Good point and interesting question. I was not aware of the distinction between weak and strong atheism. I suppose that at the moment I am actually a weak atheist, having over the years gone from christian to agnostic to now a weak atheist.
Thank you for clearing that up, even though it means I may have lost an interesting conversation hook:-)
If you're an atheist (as I am) how can you defend any view other than "as soon as it's a zygote (a DNA pattern separate from the mother's and the father's) it's a person"? If you're the final arbiter of morality (as an atheist is to himself) how can you fudge this one?
I'm an atheist (well, agnostic to be precise, but the end effect is pretty much the same) and a zygote is not a person to me. In fact, DNA really doesn't figure into my definition of a person. (What about clones? They have the same DNA as someone else, but they are persons in their own right.)
To me, a person at the very least needs to be capable of independent cognitive processing of some sort. Unfortunately, what exactly constitutes independent cognitive processing is something that I don't have a clear answer on yet, but it's something that a zygote, being only a single cell, isn't yet capable of, while an advanced foetus is.
Is still Deus Ex (The original, the sequel blows )
[...]
All it needs now is a graphics/ai overhaul and it will be perfect (Someone want to start a doom3 total conversion?)
It could do with some extra levels though. I recently replayed it and even though I took my time I still had it finished in no time.
Also, it would be tres cool if you could stick with UNATCO and work your way up in MJ12.
But it's indeed still one of the best single-players games out there, though my personal favorite is Morrowind.
The European
Transvestite Parliament voted a year ago to reject software patents conclusively.
*Sigh* RMS isn't that undiplomatic. While AFAICT the rest of the article is a verbatim copy, this is a good reminder of why you shouldn't trust these "in case it gets slashdotted" copies.
I have to admit that I'm not entirely up to date on small distro's, since my current machine is pretty beefy.
I remember hearing good things about VectorLinux though. It's Slackware based and according to the site the minimum requirements are a 166 MHz Pentium class processor with 32 MB of memory and 700 MB of hard disc space (including swap). Exactly the system you described:-)
This is just another step to linux becoming as bloated as windows.
And I welcome it. I've got dozens of free gigs that I'll gladly fill with neat stuff like this. If you don't then you can simply use a distro that takes the bloat out. That's the great thing about FOSS. Don't like it? Modify it! (Or let others do it for you.)
What a fantastically creative author that article has. To end every other paragraph with "Redmond/HP says"... Sheer brilliance. If only Shakespeare had thought of that.
Sure they don't like Nazi stuff, etc, but please, can you really ban that sort of material without banning countless other things? Free speach needs to be protected online.
Don't forget that these laws have been introduced shortly after WWII. Back then enforcing them was much easier since there was no such thing as the internet. And it wasn't at all controversial due to the Nazi's being the enemy who had recently killed millions and had destroyed much of the country.
If they feel this strong about Yahoo's sales items, why not just ban Yahoo in France(like China does with a ton of sites) until, if ever, they feel the need to remove the content.
You don't ban entire companies because they do one thing you disagree with. There are less drastic ways to settle these matters.
We can only assume that reasonable protection only exists for the short-to-medium term.
Fairly long OTP messages may be one exception.
Actually, all OTP messages are an exception. For every plaintext P and ciphertext C, there is a key K, such that an OTP of P with K will product C. Hence, if you try all possible keys on a ciphertext of length l, you'll find all possible plaintexts of length l. So, if you have a ciphertext of length 3, then there are keys for "bad", "moo", "can", "has", "aaa", "bbb", "ccc", etc., etc. There's no way for you to know what the original was.
What are the possible rammifications if MD5 is confirmed to have a collision? What other hashing algo's are there that may take its place? And even if it does have collisions, is that serious enough to break many security systems already in place?
It has already been established that MD5 has collisions. This is actually pretty trivial, since MD5 maps a byte string of arbitrary length to a byte string of length (IIRC) 16. Thus, since there are infinitely more strings of the former variety than of the latter variety, there must be at least one collision.
So, the fact that there are collisions is not a big deal; we already knew that. If one is found, then that doesn't really change anything. What would change everything is if someone found a way to find a collision for an arbitraty byte string. That way you could set up a mirror for a popular piece of software and instead of the real program, you could distribute something that has the exact same md5sum, but which does something completely else (most likely nothing sensible, since it'll be effectively a random string).
Friend of mine worked with a fully working Win98 install for 5 years.
To be honest, he didn't connect to the net much
But still, I thought it was impressive:)
I did the same for 4 years or so in my pre-linux days and even was on the net a lot (with IE even) during the last 2 years or so. It's certainly possible, but having a good firewall (preferably hardware), an up-to-date virusscanner, regular windows updates and a fair bit of determination/masochism are a must.
Ridiculous. Medicating for no serious reason *at all*? I can't wait to see people have allergic reactions (some no doubt will) and sue the government for forcing them to take this absurd vaccine.
I don't know if anyone is going to get forced into taking this vaccine, but I can't help but be reminded of a certain British genius whose life was destroyed by unnecessary "medication" that was forced on him by his government.
Isn't that "Schiessbude" (shooting booth)? See Schiessen vs. Scheissen...
It is. See an image over here (the text on the page spells it wrong though).
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"? I would understand if they always wrote "ei", but I see too many instances of "wierd" for that to be true. Odd...
Actually OO.org does have a VBA equivalent. Unfortunately, it's not exactly compatible with VBA, though (but then again, if it was the MS lawyers would love it) and the editor isn't quite as nice as the one in Office.
> The person I replied to should be marked as a troll, not I. > >I encourage the mod to come out and argue with me. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards.
Not one of the moderators, but I do consider your point to be invalid. The USA, as well as the Soviet Union, Canada and many other countries have helped us Europeans immensely in the past, but that does not mean that we now have an eternal debt of grattitute to these countries.
You may buy someone a beer because his grandparent once saved the life of yours, but if you see him beat up someone without a good reason, then you'll still cry foul.
(Disclaimer: please note that I'm only giving an example of why the point is invalid. I don't mean to imply anything about the actions of the USA.)
Well, the point I was trying to make in my post was that comparing the USA with the world court was invalid because the latter operates with the formal support of the vast majority of countries in the world (the NL bit in my post was to emphasize that), while the former does not.
Now, I do agree with much of what you wrote. Many Europeans, including myself, feel the same about the EU as you feel about the UN and of course every government does take acties to further its own interests.
The thing is that its much easier to swallow when the EU does something I don't like than when, for instance, France does something I don't like. That way at least my country (the Netherlands) and by extension myself will have had some miniscule say in the matter. The same goes for the UN and the USA, particularly now that the USA often does not seem to care about the opinion of others at all. (Bear in mind that this is an impression and not necessarily the truth.)
But this is indeed very offtopic. I like ranting too much, though:-)
>oh you mean thats different than how the world court in the netherlands thinks they have jurisdiction over the entire freaking world?
Uh, yeah. The world court is an official body of the UN and has nothing to do with the Netherlands apart from the fact that it is housed in The Hague. In a building paid for by an American, by the way.
>oh you mean thats different than how the french think they are the major power in europe and are so much better, more cultured, and have a better language than the rest of the world?
That's exaggerated. And in any case, though they _may_ want to force their views on others, they cannot. At least not to any extend that can be compared to the extend that the USA can.
>>OO.org is great, but Impress presentations don't always look perfect in PowerPoint, which I have to use for the actual presentation > >Ever considered saving your documents as.pdf for demonstrations? They look quite good that way. I'm sorry but I don't remember the control combo to fullscreen in Acrobat Reader in Windows since I have not used Windows in a while. You can probably google for it, or perhaps someone at/. is nice enough to reply here and share it with us.:)
I have actually. Unfortunately, some of the machines that I have to use for presentations can't be relied upon to correctly read CD-Rs or USB-sticks, so I like to have a backup copy on floppy disk to be on the safe side. The last time I tried (which admittedly is some time ago now, so maybe the situation has improved) Impress would sometimes produce awfully big pdfs, so that didn't work out.
But those pdf presentations do look very nice though. I've seen some really great (and small!) ones that were made with pdftex. If PowerPoint wasn't so awfully convenient, then I'd probably try to go that route.
>>And of course the price is really nice too, but that's not as big a selling point to me as those other 2 points, since I can get cheap/free copies of Windows programs for most things that I need to do (student license for MS-Office, eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX, etc.) > >MS Office student licenses, sure thing, but eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX and probably etc. as well are free downloads. No need to get a license for that.
Yup. Hence the "cheap/free" bit. I admit the way I put it was a bit confusing though.
>The MS-Office license is probably the only reason why these licenses are worth mentioning if you look at it closely, unless you can get MS Developer software for cheap.
That and the Windows upgrades. If you're still on 98/ME, then that's nice too.
>I've also just tried Gentoo and Mandrake 10.0, and while I'm still a newb overall, Gentoo is taking me to all sorts of new places. I don't see Windows coming back to my systems any time soon.
We seem to have had a very similar experience. I started with Mandrake 9.1 and am now at 10.0. Like you, I've also tried Gentoo, but unfortunately had to give up after a day of trying to get my network card to work. Wasn't a waste of my time though, as I learned a lot that day.
Oh well, probably just did something incredibly stupid, so I'll try again once I've got some more time on my hands. Can't wait to replace URPMI by Portage:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Good point and interesting question. I was not aware of the distinction between weak and strong atheism. I suppose that at the moment I am actually a weak atheist, having over the years gone from christian to agnostic to now a weak atheist.
:-)
Thank you for clearing that up, even though it means I may have lost an interesting conversation hook
No, no. You misunderstand. They mean protected FROM Mr. Stallman. After all, he won't touch MSIE.
I'm an atheist (well, agnostic to be precise, but the end effect is pretty much the same) and a zygote is not a person to me. In fact, DNA really doesn't figure into my definition of a person. (What about clones? They have the same DNA as someone else, but they are persons in their own right.)
To me, a person at the very least needs to be capable of independent cognitive processing of some sort. Unfortunately, what exactly constitutes independent cognitive processing is something that I don't have a clear answer on yet, but it's something that a zygote, being only a single cell, isn't yet capable of, while an advanced foetus is.
Also, it would be tres cool if you could stick with UNATCO and work your way up in MJ12.
But it's indeed still one of the best single-players games out there, though my personal favorite is Morrowind.
*Sigh* RMS isn't that undiplomatic. While AFAICT the rest of the article is a verbatim copy, this is a good reminder of why you shouldn't trust these "in case it gets slashdotted" copies.
I have to admit that I'm not entirely up to date on small distro's, since my current machine is pretty beefy. I remember hearing good things about VectorLinux though. It's Slackware based and according to the site the minimum requirements are a 166 MHz Pentium class processor with 32 MB of memory and 700 MB of hard disc space (including swap). Exactly the system you described :-)
What a fantastically creative author that article has. To end every other paragraph with "Redmond/HP says"... Sheer brilliance. If only Shakespeare had thought of that.
- Assembly
- C
- C++
- Java/C#
- VB
People who use language X consider people who use languages < X to be freaks and people who use languages > X to be lusers.So, the fact that there are collisions is not a big deal; we already knew that. If one is found, then that doesn't really change anything. What would change everything is if someone found a way to find a collision for an arbitraty byte string. That way you could set up a mirror for a popular piece of software and instead of the real program, you could distribute something that has the exact same md5sum, but which does something completely else (most likely nothing sensible, since it'll be effectively a random string).
The Tick does indeed rock, but I have to admit that I wouldn't have recognized the quote if I hadn't had the help of my good friend google :-)
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"? I would understand if they always wrote "ei", but I see too many instances of "wierd" for that to be true. Odd...
And besides, if it makes my life even a little easier, I'll be pleased.
Actually OO.org does have a VBA equivalent. Unfortunately, it's not exactly compatible with VBA, though (but then again, if it was the MS lawyers would love it) and the editor isn't quite as nice as the one in Office.
> The person I replied to should be marked as a troll, not I.
>
>I encourage the mod to come out and argue with me. What a bunch of ungrateful bastards.
Not one of the moderators, but I do consider your point to be invalid. The USA, as well as the Soviet Union, Canada and many other countries have helped us Europeans immensely in the past, but that does not mean that we now have an eternal debt of grattitute to these countries.
You may buy someone a beer because his grandparent once saved the life of yours, but if you see him beat up someone without a good reason, then you'll still cry foul.
(Disclaimer: please note that I'm only giving an example of why the point is invalid. I don't mean to imply anything about the actions of the USA.)
Well, the point I was trying to make in my post was that comparing the USA with the world court was invalid because the latter operates with the formal support of the vast majority of countries in the world (the NL bit in my post was to emphasize that), while the former does not.
:-)
Now, I do agree with much of what you wrote. Many Europeans, including myself, feel the same about the EU as you feel about the UN and of course every government does take acties to further its own interests.
The thing is that its much easier to swallow when the EU does something I don't like than when, for instance, France does something I don't like. That way at least my country (the Netherlands) and by extension myself will have had some miniscule say in the matter. The same goes for the UN and the USA, particularly now that the USA often does not seem to care about the opinion of others at all. (Bear in mind that this is an impression and not necessarily the truth.)
But this is indeed very offtopic. I like ranting too much, though
>oh you mean thats different than how the world court in the netherlands thinks they have jurisdiction over the entire freaking world?
Uh, yeah. The world court is an official body of the UN and has nothing to do with the Netherlands apart from the fact that it is housed in The Hague. In a building paid for by an American, by the way.
>oh you mean thats different than how the french think they are the major power in europe and are so much better, more cultured, and have a better language than the rest of the world?
That's exaggerated. And in any case, though they _may_ want to force their views on others, they cannot. At least not to any extend that can be compared to the extend that the USA can.
>>OO.org is great, but Impress presentations don't always look perfect in PowerPoint, which I have to use for the actual presentation .pdf for demonstrations? They look quite good that way. I'm sorry but I don't remember the control combo to fullscreen in Acrobat Reader in Windows since I have not used Windows in a while. You can probably google for it, or perhaps someone at /. is nice enough to reply here and share it with us. :)
>
>Ever considered saving your documents as
I have actually. Unfortunately, some of the machines that I have to use for presentations can't be relied upon to correctly read CD-Rs or USB-sticks, so I like to have a backup copy on floppy disk to be on the safe side. The last time I tried (which admittedly is some time ago now, so maybe the situation has improved) Impress would sometimes produce awfully big pdfs, so that didn't work out.
But those pdf presentations do look very nice though. I've seen some really great (and small!) ones that were made with pdftex. If PowerPoint wasn't so awfully convenient, then I'd probably try to go that route.
>>And of course the price is really nice too, but that's not as big a selling point to me as those other 2 points, since I can get cheap/free copies of Windows programs for most things that I need to do (student license for MS-Office, eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX, etc.)
>
>MS Office student licenses, sure thing, but eclipse, JDK, MiKTeX and probably etc. as well are free downloads. No need to get a license for that.
Yup. Hence the "cheap/free" bit. I admit the way I put it was a bit confusing though.
>The MS-Office license is probably the only reason why these licenses are worth mentioning if you look at it closely, unless you can get MS Developer software for cheap.
That and the Windows upgrades. If you're still on 98/ME, then that's nice too.
>I've also just tried Gentoo and Mandrake 10.0, and while I'm still a newb overall, Gentoo is taking me to all sorts of new places. I don't see Windows coming back to my systems any time soon.
:-)
We seem to have had a very similar experience. I started with Mandrake 9.1 and am now at 10.0. Like you, I've also tried Gentoo, but unfortunately had to give up after a day of trying to get my network card to work. Wasn't a waste of my time though, as I learned a lot that day.
Oh well, probably just did something incredibly stupid, so I'll try again once I've got some more time on my hands. Can't wait to replace URPMI by Portage