Uh, that's the most bogus attempt to apply the results of animal studies to humans I've ever seen. According to this Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher population density than Japan --- where are all the Belgian suicides? Also, your theory implies that urban areas would have a higher rate of suicide per capita, which AFAIK has not been observed.
I once read that in the Nazi death camps, suicide was very rare, but in the month after the camps were liberated a large number of survivors took their lives.
What I mean to say is that suicide is an act undertaken by those who are physically in good shape but psychologically and philosophically shattered. When you're starving, you think only of getting the next bite of food, and the thought of killing yourself is remote. When you have the time and mental capacity to ponder nihilism, that's when you take action. I think that would explain the third-world/first-world difference; there is not more misery in the first world, but the misery that exists is more conductive to suicide.
Westerners often speculate that there must be some deep unhappiness in Japanese society to cause all these suicides, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. Suicide is much more prominent in Japanese mass culture than it is in the rest of the world, and there's less stigma attached to it. For centuries there have been honor suicides, love suicides and so on (common, and often viewed as positive acts). Popular Japanese authors regularly kill themselves (even more so than here). Also, Japan's main religions do not ban suicide. So Japanese people are more likely to consider it as a reasonable option.
For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.
I don't know if you realize just how bad NAV is for performance on many people's computers --- especially those with little RAM. I once saw a computer NAV had made so slow it took literally 2 minutes to open Microsoft Word. I mean, I think I'd actually prefer to have my computer infested with adware than cope with that.
I also once saw NAV attempt to remove a virus by moving the file to its "quarantine" directory. Unfortunately, it didn't remove the virus from memory, and as soon as the virus realized the file had disappeared, it regenerated itself. NAV then immediately moved this file, it regenerated again, and so on in an infinite loop. When I came to the scene the computer had run out of disk space because of the gigabytes of quarantined virus files. Way to go NAV...
With experiences like this, I can't in good conscience recommend NAV to anyone. Let's face it, whatever its theoretical feature set, this software is pure crap.
Yes, monster showstopper bugs that are impossible to work around don't happen in Linux. With sufficient knowledge and experience, you can fix most things in a reasonable amount of time. But the tradeoff you make is that you have to spend a lot of time tinkering with the system and learning about it at all times, so that for someone who just wants to get his work done it's as much of a pain.
Except when that old hardware has outdated firmware, it which case the OS X 10.2 or higher installer instantly kills all video output (preventing you from even going back to OS 9) and the only way to recover is doing elaborate ninjitsu involving removing the hard drive, plugging into another working Mac and installing a remote desktop program. Bleh. When that happened to me I lost faith in the myth that buying Apple saves you troubleshooting.
Ha. This after going into detail about the truly vast amount of effort an expert needs to go to in order to impose the facts against stubborn idiots! Not to mention that cranks usually have much more free time than experts (who are busy writing books and giving lectures on the topic). No, I don't see that the system as it stands favors anyone except those who have lots of time to waste.
That headline really ought to say "BitTorrent to Sue Spyware Makers over Trademark," because as of now about 2/3s of the comments are people saying "BitTorrent is dead because Bram is going to sue uTorrent and BitComet and other legitimate clients! Nooo!" Look, I know this is slashdot and people don't RTFA but you could at least RTF summary. They're only suing scumbags. This is a good thing.
Bram didn't just declare he was against it, he presented a number of technical arguments to support his view. If you really think he's lying, please explain why you think those arguments are bogus.
Arrrgh. Then if the teacher's lectures are mediocre, or I miss a lecture, then without a single canonical textbook there's no way to study the correct material for the exam. If I choose some random textbook I'm bound to waste time studying material that's not on the exam or, worse, miss some that is. It's much better for the students to "parrot a textbook", as you say.
So in your fantasy land, rehab gives you a magic "anti-drug" pill that instantly eliminates your addiction and sends you off to live a normal life? Riiight.
It matters because the book was billed as an honest account of a serious addiction and how to get out of it. If people's view of addiction is twisted by misinformation, that can lead to misunderstandings and inappropriate methods of coping for addicts and their close ones.
Of course it's incorrect. The CPU is the processor. It's not the RAM, the motherboard, the power supply or the metal case containing all that stuff. If you mean the "case", then say "the case" or "the tower". Using the precise acronym "CPU" is just confusing.
The truth is that the complex ethical decisions faced by Google don't fall easily into a black-and-white division of "good" versus "evil". Providing a powerful search service makes people better-informed and more productive. That's good! On the other hand, it gravely erodes privacy since anything you ever put on the web can be easily traced. That's bad! In this China business, they are only one part of a system engineering by the PRC govt. Either they partially submit to the Chinese demands and hope to do at least some good, or they bail out completely and leave the field to other companies who will censor even further. No decision they can make is completely non-evil.
It's really their own fault for coming up with a simplistic slogan that's impossible to fulfill in reality. That said, as far as I can see they're doing their best to act ethically in this moral minefield.
You can indeed do port forwarding with your average router, and honestly all the other things you listed aren't that useful (especially to a single user). I used to have a dedicated Linux routing box, and have since switched to a small inexpensive Linksys wireless router and have no reason to be unhappy about it.
Dumb question... but can't they automate this process? It would seem easy to flag anything that isn't uniform/the right color/too big.
From the FAQ:
Westphal and his teams considered using sophisticated pattern recognition software that would be able to distinguish between cracks in the aerogel and actual particle tracks. They consulted with Professor Jitendra Malik, a U.C. Berkeley computer scientist, who suggested that such a finely discriminating program was, in principle, possible. In order for it to work, however, they would have to "train" the computer with real images of aerogel containing grains of interstellar dust. But here's the rub: no such particles had ever been collected! Scientists can only approximate what real grains embedded in aerogel would look like. For a computer program, this was simply not good enough, and the plan to automatically scan the aerogel collector seemed to lead to a dead end.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, that's the most bogus attempt to apply the results of animal studies to humans I've ever seen. According to this Belgium and the Netherlands have a higher population density than Japan --- where are all the Belgian suicides? Also, your theory implies that urban areas would have a higher rate of suicide per capita, which AFAIK has not been observed.
What I mean to say is that suicide is an act undertaken by those who are physically in good shape but psychologically and philosophically shattered. When you're starving, you think only of getting the next bite of food, and the thought of killing yourself is remote. When you have the time and mental capacity to ponder nihilism, that's when you take action. I think that would explain the third-world/first-world difference; there is not more misery in the first world, but the misery that exists is more conductive to suicide.
For example, I remember reading that a popular 17th-century puppet play by Chikamatsu glorified love suicides, and as a result there was a rash of them. This deep-set tendency has only been partially reduced by Western influence.
I also once saw NAV attempt to remove a virus by moving the file to its "quarantine" directory. Unfortunately, it didn't remove the virus from memory, and as soon as the virus realized the file had disappeared, it regenerated itself. NAV then immediately moved this file, it regenerated again, and so on in an infinite loop. When I came to the scene the computer had run out of disk space because of the gigabytes of quarantined virus files. Way to go NAV...
With experiences like this, I can't in good conscience recommend NAV to anyone. Let's face it, whatever its theoretical feature set, this software is pure crap.
Some eternal wisdom:
One question that arises frequently on alt.sysadmin.recovery is "Is there any operating system that doesn't suck?"
Of course, it's usually phrased as "AAAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!! Aren't there any operating systems that don't suck?!?!?!"
The answer, as we all know, is no.
Except when that old hardware has outdated firmware, it which case the OS X 10.2 or higher installer instantly kills all video output (preventing you from even going back to OS 9) and the only way to recover is doing elaborate ninjitsu involving removing the hard drive, plugging into another working Mac and installing a remote desktop program. Bleh. When that happened to me I lost faith in the myth that buying Apple saves you troubleshooting.
Ha. This after going into detail about the truly vast amount of effort an expert needs to go to in order to impose the facts against stubborn idiots! Not to mention that cranks usually have much more free time than experts (who are busy writing books and giving lectures on the topic). No, I don't see that the system as it stands favors anyone except those who have lots of time to waste.
That headline really ought to say "BitTorrent to Sue Spyware Makers over Trademark," because as of now about 2/3s of the comments are people saying "BitTorrent is dead because Bram is going to sue uTorrent and BitComet and other legitimate clients! Nooo!" Look, I know this is slashdot and people don't RTFA but you could at least RTF summary. They're only suing scumbags. This is a good thing.
A better example is Dragon Quest; wildly popular there but doesn't sell much here. DQ is to America what Halo is to Japan.
It took me a long time to puzzle out whether or not you're joking. I've decided "not joking," but you could've made it more explicit.
There's a solution to this: you can upgrade to an open-source router firmware that doesn't have the problem. See this guide
Bram didn't just declare he was against it, he presented a number of technical arguments to support his view. If you really think he's lying, please explain why you think those arguments are bogus.
Arrrgh. Then if the teacher's lectures are mediocre, or I miss a lecture, then without a single canonical textbook there's no way to study the correct material for the exam. If I choose some random textbook I'm bound to waste time studying material that's not on the exam or, worse, miss some that is. It's much better for the students to "parrot a textbook", as you say.
So in your fantasy land, rehab gives you a magic "anti-drug" pill that instantly eliminates your addiction and sends you off to live a normal life? Riiight.
That gave me a good laugh, thanks.
It matters because the book was billed as an honest account of a serious addiction and how to get out of it. If people's view of addiction is twisted by misinformation, that can lead to misunderstandings and inappropriate methods of coping for addicts and their close ones.
See, now that's pedantry. I see your point, but this wikipedia featured article says my usage is fine.
Indeed, not to mention that if you do a little research, you'll find that Mother Theresa was to a large extent a fraud.
Of course it's incorrect. The CPU is the processor. It's not the RAM, the motherboard, the power supply or the metal case containing all that stuff. If you mean the "case", then say "the case" or "the tower". Using the precise acronym "CPU" is just confusing.
And Joe Sixpack who thinks he's a computer expert calls it "the CPU". That one always drives me up the wall.
The truth is that the complex ethical decisions faced by Google don't fall easily into a black-and-white division of "good" versus "evil". Providing a powerful search service makes people better-informed and more productive. That's good! On the other hand, it gravely erodes privacy since anything you ever put on the web can be easily traced. That's bad! In this China business, they are only one part of a system engineering by the PRC govt. Either they partially submit to the Chinese demands and hope to do at least some good, or they bail out completely and leave the field to other companies who will censor even further. No decision they can make is completely non-evil.
It's really their own fault for coming up with a simplistic slogan that's impossible to fulfill in reality. That said, as far as I can see they're doing their best to act ethically in this moral minefield.
You can indeed do port forwarding with your average router, and honestly all the other things you listed aren't that useful (especially to a single user). I used to have a dedicated Linux routing box, and have since switched to a small inexpensive Linksys wireless router and have no reason to be unhappy about it.
You mean like this guy?
Meh, there's ugly code like this in most large projects. Think how bad it must be in codebases which aren't open for everyone to see.
From the FAQ: