Muhammad is the exception. The caliphs had the authority specified by the Qur'an, not more. Some of them have tried to exceed that authority, but Islam resists that quite effectively. Notice also that the caliph title is not hereditary, nor did the caliph appoint his successor.
The EU is just an organisation of various (now quite many, but certainly not all) European countries. Why would the European headquarters for an unrelated organisation have to be in the EU?
What do you expect the UN to do? The UN is a bunch of people talking. Even if you gave rifles to the whole general assembly, they wouldn't last a day in Darfur.
It's simply a place where countries get together and decide who should do something about what. Since participation in fixing problems is voluntary, sometimes no one want to do the dishes, and then the dishes won't get done.
Islam was a way to protect the populace from the whims of rulers, giving them a set of consistent rules to live by. It made the people more free from the tyrans, and (like many other religions) it has often been in opposition to the rulers. This constant thousand-year struggle has made Islam very resistant to change.
It doesn't cope well with democracy, where the rulers are supposed to be benign (at least to the point where you don't get randomly burned at the stake), and therefore you don't need this protection.
It is worth noting that in Malaysia Muslims can be punished by normal courts for doing things which are perfectly legal for non-muslims in the same country.
You are saying that as if it's a bad thing. Imagine a group of people get together and decide on some fairly stupid regulations, like say being banned from using toilet paper on alternate Tuesdays. However, they recognize that they will need to interact with the outside world, and therefore they allow people who visit them to continue using toilet paper even on the Holy Tuesdays. That seems perfectly ok to me.
Freedom of individuals is not just on the back burner, it was taken out of the building and buried long ago.
You say that as if the world was free before, and then tyranny descended on us. In reality, more people have more freedoms than ever before. That doesn't mean there is no need for more freedom, and we must certainly not give up the fight against those who try to spread tyranny. Overall, when it comes to liberty, we're better off, and there are good chances that we will continue to be better off.
The UN has lowered tensions between nations, simply because they are practically forced to talk to each other. In particular, the security council has helped ensure that the only military exchanges between the 5 permanent members have been through proxy wars.
While it is easy to say that the UN does both too little and too much, just be aware that it does little actual harm (in most cases you can just ignore the UN, if you prefer) and a bit of good.
Would Netscape 6.2 offer that much a better browsing experience for today's internet?
Probably not, because today's internet tests for IE6 and hand feeds it something it can handle. The same isn't done for Netscape 6.2. However, if you removed the hand feeding and fed Netscape 6.2 what you feed Firefox, it would do vastly better than IE6.
Also, Firefox 1 arrived less than a year after IE6, and its standard support is probably on par with IE7.
--if it's actually a naturally occurring phenomenon, whether caused by the sun or some other extremely complex and poorly understood source---then it is very unlikely that human behavior can change it.
I believe you are vastly underestimating the capabilities of humanity. We can certainly terraform Earth, if we so choose.
I think it is happening! Though do you read about this in the media? NOOOOO because we all associate climate change with warming not change!
Within the last few years papers seem to indicate that the threat of the Atlantic conveyor shutting down isn't as high as once expected, and that the effects would likely not be as severe as expected. There is e.g. "Climate change: A sea change", but you need a Nature subscription to read it. Anyway, personally I'm not as worried about that particular effect of global warming anymore.
If you manage to get hold of the actual Cisco vulnerability statement, it contains information about how to request a patched version even if you don't have a service contract.
Random onboard sound. One is a notebook, the other a Shuttle. Other applications don't seem to cause the problem, but then I hardly need the sound in other applications.
Pulse only eats up a 'shitload' of CPU if you have it set up to resample (hint... use your card's native rate and don't resample)... especially if you use a CPU intensive resample algorithm.
If only this was true. Puzzle Pirates will cause Pulseaudio to eat 50% CPU (more than the game itself!) even though the sample rate of the card and of Puzzle Pirates are the same and there are no other sounds playing. Also, just for kicks, the resampling algorithm is set to trivial. This happens on two different computers.
I guess it's nice to have found something more wasteful of resources than Java. I just didn't expect it to be a sound server.
Tell that to the people who believed PlaysForSure. Yes, Steam isn't Microsoft, but such a promise has practically never been kept by anyone. Once the bankruptcy court takes over, all bets are off.
This is why there should always be 2 copies of the BIOS. One that is physically read-only and contains the BIOS as shipped. And another writable one that can be disabled with a jumper. If your BIOS is corrupted or hijacked, you could always go back to the backup BIOS and restore.
Nice idea, but it doesn't always work.
Sometimes you need a newer BIOS to make a newer CPU work. So you upgrade the BIOS using the old CPU, replace the CPU, sell the old one. If you then have to go back to the factory BIOS, the system won't boot.
If I come across other broken file systems, I reserve the right to yell at their authors too.
Meanwhile, if KDE used fsync where you wanted them to, I'd be yelling at them for making the drive spin up for no good reason. Well ok, I wouldn't, because I don't use KDE, but the same is true for Gnome.
The problem isn't that the data gets to disk too late, the problem is that the rename hits the disk too early. You can delay that for half an hour for all I care, when I'm running on battery.
I just want to say that I really like that idea, apart from the fsync call. fsync should not have any effect on correctly working (non-crashing) systems. An application should be able to call fsync at any time and not change anything (except ruin performance).
Slashdot Mirror
Floating wind turbines. (The project has progressed a bit since then, but I needed an English-language link, and that is what Google gave me.)
Yes. But the effect of erecting cities is far larger.
And of course the USA was much more free in its first years than it is today - examples of that are obvious.
Yes, I'm sure black people and women really appreciated all their freedoms back then, and now lament their loss of rights.
Muhammad is the exception. The caliphs had the authority specified by the Qur'an, not more. Some of them have tried to exceed that authority, but Islam resists that quite effectively. Notice also that the caliph title is not hereditary, nor did the caliph appoint his successor.
Does it matter than a UN resolution tramples on your rights? You can't get convicted for violating it.
Yes, I mixed it up with Mozilla 1.0, which isn't on par with IE7 for standards compliance (while still being significantly better than IE6).
The EU is just an organisation of various (now quite many, but certainly not all) European countries. Why would the European headquarters for an unrelated organisation have to be in the EU?
What do you expect the UN to do? The UN is a bunch of people talking. Even if you gave rifles to the whole general assembly, they wouldn't last a day in Darfur.
It's simply a place where countries get together and decide who should do something about what. Since participation in fixing problems is voluntary, sometimes no one want to do the dishes, and then the dishes won't get done.
Islam was a way to protect the populace from the whims of rulers, giving them a set of consistent rules to live by. It made the people more free from the tyrans, and (like many other religions) it has often been in opposition to the rulers. This constant thousand-year struggle has made Islam very resistant to change.
It doesn't cope well with democracy, where the rulers are supposed to be benign (at least to the point where you don't get randomly burned at the stake), and therefore you don't need this protection.
It is worth noting that in Malaysia Muslims can be punished by normal courts for doing things which are perfectly legal for non-muslims in the same country.
You are saying that as if it's a bad thing. Imagine a group of people get together and decide on some fairly stupid regulations, like say being banned from using toilet paper on alternate Tuesdays. However, they recognize that they will need to interact with the outside world, and therefore they allow people who visit them to continue using toilet paper even on the Holy Tuesdays. That seems perfectly ok to me.
Freedom of individuals is not just on the back burner, it was taken out of the building and buried long ago.
You say that as if the world was free before, and then tyranny descended on us. In reality, more people have more freedoms than ever before. That doesn't mean there is no need for more freedom, and we must certainly not give up the fight against those who try to spread tyranny. Overall, when it comes to liberty, we're better off, and there are good chances that we will continue to be better off.
The UN has lowered tensions between nations, simply because they are practically forced to talk to each other. In particular, the security council has helped ensure that the only military exchanges between the 5 permanent members have been through proxy wars.
While it is easy to say that the UN does both too little and too much, just be aware that it does little actual harm (in most cases you can just ignore the UN, if you prefer) and a bit of good.
Would Netscape 6.2 offer that much a better browsing experience for today's internet?
Probably not, because today's internet tests for IE6 and hand feeds it something it can handle. The same isn't done for Netscape 6.2. However, if you removed the hand feeding and fed Netscape 6.2 what you feed Firefox, it would do vastly better than IE6.
Also, Firefox 1 arrived less than a year after IE6, and its standard support is probably on par with IE7.
--if it's actually a naturally occurring phenomenon, whether caused by the sun or some other extremely complex and poorly understood source---then it is very unlikely that human behavior can change it.
I believe you are vastly underestimating the capabilities of humanity. We can certainly terraform Earth, if we so choose.
I think it is happening! Though do you read about this in the media? NOOOOO because we all associate climate change with warming not change!
Within the last few years papers seem to indicate that the threat of the Atlantic conveyor shutting down isn't as high as once expected, and that the effects would likely not be as severe as expected. There is e.g. "Climate change: A sea change", but you need a Nature subscription to read it. Anyway, personally I'm not as worried about that particular effect of global warming anymore.
If you manage to get hold of the actual Cisco vulnerability statement, it contains information about how to request a patched version even if you don't have a service contract.
Random onboard sound. One is a notebook, the other a Shuttle. Other applications don't seem to cause the problem, but then I hardly need the sound in other applications.
Pulse only eats up a 'shitload' of CPU if you have it set up to resample (hint... use your card's native rate and don't resample)... especially if you use a CPU intensive resample algorithm.
If only this was true. Puzzle Pirates will cause Pulseaudio to eat 50% CPU (more than the game itself!) even though the sample rate of the card and of Puzzle Pirates are the same and there are no other sounds playing. Also, just for kicks, the resampling algorithm is set to trivial. This happens on two different computers.
I guess it's nice to have found something more wasteful of resources than Java. I just didn't expect it to be a sound server.
Tell that to the people who believed PlaysForSure. Yes, Steam isn't Microsoft, but such a promise has practically never been kept by anyone. Once the bankruptcy court takes over, all bets are off.
It doesn't matter whether you implemented or documented it. What matters is whether you published.
This is why there should always be 2 copies of the BIOS. One that is physically read-only and contains the BIOS as shipped. And another writable one that can be disabled with a jumper. If your BIOS is corrupted or hijacked, you could always go back to the backup BIOS and restore.
Nice idea, but it doesn't always work.
Sometimes you need a newer BIOS to make a newer CPU work. So you upgrade the BIOS using the old CPU, replace the CPU, sell the old one. If you then have to go back to the factory BIOS, the system won't boot.
Fork isn't slow or painful. And if you think shared memory is a bad way to communicate, you REALLY won't like threads.
I understand that fsync is useless when done on one of those temporary files, but I think that's preferable to it having a strange side effect.
If I come across other broken file systems, I reserve the right to yell at their authors too.
Meanwhile, if KDE used fsync where you wanted them to, I'd be yelling at them for making the drive spin up for no good reason. Well ok, I wouldn't, because I don't use KDE, but the same is true for Gnome.
The problem isn't that the data gets to disk too late, the problem is that the rename hits the disk too early. You can delay that for half an hour for all I care, when I'm running on battery.
I just want to say that I really like that idea, apart from the fsync call. fsync should not have any effect on correctly working (non-crashing) systems. An application should be able to call fsync at any time and not change anything (except ruin performance).