I did look at the histogram. Feel free to enlighten me how you get that the image was tampered with, from looking at that histogram.
In a predominantly red scene, you will get a red histogram that peaks in the high values, while green and blue will peak at lower values. That's what I'd expect, and that is what I see -- plus sharp peaks that were caused by the bits of the rover that are within the frame.
Now, take a look at the histogram for that other picture I mentioned, the one with the yellowish-green leaves. Notice the near-absence of blue. By your logic, that would prove that that image was tampered with; you suggested "fixing" the Mars image by normalizing all channels to the 0..255 range... Apparently you don't understand that real-life scenes very rarely have channels occupying the entire available range.
To summarize, your analysis of this picture is such blatant BS, and the conclusion you draw from it so paranoid, that I think comparing you with a moon-landing-denier was perfectly valid. If you're going to get all offended at that, just spend a little more time *thinking* before you post next time.
Once again, another BS color image from Mars.
Anyone who cares to, do this: Open the image in Gimp or Photoshop.
Look at the per-channel histograms. You will see that someone compressed the Blue and Green channels before posting the image.
You must be one of those people who believe the moon landings were faked.
Take a look at this image in the Gimp.
OMG, someone squeezed the blue all the way out!!!
Hint: Mars really is red, and being almost entirely desert with plenty of wind, there will be red dust in the air.
are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km?
Sure, why not. It's not like there won't be parks, squares, expedition, lanes, views.. dense cities are essentially one mega building already.
I've lived in some dense environments, and I could always open a window and let in the actual outside air. I could step onto my balcony and actually be outside. I could walk down a few flights of stairs and out the front door, and be entirely outside of the building.
Put me in an arcology and I'd go nuts before the first day was out. No open sky? No thanks. Not for any amount of money in the world.
It's funny, but I've never heard people openly talk about how much they hate a Microsoft product before. Personally I think Microsoft has made a LOT crappier products than Vista. Outlook, IE6, and Exchange are a lot worse than Vista.
It's always puzzled me why Microsoft is so evil -- because, in my experience at least, there was never any reason for them to be that way.
For example, back in the late 1980s, I had a Macintosh, and my favorite word processor was Microsoft Word 3 (for Macintosh, obviously). Its user interface had one or two flaws, but it was mostly good, and in terms of functionality and performance, it was the best of the bunch: it had an outliner, TOC and index generation, style sheets, an equation editor... and it performed well even with little memory; I used it to edit complex 100-page documents on an original Mac with 1 megabyte of RAM.
I've been very happy with several of Microsoft's other flagship products as well: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP; Office 97, Office 2000...
As far as I can tell, Microsoft became the giant they are because they had good products. I was there when everyone used WordPerfect, and I witnessed the ascendancy of Word; I saw people who had used MS-DOS for years switch to Windows... These changes all happened because the products in question were good. The "monopoly" that many people say Microsoft has, is, in my experience, simply the result of the superiority of their products compared to the competition.
Vista seems to be a big change because this is one of those rare moments that a major MS product just... sucks.
I, personally, am not interested in Vista, because XP works fine for me... and, perhaps even more importantly: I realize that I will have to pay for an upgrade every now and then, but Vista is overpriced, *and* it has an activation scheme that I will try as hard as I can to avoid. With XP, there is a limit to how many computers I can install it on. Fair enough. With Vista, I'll have to beg for a new activation if I so much as replace my video card.
...erm, WTF? I'm an OSS fan, but when it comes to actually *using* systems, I like Windows XP way more than any Linux distro... But I'll switch to Linux and deal with its problems, rather than tie a noose around my neck and hand the other end of the rope to Microsoft, the way that Vista requires me to do.
Hint to MS: your company is a success mostly because you make good products. Your anti-competitive shenanigans probably helped you, too... but they won't keep you afloat in the long run. Try focusing on making good products again, like you did so well with Word for Macintosh 3, Word for Windows 6, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc... do that, and you won't have to bully people into buying your products; your products will sell themselves... again.
I'm an atheist, have been all my life. Yet, I was always nice to my teddy bear. It's not like I believe that the thing is alive, has feelings, has a soul, or anything like that... but still, even today, I'll make sure that it sits in a comfortable spot. When someone I care about dies, their mortal remains are no more capable of suffering than my inanimate teddy bear, and yet, I'll do my best to give them a decent funeral. Why? Because it feels wrong not to, that's all.
This is called Anthropomorphism. You are subconsciously attributing human attributes to nonhumans (a teddy bear and a corpse) and empathizing with the feelings and comfort levels they don't have.
I'm not "subconsciously" anything. Life has conditioned me to be nice to living things; when I'm nasty, bad things tend to happen -- I get punished, people take revenge, or, I may reflect on my actions later on, empathize with my victims, and feel guilt or remorse later on.
Treating a doll or a corpse like just any old thing may not have any of these repercussions, but if the object in question is sufficiently similar to a living thing, my trained reflexes may just kick in and make me feel bad anyway, even though there is no objective reason to feel that way.
To assume that there is anything spiritual going on in situations like that is facile at best.
I never assumed it was the reason, as I clearly stated in my post. I suggested that spirituality was the most likely explanation because that is the most common reason for funerary preparations, when you look at all the cultures around the world. Thus, it is most likely that is the case for a culture we don't know enough about. It could still be any of the other reasons I listed.
My point is that I disagree with the notion that the "most likely" explanation for funeral rites is spirituality. Plain and simple "common courtesy" explains it just fine; you may argue that that sentiment is, strictly speaking, misplaced when dealing with the dead, but my point is that people are so used to dealing with the living that they will tend to extend those same courtesies to the dead as well, not necessarily because they have any kind of spirituality, but simply because the dead don't seem like just "objects".
You can take a hammer and use it to shatter a rock into bits without feeling any emotion beyond the fun of just doing it... But taking a hammer and using it to smash in a corpse's face is something that most people would flatly refuse to do... Regardless of how they feel about religion, spirituality, or the afterlife. It just feels wrong, because a corpse is too much like a living thing.
For all we know they buried them alive and they simply died in that posture, or these people had no belief in an afterlife, but enjoyed arranging corpses as an art form. Still, spiritual beliefs are the most likely sounding explanation to me.
"Most likely"?
I'm an atheist, have been all my life. Yet, I was always nice to my teddy bear. It's not like I believe that the thing is alive, has feelings, has a soul, or anything like that... but still, even today, I'll make sure that it sits in a comfortable spot.
When someone I care about dies, their mortal remains are no more capable of suffering than my inanimate teddy bear, and yet, I'll do my best to give them a decent funeral. Why? Because it feels wrong not to, that's all.
To assume that there is anything spiritual going on in situations like that is facile at best. I believe there is a simply psychological explanation for these phenomena: all of us who aren't pathologists or undertakers spend almost all of our lives interacting with the living. When we see a dead person, or a doll, what jumps out at us is *not* that they are dead, but rather, how much they are like the living; in the case of the dead, we have to bury or cremate them because things will get pretty nasty pretty soon if we don't, but *still*, we don't just casually toss them into a hole in the ground or into a furnace... we dress them up nice, and we move and position them *gently*... Because that's how we treat people in general.
Just because someone's dead is no reason to be mean to them, that's all.
English is my third language, and I can read it with no problem. My first two languages are Dutch and German, FWIW.
I think this is pretty interesting. I'm going to write a little program to randomize text in this manner, and then I'll feed some ebooks through it. I wonder how readable chemistry texts will be after this kind of treatment.:-)
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day? If yes then I believe this should require a warrant. Else, what's the difference except it costs much less and is more discreet.
There, fixed that for ya.
I know, who cares about spelling? Complaining about orthography is commonly regarded as politically incorrect. Yada yada yada.
So, if you want to shorten difference to diff, I guess you're just lazy, so, whatever...
But the fact that nobody on this thread so far (at least as far as I can see with my threshold set at -1) has managed to spell discreet correctly... that bothers me a bit. Seriously, look it up. There is a difference between discrete and discreet.
Damn, English isn't even my first language, and it hurts even me to see it butchered on Slashdot all the time!
The nice thing about the old URL bar is that it allows you to go back to recently visited sites with only two mouse clicks. No typing required at all.
It would have been better if selecting a URL from the drop-down had actually moved it to the top of the list, so that the most recently visited entries would always be at the top, but for some reason (and despite many requests, just check the bugzilla), the FF gods decided that that feature, which Mozilla had had since time immemorial, should no longer exist. I guess this was when I started to get that creepy feeling that the FF architects no longer cared what actual users think, since they are so much smarter and will therefore do our thinking for us.
FWIW, I actually created and submitted a patch for the FF2 URL bar, but it was not accepted. Developers too busy with the Awesome Bar, I guess... So now, after first having seen the URL bar take an (admittedly small) turn for the worse in FF compared to Mozilla, now we have this monstrosity that shows tons of pages whose URL I never typed; instead of it being a convenient most-recently-selected list, it has become a search engine.
I don't object to improvements and new features, but why on Earth the FF architects feel this intense need to remove a popular feature is beyond me. Is it stupidity or arrogance or what? The comments here on/. also tend to be in the same vein: the Awesome Bar is better, if you don't like it there is something wrong with you -- obviously never having paid attention to the criticism that useful functionality was removed. Sheesh.
What makes the Fermi Paradox so powerful is it only takes one. It only takes one civilization creating a sublight self-reproducing probe to geometrically fill a galaxy in around 1-10 million years, a blip in the history of the galaxy. Or, using sleep ships, a civilization could fill the galaxy in around the same amount of time.
I think that the problem with that reasoning is that it doesn't take the difficulty of distance into account. Between the stars, you basically have nothing but hard vacuum and absolute-zero cold. Maintaining life support in those conditions means you have to take everything with you, and that is going to limit the distance you can travel if you expect to arrive at your destination alive... I don't know what the practical limit on distance would be, but even if I were to assume that you could traverse several hundred light years, you would still be talking about only a few hundred or thousand stars within your reach, not billions.
In other words, I agree that there could be many, many civilizations out there, but the odds of any of them being within reach still seem incredibly slim to me.
There seems to be a flawed assumption underlying the Fermi Paradox, namely, that intelligent life will invariably make a concerted effort to contact other intelligent life on other planets. I can think of two good reasons not to do that: first, if interstellar travel is impractical, then those other civilizations will never be more than pen pals, and with interstellar e-mail round-trip times likely to be many years or even centuries, why bother?
And second, if interstellar travel is practical, do you really want to broadcast the fact that your planet is habitable to all those nice Kzinti out there? We have enough problems without having to deal with alien invasions, thank you very much.
Just because people don't get "keyed up" over eating, drinking, talking to a passenger while negotiating busy traffic, changing tracks on a CD, etc., doesn't mean those activities are any less dangerous than the ones they do worry about. It just means they don't get it yet.
Heck, I've had a couple of almost-accidents while fiddling with the radio or rummaging through a bag for that bottle of water. Guess what: I got the message, counted my blessings that those almost-accidents were just that (no thanks to me, all thanks to the other drivers who were alert enough to avoid me, and nice enough not to beat me up at the next rest stop)... And I just don't do that kind of stuff any more.
People tend not to stick to their usual style when they're angry, and after the installation nightmare described in the memo, anyone would be pissed.
As far as Gates referring to the microsoft.com web site team as "they" is concerned: I work for a large company (100,000+ employees) and nobody uses "we" vs. "they" consistently. "We" can mean "our team", "our division", "the company" -- but at the same time "they" can refer to any subset of those people as well: "our servers are really slow today... I wish the admins would figure it out already. They need to get their act together."
I agree that network transparency is a key feature of X, but it doesn't always work very well. Here at the office over the LAN, it's great, but doing a remote X login from home is bloody awful. It's not for lack of bandwidth -- I have a cable modem -- but the latency is killing it; while the X protocol is pretty good at avoiding unnecessary round trips, you can never eliminate them entirely (and I also suspect that Gnome does not play very nice with X in general).
Using VNC avoids the latency problem, and this option is even available for Mac users: in System Preferences, go to Sharing, and enable Screen Sharing; you can then connect to it using Chicken of the VNC (from a Mac) or RealVNC free edition (from Windows or Linux), and probably using other VNC clients as well. In RealVNC, you have to make sure to set the encoding to "Hextile" before connecting; also, when logging in, the connection will be dropped when you go from the login screen to the desktop... Minor annoyances as far as I'm concerned; I can use my Mac desktop from my home laptop, and that's the main thing.
The reason why they are "compelled to make every iteration a bit bigger", is often due to safety standards. Else cars like the Commodore (Pontiac G8/Vauxhal VXR) wouldn't be so boxy and bulky now a days, compared to a few years ago when it was a lot more streamlined.
Those increasingly strict safety standards still seem to allow cars like the Toyota Yaris (which is what I drive nowadays).
Then the rest of the weight gain is imposed by everyone wanting a cheap car.
Please explain how everyone's desire to own a cheap car causes car manufacturers to makes cars heavier, not lighter?
Wow, where do you live? Where I live (New Jersey, U.S.), out of all of those things you listed, only air bags are mandatory. The 2008 Civic has air bags and anti-lock brakes, but no stability control and no traction control.
I'd be surprised if those air bags and anti-lock brakes add more than 100 kg to the car's total weight. That's nothing compared to the fact that the 2008 Civic is as large as a late-1970s mid-size family sedan... While the original Civic was a compact. This kind of size inflation has been going on throughout the industry.
I find it hard to believe that a few air bags add 500 kg to the weight of any car. Rather, in the eternal bigger-is-better orgy, car manufacturers feel compelled to make every iteration of any model a bit bigger than the previous one. That 2008 Honda Civic, for example, is larger than a 1979 Honda Accord, and let's not even talk about the fact that the smallest engine you can get it with (in the U.S.) is a 1.8 liter 145 hp monster...
I just bought a T61 with Linux preinstalled. I saved a little over $100 compared to the same model with Windows, and of course I saved myself the pain of getting wireless etc. to work in Linux.
I shrank the Linux partition and installed Windows XP (which I had lying around anyway) in the freed-up space. The only tricky bit was getting XP to recognize the hard drive; I don't remember the details off the top of my head, but the disk controller can operate in two modes (see BIOS settings), and SuSE only recognizes it in the one and XP only in the other. It was easy to find instructions on how to resolve this by a few minutes of googling, and everything else was a simple matter of downloading and installing a bunch of drivers from Lenovo's web site.
So, $100 saved, no Linux configuration headaches, and I'm running XP SP3 instead of Vista. Good deal.
A little-mentioned affect on privacy is how RFID antennas could easily be placed around campus and around Seattle, tracking students as they go about their lives. That effect is painfully easy to prevent: just wrap the card in tinfoil (not just useful for making hats (TM)) and only take it out when you actually use it. Want to ride the bus anonymously? Pay cash.
N.B. The EZ-Pass system we use here in the Northeast, which uses RFID chips to identify cars for toll collection purposes, actually explains how to disable the tag by storing it in a conducting plastic bag, which they provide.
What I'd really like to see is an HBO-type mini-series treatment with 10-12 hour long episodes. I felt like they were able to do convincing political drama on Rome, so why not use that format for something like Dune? While I agree that that's probably the only way to do Dune justice, I can't see anyone raising the money for it. HBO has had to cut much less ambitious miniseries, like Rome and Carnivale, short because of production costs; I fear shooting Dune would be even more expensive.
Of course, Dune is a great novel, perhaps the greatest classic of the Sci-Fi genre... But after two disappointing attempts to bring it to the screen, maybe people should rethink the viability of turning an epic with such a convoluted backstory into a movie.
Now, Ringworld, on the other hand... That's a classic novel that just aches to be made into a movie. A simple, easy to follow adventure story, with interesting characters and plenty of potential for awesome visuals. *crosses fingers*
That's what the hippy's thought in the 1960s with free love, drug law reform, and peace. Look at that generation now... Hmmm... Seems to me that the hippies were brought down in the end because they were too confident they would win; they underestimated just how much The Establishment hated them, and how far it would go in terms of character assassination, and repression by law and in the workplace. The sheeple cheered as the Benevolent Corporations kicked the hippies' collective ass, threw it in jail, or sent it to Vietnam.
I think public perception of the Benevolent Corporations has changed a bit since then, though. Too many of the abuses and criminal conspiracies, that the flower children accused the establishment of, have actually proved to be true, and the establishment isn't helping its cause by allowing CEOs to rake in astronomical pay packages while simultaneously transferring jobs to China.
Just because Bob Dylan was premature when he said that the times were a-changin', doesn't mean such predictions will always be wrong. All it takes is for the establishment to alienate enough people, and the way Big Corporate has been behaving during the last 20-odd years, that kind of critical mass just might be closer than you think. The fact that people like Michael Moore and Barack Obama are enjoying mainstream success is something I wouldn't have expected 10 years ago.
Give me a break. The Chunnel and the Concorde were 50/50 partnerships with the UK And your point is...? Cooperating with the UK on these projects means France doesn't get credit?
I thought cooperation was a good thing. Does an accomplishment only count if you do it on your own?
and their food & wine is a mark of their previous couple thousand years, not since 1900. I'd love to see you try that line on the farmers, vintners, and chefs of France. Like they don't have to work hard to produce the fine things they do. Just because that tradition is old, doesn't mean the work takes care of itself today!
You just named a very short list of impressive accomplishments, even including those. The US, UK, Germany and other rivals to France do that every day before breakfast. Very short? I can't help noticing that you're not even trying to demonstrate how the US, UK, Germany, and other rivals outdo France every day. Let's hear it -- I'm listening.
Slashdot Mirror
I did look at the histogram. Feel free to enlighten me how you get that the image was tampered with, from looking at that histogram.
In a predominantly red scene, you will get a red histogram that peaks in the high values, while green and blue will peak at lower values. That's what I'd expect, and that is what I see -- plus sharp peaks that were caused by the bits of the rover that are within the frame.
Now, take a look at the histogram for that other picture I mentioned, the one with the yellowish-green leaves. Notice the near-absence of blue. By your logic, that would prove that that image was tampered with; you suggested "fixing" the Mars image by normalizing all channels to the 0..255 range... Apparently you don't understand that real-life scenes very rarely have channels occupying the entire available range.
To summarize, your analysis of this picture is such blatant BS, and the conclusion you draw from it so paranoid, that I think comparing you with a moon-landing-denier was perfectly valid. If you're going to get all offended at that, just spend a little more time *thinking* before you post next time.
Once again, another BS color image from Mars. Anyone who cares to, do this: Open the image in Gimp or Photoshop. Look at the per-channel histograms. You will see that someone compressed the Blue and Green channels before posting the image.
You must be one of those people who believe the moon landings were faked.
Take a look at this image in the Gimp.
OMG, someone squeezed the blue all the way out!!!
Hint: Mars really is red, and being almost entirely desert with plenty of wind, there will be red dust in the air.
The 5.25" optical disc format
CDs and their successors are 120 mm across -- that's about 4.72".
are people willing to live in a mega building of 2.3 sq km?
Sure, why not. It's not like there won't be parks, squares, expedition, lanes, views.. dense cities are essentially one mega building already.
I've lived in some dense environments, and I could always open a window and let in the actual outside air. I could step onto my balcony and actually be outside. I could walk down a few flights of stairs and out the front door, and be entirely outside of the building.
Put me in an arcology and I'd go nuts before the first day was out. No open sky? No thanks. Not for any amount of money in the world.
It's funny, but I've never heard people openly talk about how much they hate a Microsoft product before. Personally I think Microsoft has made a LOT crappier products than Vista. Outlook, IE6, and Exchange are a lot worse than Vista.
It's always puzzled me why Microsoft is so evil -- because, in my experience at least, there was never any reason for them to be that way.
For example, back in the late 1980s, I had a Macintosh, and my favorite word processor was Microsoft Word 3 (for Macintosh, obviously). Its user interface had one or two flaws, but it was mostly good, and in terms of functionality and performance, it was the best of the bunch: it had an outliner, TOC and index generation, style sheets, an equation editor... and it performed well even with little memory; I used it to edit complex 100-page documents on an original Mac with 1 megabyte of RAM.
I've been very happy with several of Microsoft's other flagship products as well: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP; Office 97, Office 2000...
As far as I can tell, Microsoft became the giant they are because they had good products. I was there when everyone used WordPerfect, and I witnessed the ascendancy of Word; I saw people who had used MS-DOS for years switch to Windows... These changes all happened because the products in question were good. The "monopoly" that many people say Microsoft has, is, in my experience, simply the result of the superiority of their products compared to the competition.
Vista seems to be a big change because this is one of those rare moments that a major MS product just... sucks.
I, personally, am not interested in Vista, because XP works fine for me... and, perhaps even more importantly: I realize that I will have to pay for an upgrade every now and then, but Vista is overpriced, *and* it has an activation scheme that I will try as hard as I can to avoid. With XP, there is a limit to how many computers I can install it on. Fair enough. With Vista, I'll have to beg for a new activation if I so much as replace my video card.
...erm, WTF? I'm an OSS fan, but when it comes to actually *using* systems, I like Windows XP way more than any Linux distro... But I'll switch to Linux and deal with its problems, rather than tie a noose around my neck and hand the other end of the rope to Microsoft, the way that Vista requires me to do.
Hint to MS: your company is a success mostly because you make good products. Your anti-competitive shenanigans probably helped you, too... but they won't keep you afloat in the long run. Try focusing on making good products again, like you did so well with Word for Macintosh 3, Word for Windows 6, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, etc... do that, and you won't have to bully people into buying your products; your products will sell themselves... again.
I'm an atheist, have been all my life. Yet, I was always nice to my teddy bear. It's not like I believe that the thing is alive, has feelings, has a soul, or anything like that... but still, even today, I'll make sure that it sits in a comfortable spot. When someone I care about dies, their mortal remains are no more capable of suffering than my inanimate teddy bear, and yet, I'll do my best to give them a decent funeral. Why? Because it feels wrong not to, that's all.
This is called Anthropomorphism. You are subconsciously attributing human attributes to nonhumans (a teddy bear and a corpse) and empathizing with the feelings and comfort levels they don't have.
I'm not "subconsciously" anything. Life has conditioned me to be nice to living things; when I'm nasty, bad things tend to happen -- I get punished, people take revenge, or, I may reflect on my actions later on, empathize with my victims, and feel guilt or remorse later on.
Treating a doll or a corpse like just any old thing may not have any of these repercussions, but if the object in question is sufficiently similar to a living thing, my trained reflexes may just kick in and make me feel bad anyway, even though there is no objective reason to feel that way.
To assume that there is anything spiritual going on in situations like that is facile at best.
I never assumed it was the reason, as I clearly stated in my post. I suggested that spirituality was the most likely explanation because that is the most common reason for funerary preparations, when you look at all the cultures around the world. Thus, it is most likely that is the case for a culture we don't know enough about. It could still be any of the other reasons I listed.
My point is that I disagree with the notion that the "most likely" explanation for funeral rites is spirituality. Plain and simple "common courtesy" explains it just fine; you may argue that that sentiment is, strictly speaking, misplaced when dealing with the dead, but my point is that people are so used to dealing with the living that they will tend to extend those same courtesies to the dead as well, not necessarily because they have any kind of spirituality, but simply because the dead don't seem like just "objects".
You can take a hammer and use it to shatter a rock into bits without feeling any emotion beyond the fun of just doing it... But taking a hammer and using it to smash in a corpse's face is something that most people would flatly refuse to do... Regardless of how they feel about religion, spirituality, or the afterlife. It just feels wrong, because a corpse is too much like a living thing.
For all we know they buried them alive and they simply died in that posture, or these people had no belief in an afterlife, but enjoyed arranging corpses as an art form. Still, spiritual beliefs are the most likely sounding explanation to me.
"Most likely"?
I'm an atheist, have been all my life. Yet, I was always nice to my teddy bear. It's not like I believe that the thing is alive, has feelings, has a soul, or anything like that... but still, even today, I'll make sure that it sits in a comfortable spot.
When someone I care about dies, their mortal remains are no more capable of suffering than my inanimate teddy bear, and yet, I'll do my best to give them a decent funeral. Why? Because it feels wrong not to, that's all.
To assume that there is anything spiritual going on in situations like that is facile at best. I believe there is a simply psychological explanation for these phenomena: all of us who aren't pathologists or undertakers spend almost all of our lives interacting with the living. When we see a dead person, or a doll, what jumps out at us is *not* that they are dead, but rather, how much they are like the living; in the case of the dead, we have to bury or cremate them because things will get pretty nasty pretty soon if we don't, but *still*, we don't just casually toss them into a hole in the ground or into a furnace... we dress them up nice, and we move and position them *gently*... Because that's how we treat people in general.
Just because someone's dead is no reason to be mean to them, that's all.
English is my third language, and I can read it with no problem. My first two languages are Dutch and German, FWIW. :-)
I think this is pretty interesting. I'm going to write a little program to randomize text in this manner, and then I'll feed some ebooks through it. I wonder how readable chemistry texts will be after this kind of treatment.
Do the police require a warrant if they want to follow me around for the day? If yes then I believe this should require a warrant. Else, what's the difference except it costs much less and is more discreet.
There, fixed that for ya.
I know, who cares about spelling? Complaining about orthography is commonly regarded as politically incorrect. Yada yada yada.
So, if you want to shorten difference to diff, I guess you're just lazy, so, whatever...
But the fact that nobody on this thread so far (at least as far as I can see with my threshold set at -1) has managed to spell discreet correctly... that bothers me a bit. Seriously, look it up. There is a difference between discrete and discreet.
Damn, English isn't even my first language, and it hurts even me to see it butchered on Slashdot all the time!
I swear I saw another story like this one, about VMWare being used to test botnets, and being the perfect test environment for debugging etc., etc.
http://xkcd.com/350/
The nice thing about the old URL bar is that it allows you to go back to recently visited sites with only two mouse clicks. No typing required at all. /. also tend to be in the same vein: the Awesome Bar is better, if you don't like it there is something wrong with you -- obviously never having paid attention to the criticism that useful functionality was removed. Sheesh.
It would have been better if selecting a URL from the drop-down had actually moved it to the top of the list, so that the most recently visited entries would always be at the top, but for some reason (and despite many requests, just check the bugzilla), the FF gods decided that that feature, which Mozilla had had since time immemorial, should no longer exist. I guess this was when I started to get that creepy feeling that the FF architects no longer cared what actual users think, since they are so much smarter and will therefore do our thinking for us.
FWIW, I actually created and submitted a patch for the FF2 URL bar, but it was not accepted. Developers too busy with the Awesome Bar, I guess... So now, after first having seen the URL bar take an (admittedly small) turn for the worse in FF compared to Mozilla, now we have this monstrosity that shows tons of pages whose URL I never typed; instead of it being a convenient most-recently-selected list, it has become a search engine.
I don't object to improvements and new features, but why on Earth the FF architects feel this intense need to remove a popular feature is beyond me. Is it stupidity or arrogance or what? The comments here on
I think that the problem with that reasoning is that it doesn't take the difficulty of distance into account. Between the stars, you basically have nothing but hard vacuum and absolute-zero cold. Maintaining life support in those conditions means you have to take everything with you, and that is going to limit the distance you can travel if you expect to arrive at your destination alive... I don't know what the practical limit on distance would be, but even if I were to assume that you could traverse several hundred light years, you would still be talking about only a few hundred or thousand stars within your reach, not billions.
In other words, I agree that there could be many, many civilizations out there, but the odds of any of them being within reach still seem incredibly slim to me.
And second, if interstellar travel is practical, do you really want to broadcast the fact that your planet is habitable to all those nice Kzinti out there? We have enough problems without having to deal with alien invasions, thank you very much.
Just because people don't get "keyed up" over eating, drinking, talking to a passenger while negotiating busy traffic, changing tracks on a CD, etc., doesn't mean those activities are any less dangerous than the ones they do worry about. It just means they don't get it yet.
Heck, I've had a couple of almost-accidents while fiddling with the radio or rummaging through a bag for that bottle of water. Guess what: I got the message, counted my blessings that those almost-accidents were just that (no thanks to me, all thanks to the other drivers who were alert enough to avoid me, and nice enough not to beat me up at the next rest stop)... And I just don't do that kind of stuff any more.
People tend not to stick to their usual style when they're angry, and after the installation nightmare described in the memo, anyone would be pissed.
As far as Gates referring to the microsoft.com web site team as "they" is concerned: I work for a large company (100,000+ employees) and nobody uses "we" vs. "they" consistently. "We" can mean "our team", "our division", "the company" -- but at the same time "they" can refer to any subset of those people as well: "our servers are really slow today... I wish the admins would figure it out already. They need to get their act together."
Using VNC avoids the latency problem, and this option is even available for Mac users: in System Preferences, go to Sharing, and enable Screen Sharing; you can then connect to it using Chicken of the VNC (from a Mac) or RealVNC free edition (from Windows or Linux), and probably using other VNC clients as well. In RealVNC, you have to make sure to set the encoding to "Hextile" before connecting; also, when logging in, the connection will be dropped when you go from the login screen to the desktop... Minor annoyances as far as I'm concerned; I can use my Mac desktop from my home laptop, and that's the main thing.
Those increasingly strict safety standards still seem to allow cars like the Toyota Yaris (which is what I drive nowadays).
Then the rest of the weight gain is imposed by everyone wanting a cheap car.
Please explain how everyone's desire to own a cheap car causes car manufacturers to makes cars heavier, not lighter?
I'd be surprised if those air bags and anti-lock brakes add more than 100 kg to the car's total weight. That's nothing compared to the fact that the 2008 Civic is as large as a late-1970s mid-size family sedan... While the original Civic was a compact. This kind of size inflation has been going on throughout the industry.
I find it hard to believe that a few air bags add 500 kg to the weight of any car. Rather, in the eternal bigger-is-better orgy, car manufacturers feel compelled to make every iteration of any model a bit bigger than the previous one. That 2008 Honda Civic, for example, is larger than a 1979 Honda Accord, and let's not even talk about the fact that the smallest engine you can get it with (in the U.S.) is a 1.8 liter 145 hp monster...
I just bought a T61 with Linux preinstalled. I saved a little over $100 compared to the same model with Windows, and of course I saved myself the pain of getting wireless etc. to work in Linux.
I shrank the Linux partition and installed Windows XP (which I had lying around anyway) in the freed-up space. The only tricky bit was getting XP to recognize the hard drive; I don't remember the details off the top of my head, but the disk controller can operate in two modes (see BIOS settings), and SuSE only recognizes it in the one and XP only in the other. It was easy to find instructions on how to resolve this by a few minutes of googling, and everything else was a simple matter of downloading and installing a bunch of drivers from Lenovo's web site.
So, $100 saved, no Linux configuration headaches, and I'm running XP SP3 instead of Vista. Good deal.
N.B. The EZ-Pass system we use here in the Northeast, which uses RFID chips to identify cars for toll collection purposes, actually explains how to disable the tag by storing it in a conducting plastic bag, which they provide.
Now, Ringworld, on the other hand... That's a classic novel that just aches to be made into a movie. A simple, easy to follow adventure story, with interesting characters and plenty of potential for awesome visuals. *crosses fingers*
I think public perception of the Benevolent Corporations has changed a bit since then, though. Too many of the abuses and criminal conspiracies, that the flower children accused the establishment of, have actually proved to be true, and the establishment isn't helping its cause by allowing CEOs to rake in astronomical pay packages while simultaneously transferring jobs to China.
Just because Bob Dylan was premature when he said that the times were a-changin', doesn't mean such predictions will always be wrong. All it takes is for the establishment to alienate enough people, and the way Big Corporate has been behaving during the last 20-odd years, that kind of critical mass just might be closer than you think. The fact that people like Michael Moore and Barack Obama are enjoying mainstream success is something I wouldn't have expected 10 years ago.
I thought cooperation was a good thing. Does an accomplishment only count if you do it on your own? and their food & wine is a mark of their previous couple thousand years, not since 1900. I'd love to see you try that line on the farmers, vintners, and chefs of France. Like they don't have to work hard to produce the fine things they do. Just because that tradition is old, doesn't mean the work takes care of itself today! You just named a very short list of impressive accomplishments, even including those. The US, UK, Germany and other rivals to France do that every day before breakfast. Very short? I can't help noticing that you're not even trying to demonstrate how the US, UK, Germany, and other rivals outdo France every day. Let's hear it -- I'm listening.