Soon, EVERY web app will need to be an AJAX app...even if it doesn't need to be.
I'm afraid you may well be right. Most users never touch command-line programs today, even though the command-line is, for many tasks, easier and faster than the GUI equivalent (not to mention the fact that programming for the command line is far simpler). So, yeah I hope it doesn't happen, but it wouldn't be the first time...
Whether it's justifiable to curtail freedom for the purpose of safety isn't even the right argument, though, because that's not what they're doing. They're curtailing freedom for the appearance of safety, dedicating their time and money (or rather, your money if you live or work here) towards measures that are highly visible, highly intrusive
I agree, but for a different reason. Whether it's justifiable to curtail freedom for the purpose of safety isn't even the right argument, because they're curtailing the appearance of freedom. How does being asked "are you planning an attack on this flight?" constitute a loss of freedom? The government will not be searching you, preventing your free speech, preventing your freedom of religion, or putting you in jail. Slashdotters will pounce on just about any security measure as a denial of fundamental freedoms, when in fact they deny no real freedoms; at most they are some inconvenience. They're not asking you "have you ever committed a crime?" or "are ever going to commit a crime?" They're merely asking you if you are going to try to do something illegal with the flight; seems a reasonable question to me.
That said, I generally distrust "lie-detectors," as they have often been shown to be unreliable. It'll take more than one test to convince me of how useful this really is. But even so, you can't be convicted for failing the test; at worst you will be searched more extensively. If this test is reliable enough (and again, I seriously doubt it is), the only thing it will do is better target who the TSA searches. That would be a good thing. You'll never be able to have airport security without some inconvenience to innocent people, but the fewer innocents who are inconvenienced and the more likely criminals are to be caught, the better.
I just treated myself to one for those reasons, I can afford and I'm sorry if you think that's weird but it's my choice.
My post was half just kidding with you, half substance. Here's the substance:
The submitter of the story wanted to know how Slashdotters avoid vendor lock-in when it comes to music. Your economic decisions are, of course, up to you, but you appear to be locked in tight with Apple. You may not find that to be a problem, but it is exactly the situation that the submitter is trying to avoid.
Personally, my tendencies lie with the submitter; I greatly dislike vendor lock-in. I don't have an iPod or any portable music player for that matter, but if I did want one, I would try to reward vendors who, unlike Apple, encourage you to have a freedom of choices. One such vendor that comes to mind is Neuros, whose players are among the few that let you play Ogg Vorbis files and also sponsors open source development. Apple's practices, with DRM and so forth, appear quite different.
So, my point is that your recommendation is precisely what the submitter doesn't want. IMHO, the submitter's "best bet" is not with MP3, which in my view is one of the ISO's biggest blunders ever, but with Ogg and players that support it, such as Neuros.
iPod, iTune, iTunes Music Store, and MP3 is your best bet - period!
Funny how the submitter was asking about how to avoid being locked in to a vendor... Well, I guess resistance is futile! Sheesh. What an idiot I've been, thinking that listening to music in Ogg Vorbis was possible. How did I ever survive without DRM?
The player is both Windows and Mac compatible. It allows you access to largest and well known music stores in existence. It allows you to access music, video and TV episodes.
My wife has her iPod with all of our music and she loves it. We have the airport express with air tunes and play all our music to our stereo system, very cool!
I have my iPod, my wifes old iPod and I use it for the office and the car. I have a 1gb iPod Shuttle that I use when walking around, snow boarding and any other time I want to be portable.
Let's suppose for a moment that you are not from Apple's marketing department...
Okay, so your wife has an iPod, and you have an iPod for general use, an iPod for work, and an iPod for walking around. Are you saving up for an iPod for sitting down as well?
The U.S. was attacked on 9/11 in a very public and spectacular -- but in the end numerically insignificant -- way, and responded by picking a couple countries that it wasn't particularly fond of and invading them, at enormous expense and very little gain. Why? Because a whole lot of Americans wanted to see somebody, somewhere, get the living shit bombed out of them on CNN, and there were marginal excuses for Afghanistan (supporting terrorism) and Iraq (WMDs). Really, they were just convenient: it is and was a Spanish-American War for the 21st Century.
Two points:
1) To say that 9/11 was "numerically insignificant" is quite an understatement. It was the most deadly terrorist attack in history; it killed more people than Pearl Harbor (which I hope we agree was not insignificant). It was also a wake-up call that more, potentially deadlier attacks could come later. Was 9/11 the end of the world? No. Was it a significant attack? Yes.
2) I agree that a lot of the public support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq came from a desire for revenge from the American public. However, there were also very rational, though debatable, reasons for the wars. Iraq has been rehashed on/. a million times, so I won't go into it.
That said, I disagree with your analogy of the Spanish-American War with Afghanistan. Let's review what happened with the Spanish-American War. The USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor. No one knew why (we are now pretty certain it was an accident), but the American press sensationalized as a Spanish attack on an American warship. So, the US decides to go conquer a bunch of colonies from the Spanish.
Do we know who committed the 9/11 attacks? Definitely; Al Qaeda did, which was essentially "headquartered" in Afghanistan. Did the US go on and colonize Afghanistan? No; the US helped set up a sovereign government there and, once it is able to, will leave. Was there "very little gain" in invading Afghanistan? Given that a very large number of Al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, and Al Qaeda no longer has a complete sanctuary for training and operations, I think "very little gain" is a considerable understatement.
Besides, if you think that invading Afghanistan was a mistake, what sort of response did you support after 9/11?
Anyhow, although the portrayal of post 9/11 foreign policy as a completely unjustified return to imperialism by the US is rather popular on Slashdot, it isn't accurate. I disagree with a lot of the policy, but such analogies are far-fetched.
I love AMD as much as anyone, but there is a reason other than Intel's brand name that Dell doesn't use AMD. AMD simply doesn't have the production capacity that Intel does, and since Dell produces a lot of computers, it needs a lot of CPUs. I always buy AMD processors for my computers, but I can do that because I'm not building hundreds of thousands of machines. I'm not saying that the Intel brand doesn't have an effect; I'm just saying that it isn't the only thing at play here.
Also, as far as mobile processors go, one reason that you don't see many AMD-powered laptops around is that AMD hasn't been quite as successful as Intel when it comes to keeping processors cool, which is especially true with laptops. I can now personally attest to this (though it involved my desktop's processor, not a laptop); I had to replace my AMD Athlon XP due to overheating and causing processor-intensive programs to crash.
Too bad he's not involving himself figuring out how to make 50% efficient solar panels.. with him on the darpa team, they could probably be making these panels for $1.00 within 3 years.
DARPA is great, but string theory, should it prove true, would be much more important than DARPA or anything the Pentagon is working on, at least as far as science goes.
That said, I'd really like to know how string theory could be applied to cars. I'm not an expert by any means, but I've read The Elegant Universe and so forth, and I think there are at least two big hurdles before this kid even has a chance with his idea. 1) There is no experimental evidence to support string theory, so we don't even know if it's true yet. 2) If he can make flying cars using string theory, that implies that these cars would serve as experimental evidence for it. Why is he already jumping from "something that might be true" to "let's start an engineering project with it?" So, if he has some magic that he can pull out of his hat, great let's hear it, but somehow I doubt that this will happen any time soon.
This kid is going to have the social skills of a log.
Perhaps not. If the kid hangs out with adults, he may well end up behaving more like an adult, and hence more mature than his peers. In any case, he'll likely spend a lot more time working obsessively on physics problems that interest him than with other people, much like we nerds enjoy working obsessively on problems that interest us, be it physics, programming, or both (like I do). This kid will likely turn out as the nerdiest of nerds, which is something we all wish we could aspire to. Heck, if social lives were more important to us than science, computers, etc., we all probably wouldn't be on Slashdot arguing about this.;-)
If government wants to help, then it can help by getting out of the way! Government can stop standardizing on proprietary formats. Government can stop handing out software patents. Government can stop recognizing mouse click licensing. Government could liberalize copyright and abolish the DMCA.
I agree with almost everything, but I don't see what is wrong with mouse click licensing. How do you propose people agree to software licenses before they use programs?
I just can't wait until we see sites declaring "Page will not render correctly under Microsoft IE".
Already true of my website (though I just ask if my website looks white and ugly, which is true in the case of IE, so that I can rant about the incompliance of IE with W3C standards).
There is no generally accepted definition of life. And if there was, it certainly wouldn't be the one you mentioned, since, according to it, trees aren't alive - or at least I've never seen any walking around.
That's why I said "externally or internally." There is a lot of internal motion that goes on. For example, nutrients and water flow through the xylem and phloem.
Second, the above definition *is* the conventional definition. There are debates amongst biologists on other criteria (as you'll see in the article), but even these criteria are ultimately based on chemistry.
Furthermore, what are reproduction and metabolism ? Fire "eats" wood and turns it into ashes, releasing energy in the process; are flames alive ? They certainly grow and reproduce - one flame ignites others, and they respond to stimuli, as do all observable physical systems.
Metabolism is the chemical processes that go on in living organisms that do things use the energy from nutrients to build molecules like proteins. Fire is just a single chemical process that converts oxygen and organic molecules into water and carbon dioxide.
No; the parent meant that having a soul is the difference between a living thing and a corpse. Same matter, in roughly the same configuration (at least immediately after death), obeying the same laws of physics, can form either a living creature or a dead corpse of one.
The matter in a corpse is *not* in the same configuration as in a living body, and it is likely not the same matter. For example, if an animal drowns, that's because it oxygen isn't getting to the cells, and thus it is unable to carry out essential processes, like the citric acid cycle. It then cannot produce enough energy, and thus metabolism cannot continue. When a living thing ceases to carry out metabolism, it fails the definition for "living," and therefore it is dead.
So, in this case, would the parent be claiming that oxygen is the "soul" of living things? In a sense it is... but there are lots of chemicals different organisms need. Do living things have multiple "souls" then, one being oxygen, another being carbohydrates, another lipids, another amino acids, etc.? Even so, you could pump as much oxygen as you wanted into a corpse; it won't come alive.
Anyhow, it seems more appropriate to label these as "essential nutrients" or something like that, not "souls," don't you think?
The grandparent meant that soul is the life of a living creature. It is the difference between living and dead. You have a soul, so your body is alive; take that soul away, and your body is just a rapidly decaying collection of organic molecules.
Let's briefly review the definition of life. Living things must have: 1) Growth, 2) Metabolism, 3) Motion (externally or internally), 4) Reproduction, and 5) Response to Stimuli. The collection of organic molecules that make up living things exhibit these features simply by obeying the laws of chemistry and physics -- a far cry from "rapidly decaying."
So did the parent mean that the "soul" of living things is chemistry? If so, I guess I can see where you'd go with that. We probably wouldn't be alive if the laws of chemistry suddenly went haywire.:) But then again, death is also governed by chemistry, and chemistry is just as applicable to corpses as to living organisms; so everything, living or dead, would always have a soul. In fact, we'd all share the same soul, not separate ones.
Did I get something wrong in my logic, or am I just completely off track?
But my understanding is that the "soul" or "spirit" of someone (or some creature) is sort of its eternal counterpart that gives it life. The relationship between a body, and a spirit is like the relationship bewteen a hand and a glove; without a hand, a glove is like an empty inanimate shell.
Um, it's already living... so what do you mean it "gives it life?" A body isn't like a "glove"; it's the hand itself -- it's a living, breathing thing. So why would it need a "counterpart" and, since living organisms are already living, I still don't quite see what this counterpart would do.
I'm a Christian and I believe animals have a soul, too.
Could you please explain what you mean by "soul?" Lots of people talk about organisms, especially humans, and I never quite understand what they mean by "soul." Are they talking about their brains? (In that case, what is the "soul" of a sponge? They have no nervous tissue.)
This article made me think about it. I mean Microsoft is shipping an operating system without a compiler included. Isn't that strange, that everyone takes this as normal? Isn't a compiler an integral part of an operating system.
Well, even some Linux distros are shipping without GCC (examples I know of: SUSE (regular, not professional), Ubuntu). Still even these distros make it relatively easy to get compilers (with YaST or Synaptic or apt-get). In a way it is ashame that operating systems don't ship with compilers; it would probably help encourage more people to learn to program, just by making it something available for people to play with (kind of like including Solitaire with Windows made it one of the most popular time-killing activities for computer users). Then again, unless you do happen to be a developer or at least a "power user" who likes to compile everything from source, a compiler isn't an integral part for your operating system. You want to run software, not compile it; so the compiler would just sit there unused, using up hard drive space.
So yes, since I'm a programmer, of course I like the idea of every computer coming with a compiler. But the difference is that in the "good ol' days," developers comprised a much bigger portion of computer users than they do now. Today there are a lot of people who know next to nothing about computers, but still use them -- that's why AOL exists.;)
But in a federal filing, the [State] department said that 98.5 percent of the 2,335 comments it received since it issued proposed rules last spring opposed the program.
Abraham Lincoln once said "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I don't know about you all, but I think that Abe was a pretty wise man with a great idea.
In order to have "government of the people," people usually hold elections to measure the will of the people. Are you suggesting that the government behave according to who can send in the most comments? I'm worried about privacy concerns here too, but just because people sent letters doesn't necessarily indicate public opinion, let alone should it be used to set policy.
Lets see how well novel can compete in the linux market place with not enough people to do the job.. People will be stressed out and production and serivce will suffer, thus customers will leave and new customers will shy away.
Believe it or not, shareholders aren't out to hurt themselves, and they generally aren't complete idiots. Companies lay off workers when they have too *many* workers, not too few. Otherwise, they hire new employees. But when their revenue falls (as is the case here), they can't spend as much money on workers as before, so they're forced to lay off workers. No one is happy about this, but it's reality.
I'd be interested to find out how many artists approve of DRM, and how many oppose it. Most of the names I see tossed about are has-beens, or never-heard-ofs -- I said most not all.
Seems to me that an artist would want their art spread as widely as possible, since most of their money is made in merchandising, and touring. Name recognition is everything.
Well, I can remember watching the Nightly Business Report recently and seeing Ashanti, who I've heard of (never heard her music), complain about how easy it is to pirate music, so I imagine she would (does) support DRM because it makes piracy at least a little more difficult. I've also seen a few ads here and there featuring artists criticizing piracy, though I can't remember who they are (I'm not very familiar with pop culture anyhow, so yeah...).
But you do raise an interesting point. How can the recording industry enforce its copyright without trampling on the feet of people who aren't pirating music? Personally, I don't think this requires any new legislation (e.g. DMCA). I'm not trolling, but I the best way IMHO, both legally and ethically, is to simply sue pirates. To me it makes sense that when people violate the law, what you do is put them into a court room to defend themselves. Apparently lots of Slashdotters disagree, but I've never understood why. Could someone enlighten me please?:-)
If you look at a typical X windows install, the overwhelming majority of fonts are NOT truetypes. There are a gazillion different X fonts on a normal installl, but only a small subset of them are truetype. Font handling in X has always been atrocious.
Well, my point is that, if Microsoft made a Linux version of Office, they'd ship the same fonts they use on Windows, so there wouldn't be a shortage of fonts. Just my experience, but the most difficult thing I've had to do with fonts is installing Microsoft's using cabextract, and this wouldn't be an issue if you put Office on Linux anyway, so I don't know what's so "atrocious" about Linux fonts.
Regardind just "picking" KDE vs Gnome - great, we can take the already non-existant market and then cut it in half. And for the half that is supported, they'll be irate that they can ONLY drag and drop with other KDE apps, right?
OpenOffice can do drag and drop with both Konqueror and Nautilus. I don't know what they're doing, but there's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same.
You haven't outright said it, but you're implying that the platform stack of Windows is more or less a straight across port to Linux. And my response is "bullshit". I've tried to pick a few things that will significantly different because the infrastructure to support them is either not there or very different (font handling, embedded HTML controls, and pervasive drag-n-drop being a few that i picked).
Of course I'm not saying it's just a recompile. I'm sure there are substantial differences between Windows' APIs Linux's. But Microsoft managed to port to another completely different platform (OS X), and I see no compelling reason for why MS couldn't do the same on Linux if it wanted to.
I know that fonts used to be not-so-great on Linux, but that was years ago. Today, I'm not experiencing the problems you're talking about; of course, that's just my experience, but I don't see what's wrong with Linux fonts today.
I also especially don't see why you think embedded HTML doesn't exist in Linux. I know of a couple of KDE programs that use embedded HTML (or at least some markup language, like XML), off the top of my head: amaroK and KDevelop.
And again, OpenOffice can drag and drop with both Nautilus and KDE, which I think suffices for being compatible with both major GUIs.
So again, I know Windows isn't Linux, and porting wouldn't just take a few hours of renaming function calls and recompiling. But Office can exist without Windows (the OS X port proves that). I'm just saying that if Microsoft wanted to, it could do the same thing for Office on Linux that it did with OS X.
What drag and drop mechanism should Office for Linux use? Should it bring along it's own, that only works with Office? Should it support Motif DnD? Xt ? Gnome? KDE ? All of them ? Why cant they all just be the same?
Um, it's easy to simply choose one GUI API to program with, which is what most Linux programmers do. For example, Firefox uses GTK+, and that's that. Microsoft would have numerous options available to them, but that's not a bad thing. They can simply choose one, and that's that.
When Office wants to launch HTML help, how should it embed a web browser into an office window do render the HTML? Which HTML renderer should it use? Are they porting IE to linux also, or are they getting a license for KHTML or something, in such a way that they can keep Office closed but statically link to GPL/other F/OSS licensed web content ?
Suppose MS chose KDE as its platform. It could use KHTML, which is LGPL, to render the webpages. Proprietary programs are allowed to link to LGPLed programs.
Even stuff like font metrics, font browsers, and font descriptions are fundamentally different - you really have no guarantees about what fonts are available on a linux system, and the various fonts work in different ways depending on encoding and technology. Are you guaranteed to be able to get X fonts to look right on a printer? Only certain fonts? How do you communicate that to the user effectively?
If I install Whizbang font on Windows, use it in Office, and send my document to someone else who doesn't have it, they'll have to also Whizbang font to view it. There's a certain set of fonts that nearly all distros come with, and the most famous fonts (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial) are Microsoft's own fonts, so it would be easy to ship the fonts with Office. And why would Linux's fonts not look right on a printer? They are TrueType fonts, just like on Windows or any other OS. What do you mean "communicate that to the user effectively?" What's there to communicate? Fonts are fonts....
I really don't understand what your criticism is. You seem to presume that Linux is somehow going to fail all over the place for the user, and I don't see why that would happen. I guess my question is, what does Windows have that Linux doesn't for the Office programmer?
I mostly agree with your second point, but I don't understand your first point:
1) the facilities available on linux/X windows to make something like office are lacking. It's not an intractible problem, but you've got a lot more richness in the Windows platform that the Office team would need to get from _somewhere_
This is why I have my mom running Firefox on windows, and for those who will say FF has vulns, yes, they do, but with the 'auto-updating' option on 1.5 it will change that view. No one (save for us geeks) want to reinstall software all the time; most of the time if it works, they're not going to upgrade. 1.5 will 'auto-update' the bits to keep the browser secure, and I'm sure it will continue to while the browser moves to 1.6 and beyond.
To be fair, Internet Explorer is also "auto-updated" through automatic updates in Windows, so I'm not sure one can argue Firefox has an advantage. There are lots of reasons to use Firefox over Internet Explorer, but I think Firefox's claim of better security than IE has become at least debatable in recent weeks.
Disclaimer: I'll use Firefox over IE any day, but my primary browser is Konqueror. Speaking of which, there's been a lot of attention given to the security of IE and Firefox, but how do the security of other browsers like Konqueror, Safari and Opera compare?
Could someone tell me why are they wrong? And if they are not wrong, what is this US opposition? If the USA doesn't like living in a world where there are multiple countries to deal with, they can just close their borders and shut down their trade. Noone will miss them.
It seems to me the US is playing "i don't want to do this and i won't tell why not". Those dealings are the most suspicious to me, as they are not only arrogant, but they cannot be sustained for a long time.
Allowing UN control would mean letting countries like China, Iran and others having a say in administrating the Internet. Whether you like the US or not, please say what they've done wrong with DNS. The system works and it works well.
On the other hand, we all know what the Chinese have done with their Internet; do you want to include them in making decisions about the Internet? The US is not isolationist. Whatever you may think of the Iraq war, the US welcomes immigration and free trade. What it does not welcome is allowing nondemocratic regimes a say in the Internet.
These "suspicious dealings" on the part of the US are to prevent the countries like China engaging in truly shady activities. In any case, US control of DNS is very sustainable will continue for the foreseeable future because it's been working great for years and there are no practical reasons to switch.
Although my primary machine thus far has been an Apple Powerbook, I can definite say that I miss a decent windows computer in my life (I switched to mac just this April). A friend asked me to troubleshoot his PC just a few days ago and scarily enough it took a few seconds to get into the groove of things in his windows environment.
Just out of curiosity, what is it you miss about Windows? Also, why is it that troubleshooting made you nostalgic?
Slashdot Mirror
Soon, EVERY web app will need to be an AJAX app...even if it doesn't need to be.
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I'm afraid you may well be right. Most users never touch command-line programs today, even though the command-line is, for many tasks, easier and faster than the GUI equivalent (not to mention the fact that programming for the command line is far simpler). So, yeah I hope it doesn't happen, but it wouldn't be the first time
Whether it's justifiable to curtail freedom for the purpose of safety isn't even the right argument, though, because that's not what they're doing. They're curtailing freedom for the appearance of safety, dedicating their time and money (or rather, your money if you live or work here) towards measures that are highly visible, highly intrusive
I agree, but for a different reason. Whether it's justifiable to curtail freedom for the purpose of safety isn't even the right argument, because they're curtailing the appearance of freedom. How does being asked "are you planning an attack on this flight?" constitute a loss of freedom? The government will not be searching you, preventing your free speech, preventing your freedom of religion, or putting you in jail. Slashdotters will pounce on just about any security measure as a denial of fundamental freedoms, when in fact they deny no real freedoms; at most they are some inconvenience. They're not asking you "have you ever committed a crime?" or "are ever going to commit a crime?" They're merely asking you if you are going to try to do something illegal with the flight; seems a reasonable question to me.
That said, I generally distrust "lie-detectors," as they have often been shown to be unreliable. It'll take more than one test to convince me of how useful this really is. But even so, you can't be convicted for failing the test; at worst you will be searched more extensively. If this test is reliable enough (and again, I seriously doubt it is), the only thing it will do is better target who the TSA searches. That would be a good thing. You'll never be able to have airport security without some inconvenience to innocent people, but the fewer innocents who are inconvenienced and the more likely criminals are to be caught, the better.
I just treated myself to one for those reasons, I can afford and I'm sorry if you think that's weird but it's my choice.
My post was half just kidding with you, half substance. Here's the substance:
The submitter of the story wanted to know how Slashdotters avoid vendor lock-in when it comes to music. Your economic decisions are, of course, up to you, but you appear to be locked in tight with Apple. You may not find that to be a problem, but it is exactly the situation that the submitter is trying to avoid.
Personally, my tendencies lie with the submitter; I greatly dislike vendor lock-in. I don't have an iPod or any portable music player for that matter, but if I did want one, I would try to reward vendors who, unlike Apple, encourage you to have a freedom of choices. One such vendor that comes to mind is Neuros, whose players are among the few that let you play Ogg Vorbis files and also sponsors open source development. Apple's practices, with DRM and so forth, appear quite different.
So, my point is that your recommendation is precisely what the submitter doesn't want. IMHO, the submitter's "best bet" is not with MP3, which in my view is one of the ISO's biggest blunders ever, but with Ogg and players that support it, such as Neuros.
iPod, iTune, iTunes Music Store, and MP3 is your best bet - period!
... Well, I guess resistance is futile! Sheesh. What an idiot I've been, thinking that listening to music in Ogg Vorbis was possible. How did I ever survive without DRM?
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Funny how the submitter was asking about how to avoid being locked in to a vendor
The player is both Windows and Mac compatible. It allows you access to largest and well known music stores in existence. It allows you to access music, video and TV episodes.
My wife has her iPod with all of our music and she loves it. We have the airport express with air tunes and play all our music to our stereo system, very cool!
I have my iPod, my wifes old iPod and I use it for the office and the car. I have a 1gb iPod Shuttle that I use when walking around, snow boarding and any other time I want to be portable.
Let's suppose for a moment that you are not from Apple's marketing department
Okay, so your wife has an iPod, and you have an iPod for general use, an iPod for work, and an iPod for walking around. Are you saving up for an iPod for sitting down as well?
The U.S. was attacked on 9/11 in a very public and spectacular -- but in the end numerically insignificant -- way, and responded by picking a couple countries that it wasn't particularly fond of and invading them, at enormous expense and very little gain. Why? Because a whole lot of Americans wanted to see somebody, somewhere, get the living shit bombed out of them on CNN, and there were marginal excuses for Afghanistan (supporting terrorism) and Iraq (WMDs). Really, they were just convenient: it is and was a Spanish-American War for the 21st Century.
/. a million times, so I won't go into it.
Two points:
1) To say that 9/11 was "numerically insignificant" is quite an understatement. It was the most deadly terrorist attack in history; it killed more people than Pearl Harbor (which I hope we agree was not insignificant). It was also a wake-up call that more, potentially deadlier attacks could come later. Was 9/11 the end of the world? No. Was it a significant attack? Yes.
2) I agree that a lot of the public support for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq came from a desire for revenge from the American public. However, there were also very rational, though debatable, reasons for the wars. Iraq has been rehashed on
That said, I disagree with your analogy of the Spanish-American War with Afghanistan. Let's review what happened with the Spanish-American War. The USS Maine blew up in Havana Harbor. No one knew why (we are now pretty certain it was an accident), but the American press sensationalized as a Spanish attack on an American warship. So, the US decides to go conquer a bunch of colonies from the Spanish.
Do we know who committed the 9/11 attacks? Definitely; Al Qaeda did, which was essentially "headquartered" in Afghanistan. Did the US go on and colonize Afghanistan? No; the US helped set up a sovereign government there and, once it is able to, will leave. Was there "very little gain" in invading Afghanistan? Given that a very large number of Al Qaeda operatives have been captured or killed, and Al Qaeda no longer has a complete sanctuary for training and operations, I think "very little gain" is a considerable understatement.
Besides, if you think that invading Afghanistan was a mistake, what sort of response did you support after 9/11?
Anyhow, although the portrayal of post 9/11 foreign policy as a completely unjustified return to imperialism by the US is rather popular on Slashdot, it isn't accurate. I disagree with a lot of the policy, but such analogies are far-fetched.
That's easy: Marketing
I love AMD as much as anyone, but there is a reason other than Intel's brand name that Dell doesn't use AMD. AMD simply doesn't have the production capacity that Intel does, and since Dell produces a lot of computers, it needs a lot of CPUs. I always buy AMD processors for my computers, but I can do that because I'm not building hundreds of thousands of machines. I'm not saying that the Intel brand doesn't have an effect; I'm just saying that it isn't the only thing at play here.
Also, as far as mobile processors go, one reason that you don't see many AMD-powered laptops around is that AMD hasn't been quite as successful as Intel when it comes to keeping processors cool, which is especially true with laptops. I can now personally attest to this (though it involved my desktop's processor, not a laptop); I had to replace my AMD Athlon XP due to overheating and causing processor-intensive programs to crash.
Too bad he's not involving himself figuring out how to make 50% efficient solar panels.. with him on the darpa team, they could probably be making these panels for $1.00 within 3 years.
DARPA is great, but string theory, should it prove true, would be much more important than DARPA or anything the Pentagon is working on, at least as far as science goes.
That said, I'd really like to know how string theory could be applied to cars. I'm not an expert by any means, but I've read The Elegant Universe and so forth, and I think there are at least two big hurdles before this kid even has a chance with his idea. 1) There is no experimental evidence to support string theory, so we don't even know if it's true yet. 2) If he can make flying cars using string theory, that implies that these cars would serve as experimental evidence for it. Why is he already jumping from "something that might be true" to "let's start an engineering project with it?" So, if he has some magic that he can pull out of his hat, great let's hear it, but somehow I doubt that this will happen any time soon.
This kid is going to have the social skills of a log.
;-)
Perhaps not. If the kid hangs out with adults, he may well end up behaving more like an adult, and hence more mature than his peers. In any case, he'll likely spend a lot more time working obsessively on physics problems that interest him than with other people, much like we nerds enjoy working obsessively on problems that interest us, be it physics, programming, or both (like I do). This kid will likely turn out as the nerdiest of nerds, which is something we all wish we could aspire to. Heck, if social lives were more important to us than science, computers, etc., we all probably wouldn't be on Slashdot arguing about this.
I'm guessing he's going to grow up a bit anti-social and with a lack of understanding of general social rules and rituals.
Like that ever stopped us Slashdotters!
If government wants to help, then it can help by getting out of the way! Government can stop standardizing on proprietary formats. Government can stop handing out software patents. Government can stop recognizing mouse click licensing. Government could liberalize copyright and abolish the DMCA.
I agree with almost everything, but I don't see what is wrong with mouse click licensing. How do you propose people agree to software licenses before they use programs?
I just can't wait until we see sites declaring "Page will not render correctly under Microsoft IE".
Already true of my website (though I just ask if my website looks white and ugly, which is true in the case of IE, so that I can rant about the incompliance of IE with W3C standards).
There is no generally accepted definition of life. And if there was, it certainly wouldn't be the one you mentioned, since, according to it, trees aren't alive - or at least I've never seen any walking around.
... but there are lots of chemicals different organisms need. Do living things have multiple "souls" then, one being oxygen, another being carbohydrates, another lipids, another amino acids, etc.? Even so, you could pump as much oxygen as you wanted into a corpse; it won't come alive.
That's why I said "externally or internally." There is a lot of internal motion that goes on. For example, nutrients and water flow through the xylem and phloem.
Second, the above definition *is* the conventional definition. There are debates amongst biologists on other criteria (as you'll see in the article), but even these criteria are ultimately based on chemistry.
Furthermore, what are reproduction and metabolism ? Fire "eats" wood and turns it into ashes, releasing energy in the process; are flames alive ? They certainly grow and reproduce - one flame ignites others, and they respond to stimuli, as do all observable physical systems.
Metabolism is the chemical processes that go on in living organisms that do things use the energy from nutrients to build molecules like proteins. Fire is just a single chemical process that converts oxygen and organic molecules into water and carbon dioxide.
No; the parent meant that having a soul is the difference between a living thing and a corpse. Same matter, in roughly the same configuration (at least immediately after death), obeying the same laws of physics, can form either a living creature or a dead corpse of one.
The matter in a corpse is *not* in the same configuration as in a living body, and it is likely not the same matter. For example, if an animal drowns, that's because it oxygen isn't getting to the cells, and thus it is unable to carry out essential processes, like the citric acid cycle. It then cannot produce enough energy, and thus metabolism cannot continue. When a living thing ceases to carry out metabolism, it fails the definition for "living," and therefore it is dead.
So, in this case, would the parent be claiming that oxygen is the "soul" of living things? In a sense it is
Anyhow, it seems more appropriate to label these as "essential nutrients" or something like that, not "souls," don't you think?
The grandparent meant that soul is the life of a living creature. It is the difference between living and dead. You have a soul, so your body is alive; take that soul away, and your body is just a rapidly decaying collection of organic molecules.
:) But then again, death is also governed by chemistry, and chemistry is just as applicable to corpses as to living organisms; so everything, living or dead, would always have a soul. In fact, we'd all share the same soul, not separate ones.
Let's briefly review the definition of life. Living things must have: 1) Growth, 2) Metabolism, 3) Motion (externally or internally), 4) Reproduction, and 5) Response to Stimuli. The collection of organic molecules that make up living things exhibit these features simply by obeying the laws of chemistry and physics -- a far cry from "rapidly decaying."
So did the parent mean that the "soul" of living things is chemistry? If so, I guess I can see where you'd go with that. We probably wouldn't be alive if the laws of chemistry suddenly went haywire.
Did I get something wrong in my logic, or am I just completely off track?
But my understanding is that the "soul" or "spirit" of someone (or some creature) is sort of its eternal counterpart that gives it life. The relationship between a body, and a spirit is like the relationship bewteen a hand and a glove; without a hand, a glove is like an empty inanimate shell.
... so what do you mean it "gives it life?" A body isn't like a "glove"; it's the hand itself -- it's a living, breathing thing. So why would it need a "counterpart" and, since living organisms are already living, I still don't quite see what this counterpart would do.
Um, it's already living
I'm a Christian and I believe animals have a soul, too.
Could you please explain what you mean by "soul?" Lots of people talk about organisms, especially humans, and I never quite understand what they mean by "soul." Are they talking about their brains? (In that case, what is the "soul" of a sponge? They have no nervous tissue.)
This article made me think about it. I mean Microsoft is shipping an operating system without a compiler included. Isn't that strange, that everyone takes this as normal? Isn't a compiler an integral part of an operating system.
;)
Well, even some Linux distros are shipping without GCC (examples I know of: SUSE (regular, not professional), Ubuntu). Still even these distros make it relatively easy to get compilers (with YaST or Synaptic or apt-get). In a way it is ashame that operating systems don't ship with compilers; it would probably help encourage more people to learn to program, just by making it something available for people to play with (kind of like including Solitaire with Windows made it one of the most popular time-killing activities for computer users). Then again, unless you do happen to be a developer or at least a "power user" who likes to compile everything from source, a compiler isn't an integral part for your operating system. You want to run software, not compile it; so the compiler would just sit there unused, using up hard drive space.
So yes, since I'm a programmer, of course I like the idea of every computer coming with a compiler. But the difference is that in the "good ol' days," developers comprised a much bigger portion of computer users than they do now. Today there are a lot of people who know next to nothing about computers, but still use them -- that's why AOL exists.
From TFA:
But in a federal filing, the [State] department said that 98.5 percent of the 2,335 comments it received since it issued proposed rules last spring opposed the program.
Abraham Lincoln once said "that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I don't know about you all, but I think that Abe was a pretty wise man with a great idea.
In order to have "government of the people," people usually hold elections to measure the will of the people. Are you suggesting that the government behave according to who can send in the most comments? I'm worried about privacy concerns here too, but just because people sent letters doesn't necessarily indicate public opinion, let alone should it be used to set policy.
Lets see how well novel can compete in the linux market place with not enough people to do the job.. People will be stressed out and production and serivce will suffer, thus customers will leave and new customers will shy away.
Believe it or not, shareholders aren't out to hurt themselves, and they generally aren't complete idiots. Companies lay off workers when they have too *many* workers, not too few. Otherwise, they hire new employees. But when their revenue falls (as is the case here), they can't spend as much money on workers as before, so they're forced to lay off workers. No one is happy about this, but it's reality.
I'd be interested to find out how many artists approve of DRM, and how many oppose it. Most of the names I see tossed about are has-beens, or never-heard-ofs -- I said most not all.
:-)
Seems to me that an artist would want their art spread as widely as possible, since most of their money is made in merchandising, and touring. Name recognition is everything.
Well, I can remember watching the Nightly Business Report recently and seeing Ashanti, who I've heard of (never heard her music), complain about how easy it is to pirate music, so I imagine she would (does) support DRM because it makes piracy at least a little more difficult. I've also seen a few ads here and there featuring artists criticizing piracy, though I can't remember who they are (I'm not very familiar with pop culture anyhow, so yeah...).
But you do raise an interesting point. How can the recording industry enforce its copyright without trampling on the feet of people who aren't pirating music? Personally, I don't think this requires any new legislation (e.g. DMCA). I'm not trolling, but I the best way IMHO, both legally and ethically, is to simply sue pirates. To me it makes sense that when people violate the law, what you do is put them into a court room to defend themselves. Apparently lots of Slashdotters disagree, but I've never understood why. Could someone enlighten me please?
If you look at a typical X windows install, the overwhelming majority of fonts are NOT truetypes. There are a gazillion different X fonts on a normal installl, but only a small subset of them are truetype. Font handling in X has always been atrocious.
Well, my point is that, if Microsoft made a Linux version of Office, they'd ship the same fonts they use on Windows, so there wouldn't be a shortage of fonts. Just my experience, but the most difficult thing I've had to do with fonts is installing Microsoft's using cabextract, and this wouldn't be an issue if you put Office on Linux anyway, so I don't know what's so "atrocious" about Linux fonts.
Regardind just "picking" KDE vs Gnome - great, we can take the already non-existant market and then cut it in half. And for the half that is supported, they'll be irate that they can ONLY drag and drop with other KDE apps, right?
OpenOffice can do drag and drop with both Konqueror and Nautilus. I don't know what they're doing, but there's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same.
You haven't outright said it, but you're implying that the platform stack of Windows is more or less a straight across port to Linux. And my response is "bullshit". I've tried to pick a few things that will significantly different because the infrastructure to support them is either not there or very different (font handling, embedded HTML controls, and pervasive drag-n-drop being a few that i picked).
Of course I'm not saying it's just a recompile. I'm sure there are substantial differences between Windows' APIs Linux's. But Microsoft managed to port to another completely different platform (OS X), and I see no compelling reason for why MS couldn't do the same on Linux if it wanted to.
I know that fonts used to be not-so-great on Linux, but that was years ago. Today, I'm not experiencing the problems you're talking about; of course, that's just my experience, but I don't see what's wrong with Linux fonts today.
I also especially don't see why you think embedded HTML doesn't exist in Linux. I know of a couple of KDE programs that use embedded HTML (or at least some markup language, like XML), off the top of my head: amaroK and KDevelop.
And again, OpenOffice can drag and drop with both Nautilus and KDE, which I think suffices for being compatible with both major GUIs.
So again, I know Windows isn't Linux, and porting wouldn't just take a few hours of renaming function calls and recompiling. But Office can exist without Windows (the OS X port proves that). I'm just saying that if Microsoft wanted to, it could do the same thing for Office on Linux that it did with OS X.
What drag and drop mechanism should Office for Linux use? Should it bring along it's own, that only works with Office? Should it support Motif DnD? Xt ? Gnome? KDE ? All of them ? Why cant they all just be the same?
....
Um, it's easy to simply choose one GUI API to program with, which is what most Linux programmers do. For example, Firefox uses GTK+, and that's that. Microsoft would have numerous options available to them, but that's not a bad thing. They can simply choose one, and that's that.
When Office wants to launch HTML help, how should it embed a web browser into an office window do render the HTML? Which HTML renderer should it use? Are they porting IE to linux also, or are they getting a license for KHTML or something, in such a way that they can keep Office closed but statically link to GPL/other F/OSS licensed web content ?
Suppose MS chose KDE as its platform. It could use KHTML, which is LGPL, to render the webpages. Proprietary programs are allowed to link to LGPLed programs.
Even stuff like font metrics, font browsers, and font descriptions are fundamentally different - you really have no guarantees about what fonts are available on a linux system, and the various fonts work in different ways depending on encoding and technology. Are you guaranteed to be able to get X fonts to look right on a printer? Only certain fonts? How do you communicate that to the user effectively?
If I install Whizbang font on Windows, use it in Office, and send my document to someone else who doesn't have it, they'll have to also Whizbang font to view it. There's a certain set of fonts that nearly all distros come with, and the most famous fonts (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial) are Microsoft's own fonts, so it would be easy to ship the fonts with Office. And why would Linux's fonts not look right on a printer? They are TrueType fonts, just like on Windows or any other OS. What do you mean "communicate that to the user effectively?" What's there to communicate? Fonts are fonts
I really don't understand what your criticism is. You seem to presume that Linux is somehow going to fail all over the place for the user, and I don't see why that would happen. I guess my question is, what does Windows have that Linux doesn't for the Office programmer?
I mostly agree with your second point, but I don't understand your first point:
1) the facilities available on linux/X windows to make something like office are lacking. It's not an intractible problem, but you've got a lot more richness in the Windows platform that the Office team would need to get from _somewhere_
What kind of "richness" is Linux lacking exactly?
This is why I have my mom running Firefox on windows, and for those who will say FF has vulns, yes, they do, but with the 'auto-updating' option on 1.5 it will change that view. No one (save for us geeks) want to reinstall software all the time; most of the time if it works, they're not going to upgrade. 1.5 will 'auto-update' the bits to keep the browser secure, and I'm sure it will continue to while the browser moves to 1.6 and beyond.
To be fair, Internet Explorer is also "auto-updated" through automatic updates in Windows, so I'm not sure one can argue Firefox has an advantage. There are lots of reasons to use Firefox over Internet Explorer, but I think Firefox's claim of better security than IE has become at least debatable in recent weeks.
Disclaimer: I'll use Firefox over IE any day, but my primary browser is Konqueror. Speaking of which, there's been a lot of attention given to the security of IE and Firefox, but how do the security of other browsers like Konqueror, Safari and Opera compare?
Could someone tell me why are they wrong? And if they are not wrong, what is this US opposition? If the USA doesn't like living in a world where there are multiple countries to deal with, they can just close their borders and shut down their trade. Noone will miss them.
It seems to me the US is playing "i don't want to do this and i won't tell why not". Those dealings are the most suspicious to me, as they are not only arrogant, but they cannot be sustained for a long time.
Allowing UN control would mean letting countries like China, Iran and others having a say in administrating the Internet. Whether you like the US or not, please say what they've done wrong with DNS. The system works and it works well.
On the other hand, we all know what the Chinese have done with their Internet; do you want to include them in making decisions about the Internet? The US is not isolationist. Whatever you may think of the Iraq war, the US welcomes immigration and free trade. What it does not welcome is allowing nondemocratic regimes a say in the Internet.
These "suspicious dealings" on the part of the US are to prevent the countries like China engaging in truly shady activities. In any case, US control of DNS is very sustainable will continue for the foreseeable future because it's been working great for years and there are no practical reasons to switch.
Although my primary machine thus far has been an Apple Powerbook, I can definite say that I miss a decent windows computer in my life (I switched to mac just this April). A friend asked me to troubleshoot his PC just a few days ago and scarily enough it took a few seconds to get into the groove of things in his windows environment.
Just out of curiosity, what is it you miss about Windows? Also, why is it that troubleshooting made you nostalgic?