I joined a company recently which had a very bizarre problem-solving M.O.: they didn't use google. at all. ever. It wasn't that they used something else like Yahoo, they just didn't do the whole "check to see if anyone else has come across this before" thing. This was -extremely- strange from my perspective, I just couldn't understand it.
The company was in software development, using windows, java,.NET, and some proprietary products and libraries for web portals and the like. I soon discovered that for many of the problems I encountered, googling was no use, because there just didn't seem to be any (useful) information out there - this was mainly because the code relied so heavily on closed (and very badly documented - or undocumented - APIs). You either figured things out by yourself using the old bang-head-against-wall-until-it-works technique, or you figured out another way to do it. It was an awful way to work, and one of the main reasons I left the company soon after joining them - I just couldn't work like that.
But even when we had problems with widely used and understood software, i seemed to be the only person who actually went looking for solutions 'outside' the company. I remember one problem with CVSNT which took me about 10 minutes to find a solution for on google (and even less to implement), but which had stumped all the devs at the company for months - and they were all impressed when I had it fixed within 30 minutes of saying "I'll look into it". a similar ethos pervaded the whole development team (to be fair a couple of them were much better at finding solutions elsewhere, but those guys, ironically, were no longer so 'hands on'). I know it's a cliche, but if it wasn't microsoft or java, they wouldn't even think of it - not through a blinkered outlook as such, but just because they had no concept of other possibilities existing. They were all good at their jobs - there were some very good developers there; but outside their usual 'sphere' they weren't that good at problem solving.
it still seems strange to me now. google is the best development/admin/debugging tool I have (before that it was hotbot, altavista - the names change but the use was always the same).
this leads me to a truism: it usually takes far longer to find the solution than to implement it. it is therefore often better to know how to find information than to actually 'know' stuff. but, this is more true for open-source software than for closed-source, as the former has exponentially more information easily accessible than the latter.
"Before HTTPRequest you could have as easily done an location.replace() to a CGI in a hidden frame and had the CGI's response do a callback to a function in the calling window and it would work exactly the same way."
Yeah, it's like air travel - what's all the fuss about? Before 1900, if you wanted to travel from Paris to Chicago you could have easily walked across town to the nearest coaching inn, caught a stagecoach to the coast, walk down to the quayside, board a steamer and take a few days to cross the ocean, get another stagecoach to the city and you're there. bloody air-travel fad.
your opinion is worthless here, stranger. 1st hand experience counts for nothing alongside all these excellent, well-informed expert opinions from the world's leading digital camera exponents. you are not welcome here.
please explain how having a fixed lens 'traps' you into 'their own proprietary products and services'. what products and services are you thinking of, exactly? are you suggesting that fixed lenses need special filters and/or lens caps? or that fixed-lens cameras can't use standard tripods or carry cases?
you do know that practically every camera manufacturer in existence makes fixed-lens cameras, and that they outsell interchangeable lens models, right? right?
First of all, if powershots and rebels are so far in front of everything else on the market, why do people still buy Nikons, Minoltas, Olympuses, etc etc? Canon may well make good cameras, and they may well be your favourite manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they 'blow away' everything else on the market. For one thing, the UI on their SLRs is definitely an acquired taste - I've had a canon for years and still hate their button fetish interfaces.
Secondly, the R1 doesn't use a CCD. It has a CMOS sensor.
Thirdly, sony doesn't make lenses (at least, not for this camera); the glass is made by Zeiss - if you're trying to suggest that Zeiss glass is 'lacking' in some way... ha. ha ha ha ha. you don't know much about lenses, do you?
Fourthly, the R1 is not an SLR. There is no *R*eflex involved in this camera - this is in fact one of it's main selling points, as it allows the lens and the sensor to be placed very close together, improving (in theory) such problems as chromatic aberration, and making the camera more compact. SLRs are not the be-all and end-all of photography. Get over it.
Fifthly, if you're going to be happy with the range offered by one lens (and lots of people will be) there is no advantage, and lots of disadvantages, to having an interchangeable lens. Dust for starters - having a fixed lens will dramamtically cut down on the amount of dust getting to the sensor. There are plenty of other reasons why a fixed lens can be A Good Thing.
The R1 may not be for everyone - it may not even be a good camera, for all I know - but your reasons for criticizing it are all, without exception, flawed.
openoffice has it's share of problems, but this article is pretty crap, tbh. he goes on about it being really buggy, and then the best two bugs he can find are that spaces don't show at the end of lines (!?), and notes don't wrap. were these the best two he could come up with?!
ok, OO isn't on a par with MS Office for functionality- but then as many have pointed out, the average person doesn't need the extra stuff that MS Office does. and the article didn't mention that ms office has it's quirks too; i can never get it to format tables the way I want to, and trying to get a document to look the same in different versions of Word is a non-starter unless it's extremely basic.
i've been using both programs for years now, and OO is far from perfect - but i prefer it to ms office because it's easier to do the everyday things. it's just as stable in everyday use, i can use it anywhere, the UI doesn't change too much across versions, the formats don't change across versions, I don't have to pay to upgrade... i could go on. yes, it's slower - but we're talking fractions of a second for most operations, for god's sake. is it bigger? does anyone care these days, when hard drives are measured in the 100s of Gb? OO's saved documents tend to be smaller, in my experience - which is more important. i'm sure most people would be better off with ms office, but would they be [insert retail price here] better off? i doubt it.
in any case, the article spends 90% of it's words slating OO, then at the end the guy says he still thinks it's better for writing books. eh? he criticizes OO for having no support desk - is he serious!? how many MS Office users ring MS Support desk when they can't write in blue text? seriously. the article is full of this stuff - it's about as balanced as a one-legged trapeze artist.
OO has a way to go yet, but labelling it 'dire', and a complete failure, because it isn't as good (yet) as the dominant product in the sector, (which has had a monopoly for the best part of 10 years, and until recently was pretty buggy and resource hungry itself), is incredible. if it's so 'dire', why does he still use it himself?
this brings to mind similar abuses happening recently in the UK - not similar in what the abuses consisted of, but in the way they came about: a government wants more power to control/monitor people and uses fear as a justification; in the UK's case the Prevention of Terrorism bill was introduced on the back of 9/11 and 'intelligence' (or what passes as it, these days) about threats to UK security.
The end result? An old man gets man-handled out of a political conference and arrested under new anti-terrorism laws, all for shouting "rubbish!" at a speaker. Yes, anti-terrorism. A woman is arrested for walking along a cyclepath (see, she should have been cycling, not walking: clearly a potential terrorist threat there). A man is shot dead without warning because he lived in the wrong apartment block (although the government tried its best to make people think he was a terrorist, or failing that, an illegal and therefore unimportant immigrant). And apparently several thousand other similar abuses we don't even hear about. But don't worry about the new laws - they won't be abused, because we're the good guys. Anyone who says otherwise is a liberal cry-baby and probably a terrorist sympathiser (which, by the way, will soon be illegal anyway. really).
The whole gist of government and law making in these countries seems to be changing; where once there was an assumption that fewer laws were better laws, that power should be granted only where specifically needed and only to those who really needed it, now the aim is to have as much unfettered power as possible, with as few safeguards, because it's Us against Them and our (infallible, selfless) governments need more power to protect us. If that means that we're now all suspects, that we can be shot dead just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or arrested and locked up for months without charge just because someone has voiced a suspicion, then so be it - it's for our own good and we should be thankful. Anyone who says otherwise must have an ulterior motive, and is probably a terrorist or a sympathiser anyway.
Like another poster said, power which can be abused is the same as power that will be abused - it's only a matter of time. And at the moment the governments of many countries - the US and the UK especially - are doing their utmost to get as much power as possible, and to remove any safeguards that may be in place (trials? judges? evidence? they only get in the way - we know who's guilty because our intelligence tells us so, anything else just plays into the terrorist's hands).
If i was Bin Laden i'd be pi**ing myself laughing - it's amazing how a couple of planes and a bomb here and there can derail centuries of democracy and accountable government, where dozens of wars, natural disasters, the nuclear threat and the cold war all failed.
the ships wouldn't always be moving
on
Archimedes Death Ray
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· Score: 2, Insightful
remember, this was supposedly used against ships trying to either get near sea walls or drop off soldiers onto walls / quays / seafronts... it would have been fairly easy for archimedes to ensure that the roman ships had to pass through restricted spaces (sinking boats round the harbour, laying chains, dropping piles of boulders etc etc); it may even have been the case that there were only a few places where the roman ships could get close to land simply because of the layout of the place. in which case, you wouldn't need lots of people trying to aim lots of moving mirrors at moving targets- a few pre-aimed ones covering strategic spots could be used whenever a ship was in the right place. if the ships where disgorging soldiers, they'd have to keep still for several minutes at least.
if i was archimedes and trying to attack moving targets with a weapon that was best used on stationary targets, my first thought would be to hamper the targets' movement.
it's a basic principle of fortification and defense - ensure the enemy has to pass through or in front of a concentration of your best firepower to get to you. it's why castles have gatehouses, un-aligned entrances, and towers with arrow-slits covering the area immediately in front of the walls. you don't need to attack the enemy while they're a hundred yards away - they'll come right up to you. if they retreat out of range, it means you're winning.
films != software
wifi != software
just because you can get access to something by using software, does not make that thing software.
ditching royalties for music and films in favour of taxation on connectivity is, IMO, stupid. on the one hand, you can pay for what you're using, or on the other, you can charge everyone who uses a service for something some (many) of those people will never use. I don't download music or films - why the hell should I subsidise those who do!?
just because piracy exists doesn't mean that *everyone* should pay for pirated music. the fundamental problem leading to piracy is not that it's possible to copy and distribute it (which has always been true); the problem is that music is usually overpriced.
" While web usage stats may indeed be inaccurate, it is so across the board. This means, everything that relies on it has the same amount of inaccuracy... "
er, no.
Stats Package A overesitimates visitors by around 30% and underestimates visits by around 8%. Stats Package B underestimates visitors and vists by around 5%.
The "state" Israel is proposing is more like a series of walled ghettos in to which they want to lock the Palestinians and forget about them
Bullshit
So how do you explain the series of walled ghettos into which the Palestinians are being forced, and only allowed out through Israeli-controlled checkpoints?
The above isn't a prediction or an opinion, it's current fact.
don't be daft - prohibition is the answer! it's a tried and trusted theory; if you want to stop people abusing something, make it illegal and drive it underground where you can safely ignore the problem.
it's worked with drugs, it's worked with prostitution, and it worked *really well* in 1930s america, why wouldn't it work now?!
aesop's fable summary: the sun and the wind see a man wearing a warm coat and decide to have a competition to see who can make him remove it quickest. the wind is confident it will win because it is so strong, but no matter how hard it blows, the coat will not come off; the man simply pulls it tighter around him. then the sun tries - it shines down as hot as it can, and after only a few minutes, the man takes the coat off himself. the sun wins.
moral of the story? forcing people to do something against their will is much harder than simply giving them a good reason to do that thing.
here's my own fable:
Tom explores his neighbourhood one day and sees a nice house, so he breaks in, steals half the stuff in it, forces the family who live there to the back room to live off stale bread - killing any who complain or make things difficult, then, when he gets bored he leaves. before he goes, he chooses the nastiest occupant to be in control of the house. he also knocks through some walls to next-door, even though the two households hate each other. he gives the nasty man he left in control some baseball bats and knuckle dusters to help him keep 'control'. tom then encourages many of his friends to do the same thing in other houses, which they do.
a few of the family's friends are angry at this, and some of them throw petrol bombs at tom's house.
the whole neighbourhood condemns the petrol bombs; tom and some friends decide to sort things out - they say "the nasty men in those houses are sponsoring terror, we need to get rid of them". they get a mob together and invade a couple of the houses. lots of fighting ensues. lots of people die. more petrol bombs are thrown. things do not get better for anyone.
moral of this story? petrol bombs are bad, but so are house-breaking, theft, and a whole host of other things tom did. you reap what you sow.
if you want the petrol bombs to stop, first understand why they're being thrown.
Seriously, would you go to work if there was a swarm of pissed-off people outside your window who would just as soon talk to you as tip over your car?
How about one guy who stands there quietly with a couple of "peace" banners every day. on his own. thats why the law was introduced... seriously, it actually was why it was introduced, because the government found that one guy embarrassing. so now we've lost the right to protest.
Isn't bypassing the corruption what we attempted to do when we bypassed the UN?
No, pretending we were playing by international law, then when it became obvious that wasn't going to work, blatantly ignoring it, is what we did when we bypassed the UN. I'm with you if you think the UN is a toothless and largely useless entity, but saying you'll abide by its decisions, then ignoring them when they don't go your way, is, actually, illegal. invading a sovereign nation. illegal. and it's illegal for a reason - because it's wrong, which is why only a couple of countries round the world were in favour, and all the others against.
And once we understand why they want to kill us, how does that stop the attacks!
just because someone is a terrorist doesn't mean their views are automatically invalid. nelson mandela was a terrorist, but now that his views are generally heldto be the right ones, people tend to forget that fact. people are getting so desperate they're willing to do anything to try to change things, even kill themselves and others - this applies equally to the terrorists and our governments, by the way (except our governments want things to stay the same). we've been screwing with other people's lives and governments long enough to know the likely consequences, yet what is our reaction? create lots more terrorists by killing 10s of thousands of innocent people, wreck a country's infrastructure and rule of law, then pretend it's all the fault of someone else, cos they started it. (pretending they started it always helps - always play down our own role in destablizing countries. funny how all the worlds problems stem from countries the west has messed with in the past - you'd think we'd have learnt by now).
Disciplining and raising children never was supposed to be the government's job, and it isn't one they took on willfully.
accepted - so how to approach the problem? criminalize people based on their age? marvellous solution!
And you don't see a problem with "violent protests?"
I most certainly DO see a problem with it - if people are protesting violently, it means you're doing something badly wrong and you need to look a t what. it doesn't mean you should ignore the protests and just repress them with weaponry. for one, it doesn't work. apartheid, anyone? your solution would be to attack the symptom, mine to attack the cause
You hippy/liberal/pacifists do as much damage to your own credibility as Bush does to his anytime he talks in front of a camera.
nice to see you're not generalizing.
plenty of people foresaw the current trouble in iraq, the current terrorist attacks which are becoming more and more frequent, and everything else i've mentioned. funny how the people who, as time passes, are proved more and more right, are the ones whose views are attacked more and more vigorously.
ever heard aesop's fable about the sun, the wind, and the man with the coat?
...and what happens when you try to install software on windows which hasn't been packaged for it?
the difference is that with linux, you can install just about anything, whether it's been packaged for your distro or not. some things are harder than others, but everything's possible. in windows, either it's packaged for windows in some form, or it's not installable.
Thats a fair point, but when it's an entire region of the world you're messing with; or when it's people's fundamental rights, it stops being a minority issue and becomes something that affects everyone, whether they realise it or not.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, really - the whole culture of western government (the US and UK, certainly) is moving away from solving the problems they face, and toward minimising the bother they cause the government.
Too many people protesting outside parliament? Don't find out why they're so angry, just make it illegal for anyone to protest, peacefully or otherwise, within 1km of parliament.
Too many corrupt middle-eastern regimes? Don't try to help get rid of the corruption, just invade one and hope for the best!
Too many terrorist attacks? Don't try to figure out why so many people are willing to die to hurt you, just find a convenient country to blame and invade it!
Too many underage criminals active at night? Make it illegal for *any* children to be on the streets at night, whether they're doing anything wrong or not.
Too many riots and violent protests? Don't worry about it, just develop new and ever more sophisticated ways of punishing those who take part, or even those who are in the same place at the same time.
What's next? Too many people thinking Bad Things? Don't worry...
The whole mindset of the people in control at the moment is skewed - they're not solving problems, they're just hiding symptoms (or, increasingly, brutally suppressing them).
In a way you're right... but in a more fundamental way, you are completely wrong. so wrong it should be obvious.
You honestly expect the 95% of adults in the country who drive to all, at a uniform level of competence, learn mechanical physics of moving objects, hydraulic fluid degredation, and whatever else is necessary to become a racing driver and thus control a vehicle "near its limits"!? You expect your 68yr-old granny to understand, and not only that but also be able to react instinctively to, how a car handles on a wet corner? You're living in a dream world.
Expecting all drivers to be competent is not just naive, it's stupid; people are human, they do stupid things - thinking that you can eliminate stupidity from users (in this case users of cars) is fantasy.
What you -can- do is take steps to prevent people acting stupidly most of the time, and to limit the damage done when they -are- stupid the rest of the time. In the case of driving, having a speed limit, (which is always based on the road conditions anyway, btw - that's why motorway limits go down when there are tight corners) is a sensible choice. The whole point is to prevent cars travelling close to their limits - and to prevent drivers driving close to their limits.
A stupid driver crashing at 60mph has a much better chance of survival than Ayrton Senna crashing at 160mph. What's more, the chances of educating all drivers up to such a level are non-existant anyway, so it's a moot point.
my thoughts exactly; it may be a few years since i studied neural networks at university, but unless someone has sneakily made a quantum leap forward, any claims of simulating entire brains or creating self-aware computers is still science fiction.
it constantly amazes me that people still assume that once a certain amount of computing 'power' is available, a computer could suddenly become sentient, as if someone just flicked a switch.
we don't even know what sentience and consciousness really mean ourselves, and we've been trying to find out for centuries. as the parent poster said, we don't even understand everything about our own brains yet (and we're not that close, either), so claims of artificial life forms suddenly springing up after a few years of adding teraflops here and there are way off the mark.
we could create a machine which could count all the atoms in all the stars in the universe (every universe, if you believe in multiple ones) in a nanosecond, while simultaneously predicting every person's actions for the rest of time, but we'd still be no closer to a self-aware life form.
and even if we *did* create one, how could we tell if it was really 'alive', or just a brilliant simulation? the answer is, at the moment, that we wouldn't even be able to tell.
Slashdot Mirror
I joined a company recently which had a very bizarre problem-solving M.O.: they didn't use google. at all. ever. It wasn't that they used something else like Yahoo, they just didn't do the whole "check to see if anyone else has come across this before" thing. This was -extremely- strange from my perspective, I just couldn't understand it.
.NET, and some proprietary products and libraries for web portals and the like. I soon discovered that for many of the problems I encountered, googling was no use, because there just didn't seem to be any (useful) information out there - this was mainly because the code relied so heavily on closed (and very badly documented - or undocumented - APIs). You either figured things out by yourself using the old bang-head-against-wall-until-it-works technique, or you figured out another way to do it. It was an awful way to work, and one of the main reasons I left the company soon after joining them - I just couldn't work like that.
The company was in software development, using windows, java,
But even when we had problems with widely used and understood software, i seemed to be the only person who actually went looking for solutions 'outside' the company. I remember one problem with CVSNT which took me about 10 minutes to find a solution for on google (and even less to implement), but which had stumped all the devs at the company for months - and they were all impressed when I had it fixed within 30 minutes of saying "I'll look into it". a similar ethos pervaded the whole development team (to be fair a couple of them were much better at finding solutions elsewhere, but those guys, ironically, were no longer so 'hands on'). I know it's a cliche, but if it wasn't microsoft or java, they wouldn't even think of it - not through a blinkered outlook as such, but just because they had no concept of other possibilities existing. They were all good at their jobs - there were some very good developers there; but outside their usual 'sphere' they weren't that good at problem solving.
it still seems strange to me now. google is the best development/admin/debugging tool I have (before that it was hotbot, altavista - the names change but the use was always the same).
this leads me to a truism: it usually takes far longer to find the solution than to implement it. it is therefore often better to know how to find information than to actually 'know' stuff. but, this is more true for open-source software than for closed-source, as the former has exponentially more information easily accessible than the latter.
"Before HTTPRequest you could have as easily done an location.replace() to a CGI in a hidden frame and had the CGI's response do a callback to a function in the calling window and it would work exactly the same way."
Yeah, it's like air travel - what's all the fuss about? Before 1900, if you wanted to travel from Paris to Chicago you could have easily walked across town to the nearest coaching inn, caught a stagecoach to the coast, walk down to the quayside, board a steamer and take a few days to cross the ocean, get another stagecoach to the city and you're there. bloody air-travel fad.
remind me again how much those 10-20mm lenses cost, ON TOP of the price of whatever camera they're used on...
your opinion is worthless here, stranger. 1st hand experience counts for nothing alongside all these excellent, well-informed expert opinions from the world's leading digital camera exponents. you are not welcome here.
please explain how having a fixed lens 'traps' you into 'their own proprietary products and services'. what products and services are you thinking of, exactly? are you suggesting that fixed lenses need special filters and/or lens caps? or that fixed-lens cameras can't use standard tripods or carry cases?
you do know that practically every camera manufacturer in existence makes fixed-lens cameras, and that they outsell interchangeable lens models, right? right?
First of all, if powershots and rebels are so far in front of everything else on the market, why do people still buy Nikons, Minoltas, Olympuses, etc etc? Canon may well make good cameras, and they may well be your favourite manufacturer, but that doesn't mean they 'blow away' everything else on the market. For one thing, the UI on their SLRs is definitely an acquired taste - I've had a canon for years and still hate their button fetish interfaces.
Secondly, the R1 doesn't use a CCD. It has a CMOS sensor.
Thirdly, sony doesn't make lenses (at least, not for this camera); the glass is made by Zeiss - if you're trying to suggest that Zeiss glass is 'lacking' in some way... ha. ha ha ha ha. you don't know much about lenses, do you?
Fourthly, the R1 is not an SLR. There is no *R*eflex involved in this camera - this is in fact one of it's main selling points, as it allows the lens and the sensor to be placed very close together, improving (in theory) such problems as chromatic aberration, and making the camera more compact. SLRs are not the be-all and end-all of photography. Get over it.
Fifthly, if you're going to be happy with the range offered by one lens (and lots of people will be) there is no advantage, and lots of disadvantages, to having an interchangeable lens. Dust for starters - having a fixed lens will dramamtically cut down on the amount of dust getting to the sensor. There are plenty of other reasons why a fixed lens can be A Good Thing.
The R1 may not be for everyone - it may not even be a good camera, for all I know - but your reasons for criticizing it are all, without exception, flawed.
openoffice has it's share of problems, but this article is pretty crap, tbh. he goes on about it being really buggy, and then the best two bugs he can find are that spaces don't show at the end of lines (!?), and notes don't wrap. were these the best two he could come up with?!
ok, OO isn't on a par with MS Office for functionality- but then as many have pointed out, the average person doesn't need the extra stuff that MS Office does. and the article didn't mention that ms office has it's quirks too; i can never get it to format tables the way I want to, and trying to get a document to look the same in different versions of Word is a non-starter unless it's extremely basic.
i've been using both programs for years now, and OO is far from perfect - but i prefer it to ms office because it's easier to do the everyday things. it's just as stable in everyday use, i can use it anywhere, the UI doesn't change too much across versions, the formats don't change across versions, I don't have to pay to upgrade... i could go on. yes, it's slower - but we're talking fractions of a second for most operations, for god's sake. is it bigger? does anyone care these days, when hard drives are measured in the 100s of Gb? OO's saved documents tend to be smaller, in my experience - which is more important. i'm sure most people would be better off with ms office, but would they be [insert retail price here] better off? i doubt it.
in any case, the article spends 90% of it's words slating OO, then at the end the guy says he still thinks it's better for writing books. eh? he criticizes OO for having no support desk - is he serious!? how many MS Office users ring MS Support desk when they can't write in blue text? seriously. the article is full of this stuff - it's about as balanced as a one-legged trapeze artist.
OO has a way to go yet, but labelling it 'dire', and a complete failure, because it isn't as good (yet) as the dominant product in the sector, (which has had a monopoly for the best part of 10 years, and until recently was pretty buggy and resource hungry itself), is incredible. if it's so 'dire', why does he still use it himself?
You think so?
what, you mean the onboard missile control system does use windows?!
my mistake
this brings to mind similar abuses happening recently in the UK - not similar in what the abuses consisted of, but in the way they came about: a government wants more power to control/monitor people and uses fear as a justification; in the UK's case the Prevention of Terrorism bill was introduced on the back of 9/11 and 'intelligence' (or what passes as it, these days) about threats to UK security.
The end result? An old man gets man-handled out of a political conference and arrested under new anti-terrorism laws, all for shouting "rubbish!" at a speaker. Yes, anti-terrorism. A woman is arrested for walking along a cyclepath (see, she should have been cycling, not walking: clearly a potential terrorist threat there). A man is shot dead without warning because he lived in the wrong apartment block (although the government tried its best to make people think he was a terrorist, or failing that, an illegal and therefore unimportant immigrant). And apparently several thousand other similar abuses we don't even hear about. But don't worry about the new laws - they won't be abused, because we're the good guys. Anyone who says otherwise is a liberal cry-baby and probably a terrorist sympathiser (which, by the way, will soon be illegal anyway. really).
The whole gist of government and law making in these countries seems to be changing; where once there was an assumption that fewer laws were better laws, that power should be granted only where specifically needed and only to those who really needed it, now the aim is to have as much unfettered power as possible, with as few safeguards, because it's Us against Them and our (infallible, selfless) governments need more power to protect us. If that means that we're now all suspects, that we can be shot dead just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or arrested and locked up for months without charge just because someone has voiced a suspicion, then so be it - it's for our own good and we should be thankful. Anyone who says otherwise must have an ulterior motive, and is probably a terrorist or a sympathiser anyway.
Like another poster said, power which can be abused is the same as power that will be abused - it's only a matter of time. And at the moment the governments of many countries - the US and the UK especially - are doing their utmost to get as much power as possible, and to remove any safeguards that may be in place (trials? judges? evidence? they only get in the way - we know who's guilty because our intelligence tells us so, anything else just plays into the terrorist's hands).
If i was Bin Laden i'd be pi**ing myself laughing - it's amazing how a couple of planes and a bomb here and there can derail centuries of democracy and accountable government, where dozens of wars, natural disasters, the nuclear threat and the cold war all failed.
remember, this was supposedly used against ships trying to either get near sea walls or drop off soldiers onto walls / quays / seafronts... it would have been fairly easy for archimedes to ensure that the roman ships had to pass through restricted spaces (sinking boats round the harbour, laying chains, dropping piles of boulders etc etc); it may even have been the case that there were only a few places where the roman ships could get close to land simply because of the layout of the place. in which case, you wouldn't need lots of people trying to aim lots of moving mirrors at moving targets- a few pre-aimed ones covering strategic spots could be used whenever a ship was in the right place. if the ships where disgorging soldiers, they'd have to keep still for several minutes at least.
if i was archimedes and trying to attack moving targets with a weapon that was best used on stationary targets, my first thought would be to hamper the targets' movement.
it's a basic principle of fortification and defense - ensure the enemy has to pass through or in front of a concentration of your best firepower to get to you. it's why castles have gatehouses, un-aligned entrances, and towers with arrow-slits covering the area immediately in front of the walls. you don't need to attack the enemy while they're a hundred yards away - they'll come right up to you. if they retreat out of range, it means you're winning.
acquire? who said anything about anyone acquiring anything?
just because sun are looking at postgresql doesn't mean they're going to buy it... (is there even anything to 'buy' where postgresql is concerned?)
films != software wifi != software just because you can get access to something by using software, does not make that thing software. ditching royalties for music and films in favour of taxation on connectivity is, IMO, stupid. on the one hand, you can pay for what you're using, or on the other, you can charge everyone who uses a service for something some (many) of those people will never use. I don't download music or films - why the hell should I subsidise those who do!? just because piracy exists doesn't mean that *everyone* should pay for pirated music. the fundamental problem leading to piracy is not that it's possible to copy and distribute it (which has always been true); the problem is that music is usually overpriced.
" While web usage stats may indeed be inaccurate, it is so across the board. This means, everything that relies on it has the same amount of inaccuracy... "
er, no.
Stats Package A overesitimates visitors by around 30% and underestimates visits by around 8%. Stats Package B underestimates visitors and vists by around 5%.
Everything inaccurate != everything is the same
The "state" Israel is proposing is more like a series of walled ghettos in to which they want to lock the Palestinians and forget about them Bullshit
So how do you explain the series of walled ghettos into which the Palestinians are being forced, and only allowed out through Israeli-controlled checkpoints?The above isn't a prediction or an opinion, it's current fact.
don't be daft - prohibition is the answer! it's a tried and trusted theory; if you want to stop people abusing something, make it illegal and drive it underground where you can safely ignore the problem. it's worked with drugs, it's worked with prostitution, and it worked *really well* in 1930s america, why wouldn't it work now?!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4640007. stm
http://www.parliament-square.org.uk/defend.htm
aesop's fable summary: the sun and the wind see a man wearing a warm coat and decide to have a competition to see who can make him remove it quickest. the wind is confident it will win because it is so strong, but no matter how hard it blows, the coat will not come off; the man simply pulls it tighter around him. then the sun tries - it shines down as hot as it can, and after only a few minutes, the man takes the coat off himself. the sun wins.
moral of the story? forcing people to do something against their will is much harder than simply giving them a good reason to do that thing.
here's my own fable:
Tom explores his neighbourhood one day and sees a nice house, so he breaks in, steals half the stuff in it, forces the family who live there to the back room to live off stale bread - killing any who complain or make things difficult, then, when he gets bored he leaves. before he goes, he chooses the nastiest occupant to be in control of the house. he also knocks through some walls to next-door, even though the two households hate each other. he gives the nasty man he left in control some baseball bats and knuckle dusters to help him keep 'control'. tom then encourages many of his friends to do the same thing in other houses, which they do.
a few of the family's friends are angry at this, and some of them throw petrol bombs at tom's house.
the whole neighbourhood condemns the petrol bombs; tom and some friends decide to sort things out - they say "the nasty men in those houses are sponsoring terror, we need to get rid of them". they get a mob together and invade a couple of the houses. lots of fighting ensues. lots of people die. more petrol bombs are thrown. things do not get better for anyone.
moral of this story? petrol bombs are bad, but so are house-breaking, theft, and a whole host of other things tom did. you reap what you sow.
if you want the petrol bombs to stop, first understand why they're being thrown.
How about one guy who stands there quietly with a couple of "peace" banners every day. on his own. thats why the law was introduced... seriously, it actually was why it was introduced, because the government found that one guy embarrassing. so now we've lost the right to protest.
Isn't bypassing the corruption what we attempted to do when we bypassed the UN?No, pretending we were playing by international law, then when it became obvious that wasn't going to work, blatantly ignoring it, is what we did when we bypassed the UN. I'm with you if you think the UN is a toothless and largely useless entity, but saying you'll abide by its decisions, then ignoring them when they don't go your way, is, actually, illegal. invading a sovereign nation. illegal. and it's illegal for a reason - because it's wrong, which is why only a couple of countries round the world were in favour, and all the others against.
And once we understand why they want to kill us, how does that stop the attacks!just because someone is a terrorist doesn't mean their views are automatically invalid. nelson mandela was a terrorist, but now that his views are generally heldto be the right ones, people tend to forget that fact. people are getting so desperate they're willing to do anything to try to change things, even kill themselves and others - this applies equally to the terrorists and our governments, by the way (except our governments want things to stay the same). we've been screwing with other people's lives and governments long enough to know the likely consequences, yet what is our reaction? create lots more terrorists by killing 10s of thousands of innocent people, wreck a country's infrastructure and rule of law, then pretend it's all the fault of someone else, cos they started it. (pretending they started it always helps - always play down our own role in destablizing countries. funny how all the worlds problems stem from countries the west has messed with in the past - you'd think we'd have learnt by now).
Disciplining and raising children never was supposed to be the government's job, and it isn't one they took on willfully.accepted - so how to approach the problem? criminalize people based on their age? marvellous solution!
And you don't see a problem with "violent protests?"I most certainly DO see a problem with it - if people are protesting violently, it means you're doing something badly wrong and you need to look a t what. it doesn't mean you should ignore the protests and just repress them with weaponry. for one, it doesn't work. apartheid, anyone? your solution would be to attack the symptom, mine to attack the cause
You hippy/liberal/pacifists do as much damage to your own credibility as Bush does to his anytime he talks in front of a camera.nice to see you're not generalizing.
plenty of people foresaw the current trouble in iraq, the current terrorist attacks which are becoming more and more frequent, and everything else i've mentioned. funny how the people who, as time passes, are proved more and more right, are the ones whose views are attacked more and more vigorously.ever heard aesop's fable about the sun, the wind, and the man with the coat?
...and what happens when you try to install software on windows which hasn't been packaged for it? the difference is that with linux, you can install just about anything, whether it's been packaged for your distro or not. some things are harder than others, but everything's possible. in windows, either it's packaged for windows in some form, or it's not installable.
Thats a fair point, but when it's an entire region of the world you're messing with; or when it's people's fundamental rights, it stops being a minority issue and becomes something that affects everyone, whether they realise it or not.
This shouldn't surprise anyone, really - the whole culture of western government (the US and UK, certainly) is moving away from solving the problems they face, and toward minimising the bother they cause the government.
Too many people protesting outside parliament? Don't find out why they're so angry, just make it illegal for anyone to protest, peacefully or otherwise, within 1km of parliament.
Too many corrupt middle-eastern regimes? Don't try to help get rid of the corruption, just invade one and hope for the best!
Too many terrorist attacks? Don't try to figure out why so many people are willing to die to hurt you, just find a convenient country to blame and invade it!
Too many underage criminals active at night? Make it illegal for *any* children to be on the streets at night, whether they're doing anything wrong or not.
Too many riots and violent protests? Don't worry about it, just develop new and ever more sophisticated ways of punishing those who take part, or even those who are in the same place at the same time.
What's next? Too many people thinking Bad Things? Don't worry...
The whole mindset of the people in control at the moment is skewed - they're not solving problems, they're just hiding symptoms (or, increasingly, brutally suppressing them).
In a way you're right... but in a more fundamental way, you are completely wrong. so wrong it should be obvious. You honestly expect the 95% of adults in the country who drive to all, at a uniform level of competence, learn mechanical physics of moving objects, hydraulic fluid degredation, and whatever else is necessary to become a racing driver and thus control a vehicle "near its limits"!? You expect your 68yr-old granny to understand, and not only that but also be able to react instinctively to, how a car handles on a wet corner? You're living in a dream world. Expecting all drivers to be competent is not just naive, it's stupid; people are human, they do stupid things - thinking that you can eliminate stupidity from users (in this case users of cars) is fantasy. What you -can- do is take steps to prevent people acting stupidly most of the time, and to limit the damage done when they -are- stupid the rest of the time. In the case of driving, having a speed limit, (which is always based on the road conditions anyway, btw - that's why motorway limits go down when there are tight corners) is a sensible choice. The whole point is to prevent cars travelling close to their limits - and to prevent drivers driving close to their limits. A stupid driver crashing at 60mph has a much better chance of survival than Ayrton Senna crashing at 160mph. What's more, the chances of educating all drivers up to such a level are non-existant anyway, so it's a moot point.
my thoughts exactly; it may be a few years since i studied neural networks at university, but unless someone has sneakily made a quantum leap forward, any claims of simulating entire brains or creating self-aware computers is still science fiction.
it constantly amazes me that people still assume that once a certain amount of computing 'power' is available, a computer could suddenly become sentient, as if someone just flicked a switch.
we don't even know what sentience and consciousness really mean ourselves, and we've been trying to find out for centuries. as the parent poster said, we don't even understand everything about our own brains yet (and we're not that close, either), so claims of artificial life forms suddenly springing up after a few years of adding teraflops here and there are way off the mark.
we could create a machine which could count all the atoms in all the stars in the universe (every universe, if you believe in multiple ones) in a nanosecond, while simultaneously predicting every person's actions for the rest of time, but we'd still be no closer to a self-aware life form.
and even if we *did* create one, how could we tell if it was really 'alive', or just a brilliant simulation? the answer is, at the moment, that we wouldn't even be able to tell.
x = x++; // add one to x
there's something else obvious about that, too...is obviously not useful.