I used to use Gentoo, mostly because it was the only distribution which had a bleeding-edge kernel new enough to handle my TV capture hardware. Happily, the MythTV variant of Ubuntu now does just fine...
Gentoo is good for learning the underlying system though ; the installation manual alone makes you learn a lot.
It tastes better too. People have long imported soda from Mexico because they use cane sugar to make it. Here in the UK we probably use beet sugar. My wife loves Coke, but won't drink it in the States because it tastes bad.
Here we have another problem with adulterating our soda though ; because artificial sweeteners are so much cheaper than sugar, even the non-diet varieties are replacing some fraction of the sugar with sweetener, which means that you get all the down side - nasty aftertaste, etc - without the upside - no calories.
So now we have premium brands of tonic water, and soda, that only use sugar as a sweetener appearing...
I think it was the quantity, rather than molecular incompatibility, that caused the issues.
Think of it like overclocking the cow beyond a sensible limit.
It's not as if there was a shortage of milk, either. The main reason farmers were willing to buy rBGH was that the milk price was so low because there was massive overproduction. rBGH was just intended to segregate farmers into two groups - those producing milk for a glut market, and those producing even more milk for a glut market and paying Monsanto for the privilege.
Integrating PalmOS (even at the PalmOS 4 level) into the base operating system of the DS would have been super-awesome. Even just a PalmOS cart would have been great, maybe with an integrated Bluetooth dialler. A DS in a leather cover would not have looked at all out of place in a business meeting. A target market of 150 million units, the possibility of selling add-on services (cloud sync, Exchange integration, etc), a low cost of entry for new buyers (a DS is very cheap, a new phone is not).
I've not used WebOS but I presume it's rather heavier than the old PalmOS builds used to be ; they are missing a trick. PalmOS was great, even in it's early incarnations. Modern hardware would really make it snap.
The source material is the original film stock, not the broadcast tapes that the original DVD releases were based on, so it does have the capacity to look great - TFA has some comparison shots and the difference is very obvious.
Nice troll. I put it to you that Sony avoided anything with a copyleft license* like the plague when they wrote their BluRay player software, which accounts for it's bugginess since they had to implement so much from scratch. Linux is just the kernel - anything on top that plays media is Sony's product.
* The kernel is GPL2 but GPL permits you to link code that ordinarily comes with your operating system without creating a derivative work.
I'm sorry ; I define an entity as evil when it knowingly inflicts suffering on the innocent for it's own gain or pleasure. I am aware of examples where Microsoft, at least, has done this. I'm sure that the lack of examples in my memory for Google is more to do with their relative youth as a corporation than their actual purity.
But, you say, a corporation is not a person... but corporations are very keen on being defined as a person for purposes that further their interests. It's just when that corporate personhood starts to attract the ire you'd usually direct towards a human person that it suddenly becomes untrue.
The problem with corporations is that it only takes a few evil people to poison the corporate culture to the point where evil becomes standard operating procedure. Props to Larry and Sergei for recognizing this and attempting to enshrine resistance to this in their corporate culture from the beginning.
Though was pleasantly surprised when ID cards got scrapped.
You have to infer that there were some corporate interests that figured out it would have caused too much efficiency and thus deprived them of profits. Or that the balance would have cost more than the PR they would have had to produce to overcome it.
what purpose would jamming a GPS network in a range of 200 yards around your vehicle serve
Part of me thinks the enforcement of this is a prelude to the coming age where our vehicle positions are all tracked ; that isn't tinfoil hat territory, it's a serious proposition that has been raised by the government of the UK amongst others in Europe. I'm firmly convinced that this is one of the major justifications for the new Galileo navigation satellite constellation - it's been designed to work much better in the kind of convoluted urban environment common in European cities.
The legislative justification is "road pricing" - the idea being ostensibly to reduce congestion on busy roads at rush hour by charging higher tolls for them, all enforced by an on-board GPS / Galileo datalogger with a cellular modem. Since a back-of-the-napkin calculation can tell you that it's an order of magnitude cheaper to toll roads by mandating active RFID tags in license plates, Occam's Razor says that road pricing is not the real aim of fitting every vehicle with a tracking device.
Quite apart from the current reasons for enforcing a ban on GPS jammers (interference with airport GPS equipment, etc), they have a vested interest in not letting these devices become common enough to render them effectively impossible to police.
GPL is "freedom preserving" ; it comes free, and has to remain free.
BSD is "do what the hell you like" free, including allowing you to take away the freedom.
They are both Free Software (by the Open Source Definition). Both licenses let you take my code, make something from it, and sell it back to me for a handsome profit. The difference is that with GPL you can only do it once (if your customer has enough technical chops to compile a build themselves).
I actually think GPL encourages a more realistic and sustainable pricing model for software ; the disadvantage of it is that it makes selling software in the retail model a much harder thing to do, because you have to provide the source. The upside is that encourages you to actually charge what your services are worth instead of either undercharging in the hope that the software will be saleable to other customers, or providing a very small value add to a BSD-style codebase and charging as if you developed the whole thing from scratch.
Another question is whether certain kinds of software are actually feasible to develop in this model. Would Lotus 1-2-3 have been developed if the first copy cost a million dollars? A difficult question.
I've worked on systems that were ancient, by any stretch of the imagination ; VB3 extensions of prescription labelling systems originally written in BBC BASIC. 17 years old at the time, and this was 10 years ago.
This thing would detect a large number of common drug interactions. Just the savings on transcribing prescription charts were worth it though.
The handwritten paper charts we used would last two weeks. Many of our patients were on multiple medications. Legally speaking, the only person who's permitted to copy the chart onto another chart was a doctor. Which means that the junior doctor ends up doing about 5-10 minutes work for each patient, manually copying a bunch of directives to another paper chart. Given that a junior at this hospital was responsible for a minimum of 4 wards of 30 patients apiece, you would be spending (optimistically) about 5 hours a week just copying drug charts. Even taking into account the fact that you were also working an 80 hour work makes this a smaller fraction of your time, that's a lot of very expensive and highly trained professional time just wasted on something that a computer can do instantly.
Or all the old Linux guys care less about consuming content than making something.
I do find Linux a little stunted in the multimedia department - the texture tearing on at least one monitor when using a composite desktop is mildly annoying when using standard applications, but unacceptable when watching video. I'm hoping that Wayland will improve this, but holding my breath for it to arrive would be foolish.
If they try and organise, they are banged up for 12 years. I'm thinking that in the Chinese prison system, that's code for "slowly tortured to death over about 11.5 years" (just by the conditions. no need to hire a torturer, a skilled torturer is expensive, right?)
The key word is think - which you seem to do. I would expect most atheists would agree that your values are good ones. I am glad that you think, and I have no quarrel with people who do so.
Some people seem to believe that their religion absolves them from thinking. Some of them hold viewpoints that we would hold morally repugnant ; and given the large volume of archaically and ambiguously worded rules in the typical holy book, they usually find some scripture to justify those viewpoints. Now they can proceed to act on those viewpoints, without even a qualm of conscience, because "God wants them to".
As an atheist, the only source for moral I have is logic. If I do something someone else finds morally questionable, I either have to argue my position, or change my mind. I may end up doing immoral things, out of weakness, or incomplete information, but if I do, I don't have a holy book to hide behind. It's difficult to maintain enthusiasm for any activity when everyone hates you for it and your only defence is "Well, I just really like being a complete arsehole...", unless you are one of the sociopaths that seem to populate the upper echelons of our society today. I freely admit, sometimes I get it wrong, sometimes I'm just weak, or lazy, or selfish. I'm sure this is not a foreign sensation to the majority of morally conscientious theists either.
I would much rather someone had a moral sense formed from an education about what impact their choices had on society, rather than being taught that they should behave a certain way because a holy book says so, and that an all powerful force will punish them if they don't.
Modern variants of Christianity don't even have the punishment - since they very explicitly state that your sins are forgiven simply for the asking, there is not the traditional concept of a moral balance sheet that tallies your worthiness to enter paradise. People operating under that notion could literally do anything - including breaking the laws in their holy book - as long as they believe they are forgiven, and that their actions are justified by some higher purpose. So in that sense, they are morally no different to any selfish non-believer - except they think they have a safety net of divine forgiveness, and they possess a large book which can be cherry-picked to justify nearly any action, and is particularly rich in examples and even laws concerning the use of lethal force.
Mind, this was in 2006 when LCD sets were already on the rise.But the BBC are incredibly secretive about the technology their vans use - but if it's a secret, then it is inadmissible in court.
There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence that the vans were actually just set-dressing - something the BBC clearly DO understand. They may have hired some of the people who used to do this kind of thing in WWII (cardboard tanks, etc, to make it look like our armed forces were stronger, or elsewhere).
I don't really think they are necessary now, even if they are bullshit. People now know that a database is a far more effective tool at searching for unlicensed TVs than a van. And watching live streams from the BBC attracts the same license fee requirement (although not viewing streams on demand), so a dedicated TV is no longer required. The downside to this method is the false positives ; I have at least one friend who chose to live his life without a TV for some years, and found that the constant hassle from the TV licensing department was unpleasant, and he's not the only one.
They cut this from the programme before broadcast... apparently someone near the top of the chain of command must be a churchgoer who doesn't share the British sense of humour..
He's looking pretty decrepit in that trailer. I wouldn't be surprised if he was interested in pulling off "One Last Big Score" - alluded to by the "Ocean's Eleven" reference - before he passed away, or lost his marbles (not that he seems to be diminished mentally).
Not that anyone is still listening, but I've since discovered that these poor bastards are expected to work 30-40 hour weeks, which puts the "pay" they are receiving (Job Seekers Allowance) at ~ 21-29% of minimum wage.
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I used to use Gentoo, mostly because it was the only distribution which had a bleeding-edge kernel new enough to handle my TV capture hardware. Happily, the MythTV variant of Ubuntu now does just fine...
Gentoo is good for learning the underlying system though ; the installation manual alone makes you learn a lot.
I found Gentoo instructive for similar reasons. Painful, but instructive.
It tastes better too. People have long imported soda from Mexico because they use cane sugar to make it. Here in the UK we probably use beet sugar. My wife loves Coke, but won't drink it in the States because it tastes bad.
Here we have another problem with adulterating our soda though ; because artificial sweeteners are so much cheaper than sugar, even the non-diet varieties are replacing some fraction of the sugar with sweetener, which means that you get all the down side - nasty aftertaste, etc - without the upside - no calories.
So now we have premium brands of tonic water, and soda, that only use sugar as a sweetener appearing...
I think it was the quantity, rather than molecular incompatibility, that caused the issues.
Think of it like overclocking the cow beyond a sensible limit.
It's not as if there was a shortage of milk, either. The main reason farmers were willing to buy rBGH was that the milk price was so low because there was massive overproduction. rBGH was just intended to segregate farmers into two groups - those producing milk for a glut market, and those producing even more milk for a glut market and paying Monsanto for the privilege.
The last time I visited, they were digging a trench across the entire country to put optical fibre in ; we drove alongside it for quite a stretch.
Now watch the sudden departure of internet companies from Ireland....
You know who should have bought Palm?
Nintendo.
Integrating PalmOS (even at the PalmOS 4 level) into the base operating system of the DS would have been super-awesome. Even just a PalmOS cart would have been great, maybe with an integrated Bluetooth dialler. A DS in a leather cover would not have looked at all out of place in a business meeting. A target market of 150 million units, the possibility of selling add-on services (cloud sync, Exchange integration, etc), a low cost of entry for new buyers (a DS is very cheap, a new phone is not).
I've not used WebOS but I presume it's rather heavier than the old PalmOS builds used to be ; they are missing a trick. PalmOS was great, even in it's early incarnations. Modern hardware would really make it snap.
The source material is the original film stock, not the broadcast tapes that the original DVD releases were based on, so it does have the capacity to look great - TFA has some comparison shots and the difference is very obvious.
It is a little buggy (Linux after all)
Nice troll. I put it to you that Sony avoided anything with a copyleft license* like the plague when they wrote their BluRay player software, which accounts for it's bugginess since they had to implement so much from scratch. Linux is just the kernel - anything on top that plays media is Sony's product.
* The kernel is GPL2 but GPL permits you to link code that ordinarily comes with your operating system without creating a derivative work.
I'm sorry ; I define an entity as evil when it knowingly inflicts suffering on the innocent for it's own gain or pleasure. I am aware of examples where Microsoft, at least, has done this. I'm sure that the lack of examples in my memory for Google is more to do with their relative youth as a corporation than their actual purity.
But, you say, a corporation is not a person ... but corporations are very keen on being defined as a person for purposes that further their interests. It's just when that corporate personhood starts to attract the ire you'd usually direct towards a human person that it suddenly becomes untrue.
The problem with corporations is that it only takes a few evil people to poison the corporate culture to the point where evil becomes standard operating procedure. Props to Larry and Sergei for recognizing this and attempting to enshrine resistance to this in their corporate culture from the beginning.
Some recruiters want it as Word, because they scrape it into a database and they are too lame to get a scraper that works on PDF.
Though was pleasantly surprised when ID cards got scrapped.
You have to infer that there were some corporate interests that figured out it would have caused too much efficiency and thus deprived them of profits. Or that the balance would have cost more than the PR they would have had to produce to overcome it.
what purpose would jamming a GPS network in a range of 200 yards around your vehicle serve
Part of me thinks the enforcement of this is a prelude to the coming age where our vehicle positions are all tracked ; that isn't tinfoil hat territory, it's a serious proposition that has been raised by the government of the UK amongst others in Europe. I'm firmly convinced that this is one of the major justifications for the new Galileo navigation satellite constellation - it's been designed to work much better in the kind of convoluted urban environment common in European cities.
The legislative justification is "road pricing" - the idea being ostensibly to reduce congestion on busy roads at rush hour by charging higher tolls for them, all enforced by an on-board GPS / Galileo datalogger with a cellular modem. Since a back-of-the-napkin calculation can tell you that it's an order of magnitude cheaper to toll roads by mandating active RFID tags in license plates, Occam's Razor says that road pricing is not the real aim of fitting every vehicle with a tracking device.
Quite apart from the current reasons for enforcing a ban on GPS jammers (interference with airport GPS equipment, etc), they have a vested interest in not letting these devices become common enough to render them effectively impossible to police.
GPL is "freedom preserving" ; it comes free, and has to remain free.
BSD is "do what the hell you like" free, including allowing you to take away the freedom.
They are both Free Software (by the Open Source Definition). Both licenses let you take my code, make something from it, and sell it back to me for a handsome profit. The difference is that with GPL you can only do it once (if your customer has enough technical chops to compile a build themselves).
I actually think GPL encourages a more realistic and sustainable pricing model for software ; the disadvantage of it is that it makes selling software in the retail model a much harder thing to do, because you have to provide the source. The upside is that encourages you to actually charge what your services are worth instead of either undercharging in the hope that the software will be saleable to other customers, or providing a very small value add to a BSD-style codebase and charging as if you developed the whole thing from scratch.
Another question is whether certain kinds of software are actually feasible to develop in this model. Would Lotus 1-2-3 have been developed if the first copy cost a million dollars? A difficult question.
Would you WANT to code in MUMPS?
I've worked on systems that were ancient, by any stretch of the imagination ; VB3 extensions of prescription labelling systems originally written in BBC BASIC. 17 years old at the time, and this was 10 years ago.
This thing would detect a large number of common drug interactions. Just the savings on transcribing prescription charts were worth it though.
The handwritten paper charts we used would last two weeks. Many of our patients were on multiple medications. Legally speaking, the only person who's permitted to copy the chart onto another chart was a doctor. Which means that the junior doctor ends up doing about 5-10 minutes work for each patient, manually copying a bunch of directives to another paper chart. Given that a junior at this hospital was responsible for a minimum of 4 wards of 30 patients apiece, you would be spending (optimistically) about 5 hours a week just copying drug charts. Even taking into account the fact that you were also working an 80 hour work makes this a smaller fraction of your time, that's a lot of very expensive and highly trained professional time just wasted on something that a computer can do instantly.
You've just irrevocably associated the post of Home Secretary with the title "Grand Vizier" in my head.
waaaayyyy before the TSA even existed.
Officially, anyway. :-P
Or all the old Linux guys care less about consuming content than making something.
I do find Linux a little stunted in the multimedia department - the texture tearing on at least one monitor when using a composite desktop is mildly annoying when using standard applications, but unacceptable when watching video. I'm hoping that Wayland will improve this, but holding my breath for it to arrive would be foolish.
If they try and organise, they are banged up for 12 years. I'm thinking that in the Chinese prison system, that's code for "slowly tortured to death over about 11.5 years" (just by the conditions. no need to hire a torturer, a skilled torturer is expensive, right?)
Strewth!
I think these are good things?
The key word is think - which you seem to do. I would expect most atheists would agree that your values are good ones. I am glad that you think, and I have no quarrel with people who do so.
Some people seem to believe that their religion absolves them from thinking. Some of them hold viewpoints that we would hold morally repugnant ; and given the large volume of archaically and ambiguously worded rules in the typical holy book, they usually find some scripture to justify those viewpoints. Now they can proceed to act on those viewpoints, without even a qualm of conscience, because "God wants them to".
As an atheist, the only source for moral I have is logic. If I do something someone else finds morally questionable, I either have to argue my position, or change my mind. I may end up doing immoral things, out of weakness, or incomplete information, but if I do, I don't have a holy book to hide behind. It's difficult to maintain enthusiasm for any activity when everyone hates you for it and your only defence is "Well, I just really like being a complete arsehole...", unless you are one of the sociopaths that seem to populate the upper echelons of our society today. I freely admit, sometimes I get it wrong, sometimes I'm just weak, or lazy, or selfish. I'm sure this is not a foreign sensation to the majority of morally conscientious theists either.
I would much rather someone had a moral sense formed from an education about what impact their choices had on society, rather than being taught that they should behave a certain way because a holy book says so, and that an all powerful force will punish them if they don't.
Modern variants of Christianity don't even have the punishment - since they very explicitly state that your sins are forgiven simply for the asking, there is not the traditional concept of a moral balance sheet that tallies your worthiness to enter paradise. People operating under that notion could literally do anything - including breaking the laws in their holy book - as long as they believe they are forgiven, and that their actions are justified by some higher purpose. So in that sense, they are morally no different to any selfish non-believer - except they think they have a safety net of divine forgiveness, and they possess a large book which can be cherry-picked to justify nearly any action, and is particularly rich in examples and even laws concerning the use of lethal force.
There's some speculation that the "TV Detector Vans" were just a van with an aerial on the roof intended to scare people into buying a license.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/31/bbc-admits-that-tv-d.html
Mind, this was in 2006 when LCD sets were already on the rise.But the BBC are incredibly secretive about the technology their vans use - but if it's a secret, then it is inadmissible in court.
There's also plenty of anecdotal evidence that the vans were actually just set-dressing - something the BBC clearly DO understand. They may have hired some of the people who used to do this kind of thing in WWII (cardboard tanks, etc, to make it look like our armed forces were stronger, or elsewhere).
I don't really think they are necessary now, even if they are bullshit. People now know that a database is a far more effective tool at searching for unlicensed TVs than a van. And watching live streams from the BBC attracts the same license fee requirement (although not viewing streams on demand), so a dedicated TV is no longer required. The downside to this method is the false positives ; I have at least one friend who chose to live his life without a TV for some years, and found that the constant hassle from the TV licensing department was unpleasant, and he's not the only one.
Tim Minchin doing his song about Jesus
They cut this from the programme before broadcast... apparently someone near the top of the chain of command must be a churchgoer who doesn't share the British sense of humour..
He's looking pretty decrepit in that trailer. I wouldn't be surprised if he was interested in pulling off "One Last Big Score" - alluded to by the "Ocean's Eleven" reference - before he passed away, or lost his marbles (not that he seems to be diminished mentally).
Not that anyone is still listening, but I've since discovered that these poor bastards are expected to work 30-40 hour weeks, which puts the "pay" they are receiving (Job Seekers Allowance) at ~ 21-29% of minimum wage.