As an Albertan i was a little worried when i first saw this a while ago. In the last big oil boom, a former premier, peter lougheed, billions of dollars on infrastructure projects such as attempting to pave every grid road in the province(i think thats one per mile or km, over a large province). This put the province into a debt that is still with us. As i have thought of this, it occurs to me that this will not happen. The current government as almost compeletly paid off the total debt, and would never, no matter how dumb you may think they are, do something as hypocritical as starting a new debt in a time of prosparity.
What you have to understand, is that the christian right does not do these things because the religion says so, they use the religion to justify what they want to do, regardless of what the religion says.
I grew up in Canada, and that was part of our junor high school 'health' program was having a former cocaine addict come and talk to us. I am not the type of person that would do hard drugs, but it seemed much more effective than a police officer lecturing us. The most important parts are showing kids solid proof of the effects of drug use, and making it interesting enough. Having a former addict talk goes a long way towards both of these.
You seem to be misunderstanding keysian economics.
Using this ideology the debt should only be accumulated during times of recession, and should be paid off during times of growth. Thus, when ression hits again, there should be little or no debt load. If the debt is paid off in the future there will be more money for the government, and the people to spend. Then again i live in canada where the debt per captia is higer.
The 2.2 series kernels will still be maintained for several years after the the release of 2.4. Linus has already said that he will stop supporting systems with less than 4MB of ram in the 2.2 series. Why not raise that cap with the 2.4 or 2.5/6. I see very little reason to run a more recent kernel on a 486. Is anyone going to have USB or AGP on a 486? What about a new netcard or raid controller? Old kernels are still being mantained, so security is not an issue. It will benifit more people by raising the standard than keeping it low.
This is an excellent attempt at American bashing, but unfortunatly it is not true. This bill is a legitimate attempt to bring in more highly skilled IT workers. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled workers, usually with special education and experience requirements. These workers usually go to the US from first world countries in order to get the jobs with the best pay and benfits.
Being from Canada, I would say the greatest problem with this bill is that with more spots open it will be easier to get into the US. This can lead to or increase the 'brain drain' in countries such as Canada and Austrailia. Whether this is a problem for these countries is yet to be seen, but like doctors, it can not be a good thing to have the top IT grads leaving the country.
MPEG-2 is a lossful compression, but after the initial encoding it can be copied without further loss. MPEG-2 is currently higher quality than any consumer products, so the loss is hardly noticable.
Which is NOT good, since big corporations can afford lawyers, and I can't. Nowadays the mere threat of legal action is sufficient to get
a small developer to back down, even if the company's claim is unwarranted.
Well then what do you propose as a better way to do it. Random 'experts' in the field deciding the fait of companies and individuals. Like it or not the legal system in the most fair and least biased way to deal with issues such as this.
Computer skills, no. Common sense, yes. The patent office grants patents for such drivel as faster than light communication and
extracting energy from other dimensions to increase plant-growth. All you need to do is to make a trivial invention seem very complex.
The patent office lacks common sense and time. Anybody with a highschool-diploma and 15 minutes of time could have dismissed the
above patent. The USPO did not.
I see no reason to dismiss this patent. Why should they deny them a patent based on the 'high school education' of those at the patent office. Is this patent hurting anyone? What would happen if it works? That is what is so good about this system, if the papers are filled and there is no objection you can patent anything. Now they have wasted their own money, and far less of yours fir a patent which they can do nothing with but hand on a wall. I'm sure the USPO even got a good laugh at this one when it went through.
In the United States, the patent office is neither a legal body nor do they have expertise on everything. All the patent office does is gather information and makes sure everything is in order. They will only stop a patent if it is very obvious that it will not stand. Everything passed this is then left up to the courts, a body much more capable of making a decision. In this case there is so much prior art that it is unlikely that it would get passed the patent office, but during the time it takes to file the patents, they may claim that there is a patent pending.
In my opinion the American patent model is very good, leaving as much of the judging to the justice system as posssible. The cost, time and loss of skill that would go into the patent office having a staff that could understand every patent is unreasonable, and dispite what slashdot might say it is a very effective way around that.
Oh, and in response to everyone who has said that the patent office is 'stupid', just because they do not have a staff skilled in computers does not mean they are stupid. It amazes me that so many people believe that just because they are good with them, that computer skill is the final judge of intellegence.
Your points are completely invalid. The crimes are as close as your perspective makes them. 'Hacking' into a computer can often be a trivial task involving not much more skill than being able to click a button twice. Robbery can be a practiced skill, and those who posess those skills can be of great value, often at a much lower risk.
Many of the best learned a great deal through their 'stunts', but were never caught. Why wern't they caught? In some cases they better then everyone else, in others they did less damage, but they did not get caught. Many people in this discussion believe laws are only to punish, when in reality they are a deterrent. If you are not caught, you are not guilty, that is why the statue of limitation exists.
Should a delivery person not lose their job if they lose their drivers licesce? What if it is for to many speeding tickets? Even if You speed every day and never get caught? Would you trust your personal information to someone who was convicted of stealing it in the past? Even if they are very good at what they do? Well I certainly do not.
I really hate getting into this, but here it goes.
No, really, I think I'm going to be sick... Evolution is a confirmed, actual, demonstrable, repeatable, falsifiable honest-to-god fact.
What you, and all the other creationists/guidance-ists/whatever-ists are talking about is... Natural Selection
I think you are the one that is confused. You are referring to micro-evolution, something which has been proven. I am referring to something quite different than that, something that has not been proven.
The theory of gravity is undergoing refinements. Saying the theory of gravity is being changed is like saying that by adding another
digit of significance to pi we are completely negating the validity of 3.14.
While gravity will continue to pull masses together, the ideas of how it works like much or physics are undergoing fundamental changes. This would be similar to finding that pie as exactly equal to 4. Christianity is a 1400 year story of sword-point converstion and persecution of those with different beliefs. You can take a -1, it's not
like it's the Inquisition or anything...
Well looking at all the dumb responses to this post, i would have to assume that your point is invalid. The Catholic Church has done many things wrong in its history, mostly due to corruption, but to say that the religion is responsible for this is wrong, just like saying that you support the opinion of the 'you are an idiot even though i have no evidence' posts.
I am having trouble deciding whether to be scared or to laugh at your ignorance or close mindedness. For those of us who have had a scientific background at the University level your claim that evolution is correct in every way is moronic. Evolution is far from confirmed, and has many, many flaws. 150 years ago, many things in physics were 'confirmed', now many of these ideas are looked at and laughed at. Even the theory of gravity is undergoing changes at this very time. You are welcome to have your own beliefs, however please think and do the research before you you defend them with ignorance.
btw, while I don't believe in a literal version of creationism, I am a Christian.(don't moderate me down because of my beliefs.
I have been looking at CUPS which is free/open software, but the company charges for filters. Does anyone know of an effort to write free filters for CUPS? If free filters were available it would have a much better chance to become a Unix standard.
If you want the best paying cutting edge job stay in the US. If you want to work abroad to expand your horizans, which I highly recommend, choose the country based on what you want. Most countries are in need of tech workers and will pay a good salary in relation to the area.
I was born, raised and am currently living in Canada, and have lived in the US, Australia and France for extended time and the UK and Germany for short periods of time. I would recommend any one of these countries, each of them has a slighty different culture and history, and any one can be a great expenence.
After living in Calgary for most of my life the 30c temperatures of Perth and Sydney in Australia was great, although Germany is also amazing.
If you want to make money stay in the US, even after living in five other countries I believe it is a great place dispite what people might say. I choose to come back to Canada to start a family near my family, but I could have stayed in, and have visited many of these countries.
What kind of patriot are you? The CRTC protects Canadian culture by allowing us to listen the music that we really want to. I know that Mrs. Copps knows best, and i even respect canadian content laws while listening to cd and mp3s. Just remember, culture is whatever the government wants to shove down our throat.
Well at least we still have Molsons to keep us patriotic.
There seems to be a trend towards seperating web, mail, news and development. Unfortunatly mozilla has not reconized this and I am forced to use a web browser with other applications that I do not use. There is also the issue of speed and size which comes into play on my old 200 (though it runs good on my 400). Is there currently any effort being put into deveoping (at netscape or elseware) a stand alone, non themeable browser based on Gecko?
The vary point of what I said was the hypocricy of it. I did not mean to imply that pro-abortion is wrong, and my moral stance is that it is abortion is wrong. I do not however see any legal reasons for it to be banned, but living in Canada I do not like the idea of government sponsored abortions
The site doesn;t seen to have been updated since 1996, but it is still a good laugh at the hypocracy or organizations like PETA and their supporters. The mail section is especially good, very similar anti-abortion (pro-life) supporters shooting doctors.
I am not a vegitarian, but I understand and can respect those that are. PETA and it's senstationalism only hurt my respect for people who do not eat meat, regardless or the reason.
These problems are all with the backend servers, which if i'm not mistaken are Sun. Not that your theory still couldn't be used, but it doesn't seen likely.
More likely microsoft is waiting until the next hotmail upgrade to move it over to several thousand w2k boxes and putti advertisments everywhere saying how its now 20 times better.
As a Computer Scientist and professional system admin who uses debian at home, I hope i'm not responding to flamebait.
Your comment seem to be lecking consistancy. You complain about how long their is between debian stable releases and then you complain about gnomes lack of stability. The reason that there is so long between debian releases is so that it is stable and not broken.
I agree that Debian releases are to slow. The best times are during the early part of the frozen cycle, but i have found that as long as you don't force anything you can have a perfectly stable system with an unstable dist. With many of the Red-hat derived distributions being released every few months there is a definate lack of testing, that while not showing up often is still there.
Finally as someone who has just recently moved to gnome, I must say that it is completely stable and quite fast. It is very useful, and I have spent very little time with any themes. In my limited experence with KDE I have found it good, but there is no compelling reason to use it over gnome.
However if Debian removes the non-free, and i have to install Netscape with dpkg i will stop using debian because there is no advantage over a RPM based distribution.
Slashdot Mirror
I;ve been using the phase2 ones for a while now with no problems at all.
Just make sure your card is supported, and it should work well. The config files are different, but it uses a dialog setup tool that works ok.
Its actually a really nice config file, so if there are any problems you shoud be ok.
You have no idea about keysian economics at all.
Govenrment spends in times of resession to promte growth, and save in times of growth, to maintain control.
As an Albertan i was a little worried when i first saw this a while ago. In the last big oil boom, a former premier, peter lougheed, billions of dollars on infrastructure projects such as attempting to pave every grid road in the province(i think thats one per mile or km, over a large province). This put the province into a debt that is still with us. As i have thought of this, it occurs to me that this will not happen. The current government as almost compeletly paid off the total debt, and would never, no matter how dumb you may think they are, do something as hypocritical as starting a new debt in a time of prosparity.
Well that was part of the merger with bct (bc's former telephone monopoly). They have recently moved large sections back to Calgary and Edmonton.
What you have to understand, is that the christian right does not do these things because the religion says so, they use the religion to justify what they want to do, regardless of what the religion says.
I grew up in Canada, and that was part of our junor high school 'health' program was having a former cocaine addict come and talk to us. I am not the type of person that would do hard drugs, but it seemed much more effective than a police officer lecturing us. The most important parts are showing kids solid proof of the effects of drug use, and making it interesting enough. Having a former addict talk goes a long way towards both of these.
You seem to be misunderstanding keysian economics. Using this ideology the debt should only be accumulated during times of recession, and should be paid off during times of growth. Thus, when ression hits again, there should be little or no debt load. If the debt is paid off in the future there will be more money for the government, and the people to spend. Then again i live in canada where the debt per captia is higer.
The 2.2 series kernels will still be maintained for several years after the the release of 2.4. Linus has already said that he will stop supporting systems with less than 4MB of ram in the 2.2 series. Why not raise that cap with the 2.4 or 2.5/6. I see very little reason to run a more recent kernel on a 486. Is anyone going to have USB or AGP on a 486? What about a new netcard or raid controller? Old kernels are still being mantained, so security is not an issue. It will benifit more people by raising the standard than keeping it low.
Your post set off my bullshit alarm
This is an excellent attempt at American bashing, but unfortunatly it is not true. This bill is a legitimate attempt to bring in more highly skilled IT workers. H-1B visas are designed for highly skilled workers, usually with special education and experience requirements. These workers usually go to the US from first world countries in order to get the jobs with the best pay and benfits.
Being from Canada, I would say the greatest problem with this bill is that with more spots open it will be easier to get into the US. This can lead to or increase the 'brain drain' in countries such as Canada and Austrailia. Whether this is a problem for these countries is yet to be seen, but like doctors, it can not be a good thing to have the top IT grads leaving the country.
MPEG-2 is a lossful compression, but after the initial encoding it can be copied without further loss. MPEG-2 is currently higher quality than any consumer products, so the loss is hardly noticable.
Well then what do you propose as a better way to do it. Random 'experts' in the field deciding the fait of companies and individuals. Like it or not the legal system in the most fair and least biased way to deal with issues such as this.
Computer skills, no. Common sense, yes. The patent office grants patents for such drivel as faster than light communication and extracting energy from other dimensions to increase plant-growth. All you need to do is to make a trivial invention seem very complex. The patent office lacks common sense and time. Anybody with a highschool-diploma and 15 minutes of time could have dismissed the above patent. The USPO did not.In the United States, the patent office is neither a legal body nor do they have expertise on everything. All the patent office does is gather information and makes sure everything is in order. They will only stop a patent if it is very obvious that it will not stand. Everything passed this is then left up to the courts, a body much more capable of making a decision. In this case there is so much prior art that it is unlikely that it would get passed the patent office, but during the time it takes to file the patents, they may claim that there is a patent pending.
In my opinion the American patent model is very good, leaving as much of the judging to the justice system as posssible. The cost, time and loss of skill that would go into the patent office having a staff that could understand every patent is unreasonable, and dispite what slashdot might say it is a very effective way around that.
Oh, and in response to everyone who has said that the patent office is 'stupid', just because they do not have a staff skilled in computers does not mean they are stupid. It amazes me that so many people believe that just because they are good with them, that computer skill is the final judge of intellegence.
Your points are completely invalid. The crimes are as close as your perspective makes them. 'Hacking' into a computer can often be a trivial task involving not much more skill than being able to click a button twice. Robbery can be a practiced skill, and those who posess those skills can be of great value, often at a much lower risk.
Many of the best learned a great deal through their 'stunts', but were never caught. Why wern't they caught? In some cases they better then everyone else, in others they did less damage, but they did not get caught. Many people in this discussion believe laws are only to punish, when in reality they are a deterrent. If you are not caught, you are not guilty, that is why the statue of limitation exists.
Should a delivery person not lose their job if they lose their drivers licesce? What if it is for to many speeding tickets? Even if You speed every day and never get caught? Would you trust your personal information to someone who was convicted of stealing it in the past? Even if they are very good at what they do? Well I certainly do not.
You are referring to the action of gravity, not why it happens.
I don;t want to respond to a troll, but you seem to be mistaking evolution with microevolution.
I really hate getting into this, but here it goes.
No, really, I think I'm going to be sick... Evolution is a confirmed, actual, demonstrable, repeatable, falsifiable honest-to-god fact.
What you, and all the other creationists/guidance-ists/whatever-ists are talking about is... Natural Selection
I think you are the one that is confused. You are referring to micro-evolution, something which has been proven. I am referring to something quite different than that, something that has not been proven.
The theory of gravity is undergoing refinements. Saying the theory of gravity is being changed is like saying that by adding another
digit of significance to pi we are completely negating the validity of 3.14.
While gravity will continue to pull masses together, the ideas of how it works like much or physics are undergoing fundamental changes. This would be similar to finding that pie as exactly equal to 4.
Christianity is a 1400 year story of sword-point converstion and persecution of those with different beliefs. You can take a -1, it's not
like it's the Inquisition or anything...
Well looking at all the dumb responses to this post, i would have to assume that your point is invalid. The Catholic Church has done many things wrong in its history, mostly due to corruption, but to say that the religion is responsible for this is wrong, just like saying that you support the opinion of the 'you are an idiot even though i have no evidence' posts.
I am having trouble deciding whether to be scared or to laugh at your ignorance or close mindedness. For those of us who have had a scientific background at the University level your claim that evolution is correct in every way is moronic. Evolution is far from confirmed, and has many, many flaws. 150 years ago, many things in physics were 'confirmed', now many of these ideas are looked at and laughed at. Even the theory of gravity is undergoing changes at this very time. You are welcome to have your own beliefs, however please think and do the research before you you defend them with ignorance.
btw, while I don't believe in a literal version of creationism, I am a Christian.(don't moderate me down because of my beliefs.I have been looking at CUPS which is free/open software, but the company charges for filters. Does anyone know of an effort to write free filters for CUPS? If free filters were available it would have a much better chance to become a Unix standard.
If you want the best paying cutting edge job stay in the US. If you want to work abroad to expand your horizans, which I highly recommend, choose the country based on what you want. Most countries are in need of tech workers and will pay a good salary in relation to the area.
I was born, raised and am currently living in Canada, and have lived in the US, Australia and France for extended time and the UK and Germany for short periods of time. I would recommend any one of these countries, each of them has a slighty different culture and history, and any one can be a great expenence.
After living in Calgary for most of my life the 30c temperatures of Perth and Sydney in Australia was great, although Germany is also amazing.
If you want to make money stay in the US, even after living in five other countries I believe it is a great place dispite what people might say. I choose to come back to Canada to start a family near my family, but I could have stayed in, and have visited many of these countries.
Good luck
What kind of patriot are you? The CRTC protects
Canadian culture by allowing us to listen the music that we really want to. I know that Mrs. Copps knows best, and i even respect canadian content laws while listening to cd and mp3s. Just remember, culture is whatever the government wants to shove down our throat.
Well at least we still have Molsons to keep us patriotic.
There seems to be a trend towards seperating web, mail, news and development. Unfortunatly mozilla has not reconized this and I am forced to use a web browser with other applications that I do not use. There is also the issue of speed and size which comes into play on my old 200 (though it runs good on my 400). Is there currently any effort being put into deveoping (at netscape or elseware) a stand alone, non themeable browser based on Gecko?
The vary point of what I said was the hypocricy of it. I did not mean to imply that pro-abortion is wrong, and my moral stance is that it is abortion is wrong. I do not however see any legal reasons for it to be banned, but living in Canada I do not like the idea of government sponsored abortions
The site doesn;t seen to have been updated since 1996, but it is still a good laugh at the hypocracy or organizations like PETA and their supporters. The mail section is especially good, very similar anti-abortion (pro-life) supporters shooting doctors.
I am not a vegitarian, but I understand and can respect those that are. PETA and it's senstationalism only hurt my respect for people who do not eat meat, regardless or the reason.
These problems are all with the backend servers, which if i'm not mistaken are Sun. Not that your theory still couldn't be used, but it doesn't seen likely.
More likely microsoft is waiting until the next hotmail upgrade to move it over to several thousand w2k boxes and putti advertisments everywhere saying how its now 20 times better.
As a Computer Scientist and professional system admin who uses debian at home, I hope i'm not responding to flamebait.
Your comment seem to be lecking consistancy. You complain about how long their is between debian stable releases and then you complain about gnomes lack of stability. The reason that there is so long between debian releases is so that it is stable and not broken.
I agree that Debian releases are to slow. The best times are during the early part of the frozen cycle, but i have found that as long as you don't force anything you can have a perfectly stable system with an unstable dist. With many of the Red-hat derived distributions being released every few months there is a definate lack of testing, that while not showing up often is still there.
Finally as someone who has just recently moved to gnome, I must say that it is completely stable and quite fast. It is very useful, and I have spent very little time with any themes. In my limited experence with KDE I have found it good, but there is no compelling reason to use it over gnome.
However if Debian removes the non-free, and i have to install Netscape with dpkg i will stop using debian because there is no advantage over a RPM based distribution.