Some of the major issues I've come across: touch-click trackpad support is gone (where you can touch the trackpad twice in succession as an alternative way of clicking the left mouse button). I never knew how much I missed it until I tried a friend's Apple iBook running MacOS X which does not have it and has no readily apparent way to turn this on.
Go to System Preferences, click on "Keyboard & Mouse", choose "Trackpad", and then select "Use trackpad for clicking". You can also select other check boxes for using the trackpad for dragging, and drag-lock.
Note, the above guide is for Panther, but if memory serves me correctly, those settings are the same for earlier versions of OS X.
I'd love to be able to boot up into old (or ancient) versions of Mac OS which run in a safe little sandbox on my OS X machine - simply for the sake of nostalgia. Are there any non-flash implementations which can run as stand-alone applications?
The relationship between the law and morality is a complex one.
The position you are asserting is an extreme form of natural law
theory. According to natural law theory, there is a necessary overlap between law and morality. Your position is an extreme form because the overlap is, effectively, entire: the prohibitions and permissions supported by law are exactly those prohibitions and permissions supported by morality.
Natural law theory has a (very) long tradition, tracing back at least to St. Aquinas.
An alternate position is that of Legal Positivism, which asserts that the law and morality are conceptually distinct. Being that they are conceptually distinct, there need not be, in principle, any overlap between the two. Although, in practice, there will always be significant overlap. However, the existence of this overlap, from the point of view of legal positivism, is not necessary.
Google "philosophy of law" and you'll find a number of sites that you can read for further details. One good site is here.
I mean, no matter what you say, or what you do, or what policies you pass, eventually someone, somewhere, will try to shave their testicles with a chainsaw.
Re:Photo and PIN on Cash Card / Credit Card??
on
RFID MasterCard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If my photo had to be on my Credit Card and also I had to enter a Secret PIN to use it - would that stop a load of Credit Card Fraud??
It's interesting that you suggest this scheme. Over here in Europe, several countries have started using/requiring PINs to be entered for all credit card purchases. They claim that since this scheme has been implemented, credit card fraud has fallen markedly.
Personally, I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Credit cards have - until now - always been safe, emergency financial fallback. As long as you have your card (and haven't hit the limit) you can use it to get yourself out of any bind: buy a ticket, buy a meal, pay for a cab. Now, even if you still have your credit card, if you forget your PIN you're in a world of hurt. ("So, don't forget your PIN, dummy!" Yeah, I know. But no one ever plans on forgetting their PIN.)
> I wouldn't have bothered dignifying this with a reply, if I'd > noticed earlier that you were trolling.
In all honesty, I wasn't trolling. I wholeheartedly agree that writing a suite of mathematical modelling tools is educationally beneficial, but you need to realise that not all students can do this or would really benefit from it. The task is above and beyond the abilities of many students - even those who intend to become physicists and engineers.
> If I was in charge of a university's computer systems, > absolutely no proprietary, closed source software would be > allowed anywhere on my network, especially not the parts > accessible to students
So, preventing your students from being unable to run Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, Visual Studio,... is educationally beneficial in what way?
Yes, closed source software has problems. So does open source. An all-out ban either way helps no one and solves nothing.
If it DOES contaminate and take hold of the planet, then it was meant to be;
You, sir, would benefit a basic course in logic. Simply because something is the case (or becomes the case) does not imply that it ought to be the case.
No, I'm not. I know that one could reconstruct the information if one had to, but, since he had already done the work, it would be nice if he released it.
Pretty pictures and animations are great, but it would be even better if he released the underlying data. Like what the Stanford GraphBase did for a handful of literary texts.
Remember, one of the requirements to having an armed rebellion, is an armed populace.
I wish people would stop iterating this claim as if it still meant now what it meant 200+ years ago. At one time, yes, it was true that an armed populace would provide an important check on the government, preventing it from becoming corrupt. But how can anyone seriously think that any number of guns owned by any number of citizens of technologically advanced Western countries could effectively hold an armed rebellion?
The U.S. military is the most technologically advanced, well-armed, and well-trained army in the history of the world. The amount of firepower and armor at its disposal is unbelievable. No citizenry, however armed by conventional firepower, would be able to hold an armed rebellion capable of overthrowing the government without being immediately and utterly crushed. The numbers just aren't there.
Now, if it were a massively popular uprising, the military might not chose to fight back. But this shouldn't be interpreted as meaning that the armed rebellion successfully overthrew the government, but, rather that there was a military coup which rode a wave of popular sentiment to destablize the government. For, in not fighting back against the armed rebellion, the military would have effectively signaled their belief that the government was not legitimate.
The point is this: believe what you like about gun ownership preserving democracy, but those days are past. The difference in military power now existing between the citizenry and the military precludes the citizenry from presenting a serious threat against the entrenched power.
C|Net reports that the first major test of e-voting went smoothly with only minor glitches. Anyone know if this is just due to lazy and inaccurate reporting or whether there's a bit of a cover-up here?
there are too many critical systems that are relying on Windows Servers.
But this is just foolish. Doesn't Microsoft explicitly say that Windows is not to be used for critical systems? There are special (i.e., non-mainstream) operating systems which are expressly designed for use in critical systems so that the problems caused by worms, etc. doesn't happen. If someone dies because of a Windows worm, it's the fault of the programmer who made a bad choice of the embedded system.
How come Apple cant seem to let you hear the whole sone but
instead gives you 30 secs.
Because then people could listen to a single song streamed over the net and copy it to disk using a utility like Wiretap. If you could easily obtain a complete album in the time it takes to listen to it that would completely kill their business. Now, maybe 30 seconds isn't quite long enough, but it's not too bad and seems a reasonable compromise.
I just tried out an iChat -> AIM video chat and wasn't too impressed. Although I didn't have my iSight hooked up to my Mac, my friend had a video camera hooked up to a PC and was able to initiate a one-way video chat to me. Video was pretty good from my end (I could resize it to full-screen), but it seems like AIM users are going to be stuck with a postage-stamp sized video window. Even Yahoo! Messenger provides larger video than AIM.
Can anyone verify that Windows AIM users are limited to a *very* small video window?
As someone who has worked in the Alaskan fishing industry, this is more true than you may realise. At one time, crab fisherman in Alaska were making over $50,000 for a summer's work. Or course, it was incredibly dangerous and you nearly got killed every other week, but there was good money in it. Read Spike Walker's Working on the Edge for more information.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding! Next thing you know, they'll be giving out tax breaks to the rich!
Go to System Preferences, click on "Keyboard & Mouse", choose "Trackpad", and then select "Use trackpad for clicking". You can also select other check boxes for using the trackpad for dragging, and drag-lock.
Note, the above guide is for Panther, but if memory serves me correctly, those settings are the same for earlier versions of OS X.
Now we can emulate a crappy operating system on a toy operating system!
I suppose the only consolation is that it could have been worse. How, exactly, is eluding me at the moment, but I am sure that it could have been.
I'd love to be able to boot up into old (or ancient) versions of Mac OS which run in a safe little sandbox on my OS X machine - simply for the sake of nostalgia. Are there any non-flash implementations which can run as stand-alone applications?
Or, wait... would that mean that they're no longer geeks?
The relationship between the law and morality is a complex one. The position you are asserting is an extreme form of natural law theory. According to natural law theory, there is a necessary overlap between law and morality. Your position is an extreme form because the overlap is, effectively, entire: the prohibitions and permissions supported by law are exactly those prohibitions and permissions supported by morality.
Natural law theory has a (very) long tradition, tracing back at least to St. Aquinas.
An alternate position is that of Legal Positivism, which asserts that the law and morality are conceptually distinct. Being that they are conceptually distinct, there need not be, in principle, any overlap between the two. Although, in practice, there will always be significant overlap. However, the existence of this overlap, from the point of view of legal positivism, is not necessary.
Google "philosophy of law" and you'll find a number of sites that you can read for further details. One good site is here.
I mean, no matter what you say, or what you do, or what policies you pass, eventually someone, somewhere, will try to shave their testicles with a chainsaw.
So, uh, what program do you use?
Sorry, that was a cheap shot...
It's interesting that you suggest this scheme. Over here in Europe, several countries have started using/requiring PINs to be entered for all credit card purchases. They claim that since this scheme has been implemented, credit card fraud has fallen markedly.
Personally, I have somewhat mixed feelings about it. Credit cards have - until now - always been safe, emergency financial fallback. As long as you have your card (and haven't hit the limit) you can use it to get yourself out of any bind: buy a ticket, buy a meal, pay for a cab. Now, even if you still have your credit card, if you forget your PIN you're in a world of hurt. ("So, don't forget your PIN, dummy!" Yeah, I know. But no one ever plans on forgetting their PIN.)
Indeed, I hear that that group has been quite underprivileged for the past 200 years.
> I wouldn't have bothered dignifying this with a reply, if I'd
> noticed earlier that you were trolling.
In all honesty, I wasn't trolling. I wholeheartedly agree that writing a suite of mathematical modelling tools is educationally beneficial, but you need to realise that not all students can do this or would really benefit from it. The task is above and beyond the abilities of many students - even those who intend to become physicists and engineers.
> If I was in charge of a university's computer systems,
> absolutely no proprietary, closed source software would be
> allowed anywhere on my network, especially not the parts
> accessible to students
So, preventing your students from being unable to run Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, Visual Studio,... is educationally beneficial in what way?
Yes, closed source software has problems. So does open source. An all-out ban either way helps no one and solves nothing.
I seriously hope that was a feeble attempt at humour. Otherwise it is really, really disturbing that people actually want to watch this.
You, sir, would benefit a basic course in logic. Simply because something is the case (or becomes the case) does not imply that it ought to be the case.
> You are taking the piss, aren't you?
No, I'm not. I know that one could reconstruct the information if one had to, but, since he had already done the work, it would be nice if he released it.
Pretty pictures and animations are great, but it would be even better if he released the underlying data. Like what the Stanford GraphBase did for a handful of literary texts.
I wish people would stop iterating this claim as if it still meant now what it meant 200+ years ago. At one time, yes, it was true that an armed populace would provide an important check on the government, preventing it from becoming corrupt. But how can anyone seriously think that any number of guns owned by any number of citizens of technologically advanced Western countries could effectively hold an armed rebellion?
The U.S. military is the most technologically advanced, well-armed, and well-trained army in the history of the world. The amount of firepower and armor at its disposal is unbelievable. No citizenry, however armed by conventional firepower, would be able to hold an armed rebellion capable of overthrowing the government without being immediately and utterly crushed. The numbers just aren't there.
Now, if it were a massively popular uprising, the military might not chose to fight back. But this shouldn't be interpreted as meaning that the armed rebellion successfully overthrew the government, but, rather that there was a military coup which rode a wave of popular sentiment to destablize the government. For, in not fighting back against the armed rebellion, the military would have effectively signaled their belief that the government was not legitimate.
The point is this: believe what you like about gun ownership preserving democracy, but those days are past. The difference in military power now existing between the citizenry and the military precludes the citizenry from presenting a serious threat against the entrenched power.
Story at:
http://news.com.com/2100-1028-5168670.html
But this is just foolish. Doesn't Microsoft explicitly say that Windows is not to be used for critical systems? There are special (i.e., non-mainstream) operating systems which are expressly designed for use in critical systems so that the problems caused by worms, etc. doesn't happen. If someone dies because of a Windows worm, it's the fault of the programmer who made a bad choice of the embedded system.
Because then people could listen to a single song streamed over the net and copy it to disk using a utility like Wiretap. If you could easily obtain a complete album in the time it takes to listen to it that would completely kill their business. Now, maybe 30 seconds isn't quite long enough, but it's not too bad and seems a reasonable compromise.
I just tried out an iChat -> AIM video chat and wasn't too impressed. Although I didn't have my iSight hooked up to my Mac, my friend had a video camera hooked up to a PC and was able to initiate a one-way video chat to me. Video was pretty good from my end (I could resize it to full-screen), but it seems like AIM users are going to be stuck with a postage-stamp sized video window. Even Yahoo! Messenger provides larger video than AIM.
Can anyone verify that Windows AIM users are limited to a *very* small video window?
As someone who has worked in the Alaskan fishing industry, this is more true than you may realise. At one time, crab fisherman in Alaska were making over $50,000 for a summer's work. Or course, it was incredibly dangerous and you nearly got killed every other week, but there was good money in it. Read Spike Walker's Working on the Edge for more information.
> Manned space exploration is expensive and dangerous.
Erm, so was exploring the ocean. Magellen didn't have too easy of a time of it and Captain Cook met a rather unsavory end.
Exploration *is* dangerous. But, without meaning to sound too much like Indiana Jones, people will always be willing to risk it for fortune and glory.