One of the largest problems with education (at least American education) is the utter lack of critical thinking skills. American education is based in doctrines developed by Horace Mann at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We need to educate children on more than the repetition of rote facts, and teach them to logically process information in a rigorous manner.
There's a wonderful article that's been thankfully saved from extinction by the Internet Archive called http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.39/sesame_epist.html"> Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom that does an excellent job of laying out the kind of critical thinking skills needed to make people capable of understanding the modern world.
Beyond that, education should no longer be used as a system that shelters kids from real life. Students need to be held to high standards, and parents along with them. If someone like Jaime Escalante can take a group of kids that the system assumed would fail and make them perform, then it's clear that the system is letting kids down.
Human capital is crucial to the success of a modern society, and keeping a system around that's powered by bureaucratic inertia and doesn't do the job hurts not only the kids trapped in the system, but the country at large.
Universal produced the show, but as a condition of picking up a series, a network gains the exclusive first rights to air the series on television. The rights to Firefly are still held by Fox, and Fox has expressed no interest in transferring those rights back.
Universal retains all the other rights, which is why Serenity got made, but unless someone's willing to cough up a very large amount of dough, it's unlikely that Fox would let their first-run TV contract drop.
Both Apple and Linux serve niche markets, but they're largely different niche markets.
Apple sells expensive but proven and well-integrated hardware. Apple users generally don't want to get into the guts of their system and mess around with it. The Apple mantra is having a system that just works. It's all about the experience and the ease-of-use.
Linux is a tinkerer's OS. It's designed to run on everything from the latest 3.6GHz monster rig to a simple embedded device to a dead badger. It isn't particularly easy to use, but it's very powerful and very customizable.
There's only some overlap between Apple and Linux, and if anything, the switch to Intel will aid Linux. Not having to worry about architectural issues will make it easier to share UNIX-based software between Mac OS X and other UNIX-like systems.
If anything, I bet we'll see people do what's already being done - using Apple's excellent hardware to do Linux development - which will be even easier than before when Apple switches to an Intel-based architecture.
For one, the White House has nothing to do with software purchases by government agencies. Plenty of government agencies use non-Microsoft and open source software - including the FBI, NSA, CIA, and others.
Second, the HHS has already signed the deal with Novell, which means your argument is utterly moot.
Finally, you offer absolutely no evidence that you work for HHS. In fact, I'd put money that you didn't even get the name of the agency right. Not once have I heard a single HHS employee use the term DHHS, and I used to know several people who worked there. An employee of a government agency wouldn't mess up the name of their agency in the way you did.
Arguing that the Administration would use the terms "unamerican" or "socialist" is also completely asinine on its face. If there was a push to eliminate open-source software, there are plenty of bureaucratic ways of doing it. And not once have I seen a government memo that would use such terms to describe anything.
Based on your comments, I can only conclude that your post is a blatant troll.
Trying to decode an HD stream on a Mac mini is probably not that good of an idea - a single G4 doesn't have quite enough power to manage it.
H.264 is designed to scale down to various processor architectures, so a lower-resolution stream would probably play acceptably, but I rather doubt that you'd get enough horsepower out of a Mac mini to acceptably decode HD content encoded with H.264 in realtime.
The massive laptop is actually part of a new chipset design by Intel - with the success of the small and light Centrino design, Intel wants to persue the larger laptop market as well. The new chipset, the Overcompenson is expected to do well among groups that purchase expensive sports cars, Hummer H2s, and respond positively to Enzyte commercials.
Wow, between the unquoted attributes, the tables, and the capitalized tags, that drives the Crazy Pedantic Web Standards Designer part of me up a bloody wall...
This gets brought up a lot, but it isn't going to happen.
Recompiling OSX for AMD64 might not be too bad. Recompiling the libraries on top of it would be much harder - those aren't even optimized for 64-bit processors yet for compatibility reasons (and because it doesn't yet offer a big performance boost.)
Recompiling everyone's applications would be fatal for Apple. Application vendors aren't going to support both Mac/PPC and Mac/x64. The Mac marketshare is small enough as it is - dividing it in half wouldn't help at all.
Apple won't go to x64 or x86 processors unless they absolutely have to, and even then it wouldn't surprise me if they invested in chip design and fabrication themselves before they got to that stage.
In those cases, the airlines and Boeing took steps to check for structural fatigue problems. If Airbus and the airlines that fly Airbus aircraft began a program to do ultrasound inspections of all A300 and A310 airframes looking for structural cavities, then the safety issue would be dealt with in a responsible manner.
The problem is that Airbus doesn't mandate ultrasound inspections. Visual inspections won't reveal subsurface cavities and tap inspections aren't nearly accurate enough. The problem is that the layers of carbon fiber material lose structural integrity between layers, and that sort of thing can only be detected by ultrasound evaluation.
Airbus has a great safety record, but we're just now running into the length of times where these sort of structural flaws can occur. It's wise for Airbus to take a serious look at delamination and ensure that it doesn't become a serious problem.
Air travel is still the safest form of travel, but only because airlines and aviation regulatory organizations take aircraft safety very seriously. This is a case where proper preventative maintenance could have potentially saved the lives of the people on Flight 587.
Because these problems will only occur over time - they won't start showing up until the airframes reach a certain number of flight hours and a certain number of compression/decompression cycles.
The risks of delamination is very real. That was very likely to have been a contributory cause of the crash of Flight 587.
Let's review the data, shall we:
Flight 587: Aircraft lost rudder in flight, crashed.
Air Transat Flight 961: Loss of rudder in flight
A FedEx aircraft demonstrates damage to rudder actuator section right where the damage to those two other flights occurred.
Any competent safety official would not ignore these trends. Visual inspection is not enough to determine if stress has caused voids in a carbon fiber component.Only ultrasound inspections can reveal those voids. Airbus currently does not mandate ultrasound inspections. The current inspection procedures are not adaquate to deal with the dangers of severe structural damage - damage that has already produced one fatal accident and damn near another.
This is a serious problem, and God help us if this kind of reaction is the way the FAA approaches the issue of safety or Flight 587 won't be the only incident of this kind. Such a lax attitude for safety is simply appalling.
The separation of the rudder may have further implications for the cause of the 587 crash. In its report, the NTSB said the tail and rudder failed because they were subjected to stresses "beyond ultimate load", imposed because the co-pilot, Sten Molin, overreacted to minor turbulence and made five violent side-to-side "rudder reversals". The report said the design of the A300 controls was flawed because it allowed this to happen.
However, the NTSB investigation has been criticised by many insiders. Ellen Connors, the NTSB chair, told reporters last January that the report was delayed because of "inappropriate" and "intense" lobbying by Airbus over its contents, adding: "The potential for contaminating the investigation exists." In America, the NTSB staff is small and manufacturers provide many of the staff employed on air-crash investigations into their own products.
There have been several other incidents of Airbus aircaft experiencing similar uncommanded rudder inputs or even losing sections of the vertical stabilizer in-flight. This is caused by inadaquate maintenance procedures:
In an article published after the flight 587 crash, Professor James Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the world's leading authorities in this field, said that to rely on visual inspection was "a lamentably naive policy. It is analogous to assessing whether a woman has breast cancer by simply looking at her family portrait."
Williams and other scientists have stated that composite parts in any aircraft should be tested frequently by methods such as ultrasound, allowing engineers to "see" beneath their surface. His research suggests that repeated journeys to and from the sub-zero temperatures found at cruising altitude causes a build-up of condensation inside composites, and separation of the carbon fibre layers as this moisture freezes and thaws. According to Williams, "like a pothole in a roadway in winter, over time these gaps may grow".
Until Airbus fixes their maintenance procedures passengers might see more things like these when they fly Airbus aircaft. Given the increased stresses of a larger aircaft, I'm not sure how seceptible the A380 would be to this kind of damage, and it would be harded to run the necessary inspections on the larger airframe as well.
The image was done in LightWave 5 roundabout 1996-1997. The Omega cruiser was done by Matt Stetson, and the Starfury mesh was done by Mark Kane. LightWave was the same program used to do the show as well.
Oh yes, and I know this because I created that image.:)
My old site with a bunch of Babylon 5 renders is still up, although much of it was lost several years back.
This line keeps getting repeated, and it's an absolute lie.
There were two groups of people fighting in Afghanistan against the Russians. The first were the Afghans, and the second were the "Afghan Arabs" like bin Laden who came from the Gulf states and elsewhere. Neither of the two particularly cared for each other, but got along because they both hated the Russians.
The mujihadeen that we gave money and arms to were all Afghans. The "Afghan Arabs" hated the US and wouldn't have accepted money or training from us if we'd offered.
The people we did support were people like Ahmed Shah Masood. Masood was the founder of the Northern Alliance, and an enemy of the Taliban.
In 2001, most of the fighting in Afghanistan was done by the Northern Alliance using US Special Forces and air support. The same people we gave help to in fighting the Russians later helped us fight the Taliban.
We did not give money or weapons to bin Laden's group in Afghanistan. Even if we'd offered he would not have taken them.
Even though I depend on GNOME libraries for my projects (specifically PyGTK), I think this is a good thing.
The reason why is that having a bleeding-edge version that integrates things like Cairo, xcompmgr, more eye candy, etc will give us who like to have a system with all the eye candy a chance, without having to worry about adding them to GNOME 2.x and possibly disrupting users who want a no-frills desktop. When GNOME 3 becomes stable, it can replace the old version.
But moreover, the Linux desktop is at an inflection point - we're just starting to get the kind of nifty eye candy that other desktops have. GNOME 3 should be a chance to get GNOME ready for the future of the Linux desktop - using Cairo to render the GTK widgets, using Luminosity as the next GNOME window manager, etc.
Sometimes it's healthy to fork off your code and rethink some of the assumptions you made rather than having to deal with the cascading problems that can crop up when you try to muck about and fix those messy hacks we all seem to create.
Forking isn't always bad - sometimes it's necessary to eliminate cruft. If the end result is a better desktop, then that's what should be done.
One of the problems with FLOSS is that it tends to be written by hackers (which is also one of its biggest benefits, but I digress)...
Hackers want lots of options. They want to be able to configure FIFO settings for serial printers and flow controls, and all the technical nitty gritty.
Grandma doesn't know what the hell a flow control is. All she wants to do is a print a picture the grandkids sent her.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options. A good GUI presents the most basic options you need to accomplish a task, and hides the rest where Grandma won't find it, but where someone who wants to change some deep, dark setting has the option of doing so.
IMHO, Mac OS X Gets It Right. Their configuration dialogs are quite simple, but you can always get under the hood if you need to. That sort of ease of use is what makes OS X a Unix that Grandma can use.
And if it takes messing about with obscure settings to get things to work, then the back end needs to be refined until the system works.
Complexity is at odds with usability, and in general FLOSS tends to be balanced more towards the former than the latter.
Now, before I am modded down to hell as Flamebait, let us get to business: NOBODY is saying anyone has the divine right to broadband. On the contrary, legislation is being passed to FORBID communities to install their own infra-structure. Legislators bought and paid by interested corporations are legislating against the will of their own voters. The "right" involved is right for communities to decide their own fate, to decide what they think is a public service and how it should be implemented. Broadband is incidental, corporate greed and malice is not.
That's not what I'm arguing here. If that's your view, fine. I'm not saying that government can never get into the broadband market. In fact, if the community can benefit and the voters approve of it, I'm fine.
My objection here is the concept of broadband being a "right" on the order of freedom of speech. It isn't. It can be a perk, a benefit, a "public good" but don't call it a "right" because it isn't. Had the original author used the prase "public good" I still might disagree, but he wouldn't be engaging in an egregious abuse of the concept of what a right is.
And for the record, I think laws that prohibit municipal wireless networks and the like are idiotic and should be stopped. So long as government doesn't close the marketplace to others, they're in the clear philosophically.
First, you're an idiot. The sentence "That is Communism, and not only does it not work practically, it's ethically and morally unjustifiable as well." tailing your comment as if anything you saud before it justified such conclusion must be one of the most pathetic idioticies i've read this week in Slashdot.
Now that is flamebait. A doctrine which establishes that someone has a right to the property or work of another is unworkable and immoral. It's just that simple.
That's exactly the sort of thing that society must avoid.
For instance, if society says that "we have a right to take all the stuff from Slashdot user 5551" is that a right? By your definition it would be.
When a right conflicts with another right, it's no longer a right. When my right to speech requires you to surrender part of yours, then my rights end. Or as J.S. Mill wrote:
...the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right...The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
That's why broadband can't be a right - because it would require government to take from others. It can be a privilege, it can be a benefit but it can never be a right.
Quite right. I saw a load of people this morning on the freeway. They sure as hell didn't produce that road, and they sure as hell didn't pay any tolls to get on it. Damn commies!
They probably paid taxes of some sort or another. If they took a cab, they paid taxes on the cab fare. If they rented a car, they also paid taxes. If they're residents, they paid some sort of taxes for road construction.
A right is something that cannot be taken away. Don't you remember the part of driver's ed where they said that "driving is a privilege?" If their car doesn't meet emission standards, they can lose the right to use the roadways. If they're drunk, they can lose the right to use the roadways. Roads aren't a right, they're a privilege.
Or to put it in/. terms, roads are "free-as-in-beer" not "free-as-in-speech."
(Man, I wish there were common English terms that split "free" into its respective contexts of libertas and gratiutas... but I'm a nerd that way...)
Do the people making this argument also think that the government should get out of the "road" business, and that all roads should be privately run toll roads?
No one says that "we have a right to roads." Public works projects are considered a perfectly legitimate function of governance even by most libertarians. If the government didn't build them, private industry would. But roads aren't a right. If tomorrow the governnent decided to sell off the federal highway system, there's no Constitutional clause preventing it. (There's probably some statutory clause, but Congress could always change that.)
Personally, I'm not a hardcore libertarian. If government wants to do something and they can show a positive and clear cost/benefit analysis, then I'm all for it. My problem is that most of the things government does are done without any regard for cost/benefit analysis.
Broadband is the 21st century equivalent of a road. If a region doesn't have broadband, it becomes the economic equivalent of a third world country with dirt roads.
Except nearly every place in the US already has broadband, or will get it soon. Even in some of the most godforsaken parts of this country, there's at least dialup.
If government wants to go to the people and say "we can build a community wireless network, and it will raise taxes this much and provide these benefits, is this something we should do" I say great. Let the voters decide if that's a priority to them.
However, that's different than saying "I have a right to broadband access, and the community has to pay for it whether they want it or not." At that point why not say that you have a right to a computer as well? Why shouldn't the state buy everything for you?
That's why the language of rights should only apply to things that are innate to the human condition. Rights cease to be so when they require the removal of someone else's rights. My right to property doesn't give me the right to steal from my neighbors, and your right to free expression doesn't include taking away a measure of my right to property to pay for it.
I absolutely, positively, and totally detest the notion of everything and everything being a "right." Connectivity isn't a right because it's not something innate to you. We're not born with the ability to access the Internet. Someone has to build the backbone, the infrastructure, and the hardware to enable Internet access. It's not like freedom of speech, in which case we're all born with the ability to speak.
Defining something as a "right" which requires one to use the labor of others isn't a right -- it's saying that you should have control over someone else's property or work. It's like someone saying that they have the "right" to take GPL software and use it commercially without adhering to the GPL -- they're taking someone else's work and using as it they wish without consideration of the author's wishes.
If a community wants to implement a "free" wireless network, fine. Let the electorate of that community make the decision. However, don't try to sell the line that one has a "right" to something that they didn't produce. That is Communism, and not only does it not work practically, it's ethically and morally unjustifiable as well.
The reason we're not seeing a Mac mini G5 or a PowerBook G5 is because the G5 chip has some severe thermal issues. You could have either, but in both cases you'd need a massive fan to keep the chip cool. The iMac is about the limit of how tightly you can cram a G5 into a case without worrying about the thing overheating and turning your machine into a desktop hibachi.
You're really not gaining much with 64-bit quite yet. Even with Tiger, the Cocoa and Carbon libraries are still 32-bit, meaning that unless you have someone writing a 64-bit backend that interfaces with the 32-bit UI, most apps won't take advantage of the extra address space. In fact, for some applications, 64-bit addressing actually slows things down - why allocate a pointer that's 64-bits wide unless you need to do so?
IIRC, the issue with the capacitors in the iMac was that a supplier stole a formula for capacitor chemicals from another company, but got the formula wrong, causing the capacitors to burst. I'd imagine that Apple got rid of any remaining stocks of the bad capacitors and replaced them with ones that function normall.
As programmers, we have to consider communicating with our users better. For instance, Apple has the right idea when it comes to dialog boxes: always make the options for each button a verb. Yes/No/Cancel buttons require users to read a usually convoluted sentence and then interpret what they're agreeing to. This causes all sorts of usability problems.
To run with the parent poster's dialog, a more usable dialog would read:
Oil Levels are low. Would you like to:
Change Oil | Do Not Change Oil
Just by reading the button text a user will know precisely what each option will do.
This is something that programmers both open-source and closed can do right now to enhance usability. Apple has the right idea, and there's no reason why we should have software that confuses our users with unclear dialogs.
Now I know how easy it is to criticize Mr. Eccleston for his choice, but leaving a popular TV series to pursue another career is a common thing for an actor to do. Just look at how successful David Caruso was after leaving NYPD Blue...
Um, what about Shelley Long after leaving Cheers... oh, crap...
In that case, it looks like Eccleston will be missing having a steady paycheck in a while...
Slashdot Mirror
One of the largest problems with education (at least American education) is the utter lack of critical thinking skills. American education is based in doctrines developed by Horace Mann at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We need to educate children on more than the repetition of rote facts, and teach them to logically process information in a rigorous manner.
There's a wonderful article that's been thankfully saved from extinction by the Internet Archive called http://www.zolatimes.com/V4.39/sesame_epist.html"> Sesame Street, Epistemology, and Freedom that does an excellent job of laying out the kind of critical thinking skills needed to make people capable of understanding the modern world.
Beyond that, education should no longer be used as a system that shelters kids from real life. Students need to be held to high standards, and parents along with them. If someone like Jaime Escalante can take a group of kids that the system assumed would fail and make them perform, then it's clear that the system is letting kids down.
Human capital is crucial to the success of a modern society, and keeping a system around that's powered by bureaucratic inertia and doesn't do the job hurts not only the kids trapped in the system, but the country at large.
...at least not for a long while.
Universal produced the show, but as a condition of picking up a series, a network gains the exclusive first rights to air the series on television. The rights to Firefly are still held by Fox, and Fox has expressed no interest in transferring those rights back.
Universal retains all the other rights, which is why Serenity got made, but unless someone's willing to cough up a very large amount of dough, it's unlikely that Fox would let their first-run TV contract drop.
The release notes are here. Major changes include:
Both Apple and Linux serve niche markets, but they're largely different niche markets.
Apple sells expensive but proven and well-integrated hardware. Apple users generally don't want to get into the guts of their system and mess around with it. The Apple mantra is having a system that just works. It's all about the experience and the ease-of-use.
Linux is a tinkerer's OS. It's designed to run on everything from the latest 3.6GHz monster rig to a simple embedded device to a dead badger. It isn't particularly easy to use, but it's very powerful and very customizable.
There's only some overlap between Apple and Linux, and if anything, the switch to Intel will aid Linux. Not having to worry about architectural issues will make it easier to share UNIX-based software between Mac OS X and other UNIX-like systems.
If anything, I bet we'll see people do what's already being done - using Apple's excellent hardware to do Linux development - which will be even easier than before when Apple switches to an Intel-based architecture.
This one doesn't even pass the smell test.
For one, the White House has nothing to do with software purchases by government agencies. Plenty of government agencies use non-Microsoft and open source software - including the FBI, NSA, CIA, and others.
Second, the HHS has already signed the deal with Novell, which means your argument is utterly moot.
Finally, you offer absolutely no evidence that you work for HHS. In fact, I'd put money that you didn't even get the name of the agency right. Not once have I heard a single HHS employee use the term DHHS, and I used to know several people who worked there. An employee of a government agency wouldn't mess up the name of their agency in the way you did.
Arguing that the Administration would use the terms "unamerican" or "socialist" is also completely asinine on its face. If there was a push to eliminate open-source software, there are plenty of bureaucratic ways of doing it. And not once have I seen a government memo that would use such terms to describe anything.
Based on your comments, I can only conclude that your post is a blatant troll.
Trying to decode an HD stream on a Mac mini is probably not that good of an idea - a single G4 doesn't have quite enough power to manage it.
H.264 is designed to scale down to various processor architectures, so a lower-resolution stream would probably play acceptably, but I rather doubt that you'd get enough horsepower out of a Mac mini to acceptably decode HD content encoded with H.264 in realtime.
For more, see Apple's H.264 FAQ.
An iMac G5 should have the horsepower, however.
The massive laptop is actually part of a new chipset design by Intel - with the success of the small and light Centrino design, Intel wants to persue the larger laptop market as well. The new chipset, the Overcompenson is expected to do well among groups that purchase expensive sports cars, Hummer H2s, and respond positively to Enzyte commercials.
Wow, between the unquoted attributes, the tables, and the capitalized tags, that drives the Crazy Pedantic Web Standards Designer part of me up a bloody wall...
This gets brought up a lot, but it isn't going to happen.
Recompiling OSX for AMD64 might not be too bad. Recompiling the libraries on top of it would be much harder - those aren't even optimized for 64-bit processors yet for compatibility reasons (and because it doesn't yet offer a big performance boost.)
Recompiling everyone's applications would be fatal for Apple. Application vendors aren't going to support both Mac/PPC and Mac/x64. The Mac marketshare is small enough as it is - dividing it in half wouldn't help at all.
Apple won't go to x64 or x86 processors unless they absolutely have to, and even then it wouldn't surprise me if they invested in chip design and fabrication themselves before they got to that stage.
In those cases, the airlines and Boeing took steps to check for structural fatigue problems. If Airbus and the airlines that fly Airbus aircraft began a program to do ultrasound inspections of all A300 and A310 airframes looking for structural cavities, then the safety issue would be dealt with in a responsible manner.
The problem is that Airbus doesn't mandate ultrasound inspections. Visual inspections won't reveal subsurface cavities and tap inspections aren't nearly accurate enough. The problem is that the layers of carbon fiber material lose structural integrity between layers, and that sort of thing can only be detected by ultrasound evaluation.
Airbus has a great safety record, but we're just now running into the length of times where these sort of structural flaws can occur. It's wise for Airbus to take a serious look at delamination and ensure that it doesn't become a serious problem.
Air travel is still the safest form of travel, but only because airlines and aviation regulatory organizations take aircraft safety very seriously. This is a case where proper preventative maintenance could have potentially saved the lives of the people on Flight 587.
Because these problems will only occur over time - they won't start showing up until the airframes reach a certain number of flight hours and a certain number of compression/decompression cycles.
The risks of delamination is very real. That was very likely to have been a contributory cause of the crash of Flight 587.
Let's review the data, shall we:
If I'm spouting such "uninformed nonsense" then please explain to me why the French government issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive on A300 series rudder assemblies.
Any competent safety official would not ignore these trends. Visual inspection is not enough to determine if stress has caused voids in a carbon fiber component. Only ultrasound inspections can reveal those voids. Airbus currently does not mandate ultrasound inspections. The current inspection procedures are not adaquate to deal with the dangers of severe structural damage - damage that has already produced one fatal accident and damn near another.
This is a serious problem, and God help us if this kind of reaction is the way the FAA approaches the issue of safety or Flight 587 won't be the only incident of this kind. Such a lax attitude for safety is simply appalling.
I won't fly on Airbus aircraft until Airbus corrects a major flaw in their recommended maintenance procedures.
In 2001 Flight 587 crashed in Queens when its rudder fell off the aircraft:
There have been several other incidents of Airbus aircaft experiencing similar uncommanded rudder inputs or even losing sections of the vertical stabilizer in-flight. This is caused by inadaquate maintenance procedures:
Until Airbus fixes their maintenance procedures passengers might see more things like these when they fly Airbus aircaft. Given the increased stresses of a larger aircaft, I'm not sure how seceptible the A380 would be to this kind of damage, and it would be harded to run the necessary inspections on the larger airframe as well.
The image was done in LightWave 5 roundabout 1996-1997. The Omega cruiser was done by Matt Stetson, and the Starfury mesh was done by Mark Kane. LightWave was the same program used to do the show as well.
Oh yes, and I know this because I created that image. :)
My old site with a bunch of Babylon 5 renders is still up, although much of it was lost several years back.
This line keeps getting repeated, and it's an absolute lie.
There were two groups of people fighting in Afghanistan against the Russians. The first were the Afghans, and the second were the "Afghan Arabs" like bin Laden who came from the Gulf states and elsewhere. Neither of the two particularly cared for each other, but got along because they both hated the Russians.
The mujihadeen that we gave money and arms to were all Afghans. The "Afghan Arabs" hated the US and wouldn't have accepted money or training from us if we'd offered.
The people we did support were people like Ahmed Shah Masood. Masood was the founder of the Northern Alliance, and an enemy of the Taliban.
In 2001, most of the fighting in Afghanistan was done by the Northern Alliance using US Special Forces and air support. The same people we gave help to in fighting the Russians later helped us fight the Taliban.
We did not give money or weapons to bin Laden's group in Afghanistan. Even if we'd offered he would not have taken them.
Even though I depend on GNOME libraries for my projects (specifically PyGTK), I think this is a good thing.
The reason why is that having a bleeding-edge version that integrates things like Cairo, xcompmgr, more eye candy, etc will give us who like to have a system with all the eye candy a chance, without having to worry about adding them to GNOME 2.x and possibly disrupting users who want a no-frills desktop. When GNOME 3 becomes stable, it can replace the old version.
But moreover, the Linux desktop is at an inflection point - we're just starting to get the kind of nifty eye candy that other desktops have. GNOME 3 should be a chance to get GNOME ready for the future of the Linux desktop - using Cairo to render the GTK widgets, using Luminosity as the next GNOME window manager, etc.
Sometimes it's healthy to fork off your code and rethink some of the assumptions you made rather than having to deal with the cascading problems that can crop up when you try to muck about and fix those messy hacks we all seem to create.
Forking isn't always bad - sometimes it's necessary to eliminate cruft. If the end result is a better desktop, then that's what should be done.
One of the problems with FLOSS is that it tends to be written by hackers (which is also one of its biggest benefits, but I digress)...
Hackers want lots of options. They want to be able to configure FIFO settings for serial printers and flow controls, and all the technical nitty gritty.
Grandma doesn't know what the hell a flow control is. All she wants to do is a print a picture the grandkids sent her.
The biggest barrier to FLOSS usability is often overwhelming the user with too many options. A good GUI presents the most basic options you need to accomplish a task, and hides the rest where Grandma won't find it, but where someone who wants to change some deep, dark setting has the option of doing so.
IMHO, Mac OS X Gets It Right. Their configuration dialogs are quite simple, but you can always get under the hood if you need to. That sort of ease of use is what makes OS X a Unix that Grandma can use.
And if it takes messing about with obscure settings to get things to work, then the back end needs to be refined until the system works.
Complexity is at odds with usability, and in general FLOSS tends to be balanced more towards the former than the latter.
That's not what I'm arguing here. If that's your view, fine. I'm not saying that government can never get into the broadband market. In fact, if the community can benefit and the voters approve of it, I'm fine.
My objection here is the concept of broadband being a "right" on the order of freedom of speech. It isn't. It can be a perk, a benefit, a "public good" but don't call it a "right" because it isn't. Had the original author used the prase "public good" I still might disagree, but he wouldn't be engaging in an egregious abuse of the concept of what a right is.
And for the record, I think laws that prohibit municipal wireless networks and the like are idiotic and should be stopped. So long as government doesn't close the marketplace to others, they're in the clear philosophically.
Now that is flamebait. A doctrine which establishes that someone has a right to the property or work of another is unworkable and immoral. It's just that simple.
That's exactly the sort of thing that society must avoid.
For instance, if society says that "we have a right to take all the stuff from Slashdot user 5551" is that a right? By your definition it would be.
When a right conflicts with another right, it's no longer a right. When my right to speech requires you to surrender part of yours, then my rights end. Or as J.S. Mill wrote:
That's why broadband can't be a right - because it would require government to take from others. It can be a privilege, it can be a benefit but it can never be a right.
They probably paid taxes of some sort or another. If they took a cab, they paid taxes on the cab fare. If they rented a car, they also paid taxes. If they're residents, they paid some sort of taxes for road construction.
A right is something that cannot be taken away. Don't you remember the part of driver's ed where they said that "driving is a privilege?" If their car doesn't meet emission standards, they can lose the right to use the roadways. If they're drunk, they can lose the right to use the roadways. Roads aren't a right, they're a privilege.
Or to put it in /. terms, roads are "free-as-in-beer" not "free-as-in-speech."
(Man, I wish there were common English terms that split "free" into its respective contexts of libertas and gratiutas... but I'm a nerd that way...)
No one says that "we have a right to roads." Public works projects are considered a perfectly legitimate function of governance even by most libertarians. If the government didn't build them, private industry would. But roads aren't a right. If tomorrow the governnent decided to sell off the federal highway system, there's no Constitutional clause preventing it. (There's probably some statutory clause, but Congress could always change that.)
Personally, I'm not a hardcore libertarian. If government wants to do something and they can show a positive and clear cost/benefit analysis, then I'm all for it. My problem is that most of the things government does are done without any regard for cost/benefit analysis.
Except nearly every place in the US already has broadband, or will get it soon. Even in some of the most godforsaken parts of this country, there's at least dialup.
If government wants to go to the people and say "we can build a community wireless network, and it will raise taxes this much and provide these benefits, is this something we should do" I say great. Let the voters decide if that's a priority to them.
However, that's different than saying "I have a right to broadband access, and the community has to pay for it whether they want it or not." At that point why not say that you have a right to a computer as well? Why shouldn't the state buy everything for you?
That's why the language of rights should only apply to things that are innate to the human condition. Rights cease to be so when they require the removal of someone else's rights. My right to property doesn't give me the right to steal from my neighbors, and your right to free expression doesn't include taking away a measure of my right to property to pay for it.
I absolutely, positively, and totally detest the notion of everything and everything being a "right." Connectivity isn't a right because it's not something innate to you. We're not born with the ability to access the Internet. Someone has to build the backbone, the infrastructure, and the hardware to enable Internet access. It's not like freedom of speech, in which case we're all born with the ability to speak.
Defining something as a "right" which requires one to use the labor of others isn't a right -- it's saying that you should have control over someone else's property or work. It's like someone saying that they have the "right" to take GPL software and use it commercially without adhering to the GPL -- they're taking someone else's work and using as it they wish without consideration of the author's wishes.
If a community wants to implement a "free" wireless network, fine. Let the electorate of that community make the decision. However, don't try to sell the line that one has a "right" to something that they didn't produce. That is Communism, and not only does it not work practically, it's ethically and morally unjustifiable as well.
The reason we're not seeing a Mac mini G5 or a PowerBook G5 is because the G5 chip has some severe thermal issues. You could have either, but in both cases you'd need a massive fan to keep the chip cool. The iMac is about the limit of how tightly you can cram a G5 into a case without worrying about the thing overheating and turning your machine into a desktop hibachi.
You're really not gaining much with 64-bit quite yet. Even with Tiger, the Cocoa and Carbon libraries are still 32-bit, meaning that unless you have someone writing a 64-bit backend that interfaces with the 32-bit UI, most apps won't take advantage of the extra address space. In fact, for some applications, 64-bit addressing actually slows things down - why allocate a pointer that's 64-bits wide unless you need to do so?
IIRC, the issue with the capacitors in the iMac was that a supplier stole a formula for capacitor chemicals from another company, but got the formula wrong, causing the capacitors to burst. I'd imagine that Apple got rid of any remaining stocks of the bad capacitors and replaced them with ones that function normall.
As programmers, we have to consider communicating with our users better. For instance, Apple has the right idea when it comes to dialog boxes: always make the options for each button a verb. Yes/No/Cancel buttons require users to read a usually convoluted sentence and then interpret what they're agreeing to. This causes all sorts of usability problems.
To run with the parent poster's dialog, a more usable dialog would read:
Just by reading the button text a user will know precisely what each option will do.
This is something that programmers both open-source and closed can do right now to enhance usability. Apple has the right idea, and there's no reason why we should have software that confuses our users with unclear dialogs.
Now I know how easy it is to criticize Mr. Eccleston for his choice, but leaving a popular TV series to pursue another career is a common thing for an actor to do. Just look at how successful David Caruso was after leaving NYPD Blue...
Um, what about Shelley Long after leaving Cheers... oh, crap...
In that case, it looks like Eccleston will be missing having a steady paycheck in a while...