Actually, all of the legal battles and expenses of keeping your ignorant asses alive far out costs anything that you give back. Regardless, I'd be more then willing to raise taxes if it meant saving hundreds of thousands of lives per year. Sometime people are so stupid that the government must protect them from themselves. If you still smoke in this day and age with all the knowledge about it then you are a moron. Regards, Steve
I have absolutely no problems raising taxes to not only make the air healthier for me but for those too ignorant to realize the harmful side affects of smoking. I already pay for homeless shelters, welfare, and section 8 housing none of which I'll ever use (assuming something drastic doesn't happen) and the last 2 tend to bring down neighborhoods due to abuse. Many are arguing that driving cars is worse, but the fact that there is mass transportation is a leading factor as to why society has progressed as far as it has. Driving is much more necessary and there is tons of reasearch on making it better for the environment. Smoking is voluntary and contributes nothing to anyone. Some people are just so ignorant that the government must protect them from themselves. Regards, Steve
How about you're in severe denial. I can't believe you would even argue a point like that, are you nuts? Its been proven time over time again that the things you inhale are the same chemicals responsible for many forms of cancer. The main ingredient in many rat poisons is used in cigarettes.
The following isn't necessearily directed at you, but just to smokers in general: Please stop living in denial, I'm trying to save your life here. I'm not being a dick or telling you how to live, I've just seen way too many people die from smoking and unfortunately many were very close to me. I've never met you and never will but I do care about your life. Take good advice when you hear it, you won't regret quitting, but you will regret continuing. Regards, Steve
The negative effects of smoking were not known nearly as well then. Anyone in any position of authority who still smokes knowing all of the horrible things that go along with it is in no way a responsible person and deserves to be no where but in the slums of society. Regards, Steve
I have no problem with you leading your life as long as your actions don't imapct me. If you want to kill yourself keep it in your house. By smoking anywhere in public you are contributing carcogens to the rest of society. Your actions are negatively affecting us, while we are not negatively affecting you. Regards, Steve
You have a problem and you need help. You are trying to justify smoking on a plane. You can't go a few hours without a smoke? People are doing a favor for your life, how many tmes has it been proven that smoking kills you, and kills you quickly. I'm so glad my city is banning smoking, you people contribute nothing but ill effects to the rest of society. Take a hint and try to quit, its a dirty disgusting habit that shortens your life. It doesn't even calm you until you've become addicted to it. Stop trying to jsutify your actions and instead correct them. Don't force your smoke on other passengers or employees of the airport. If you want to kill yourself, confine it to your house. Regards, Steve
Perhaps we should start yelling at the submitters of dupes instead of the editors. Yes the editors have responsibilities, but if noone submitted dupes then there'd be no problem. Cut it off at the source. Regards, Steve
That statemnet is not legally binding in the United States. For one, fairuse specifically cites news reports as able to be summarized, but also they should require all reders of the site to use a login and protect all of their content. If I wrote a bot to go around the web and find any likely new sources and index their stories, I sure as hell would have never been able to read the tens of thousands of copyright statements. People need to learn to start taking responsibility of thier own stuff on the net and stop being so damn litigious. Regards, Steve
Often times, web filters are pretty weak. Either use Google's cache of it, or use wikipedia's IP number instead of the hostname. Granted any sophisticated filter will still block it, I've worked with many that won't. In a worst case scenario, set up a box at home with sshd and just create an encrypted tunnel home and proxy your connection through there. Its extremely easy. I'm not sure what the current state of school filtering software is in, as I haven't been around it for a few years, but back when I was in school (not too long ago) the above tricks worked well. Yes you may get in trouble, but then you can become a "hero" and start a movement for your school to protect the same rights given to you by the constitution (assuming your in America). Anyway... find out what the filtering software is and google for ways to get around it. One popular piece called Bess used to have tons of flaws. Regards, Steve
I understand that Debian folk are not too fond of Red Hat folk, but honestly, Fedora seems like a stable base, or even RHEL4. Grab the source from Red Hat or CentOS (which a few red hat engineers actually help out with). You'll have a modern, secure, easy to use base with an up to date kernel and many added security features like SELinux and services compiled with random memory mappings. I'm not trying to start a distrowar or anything, I personally use both debian and fedora (however I only have one debian server left, used to have a few more). If nothing else, its at least worth tossing the idea around. Best of luck with your project. Regards, Steve
Fedora has Yum which has a similar feel to apt, but with a simpler syntax, and also apt-get for fedora works very well. www.FedoraFAQ.org answers alot of questions about that stuff if you do decide to check it out. Apparently alot of people have been pleased with Fedora considering that its usage as a server has increased 122% in the past 6 months. It is worth checking out, FC4 is coming out soon and it should be real nice, however I believe FC5 is supposed be damn near magical:) Regards, Steve
E = MC^2 is a common misconception. You would actually get more energy out of the system then that equation implies. The reason you ask? That equation is wrong (well its not wrong, just not completely right). Einstein's full equation is E^2 = M^2C^2 + P^2C^2. E=MC^2 is only for objects at rest, but as you stated, we would be accelerating matter into it, and the blackhole's gravitational force would be further accelerating it. The P in the equation stands for the momentum-energy 4 vector, so if an object is at rest, it has no momentum and thus the equation is simplified to the form you quoted. You weren't entirely wrong, just not entirely right:) Although I'm sure some physicists that specializes in relativity will come and point out some mistake I made:) One last point about the equation, using the full form implies that negative masses have solutions for both negative and positive energy and vice versa... this become important where as the short form will mess you up quickly. Regards, Steve
Actually, at scales this small gravity is not the dominating force (thats from the article). A gust of wind would literally blow the black hole apart. Its actually pretty interesting from a research perspective. You can see how black holes work, throw something in, see how it comes out, etc... The only thing though is that in order to have some real fun you really do need massive blackholes because then you can warp spacetime and have well defined event horizons etc... Regards, Steve
The right tool for the right job. Sometimes java's stronger typing, IDE's, and large platform support are needed. Also, java is very easy to use as a web backend or even on a mobile phone. It is several tims faster then a scripting language (recent benchmarks argue that it is as fast and sometimes faster then a c++ implementation). It also has some amazing abilities with features such as hotspot which dynamically modifies your code at run time to optimize itself as it finds what areas of code are used most often. Java has a ton of libraries and there are many more more reasons I could think of using it. Sure scripting languages may do some things in less lines of code but thats hardly a valid way of measuring a language. Also java imo makes it easier to do complex tasks. Once you start stepping away from simple things, java real starts to shine. I mean printing out a file in sorted order line by line in perl simply consists of "print sort <>;" as the entire program, obviously your not going to get much shorter then that. Start coding 100,000 lines in perl and all the sudden java is looking really good (one of the things being how java clearly lays out what everything is and what it is doing). I could certainly make out what your script does, but I'd hardly want to look at code like that all day. Regards, Steve
Despite the other posters, gcj compiles things very nicely. It also has support for many things including SWT and basic AWT (enough support to compile jogl (opengl bindings)) Its definitly an alternative and has made major headway recently. It can compile eclipse and the Apache Tomcat server as well. GCJ is nice for compiling natively, and we already have an open source JVM called blackdown. Sun opening Java would be nice, but certainly not essential. Regards, Steve
Just as a test I just coded an image viewer in Java. Total time: 40 minutes. Number of platforms it can run on: At a minimum, 3 supported platforms. Capabilities: View images as thumbnails, single images (full screen, etc...), rotate, crop, some minor little effects. All of this graphics stuff is hardware accelerated as well because I used Java2d. It is a fully capable image viewer that I put together while watching TV. VB is not any better then any other language. It is crippled, it supports inconsistent coding, it is slow. You can build applications quickly in any language assuming you are knowledgable of that language. Your web browser probably used the IE activex control, what a waste, and the other apps you listed could probably be done each in a half hour to hour in java. Other languages are faster, java also avoids buffer overflows, and other languages don't limit you nearly as much as VB does. Yes I've coded in VB and "grew up" on it, hell didnt we all? But it wasn't until I started coding in C/C++/Java that I realized how limited VB left you. Pointers, btw, are a wonderful thing and you are acting like they are bad. Anyway... in a VB coders head, they usually aren't able to think of anything that they can't do with it so my arguments may not make sense. Regardless, its been shown that the thoughts people think are constrained by their language(i.e. you can't think something you can't express in words, more or less). After spending the time doing significant amounts of coding in the other languages, I wouldn't use VB if you put a gun to my head. Yes other languages have higher learning curves, but its definitly worth it. Regards, Steve
The problem with these robots is how fragile they are. I havent physically seen the other two robots, but Honda's Asimo stays in a little closet when in the lab. Not your typical closet of course, but you get the idea. When in the lab, all you see are other cheaper parts of robots similar or duplicated from Asimo. All the work and main testing is done on these pieces (which makes sense). The thing that I don't like though, and many people don't realize, is that before Asimo is ever unveiled to the public, he undergoes at least 8 hours of configuration. This is each and every time, and then he can only run for maybe an hour and a half iirc. These robots certainly have a lot of potential, and one day possibly could do factory work, but right now the public is being mislead thinking we are further along then we really are. People see this robot and think it probably just walks around all day and they'd like one. There are certainly some huge milestones being made, but the most publically known robots are imho overhyped. I'm not being a pessimist, I would just like to see even more reasearch in humanoid robotics so we can have the future sooner rather then later. Even just a self configuring Asimo would be a huge step in the right direction. Regards, Steve
Sorry for replying twice, but this may be of interest to you: Netcraft shows that Fedora is by far the fastest growing server OS, growing 122% in 6 months. Regards, Steve
Actually, yes it was. And it is run on many hosting companies as a choice of operating system. I run it on many servers and it is the most stable OS I've used to date. I only have one debian server left running and that is only because it has a very high uptime and I'd hate to reboot it:) Don't make judgements about Fedora without extensively using it. And if you do test it, don't use a test release, use a stable release. Just keep an open mind. I've tried at least 15 or 16 different distriubtions pretty extensivly and I've been by far most pleased with the Fedora series. More so then the older Red Hat line, and signifcantly more pleased then with Suse and Mandrake. Regards, steve
Fine, stick with Mandrake and support software patents. Mandrake is taking a huge legal risk here, while also not fully supporting open soruce efforts. Switch all of your music to Ogg, its really not hard and there are tons of really good players out there for it.Or just go to fedorafaq.org and with two seconds of reading you'll see how easy it is to add mp3 and dvd support. I however no longer choose to even install mp3 support, I won't support software patents and I like my system to only consist of free software. Red Hat abides by its free software only policy in the most strict sense. Regards, Steve
Actually, if you ever let someone else get a copy of any of your mp3's, you'd be liable for $50,000 for using the mp3 codec. Companies can buy mass licensing for their customers for a couple hundred thousand dollars if they see the need. Red Hat's software has always consisted of pure open source. The nice thing about using FC is that you have no worries about patents, everything is open. They abide by this policy more strictly then Debian. Since my switch to Fedora, I've switched all my music to Ogg and only buy ogg compatible players. Yes it required some minor initial efforts, but its worth it now and I'm very pleased with Red Hat's choice. Regards, Steve
It has full support for any open source codecs or patent free codecs. It can also play audio cds just fine. It supports many media formats. If you want to add DVD and mp3 support, simply go to fedorafaq.org and they'll tell you how to. Its very simple, just add an entry to your yum.conf and then "yum install xmms-mp3". Personally, I'm very glad they made the move, I've never used so many open formats in my life and now I only buy ogg compatible players (which there are plenty of). Two years ago all my music was mp3 format, now I have over 12 gigs in ogg. Ogg also gives you the same quality with less space so its good for my harddrive too:) Regards, Steve
Apt is always an alternative, but Yum for FC4 has apparently undergone a huge revampment and is supposedly significantly faster. I'm not sure about the download resuming though. Regards, Steve
You should definitly give it a shot. It is fast, supports SELinux, and comes with all kinds of nice software, and is very stable. Yum is very easy to use and they are setting up an Extras repository for additional packages. Upgrading (despite what the above posters said) is very easy, just grab the newest version of yum and type yum upgrade, or do the recommended thing and download the new cds, and at the install screen hit "Upgrade". Very easy and works really well. Despite the 6-8 month release cycle, after the main Fedora project drops support for it, Fedora Legacy still will support it for 1.5 years and possible longer if the community is interested in providing help. I've been running FC since its very first day and it has since replaced all but one of my Debian servers (which is only still running because I dont want to reset its uptime:] ) Regards, Steve
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, all of the legal battles and expenses of keeping your ignorant asses alive far out costs anything that you give back. Regardless, I'd be more then willing to raise taxes if it meant saving hundreds of thousands of lives per year. Sometime people are so stupid that the government must protect them from themselves. If you still smoke in this day and age with all the knowledge about it then you are a moron.
Regards,
Steve
I have absolutely no problems raising taxes to not only make the air healthier for me but for those too ignorant to realize the harmful side affects of smoking. I already pay for homeless shelters, welfare, and section 8 housing none of which I'll ever use (assuming something drastic doesn't happen) and the last 2 tend to bring down neighborhoods due to abuse. Many are arguing that driving cars is worse, but the fact that there is mass transportation is a leading factor as to why society has progressed as far as it has. Driving is much more necessary and there is tons of reasearch on making it better for the environment. Smoking is voluntary and contributes nothing to anyone. Some people are just so ignorant that the government must protect them from themselves.
Regards,
Steve
How about you're in severe denial. I can't believe you would even argue a point like that, are you nuts? Its been proven time over time again that the things you inhale are the same chemicals responsible for many forms of cancer. The main ingredient in many rat poisons is used in cigarettes.
The following isn't necessearily directed at you, but just to smokers in general: Please stop living in denial, I'm trying to save your life here. I'm not being a dick or telling you how to live, I've just seen way too many people die from smoking and unfortunately many were very close to me. I've never met you and never will but I do care about your life. Take good advice when you hear it, you won't regret quitting, but you will regret continuing.
Regards,
Steve
The negative effects of smoking were not known nearly as well then. Anyone in any position of authority who still smokes knowing all of the horrible things that go along with it is in no way a responsible person and deserves to be no where but in the slums of society.
Regards,
Steve
I have no problem with you leading your life as long as your actions don't imapct me. If you want to kill yourself keep it in your house. By smoking anywhere in public you are contributing carcogens to the rest of society. Your actions are negatively affecting us, while we are not negatively affecting you.
Regards,
Steve
You have a problem and you need help. You are trying to justify smoking on a plane. You can't go a few hours without a smoke? People are doing a favor for your life, how many tmes has it been proven that smoking kills you, and kills you quickly. I'm so glad my city is banning smoking, you people contribute nothing but ill effects to the rest of society. Take a hint and try to quit, its a dirty disgusting habit that shortens your life. It doesn't even calm you until you've become addicted to it. Stop trying to jsutify your actions and instead correct them. Don't force your smoke on other passengers or employees of the airport. If you want to kill yourself, confine it to your house.
Regards,
Steve
Hrm... I think I see a pattern there.
Perhaps we should start yelling at the submitters of dupes instead of the editors. Yes the editors have responsibilities, but if noone submitted dupes then there'd be no problem. Cut it off at the source.
Regards,
Steve
That statemnet is not legally binding in the United States. For one, fairuse specifically cites news reports as able to be summarized, but also they should require all reders of the site to use a login and protect all of their content. If I wrote a bot to go around the web and find any likely new sources and index their stories, I sure as hell would have never been able to read the tens of thousands of copyright statements. People need to learn to start taking responsibility of thier own stuff on the net and stop being so damn litigious.
Regards,
Steve
Often times, web filters are pretty weak. Either use Google's cache of it, or use wikipedia's IP number instead of the hostname. Granted any sophisticated filter will still block it, I've worked with many that won't. In a worst case scenario, set up a box at home with sshd and just create an encrypted tunnel home and proxy your connection through there. Its extremely easy. I'm not sure what the current state of school filtering software is in, as I haven't been around it for a few years, but back when I was in school (not too long ago) the above tricks worked well. Yes you may get in trouble, but then you can become a "hero" and start a movement for your school to protect the same rights given to you by the constitution (assuming your in America). Anyway... find out what the filtering software is and google for ways to get around it. One popular piece called Bess used to have tons of flaws.
Regards,
Steve
I understand that Debian folk are not too fond of Red Hat folk, but honestly, Fedora seems like a stable base, or even RHEL4. Grab the source from Red Hat or CentOS (which a few red hat engineers actually help out with). You'll have a modern, secure, easy to use base with an up to date kernel and many added security features like SELinux and services compiled with random memory mappings. I'm not trying to start a distrowar or anything, I personally use both debian and fedora (however I only have one debian server left, used to have a few more). If nothing else, its at least worth tossing the idea around. Best of luck with your project.
Regards,
Steve
Fedora has Yum which has a similar feel to apt, but with a simpler syntax, and also apt-get for fedora works very well. www.FedoraFAQ.org answers alot of questions about that stuff if you do decide to check it out. Apparently alot of people have been pleased with Fedora considering that its usage as a server has increased 122% in the past 6 months. It is worth checking out, FC4 is coming out soon and it should be real nice, however I believe FC5 is supposed be damn near magical :)
Regards,
Steve
E = MC^2 is a common misconception. You would actually get more energy out of the system then that equation implies. The reason you ask? That equation is wrong (well its not wrong, just not completely right). Einstein's full equation is E^2 = M^2C^2 + P^2C^2. E=MC^2 is only for objects at rest, but as you stated, we would be accelerating matter into it, and the blackhole's gravitational force would be further accelerating it. The P in the equation stands for the momentum-energy 4 vector, so if an object is at rest, it has no momentum and thus the equation is simplified to the form you quoted. You weren't entirely wrong, just not entirely right:) Although I'm sure some physicists that specializes in relativity will come and point out some mistake I made :) One last point about the equation, using the full form implies that negative masses have solutions for both negative and positive energy and vice versa... this become important where as the short form will mess you up quickly.
Regards,
Steve
Actually, at scales this small gravity is not the dominating force (thats from the article). A gust of wind would literally blow the black hole apart. Its actually pretty interesting from a research perspective. You can see how black holes work, throw something in, see how it comes out, etc... The only thing though is that in order to have some real fun you really do need massive blackholes because then you can warp spacetime and have well defined event horizons etc...
Regards,
Steve
The right tool for the right job. Sometimes java's stronger typing, IDE's, and large platform support are needed. Also, java is very easy to use as a web backend or even on a mobile phone. It is several tims faster then a scripting language (recent benchmarks argue that it is as fast and sometimes faster then a c++ implementation). It also has some amazing abilities with features such as hotspot which dynamically modifies your code at run time to optimize itself as it finds what areas of code are used most often. Java has a ton of libraries and there are many more more reasons I could think of using it. Sure scripting languages may do some things in less lines of code but thats hardly a valid way of measuring a language. Also java imo makes it easier to do complex tasks. Once you start stepping away from simple things, java real starts to shine. I mean printing out a file in sorted order line by line in perl simply consists of "print sort <> ;" as the entire program, obviously your not going to get much shorter then that. Start coding 100,000 lines in perl and all the sudden java is looking really good (one of the things being how java clearly lays out what everything is and what it is doing). I could certainly make out what your script does, but I'd hardly want to look at code like that all day.
Regards,
Steve
Despite the other posters, gcj compiles things very nicely. It also has support for many things including SWT and basic AWT (enough support to compile jogl (opengl bindings)) Its definitly an alternative and has made major headway recently. It can compile eclipse and the Apache Tomcat server as well. GCJ is nice for compiling natively, and we already have an open source JVM called blackdown. Sun opening Java would be nice, but certainly not essential.
Regards,
Steve
Just as a test I just coded an image viewer in Java. Total time: 40 minutes. Number of platforms it can run on: At a minimum, 3 supported platforms. Capabilities: View images as thumbnails, single images (full screen, etc...), rotate, crop, some minor little effects. All of this graphics stuff is hardware accelerated as well because I used Java2d. It is a fully capable image viewer that I put together while watching TV. VB is not any better then any other language. It is crippled, it supports inconsistent coding, it is slow. You can build applications quickly in any language assuming you are knowledgable of that language. Your web browser probably used the IE activex control, what a waste, and the other apps you listed could probably be done each in a half hour to hour in java. Other languages are faster, java also avoids buffer overflows, and other languages don't limit you nearly as much as VB does. Yes I've coded in VB and "grew up" on it, hell didnt we all? But it wasn't until I started coding in C/C++/Java that I realized how limited VB left you. Pointers, btw, are a wonderful thing and you are acting like they are bad. Anyway... in a VB coders head, they usually aren't able to think of anything that they can't do with it so my arguments may not make sense. Regardless, its been shown that the thoughts people think are constrained by their language(i.e. you can't think something you can't express in words, more or less). After spending the time doing significant amounts of coding in the other languages, I wouldn't use VB if you put a gun to my head. Yes other languages have higher learning curves, but its definitly worth it.
Regards,
Steve
The problem with these robots is how fragile they are. I havent physically seen the other two robots, but Honda's Asimo stays in a little closet when in the lab. Not your typical closet of course, but you get the idea. When in the lab, all you see are other cheaper parts of robots similar or duplicated from Asimo. All the work and main testing is done on these pieces (which makes sense). The thing that I don't like though, and many people don't realize, is that before Asimo is ever unveiled to the public, he undergoes at least 8 hours of configuration. This is each and every time, and then he can only run for maybe an hour and a half iirc. These robots certainly have a lot of potential, and one day possibly could do factory work, but right now the public is being mislead thinking we are further along then we really are. People see this robot and think it probably just walks around all day and they'd like one. There are certainly some huge milestones being made, but the most publically known robots are imho overhyped. I'm not being a pessimist, I would just like to see even more reasearch in humanoid robotics so we can have the future sooner rather then later. Even just a self configuring Asimo would be a huge step in the right direction.
Regards,
Steve
Sorry for replying twice, but this may be of interest to you: Netcraft shows that Fedora is by far the fastest growing server OS, growing 122% in 6 months.
Regards,
Steve
Actually, yes it was. And it is run on many hosting companies as a choice of operating system. I run it on many servers and it is the most stable OS I've used to date. I only have one debian server left running and that is only because it has a very high uptime and I'd hate to reboot it :) Don't make judgements about Fedora without extensively using it. And if you do test it, don't use a test release, use a stable release. Just keep an open mind. I've tried at least 15 or 16 different distriubtions pretty extensivly and I've been by far most pleased with the Fedora series. More so then the older Red Hat line, and signifcantly more pleased then with Suse and Mandrake.
Regards,
steve
Fine, stick with Mandrake and support software patents. Mandrake is taking a huge legal risk here, while also not fully supporting open soruce efforts. Switch all of your music to Ogg, its really not hard and there are tons of really good players out there for it.Or just go to fedorafaq.org and with two seconds of reading you'll see how easy it is to add mp3 and dvd support. I however no longer choose to even install mp3 support, I won't support software patents and I like my system to only consist of free software. Red Hat abides by its free software only policy in the most strict sense.
Regards,
Steve
Actually, if you ever let someone else get a copy of any of your mp3's, you'd be liable for $50,000 for using the mp3 codec. Companies can buy mass licensing for their customers for a couple hundred thousand dollars if they see the need. Red Hat's software has always consisted of pure open source. The nice thing about using FC is that you have no worries about patents, everything is open. They abide by this policy more strictly then Debian. Since my switch to Fedora, I've switched all my music to Ogg and only buy ogg compatible players. Yes it required some minor initial efforts, but its worth it now and I'm very pleased with Red Hat's choice.
Regards,
Steve
It has full support for any open source codecs or patent free codecs. It can also play audio cds just fine. It supports many media formats. If you want to add DVD and mp3 support, simply go to fedorafaq.org and they'll tell you how to. Its very simple, just add an entry to your yum.conf and then "yum install xmms-mp3". Personally, I'm very glad they made the move, I've never used so many open formats in my life and now I only buy ogg compatible players (which there are plenty of). Two years ago all my music was mp3 format, now I have over 12 gigs in ogg. Ogg also gives you the same quality with less space so its good for my harddrive too:)
Regards,
Steve
Apt is always an alternative, but Yum for FC4 has apparently undergone a huge revampment and is supposedly significantly faster. I'm not sure about the download resuming though.
Regards,
Steve
You should definitly give it a shot. It is fast, supports SELinux, and comes with all kinds of nice software, and is very stable. Yum is very easy to use and they are setting up an Extras repository for additional packages. Upgrading (despite what the above posters said) is very easy, just grab the newest version of yum and type yum upgrade, or do the recommended thing and download the new cds, and at the install screen hit "Upgrade". Very easy and works really well. Despite the 6-8 month release cycle, after the main Fedora project drops support for it, Fedora Legacy still will support it for 1.5 years and possible longer if the community is interested in providing help. I've been running FC since its very first day and it has since replaced all but one of my Debian servers (which is only still running because I dont want to reset its uptime :] )
Regards,
Steve