What I mean is that dress codes keep the idea going in the public mindset that there are two kinds of people in the world, "good enough" and "not good enough", and the two can be distinguished visually. A person who has been refused entry to a nightclub for wearing the wrong sort of shoes has just been given a lesson that discrimination is socially acceptable. If that person suffers from a tendency to relieve tension by kicking out at someone lower down the hierarchy, then the next time they hear of a homophobic/racist/sexist incident, they will just think "Well, I got kicked out of Time Nightclub for wearing trainers, didn't I? Deal with it, you stupid whinging p**f/p*ki/b*tch!"
There is a definite positive correlation between the level of violence outside a nightclub and the strictness of the dress code. Ask any plod. Zanzibar: tough dress code, stabbings, punch-ups. Rockhouse: wear whatever the f**k you like, everyone chilled out and friendly. Why? Because many of the people who go to those places have had it instilled into them that you can tell just by looking how much respect someone deserves.
And, just so you know, my bare feet are actually cleaner than your shoes.
Actually, you need a zener diode and a fuse for overvoltage protection. And you get reverse-polarity protection as a bonus.
A zener diode in reverse breakdown will draw as much current as the power supply can put out, and something is likely to give way. (Normally, when a zener is being used for regulation as opposed to protection, a series resistance is used; whatever current the load can't sink flows through the zener instead.)
Any P-N junction, when subjected to a large enough reverse voltage, goes into a constant-voltage state where the voltage across the device varies very little irrespective of the amount of current flowing through it. All P-N junctions, even transistors and LEDs, exhibit this behaviour, though their "constant voltage" region may not be all that constant, and will recover as long as care is taken not to dissipate too much power in the device. A zener diode is just very carefully controlled so the breakdown occurs at a predictable voltage and the voltage really is constant. An LED will not glow in reverse breakdown.
You can even use zener diodes as rectifiers, provided that the peak-to-peak AC voltage is less than the breakdown voltage of the zener.
In fairness to Mandrake, the LG drives were actually out-of-spec. LG had used an instruction that should have meant "write disc" to mean "update firmware". Mandrake's drive-detection program (which was actually borrowed from SuSE) attempted to determine whether the drive was a writer, by issuing a write instruction and seeing whether or not it returned a "NOT IMPLEMENTED" error. The authors of the detection script should not have been expected to guess that someone would make a drive which so spectacularly violated the specifications as to knacker itself when given a fairly-plausible instruction.
It's actually the easier-to-justify rights violations (such as discrimination on attire) that keep the harder-to-justify violations (such as racism, sexism and homophobia) going. If you banned "clothesism", a lot more people would be objecting to the other -isms.
I know it's bad form to respond to sigs, but you can install Debian (and Ubuntu).deb packages on Slackware reasonably easily. First, use ar to extract the files from the.deb. You will get three files. The first, "debian-binary" can safely be ignored (all it contains is a version number to help the Debian packaging utilities). The second, "control.tar.gz" contains various scripts for pre- and post- installation and removal operations, and dependency-control information. These may be worth a butchers but probably can be ignored. Lastly there is "data.tar.gz" which, to all intents and purposes, is identical to a Slackware package. That is to say, it is a binary tarball which can just be unpacked straight into the root directory.
Watch out, though, for incompatibilities between Debian's and Slackware's default file layouts.
In general, if you're ever installing anything that wasn't packaged by your distribution, it's always best to install it from the source.tar.gz file. And if it swears blind you're missing something that you're convinced you've got, you're most probably missing the corresponding -dev or -devel package. Just install the missing package from source (and, if it's a library, remember to run ldconfig straight afterward).
It would be better if people who don't enjoy compiling the nVidious kernel module wrote to their MP and asked for a new law mandating that manufacturers supply hardware specifications in sufficient detail to enable writing of a driver as part of the operating instructions for the device, otherwise their products are banned from sale. With it being law, there is no way for competitors to gain an advantage by reading your specs and not releasing their own -- the excuse they currently trot out for not doing it.
You're talking dangerously like an old-skool hacker there. Next thing, you'll be shaving off a few CPU cycles by omitting extraneous whitespace in text files. I bet you do a bit of electronics or plumbing or something constructive with your hands when you're not using a computer.
Things like this aren't meant to appeal to our sort (I bet you knew what the "logs of sines" and similar obscure tables were used for), but to those pointy-haired types who believe management is a transferrable skill, essentially abstract of the job being done by the workers, and who choose to believe that a single complex tool which claims to be able to do many jobs is better than a selection of simple tools which do one job unconditionally. Which do you think will last longer and perform better: a "magic hammer" which has a camera for identifying different screw recesses -- slotted, Torx, Phillips, Posidriv, hex, tamperproof and so on, a mechanism which automatically deploys the correct driver bit into the chuck, and another mechanism which transforms the impulsive energy of a hammer-like blow into rotary motion; or a set of screwdrivers?
Meanwhile, we can only watch the rise of the New Consuming Class with ill-disguised bemusement; and derive some comfort from the fact that when it all comes crashing down in a heap, we who do actually know how to do something vaguely useful will have the best chances of survival.
Well, this is what happens when you use an authoring package of any kind. It's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using a tool to do a job for which it was not designed. That's the difference between a calligrapher and an idiot with a stencil.
It's obvious when a web page was made using Dreamweaver, because you'll get things like <font> tags around spaces and sometimes nested <font> tags rather than declaring the colour, size and typeface in one {or, preferably, doing it properly with CSS}. The problem is that these authoring packages don't reduce things to their simplest terms the way a good programmer will do as a matter of course. It's rather like using a slide rule to do a series of multiplications followed by a series of divisions, as opposed to alternating multiplications with divisions {which is almost twice as fast; a multiply-and-divide operation is just as quick as a single operation, unless it goes of the end and requires repositioning of the slide}.
All in all, a WYSIWYG front end to a non-WYSIWIG process always ends up being a bit like having a device with piano-like keys that clips onto the neck of a guitar and frets and strums the strings according to the keys you're pressing, so that -- in theory -- a pianist can get a tune out of a guitar. In practice it looks riduculous and sounds mediocre at best.
So are you saying that if they invented a pill you could take that would change the colour of your skin, then that would make it OK to have "whites only" or "blacks only" establishments? And then what if, twenty or thirty years down the line by which time it had become standard, accepted practice for establishments to enforce colour bars, it turned out that the drug had horrific side effects which -- due to a fundamental difference between humans and animals -- had never manifested during the extensive animal testing to which it had been subjected?
Just because you can change something, doesn't mean you should change it. Discrimination on attire is still wrong.
In a perfect world, people wouldn't be judged upon their e-mail address or their web page; nor upon the colour of their skin, nor their clothing or hairstyle.
The fact that businesses are allowed to set dress codes for their customers suggests we are not living in a perfect world.
I'd argue that "virii" is a word: it's the plural of "virius". Whatever a virius is.
The proper English plural of "virus" is "viruses", and this is why. Words adopted into the English language generally retain the pluralisation from the donor language, barring a significant change in meaning (which is why beetles have antennae, but radios have antennas). However, "virus" in Latin is a stuff-word, not a thing-word, and therefore does not have a plural form. (If it did, it would be "viri" [one i; "-us" changes to "-i"].) The change in meaning from "some stuff" to "a thing" is big enough to trigger English pluralisation rules.
And I'll raise your irreducible complexity claim and toss in a paradox involving either an irreducibly complex designer arising spontaneously, or already-irreducibly complex life arising spontaneously. Either way, something irreducibly complex must have arisen spontaneously; but the second is simpler and passes both Occam's and Dawkins's razors.
At the moment, councils are not offering a service to separate rubbish from recyclables. But that's alright, because they never actually need to get mixed up anyway. Just have separate bins for different materials. So for instance when you open a glass jar and cook the contents, you put the metal lid in with the cans and the empty glass jar in with glass. Zero extra time or effort required.
If the well-being of future generations is not on your priorities list then, frankly, you're as bad as any of those mindless thugs who go around smashing stuff up. Or worse, even, because you're not so visible.
It's not as if there is a shortage of real human organs available. People are dying every day, and many of their organs are in re-usable condition.
Organ donation should be compulsory, with no opting-out allowed. Not even for religious reasons -- we don't allow ritual human sacrifice even when religion calls for it, so why should we allow acts of selfishness beyond the grave when religion calls for it? Living people have rights. Corpses don't.
Nobody is preventing you from stockpiling your recyclable goods until you have enough to sell to an appropriate merchant at a fair price; and you ought to be able to get a rather better price than 4p a kilo if they are properly separated into ferrous and non-ferrous metals, different colours of glass, different codes of plastics and different grades of paper. If you don't have the space, the time or the inclination, then the council will do this for you -- for a fee, of course.
I do not pay my council tax to subsidise a few selfish, lazy ignorant cunts who put recyclables (which could be sold to earn good money) into landfill (which costs money) just because they can't be fucked to put it in the right bin. If I had my way, the bin inspectors would be armed -- and the problem would go away very quickly.
And why would rotting meat be in my rubbish bin in Summer? It would more likely be in the compost maker, where the maggots would be doing something useful by turning it into nutrients for the soil. But then again, if you have food left over then you're doing something wrong.
If "Windows has better power management" it is because of manufacturers not releasing details to the Linux kernel developers. Something which could be rectified by passing a suitable law e.g. "Hardware specifications are not proprietary secrets but form part of the operating instructions. Approval of a product for sale is contingent upon the hardware manufacturer releasing specifications in sufficient detail to enable the writing of an Open Source driver".
See, that's the thing that nobody wants to talk about.
We know the world can't sustain a population of seven billion people all living the all-electric 21st century Western lifestyle. The question is, do we aim to cut the population to about 2.5 - 3G and keep our gadgets -- or let it grow past 10G and become relegated to the level of subsistence farmers, scratching out a meagre living in the dirt?
Well, that would be a good idea. The NHS is a big enough user to be able to have its own dedicated IT department. It would for sure be cheaper to employ local programmers (who buy gooods in local shops, pay local taxes, eat in local restaurants, donate to local good causes and take their family to visit local tourist attractions) to work on software and know that it will always be maintainable, than to keep shipping taxpayers' money out to Redmond for precious little benefit. I don't begrudge the NHS a single penny, I just think it's being spent on all the wrong things.
Come to think of it, the NHS is big enough to get a blanket exemption from all drug patents. But that's a different story.
As long as there are no recyclables in your rubbish bin and no rubbish in your recycling bin, you have nothing to worry about.
Disposing of rubbish in landfill costs 5 pence per kilo. Mixed recyclables bring in 4 pence per kilo. This means anyone putting recyclables in their rubbish bin is effectively stealing 9 pence per kilo from your local council; and therefore from the police, local schools and old people's homes.
I would have thought that handing over the passwords in the first place would constitute a ToS violation.
Part of me hopes people will end up getting themselves banned from GMail, AOL, Hotmail &c. because of this, if only in order to generate some publicity and draw some attention. You wouldn't give a shady stranger the keys to your home. Why let them into your email accounts?
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No, you've misunderstood.
What I mean is that dress codes keep the idea going in the public mindset that there are two kinds of people in the world, "good enough" and "not good enough", and the two can be distinguished visually. A person who has been refused entry to a nightclub for wearing the wrong sort of shoes has just been given a lesson that discrimination is socially acceptable. If that person suffers from a tendency to relieve tension by kicking out at someone lower down the hierarchy, then the next time they hear of a homophobic/racist/sexist incident, they will just think "Well, I got kicked out of Time Nightclub for wearing trainers, didn't I? Deal with it, you stupid whinging p**f/p*ki/b*tch!"
There is a definite positive correlation between the level of violence outside a nightclub and the strictness of the dress code. Ask any plod. Zanzibar: tough dress code, stabbings, punch-ups. Rockhouse: wear whatever the f**k you like, everyone chilled out and friendly. Why? Because many of the people who go to those places have had it instilled into them that you can tell just by looking how much respect someone deserves.
And, just so you know, my bare feet are actually cleaner than your shoes.
Actually, you need a zener diode and a fuse for overvoltage protection. And you get reverse-polarity protection as a bonus.
A zener diode in reverse breakdown will draw as much current as the power supply can put out, and something is likely to give way. (Normally, when a zener is being used for regulation as opposed to protection, a series resistance is used; whatever current the load can't sink flows through the zener instead.)
Any P-N junction, when subjected to a large enough reverse voltage, goes into a constant-voltage state where the voltage across the device varies very little irrespective of the amount of current flowing through it. All P-N junctions, even transistors and LEDs, exhibit this behaviour, though their "constant voltage" region may not be all that constant, and will recover as long as care is taken not to dissipate too much power in the device. A zener diode is just very carefully controlled so the breakdown occurs at a predictable voltage and the voltage really is constant. An LED will not glow in reverse breakdown.
You can even use zener diodes as rectifiers, provided that the peak-to-peak AC voltage is less than the breakdown voltage of the zener.
In fairness to Mandrake, the LG drives were actually out-of-spec. LG had used an instruction that should have meant "write disc" to mean "update firmware". Mandrake's drive-detection program (which was actually borrowed from SuSE) attempted to determine whether the drive was a writer, by issuing a write instruction and seeing whether or not it returned a "NOT IMPLEMENTED" error. The authors of the detection script should not have been expected to guess that someone would make a drive which so spectacularly violated the specifications as to knacker itself when given a fairly-plausible instruction.
It's actually the easier-to-justify rights violations (such as discrimination on attire) that keep the harder-to-justify violations (such as racism, sexism and homophobia) going. If you banned "clothesism", a lot more people would be objecting to the other -isms.
Just think of it as a sort of poor man's deb2tgz :)
I know it's bad form to respond to sigs, but you can install Debian (and Ubuntu) .deb packages on Slackware reasonably easily. First, use ar to extract the files from the .deb. You will get three files. The first, "debian-binary" can safely be ignored (all it contains is a version number to help the Debian packaging utilities). The second, "control.tar.gz" contains various scripts for pre- and post- installation and removal operations, and dependency-control information. These may be worth a butchers but probably can be ignored. Lastly there is "data.tar.gz" which, to all intents and purposes, is identical to a Slackware package. That is to say, it is a binary tarball which can just be unpacked straight into the root directory.
.tar.gz file. And if it swears blind you're missing something that you're convinced you've got, you're most probably missing the corresponding -dev or -devel package. Just install the missing package from source (and, if it's a library, remember to run ldconfig straight afterward).
Watch out, though, for incompatibilities between Debian's and Slackware's default file layouts.
In general, if you're ever installing anything that wasn't packaged by your distribution, it's always best to install it from the source
It would be better if people who don't enjoy compiling the nVidious kernel module wrote to their MP and asked for a new law mandating that manufacturers supply hardware specifications in sufficient detail to enable writing of a driver as part of the operating instructions for the device, otherwise their products are banned from sale. With it being law, there is no way for competitors to gain an advantage by reading your specs and not releasing their own -- the excuse they currently trot out for not doing it.
You're talking dangerously like an old-skool hacker there. Next thing, you'll be shaving off a few CPU cycles by omitting extraneous whitespace in text files. I bet you do a bit of electronics or plumbing or something constructive with your hands when you're not using a computer.
Things like this aren't meant to appeal to our sort (I bet you knew what the "logs of sines" and similar obscure tables were used for), but to those pointy-haired types who believe management is a transferrable skill, essentially abstract of the job being done by the workers, and who choose to believe that a single complex tool which claims to be able to do many jobs is better than a selection of simple tools which do one job unconditionally. Which do you think will last longer and perform better: a "magic hammer" which has a camera for identifying different screw recesses -- slotted, Torx, Phillips, Posidriv, hex, tamperproof and so on, a mechanism which automatically deploys the correct driver bit into the chuck, and another mechanism which transforms the impulsive energy of a hammer-like blow into rotary motion; or a set of screwdrivers?
Meanwhile, we can only watch the rise of the New Consuming Class with ill-disguised bemusement; and derive some comfort from the fact that when it all comes crashing down in a heap, we who do actually know how to do something vaguely useful will have the best chances of survival.
Well, this is what happens when you use an authoring package of any kind. It's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using a tool to do a job for which it was not designed. That's the difference between a calligrapher and an idiot with a stencil.
It's obvious when a web page was made using Dreamweaver, because you'll get things like <font> tags around spaces and sometimes nested <font> tags rather than declaring the colour, size and typeface in one {or, preferably, doing it properly with CSS}. The problem is that these authoring packages don't reduce things to their simplest terms the way a good programmer will do as a matter of course. It's rather like using a slide rule to do a series of multiplications followed by a series of divisions, as opposed to alternating multiplications with divisions {which is almost twice as fast; a multiply-and-divide operation is just as quick as a single operation, unless it goes of the end and requires repositioning of the slide}.
All in all, a WYSIWYG front end to a non-WYSIWIG process always ends up being a bit like having a device with piano-like keys that clips onto the neck of a guitar and frets and strums the strings according to the keys you're pressing, so that -- in theory -- a pianist can get a tune out of a guitar. In practice it looks riduculous and sounds mediocre at best.
So are you saying that if they invented a pill you could take that would change the colour of your skin, then that would make it OK to have "whites only" or "blacks only" establishments? And then what if, twenty or thirty years down the line by which time it had become standard, accepted practice for establishments to enforce colour bars, it turned out that the drug had horrific side effects which -- due to a fundamental difference between humans and animals -- had never manifested during the extensive animal testing to which it had been subjected?
Just because you can change something, doesn't mean you should change it. Discrimination on attire is still wrong.
In a perfect world, people wouldn't be judged upon their e-mail address or their web page; nor upon the colour of their skin, nor their clothing or hairstyle.
The fact that businesses are allowed to set dress codes for their customers suggests we are not living in a perfect world.
I'd argue that "virii" is a word: it's the plural of "virius". Whatever a virius is.
The proper English plural of "virus" is "viruses", and this is why. Words adopted into the English language generally retain the pluralisation from the donor language, barring a significant change in meaning (which is why beetles have antennae, but radios have antennas). However, "virus" in Latin is a stuff-word, not a thing-word, and therefore does not have a plural form. (If it did, it would be "viri" [one i; "-us" changes to "-i"].) The change in meaning from "some stuff" to "a thing" is big enough to trigger English pluralisation rules.
And I'll raise your irreducible complexity claim and toss in a paradox involving either an irreducibly complex designer arising spontaneously, or already-irreducibly complex life arising spontaneously. Either way, something irreducibly complex must have arisen spontaneously; but the second is simpler and passes both Occam's and Dawkins's razors.
At the moment, councils are not offering a service to separate rubbish from recyclables. But that's alright, because they never actually need to get mixed up anyway. Just have separate bins for different materials. So for instance when you open a glass jar and cook the contents, you put the metal lid in with the cans and the empty glass jar in with glass. Zero extra time or effort required.
If the well-being of future generations is not on your priorities list then, frankly, you're as bad as any of those mindless thugs who go around smashing stuff up. Or worse, even, because you're not so visible.
You see? If you had the Source Code, you -- or a competent programmer of your choice -- could have fixed it by now.
It's not as if there is a shortage of real human organs available. People are dying every day, and many of their organs are in re-usable condition.
Organ donation should be compulsory, with no opting-out allowed. Not even for religious reasons -- we don't allow ritual human sacrifice even when religion calls for it, so why should we allow acts of selfishness beyond the grave when religion calls for it? Living people have rights. Corpses don't.
Nobody is preventing you from stockpiling your recyclable goods until you have enough to sell to an appropriate merchant at a fair price; and you ought to be able to get a rather better price than 4p a kilo if they are properly separated into ferrous and non-ferrous metals, different colours of glass, different codes of plastics and different grades of paper. If you don't have the space, the time or the inclination, then the council will do this for you -- for a fee, of course.
If you're using Ecover washing powder, however, the dirt never actually makes it as far as the sewer. That was the point you appear to have missed.
I do not pay my council tax to subsidise a few selfish, lazy ignorant cunts who put recyclables (which could be sold to earn good money) into landfill (which costs money) just because they can't be fucked to put it in the right bin. If I had my way, the bin inspectors would be armed -- and the problem would go away very quickly.
And why would rotting meat be in my rubbish bin in Summer? It would more likely be in the compost maker, where the maggots would be doing something useful by turning it into nutrients for the soil. But then again, if you have food left over then you're doing something wrong.
If "Windows has better power management" it is because of manufacturers not releasing details to the Linux kernel developers. Something which could be rectified by passing a suitable law e.g. "Hardware specifications are not proprietary secrets but form part of the operating instructions. Approval of a product for sale is contingent upon the hardware manufacturer releasing specifications in sufficient detail to enable the writing of an Open Source driver".
You mean like Ecover washing powder? One pollutant that definitely doesn't release into the environment is the dirt out of your clothes!
See, that's the thing that nobody wants to talk about.
We know the world can't sustain a population of seven billion people all living the all-electric 21st century Western lifestyle. The question is, do we aim to cut the population to about 2.5 - 3G and keep our gadgets -- or let it grow past 10G and become relegated to the level of subsistence farmers, scratching out a meagre living in the dirt?
Well, that would be a good idea. The NHS is a big enough user to be able to have its own dedicated IT department. It would for sure be cheaper to employ local programmers (who buy gooods in local shops, pay local taxes, eat in local restaurants, donate to local good causes and take their family to visit local tourist attractions) to work on software and know that it will always be maintainable, than to keep shipping taxpayers' money out to Redmond for precious little benefit. I don't begrudge the NHS a single penny, I just think it's being spent on all the wrong things.
Come to think of it, the NHS is big enough to get a blanket exemption from all drug patents. But that's a different story.
As long as there are no recyclables in your rubbish bin and no rubbish in your recycling bin, you have nothing to worry about.
Disposing of rubbish in landfill costs 5 pence per kilo. Mixed recyclables bring in 4 pence per kilo. This means anyone putting recyclables in their rubbish bin is effectively stealing 9 pence per kilo from your local council; and therefore from the police, local schools and old people's homes.
I would have thought that handing over the passwords in the first place would constitute a ToS violation.
Part of me hopes people will end up getting themselves banned from GMail, AOL, Hotmail &c. because of this, if only in order to generate some publicity and draw some attention. You wouldn't give a shady stranger the keys to your home. Why let them into your email accounts?