You DID know that poison ivy is a hypersensitivity reaction, didn't you?
No, he didn't know. That's why he was at the doctor. Now, why didn't the doctor tell him this instead of laughing him off? He wanted to know why the doctor did what he did, but the doc decided the man was too dumb to understand. It isn't malpractice, but it is rude. Don't visit a doctor who won't tell you the "why" part. They aren't giving you full service.
It seems like most of the enemies of electronic voting have hit upon printouts as a solution to the problem. However, Cox points out in the article that there's been fraud with these too. So why not do some intelligent auditing of all votes. I mean, recheck a sample of the ballots at each county level and make sure that you get within.1% of the reported tally proportions. If not, check again. If that time doesn't work, there's been a problem and people should vote again.
In this system paper printouts are necessary, as would be a physical record of each vote cast, no matter how that vote was cast. The statistics provide an additional and difficult layer of security that's hard to circumevent.
Why is this so hard?
Re:What does it do that's so special?
on
KDE 3.2.0 Released
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· Score: 1
Let me answer:
why does it matter how long it takes to start? I just switch my computer on in the morning and off in the evening, so I only see the startup time once a day.
Becuase I use two personal computers plus departmental computers with NFS homes. If I want to show my advisor something, I log in on his desktop, if I want to check my mail, I log in to a shared computer. Print something? you guessed it. I log on and off alot. To keep all of my desktops looking to same, I use the same manager on all of them.
Everything in KDE is configurable. Can you see a taskbar in this screenshot?. I have a window list bound to alt-X.
Everything in WM is configurable too. Better yet, it's really easy to do advanced things. The default config files are basically walking examples to help you edit in your own ideas. My windowlist comes up with F11.
The CLI is still there for when you need it. Transparently sftp connecting using konqueror to remote servers is useful and faster in most cases than a sftp in an xterm. If the CLI is faster for you, then use it. I think in many cases people just say that because it make them feel more 'l33t'.
Elite or not, it depends what you do. when I sftp, I mostly move tarballs around with scp. Since I just created the tarball, I might as well send it with the cursor in the same ole terminal than switching desktops or aps. Besides, I use a laptop about 50% of the time. The touchpad isn't exactly a precision pointing device. The keyboard is much easier. I write small C programs, run gnuplot, look at stuff with gv, etc. I don't do things that require manipulating lots of files in a directory individually (something that konqueror is very good at). Still, most people aren't me. They're developing larger projects, doing multi-media stuff, or playing games. I'll take your point that KDE provides good support for this stuff.
The apps in KDE are excellent - I like Juk, KMail and konqueror (as a file manager). All well integrated into the desktop.
Many of the KDE apps are quite good, especially kdvi. But I can run these in WM just a well as anything else with the right libraries. Still, the list of X apps I use regularly is quite small and doesn't include any K* apps. As far as I can tell, "Desktop Integration" means that the file browser works as it should, launching a default app or popping up a list of possible browsers for a given document. Not that useful if you aren't using a FM to begin with
I used gnome and kde for a while, then I came back to windowmaker for speed and simplicity
Indeed. I understand that expanding the tree of board positions is a difficult task, but it isn't exactly the most elegant approach. Perhaps they should develop an AI to play go, where the tree is so large that pattern-matching is the only real way to play. Or maybe teach a computer to play diplomacy, where the tree is so small that all of the human players know it, but the computer must employ chatbot to communicate with humans, judge their reactions in both words and deeds, then make a move.
I don't want to troll, but I'm actually curious why people choose KDE (or gnome for that matter). I mean, the audience here is a cross-section of power users. I've used Gnome and KDE (2.4 and 3.0 respectively) and found them to be slow to start and bloated with widgets and effects I didn't need.
That's inflamitory, so let me explain: I use windowmaker. It's small, easy to configure by hand or by program, and I can trim out all of the visual fat that I don't need. That means no "start bar". If I want to run something, I click on a free spot on the desktop and up pops my menu. My running applications appear in the "window" menu with a quick right click. No fuss, no clutter. Desktop icons are redundant. I'll be using an xterm to do just about everything anyway. Scrollbars are likewise unncessary in most applications if you have a wheel or a good touchpad driver.
So what does KDE do you for? Do linux people use the right-click-drag-and-drop model from windows? I remember being addicted to it long ago, but I've since found CLI to be faster and more powerful.
I know, I know, the joy of linux is that you can have your desktop manager and I can have mine. But I'm curious what KDE does for you.
In science, all good measurements come with error bars. Why can't we count votes the same way? It should be possible to predict the margin of error in hand counted votes, punchcard votes, scantron votes, and so on. If the results of the election are decideded by a gap less than twice the error, everyone votes again.
Better yet, why not switch to a voting system that isn't broken? The "one person one vote" system forces strategic voting instead of preference voting. Don't vote for the third party candidate or you throw your vote away, even though you really wanted them. Preference voting allows you to rank the candidates in order of preference. If your 1st choice is at the bottom of the heap and there's no winner, your vote is moved to the next person on your list.
We don't do this, or any other system that takes more time because democracy is a spectator sport. More people watch election coverage than vote. It's like the superbowl. You don't know who will win so it's exciting. The "experts" argue, but you get to see one of them proved wrong. The vague notion that the outcome will impact your life just adds to the drama.
Your comparison of bandwidth service to water service is interesting. Early water systems didn't meter usage. Rather, a household paid a flat fee for service. This lead to a variety of water powered devices (drawing energy from the pressure of the water), including personal massagers for hysteria (is water-powered vibrators).
Obviously bored housewives and their new friends used lots of water. Meters were promptly invented and installed, and water service was sold in the same way it is today.
I hope bandwidth will go the same way. Personally, I'd like to see a state monopoly on the copper (or fiber) line that goes to each house. Then I could just buy bandwidth from any ISP I wanted. It worked well for water. It was working well for electricity (well, until deregulation stuffed it up. I lived in CA and I'm not bitter. Really.).
IMHO, Microsoft will probably release around the same day and time as Sony to be safe. By putting their cards on the table early, it will give Sony plenty of time to respond. If they release around the same time, it will be more like a game of rock,paper, scissors (just hope they both choose scissors).
Amen. Finally someone who views the console wars the right way. We (the consumers) only win while there's a war. I like the three company videogame market. There's more innovation, more cross-platform games, and lower prices. As I see it, Microsoft is no more evil than Sony (paying stores off to not stock DC) or Nintendo (remember the pricefixing conviction they had in the 90's?). But with three of them around and strong, shenanigans are harder to pull. I hope MS holds their hand close and doesn't try to jump generations too soon.
If the argument above seems plausible, think of the following: It is cheaper for IBM to outsource labor to India then pay for it in the States. The different cost of living allows them to pay a lower wage. When the music promoter argues that the cost of a release is higher in the UK than in Hong Kong, he should remember that we're a global economy. If IBM can outsource to avoid the steep cost of labor in developed countries, why shouldn't the consumer "outsource" to avoid the steep cost of promotional crap?
I'd be more sympathetic to the BPI if there were more protections for domestic labor.
Bah, home fitness videogame gizmos indeed. What they REALLY need is to hook up the old Paperboy game to a stationary bike. You'd have a screen to see a first-person view of the neighborhood, a "mirror" region to see the dogs chasing you, and a button to throw papers. You could have fun while riding the damned bike. How hard is that?
I'm serious. They already as gizmos about calories burned, heart rate, miles traveled, and other crap to these bikes for infotainment. Why not take the next step? Hell, you could make people pay for rides with quarters and turn every fitness club in the country into an arcade.
(1) Make subscription-based software a viable buisness model. This one is obvious. Microsoft has been trying to do this for years. Their solution is typical for a monopoly. It over-reaches. If you want people to subscribe to your OS, don't force them to. Offer the subcription as a service. It comes with technical support and free upgrades as long as you pay. The other poor users will have to do the best they can with your "patches" and upgrade-editions. Instead, MS wants to rope everyone in. Deny them choice. This is what monopolies are about: control.
(2) This dovetails with automatic windows updates to become "The Sysadmin from Redmond." Yeah, from MS's point of view, they keep getting calls from the computer-illiterate about trivial stuff. Of course they want to take control of the illiterate's computer. They think he doesn't want to mess with it. They think he wants them to fix it and not worry about it. But technical people (ie, the audience here) want to fix their computer themselves. We warn the illiterates of the dangers of the Sysadmin from Redmond, but they don't understand.
I think most computer owners NEED a sysadmin. I don't think that admin should be an update server and a telephone techsupport script reader, she sould be someone who lives nearby, who can make house-calls, who can connect as root and clean up messes, who can admonish people for not keeping their files in their home directories. This isn't absurd. Most people have mechanics for their cars, doctors for their health... why shouldn't they have someone to look after their computer?
It is not different times. It is not smarter or better trained users.
Bah. C'mon. The nintendo generation is better at reading lots of information at once than their parents. Case in point: fighter planes. In Vietnam, pilots would turn off their SAM warning squawk-boxes because of information overload. The noisy box would begin to ping and the pilots would melt-down from watching too many gauges. Nowdays, our pilots process much much more information. Sure, some of this increased capacity comes from a proper layout of the cockpit, but much of it comes from training recieved from two Italian plummers and buttons A and B.
In exchange for shorter attention spans, we've gained the ability to process lots of information quickly.
I like the box, but the manuals have gone straight down the toilet. I remember when Master of Magic came out around 1996 with two large manuals that explained the rules in detail. Now days, you'll get some two-page glossy book that tells you how to press the "X" button. They'll never tell you the game mechanics. No formulae, nothing. For example, the manual for Knights of the Old Republic explains just about zero percent of the d20 rule system. They leave the essential information up to the FAQs and game guides.
"It looks like Circuit City in some of those rooms," said Dan Bertsos, director of residence services at Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio.
And also:
They power a color TV, stereo, compact disc and DVD players, video game player, desktop computer and laptop, printer, scanner, refrigerator, microwave and two fans. Then there are rechargers for a cell phone, hand-held computer, camera, electric razor and toothbrush.
Yeah, but I bet Dan has all of these things at home too. Most of these new appliances are a result of college policies and planning. The computer is obvious. It is at minimum the new typewriter. The printer and scanner come along when the college doesn't provide these services in a convenient place or charges too much for them. The stereo has been around for a while in dorm rooms. You need one because the shitty radio isn't going to cut it. The TV and the DVD player are in each room because there's no communal space for reasonably sized groups (4-8 students). If they had a place with their friends, these things could live out in some sort of small living room. The microwave and refrigerator are in response to colleges jacking up board costs to pay for fundraising activities (a very common practice). They are also not new: my mom was boiling water on a hotplate in here dorm room -- much less safe than a microwave. Again, some communal space could reduce the number of microwaves a fridges.
Most dorms try to provide communal space in living rooms that are public to some 12-20 students. This is far too large. There's too much sharing of responsibility for the accidents in the microwave to ever get cleaned or for food in the fridge to be safe from hungry fingers. You need a space that the small group feels ownership over.
So when news gets out that the government let knowledge of the 9/11 attacks sit around untouched, the public is outraged and demands a change. THEN the government changes things to allow the FBI to act quicker when presented with evidence of terrorist plans.
Did you see how close the FBI was to finding the hijackers using the means availible to them at the time? They only failed because their REQUESTS for permission to investigate (permission from their higher-ups, not the courts) were turned down. The subjects were Saudis and therefore untouchable. No, none of the changes made by the PATRIOT act or dept of homeland security address what the failing was.
It's not just scary, it should be illegal. I understand that some military and spy funding needs to be done in secret, but when the congress established how to handle these delicate issues they were negligent. They SHOULD have forced any secret spending bill with non-spending riders to no longer be secret. It only makes sense. If you want the $50 billion for some assasination laser kept secret, fine (well, not that fine, but I can cope). But when you attach a rider reducing the privacy of citizens, that whole bill should now be open for public debate.
This is an end-run around democracy. We can't stand for it. What's worse is that the legislation is difficult to litigate over. You can't sue for a breach of your rights because the company that helped the government isn't allowed to come forward. The system of checks and balances is being hampered here too.
And I don't feel any safer. I mean, the New York bombing reports seemed to say that to prevent terrorist strikes, we just need a little better cooperation between intelligence agencies and fewer "blinders" when suspects come from supposedly friendly nations. What we got instead was another intelligence department that does fuck-all, two wars with questionable success, and a ever-increasing restriction of our personal freedoms.
Actually, it seems like the money would be better spent in China, improving the humanitarian and social situation.
I'm all for space programs, but a country like China should reconsider its priorities.
Man, you don't get it, do you. Go to any American university. The departments are full of graduate students from other nations, many of which will stay in the US after they get their degrees. For China, this means their brightest minds are drained away into the US. A space program creates a domestic need for PhD's at home. It can build a whole technology sector. PhD's at home can create an intellectual culture to improve the social situation.
Now, China might be thinking narrowly about keeping bright citizens, they might be thinking about building a better domestic science program, they might be thinking of mining the moon (as they actually say). But the results will likely benifit everyone. The "one thing at a time" attitude of China's critics is stupid. They argue that you must first improve the social situation, then set off in search of better science. This isn't how things developed in the West. It went the other way. First child labor and Maxwell's laws, then labor laws and computers.
To drift off topic a bit, this is the same backwards crap that the IMF pushes on developing nations. They tell them to use tight fiscal policy and not spend themselves out of recessions, when just these actions are used by the rich developed nations. What, is Keynsian economics proprietary to the US and Europe?
I mean, in theory the UN creating a regulating body that has a relationship to the UN like the Fed has with the US government would be fine. The Fed acts in generally everyone's best interest (at least with the current board). But 50/50 the UN would stuff it up and have crazy rules for selecting Internet Committee members or demand more direct control.
In practice, what does this really mean? If I browse French sites via TCP/IP, does that mean I'm using the internet or just a subnet (the franco-american net)? How do these changes in regulation force peers on the network to use supplied protocols, DNS servers, and so on? How much could a regulatory body really restrict traffic? I don't mean these questions rhetorically. I think this is the center of the debate.
Me: What! Lousy bluejackers! Wait, herbal viagra for only $19.95? How could I lose?
Yeah right. I didn't buy the stuff from spam, I filtered it out. I didn't buy the stuff from junk mail, I threw it away unopened. I'm on a no-call list. I configured my computer to stop showing ads from the internet. I use a pvr to avoid commecials. Why oh why will I buy stuff from a phone message?
I'm so sick of advertising like this. I like ads that keep me informed as to what is availible or make me laugh. I dislike repition, ads designed to make me feel bad, and local car dealership commercials. Given that balance, I'll choose to avoid any ads but the ones on google and in my phonebook.
We were all suposed to sell mindshare in exchange for radio, tv, and websites. But I'm sick of it. It's my mind. Give it back. I need all of it. Find another business model and leave me alone.
Little is wrong with the current cut-buffer. It is fast and serves its purpose. The only drawback is the "woops" factor where you blow away the text in the buffer by accidentally highlighting something else. This happens to me all the time when using a touchpad.
What I think the poster wants is a second cut-buffer that acts like a clipboard. That means you can cut jpegs and paste them into another document, cut a text file and paste it into another one. While I think this is a cool idea, why not implement this in the window manager/window environment? It seems like KDE and Gnome would have a better idea what to do with rich objects slapped into the clipboard than plain ole' X.
First the Navy trains dolphins to swim into mines, then the gov'ment is sending innocent cockroaches into the most hazardous sites without protection! Wait until PETA hears of this.
I thought response rates were much lower, like less than half a percent. This 30% response rate must be "30% of those surveyed replied at least once to spam". Did they consider "please remove me" as part of the spam? Did they consider opt-in users responding to coupons for sites they frequent? How did they classify spam?
I guess I'm too shocked.
No! Holy crap! How many times do I have to tell people that simply because the mean is 100, that doesn't mean half the people are below it.
For example, a test is given to 4 people who scores are 5, 90, 95, 100. The average (mean) score is 72.5, but three of the four people are "above average".
Does this mean that the new bargain line for intel will have a higher stardard deviation to its error? Imagine buging a 5 p/m 3 ghz chip. This could be big for overclockers. Perhaps that three gig chip was mislabeled and you have an eight ghz model on your hands...
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You DID know that poison ivy is a hypersensitivity reaction, didn't you?
No, he didn't know. That's why he was at the doctor. Now, why didn't the doctor tell him this instead of laughing him off? He wanted to know why the doctor did what he did, but the doc decided the man was too dumb to understand. It isn't malpractice, but it is rude. Don't visit a doctor who won't tell you the "why" part. They aren't giving you full service.
It seems like most of the enemies of electronic voting have hit upon printouts as a solution to the problem. However, Cox points out in the article that there's been fraud with these too. So why not do some intelligent auditing of all votes. I mean, recheck a sample of the ballots at each county level and make sure that you get within .1% of the reported tally proportions. If not, check again. If that time doesn't work, there's been a problem and people should vote again.
In this system paper printouts are necessary, as would be a physical record of each vote cast, no matter how that vote was cast. The statistics provide an additional and difficult layer of security that's hard to circumevent.
Why is this so hard?
Let me answer:
why does it matter how long it takes to start? I just switch my computer on in the morning and off in the evening, so I only see the startup time once a day.
Becuase I use two personal computers plus departmental computers with NFS homes. If I want to show my advisor something, I log in on his desktop, if I want to check my mail, I log in to a shared computer. Print something? you guessed it. I log on and off alot. To keep all of my desktops looking to same, I use the same manager on all of them.
Everything in KDE is configurable. Can you see a taskbar in this screenshot?. I have a window list bound to alt-X.
Everything in WM is configurable too. Better yet, it's really easy to do advanced things. The default config files are basically walking examples to help you edit in your own ideas. My windowlist comes up with F11.
The CLI is still there for when you need it. Transparently sftp connecting using konqueror to remote servers is useful and faster in most cases than a sftp in an xterm. If the CLI is faster for you, then use it. I think in many cases people just say that because it make them feel more 'l33t'.
Elite or not, it depends what you do. when I sftp, I mostly move tarballs around with scp. Since I just created the tarball, I might as well send it with the cursor in the same ole terminal than switching desktops or aps. Besides, I use a laptop about 50% of the time. The touchpad isn't exactly a precision pointing device. The keyboard is much easier. I write small C programs, run gnuplot, look at stuff with gv, etc. I don't do things that require manipulating lots of files in a directory individually (something that konqueror is very good at). Still, most people aren't me. They're developing larger projects, doing multi-media stuff, or playing games. I'll take your point that KDE provides good support for this stuff.
The apps in KDE are excellent - I like Juk, KMail and konqueror (as a file manager). All well integrated into the desktop.
Many of the KDE apps are quite good, especially kdvi. But I can run these in WM just a well as anything else with the right libraries. Still, the list of X apps I use regularly is quite small and doesn't include any K* apps. As far as I can tell, "Desktop Integration" means that the file browser works as it should, launching a default app or popping up a list of possible browsers for a given document. Not that useful if you aren't using a FM to begin with
I used gnome and kde for a while, then I came back to windowmaker for speed and simplicity
Indeed. I understand that expanding the tree of board positions is a difficult task, but it isn't exactly the most elegant approach. Perhaps they should develop an AI to play go, where the tree is so large that pattern-matching is the only real way to play. Or maybe teach a computer to play diplomacy, where the tree is so small that all of the human players know it, but the computer must employ chatbot to communicate with humans, judge their reactions in both words and deeds, then make a move.
I don't want to troll, but I'm actually curious why people choose KDE (or gnome for that matter). I mean, the audience here is a cross-section of power users. I've used Gnome and KDE (2.4 and 3.0 respectively) and found them to be slow to start and bloated with widgets and effects I didn't need.
That's inflamitory, so let me explain: I use windowmaker. It's small, easy to configure by hand or by program, and I can trim out all of the visual fat that I don't need. That means no "start bar". If I want to run something, I click on a free spot on the desktop and up pops my menu. My running applications appear in the "window" menu with a quick right click. No fuss, no clutter. Desktop icons are redundant. I'll be using an xterm to do just about everything anyway. Scrollbars are likewise unncessary in most applications if you have a wheel or a good touchpad driver.
So what does KDE do you for? Do linux people use the right-click-drag-and-drop model from windows? I remember being addicted to it long ago, but I've since found CLI to be faster and more powerful.
I know, I know, the joy of linux is that you can have your desktop manager and I can have mine. But I'm curious what KDE does for you.
In science, all good measurements come with error bars. Why can't we count votes the same way? It should be possible to predict the margin of error in hand counted votes, punchcard votes, scantron votes, and so on. If the results of the election are decideded by a gap less than twice the error, everyone votes again.
Better yet, why not switch to a voting system that isn't broken? The "one person one vote" system forces strategic voting instead of preference voting. Don't vote for the third party candidate or you throw your vote away, even though you really wanted them. Preference voting allows you to rank the candidates in order of preference. If your 1st choice is at the bottom of the heap and there's no winner, your vote is moved to the next person on your list.
We don't do this, or any other system that takes more time because democracy is a spectator sport. More people watch election coverage than vote. It's like the superbowl. You don't know who will win so it's exciting. The "experts" argue, but you get to see one of them proved wrong. The vague notion that the outcome will impact your life just adds to the drama.
Your comparison of bandwidth service to water service is interesting. Early water systems didn't meter usage. Rather, a household paid a flat fee for service. This lead to a variety of water powered devices (drawing energy from the pressure of the water), including personal massagers for hysteria (is water-powered vibrators).
Obviously bored housewives and their new friends used lots of water. Meters were promptly invented and installed, and water service was sold in the same way it is today.
I hope bandwidth will go the same way. Personally, I'd like to see a state monopoly on the copper (or fiber) line that goes to each house. Then I could just buy bandwidth from any ISP I wanted. It worked well for water. It was working well for electricity (well, until deregulation stuffed it up. I lived in CA and I'm not bitter. Really.).
IMHO, Microsoft will probably release around the same day and time as Sony to be safe. By putting their cards on the table early, it will give Sony plenty of time to respond. If they release around the same time, it will be more like a game of rock,paper, scissors (just hope they both choose scissors).
Amen. Finally someone who views the console wars the right way. We (the consumers) only win while there's a war. I like the three company videogame market. There's more innovation, more cross-platform games, and lower prices. As I see it, Microsoft is no more evil than Sony (paying stores off to not stock DC) or Nintendo (remember the pricefixing conviction they had in the 90's?). But with three of them around and strong, shenanigans are harder to pull. I hope MS holds their hand close and doesn't try to jump generations too soon.
If the argument above seems plausible, think of the following: It is cheaper for IBM to outsource labor to India then pay for it in the States. The different cost of living allows them to pay a lower wage. When the music promoter argues that the cost of a release is higher in the UK than in Hong Kong, he should remember that we're a global economy. If IBM can outsource to avoid the steep cost of labor in developed countries, why shouldn't the consumer "outsource" to avoid the steep cost of promotional crap?
I'd be more sympathetic to the BPI if there were more protections for domestic labor.
Bah, home fitness videogame gizmos indeed. What they REALLY need is to hook up the old Paperboy game to a stationary bike. You'd have a screen to see a first-person view of the neighborhood, a "mirror" region to see the dogs chasing you, and a button to throw papers. You could have fun while riding the damned bike. How hard is that?
I'm serious. They already as gizmos about calories burned, heart rate, miles traveled, and other crap to these bikes for infotainment. Why not take the next step? Hell, you could make people pay for rides with quarters and turn every fitness club in the country into an arcade.
As far as I see it, Palladium has two goals:
(1) Make subscription-based software a viable buisness model. This one is obvious. Microsoft has been trying to do this for years. Their solution is typical for a monopoly. It over-reaches. If you want people to subscribe to your OS, don't force them to. Offer the subcription as a service. It comes with technical support and free upgrades as long as you pay. The other poor users will have to do the best they can with your "patches" and upgrade-editions. Instead, MS wants to rope everyone in. Deny them choice. This is what monopolies are about: control.
(2) This dovetails with automatic windows updates to become "The Sysadmin from Redmond." Yeah, from MS's point of view, they keep getting calls from the computer-illiterate about trivial stuff. Of course they want to take control of the illiterate's computer. They think he doesn't want to mess with it. They think he wants them to fix it and not worry about it. But technical people (ie, the audience here) want to fix their computer themselves. We warn the illiterates of the dangers of the Sysadmin from Redmond, but they don't understand.
I think most computer owners NEED a sysadmin. I don't think that admin should be an update server and a telephone techsupport script reader, she sould be someone who lives nearby, who can make house-calls, who can connect as root and clean up messes, who can admonish people for not keeping their files in their home directories. This isn't absurd. Most people have mechanics for their cars, doctors for their health ... why shouldn't they have someone to look after their computer?
the identities of purported coyright infringers...
I don't believe in coyrights. I mean, if you have rights, you should be upfront about them. No need to be coy.
It is not different times. It is not smarter or better trained users.
Bah. C'mon. The nintendo generation is better at reading lots of information at once than their parents. Case in point: fighter planes. In Vietnam, pilots would turn off their SAM warning squawk-boxes because of information overload. The noisy box would begin to ping and the pilots would melt-down from watching too many gauges. Nowdays, our pilots process much much more information. Sure, some of this increased capacity comes from a proper layout of the cockpit, but much of it comes from training recieved from two Italian plummers and buttons A and B.
In exchange for shorter attention spans, we've gained the ability to process lots of information quickly.
I like the box, but the manuals have gone straight down the toilet. I remember when Master of Magic came out around 1996 with two large manuals that explained the rules in detail. Now days, you'll get some two-page glossy book that tells you how to press the "X" button. They'll never tell you the game mechanics. No formulae, nothing. For example, the manual for Knights of the Old Republic explains just about zero percent of the d20 rule system. They leave the essential information up to the FAQs and game guides.
"It looks like Circuit City in some of those rooms," said Dan Bertsos, director of residence services at Wright State University near Dayton, Ohio.
And also:
They power a color TV, stereo, compact disc and DVD players, video game player, desktop computer and laptop, printer, scanner, refrigerator, microwave and two fans. Then there are rechargers for a cell phone, hand-held computer, camera, electric razor and toothbrush.
Yeah, but I bet Dan has all of these things at home too. Most of these new appliances are a result of college policies and planning. The computer is obvious. It is at minimum the new typewriter. The printer and scanner come along when the college doesn't provide these services in a convenient place or charges too much for them. The stereo has been around for a while in dorm rooms. You need one because the shitty radio isn't going to cut it. The TV and the DVD player are in each room because there's no communal space for reasonably sized groups (4-8 students). If they had a place with their friends, these things could live out in some sort of small living room. The microwave and refrigerator are in response to colleges jacking up board costs to pay for fundraising activities (a very common practice). They are also not new: my mom was boiling water on a hotplate in here dorm room -- much less safe than a microwave. Again, some communal space could reduce the number of microwaves a fridges.
Most dorms try to provide communal space in living rooms that are public to some 12-20 students. This is far too large. There's too much sharing of responsibility for the accidents in the microwave to ever get cleaned or for food in the fridge to be safe from hungry fingers. You need a space that the small group feels ownership over.
So when news gets out that the government let knowledge of the 9/11 attacks sit around untouched, the public is outraged and demands a change. THEN the government changes things to allow the FBI to act quicker when presented with evidence of terrorist plans.
Did you see how close the FBI was to finding the hijackers using the means availible to them at the time? They only failed because their REQUESTS for permission to investigate (permission from their higher-ups, not the courts) were turned down. The subjects were Saudis and therefore untouchable. No, none of the changes made by the PATRIOT act or dept of homeland security address what the failing was.
It's not just scary, it should be illegal. I understand that some military and spy funding needs to be done in secret, but when the congress established how to handle these delicate issues they were negligent. They SHOULD have forced any secret spending bill with non-spending riders to no longer be secret. It only makes sense. If you want the $50 billion for some assasination laser kept secret, fine (well, not that fine, but I can cope). But when you attach a rider reducing the privacy of citizens, that whole bill should now be open for public debate.
This is an end-run around democracy. We can't stand for it. What's worse is that the legislation is difficult to litigate over. You can't sue for a breach of your rights because the company that helped the government isn't allowed to come forward. The system of checks and balances is being hampered here too.
And I don't feel any safer. I mean, the New York bombing reports seemed to say that to prevent terrorist strikes, we just need a little better cooperation between intelligence agencies and fewer "blinders" when suspects come from supposedly friendly nations. What we got instead was another intelligence department that does fuck-all, two wars with questionable success, and a ever-increasing restriction of our personal freedoms.
Actually, it seems like the money would be better spent in China, improving the humanitarian and social situation. I'm all for space programs, but a country like China should reconsider its priorities.
Man, you don't get it, do you. Go to any American university. The departments are full of graduate students from other nations, many of which will stay in the US after they get their degrees. For China, this means their brightest minds are drained away into the US. A space program creates a domestic need for PhD's at home. It can build a whole technology sector. PhD's at home can create an intellectual culture to improve the social situation.
Now, China might be thinking narrowly about keeping bright citizens, they might be thinking about building a better domestic science program, they might be thinking of mining the moon (as they actually say). But the results will likely benifit everyone. The "one thing at a time" attitude of China's critics is stupid. They argue that you must first improve the social situation, then set off in search of better science. This isn't how things developed in the West. It went the other way. First child labor and Maxwell's laws, then labor laws and computers.
To drift off topic a bit, this is the same backwards crap that the IMF pushes on developing nations. They tell them to use tight fiscal policy and not spend themselves out of recessions, when just these actions are used by the rich developed nations. What, is Keynsian economics proprietary to the US and Europe?
I mean, in theory the UN creating a regulating body that has a relationship to the UN like the Fed has with the US government would be fine. The Fed acts in generally everyone's best interest (at least with the current board). But 50/50 the UN would stuff it up and have crazy rules for selecting Internet Committee members or demand more direct control.
In practice, what does this really mean? If I browse French sites via TCP/IP, does that mean I'm using the internet or just a subnet (the franco-american net)? How do these changes in regulation force peers on the network to use supplied protocols, DNS servers, and so on? How much could a regulatory body really restrict traffic? I don't mean these questions rhetorically. I think this is the center of the debate.
Phone: *beep* You have a new message!
Me: What! Lousy bluejackers! Wait, herbal viagra for only $19.95? How could I lose?
Yeah right. I didn't buy the stuff from spam, I filtered it out. I didn't buy the stuff from junk mail, I threw it away unopened. I'm on a no-call list. I configured my computer to stop showing ads from the internet. I use a pvr to avoid commecials. Why oh why will I buy stuff from a phone message?
I'm so sick of advertising like this. I like ads that keep me informed as to what is availible or make me laugh. I dislike repition, ads designed to make me feel bad, and local car dealership commercials. Given that balance, I'll choose to avoid any ads but the ones on google and in my phonebook.
We were all suposed to sell mindshare in exchange for radio, tv, and websites. But I'm sick of it. It's my mind. Give it back. I need all of it. Find another business model and leave me alone.
Little is wrong with the current cut-buffer. It is fast and serves its purpose. The only drawback is the "woops" factor where you blow away the text in the buffer by accidentally highlighting something else. This happens to me all the time when using a touchpad.
What I think the poster wants is a second cut-buffer that acts like a clipboard. That means you can cut jpegs and paste them into another document, cut a text file and paste it into another one. While I think this is a cool idea, why not implement this in the window manager/window environment? It seems like KDE and Gnome would have a better idea what to do with rich objects slapped into the clipboard than plain ole' X.
First the Navy trains dolphins to swim into mines, then the gov'ment is sending innocent cockroaches into the most hazardous sites without protection! Wait until PETA hears of this.
I thought response rates were much lower, like less than half a percent. This 30% response rate must be "30% of those surveyed replied at least once to spam". Did they consider "please remove me" as part of the spam? Did they consider opt-in users responding to coupons for sites they frequent? How did they classify spam? I guess I'm too shocked.
No! Holy crap! How many times do I have to tell people that simply because the mean is 100, that doesn't mean half the people are below it.
For example, a test is given to 4 people who scores are 5, 90, 95, 100. The average (mean) score is 72.5, but three of the four people are "above average".
Does this mean that the new bargain line for intel will have a higher stardard deviation to its error? Imagine buging a 5 p/m 3 ghz chip. This could be big for overclockers. Perhaps that three gig chip was mislabeled and you have an eight ghz model on your hands ...