> correct me if im wrong but the EU is not a sovereign nation (1) , most of its member nations hate the origanization (2) and only are considered part of it because their leaders lied them into it in the first place (3). now they are going to tell the world how to do business? (4)
Correcting you on (2), (3) -- those are too generalized. There are people in each country of EU who hate EU and those who like it. On (4) - EU is not telling the world how to do business. At least not as much as the USA is trying to. The only thing that EU is doing in this case, is telling MS (and indeed not only MS) what they have to do if they want to do business in EU. It is not trying to apply its judgement of MS to Middle East or the US, for example.
Unfortunately, the only problem is that whenever I want to buy a desktop (and I know I am going to use Linux on it), I can't normally buy one without Windows, as the price of Windows is included with the computer and the computer comes bundled with it.
The only exception is really small vendors who assemble computers themselves and thus can make the price about 30% cheaper. As an individual it is OK for me - even if I don't particularly like it. For my organization, however, I'd like to be able to buy a hundred Dells or Lenovo's without having to pay for a hundred Windows copies as well. Particulary so, because as an academic government institution we are getting all the Windows software almost for free, and it doesn't make any sense for me to get a retail copy of something that's already been paid for.
On one of the servers I had been administering we had around 5+ million file filesystem (of ~50k and 5k files). Turning off atime was a great speed increase. That, and using XFS (vs eg Reiser or ext3).
You only need a 10km diameter ice (not even rock or iron) asteroid to wipe out humanity due to aftereffects alone, not to mention quake:
Energy Released: 10 million MT (MegaTons of TNT) (Shoemaker Levy 9 collision with Jupiter: 5 million MT)
QUAKE!! Magnitude 10.3 (largest recorded Earthquake: 9.5)
Crater Diameter: 67.3 km Crater Depth: 1.0 km
Ohh! Look at all the dust in Earth's atmosphere! It's going to block the sunlight and make it very very cold there for many years. There will be another wave of mass extinctions. You humans will not survive.
Now, don't get me wrong, but since when sexual activity has been prescribed at high-school and lack of it is labelled as "delayed"?
I mean - it would be rational to think that smarter kids (or at least those with better grades) would on average spend more time studying than, excuse the pun, fucking around. Still plenty of years for sex as well.
Quite so. The only catch in my opinion is that while we can make reasonable assumptions about the amount of money we can make in time X, we have no idea how much (of the finite) time we actually have.
Basically, the latter. If you run out of time, you can't earn any money (and it doesn't matter).
So in my eyes time (to spend as you please) is always > money; basically the same "time is money", but reversed "money is time", with emphasis on time being the more valuable.
Obviously, as Eskarel posted below, there has to be some balance. I would just re-note that while we can make reasonable assumptions about how much money we can earn in time X, we have no idea whatsoever how much time we have actually got to spend in our lives, unless we make assumptions like "oh I will for sure live at least until 89".
The way I see it, basically, nothing can guarantee you any time beside the present you are having now. You may die tomorrow - or in a couple of minutes, same as I - a freak brick falling off a building, a car whose driver lost control, you name it. Yes. The odds might sound heavily in your favour of that not happening, of course. But out of those 1 people in 10'000 who die in a car crash every day -- it wouldn't matter that your chances for that are slim, if it WERE you.
I have a feeling (just my impressions here, not neccessarily much correlation with reality) that this is something a lot of people here (Europe) seem to be aware of. You only HAVE the time you have NOW at this instant when you are reading this. There are way too many people around who have found out they have lots less time than they imagined.
So, in my book, you can always earn a bit more money. You can't get MORE time than you have, you can only spend the seconds you possibly have.
Down here (Latvia, East Europe), it has been a boost in the past couple years. In major towns you can typically get access to 10Mbit+ Ethernet for around $20/month - there are plenty of tiny ISPs who lease access to fiberoptic lines or radiolinks from the couple of major carriers and then get their area connected one by one.
In the rest of the country where you aren't so lucky, you can for the most part get access to 512k to 2Mbit DSL by the local telco, which strangely enough seems to work better now than before. The coverage isn't full, but it is improving. If everything else fails, you should be able to get access nearly everywhere in the country via GPRS, EDGE(up to 236Kbps) or HSDPA(3,6Mbps) if you've got the mobile.
The concept of "foreign" traffic (ie. accessing anything outside your country), which you had to pay for by megabyte trasferred, is now almost completely gone.
All in all, major steps in getting connected and getting broadband, all in the past 2 years or so.
> (which the EU seems to want to do for things that benefit it, but seem wont to do when the statistics are less than flattering)
Well, that is because EU is a union of a type which is pretty rare (if not unique) historically. Within EU there are (countries) proponents of the view that it should be more like a single country - including common foreign policy, for example, and those who want it to be as divided as possible, and only use EU for their own (typically, economical) goals. Depending on which people are in charge on which commissions, these things shift all the time.
AFAI have looked, port 80 is the one that is least likely to be stopped by firewalls.
There are a number of small (and I mean tiny - think 100 clients max) ISPs around my city alone, whose networking expertise is close to nil. They go with default settings of the equipment they get. So even if they put up a firewall of sorts to protect their clients, it is left at default settings.
The fact is there are not only tons of users out there without a clue, but a nice bunch of ISPs as well and sloppy network admins, sometimes even of large organizations.
If only it were programs only that could be patented.
Unfortunately the loudest trivial cases we hear about are kind of organizational or visual, such as Amazon's one-click, etc. Which means that there are plenty of people who deem themselves capable of pointing out an infringement and they don't even supposedly need any much technical knowledge about anything to do that.
This is assuming people make rational choices, when in fact it is usually not the case.
(I don't have the links on hands, but there have been studies, I think even referenced in Slashdot, about how people really don't follow the "rational economics" model)
It really depends on the way particular stuff is made.
For example, a lot of major "folk" vodkas are made in a way which doesn't even closely resemble their adverts.
Ditto for eg. East European sparkling wines - a (comparatively major) brand servicing Russia switched from making "natural" bubbles to just adding CO2 a couple years ago.
Same for a popular semi-soft drink "kvass" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass) [fermented mildly alcoholic beverage very popular in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries].
Whereas in Soviet times kvass had sort of mild "bubbles" coming from fermented bread, and was a pretty good drink, since both sugar and CO2 were too expensive to add, it is now basically the same kind of artificial sugary added-CO2 drink the worst examples of which are Coke, Pepsi and 7up.
There were a number of propoganda-style books back in the USSR about the "bad capitalist way of living".
One of the interesting ones tried to summarize the lives of then-popular richest people of the US. I think among them was Paul Getty, Hugh Hefner, Howard Hughes(sp?) and some others. And among other things, there was a thing which stuck in my adolescent mind and which (contrary to most other things of that time) seems to make sense even now. I think the book cited Paul Getty as declaring that "white edible things are bad for you - white flour, white sugar, etc". And the book rather acidly remarked that it seemed that as long as you were fabulously rich, your diet wasn't of any particular interest, since it was the wealth that helped ensure you live a long life.
1) the string concatation technique being present in several pretty popular (and awful) PHP books, and (afai remember) in the PHP documentation itself, thus becoming defacto "standard";
2) The general ignorance of a significant part of PHP developers of any database abstraction layers and in fact anything but the magic LAMP.
> At least for my market, I have to conclude that all the quality people have jobs, 'cuz I can't find a single one.
I'd say it goes for most of the markets? You either have to snatch the bright kids at college level (they'd be missing experience though, for sure), or just try to erm "get" quality people from their current jobs, it seems.
> could be explained to anyone in a way which allowed them to understand the concepts without needing an advanced degree in the subject.
Fair enough, I could subscribe to this.
> Any contributor who says it is impossible to write an encyclopedia article which describes a topic with reasonable accuracy in a way which is accessible to everyone is simply wrong.
No. There is an important distinction between "not needing advanced degree in the subject" and "accessible to everyone". When you say "everybody" you surely don't mean really EVERYONE, or would you say that every Wikipedia article needs to be understandable by a child of age of 10?
> I've even explained the basics of computers to a redneck by using a beer metaphor. And I've explained the components of computer to my mother using a writing desk metaphor.
> It's an online encyclopedia. People with the technical understanding to read NEJofM aren't going to be coming to Wikipedia to do research on Asperger's Syndrome. Bob Smith the accountant, however, may. If Bob can't understand what's written, then Wikipedia has failed in it's mission.
Every piece of writing assumes some level of general knowledge, starting with the reading and language competency. An encyclopedia is valued also for a degree of precision. I would say that Wikipedia science articles I have encountered are quite understandable by somebody who doesn't have any degree (such as myself). Thus a level compatible with high school science class seems to be sufficient to me.
I have no degree, yet I find Wikipedia's science articles I've needed to consult so far (including the ones quoted in TFA), written well enough, whenever I need some information or reference.
I'd value some extra accuracy in the encyclopedia (as far as Wikipedia claims that title) over chewing it down to people who have trouble with sciences. That's what external references in the articles should be good for though.
There seems to be a conception that everybody should be able to understand everything. It reminds me of an old joke (note, I have no idea of your nationality and it is not meant personally):
An European thinks: I don't understand him, so what's wrong with me? An American thinks: I don't understand him, so what's wrong with him?
Slashdot Mirror
Law > contract.
> correct me if im wrong but the EU is not a sovereign nation (1) , most of its member nations hate the origanization (2) and only are considered part of it because their leaders lied them into it in the first place (3). now they are going to tell the world how to do business? (4)
Correcting you on (2), (3) -- those are too generalized. There are people in each country of EU who hate EU and those who like it. On (4) - EU is not telling the world how to do business. At least not as much as the USA is trying to. The only thing that EU is doing in this case, is telling MS (and indeed not only MS) what they have to do if they want to do business in EU. It is not trying to apply its judgement of MS to Middle East or the US, for example.
There is sense in what you say.
Unfortunately, the only problem is that whenever I want to buy a desktop (and I know I am going to use Linux on it), I can't normally buy one without Windows, as the price of Windows is included with the computer and the computer comes bundled with it.
The only exception is really small vendors who assemble computers themselves and thus can make the price about 30% cheaper. As an individual it is OK for me - even if I don't particularly like it. For my organization, however, I'd like to be able to buy a hundred Dells or Lenovo's without having to pay for a hundred Windows copies as well. Particulary so, because as an academic government institution we are getting all the Windows software almost for free, and it doesn't make any sense for me to get a retail copy of something that's already been paid for.
That was a copy/paste from the linked webpage :). But it could be any bacteria or maybe an insect. They should survive allright.
On one of the servers I had been administering we had around 5+ million file filesystem (of ~50k and 5k files). Turning off atime was a great speed increase. That, and using XFS (vs eg Reiser or ext3).
You only need a 10km diameter ice (not even rock or iron) asteroid to wipe out humanity due to aftereffects alone, not to mention quake:
Energy Released: 10 million MT (MegaTons of TNT)
(Shoemaker Levy 9 collision with Jupiter: 5 million MT)
QUAKE!! Magnitude 10.3 (largest recorded Earthquake: 9.5)
Crater Diameter: 67.3 km
Crater Depth: 1.0 km
Ohh! Look at all the dust in Earth's atmosphere! It's going to block the sunlight and make it very very cold there for many years. There will be another wave of mass extinctions. You humans will not survive.
See http://janus.astro.umd.edu/astro/impact/
Excuse me?
Now, don't get me wrong, but since when sexual activity has been prescribed at high-school and lack of it is labelled as "delayed"?
I mean - it would be rational to think that smarter kids (or at least those with better grades) would on average spend more time studying than, excuse the pun, fucking around. Still plenty of years for sex as well.
What about their America's Army itself?
Quite so. The only catch in my opinion is that while we can make reasonable assumptions about the amount of money we can make in time X, we have no idea how much (of the finite) time we actually have.
Basically, the latter. If you run out of time, you can't earn any money (and it doesn't matter).
So in my eyes time (to spend as you please) is always > money; basically the same "time is money", but reversed "money is time", with emphasis on time being the more valuable.
Obviously, as Eskarel posted below, there has to be some balance. I would just re-note that while we can make reasonable assumptions about how much money we can earn in time X, we have no idea whatsoever how much time we have actually got to spend in our lives, unless we make assumptions like "oh I will for sure live at least until 89".
> You have a guaranteed amount of time,
I believe this is an interesting thing...
The way I see it, basically, nothing can guarantee you any time beside the present you are having now. You may die tomorrow - or in a couple of minutes, same as I - a freak brick falling off a building, a car whose driver lost control, you name it. Yes. The odds might sound heavily in your favour of that not happening, of course. But out of those 1 people in 10'000 who die in a car crash every day -- it wouldn't matter that your chances for that are slim, if it WERE you.
I have a feeling (just my impressions here, not neccessarily much correlation with reality) that this is something a lot of people here (Europe) seem to be aware of. You only HAVE the time you have NOW at this instant when you are reading this. There are way too many people around who have found out they have lots less time than they imagined.
So, in my book, you can always earn a bit more money. You can't get MORE time than you have, you can only spend the seconds you possibly have.
Down here (Latvia, East Europe), it has been a boost in the past couple years. In major towns you can typically get access to 10Mbit+ Ethernet for around $20/month - there are plenty of tiny ISPs who lease access to fiberoptic lines or radiolinks from the couple of major carriers and then get their area connected one by one.
In the rest of the country where you aren't so lucky, you can for the most part get access to 512k to 2Mbit DSL by the local telco, which strangely enough seems to work better now than before. The coverage isn't full, but it is improving. If everything else fails, you should be able to get access nearly everywhere in the country via GPRS, EDGE(up to 236Kbps) or HSDPA(3,6Mbps) if you've got the mobile.
The concept of "foreign" traffic (ie. accessing anything outside your country), which you had to pay for by megabyte trasferred, is now almost completely gone.
All in all, major steps in getting connected and getting broadband, all in the past 2 years or so.
> (which the EU seems to want to do for things that benefit it, but seem wont to do when the statistics are less than flattering)
Well, that is because EU is a union of a type which is pretty rare (if not unique) historically. Within EU there are (countries) proponents of the view that it should be more like a single country - including common foreign policy, for example, and those who want it to be as divided as possible, and only use EU for their own (typically, economical) goals. Depending on which people are in charge on which commissions, these things shift all the time.
AFAI have looked, port 80 is the one that is least likely to be stopped by firewalls.
There are a number of small (and I mean tiny - think 100 clients max) ISPs around my city alone, whose networking expertise is close to nil. They go with default settings of the equipment they get. So even if they put up a firewall of sorts to protect their clients, it is left at default settings.
The fact is there are not only tons of users out there without a clue, but a nice bunch of ISPs as well and sloppy network admins, sometimes even of large organizations.
If only it were programs only that could be patented.
Unfortunately the loudest trivial cases we hear about are kind of organizational or visual, such as Amazon's one-click, etc. Which means that there are plenty of people who deem themselves capable of pointing out an infringement and they don't even supposedly need any much technical knowledge about anything to do that.
This is assuming people make rational choices, when in fact it is usually not the case.
(I don't have the links on hands, but there have been studies, I think even referenced in Slashdot, about how people really don't follow the "rational economics" model)
> Ten Thousand Years Of Killing, Just Because People Are Being Told The Other Is Different.
Well, if the Other is no different, you don't have that good a feeling when killing him anyway.
It really depends on the way particular stuff is made.
For example, a lot of major "folk" vodkas are made in a way which doesn't even closely resemble their adverts.
Ditto for eg. East European sparkling wines - a (comparatively major) brand servicing Russia switched from making "natural" bubbles to just adding CO2 a couple years ago.
Same for a popular semi-soft drink "kvass" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kvass) [fermented mildly alcoholic beverage very popular in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries].
Whereas in Soviet times kvass had sort of mild "bubbles" coming from fermented bread, and was a pretty good drink, since both sugar and CO2 were too expensive to add, it is now basically the same kind of artificial sugary added-CO2 drink the worst examples of which are Coke, Pepsi and 7up.
There were a number of propoganda-style books back in the USSR about the "bad capitalist way of living".
One of the interesting ones tried to summarize the lives of then-popular richest people of the US. I think among them was Paul Getty, Hugh Hefner, Howard Hughes(sp?) and some others. And among other things, there was a thing which stuck in my adolescent mind and which (contrary to most other things of that time) seems to make sense even now. I think the book cited Paul Getty as declaring that "white edible things are bad for you - white flour, white sugar, etc". And the book rather acidly remarked that it seemed that as long as you were fabulously rich, your diet wasn't of any particular interest, since it was the wealth that helped ensure you live a long life.
Well, the number one reason for the lawsuit might actually be that Apple actually WILL be producing a vibrator...
Well said. I was going to write something to the same point, but you have made a better summary than I would have.
I think it is due to 2 reasons:
1) the string concatation technique being present in several pretty popular (and awful) PHP books, and (afai remember) in the PHP documentation itself, thus becoming defacto "standard";
2) The general ignorance of a significant part of PHP developers of any database abstraction layers and in fact anything but the magic LAMP.
> At least for my market, I have to conclude that all the quality people have jobs, 'cuz I can't find a single one.
I'd say it goes for most of the markets? You either have to snatch the bright kids at college level (they'd be missing experience though, for sure), or just try to erm "get" quality people from their current jobs, it seems.
> could be explained to anyone in a way which allowed them to understand the concepts without needing an advanced degree in the subject.
Fair enough, I could subscribe to this.
> Any contributor who says it is impossible to write an encyclopedia article which describes a topic with reasonable accuracy in a way which is accessible to everyone is simply wrong.
No. There is an important distinction between "not needing advanced degree in the subject" and "accessible to everyone". When you say "everybody" you surely don't mean really EVERYONE, or would you say that every Wikipedia article needs to be understandable by a child of age of 10?
> I've even explained the basics of computers to a redneck by using a beer metaphor.
And I've explained the components of computer to my mother using a writing desk metaphor.
> It's an online encyclopedia. People with the technical understanding to read NEJofM aren't going to be coming to Wikipedia to do research on Asperger's Syndrome. Bob Smith the accountant, however, may. If Bob can't understand what's written, then Wikipedia has failed in it's mission.
Every piece of writing assumes some level of general knowledge, starting with the reading and language competency.
An encyclopedia is valued also for a degree of precision. I would say that Wikipedia science articles I have encountered are quite understandable by somebody who doesn't have any degree (such as myself). Thus a level compatible with high school science class seems to be sufficient to me.
I'd value some extra accuracy in the encyclopedia (as far as Wikipedia claims that title) over chewing it down to people who have trouble with sciences. That's what external references in the articles should be good for though.
There seems to be a conception that everybody should be able to understand everything. It reminds me of an old joke (note, I have no idea of your nationality and it is not meant personally):
An European thinks: I don't understand him, so what's wrong with me?
An American thinks: I don't understand him, so what's wrong with him?
Although in this particular case, I'd refer more to Robert Sheckley's wonderful little story.