One of these things is just like the others. All of these things plainly belong. Can you tell what point that I am making, by the time I finish my song?
Three of these things belong together Three of these things are kind of the same Can you guess what point I am making? Now it's time to play our game
The patterns are only worthwhile if they give information. They only give information if they're statistically significant. The basic standard for testing for significance is the chi-square test. There is no chi-square test of any kind applied to the data in the article. Therefore, the article is as informative as a 404.
Oh, I should have added -- Microsoft also has sponsored ODF plug-ins, which is useful if you're using Office 2007, which Sun doesn't yet support.
So if you have Office 2000, XP, 2003, or 2007, you're minutes away from having an ODF-compatible office suite with 100% of the features of Microsoft Office.
Even if all controlled substances were legal do you think people would just start paying taxes on their purchases of crack cocaine when they haven't had to for all this time? Yes. The tax collection would be done at the distributor/retailer level, not the individual-filing-taxes level. If crack cocaine were sold for a 1000% markup over what it costs to buy coca leaves and process them into crack, and then were taxed at 1000% of that price, the price would still be cheaper than the current street prices. Same with non-crack cocaine, heroin, and a long list of other drugs.
Do you really think Crack Cocaine belongs on the streets? Given that it's already on the streets, does it matter what I believe? You might as well ask me if I think people should get the common cold.
Do you think that Children will not be able to aquire Crack Cocaine once it's price has plummeted? Are you so delusional as to believe they can't already acquire it? (The whole point of crack was that it was a cheaper form of cocaine than powder.)
I for one don't want to deal with my neighbor dancing around my condo complex naked and screaming because he took some PCP and is having a bad trip. Tell me, what do you think is currently stopping people from dancing around your condo complex naked and shouting because they drank too much alcohol and are shit-faced drunk?
Yes, there will be increased drug use with legalization; there was increased alcohol use after Prohibition was ended, too. However, there will be fewer cartel lords getting rich off drugs, fewer gangbangers getting into street wars, fewer innocent people getting shot because of no-knock drug raids that hit the wrong house, fewer drug users getting killed by adulterated drugs, a lot of prison capacity freed up, a lot more cops available to police the remaining criminal activity (including the crimes committed by people who commit them when high), and more tax money to be spent on useful things.
Marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin were all legal products in the United States available in the crowded urban cores of the late 19th Century, but none of them caused nearly as much trouble in society as alcohol. And none of the social problems caused by alcohol were as big as those caused by alcohol prohibition. Similarly, the social problems that will be caused by use of legal hard drugs in the modern era will almost certainly be smaller than either the problems caused by legal alcohol or the problems caused by drug prohibition. (And if by some one-in-ten-thousand chance they aren't, we can turn around and outlaw them again.)
or an ODF compatible software package is able to reach the level of expert-usability that Office has. No problem. I'm pretty sure Microsoft Office has 100% of the level of expert-usability that Microsoft Office has, and Microsoft Office is ODF compatible by just adding the free ODF plug-in.
Sorry, yes, I was specifically talking about the municipality level. The landlord level can block you even if there was somebody laying cable in the municipality . . . although hopefully not after this FCC thing goes through.
Municipality-granted local cable monopolies in the U.S. have been illegal for over a decade.
Now, you still have lots of ways corrupt officials in municipalities can effectively keep a monopoly in place, through the local franchising authority. But unless your county officials belong in a federal prison for corruption, the reason you don't have cable competition is that no competitors are interested in laying cable.
Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraq War is a part of his general policy of "non-intervention", which would include the U.S. withdrawing from the United Nations and NATO, withdrawal of all U.S. troops from overseas, and an end to all foreign aid.
And yes, he's earnest. He votes against any non-balanced budget, any tax increase, and any expenditure he doesn't consider specifically authorized by the Constitution. This includes not just health care, but federal education spending, disaster relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, giving Rosa Parks a Congressional Gold Medal, and farm subsidies (despite representing a rural farming district).
Because, you know, a gene of known characteristics introduced to a plant that has to be tested by the FDA, EPA, and USDA before it gets to market is so much more likely to be dangerous than a random radiation-induced mutant gene in a plant that's allowed to go into the food supply without any testing.
The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). The segmented perversion of 8086 made things even worse by making memory divided into 64kB chunks rather than contiguous.
Not quite. The 16 bits is what limited the segments to 64 kilobyte chunks -- 2^16 = 65,536. The megabyte limit was the result of the twenty-bit segmented memory addressing in the 8088 -- 2^20 = 1,048,576. (The 640K limit was then the result of the upper 384K -- originally 512K -- being reserved by the IBM PC for ROM and memory-mapped hardware.)
It's like sulfur. If you were to commercially mine coal just for the sulfur, you'd lose money competing with other sulfur sources. But scrubbing sulfur from coal smoke to comply with environmental rules extracts the sulfur anyway. The result has been a total collapse of the commercial sulfur-mining industry as power plants try to sell off the huge stockpiles of sulfur they're amassing.
Similarly, high-concentration brine is an excellent source of salt. Other sources of salt are currently economically competitive with and even somewhat superior to extraction from seawater. But the byproduct brine from a commercially viable desalination plant will be much more concentrated; converting that into salt will be much cheaper than direct extraction from seawater. Throw in environmental rules against just dumping the brine, and you wind up with lots of cheap salt replacing other commercial sources.
True, you might wind up with impressive stockpiles of salt after a while (like we have with sulfur), but that's just an open invitation for somebody to develop a productive use for it all. (Gasoline was once just a mostly-useless byproduct of kerosene production . . . ) Fill in the existing salt mines with it, maybe.
The justification is nothing more than that the Crown can grant a monopoly on anything it wants. That is, in fact, how copyright and patents started in England, with the Crown granting itself and anyone who was currently in favor "letters patent" on works or inventions. In the United Kingdom, the Crown still has a Royal Perrogative, equivalent to a copyright on the King James version of the Bible, first published in 1611.
In the United States after the Revolution, this sort of royal monopoly was seen as a form of tyranny, and a much more limited system intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" was established. Obviously, giving the Federal Government a copyright on its own works is pointless under such a system, so the system didn't give the government any.
Why don't the big cities in your glorious US-of-A have fiber for the last mile? Are they not as densely populated as Tokyo? Um, exactly. They aren't. Taking the four most populous cities in each country, and ordering them by population density, we get:
Tokyo: 13,500 people per square kilometer Osaka: 11,900 people per square kilometer New York: 10,200 people per square kilometer Yokohama: 8,300 people per square kilometer Nagoya: 6,800 people per square kilometer Chicago: 4,900 people per square kilometer Los Angeles: 3,000 people per square kilometer Houston: 1,300 people per square kilometer
If the problem were that we were going to be left with, say, three languages tomorrow, there would be cause for concern about the loss of different ways of thinking. With over 250 languages having over 1 million speakers apiece, though, there will be lots of diversity in thought patterns for a long time to come. There is a limit to how many languages can effectively contribute to the overall community of ideas, and with over 3,000 languages assured to survive the next hundred years, we're probably well above that number.
They divide the students into three groups intentionally, yes -- the students evaluated on the basis of the SAT, the students evaluated on the basis of the ACT, and the students evaluated on the basis of the TOEFL. But they do that not for the U.S. News ranking, but for their own internal admissions evaluations.
Once you have a separate "SAT pool" report coming out of the database (used by the admissions committee to track the average SAT scores of students from the SAT pool, for example), it is perfectly possible for someone grabbing "the SAT score average" to use a number drawn from that pool by careless mistake, by failing to check that the U.S. News definition and the internal-evaluation definition of the pool of students are the same.
Many meterites contain iron, a 'metal,' but it is has always been present in an oxidized form.
Um, no.
Stony-iron meteorites -- for example, mesosiderites -- are about 1% of discovered meteorites, and are stone with metallic inclusions. The metal in them is an alloy of iron and nickel. A major characteristic of nickel-iron alloys is that they don't readily oxidize; industrial iron-and-nickel alloys are called "stainless steel" for that reason. A second common characteristic of iron and nickel, both pure and alloyed with each other, is ferromagnetism.
The purposes of the UN are:
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, Now, you've said that the UN is impotent to serve these ends. Let's see, the OED defines incompetence as: "Of inadequate ability or fitness; not having the requisite capacity or qualification; incapable."
One can argue it is not the fault of the persons who make up the United Nations Organization that the organization is incompetent, but, nevertheless, it is unquestionable that the organization itself is incompetent precisely to the degree that it is impotent to implement its purpose.
There's a lot of inertia before forks happen. Remember how long the bad management of Xfree went on before the license change finally provided the spark that drove the X.org fork?
That's why "Can IBM save OpenOffice.org from itself" is the title of the linked article. IBM is going to demand a voice in the direction of OO.o. The implication is, if they don't get it, they'll be the rallying point for a fork organized along different lines.
Would anybody have cared? The legal troubles for BSD extended into 1994, with a settlement in January and 4.4 BSD Lite being released in June 1994. Which would have been faster out the gate -- HURD with chunks of BSD added after June 1994? Or FreeBSD 2.0, which historically shipped in January 1995?
I think that after Linux became a fully-functional free kernel, sure, it had an impact on Hurd development. But by the time Linux actually had a fully-functional release in 1994, the FSF had been working on a kernel for seven years, and had failed to produce anything usable -- even though both TRIX and Mach started out more functional than Linux 0.01.
So, had there been no functional Linux arriving in 1994, it seems completely reasonable to expect the unencumbered version of FreeBSD 2.0 in January 1995 would still have beaten HURD out of the gate. In which case the HURD would be just as irrelevant and incomplete today, while GNU/the FSF/the GPL would have been a lot less relevant.
Oh, yes. All they were lacking in 1991 was a kernel. Well, that should be no problem; the FSF had access to TRIX in 1986 and Mach in 1990, both working Free Software kernels that were already the core of Unix-like systems. The complete, production-quality GNU system was delivered by the FSF in, oh, 1992, right, after a bit of polishing of already-working code?
Well, by 1996, surely? I mean, the FSF started the whole kernel project in 1986 from an existing, working codebase. Surely they could come up with a working kernel from existing code in ten years. Linux was already quite useful in 1996, a mere five years since it was written from scratch, so surely an even better FSF kernel was already available.
All right. 1998, then? I mean, GNU was "almost completely finished" after the first seven years (1984-1991), then surely it was finished after another seven. That's eight years after work was started on the Mach-based HURD. NeXT was able to deliver a complete Mach-based Unix workalike OS in just four years, and most of that was spent developing the OO GUI and application frameworks; surely the FSF could get a Mach-based Unix workalike kernel out the door in twice that time?
Uh-huh.
I suspect that had Linus never written his kernel, we'd now be hearing from RMS about how FreeBSD is really GNU/FreeBSD, because it's dependent on the GNU compiler.
On the larger question, yes; the popular Internet was inevitable whomever won the desktop.
On the smaller one, the problem is that whomever is providing the IBM PC's OS to clonemakers winds up with the same dominant position that Microsoft had in real history when establishing Windows. If that isn't Microsoft, than it's probably Digital Research (knock out Microsoft before 1981, and the IBM PC and thus clones probably run Digital Research CP/M-86; knock out Microsoft after DOS, and the PC clones run DR's DOS Plus or DR-DOS).
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not short-sighted. I assure you, some day my army of enforcement robots will impose my vision of the English language upon you all!
One of these things is just like the others.
All of these things plainly belong.
Can you tell what point that I am making,
by the time I finish my song?
Three of these things belong together
Three of these things are kind of the same
Can you guess what point I am making?
Now it's time to play our game
The patterns are only worthwhile if they give information. They only give information if they're statistically significant. The basic standard for testing for significance is the chi-square test. There is no chi-square test of any kind applied to the data in the article. Therefore, the article is as informative as a 404.
Oh, I should have added -- Microsoft also has sponsored ODF plug-ins, which is useful if you're using Office 2007, which Sun doesn't yet support.
So if you have Office 2000, XP, 2003, or 2007, you're minutes away from having an ODF-compatible office suite with 100% of the features of Microsoft Office.
Yes, there will be increased drug use with legalization; there was increased alcohol use after Prohibition was ended, too. However, there will be fewer cartel lords getting rich off drugs, fewer gangbangers getting into street wars, fewer innocent people getting shot because of no-knock drug raids that hit the wrong house, fewer drug users getting killed by adulterated drugs, a lot of prison capacity freed up, a lot more cops available to police the remaining criminal activity (including the crimes committed by people who commit them when high), and more tax money to be spent on useful things.
Marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin were all legal products in the United States available in the crowded urban cores of the late 19th Century, but none of them caused nearly as much trouble in society as alcohol. And none of the social problems caused by alcohol were as big as those caused by alcohol prohibition. Similarly, the social problems that will be caused by use of legal hard drugs in the modern era will almost certainly be smaller than either the problems caused by legal alcohol or the problems caused by drug prohibition. (And if by some one-in-ten-thousand chance they aren't, we can turn around and outlaw them again.)
Sorry, yes, I was specifically talking about the municipality level. The landlord level can block you even if there was somebody laying cable in the municipality . . . although hopefully not after this FCC thing goes through.
Municipality-granted local cable monopolies in the U.S. have been illegal for over a decade.
Now, you still have lots of ways corrupt officials in municipalities can effectively keep a monopoly in place, through the local franchising authority. But unless your county officials belong in a federal prison for corruption, the reason you don't have cable competition is that no competitors are interested in laying cable.
Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraq War is a part of his general policy of "non-intervention", which would include the U.S. withdrawing from the United Nations and NATO, withdrawal of all U.S. troops from overseas, and an end to all foreign aid.
And yes, he's earnest. He votes against any non-balanced budget, any tax increase, and any expenditure he doesn't consider specifically authorized by the Constitution. This includes not just health care, but federal education spending, disaster relief for the victims of Hurricane Katrina, giving Rosa Parks a Congressional Gold Medal, and farm subsidies (despite representing a rural farming district).
.
One important feature of the FDA's policy is that we will regulate proteins (or other added substances such as fatty acids and carbohydrates) produced by genes, that have been intentionally added to food crops, as new food additives
and
In December, Monsanto Corp. applied to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for approval to field-test and sell a new line of modified corn.
Because, you know, a gene of known characteristics introduced to a plant that has to be tested by the FDA, EPA, and USDA before it gets to market is so much more likely to be dangerous than a random radiation-induced mutant gene in a plant that's allowed to go into the food supply without any testing.
It's like sulfur. If you were to commercially mine coal just for the sulfur, you'd lose money competing with other sulfur sources. But scrubbing sulfur from coal smoke to comply with environmental rules extracts the sulfur anyway. The result has been a total collapse of the commercial sulfur-mining industry as power plants try to sell off the huge stockpiles of sulfur they're amassing.
Similarly, high-concentration brine is an excellent source of salt. Other sources of salt are currently economically competitive with and even somewhat superior to extraction from seawater. But the byproduct brine from a commercially viable desalination plant will be much more concentrated; converting that into salt will be much cheaper than direct extraction from seawater. Throw in environmental rules against just dumping the brine, and you wind up with lots of cheap salt replacing other commercial sources.
True, you might wind up with impressive stockpiles of salt after a while (like we have with sulfur), but that's just an open invitation for somebody to develop a productive use for it all. (Gasoline was once just a mostly-useless byproduct of kerosene production . . . ) Fill in the existing salt mines with it, maybe.
The justification is nothing more than that the Crown can grant a monopoly on anything it wants. That is, in fact, how copyright and patents started in England, with the Crown granting itself and anyone who was currently in favor "letters patent" on works or inventions. In the United Kingdom, the Crown still has a Royal Perrogative, equivalent to a copyright on the King James version of the Bible, first published in 1611.
In the United States after the Revolution, this sort of royal monopoly was seen as a form of tyranny, and a much more limited system intended to "promote the progress of science and useful arts" was established. Obviously, giving the Federal Government a copyright on its own works is pointless under such a system, so the system didn't give the government any.
Hmm? Canada is another American state. Says so right here.
Tokyo: 13,500 people per square kilometer
Osaka: 11,900 people per square kilometer
New York: 10,200 people per square kilometer
Yokohama: 8,300 people per square kilometer
Nagoya: 6,800 people per square kilometer
Chicago: 4,900 people per square kilometer
Los Angeles: 3,000 people per square kilometer
Houston: 1,300 people per square kilometer
If the problem were that we were going to be left with, say, three languages tomorrow, there would be cause for concern about the loss of different ways of thinking. With over 250 languages having over 1 million speakers apiece, though, there will be lots of diversity in thought patterns for a long time to come. There is a limit to how many languages can effectively contribute to the overall community of ideas, and with over 3,000 languages assured to survive the next hundred years, we're probably well above that number.
They divide the students into three groups intentionally, yes -- the students evaluated on the basis of the SAT, the students evaluated on the basis of the ACT, and the students evaluated on the basis of the TOEFL. But they do that not for the U.S. News ranking, but for their own internal admissions evaluations.
Once you have a separate "SAT pool" report coming out of the database (used by the admissions committee to track the average SAT scores of students from the SAT pool, for example), it is perfectly possible for someone grabbing "the SAT score average" to use a number drawn from that pool by careless mistake, by failing to check that the U.S. News definition and the internal-evaluation definition of the pool of students are the same.
Many meterites contain iron, a 'metal,' but it is has always been present in an oxidized form.
Um, no.
Stony-iron meteorites -- for example, mesosiderites -- are about 1% of discovered meteorites, and are stone with metallic inclusions. The metal in them is an alloy of iron and nickel. A major characteristic of nickel-iron alloys is that they don't readily oxidize; industrial iron-and-nickel alloys are called "stainless steel" for that reason. A second common characteristic of iron and nickel, both pure and alloyed with each other, is ferromagnetism.
The purposes of the UN are: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, Now, you've said that the UN is impotent to serve these ends. Let's see, the OED defines incompetence as: "Of inadequate ability or fitness; not having the requisite capacity or qualification; incapable."
One can argue it is not the fault of the persons who make up the United Nations Organization that the organization is incompetent, but, nevertheless, it is unquestionable that the organization itself is incompetent precisely to the degree that it is impotent to implement its purpose.
There's a lot of inertia before forks happen. Remember how long the bad management of Xfree went on before the license change finally provided the spark that drove the X.org fork?
That's why "Can IBM save OpenOffice.org from itself" is the title of the linked article. IBM is going to demand a voice in the direction of OO.o. The implication is, if they don't get it, they'll be the rallying point for a fork organized along different lines.
Would anybody have cared? The legal troubles for BSD extended into 1994, with a settlement in January and 4.4 BSD Lite being released in June 1994. Which would have been faster out the gate -- HURD with chunks of BSD added after June 1994? Or FreeBSD 2.0, which historically shipped in January 1995?
I think that after Linux became a fully-functional free kernel, sure, it had an impact on Hurd development. But by the time Linux actually had a fully-functional release in 1994, the FSF had been working on a kernel for seven years, and had failed to produce anything usable -- even though both TRIX and Mach started out more functional than Linux 0.01.
So, had there been no functional Linux arriving in 1994, it seems completely reasonable to expect the unencumbered version of FreeBSD 2.0 in January 1995 would still have beaten HURD out of the gate. In which case the HURD would be just as irrelevant and incomplete today, while GNU/the FSF/the GPL would have been a lot less relevant.
Oh, yes. All they were lacking in 1991 was a kernel. Well, that should be no problem; the FSF had access to TRIX in 1986 and Mach in 1990, both working Free Software kernels that were already the core of Unix-like systems. The complete, production-quality GNU system was delivered by the FSF in, oh, 1992, right, after a bit of polishing of already-working code?
Well, by 1996, surely? I mean, the FSF started the whole kernel project in 1986 from an existing, working codebase. Surely they could come up with a working kernel from existing code in ten years. Linux was already quite useful in 1996, a mere five years since it was written from scratch, so surely an even better FSF kernel was already available.
All right. 1998, then? I mean, GNU was "almost completely finished" after the first seven years (1984-1991), then surely it was finished after another seven. That's eight years after work was started on the Mach-based HURD. NeXT was able to deliver a complete Mach-based Unix workalike OS in just four years, and most of that was spent developing the OO GUI and application frameworks; surely the FSF could get a Mach-based Unix workalike kernel out the door in twice that time?
Uh-huh.
I suspect that had Linus never written his kernel, we'd now be hearing from RMS about how FreeBSD is really GNU/FreeBSD, because it's dependent on the GNU compiler.
On the larger question, yes; the popular Internet was inevitable whomever won the desktop.
On the smaller one, the problem is that whomever is providing the IBM PC's OS to clonemakers winds up with the same dominant position that Microsoft had in real history when establishing Windows. If that isn't Microsoft, than it's probably Digital Research (knock out Microsoft before 1981, and the IBM PC and thus clones probably run Digital Research CP/M-86; knock out Microsoft after DOS, and the PC clones run DR's DOS Plus or DR-DOS).