The Venetian Empire was constantly threatened by the Turkish Empire...but their traders just couldn't resist doing business with the vast expanse of Asia Minor. And the long term outcome? Venice lost.
The decline of Venice had less to do with the Ottomans than it had to do with the discovery of the Americas and the sea routes to the east indies. Mediterranean trade simply became less important, and Italy lost much of its centrality.
The winds changed, the well ran dry, insert appropriate analogy. Basically, the Venicians, and the Italians in general, lost their monopoly on international trade. The Ottomans had very little to do with it, as they had more or less replaced the Byzantines.
Basically, the same thing is happening to the US today. They're losing their monopoly and centrality over trade in a multipolar world. The fall of the iron curtain was like the discovery of cape horn or the west indies. Suddenly new markets, new resources, new oppertunities, new suckers^H^H^Hcustomers, new sources of cheap labour were thrust open to all. It's a smogasboard of profit and the US can't block it all off with just its one snout.
You're witnessing the decline of US supremacy in the world today. Loss of influence in South America, rising defeciets, loss of respect and trust worldwide, it's armies dispersed fighting shadows, broken as a military power. The US is in decline just as Venice was. The freedoms and luxuries that US citizen once enjoyed are washing away along with their bank notes.
Venice was once the cultural, scientific, artistic, trade capital of the world. What's it doing now? Hosting tourists while it sinks into the mud. Do you want to know where the wealth of Venice went? Simple really. The wealthy venetian banks and merchants lent and invested it in foreign enterprises in Spain, Portugal, France and England, where it helped build new empires. Do you want to know what is happenning to the wealth of America today?
Public CVS access is great--it gives people an opportunity to try out new things and invites outside developers.
I don't know about you, but 90% of my time is spent behind http proxies with absolutely no support for cvs access whatsoever. Public CVS is about as useful to me as having the code on tape in a backup center somewhere.
such a pity to see two companies that employ so many talented people wasting their time like this.
I would hardly call it wasting time. The potential benefits from a successful patent lawsuit far outweigh the risks involved. You can quite literally put your competators out of business and gain a monopoly. In a very real sense, patent litigation is worth throwing everything and the kitchen sink into.
Now, for deployment of cheaper, small drones in war zones against unsophisticated opponents, this might be a good strategy for making things more affordable.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why Iran is investing in nuclear weapons when it should be investing in a wide scale radio jamming program for the entire country. This goes for anyone else.
In a modern war, the first thing a country under attack should do is jam every radio frequency there is. Make all communication, range finding, navigation and surveillance via radio impossible. You'd cripple the US army's ability to fight for one. Hardly any modern long range weapons will work without radio communication.
But not a single country does this, and they'll all wonder why unmanned drones controlled wirelessly are so common. It's ridiculous. The moment the channels go down, modern armies will be caught with their pants down.
The mother was doing the traditional "say Mommy, say Mommmmeeeee" thing when the kid pointed at the logo on the paper cup and said, very clearly, "McDonalds."
There's one thing I still don't understand. Sure, I know that McDonalds all pervasive advertising campaign virtually assure brand recognition by age three. I know that McDonalds isn't the only company engaged in this. I know how this works.
No. What I don't understand is why it works. Why do children fixate on McDonalds so much? What is the secret sause here? And it's not just McDonalds. Apparently, brand loyalty can be instilled before the third year.
This perplexes me. What's driving these kids to say McDonalds before Mommy?
Crook your thumbs into the shape necessary to work with the dualshock sticks. Then move them around a little. You'll feel a little fatigue (maybe not much, if you've played a lot with the controller).
I first got a DualShock, the one with the analouge sticks, way back when it came out in a dual pack with MediEvil, one of the first dual shock games. MediEvil was designed to promote use of the sticks, both of them, and I ended up using them both a lot. It was the first game to show the power of two analouge sticks.
Anyway, I've been using analouge sticks on every console for over seven years now and I can very safely say I have never felt fatigue of any kind. Ever. The analouge sticks have only improved the situation as my callous from frition on the D-pad is largely gone.
The only time I ever felt fatigue was with the original Xbox controller, and that was from the distant button placement, not the analouge sticks.
Face it. We need a year zero in IP, a fundamental reexamination of why we give any protection at all, and how much is the right amount. We need to accept that all IP to this date is on very shaky ground and that the simplest approach is to wipe the slate clean.
An obvious solution would be to sabotage the USPTO. Say, set the building on fire or something. Or perhaps simply switch the regualar coffee shipments with decaf. Or perhaps the best method is for Slashdotters to simply flood the USPTO's mail and email boxes with protests, tirades, and faux patents.
"Tom, don't let anyone kid you. It's all personal, every bit of business. Every piece of shit every man has to eat every day of his life is personal. They call it business. OK. But it's personal as hell."
Don't they realize that those are the attitudes that allowed Hitler and Stalin to operate?
Of course they do. An integral part of authoritarian regiemes is their willingness to share a portion of their absolute power with anyone willing to following their ideals and serve up their neighbours on a plate. Sycophants profit enourmously under dictatorships, and their unscrupulous devotion is just what tyrannical regiemes need to stay in power.
For a fresher look at this, read "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang for a good example of just how much the most twisted and unscrupulous of people profit when repression is required. Jung's father, a regional commander of extremely high principles and integrity, is almost beaten to death and hounded during the cultural revolution. Meanwhile, various people who you wouldn't trust as far as you could throw, continue to rise up the ranks and reel in the dough. Most notably a husband, wife pair known as the Tings, though they did eventually get ousted when they went altogether too far.
Basically, in a dictatorship, the most toxic and evil elements of society finally rise to the top and take their pleasure in stamping on the necks of all those under them. This is why dicatorships succeed. Not because of enigmatic leaders, weighty ideaologies or rhetoric; but because there are all too many willing to lick the tyrants boot so that the rest of us in turn might lick theirs.
It sends the HTTP header like GET / HTTP1,1 instead of GET / HTTP1.1
Might have been written in France.
Today's fun fact: In France, instead of using a decimal point, a decimal comma is used. Thus $4.56 is written in France as, $4,56. Also, a superscript is used instead of a subscript to delineate multiples of a thousand. Hence $1,234,567.89 is written $1'234'567,89 .
P.S. Why the hell isn't the euro symbol visible on Slashcode?
No, what's impressive is that most gamers have been successfully brainwashed that they need a $500 video card to play a modern game, while the low range has been excellent for the past 3-4 years.
Case in point, my younger sibling has been nagging me for the last week for money to get a new graphics card. His current one runs fine. I tried explaining to him about buses and such in a effort to get across that the reason his games were running slow had little to do with the graphics card, and more to do with shoddy programming, a slow bus, etc, etc. He listen patiently and then proceeded to nag me more for ~$250 for a minor upgrade to the machines current graphics card.
Meanwhile, when there are few agents on screen, every game runs smoothly and perfectly. On one game, Dawn of War, you can pause the action and rotate the camera around. When you do this, the pan is smooth regardless of the number of agents. This applies at reasonably high settings as well.
Someday, maybe, people will realise that how good a game looks has less to do with the polygon count and texture rates than it has to do with artistic design. Super Mario World looks better than 95% of most games on the shelves today. It's image will stay in your mind long after the sterile landscapes of the current console high res wars have faded into oblivion.
My problem with what you say here - and similar other arguments - is that for example plenty of hardware exist that do not work out of the box and automagically under Windows, be that hdd/raid controller, nic, cameras/tuners and I could just go on.
I have yet to meet an off the shelf, home consumer piece of hardware that would not work with a Windows system. They are all designed and constructed for the purposes of usage on Windows.
no doubt once perfected this technology can be used to make the undesirables (of the week) of society productive citizens by manipulating their cellular function to emit consumer goods,
In case you hadn't noticed, the shops are already full of crap.
Without this number (or ID card, or passport, or whatever), how does anyone -know- you're an Irish citizen?
For most intents and purposes, they are not required to -know-. If they really truely need to find out, it should be a small matter to verify this. If anyone wants to question my citizenship, they're free to do so. If anyone wants to deny me my rights because my citizenship has not be satisfied to their standards, tough luck.
The constitution does not require that their standards be satisfied. My rights are automatic, not subject to anyone's oversight and approval, be they government or otherwise. The constitution does not require me to prove my ciizenship to the satisfaction of the government. I do not need my "rights" papers.
People should not be required to satisfy their governments petty demands. That's not how fre societies are supposed to work. The government exists to protect our rights, not to scrutinise them, or had them out only when it sees fit. Too many people forget that the Government is not some all powerful institution to which we must all submit. Democracy exists for the very purpose of freeing us from such things.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux.
Available to download in multiple distros.
Acme: A User Interface for Programmers explains what acme is.
This looks awfully like EMACS.
The Venetian Empire was constantly threatened by the Turkish Empire...but their traders just couldn't resist doing business with the vast expanse of Asia Minor. And the long term outcome? Venice lost.
The decline of Venice had less to do with the Ottomans than it had to do with the discovery of the Americas and the sea routes to the east indies. Mediterranean trade simply became less important, and Italy lost much of its centrality.
The winds changed, the well ran dry, insert appropriate analogy. Basically, the Venicians, and the Italians in general, lost their monopoly on international trade. The Ottomans had very little to do with it, as they had more or less replaced the Byzantines.
Basically, the same thing is happening to the US today. They're losing their monopoly and centrality over trade in a multipolar world. The fall of the iron curtain was like the discovery of cape horn or the west indies. Suddenly new markets, new resources, new oppertunities, new suckers^H^H^Hcustomers, new sources of cheap labour were thrust open to all. It's a smogasboard of profit and the US can't block it all off with just its one snout.
You're witnessing the decline of US supremacy in the world today. Loss of influence in South America, rising defeciets, loss of respect and trust worldwide, it's armies dispersed fighting shadows, broken as a military power. The US is in decline just as Venice was. The freedoms and luxuries that US citizen once enjoyed are washing away along with their bank notes.
Venice was once the cultural, scientific, artistic, trade capital of the world. What's it doing now? Hosting tourists while it sinks into the mud. Do you want to know where the wealth of Venice went? Simple really. The wealthy venetian banks and merchants lent and invested it in foreign enterprises in Spain, Portugal, France and England, where it helped build new empires. Do you want to know what is happenning to the wealth of America today?
Public CVS access is great--it gives people an opportunity to try out new things and invites outside developers.
I don't know about you, but 90% of my time is spent behind http proxies with absolutely no support for cvs access whatsoever. Public CVS is about as useful to me as having the code on tape in a backup center somewhere.
such a pity to see two companies that employ so many talented people wasting their time like this.
I would hardly call it wasting time. The potential benefits from a successful patent lawsuit far outweigh the risks involved. You can quite literally put your competators out of business and gain a monopoly. In a very real sense, patent litigation is worth throwing everything and the kitchen sink into.
I know what you mean - you'd have to teach him calculus before he'd understand.
Not really. Just tell then it's the area under a curve, or the volume under a sheet. Even the most pretentious manager will be able to grasp that.
It wasn't the casing to which I was referring.
No pork... what a load of shit.
Best you don't ask how sausages are made.
So basically you're saying that the end justifies the means.
Fine save the kiddies. Just don't complain in fifty years time when we're up to our asses in GM crossbreed staple foods.
Now, for deployment of cheaper, small drones in war zones against unsophisticated opponents, this might be a good strategy for making things more affordable.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why Iran is investing in nuclear weapons when it should be investing in a wide scale radio jamming program for the entire country. This goes for anyone else.
In a modern war, the first thing a country under attack should do is jam every radio frequency there is. Make all communication, range finding, navigation and surveillance via radio impossible. You'd cripple the US army's ability to fight for one. Hardly any modern long range weapons will work without radio communication.
But not a single country does this, and they'll all wonder why unmanned drones controlled wirelessly are so common. It's ridiculous. The moment the channels go down, modern armies will be caught with their pants down.
The mother was doing the traditional "say Mommy, say Mommmmeeeee" thing when the kid pointed at the logo on the paper cup and said, very clearly, "McDonalds."
There's one thing I still don't understand. Sure, I know that McDonalds all pervasive advertising campaign virtually assure brand recognition by age three. I know that McDonalds isn't the only company engaged in this. I know how this works.
No. What I don't understand is why it works. Why do children fixate on McDonalds so much? What is the secret sause here? And it's not just McDonalds. Apparently, brand loyalty can be instilled before the third year.
This perplexes me. What's driving these kids to say McDonalds before Mommy?
Crook your thumbs into the shape necessary to work with the dualshock sticks. Then move them around a little. You'll feel a little fatigue (maybe not much, if you've played a lot with the controller).
I first got a DualShock, the one with the analouge sticks, way back when it came out in a dual pack with MediEvil, one of the first dual shock games. MediEvil was designed to promote use of the sticks, both of them, and I ended up using them both a lot. It was the first game to show the power of two analouge sticks.
Anyway, I've been using analouge sticks on every console for over seven years now and I can very safely say I have never felt fatigue of any kind. Ever. The analouge sticks have only improved the situation as my callous from frition on the D-pad is largely gone.
The only time I ever felt fatigue was with the original Xbox controller, and that was from the distant button placement, not the analouge sticks.
Face it. We need a year zero in IP, a fundamental reexamination of why we give any protection at all, and how much is the right amount. We need to accept that all IP to this date is on very shaky ground and that the simplest approach is to wipe the slate clean.
An obvious solution would be to sabotage the USPTO. Say, set the building on fire or something. Or perhaps simply switch the regualar coffee shipments with decaf. Or perhaps the best method is for Slashdotters to simply flood the USPTO's mail and email boxes with protests, tirades, and faux patents.
Or maybe it wasn't that trivial after all.
Or maybe it cost so many cycles for so little gain that no one bothered implementing it until processors became powerful enough.
From The Godfather, by Mario Puzo:
Mark it well.
Don't they realize that those are the attitudes that allowed Hitler and Stalin to operate?
Of course they do. An integral part of authoritarian regiemes is their willingness to share a portion of their absolute power with anyone willing to following their ideals and serve up their neighbours on a plate. Sycophants profit enourmously under dictatorships, and their unscrupulous devotion is just what tyrannical regiemes need to stay in power.
For a fresher look at this, read "Wild Swans" by Jung Chang for a good example of just how much the most twisted and unscrupulous of people profit when repression is required. Jung's father, a regional commander of extremely high principles and integrity, is almost beaten to death and hounded during the cultural revolution. Meanwhile, various people who you wouldn't trust as far as you could throw, continue to rise up the ranks and reel in the dough. Most notably a husband, wife pair known as the Tings, though they did eventually get ousted when they went altogether too far.
Basically, in a dictatorship, the most toxic and evil elements of society finally rise to the top and take their pleasure in stamping on the necks of all those under them. This is why dicatorships succeed. Not because of enigmatic leaders, weighty ideaologies or rhetoric; but because there are all too many willing to lick the tyrants boot so that the rest of us in turn might lick theirs.
It sends the HTTP header like
GET / HTTP1,1
instead of GET / HTTP1.1
Might have been written in France.
Today's fun fact: In France, instead of using a decimal point, a decimal comma is used. Thus $4.56 is written in France as, $4,56. Also, a superscript is used instead of a subscript to delineate multiples of a thousand. Hence $1,234,567.89 is written $1'234'567,89 .
P.S. Why the hell isn't the euro symbol visible on Slashcode?
He and Linus had a flame war about how to design a kernel.
I read the whole thing and I didn't consider it much of a flame fest. It all seemed very tame and respectable.
No, what's impressive is that most gamers have been successfully brainwashed that they need a $500 video card to play a modern game, while the low range has been excellent for the past 3-4 years.
Case in point, my younger sibling has been nagging me for the last week for money to get a new graphics card. His current one runs fine. I tried explaining to him about buses and such in a effort to get across that the reason his games were running slow had little to do with the graphics card, and more to do with shoddy programming, a slow bus, etc, etc. He listen patiently and then proceeded to nag me more for ~$250 for a minor upgrade to the machines current graphics card.
Meanwhile, when there are few agents on screen, every game runs smoothly and perfectly. On one game, Dawn of War, you can pause the action and rotate the camera around. When you do this, the pan is smooth regardless of the number of agents. This applies at reasonably high settings as well.
Someday, maybe, people will realise that how good a game looks has less to do with the polygon count and texture rates than it has to do with artistic design. Super Mario World looks better than 95% of most games on the shelves today. It's image will stay in your mind long after the sterile landscapes of the current console high res wars have faded into oblivion.
My problem with what you say here - and similar other arguments - is that for example plenty of hardware exist that do not work out of the box and automagically under Windows, be that hdd/raid controller, nic, cameras/tuners and I could just go on.
I have yet to meet an off the shelf, home consumer piece of hardware that would not work with a Windows system. They are all designed and constructed for the purposes of usage on Windows.
no doubt once perfected this technology can be used to make the undesirables (of the week) of society productive citizens by manipulating their cellular function to emit consumer goods,
In case you hadn't noticed, the shops are already full of crap.
In fact it could force a paradigm shift in the industry.
Whatever the hell that is.
Damn it, I think today's not my day... I'll go watch my downloaded episodes of Star Trek and see later.
Get with the times man. Geeks don't watch Star Trek anymore. That's for the masses.
Yeah that would work . . . Think of another techno-fix.
Drive slower.
Without this number (or ID card, or passport, or whatever), how does anyone -know- you're an Irish citizen?
For most intents and purposes, they are not required to -know-. If they really truely need to find out, it should be a small matter to verify this. If anyone wants to question my citizenship, they're free to do so. If anyone wants to deny me my rights because my citizenship has not be satisfied to their standards, tough luck.
The constitution does not require that their standards be satisfied. My rights are automatic, not subject to anyone's oversight and approval, be they government or otherwise. The constitution does not require me to prove my ciizenship to the satisfaction of the government. I do not need my "rights" papers.
People should not be required to satisfy their governments petty demands. That's not how fre societies are supposed to work. The government exists to protect our rights, not to scrutinise them, or had them out only when it sees fit. Too many people forget that the Government is not some all powerful institution to which we must all submit. Democracy exists for the very purpose of freeing us from such things.