Huh? Of course they're comparable, they are both software development APIs that cover major aspects of game development, they both contain APIs for input, sound, networking, and 3D graphics - and moreover, the two 3D graphics APIs in each of the two are essentially equally capable. WTF are you smoking if you think they "aren't comparable at all"?
Nobody claimed selective breeding was new, RTFA, the whole point is that these old techniques have successfully beaten modern GM techniques in some cases (i.e. created better market solutions to problems). Not that someone just "invented" selective breeding.
When you give power to your government over you, you don't only give those powers to the current government, but also to the government of ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years from now. Today's government may have good intentions, but nobody knows what tomorrow's government's intentions will be. So you're willing to give up power to a totally unknown, strange government with unknown intentions in the near future, and just blindly hope that when you're older (or when your kids or grandkids have to deal with it) that the government will continue to be "mostly harmless"?
Once you've given an extraordinary amount of power to your government, it will be a helluva lot harder to get that back again when you really really need it.
I don't know about you, but I think it's just stupid to just assume that your government will always be "harmless" and have only good intentions. If you really think so, study a little human history. The government doesn't need too much power. The more power the government has, the harder it is to fight back against them (e.g. consider something like the old apartheid government, but now assume that the apartheid government had been given all the technology and power and rights that you are handing over to your government).
If I were a terrorist, you can bet your ass I'd be thinking of much simpler/better targets for inducing terror in the civilian populace than a probably fairly well guarded military surveillance aircraft (and chances are when they bring it down for 'upgrades' it will be on a military base, hardly an interesting target for a terrorist). Hell, it's a thousand times easier and more effective to just car-bomb an office building or mall, or plant explosives in a busy subway, or try poison some water supply or something.
Well it's useful as a reminder to people too. You know, if we don't learn from history, and all that. Humans are chronically bad at learning from history, so every bit helps. Keeping quiet about our mistakes will only serve to ensure that future generations repeat those mistakes. Somehow, I'm sure that those who died at Chernobyl would want everyone in the world to know about and remember Chernobyl and say "never again".
One sees similar sentiment everywhere where tragedies have occurred, e.g. "never again" message, if you visit places such as Hiroshima in Japan, or historically significant spots in e.g. Soweto in South Africa. It's not just greedy capitalism, there is normally a genuine sentiment of "never forget", to prevent something similar from happening again.
Re:Uh, nope, not when ...
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 1
OK, true, I admit, I was trying out various coLinux images! And yes, coLinux is beta, and one of their stated goals is to make 'user friendly' releases in future.. so yes, things have improved a lot with the user-friendly distros.
Re:Fanboy......but......
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 1
Question, does vi or emacs have Unicode support?
Uh, nope, not when ...
on
JOE Hits 3.0
·
· Score: 1
.. you need to edit the network configuration files before you can use the Internet. Sorry, bud, no ftp/http/wget/lynx/mozilla, nothing, before your gateway and TCP/IP settings are configured.
This happened to me the other day when setting up a Linux system, I had to use vi to edit the text files for setting up networking on a Linux installation.
Now this is not a problem for me because I can already use vi. But if I was one of the millions of Windows users who just wanted to try out Linux, you can bet I'd have just hit a huge wall here, and gone right back to Windows.
And we wonder why people aren't flocking to Linux in droves. Don't we want more people to adopt Linux?
We have to stop expecting that all users must know vi before they can make a Linux system useful. A text editor does not inherently need to be difficult to use, and computers should help humans as far as they can. So why not just start including an alternative, friendly text editor in addition to vi as a new standard 'included in every distro', so that newcomers to Linux at least have a slightlier easier option. Requiring end-users (note I mean desktop users) to be able to know vi in order to get anywhere in Linux is a joke in 'this day and age'.
Actually it is, because having the "most Internet users of any country" has nothing to do with what we're discussing. By your reasoning, a country with about 50,000,000 users (e.g. Germany, which interestingly has almost as high a proportion of their population online as the US) would generate about 1/3 the amount of spam the US does (since the US has three times the number of users), but that just isn't true --- German spam is negligible! China has about 100,000,000 users, therefore by your reasoning China should generate 2/3 the amount of spam that the US does, but the ratio is much much lower than that.
So it's not about numbers or about the proportion of a population online, since other countries approach both same in number and in proportion as the US, but still produce small amounts of spam compared to the US.
Why can't you just admit the damn problem that the US are prominent spammers? You US people can't take any criticism at all, even when you're clearly wrong you refuse to admit it. Your incredulous denial simply makes you look foolish.
You're wrong. Currently, two/thirds of the US population are online, i.e. between 150 and 200 million people. Current estimate for the total number of users online worldwide is 945 million. Thus US users represent less than 20% of the total number of users on the Internet. And even if every single person in the US was online, the US would still only account for less than one third of all users.
If one assumed that all countries were equally likely to spam, then we would expect US spam to account for roughly 20% of all spam. However, US spam currently overshadows all spam from the entire rest of the world combined. So no matter how you look at it, this is greatly skewed towards the US --- the US are the biggest spammers.
Additionally, from that site: "Many of these (US) spam operations pretend to operate 'offshore' using servers in Asia and South America to disguise the origin."
When one looks at the products being offered in most of the spams, we're not talking abouut "Asian Viagra" but things that ONLY apply in the US, e.g. US web hosting, "Manhattan Office Space" (!), fake diplomas (from US company with US phone number), "low mortgage rates" (US), "free online business" from a US company, "plump sexy lips" from a US company, holiday offers from US companies, a "film foundation" in the US, US "business directories", US products for "increasing my gas mileage", stock tips, etc.
But don't take my word for it, check the above site. The guilty party isn't the guy whose insecure computer was used to relay the junk --- the guilty party is the spammer.
Only half? Over 80% of my spam comes from the USA (and this is not a thumbsuck, I've saved and studied all my spam received over many months).
Take a look at this "top spammers" list: http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/. One country stands out as the clear leader. China hardly features, and "Sub-Saharan Africa" doesn't feature at all.
And unlike much of this other "Free World" you speak of, we can still vote.
What the hell are you talking about? By "Free World" he/she was talking about free countries with democratically elected governments, basic human rights, liberty, and freedom of speech which are upheld by the laws in those countries.
How exactly did you manage to read and interpret "Free World" as meaning "countries without even voting rights"? What bizarre definition of "Free World" did you use? This is not sarcasm, please explain, I'd like to understand it.
With all due respect, this has to be the most ridiculously ignorant and moronic post I've ever read on Slashdot. Bar none. My head spins trying to understand the depths of your confusion.
Long term benefit in using a reliable system makes any switching price worth every penny.
Except that 99.97% of people don't think long-term. Managers can't see past the short-term cost estimate of the initial upgrade/"switch". I've seen it hundreds of times. Management will lose thousands in "invisible" costs (downtime, maintenance etc.) rather than spend a few hundred bucks getting rid of some crap buggy software, because they can "see" that short-term expense, but can't "see" the indirect losses. Yes, it's "bad management", but that's the most common type.
you can also take credit for the increased profits from operating a tight ship
As for this point, there are no credits to take because management knows that even if they take the easy, more expensive route of sticking with Windows, nobody will know what the (most likely lower) cost would have been to upgrade to better systems. Thus managers take the low-risk-higher-cost path of sticking with Microsoft crap, rather than the perceived-higher-risk-but-with-likely-greater-rewa rd path of upgrading. They think "why take a risk, I can comfortably keep doing what I'm doing and still get a pack on my back, because my higher-ups don't know any better".
The world is in a natural warming state. We could stop using fossil fuels at all and it's not going to keep the planet from warming.
And you know this, HOW, exactly? Proof please. Some references proving this warming is entirely natural.
So you know nothing about how the Earth's climate works, you post an uninformed opinion on/. with no references at all to back it up, that flies in the face of what thousands of scientists with much more knowledge about this topic than you have, and you get moderated as "Informative".
YOU DO NOT KNOW if the current warming is natural at all. You cannot claim to know, because nobody knows. If you really do know, well gosh, you're damn brilliant and know something everyone else doesn't, and I'll be the first to congratulate you on your Nobel prize.
I suppose this is just your innate, instinctive religion-grasping denial to feel as if you really have an answer, where there are no answers available. Is it so difficult to just acknowledge that you just don't know something?
No such thing as self-regulating "corporate responsibility". "Corporate responsibility" comes from a big (government) stick. The sudden move to lead-free is forced onto manufacturers by new regulations (EU regulations IIRC). You don't honestly think corporations came up with this all by themselves do you? Sure, I can picture it now, in a board meeting: "hey, let's raise our manufacturing costs by voluntarily reducing some of the polluntants in our products". Uh, riiiight. Now, back to the real world. Here is roughly the order of things: (1) companies make products that pollute, (2) government passes new regulations, (3) companies protest until they're forced to accept regulations, (4) companies produce product with fewer pollutants, (5) PR department puts a "we care for the environment" spin on the company's (forced) compliance, and issues press releases that give the impression the move was voluntary. Name ten real-world examples where companies moved directly to step 4 voluntarily. Heck, name one.
Admittedly if products start really killing large sectors of the populace, then some companies are sure to start making voluntary moves. But I'm willing to bet that government regulation WILL appear long before the voluntary self-regulation even in that case.
Why are you so afraid of anything that appears to be "pro-environment", or at least towards maintaining an environment capable of sustaining us in the long-term? You seem more "radicalised" (rabid anti-environmentalist) than the extremists you're mocking.
It's as if you're as allergic to anything "green" as they are to anything "un-green".
The existence of extremists does not mean we shouldn't be in favour of long-term sustainable management of the environment. I mean, come on, THINK! Or, wait, is that "uncool", sorry.
moderate climate changes are to happen with the life of any planet in proximity to a star
So? I don't care if global climate change is natural or not - I just want to understand if it's going to be a problem for me or my offspring, and figure out what needs to be done to fix it! It's not about blame! It's about "what do we need to do to maximise our chances for long-term survival". I don't care if it's "natural climate change" - if it threatens me or my planet, I damn well want to fix it. Would you stand in the way of, say, an avalanche, because "don't worry people, the avalance is natural"? Some people would call that "dumb". We manipulate our environment to our own advantage, and climate change is no exception. If it's a possible threat, we should want to stop it.
Honestly, the US viewpoint appears to be a reaction to what they apparently believe is an accusation against them. It is as if they think everyone is pointing fingers saying "you caused this", now they feel they must respond by stating that it's OK that we all die in a global ecosystem collapse because it "might be natural".
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Of course they're comparable, they are both software development APIs that cover major aspects of game development, they both contain APIs for input, sound, networking, and 3D graphics - and moreover, the two 3D graphics APIs in each of the two are essentially equally capable. WTF are you smoking if you think they "aren't comparable at all"?
Bzzzt wrong, SDL is LGLP not GPL. -1 Troll.
Nobody claimed selective breeding was new, RTFA, the whole point is that these old techniques have successfully beaten modern GM techniques in some cases (i.e. created better market solutions to problems). Not that someone just "invented" selective breeding.
Good short-term thinking there, pal.
When you give power to your government over you, you don't only give those powers to the current government, but also to the government of ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years from now. Today's government may have good intentions, but nobody knows what tomorrow's government's intentions will be. So you're willing to give up power to a totally unknown, strange government with unknown intentions in the near future, and just blindly hope that when you're older (or when your kids or grandkids have to deal with it) that the government will continue to be "mostly harmless"?
Once you've given an extraordinary amount of power to your government, it will be a helluva lot harder to get that back again when you really really need it.
I don't know about you, but I think it's just stupid to just assume that your government will always be "harmless" and have only good intentions. If you really think so, study a little human history. The government doesn't need too much power. The more power the government has, the harder it is to fight back against them (e.g. consider something like the old apartheid government, but now assume that the apartheid government had been given all the technology and power and rights that you are handing over to your government).
If I were a terrorist, you can bet your ass I'd be thinking of much simpler/better targets for inducing terror in the civilian populace than a probably fairly well guarded military surveillance aircraft (and chances are when they bring it down for 'upgrades' it will be on a military base, hardly an interesting target for a terrorist). Hell, it's a thousand times easier and more effective to just car-bomb an office building or mall, or plant explosives in a busy subway, or try poison some water supply or something.
George Orwell's 1984's helicopters are totally pwn3d by Judas Priest's Electric Eye, and Rob Halford sang it in 1982. Nyaaah!
WTF are you talking about? 1984 was written IIRC in the 1940s or 1950s. Or have I just been trolled?
Well it's useful as a reminder to people too. You know, if we don't learn from history, and all that. Humans are chronically bad at learning from history, so every bit helps. Keeping quiet about our mistakes will only serve to ensure that future generations repeat those mistakes. Somehow, I'm sure that those who died at Chernobyl would want everyone in the world to know about and remember Chernobyl and say "never again".
One sees similar sentiment everywhere where tragedies have occurred, e.g. "never again" message, if you visit places such as Hiroshima in Japan, or historically significant spots in e.g. Soweto in South Africa. It's not just greedy capitalism, there is normally a genuine sentiment of "never forget", to prevent something similar from happening again.
A good (IMO) movie on the above-mentioned is "Advance to Ground Zero", aka Nightbreaker.
OK, true, I admit, I was trying out various coLinux images! And yes, coLinux is beta, and one of their stated goals is to make 'user friendly' releases in future .. so yes, things have improved a lot with the user-friendly distros.
Question, does vi or emacs have Unicode support?
.. you need to edit the network configuration files before you can use the Internet. Sorry, bud, no ftp/http/wget/lynx/mozilla, nothing, before your gateway and TCP/IP settings are configured.
This happened to me the other day when setting up a Linux system, I had to use vi to edit the text files for setting up networking on a Linux installation.
Now this is not a problem for me because I can already use vi. But if I was one of the millions of Windows users who just wanted to try out Linux, you can bet I'd have just hit a huge wall here, and gone right back to Windows.
And we wonder why people aren't flocking to Linux in droves. Don't we want more people to adopt Linux?
We have to stop expecting that all users must know vi before they can make a Linux system useful. A text editor does not inherently need to be difficult to use, and computers should help humans as far as they can. So why not just start including an alternative, friendly text editor in addition to vi as a new standard 'included in every distro', so that newcomers to Linux at least have a slightlier easier option. Requiring end-users (note I mean desktop users) to be able to know vi in order to get anywhere in Linux is a joke in 'this day and age'.
Actually it is, because having the "most Internet users of any country" has nothing to do with what we're discussing. By your reasoning, a country with about 50,000,000 users (e.g. Germany, which interestingly has almost as high a proportion of their population online as the US) would generate about 1/3 the amount of spam the US does (since the US has three times the number of users), but that just isn't true --- German spam is negligible! China has about 100,000,000 users, therefore by your reasoning China should generate 2/3 the amount of spam that the US does, but the ratio is much much lower than that.
So it's not about numbers or about the proportion of a population online, since other countries approach both same in number and in proportion as the US, but still produce small amounts of spam compared to the US.
Why can't you just admit the damn problem that the US are prominent spammers? You US people can't take any criticism at all, even when you're clearly wrong you refuse to admit it. Your incredulous denial simply makes you look foolish.
No shit. We have the largest number of users.
You're wrong. Currently, two/thirds of the US population are online, i.e. between 150 and 200 million people. Current estimate for the total number of users online worldwide is 945 million. Thus US users represent less than 20% of the total number of users on the Internet. And even if every single person in the US was online, the US would still only account for less than one third of all users.
If one assumed that all countries were equally likely to spam, then we would expect US spam to account for roughly 20% of all spam. However, US spam currently overshadows all spam from the entire rest of the world combined. So no matter how you look at it, this is greatly skewed towards the US --- the US are the biggest spammers.
Additionally, from that site: "Many of these (US) spam operations pretend to operate 'offshore' using servers in Asia and South America to disguise the origin."
When one looks at the products being offered in most of the spams, we're not talking abouut "Asian Viagra" but things that ONLY apply in the US, e.g. US web hosting, "Manhattan Office Space" (!), fake diplomas (from US company with US phone number), "low mortgage rates" (US), "free online business" from a US company, "plump sexy lips" from a US company, holiday offers from US companies, a "film foundation" in the US, US "business directories", US products for "increasing my gas mileage", stock tips, etc.
But don't take my word for it, check the above site. The guilty party isn't the guy whose insecure computer was used to relay the junk --- the guilty party is the spammer.
Only half? Over 80% of my spam comes from the USA (and this is not a thumbsuck, I've saved and studied all my spam received over many months).
Take a look at this "top spammers" list: http://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/. One country stands out as the clear leader. China hardly features, and "Sub-Saharan Africa" doesn't feature at all.
Time to block the USA?
... the single largest source of spam: the USA.
Ah, there's the problem, using junior-high level "physics"! Next time try using, say, University-level physics.
And unlike much of this other "Free World" you speak of, we can still vote.
What the hell are you talking about? By "Free World" he/she was talking about free countries with democratically elected governments, basic human rights, liberty, and freedom of speech which are upheld by the laws in those countries.
How exactly did you manage to read and interpret "Free World" as meaning "countries without even voting rights"? What bizarre definition of "Free World" did you use? This is not sarcasm, please explain, I'd like to understand it.
With all due respect, this has to be the most ridiculously ignorant and moronic post I've ever read on Slashdot. Bar none. My head spins trying to understand the depths of your confusion.
Long term benefit in using a reliable system makes any switching price worth every penny.
Except that 99.97% of people don't think long-term. Managers can't see past the short-term cost estimate of the initial upgrade/"switch". I've seen it hundreds of times. Management will lose thousands in "invisible" costs (downtime, maintenance etc.) rather than spend a few hundred bucks getting rid of some crap buggy software, because they can "see" that short-term expense, but can't "see" the indirect losses. Yes, it's "bad management", but that's the most common type.
you can also take credit for the increased profits from operating a tight ship
As for this point, there are no credits to take because management knows that even if they take the easy, more expensive route of sticking with Windows, nobody will know what the (most likely lower) cost would have been to upgrade to better systems. Thus managers take the low-risk-higher-cost path of sticking with Microsoft crap, rather than the perceived-higher-risk-but-with-likely-greater-rewa rd path of upgrading. They think "why take a risk, I can comfortably keep doing what I'm doing and still get a pack on my back, because my higher-ups don't know any better".
The world is in a natural warming state. We could stop using fossil fuels at all and it's not going to keep the planet from warming.
And you know this, HOW, exactly? Proof please. Some references proving this warming is entirely natural.
So you know nothing about how the Earth's climate works, you post an uninformed opinion on /. with no references at all to back it up, that flies in the face of what thousands of scientists with much more knowledge about this topic than you have, and you get moderated as "Informative".
YOU DO NOT KNOW if the current warming is natural at all. You cannot claim to know, because nobody knows. If you really do know, well gosh, you're damn brilliant and know something everyone else doesn't, and I'll be the first to congratulate you on your Nobel prize.
I suppose this is just your innate, instinctive religion-grasping denial to feel as if you really have an answer, where there are no answers available. Is it so difficult to just acknowledge that you just don't know something?
I fail to see the consumer advantage on this kind of thing
http://www.yesmagazine.org/29globalhope/grossman.h tm
They have to.
And it's a good thing.
No such thing as self-regulating "corporate responsibility". "Corporate responsibility" comes from a big (government) stick. The sudden move to lead-free is forced onto manufacturers by new regulations (EU regulations IIRC). You don't honestly think corporations came up with this all by themselves do you? Sure, I can picture it now, in a board meeting: "hey, let's raise our manufacturing costs by voluntarily reducing some of the polluntants in our products". Uh, riiiight. Now, back to the real world. Here is roughly the order of things: (1) companies make products that pollute, (2) government passes new regulations, (3) companies protest until they're forced to accept regulations, (4) companies produce product with fewer pollutants, (5) PR department puts a "we care for the environment" spin on the company's (forced) compliance, and issues press releases that give the impression the move was voluntary. Name ten real-world examples where companies moved directly to step 4 voluntarily. Heck, name one.
Admittedly if products start really killing large sectors of the populace, then some companies are sure to start making voluntary moves. But I'm willing to bet that government regulation WILL appear long before the voluntary self-regulation even in that case.
Why are you so afraid of anything that appears to be "pro-environment", or at least towards maintaining an environment capable of sustaining us in the long-term? You seem more "radicalised" (rabid anti-environmentalist) than the extremists you're mocking.
It's as if you're as allergic to anything "green" as they are to anything "un-green".
The existence of extremists does not mean we shouldn't be in favour of long-term sustainable management of the environment. I mean, come on, THINK! Or, wait, is that "uncool", sorry.
moderate climate changes are to happen with the life of any planet in proximity to a star
So? I don't care if global climate change is natural or not - I just want to understand if it's going to be a problem for me or my offspring, and figure out what needs to be done to fix it! It's not about blame! It's about "what do we need to do to maximise our chances for long-term survival". I don't care if it's "natural climate change" - if it threatens me or my planet, I damn well want to fix it. Would you stand in the way of, say, an avalanche, because "don't worry people, the avalance is natural"? Some people would call that "dumb". We manipulate our environment to our own advantage, and climate change is no exception. If it's a possible threat, we should want to stop it.
Honestly, the US viewpoint appears to be a reaction to what they apparently believe is an accusation against them. It is as if they think everyone is pointing fingers saying "you caused this", now they feel they must respond by stating that it's OK that we all die in a global ecosystem collapse because it "might be natural".