Calling an island part of a continent is purely an arbitrary thing to do. There is no "techtonic" rule that stipulates how it is supposed to be done. I don't know what you mean by "techtonically" - you mean it's on the same plate? Well, in that case Los Angeles isn't part of North America, it's part of the Pacific Ocean.
And while we're at it, the line between "continent" and "island" is pretty fuzzy too. Greenland is an island of North America, but Australia is a separate continent. Is it because Greenland is still on the shallow "shelf" of North America, while Australia is a "shelf" unto itself? Well, if that was the definition, then Hawaii and countless other Pacific islands would be separate continents too. We don't want to call them that, because they seem too small. Face it, the distinction between continent and island, and which continent an island is 'part of' is completely arbitrary and made-up by geographers. There's no scientific principle to the naming convention.
In school they learn that World War 2 started with Pearl Harbor, not with
Germanys invasion of Poland
As one of "them" 'mericans, let me say that you are lying. I was taught about the start of world war 2, and how the different factions trickled into place (No, it didn't start with Poland, by the way. There was no one single start date, it's a situation that slowly boiled up and different countries joined in (or were invaded) one at a time.) Calling Poland the start of the war is just as ignorant as calling Pearl Harbor the start of the war. Poland was only the "start" for three of the countries involved - Britian, France, and of course Poland itself. Russia was't involved yet. Japan was expanding its empire militaristicly before then. There was no single "start" of the war.
How does a country that doesn't exist yet win a war?
Canada, as a nation, began in 1867, 55 years after 1812.
The War of 1812 was between the US and the British troops in the vast British colonial holding known as Canada. Actual Canadian colonials played only a partial role, and they certainly had nothing to do with burning the White House, which was a NAVAL landing carried out by the (then) most powerful naval power in the world, Britain.
But you also be convicted of a felony in parts of the US for having oral sex.
No you can't. There are such laws on the books as leftovers from a more prudish time in history, but anyone who tried enforcing them would fail. The only reason such laws exist is that it is harder to repeal a law than to create it, and so such laws get quietly forgotten and swept under the rug. If and when it ever became an issue, then the courts would throw it out, but until such a time as something happens to bring it to the surface, the effort to repeal them isn't undertaken.
A corporation is a body, formed by people, that is
authorized by law to act as a single person.
The problem is that this gives the *rights* of a person to the group, but not the *responsibilities* of a person. If a corporation kills someone, does it stand trial for murder? The only form of punishment the courts have against a corporation is hitting them with fines.
A corporation can't do time in prison.
This becomes a problem because then a corporation can get away with terrible crimes so long as it can throw money at the problem. Fines are the only punishment to worry about.
A corporation prevents the individuals involved from being held accountable for their actions, for even if the corp is found guilty of something, the fines come out of the corporation's pocket, not the person or persons who made the decision to do that action.
I'm no communist, I have nothing against capitalism, but I do have something against faceless capitalism that shields individuals from personal responsibility.
The only major invasions that we've had (that I'm aware of), were the Americans trying to take the
country; apparently Canada is their 'manifest destiny' or something like that.
You are referring to the War of 1812 (not to be confused with that other War of 1812 in Europe). But you forget one important fact: Canada was not its own country until 1867. The war of 1812 was not against Canada. It was against Britain, in their northern colonies in the land that would *later* become the country of Canada. British troops *stationed* in the Canadian territory did most of the fighting, not the Canadians themselves (although there was a Canadian militia, the British played the more major role, including a successful naval blockade of the entire coast, and the burning of Washington DC (which the Canadians had nothing to do with, other than being a staging ground for the British military that did it.).) I've heard several Canadians use this "we burned the White House" event as a bragging point against Americans, but they didn't do it - the British did.
The causes of the war were alleged complaints against Britain (including navy gang-pressing). The "manifest destiny" was not about expanding north or south, it was about expanding to the other coast.
I've got a lot of respect for Canada, but get your facts straight here.
Britain didn't have the capacity to help against Japan. It didn't matter whether they wanted to or not, their entire army was already comitted to action in Europe, and their entire navy was committed to supply-line efforts (like hunting u-boats, and ferrying troops around. Unlike the US, the UK doesn't have enough farmland to feed its population and has to import food just to survive. Without committing the navy to supply efforts, the British would have starved, and with Europe under nazi control, they had to go halfway around the world just to buy food. The RAF was a bit busy at the time too, facing the Luftwaffe.
The UK didn't *have* anything to spare. That's why Germany had to come first.
You are only half right. The US didn't really do much practical until the summer of 1942, but that was 6 months after the Pearl Harbor attack. The US was very non-militaristic at the time and had no useful army of any noticable size ready to send overseas yet when Pearl Harbor was attacked. (The total armed forces numbered 200,000 men at the time, and unlike the other countries, the US hadn't yet started making modernized war equipment using the latest technology. Considering the population of the US, that's a really small army.)
6 months was how long it took to have a noticable army ready, and even then it was only used in North Africa at first (a lesser theatre) because it still was mostly untrained new recruits. (the experienced officers were mostly back home trying to train the newly drafted troops as quickly as possible.)
Considering where it started from in 1941, the US turned its industry around very fast. (And had the advantage of being the only major player in the war who's industry infrastructure out of reach of the enemy.)
WW2 is what turned the US *into* a military power. Before that, the US was unready for war. In WW2, the 'defense industry' was born, and the cold war kept feeding it afterward.
Most Canadians trust their government, and for the most part, the Canadian government does little to abuse
that trust. While, in written laws, Canadians have less official rights, they have more personal freedom.
There seems to be an irony about government in general: If something is vague and unspecified, it seems to be stronger than if it is explicitly mentioned in writing. For example, most European countries have an official religion on paper, but a vague attitude of tolerance for any other opinions, while the US Constitution explicitly forbids any official religious ties to government. Yet in practice the US populace is much more religious than the Europeans, and in practice religion plays a greater role in politics in the US than it does in Europe.
The same sort of thing tends to happen with the US constitution. While it's nice to have a pirce of paper that tells the government it can't do certain things, in practice this sets up an advesarial mentality where the government thinks it can get away with anything that was not explicitly covered in the constitution. (This was a matter of debate amongst the framers of the US constitution - should things be phrased as "by default the government can't do anything unless this piece of paper says it can", so the constitution is a list of what can be done, or should it be the other way, where by default the government can do anything it wants and the piece of paper is a list of the exceptions - things it can't do.) The latter won out. I often wonder what a government done the other way around would have been like.
Canadians generally have a higher level
of literacy and a better education from playschool to undergraduate studies than Americans. Americans have
one of the world's best post-graduate ratings, however.
That's mostly a matter of where the money comes from. State Colleges are paid for half by the student, and half by government subsidies (on average, the exact ratio varies from state to state), while the lower (mandatory) levels of public schooling are paid for entirely by the government. This difference means that colleges end up being well funded, while the lower grade levels are less well funded, since they are government-run (going back to the fact you mentioned above, that in the US, people don't want to spend lots of taxes on public things.) Also, the school tax monies come from LOCAL property taxes, which leads to a snowballing problem in poor areas - poor areas generate less property taxes, so they have poorer funding for schools, which leads to less educated young adults graduating, which leads to more poverty in the area.
This circle will not be broken until American people understand that some powers are best left at a
federal level, and until the American federal government understand which powers should be absorbed,
and which should just left be.
True, but there is a difficult question: how do you get there from here? The *current* crop of people in government aren't the ones I'd trust with that power. They still think in terms of partisan politics and power.
Saying that "Every computer is hackable" is idiotic. Hacks result from design flaws, they aren't inherent to any system.
Your statement is wrong for two reasons:
You assume that all cracks result from
design flaws. Not so. Many cracks result
from low-level one-liner type coding mistakes,
not "design flaws". Things like not using
fgets() and instead using something that
allows buffer overflow are not "design flaws",
they are low level coding flaws.
Even so, you can't be sure you've found
all the flaws, be they design flaws or other
sorts of flaws. That's why it's never safe to
assume a system is uncrackable. It's just
like claiming that a piece of software has "no
bugs".
The post reccomended that as one of several
solutions, "Doofus". It also reccomended a
tabsize change. And thanks to whomever called the post a "troll". I brought up a genuine point.
I really wish text editors wouldn't do that.
I wish they'd leave the tab sizes at 8 and
not allow you to mess with them. If you want indenting that is less than 8 - use something other than hitting tab. (For example, in vi
use the ctrl-T for indent and ctrl-D for outdent
(in insert mode) - these will go by your shiftwidth size, which is settable seperately from
your tabstop size.) The reason I say changing tab sizes is evil is that it makes it so your code only looks right in THAT editor and nowhere else.
It will look wrong on a printout, it will wrong in someone else's editor. If you ever plan to have somoene else be able to edit your code ever, don't operate under altered tabstop sizes. If two people using the code have different tabstop settings, then some parts of the code will be written with different settings than other parts of the code, and no matter which setting you pick, some parts of the code will not line up right.)
I worked at a place where people were doing this
and it was hell to try to follow the improperly indented code (especially when someone with a
tabstop of 4 would go in and try to 'fix' someone else's indenting who had been using 8, because on
thier screen it looked wrong (even though it was using the more common standard).
Two problems: First, a single belief does not a religion make. After all "theism" isn't a religion either. It's merely one attribute of many that a religion might have. Second, Atheism isn't a belief. It's the lack thereof. The problem is that theists are the majority, they write the dictionaries, and they don't "get" the atheist stance, so they misrepresent it accidentally.
"I-don't-care-ism" is not mutually exclusive with atheism. One can be an apathetic atheist.
Yeah, I read that. Too bad it has nothing to do with what I was saying, because it was citing a time during which the country wasn't fully hooked up yet. That's roughly analogous to the home computer market in the early 1980's. If AT&T didn't become the monopoly, someone else would have, whether the government helped it happen or not. Microsoft managed it without government help, and their market has even less "network effect" than a phone system does.
Who created the AT&T monopoly? Why, the natural laissez-faire forces in a market that is inherently a natural monopoly, that's who. Sure, the government *regulated* the monopoly, but don't kid yourself for a second into thinking that the monopoly would have been nonexistant if the government had let things run their own course. Once Ma Bell had the first phone poles up, the first phone network, nobody else could possibly compete, because it would be impossible to find somewhere to start small. Nobody is going to sign up for some new tiny phone company that doesn't hook up to the rest of the phones in the country yet. Government regulation forces telcos to let other telcos connect to them. Take that away and nobody could ever break into the market once one company has the majority of customers, no matter what the quality of their service might be, or the price, or any of those other factors that companies normally use to compete with each other.
I don't get it. I've already made two purchase orders for Dell machines here at work in the past,
and they came pre-installed with Redhat, and Gnome as the default environment. How is this anything new? They already do this. I don't understand how there is any difference between their "business", "education", and "home" deals. Why not just offer all the models with sets of pre-installed software and not bother calling them "business" or "home" models. There really isn't any important difference - you can take a "home" model and add and subtract options to make it just like a "business" model, and visa versa. I don't understand their categories.
Nobody won in Florida. It was a tie. That would still be true even if Gore pulled into the lead on one of the recounts. Why do I say this? Because the margin is well within the range of error of the system they used. The real cuplrit here is the local Florida election handlers who used such a sloppy system that *cannot* guarantee accurracy, no matter how many recounts are done. The vote collecting technique is so bad that the data in their hands is sloppy - it doesn't matter how carefully you analyse and count the votes if they were collected in a sloppy manner in the first place. Punchcard machines that don't punch the chad out 100% of the time, and improperly printed butterfly ballots that put the arrow halfway between holes add up to well more than a 0.2% margin of error, such that no amount of human guessing will ever get the true "voter's intent" off of the data collected.
The one thing this election teaches us is that no, your one vote really *doesn't* matter, because any time the margin is that close, the count will be ruined by our country's piss-poor data collection machinery used in voting.
These problems have always existed, but it was only just now that it was so close that it mattered.
The one thing this election will teach us is that it's high time we had election reform - no not the abolishing of the electoral college, not the reform of money-gathering techniques, but the very simple, technical reform of getting a better voting machine in place, and using it universally.
Here in Wisconsin, the repubs briefly considered doing a recount because of the close margin here, but they gave up since we don't use obsolete chad-punchcards or butterfly ballots. We use a simple visual scanner that looks for a line you draw on the paper, and if the machine detects double-votes it spits the ballot back at you right there, so you know about it and can do it again. This system is good enough that a manual recount wouldn't really change much. Something similarly accurate needs to be nationalized.
While I agree with the notion that this is hype and not to be believed, it does highlight something about the GPL that frightens me: It's impossible to enforce it. *IF* a closed source product were to illegally include GPL code in it, how would anyone ever find out about it? The only way to ever find out would be to look at the source, and it's closed.
Okay, so let's say a government decides to tax something I paid $0 for - how do they do it? Do they want 5% of the purchase price? 500% - Sure,
I'll pay them 500% of $0.00, no problem. I don't mind at all. While they're at it I'm willing to give them a percentage of what I paid for the air I breathe too. This is why the Polish government's actions make no sense at all.
Before the whole free beer / free speech argument comes up, let me point out that the article specificly said they were talking about both kinds of free, so the scenario I mention *is* relevant.
I've seen these alleged color correction tools in Windows before, and I've always wondered what the point of them is. Who needs them? In what business or field of study (or video game) does it really matter that the color and gamma match exactly to what was intended? As long as they are close enough (i.e. magenta doesn't end up looking like green or something), then who cares? People are going to adjust their monitors anyway to match what the like to see, so the whole notion of gamma correction in software is pointless, as far as I can tell. In fact, I made the mistake of installing one of these things that came with a video card I bought, and now my games are all fu'bared and I can't adjust them back the way I like (and the tool didn't come with an uninstall option, so gettting rid of it will probably take
some icky registry hacking as well as just deleting the files.) Is there some field of study or business I'm unaware of that really needs this kind of tool?
I'm not trying to be flameful - I'm genuinely confused. Obviously a market of some sort exists for these tools or they wouldn't keep making them,
but I can't figure out what that market would be.
I don't really care that Netscape is making advertising money off of Mozilla's work. I consider that fair payment for their opensourcing the code in the first place. What bugs me is that they are wasting development effort on irrelevant stuff. It's not the ads themselves that bother me - it's the fact that we are getting ads *instead* of product enhancements.
Re:Can't press multiple keys at once?
on
Keyless Keyboard
·
· Score: 2
Go to this URL - it shows you how to get those extra keys on that thing - you can push the domes downward to have "shift" keys.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling an island part of a continent is purely an arbitrary thing to do. There is no "techtonic" rule that stipulates how it is supposed to be done. I don't know what you mean by "techtonically" - you mean it's on the same plate? Well, in that case Los Angeles isn't part of North America, it's part of the Pacific Ocean. And while we're at it, the line between "continent" and "island" is pretty fuzzy too. Greenland is an island of North America, but Australia is a separate continent. Is it because Greenland is still on the shallow "shelf" of North America, while Australia is a "shelf" unto itself? Well, if that was the definition, then Hawaii and countless other Pacific islands would be separate continents too. We don't want to call them that, because they seem too small. Face it, the distinction between continent and island, and which continent an island is 'part of' is completely arbitrary and made-up by geographers. There's no scientific principle to the naming convention.
How does a country that doesn't exist yet win a war?
Canada, as a nation, began in 1867, 55 years after 1812.
The War of 1812 was between the US and the British troops in the vast British colonial holding known as Canada. Actual Canadian colonials played only a partial role, and they certainly had nothing to do with burning the White House, which was a NAVAL landing carried out by the (then) most powerful naval power in the world, Britain.
A corporation can't do time in prison.
This becomes a problem because then a corporation can get away with terrible crimes so long as it can throw money at the problem. Fines are the only punishment to worry about.
A corporation prevents the individuals involved from being held accountable for their actions, for even if the corp is found guilty of something, the fines come out of the corporation's pocket, not the person or persons who made the decision to do that action.
I'm no communist, I have nothing against capitalism, but I do have something against faceless capitalism that shields individuals from personal responsibility.
The causes of the war were alleged complaints against Britain (including navy gang-pressing). The "manifest destiny" was not about expanding north or south, it was about expanding to the other coast.
I've got a lot of respect for Canada, but get your facts straight here.
The UK didn't *have* anything to spare. That's why Germany had to come first.
Considering where it started from in 1941, the US turned its industry around very fast. (And had the advantage of being the only major player in the war who's industry infrastructure out of reach of the enemy.) WW2 is what turned the US *into* a military power. Before that, the US was unready for war. In WW2, the 'defense industry' was born, and the cold war kept feeding it afterward.
The same sort of thing tends to happen with the US constitution. While it's nice to have a pirce of paper that tells the government it can't do certain things, in practice this sets up an advesarial mentality where the government thinks it can get away with anything that was not explicitly covered in the constitution. (This was a matter of debate amongst the framers of the US constitution - should things be phrased as "by default the government can't do anything unless this piece of paper says it can", so the constitution is a list of what can be done, or should it be the other way, where by default the government can do anything it wants and the piece of paper is a list of the exceptions - things it can't do.) The latter won out. I often wonder what a government done the other way around would have been like.
That's mostly a matter of where the money comes from. State Colleges are paid for half by the student, and half by government subsidies (on average, the exact ratio varies from state to state), while the lower (mandatory) levels of public schooling are paid for entirely by the government. This difference means that colleges end up being well funded, while the lower grade levels are less well funded, since they are government-run (going back to the fact you mentioned above, that in the US, people don't want to spend lots of taxes on public things.) Also, the school tax monies come from LOCAL property taxes, which leads to a snowballing problem in poor areas - poor areas generate less property taxes, so they have poorer funding for schools, which leads to less educated young adults graduating, which leads to more poverty in the area. True, but there is a difficult question: how do you get there from here? The *current* crop of people in government aren't the ones I'd trust with that power. They still think in terms of partisan politics and power.Your statement is wrong for two reasons:
The post reccomended that as one of several solutions, "Doofus". It also reccomended a tabsize change. And thanks to whomever called the post a "troll". I brought up a genuine point.
I worked at a place where people were doing this and it was hell to try to follow the improperly indented code (especially when someone with a tabstop of 4 would go in and try to 'fix' someone else's indenting who had been using 8, because on thier screen it looked wrong (even though it was using the more common standard).
"I-don't-care-ism" is not mutually exclusive with atheism. One can be an apathetic atheist.
In other words, it isn't. If atheism is a religion, then baldness is a hair color.
Yeah, I read that. Too bad it has nothing to do with what I was saying, because it was citing a time during which the country wasn't fully hooked up yet. That's roughly analogous to the home computer market in the early 1980's. If AT&T didn't become the monopoly, someone else would have, whether the government helped it happen or not. Microsoft managed it without government help, and their market has even less "network effect" than a phone system does.
Who created the AT&T monopoly? Why, the natural laissez-faire forces in a market that is inherently a natural monopoly, that's who. Sure, the government *regulated* the monopoly, but don't kid yourself for a second into thinking that the monopoly would have been nonexistant if the government had let things run their own course. Once Ma Bell had the first phone poles up, the first phone network, nobody else could possibly compete, because it would be impossible to find somewhere to start small. Nobody is going to sign up for some new tiny phone company that doesn't hook up to the rest of the phones in the country yet. Government regulation forces telcos to let other telcos connect to them. Take that away and nobody could ever break into the market once one company has the majority of customers, no matter what the quality of their service might be, or the price, or any of those other factors that companies normally use to compete with each other.
I don't get it. I've already made two purchase orders for Dell machines here at work in the past, and they came pre-installed with Redhat, and Gnome as the default environment. How is this anything new? They already do this. I don't understand how there is any difference between their "business", "education", and "home" deals. Why not just offer all the models with sets of pre-installed software and not bother calling them "business" or "home" models. There really isn't any important difference - you can take a "home" model and add and subtract options to make it just like a "business" model, and visa versa. I don't understand their categories.
The one thing this election teaches us is that no, your one vote really *doesn't* matter, because any time the margin is that close, the count will be ruined by our country's piss-poor data collection machinery used in voting.
These problems have always existed, but it was only just now that it was so close that it mattered.
The one thing this election will teach us is that it's high time we had election reform - no not the abolishing of the electoral college, not the reform of money-gathering techniques, but the very simple, technical reform of getting a better voting machine in place, and using it universally.
Here in Wisconsin, the repubs briefly considered doing a recount because of the close margin here, but they gave up since we don't use obsolete chad-punchcards or butterfly ballots. We use a simple visual scanner that looks for a line you draw on the paper, and if the machine detects double-votes it spits the ballot back at you right there, so you know about it and can do it again. This system is good enough that a manual recount wouldn't really change much. Something similarly accurate needs to be nationalized.
While I agree with the notion that this is hype and not to be believed, it does highlight something about the GPL that frightens me: It's impossible to enforce it. *IF* a closed source product were to illegally include GPL code in it, how would anyone ever find out about it? The only way to ever find out would be to look at the source, and it's closed.
It sounds like he was referring to computer reel-to-reel tapes, which *ARE* digital.
The Meaning of Life
... ... etc
Part 5
Live Organ Donation
Just Remember that you're standing / On a planet that's evolving
Before the whole free beer / free speech argument comes up, let me point out that the article specificly said they were talking about both kinds of free, so the scenario I mention *is* relevant.
I'm not trying to be flameful - I'm genuinely confused. Obviously a market of some sort exists for these tools or they wouldn't keep making them, but I can't figure out what that market would be.
I don't really care that Netscape is making advertising money off of Mozilla's work. I consider that fair payment for their opensourcing the code in the first place. What bugs me is that they are wasting development effort on irrelevant stuff. It's not the ads themselves that bother me - it's the fact that we are getting ads *instead* of product enhancements.
http://www.keybowl.com/support/training.htm