He's got a point, though. It's true that Christians aren't all against the teaching of evolution nor against homosexual behaviors, however the truth is that the leaders of most protestant Christian churches teach and believe in creation. And all of the major Christian church denominations (including Catholicism) denounce homosexuality. Oh, yes they say they love the sinner but hate the sin. But the number of family disownments and suicides of homosexuals who grew up in a Christian family tell a different tale.
If there are Christians who don't believe in the dogma of their church, then why do they keep identifying themselves as Christians? Why do they keep funding their leaders with tithes every Sunday? Why do they elect their church leaders to positions of power? Do they think that they are somehow going to change the church by continuing this behavior? I say that because they haven't changed a thing. Honestly, I feel sorry for these Christians who say that they believe in almost all of what their church preaches-- except for little things like homosexuality and science because these people are afraid to confront their church and make a difference. They just sit quietly in their pew, stand up when told to, sing when prompted, and sit down like good little Sheep.
I took a double take too. It's the same Peter Norvig all CS guys with some AI background should recognize by name. Google is one company that deserves to employee PhDs, and I'm sure guys like Norvig do well in Google's research environment.
Time changes due to daylight savings means having to change the time on several clocks on various household appliances. The time changes are also particularly jarring to the biological clock. I've noticed that with the recent one hour jump ahead that people have been leaving work one hour earlier than usual. Instead of leaving work at around 6:00 PM they are actually leaving work almost an hour earlier at 5:00 PM which gives them not zero hours of daylight left in the day (like it did a week ago) but two! I take that as a sign of fatigue caused by the time shift. I know I don't feel like working as many hours during the day as I did a week ago.
Did you hear that Astaro is looking for a mascot? I would suggest combining Astaro with Hamtaro to get Asstaro the Linux-savvy hamster, but maybe that's just me.
What does this have to do with the new name for Mandrake Linux? I have no idea. Back to your regular slightly on-topic madness that is Slashdot.
Funny. I thought the same thing too. The screenshots show the zeta in lowercase just like the symbol zoophiles use. Uncanny. If the logo was in uppercase, that would be a different story. Truth told, it is difficult to come up with a name that cannot be distorted somehow.
I had a chance to test drive a monowheel last summer. The first time I had trouble learning how to steer all over again, Because of the high center of balance (hint: it's just below the line of radial symmetry), you must be very careful while turning to avoid tipping the vehicle over! This is especially tricky because slowing down for a turn results in gerbilling (see below for a definition) where the driver is swung up from the base of the vehicle, further raising the center of gravity at a time when you need it as low as possible. Fortunately, the second time I mastered the trick of bringing the vehicle to a near stop in order to make sharp corner turns. I've (fortunately!) had several opportunities to drive one since then and my skills have improved.
For those interested, monowheel vehicles have a vocabularity of their own. For example, gerbilling is when a rider rotates around inside a monowheel due to a sudden force (such as when the wheel stops), much like what happens when a rodent stops running in an exercise wheel. Another loss of rotational control is due to the snowball effect. Snowballing is when a monowheel develops a coating of snow while rolling in much the same way you might build up layers on a snowball by rolling it. Be very careful when driving these things during winter! Monowheels are very efficient vehicles and even when driven on nearly flat ground-- even a small gradient can lead to rolling out of control.
Monowheels will never be practical vehicles. However, as recreation vehicles, they are quite fun. They're a ride, literally. There's nothing quite like steering around in one of them and feeling the unique forces that can only be felt inside of a big moving wheel. I can tell you personally that gerbilling and snowballing are both enjoyable activities assuming you take the right precautions.
But.... I already have an appliance that supplies me with all the information I need at a glance. It's ubiquitous, affordable, capable of displaying both a lot of details and a summary, it can be hooked up to a variety of devices and provide feedback specific to the device, and it's easy to use. I call it a monitor.
Linux was started in Finland. However, Linus now lives in the U.S. where he makes money in the software industry and still has time for Linux. I don't see how having a successful software industry undermines open source developers. Europe, on the other hand, has mainly open source developers and very little industry. That means programmers have to make their living doing something else other than what they love, such as a boring job working at the local petrol station.
While there is some abuse of patents in the software industry, you have to give them some credit for building an industry. Take a look at Europe, where software patents are uninforceable. Exactly how big is the software industry in Europe? I'm not talking about open source me-too clones of commercial products. I'm talking about software that's revolutionary enough that you'd actually be willing to put down a few dollars to buy. It's true that MP3 compression technology was developed by a German company, but without U.S. patents on the technology, Fraunhofer would be long dead. Except for a few videogames, Europe isn't exactly the hotbed of new software technology.
You'd think with it's war against religious fundamentalists in other countries (and one in which the Bush administration was touting that one of the reasons for attacking these countries is the lack of freedom the countries allow their citizens), that the U.S. would eliminate it's own Taliban killjoys. Nope. Instead these strict politicians get elected to office. My opinion is that people are just about the same no matter where in the world you go.. whether it's Afghanistan or the U.S.. the only difference is the magnitude of how corrupt the power hungry people have become.
Re:Could it be that the downfall to products..
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
I agree Real isn't the strongest example of a corrupt corporation, in part because Real is losing marketshare.. and that's only happening because a media player is primarily for entertainment, not as a tool required to keep competitive in the job environment like say, software or phone service. In fact, it's good to see that the company is amending its image. However, I do think the company's struggles are symptomatic of a pervasive corporate culture that embraces dishonest tactics such as resetting opt-out privacy settings, or in Real's case, hiding opt-out privacy settings. Unfortunately, not all companies pocketbooks are affected by strongarm tactics because those companies are monopolies or they have form trusts with other giants in the same industry.
Could it be that the downfall to products..
on
Real Problems
·
· Score: 1
is due to the privacy infringement, obscuring downloads and contracts with practically unreadable small print, and strongarm anticompetitive licenses/EULAs/contracts imposed by corporations? Hell yes! In my opinion American companies are some of the worst offenders of freedom. We are starting to beginning of slavery again. The days of owing your soul to the plantation store are back. It's pretty sad.
Freedom of speech undermines revolution. If you don't have the freedom to speak your mind, you build up anger that you can't release. Eventually enough people build up enough anger that they do speak out and with critical mass they form a revolution. After all, if free speech is outlawed, you better arm yourself if you want to speak out.
Free speech generates a culture of back seat driver, couch potato swear-at-the-images-on-your television citizens. It's better to let out anger than leave it in. I think I like it that way. It's better than revolution.
Open source development tools are a godsend for development work. Trying to figure out why a program won't run properly compiled in a closed source environment usually leads to wasting time working around the problem by re-engineering your sofware, rather than finding and fixing a simple bug in your development tools. Just because a development environment is supported by a big company doesn't mean that big company is going to fix the problems you discover in its software anytime soon.
The United States (or heck, the entire western world) is powerful because the people are happy. In developing nations like China, people live in poverty. Some barely get enough food to eat, and even then it's probably not much more than rice and water. The people live in non-airconditioned shacks. Their medical care fringes on pseudo-science. Their leaders are several times more corrupt than U.S. leaders. It's liveable, but you will be hard pressed to find a better place to live outside of the West. If China becomes the next super power, something will have to change. Either China's government will have to become less corrupt, or the U.S. will have to become worse.
In short, don't worry about China bitchslapping the U.S. until its people have a better quality of life than the U.S. Remember, it's the middle class that powers the country. If the middle class aren't happy, they lack the willpower to make their nation strong.
You could set this up kind of like Packet Radio.. where you can relay your packets through other servers. Back in the days of data radio communication, you relied on the mercy of the servers you relayed through. If one went down or lost contact with its relay partner stations, you lost your connection. There are insane latency issues involved, but it was pretty exciting to communicate long distances jumping through multiple stations. Ahh, the days before the internet..
It's not exactly the same.. when the U.S. wants laws enforced in other countries, it's to protect the quality of life of its citizens.. not by forcing another country into submission, but by preventing the laws of that country from undermining the U.S. economy. Take for example intellectual property laws. The U.S.'s movie industry is the best in the world. Hollywood would not exist if there weren't intellectual property laws allowing movie makers to recoup costs. People of developing nations take advantage of their lax intellectual property laws. They copy movies without compensating the creators. Thus the lax laws cause U.S. companies lose money they would have made, and cause the countries in question to have poor a body of fine art. In third world countries, if you turn on a radio station, you hear Western music, not native music! Developing nations do not have the laws to sustain movie and music industries that actually produce decent material that people would want to watch or hear. It may suck to have to pay money to watch a movie, but be glad when the U.S. wins and other countries are forced to play by its rules. You could be worse off by having the developing nation enforce its laws on you and bring the first world one step backwards.
Once a company names their competitors in marketing literature, you know the company is losing ground. Or so the marketers say. I'm not sure if I believe it though
They're great for displaying technical drawings. I'd like to see more architectual diagrams on the web, both software architecture and the physical type. With bitmapped graphics, web designers are pretty much limited to small low resolution images, dumbing down detail to a marketroid white sheet level. Vector graphics scale very well for diagrams and cad drawings.
Talk about grade inflation. I don't think I've seen a book review on Slashdot that was less than six or seven stars.. except for some free, unfinished online books.
Slashdot Mirror
He's got a point, though. It's true that Christians aren't all against the teaching of evolution nor against homosexual behaviors, however the truth is that the leaders of most protestant Christian churches teach and believe in creation. And all of the major Christian church denominations (including Catholicism) denounce homosexuality. Oh, yes they say they love the sinner but hate the sin. But the number of family disownments and suicides of homosexuals who grew up in a Christian family tell a different tale.
If there are Christians who don't believe in the dogma of their church, then why do they keep identifying themselves as Christians? Why do they keep funding their leaders with tithes every Sunday? Why do they elect their church leaders to positions of power? Do they think that they are somehow going to change the church by continuing this behavior? I say that because they haven't changed a thing. Honestly, I feel sorry for these Christians who say that they believe in almost all of what their church preaches-- except for little things like homosexuality and science because these people are afraid to confront their church and make a difference. They just sit quietly in their pew, stand up when told to, sing when prompted, and sit down like good little Sheep.
I took a double take too. It's the same Peter Norvig all CS guys with some AI background should recognize by name. Google is one company that deserves to employee PhDs, and I'm sure guys like Norvig do well in Google's research environment.
Time changes due to daylight savings means having to change the time on several clocks on various household appliances. The time changes are also particularly jarring to the biological clock. I've noticed that with the recent one hour jump ahead that people have been leaving work one hour earlier than usual. Instead of leaving work at around 6:00 PM they are actually leaving work almost an hour earlier at 5:00 PM which gives them not zero hours of daylight left in the day (like it did a week ago) but two! I take that as a sign of fatigue caused by the time shift. I know I don't feel like working as many hours during the day as I did a week ago.
Did you hear that Astaro is looking for a mascot? I would suggest combining Astaro with Hamtaro to get Asstaro the Linux-savvy hamster, but maybe that's just me.
What does this have to do with the new name for Mandrake Linux? I have no idea. Back to your regular slightly on-topic madness that is Slashdot.
Funny. I thought the same thing too. The screenshots show the zeta in lowercase just like the symbol zoophiles use. Uncanny. If the logo was in uppercase, that would be a different story. Truth told, it is difficult to come up with a name that cannot be distorted somehow.
I had a chance to test drive a monowheel last summer. The first time I had trouble learning how to steer all over again, Because of the high center of balance (hint: it's just below the line of radial symmetry), you must be very careful while turning to avoid tipping the vehicle over! This is especially tricky because slowing down for a turn results in gerbilling (see below for a definition) where the driver is swung up from the base of the vehicle, further raising the center of gravity at a time when you need it as low as possible. Fortunately, the second time I mastered the trick of bringing the vehicle to a near stop in order to make sharp corner turns. I've (fortunately!) had several opportunities to drive one since then and my skills have improved.
For those interested, monowheel vehicles have a vocabularity of their own. For example, gerbilling is when a rider rotates around inside a monowheel due to a sudden force (such as when the wheel stops), much like what happens when a rodent stops running in an exercise wheel. Another loss of rotational control is due to the snowball effect. Snowballing is when a monowheel develops a coating of snow while rolling in much the same way you might build up layers on a snowball by rolling it. Be very careful when driving these things during winter! Monowheels are very efficient vehicles and even when driven on nearly flat ground-- even a small gradient can lead to rolling out of control.
Monowheels will never be practical vehicles. However, as recreation vehicles, they are quite fun. They're a ride, literally. There's nothing quite like steering around in one of them and feeling the unique forces that can only be felt inside of a big moving wheel. I can tell you personally that gerbilling and snowballing are both enjoyable activities assuming you take the right precautions.
But.... I already have an appliance that supplies me with all the information I need at a glance. It's ubiquitous, affordable, capable of displaying both a lot of details and a summary, it can be hooked up to a variety of devices and provide feedback specific to the device, and it's easy to use. I call it a monitor.
What I want to know is how much water is needed just to make one fish stick so we can all panic about how much water humanity is wasting.
The size is probably 1x8x8 cm. In other words, it's 8 cm square and 1 cm thick.
Linux was started in Finland. However, Linus now lives in the U.S. where he makes money in the software industry and still has time for Linux. I don't see how having a successful software industry undermines open source developers. Europe, on the other hand, has mainly open source developers and very little industry. That means programmers have to make their living doing something else other than what they love, such as a boring job working at the local petrol station.
While there is some abuse of patents in the software industry, you have to give them some credit for building an industry. Take a look at Europe, where software patents are uninforceable. Exactly how big is the software industry in Europe? I'm not talking about open source me-too clones of commercial products. I'm talking about software that's revolutionary enough that you'd actually be willing to put down a few dollars to buy. It's true that MP3 compression technology was developed by a German company, but without U.S. patents on the technology, Fraunhofer would be long dead. Except for a few videogames, Europe isn't exactly the hotbed of new software technology.
You'd think with it's war against religious fundamentalists in other countries (and one in which the Bush administration was touting that one of the reasons for attacking these countries is the lack of freedom the countries allow their citizens), that the U.S. would eliminate it's own Taliban killjoys. Nope. Instead these strict politicians get elected to office. My opinion is that people are just about the same no matter where in the world you go.. whether it's Afghanistan or the U.S.. the only difference is the magnitude of how corrupt the power hungry people have become.
I agree Real isn't the strongest example of a corrupt corporation, in part because Real is losing marketshare.. and that's only happening because a media player is primarily for entertainment, not as a tool required to keep competitive in the job environment like say, software or phone service. In fact, it's good to see that the company is amending its image. However, I do think the company's struggles are symptomatic of a pervasive corporate culture that embraces dishonest tactics such as resetting opt-out privacy settings, or in Real's case, hiding opt-out privacy settings. Unfortunately, not all companies pocketbooks are affected by strongarm tactics because those companies are monopolies or they have form trusts with other giants in the same industry.
is due to the privacy infringement, obscuring downloads and contracts with practically unreadable small print, and strongarm anticompetitive licenses/EULAs/contracts imposed by corporations? Hell yes! In my opinion American companies are some of the worst offenders of freedom. We are starting to beginning of slavery again. The days of owing your soul to the plantation store are back. It's pretty sad.
2 channels ought to be enough for anybody... who listens to music with headphones. After all, we only have two ears.
Looks like you should have patented it. You can patent just about anything these days, you know.
In Israel it is April 1st. Ponder that. :)
Freedom of speech undermines revolution. If you don't have the freedom to speak your mind, you build up anger that you can't release. Eventually enough people build up enough anger that they do speak out and with critical mass they form a revolution. After all, if free speech is outlawed, you better arm yourself if you want to speak out.
Free speech generates a culture of back seat driver, couch potato swear-at-the-images-on-your television citizens. It's better to let out anger than leave it in. I think I like it that way. It's better than revolution.
Open source development tools are a godsend for development work. Trying to figure out why a program won't run properly compiled in a closed source environment usually leads to wasting time working around the problem by re-engineering your sofware, rather than finding and fixing a simple bug in your development tools. Just because a development environment is supported by a big company doesn't mean that big company is going to fix the problems you discover in its software anytime soon.
The United States (or heck, the entire western world) is powerful because the people are happy. In developing nations like China, people live in poverty. Some barely get enough food to eat, and even then it's probably not much more than rice and water. The people live in non-airconditioned shacks. Their medical care fringes on pseudo-science. Their leaders are several times more corrupt than U.S. leaders. It's liveable, but you will be hard pressed to find a better place to live outside of the West. If China becomes the next super power, something will have to change. Either China's government will have to become less corrupt, or the U.S. will have to become worse.
In short, don't worry about China bitchslapping the U.S. until its people have a better quality of life than the U.S. Remember, it's the middle class that powers the country. If the middle class aren't happy, they lack the willpower to make their nation strong.
You could set this up kind of like Packet Radio.. where you can relay your packets through other servers. Back in the days of data radio communication, you relied on the mercy of the servers you relayed through. If one went down or lost contact with its relay partner stations, you lost your connection. There are insane latency issues involved, but it was pretty exciting to communicate long distances jumping through multiple stations. Ahh, the days before the internet..
It's not exactly the same.. when the U.S. wants laws enforced in other countries, it's to protect the quality of life of its citizens.. not by forcing another country into submission, but by preventing the laws of that country from undermining the U.S. economy. Take for example intellectual property laws. The U.S.'s movie industry is the best in the world. Hollywood would not exist if there weren't intellectual property laws allowing movie makers to recoup costs. People of developing nations take advantage of their lax intellectual property laws. They copy movies without compensating the creators. Thus the lax laws cause U.S. companies lose money they would have made, and cause the countries in question to have poor a body of fine art. In third world countries, if you turn on a radio station, you hear Western music, not native music! Developing nations do not have the laws to sustain movie and music industries that actually produce decent material that people would want to watch or hear. It may suck to have to pay money to watch a movie, but be glad when the U.S. wins and other countries are forced to play by its rules. You could be worse off by having the developing nation enforce its laws on you and bring the first world one step backwards.
1. Never mention the name of your competitor.
Once a company names their competitors in marketing literature, you know the company is losing ground. Or so the marketers say. I'm not sure if I believe it though
They're great for displaying technical drawings. I'd like to see more architectual diagrams on the web, both software architecture and the physical type. With bitmapped graphics, web designers are pretty much limited to small low resolution images, dumbing down detail to a marketroid white sheet level. Vector graphics scale very well for diagrams and cad drawings.
Talk about grade inflation. I don't think I've seen a book review on Slashdot that was less than six or seven stars.. except for some free, unfinished online books.