which, incidentally, happen to protect US troops from the same treatment
Did the Nazis abide by the Geneva Conventions? The North Koreans? The Viet Cong? Does al-Qaeda? Do the Taliban?
The Geneva Conventions only work when both parties apply them. The enemies that the western world has had to fight over most of the past century don't give a damn about the Geneva Conventions. Go ahead and ask a US soldier if he believes for one minute that if he's captured by al-Qaeda, he expects to be treated humanely. He'll be tortured, trotted out for propganda videos, and in the end most likely beheaded on film for all the world to see.
Does that mean the west ought to disregard them as well? Not necessarily. I only wish to point out the naivete of assuming that western troops are in any way protected by them now, or ever have been.
You do remember that 'democracy' thing? That 'freedom' thing we're apparently fighting for? Who the fuck are you to say that they don't have a perfect right to desire Sharia Law in Britain? And if they get a majority in power, can't implement it?
Every moderator who participated in putting this comment up to a +5 should be stripped of their moderating priviliges.
Who the fuck am I? Someone who believes in equal rights for all, not for condemning women to a life of no education, no employment, no freedom of movement, no political voice. Someone who believes that different religious beliefs are not cause for summary execution. Someone who believes that so-called honour killings are an abomination. Someone who believes that Sharia law is WRONG, that anyone attempting to implement it is WRONG, and that anyone who would say those wanting to live under Sharia law should be respected is one of Lenin's "useful idiots".
They calculate the figure the same way they've always calculated it -- pulling it out of their ass. That figure is higher than the gross domestic product for 35 of the 50 states. It's fully one-quarter of the Canadian gross domestic product. Do they really expect anyone to believe that they're losing as much money as the sum of all economic activity in any of Maryland ($227b), Indiana ($227b), Minnesota ($223b), or Tennessee ($217b), every single year?
Little wonder nobody gives a damn about what they have to say on the issue.
It's not the changing of the actor -- it's that Lucas just couldn't keep his grubby mitts off the dialog in that scene. There was nothing wrong with the original dialog. It hinted at Vader's true identity, established that Luke was now regarded as a serious threat by the Empire, and told us what Vader planned to do. The new dialog is clunkier with the hint ("son of Skywalker" flows much better than "offspring of Anakin Skywalker"), has an awkward exchange that suggests Vader didn't know Luke was his son until the Emperor told him ("How is this possible?" IIRC), which leaves Vader without a real motive to be obsessed with Luke earlier in the film, and makes Vader sound like he's only parroting the Emperor at the film's climax ("Search your feelings").
If Lucas had just left the dialog alone I doubt anyone would criticize that edit.
I have not found that the repositories for Ubuntu to be any better than the ones for say Mandriva.
I've started playing around with Kubuntu at home alongside Mandriva, and I haven't managed to get the ATI drivers working on the former yet, despite a dpkg existing for them. OTOH, there's an ATI driver RPM and an accompanying DKMS RPM in the PLF repository for Mandriva that Just Works (TM).
Adept does seem to be faster than drakrpm, though.
FYI, "Moron in a hurry" isn't necessarily meant to be insulting under English law. It's the language that a judge used in a case there some years back in dismissing a trademark-infringement suit, so it's an established phrase. This was explained in the comments of a previous Apple-Apple/. article here.
I've used Madman for over a year now on my home Linux PC. Its AutoDJ feature alone blows anything else I've tried out of the water; typically when I'm at home I don't much care what I'm listening to as long as something's playing in the background. So I click AutoDJ and forget about it, though I may skip past the odd song I'm not in the mood for, or that I don't like at all - and since play count is one of AutoDJ's rules it'll take that into account as it continues. Add a built-in webserver and I can stream my tunes to my computer at work, or my brother can download them. You can also write plug-ins for it. I can't think of anything else I need to do with it, and I certainly never want to go back to organizing my tunes manually, with directory structures and standard file names and that stuff. Gets really cumbersome when you've got thousands of files.
There are no serious characterization issues (beyond Jabba's tail.)
There are more problems with that scene than stepping on Jabba's tail. The whole scene just plain shouldn't be there. One, the dialog is effectively a rehash of everything that was said in the Han/Greedo conversation -- because when Han/Jabba got cut all the relevant information was moved into the Han/Greedo scene (in fact the line "Even I get boarded sometimes," was edited into Han/Greedo from Han/Jabba -- note Han is off-screen in Han/Greedo when he says it). Two, the Millenium Falcon is seen in the background, ruining its proper introduction when Luke first sees it ("What a piece of junk!"). Three, seeing Jabba here really undercuts his threat to Han -- Han takes on Luke & Obi-Wan as passengers to earn the money to pay Jabba off, he says in Empire that if he doesn't pay off Jabba he's a dead man, and when we finally see Jabba in Jedi he's got Han strung up as a piece of artwork. Stepping on the tail just compounds this undercut. Throw in a pointless Boba Fett cameo and the total uselessness of the scene is complete.
The moment MMORPG characters and equipment have real-world monetary value
Is the moment that people/companies who run MMORPG servers can and will get sued when a server crash or mistake by a DM blows away some gamer's character or equipment.
Why would anyone in charge of a MMORPG even want to go down this road?
And MSN Search is right there on the page that "Add Engines.." directs you to. One click and a confirmation and you're done. Does/Will IE7 direct you to a page where you can add Google to its search bar as easily?
for my money this should just make it easier for genuine users
Hmm.. any Linux system: FTP/HTTP/rsync/BitTorrent of your choice to any of hundreds of mirrors. Download what you want from where you want whenever you want without any check at all.
Microsoft: use only our browser to our site on our OS, and, oh yeah, we're going to check up on your OS to see if we think it's pirated, and if we think it is, you don't get anything.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Been repealed?
Nope.
Yeah, Bush is really far down that road to being the next Mussolini.
Admittedly, third party Windows-only software can be a problem. But just work that $200-a-seat savings into a contract with some software firm to get electronics or drafting software ported to Linux.
He says, "just get it ported", as if it's the easiest thing to do. AutoCAD is on a yearly release schedule these days. I doubt you could get a Linux CAD application up to par with any released version of AutoCAD in one year, let alone keeping it up with the current year's release. As for something like AutoCAD Mechanical or Electrical, forget it. Just forget it. There's nothing even close to those in the market (effectively a full CAD application with underlying database elements to track every part, component, tag, cable, wire, etc on all the drawings in a project). I doubt you could port or develop an alternative to that in a year, and by then the new release is out.
Never mind PLC programming software, SCADA software, etc. Windows-only. Period. Try to run those on an emulator and you'll get run out of whatever plant you're in.
Bottom line: anyone who says "there are absolutely no technical barriers to switching to Linux on a workstation computer" has never seen an engineering workstation computer.
Add in a FAX spam filter module and problem solved.
The problem with junk faxes is less the data, more the time & method of transmitting the data. This isn't the internet where data transmission is measured in milliseconds, and you can have multiple connections to computers active at a time. Even a one-page fax takes several seconds to transmit, and while that fax is being sent, you can neither send one out nor receive another one on that phone line. Start letting junk faxers have free rein and you can kiss the usefulness of faxes goodbye as the phone lines jam up. No spam filter's going to help you when you can't get a call out because you've got junk faxes flooding your phone line.
The last Democratic president was doing things quite clearly differently (i.e. supported Kyoto and didn't suppress embarrassing research results); it was a Republican Congress that blocked his efforts.
The vote against ratifying the Kyoto treaty in the Senate was 98-0. Still care to blame the Republicans alone?
I don't understand the reasoning behind item 5, the "no reproduction in last 20 years of copyright" bit. Why take that right away from libraries when the work is over 75 years old? What is it about a work that's 75 years old compared to one that's 55 years old that merits it special "protection" from a library fulfilling its function?
I mean, I know the real answer, that some publishers' lobbyist bought off enough Congresscritters to get that in there at one time or another, but what was the transparent reasoning that was used to justify it?
Re:Windows XP incomplete without more software
on
Gnome 2.14 Released
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· Score: 1
For specialized applications that don't require internet access and will be locked down in corporate networks, it's not. I once wrestled WinXP Pro down to just under 60MB of memory usage for an operator station at a packaging line running RSView32. It wasn't even connected to the plant LAN, it was talking to a couple of the PLCs in the area via Data-Highway Plus and that was it. No need for firewall or anti-virus in that scenario.
And I just finished a Windows Server 2003 install into a Virtual PC image that we can use in-house for testing -- it came out at 67MB, after all security patches installed but before any server roles or user accounts are configured (besides Administrator). I was pleasantly surprised, though the install is sloooooow into a Virtual PC. Ah well -- at least you can do other things with the host PC while the virtual one is chugging away.
You can, theoretically, bring your entire library with you rather than just one or two books.
This isn't much of a selling point, to be honest, to casual readers. I read maybe a couple of books a month, varying depending on what other things I've got going on and my interest in the particular book(s). Most of the books on my bookshelf I've only actually read once. When I go away on a trip for a week or two I don't need my entire library with me, just the book or two I happen to be reading at the time.
Books aren't like songs, where having x-thousand of them on your electronic whatever is a plus. You listen to a song and it's over with in 3-5 minutes; move on to the next one, rinse and repeat. Reading a book is a multi-hour commitment. Having 100 to choose from at an instant just means that 99 of them will have to wait for a couple days, so it's not as important that I can get to those other 99 at the click of a button.
If you've ever taken First Aid training, you'll know that one of the first things you're taught is that, if there is anyone else around, you don't call 911 -- you enlist somebody else to go do it and come back to you to tell you how long until help arrives. This leaves you free to render assistance to the victim. If you're alone with the victim, do what you can for him immediately, then haul ass to the closest point to call 911. If the cell phone works, great, use it. If it doesn't, get to that landline or get to where it does work. That's all you can reasonably be expected to do.
And frankly it is irrelevent whether humans are to blame or not. It is warming, which is going to cause climate change. Are we ready for it? If not, we may want to try to stop it (or at least slow it down).
This hits the closest to the question we really should be asking ourselves. Most scientists and politicians are stuck trying to prove or disprove whether global warming/climate change is actually happening and/or whether and to what degree human activity is responsible for it. From a public policy standpoint, these questions have no bearing. The public policy question we should be grappling with is this:
Should we expend our resources on attempting to mitigate/prevent climate change or should we expend our resources on adapting to climate change, whether that change is man-made or not?
The well-known example of the former approach is the Kyoto protocol. I'll take my own country of Canada as an example of where I stand on this. Canada, led by a legacy-seeking bumbler of a Prime Minister, signed on to the Kyoto protocol a few years ago, committing itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by -- what is it, 2010? Anyway, Canadian emissions have increased by 24% since 1990. As of the 2003 figures (Link), we would have to reduce our emissions by about 180 megatonnes. That's equivalent to the total emissions produced by every plane, train, and automobile in the entire country. Park them all for good, and our target is met.
It should be bloody obvious that such an approach is hardly a wise use of resources. The economic damage from doing this could be nothing short of catastrophic, and may not stop the climate change anyway. Better in my view to continue to grow our economies, generate more wealth, and direct resources into adapting to changing climates as needed. Humans are a remarkably adaptable species, after all; it's the reason we're on top of the food chain.
One thing that I haven't seen brought up in the comments yet is how bloody stupid MLB is being here. The people who play in fantasy leagues are quite likely to be die-hard baseball fans, the ones who can rattle off all the stats for their favorite players at the drop of a hat, watch all the scores & hilights to keep up with the players they've got on their fantasy teams, talk a lot about the sport with their friends, and of course, go to games. Telling these fans that they can't play in their fantasy leagues any more because the stats are MLB property and nobody's allowed to use them would seem to me a sure-fire way to provoke a very angry reaction amongst those fans. Now they're not going to games, they're not spending money on your stuff, and they're telling their friends to do the same, and telling them why.
There's no win here for MLB. Either they lose the case, which makes them look stupid, or they win it, which makes them look heavy-handed. One would think any competent PR person could tell them as much -- assuming MLB has any, that is.
RAMBUS, inc. refuses to invest or develop their own fabs and produce products based on their own designs. They pretty much expect the memory manufacturers of the world to license their designs so that RAMBUS can use other, larger companies that actually have fabs as cash cows. What a bunch of bastards.
You just damned a lot of architectural and engineering firms in the world. Most architects and engineers don't own their own construction companies that actually build the designs they come up with, yet said architects & engineers get paid some tidy sums of money for doing them. There are differences in the fields to be sure (the designs that a&e's do tend to be one-offs rather than repeatable) but the principle's not that dissimilar.
Don't confuse your obvious distaste for RAMBUS's patent/legal situation with the wrong-headed notion that designers don't do valuable work in their own right even if they don't themselves build the things they design.
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Did the Nazis abide by the Geneva Conventions? The North Koreans? The Viet Cong? Does al-Qaeda? Do the Taliban?
The Geneva Conventions only work when both parties apply them. The enemies that the western world has had to fight over most of the past century don't give a damn about the Geneva Conventions. Go ahead and ask a US soldier if he believes for one minute that if he's captured by al-Qaeda, he expects to be treated humanely. He'll be tortured, trotted out for propganda videos, and in the end most likely beheaded on film for all the world to see.
Does that mean the west ought to disregard them as well? Not necessarily. I only wish to point out the naivete of assuming that western troops are in any way protected by them now, or ever have been.
Every moderator who participated in putting this comment up to a +5 should be stripped of their moderating priviliges.
Who the fuck am I? Someone who believes in equal rights for all, not for condemning women to a life of no education, no employment, no freedom of movement, no political voice. Someone who believes that different religious beliefs are not cause for summary execution. Someone who believes that so-called honour killings are an abomination. Someone who believes that Sharia law is WRONG, that anyone attempting to implement it is WRONG, and that anyone who would say those wanting to live under Sharia law should be respected is one of Lenin's "useful idiots".
I was wondering how the director of Transformers decided on Hoboken as a shooting location, myself.
Little wonder nobody gives a damn about what they have to say on the issue.
If Lucas had just left the dialog alone I doubt anyone would criticize that edit.
I've started playing around with Kubuntu at home alongside Mandriva, and I haven't managed to get the ATI drivers working on the former yet, despite a dpkg existing for them. OTOH, there's an ATI driver RPM and an accompanying DKMS RPM in the PLF repository for Mandriva that Just Works (TM).
Adept does seem to be faster than drakrpm, though.
FYI, "Moron in a hurry" isn't necessarily meant to be insulting under English law. It's the language that a judge used in a case there some years back in dismissing a trademark-infringement suit, so it's an established phrase. This was explained in the comments of a previous Apple-Apple /. article here.
I've used Madman for over a year now on my home Linux PC. Its AutoDJ feature alone blows anything else I've tried out of the water; typically when I'm at home I don't much care what I'm listening to as long as something's playing in the background. So I click AutoDJ and forget about it, though I may skip past the odd song I'm not in the mood for, or that I don't like at all - and since play count is one of AutoDJ's rules it'll take that into account as it continues. Add a built-in webserver and I can stream my tunes to my computer at work, or my brother can download them. You can also write plug-ins for it. I can't think of anything else I need to do with it, and I certainly never want to go back to organizing my tunes manually, with directory structures and standard file names and that stuff. Gets really cumbersome when you've got thousands of files.
There are more problems with that scene than stepping on Jabba's tail. The whole scene just plain shouldn't be there. One, the dialog is effectively a rehash of everything that was said in the Han/Greedo conversation -- because when Han/Jabba got cut all the relevant information was moved into the Han/Greedo scene (in fact the line "Even I get boarded sometimes," was edited into Han/Greedo from Han/Jabba -- note Han is off-screen in Han/Greedo when he says it). Two, the Millenium Falcon is seen in the background, ruining its proper introduction when Luke first sees it ("What a piece of junk!"). Three, seeing Jabba here really undercuts his threat to Han -- Han takes on Luke & Obi-Wan as passengers to earn the money to pay Jabba off, he says in Empire that if he doesn't pay off Jabba he's a dead man, and when we finally see Jabba in Jedi he's got Han strung up as a piece of artwork. Stepping on the tail just compounds this undercut. Throw in a pointless Boba Fett cameo and the total uselessness of the scene is complete.
So do it multiple times and average out the results.
Is the moment that people/companies who run MMORPG servers can and will get sued when a server crash or mistake by a DM blows away some gamer's character or equipment.
Why would anyone in charge of a MMORPG even want to go down this road?
And MSN Search is right there on the page that "Add Engines.." directs you to. One click and a confirmation and you're done. Does/Will IE7 direct you to a page where you can add Google to its search bar as easily?
Hmm.. any Linux system: FTP/HTTP/rsync/BitTorrent of your choice to any of hundreds of mirrors. Download what you want from where you want whenever you want without any check at all.
Microsoft: use only our browser to our site on our OS, and, oh yeah, we're going to check up on your OS to see if we think it's pirated, and if we think it is, you don't get anything.
Strange definition of "easier" you've got.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Been repealed?
Nope.
Yeah, Bush is really far down that road to being the next Mussolini.
He says, "just get it ported", as if it's the easiest thing to do. AutoCAD is on a yearly release schedule these days. I doubt you could get a Linux CAD application up to par with any released version of AutoCAD in one year, let alone keeping it up with the current year's release. As for something like AutoCAD Mechanical or Electrical, forget it. Just forget it. There's nothing even close to those in the market (effectively a full CAD application with underlying database elements to track every part, component, tag, cable, wire, etc on all the drawings in a project). I doubt you could port or develop an alternative to that in a year, and by then the new release is out.
Never mind PLC programming software, SCADA software, etc. Windows-only. Period. Try to run those on an emulator and you'll get run out of whatever plant you're in.
Bottom line: anyone who says "there are absolutely no technical barriers to switching to Linux on a workstation computer" has never seen an engineering workstation computer.
The problem with junk faxes is less the data, more the time & method of transmitting the data. This isn't the internet where data transmission is measured in milliseconds, and you can have multiple connections to computers active at a time. Even a one-page fax takes several seconds to transmit, and while that fax is being sent, you can neither send one out nor receive another one on that phone line. Start letting junk faxers have free rein and you can kiss the usefulness of faxes goodbye as the phone lines jam up. No spam filter's going to help you when you can't get a call out because you've got junk faxes flooding your phone line.
The vote against ratifying the Kyoto treaty in the Senate was 98-0. Still care to blame the Republicans alone?
I don't understand the reasoning behind item 5, the "no reproduction in last 20 years of copyright" bit. Why take that right away from libraries when the work is over 75 years old? What is it about a work that's 75 years old compared to one that's 55 years old that merits it special "protection" from a library fulfilling its function?
I mean, I know the real answer, that some publishers' lobbyist bought off enough Congresscritters to get that in there at one time or another, but what was the transparent reasoning that was used to justify it?
For specialized applications that don't require internet access and will be locked down in corporate networks, it's not. I once wrestled WinXP Pro down to just under 60MB of memory usage for an operator station at a packaging line running RSView32. It wasn't even connected to the plant LAN, it was talking to a couple of the PLCs in the area via Data-Highway Plus and that was it. No need for firewall or anti-virus in that scenario.
And I just finished a Windows Server 2003 install into a Virtual PC image that we can use in-house for testing -- it came out at 67MB, after all security patches installed but before any server roles or user accounts are configured (besides Administrator). I was pleasantly surprised, though the install is sloooooow into a Virtual PC. Ah well -- at least you can do other things with the host PC while the virtual one is chugging away.
This isn't much of a selling point, to be honest, to casual readers. I read maybe a couple of books a month, varying depending on what other things I've got going on and my interest in the particular book(s). Most of the books on my bookshelf I've only actually read once. When I go away on a trip for a week or two I don't need my entire library with me, just the book or two I happen to be reading at the time.
Books aren't like songs, where having x-thousand of them on your electronic whatever is a plus. You listen to a song and it's over with in 3-5 minutes; move on to the next one, rinse and repeat. Reading a book is a multi-hour commitment. Having 100 to choose from at an instant just means that 99 of them will have to wait for a couple days, so it's not as important that I can get to those other 99 at the click of a button.
If you've ever taken First Aid training, you'll know that one of the first things you're taught is that, if there is anyone else around, you don't call 911 -- you enlist somebody else to go do it and come back to you to tell you how long until help arrives. This leaves you free to render assistance to the victim. If you're alone with the victim, do what you can for him immediately, then haul ass to the closest point to call 911. If the cell phone works, great, use it. If it doesn't, get to that landline or get to where it does work. That's all you can reasonably be expected to do.
This hits the closest to the question we really should be asking ourselves. Most scientists and politicians are stuck trying to prove or disprove whether global warming/climate change is actually happening and/or whether and to what degree human activity is responsible for it. From a public policy standpoint, these questions have no bearing. The public policy question we should be grappling with is this:
Should we expend our resources on attempting to mitigate/prevent climate change or should we expend our resources on adapting to climate change, whether that change is man-made or not?
The well-known example of the former approach is the Kyoto protocol. I'll take my own country of Canada as an example of where I stand on this. Canada, led by a legacy-seeking bumbler of a Prime Minister, signed on to the Kyoto protocol a few years ago, committing itself to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by -- what is it, 2010? Anyway, Canadian emissions have increased by 24% since 1990. As of the 2003 figures (Link), we would have to reduce our emissions by about 180 megatonnes. That's equivalent to the total emissions produced by every plane, train, and automobile in the entire country. Park them all for good, and our target is met.
It should be bloody obvious that such an approach is hardly a wise use of resources. The economic damage from doing this could be nothing short of catastrophic, and may not stop the climate change anyway. Better in my view to continue to grow our economies, generate more wealth, and direct resources into adapting to changing climates as needed. Humans are a remarkably adaptable species, after all; it's the reason we're on top of the food chain.
One thing that I haven't seen brought up in the comments yet is how bloody stupid MLB is being here. The people who play in fantasy leagues are quite likely to be die-hard baseball fans, the ones who can rattle off all the stats for their favorite players at the drop of a hat, watch all the scores & hilights to keep up with the players they've got on their fantasy teams, talk a lot about the sport with their friends, and of course, go to games. Telling these fans that they can't play in their fantasy leagues any more because the stats are MLB property and nobody's allowed to use them would seem to me a sure-fire way to provoke a very angry reaction amongst those fans. Now they're not going to games, they're not spending money on your stuff, and they're telling their friends to do the same, and telling them why.
There's no win here for MLB. Either they lose the case, which makes them look stupid, or they win it, which makes them look heavy-handed. One would think any competent PR person could tell them as much -- assuming MLB has any, that is.
You just damned a lot of architectural and engineering firms in the world. Most architects and engineers don't own their own construction companies that actually build the designs they come up with, yet said architects & engineers get paid some tidy sums of money for doing them. There are differences in the fields to be sure (the designs that a&e's do tend to be one-offs rather than repeatable) but the principle's not that dissimilar.
Don't confuse your obvious distaste for RAMBUS's patent/legal situation with the wrong-headed notion that designers don't do valuable work in their own right even if they don't themselves build the things they design.