Do I get the third of the two invites if I prove the problem unsolvable? That is an allowable solution, isn't it?
If we're going to communicate about this, you will have to define murder and wrong. Both of these are socially constructed. Here are some examples:
-When I sell pesticides that will kill 1 in a million, that's not seen as murder by some, which is great for my bottom line. Some "enviro-wackos" claim that it's premeditated, if random murder. Sort of like having vehicles released that will explode is seen as morally repugnant, the same has not been decided with regards to pesticides.
-When I start a war that will kill over 10,000 people, I'm showing leadership and moral courage. Some believe that you shouldn't kill even in self-defense.
-Terminating a foetus before birth is held as murder by some. Others disagree or skirt around the issue. Is it murder if the child is not yet born? (and is it allowed to think it's murder while still being pro-choice?) Churches were not always as uppity about the topic as they have recently become... and in some cultures killing a child before its first year/month was not frowned upon.
-If I am a city planner and I create an auto-driven development plan, hundreds could succumb from asthma. Some will complain, but the growth prospects will gain me kudos.
-I used to be a vegetarian, but now eat animals. Is killing an animal murder? If so, what of the non-humans killed by pesticides?
-Murder assumes a life, and we are nowhere near agreement as to when it starts or which qualify as important. Some think that murder in large enough numbers is to be rewarded if it's people that are different from us and have indicated aggression. Others would only condemn as murder an act that can immediately cause death - unlike e.g. the pesticide example, or selling weapons.
-Duels have now been outlawed, but were honourable in some cultures.
BTW, I'm not necessarily taking the obvious side on any of the above issues, just pointing out that life, murder, and ideas of right and wrong are different based on society and time.
My working definition of murder is whatever form of killing a society deems wrong at a certain point in time. If you do not accept that definition, you should come up with another one:)
It simply would make a lot of sense, especially with IE stagnating and msn being its default. If Google wanted to contribute back to the OS community, they'd get more geek cred (not that they actually need more...)
I think anyone who pays >$100 per share for a peice of Google is nuts. [...] They are #1 and only have direction to go.
The thing is, Google is not just a search engine: they are a company specializing in the management of large applications.
The price of a share is immaterial. What counts is how much you expext to make off that share in dividends and price increases. For example, Bershire Hathaway shares are around $87k with a P/E that is better than Microsoft's, which is trading at around $28.6 today.
In any case, with a P/E over 30 MSFT is not a great deal these days... I'm starting to think people are brain damaged if they buy it. Google can justify a slightly inflated P/E if you believe they'll figure out how to make more money in the future. With Gmail, local searches... I think there's a reasonnable case to be made.
Taking the date out of the image itself is nifty, but I'm not sure it warrants a patent.
As to the EXIF data... sorting based on date has been done before- and in fact, it's probably exactly for that type of thing that date information is stored there in the first place.
Secrets normally take years, often decades to be out in the public domain. What was daunting before EFF's 1998 achievement is looking more and more trivia for a government that wouldn't blink at the cost of buying a 1,000 node super-computer.
To future-proof secrets, you'd have to encrypt at a level that not only would be ridiculously expensive to crack today, but as long as you need to keep them, well, secret. Imagine some of the files from the time of the UNSC's Iraq debates a year-and-a-half ago getting cracked today or before the next US presidential election.
Readability is a good point. However for a lot of us, having enough non-DRM encumbered books at a low enough price would be what seals the deal: there's no way I'm buying an expensive gadget to read e-books that are just as expensive as the dead tree editions.
Hmm... Last I checked, Perl was not an ideal language for writing "large bodies of maintainable code." In fact, it was quite the opposite.
Once I saw a brilliant 300 liner that did exactly what it needed to do, and no one dared touch it. Most of the time, the people I know who wrote Perl couldn't understand what they did just 2 weeks later.
It is also vital that African countries nurture tertiary education, customizing tertiary education courses to capture the market and produce the needed skills to be attractive to investors.
Yay, let's encourage corporate welfare for foreign corporations!
In this tested and failed system, multinational corporations no longer need to pay training costs for their workforce. Governments also compete by subsidizing infrastructure - and sometimes by direct cash subsidies too.
God forbid we actually train Africans in IT so that they could deal solve their own economic challenges.
Hmm... I did a quick research, and it seems you are correct. Not only that, whoever figures out how to solve that issue would probably be guaranteed a few million...:)
It seems there is a different filter for each ration. And it's not a great filter, either:
Hydration Technology of Albany, Oregon, which makes the membrane, says soldiers should only use urine in an absolute emergency because the membrane is too coarse to filter out urea.
The body will not find this toxic over the short term, says Ed Beaudry, an engineer with HTI, but rehydrating food this way in the long term would cause kidney damage.
So... why not give every soldier a really good filter that both filters out urea and can be reused?
Of course, the army is not necessarily known for trying to find low-cost solutions...
At the risk of starting a flame-war (please, I know this is/., but there's no need for that), can anyone tell me if Gnome is more usable than KDE? Are they both putting the same amount of effort in making their desktops user-friendly?
One of the more interesting things in that study was their list of tasks... Now that the problem is broken down in smaller pieces, it might be fun to test several designs in rapid iterations (tweak, test on 5 users, repeat) concentrating only on 2-3 tasks at a time. Oh- perhaps the most important question: how easy is it for people interested in usability to get involved in either project?
I wish! Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way.
A couple of years ago, I asked a publishing house about a classic that they had published- "Resource manual for a living revolution." It turns out that one of the authors could no longer be contacted for permission to reprint...:(
Another harsh reality I learned while working for a publisher was that many of the books did not have electronic versions - either did not exist, were lost or existed in very old formats. Sometimes it just isn't worth paying someone to re-type an entire book just to make a handfuld of sales- setting up Print-On-Demand does cost a fair bit.
For rare old books, we're still mostly stuck with dead-trees when we can find them...
These are the actions of a company that realizes they are no longer a growth stock
Shh! They don't want investors to realize the same thing. MSFT execs are hoping to cash out on juicy stock options before people clue-in to this.
A P/E (price/earning) ratio North of 40 is just plain nuts unless you think said company is going to make even more money in the future- although creating new multi-billion dollar ventures isn't easy. MSFT is also besieged by open-source competitors (Linux, OO.org, Mozilla) that are gnawing away at their cash cows.
So you're right- it seems as though the execs have figured this out. My question to you: any idea when investors will clue-in?
I don't like what the US government is doing, and I see OSS as a way to reduce your government's power. Spending $1 on a blank CD and 1 hour of my time can worsen your country's trade balance by a few hundred dollars, and that looks like an effective way of raising the costs to the Empire. (The worse the balance of trade, the more dicey it is to keep borrowing from countries that may not approve of your policies).
This is good for Open source, good for the world, and bad for the US elites in government and big business. I don't think it is bad for the US as a whole, no more than your current policies have been good for you. Your government has managed to make the world a much dangerous place, and its cold war peons are now revolting. Ignoring the reasons why you are in such a mess, your elites keep peddling war and profligate waste as remedies to your security and economic woes.
OSS has the merit of reducing the money flowing your (governments') way while building a more co-operative model of wealth creation that can also benefit you (people, rather than the corporation that finance parties and dictate policy). This is in any case inevitable- why not try to make it work for you too?
Iran number 3 on Orkut! Hello! THAT is the story I wanna read!
Same here. This whole thing seems like a tempest in a tea-pot... couldn't they separate languages a la wikipedia?
Meanwhile an exclusive by-invitation only network (that seems difficult for secret-services to monitor) is making inroads in a very repressive police-state. Let's see... 6% of 769,000 members is about 46k people.
I wonder- did they mean Iranians in Iran? How many of them are also on Orkut but exiled in the US or Canada? Has this reached a critical mass and what kind of political consequences can we expect?
Thinking about this... all of you with friends from/in repressive countries: send them invites if you have them!:)
It's a good thing for all the same reasons it's good for open-source when your neighbourhood pedophile, rapist or mass murdered uses your favorite free operating system. Bug reports and the potential they'll contribute something back in code and/or money.
And if you have some asshats "governing" you that are starting wars, passing stupid laws and taxing in even stupider ways, it's time you turfed them out of power. Imposing Windows on every bureaucrat is cruel and unusual punishment, and I think there's something about that in a couple international laws.
We could say "well, if you're not happy with the libraries, make the damn facade yourself", but that misses the point.
A lot of F/OSS project devs don't seem to care much if anyone adopts their tools. Those that do often count on consulting- and so what's the point of making it easy and including clear documentation?
Coding is only a small part of the work. To make things public domain in a way that really enriches the commons, we have to make them easy to use.
Exactly. Seeing a price-earning ratio of 40 should be cause for concern. Even if you take out the cash reserve, that's only 7 Billion earnings for 260B in capital, a P/E of of 37. That's not normal for a mature company.
And the P/E is not going to improve any time soon, at least not sustainably. OOo is squeezing their margins on their productivity suite, and they are apparently coming out with an Access alternative. After the productivity suite is cross-platform, what's to keep clients on Windows? Add to that people using cross-platform browser and mail software... and Windows is in a terrible position.
I've no idea what it is, but investors may soon realize that MSFT is not going to be a good investment... the increase in computers is not going to increase their profits sufficiently to make it an attractive investment any time soon. If I had investment money, I would be selling short.
To discuss how some vets got the short end of the stick some 50 years ago without a mention of more recent ones is rather bizarre.
Soldiers are still using DU-coated ammunition. We can't think of the past as some unfortunate occurence created by a few corrupt or ignorant individuals- recent history shows that there is a larger problem. This is not just a tragedy: it is an ongoing crime.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I get the third of the two invites if I prove the problem unsolvable? That is an allowable solution, isn't it?
:)
If we're going to communicate about this, you will have to define murder and wrong. Both of these are socially constructed. Here are some examples:
-When I sell pesticides that will kill 1 in a million, that's not seen as murder by some, which is great for my bottom line. Some "enviro-wackos" claim that it's premeditated, if random murder. Sort of like having vehicles released that will explode is seen as morally repugnant, the same has not been decided with regards to pesticides.
-When I start a war that will kill over 10,000 people, I'm showing leadership and moral courage. Some believe that you shouldn't kill even in self-defense.
-Terminating a foetus before birth is held as murder by some. Others disagree or skirt around the issue. Is it murder if the child is not yet born? (and is it allowed to think it's murder while still being pro-choice?) Churches were not always as uppity about the topic as they have recently become... and in some cultures killing a child before its first year/month was not frowned upon.
-If I am a city planner and I create an auto-driven development plan, hundreds could succumb from asthma. Some will complain, but the growth prospects will gain me kudos.
-I used to be a vegetarian, but now eat animals. Is killing an animal murder? If so, what of the non-humans killed by pesticides?
-Murder assumes a life, and we are nowhere near agreement as to when it starts or which qualify as important. Some think that murder in large enough numbers is to be rewarded if it's people that are different from us and have indicated aggression. Others would only condemn as murder an act that can immediately cause death - unlike e.g. the pesticide example, or selling weapons.
-Duels have now been outlawed, but were honourable in some cultures.
BTW, I'm not necessarily taking the obvious side on any of the above issues, just pointing out that life, murder, and ideas of right and wrong are different based on society and time.
My working definition of murder is whatever form of killing a society deems wrong at a certain point in time. If you do not accept that definition, you should come up with another one
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=116309&cid=984 5392
:)
The "GoogleFox"?
It simply would make a lot of sense, especially with IE stagnating and msn being its default. If Google wanted to contribute back to the OS community, they'd get more geek cred (not that they actually need more...)
The price of a share is immaterial. What counts is how much you expext to make off that share in dividends and price increases. For example, Bershire Hathaway shares are around $87k with a P/E that is better than Microsoft's, which is trading at around $28.6 today.
In any case, with a P/E over 30 MSFT is not a great deal these days... I'm starting to think people are brain damaged if they buy it. Google can justify a slightly inflated P/E if you believe they'll figure out how to make more money in the future. With Gmail, local searches... I think there's a reasonnable case to be made.
Taking the date out of the image itself is nifty, but I'm not sure it warrants a patent.
As to the EXIF data... sorting based on date has been done before- and in fact, it's probably exactly for that type of thing that date information is stored there in the first place.
Secrets normally take years, often decades to be out in the public domain. What was daunting before EFF's 1998 achievement is looking more and more trivia for a government that wouldn't blink at the cost of buying a 1,000 node super-computer.
To future-proof secrets, you'd have to encrypt at a level that not only would be ridiculously expensive to crack today, but as long as you need to keep them, well, secret. Imagine some of the files from the time of the UNSC's Iraq debates a year-and-a-half ago getting cracked today or before the next US presidential election.
Readability is a good point. However for a lot of us, having enough non-DRM encumbered books at a low enough price would be what seals the deal: there's no way I'm buying an expensive gadget to read e-books that are just as expensive as the dead tree editions.
Once I saw a brilliant 300 liner that did exactly what it needed to do, and no one dared touch it.
Most of the time, the people I know who wrote Perl couldn't understand what they did just 2 weeks later.
I'm going to have to disagree with that. Having worked with PHP and J2EE apps, there's no contest in my mind: Java kicks PHP's puny ass.
Take a look at java.sql.* and compare it to the PHP db functions. Look at frameworks like Hibernate... why would anyone want to use PHP for this?
Well, your original post was a score 5, Troll with my settings (you win!)
Given the flaky mods that are given here, anything positive about MS, critical of Uncle Sam or "nucular" energy is seen as troll on par with the GNAA.
In this tested and failed system, multinational corporations no longer need to pay training costs for their workforce. Governments also compete by subsidizing infrastructure - and sometimes by direct cash subsidies too.
God forbid we actually train Africans in IT so that they could deal solve their own economic challenges.
Hmm... I did a quick research, and it seems you are correct. Not only that, whoever figures out how to solve that issue would probably be guaranteed a few million... :)
So... why not give every soldier a really good filter that both filters out urea and can be reused?
Of course, the army is not necessarily known for trying to find low-cost solutions...
Ok, is it just me, or did we not manage to slashdot a server by linking to images?
:)
Come on, people, click on that link! Don't just assume a slashdotting can happen without you.
At the risk of starting a flame-war (please, I know this is /., but there's no need for that), can anyone tell me if Gnome is more usable than KDE? Are they both putting the same amount of effort in making their desktops user-friendly?
One of the more interesting things in that study was their list of tasks... Now that the problem is broken down in smaller pieces, it might be fun to test several designs in rapid iterations (tweak, test on 5 users, repeat) concentrating only on 2-3 tasks at a time. Oh- perhaps the most important question: how easy is it for people interested in usability to get involved in either project?
I wish! Unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way.
:(
A couple of years ago, I asked a publishing house about a classic that they had published- "Resource manual for a living revolution." It turns out that one of the authors could no longer be contacted for permission to reprint...
Another harsh reality I learned while working for a publisher was that many of the books did not have electronic versions - either did not exist, were lost or existed in very old formats. Sometimes it just isn't worth paying someone to re-type an entire book just to make a handfuld of sales- setting up Print-On-Demand does cost a fair bit.
For rare old books, we're still mostly stuck with dead-trees when we can find them...
A P/E (price/earning) ratio North of 40 is just plain nuts unless you think said company is going to make even more money in the future- although creating new multi-billion dollar ventures isn't easy. MSFT is also besieged by open-source competitors (Linux, OO.org, Mozilla) that are gnawing away at their cash cows.
So you're right- it seems as though the execs have figured this out. My question to you: any idea when investors will clue-in?
Since no one else seems to be saying this...
I don't like what the US government is doing, and I see OSS as a way to reduce your government's power. Spending $1 on a blank CD and 1 hour of my time can worsen your country's trade balance by a few hundred dollars, and that looks like an effective way of raising the costs to the Empire. (The worse the balance of trade, the more dicey it is to keep borrowing from countries that may not approve of your policies).
This is good for Open source, good for the world, and bad for the US elites in government and big business. I don't think it is bad for the US as a whole, no more than your current policies have been good for you. Your government has managed to make the world a much dangerous place, and its cold war peons are now revolting. Ignoring the reasons why you are in such a mess, your elites keep peddling war and profligate waste as remedies to your security and economic woes.
OSS has the merit of reducing the money flowing your (governments') way while building a more co-operative model of wealth creation that can also benefit you (people, rather than the corporation that finance parties and dictate policy). This is in any case inevitable- why not try to make it work for you too?
Meanwhile an exclusive by-invitation only network (that seems difficult for secret-services to monitor) is making inroads in a very repressive police-state. Let's see... 6% of 769,000 members is about 46k people.
I wonder- did they mean Iranians in Iran? How many of them are also on Orkut but exiled in the US or Canada? Has this reached a critical mass and what kind of political consequences can we expect?
Thinking about this... all of you with friends from/in repressive countries: send them invites if you have them!
It's a good thing for all the same reasons it's good for open-source when your neighbourhood pedophile, rapist or mass murdered uses your favorite free operating system. Bug reports and the potential they'll contribute something back in code and/or money.
And if you have some asshats "governing" you that are starting wars, passing stupid laws and taxing in even stupider ways, it's time you turfed them out of power. Imposing Windows on every bureaucrat is cruel and unusual punishment, and I think there's something about that in a couple international laws.
40% of us Canadians think America is evil, which doesn't mean we think all, or even most Americans are evil.
We could say "well, if you're not happy with the libraries, make the damn facade yourself", but that misses the point.
A lot of F/OSS project devs don't seem to care much if anyone adopts their tools. Those that do often count on consulting- and so what's the point of making it easy and including clear documentation?
Coding is only a small part of the work. To make things public domain in a way that really enriches the commons, we have to make them easy to use.
Exactly. Seeing a price-earning ratio of 40 should be cause for concern. Even if you take out the cash reserve, that's only 7 Billion earnings for 260B in capital, a P/E of of 37. That's not normal for a mature company.
And the P/E is not going to improve any time soon, at least not sustainably. OOo is squeezing their margins on their productivity suite, and they are apparently coming out with an Access alternative. After the productivity suite is cross-platform, what's to keep clients on Windows? Add to that people using cross-platform browser and mail software... and Windows is in a terrible position.
I've no idea what it is, but investors may soon realize that MSFT is not going to be a good investment... the increase in computers is not going to increase their profits sufficiently to make it an attractive investment any time soon. If I had investment money, I would be selling short.
Not to start a flamewar or anything, but I'm curious: did you contact MS before publicizing this? If not, why?
To discuss how some vets got the short end of the stick some 50 years ago without a mention of more recent ones is rather bizarre.
Soldiers are still using DU-coated ammunition. We can't think of the past as some unfortunate occurence created by a few corrupt or ignorant individuals- recent history shows that there is a larger problem. This is not just a tragedy: it is an ongoing crime.