word
Very astute observation on the blackness of Mr. Kettle, Mr. Pot!
I don't get it.
What part of "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein." do you not understand?
It's things like this that make Free Software zealots look like idiots in the eyes of the public.
Yeah, because not distributing software for people who don't comply with the terms of the license under which they recieved the source code that they are using sure is idiotic zealotry!
Patents are often compared to a weapons-race, where companies have no choice but to create patents as a measure of self-defense.
In fact, I've had patent attorneys tell me that this is -exactly- what patents are. The purpose of a large patent portfolio is not to protect your "intellectual property", but to cover such a wide base that anyone who has technology you want or whose patents you might be violating is assured of violating at least one of your patents.
"Patents protect the small and independent inventors from having their ideas stolen by large corporations," I've heard said. Bullshit. So you've invented a method to increase ADSL range and bandwidth ten-fold? Well, your website on which you try to attract licensees uses HYPERLINKS, so don't go trying to sue BT when they steal your idea.