I agree with the points you raised, but they weren't what I was referring to.
Nobody is talking about private entities requiring an ID for a service they provide you. You are not guaranteed a right to take out a loan from any bank, so they should be able to set whatever conditions they want. Also, when there is probable cause that you have committed a crime, such as robbing a bank, nobody is saying the police don't have a right to find out for sure who you are. You've hit on the two major exceptions, which is fine... but we're talking about the other cases.
This is about police demanding (at the threat of arrest) to see a specific ID without any probable cause (and when the government is not providing any privilege to you. For example, a government-owned bank could check ID when giving you a loan, or allowing you onto a secure military facility.) However, if a private bank does not want to check your ID, there should not be a government agent forcing them to. Revoking their FDIC Insurance, sure, but not forcing them absolutely. There should be no requirement to give the government your ID when engaged in a legal agreement with another private party, or when in public and breaking no law.
Incorrect. You are not even required to own one (at least in many states), although that makes it hard or impossible to apply for a job, vote, and whatnot. But you are definitely not required to carry it with you when out and about. Even if you have it on you, you are not required to show it to anyone provided you identify yourself in some other way, such as verbally. Please stop spreading misinformation.
I've carried a state ID for over 20 years, and I've never had anyone ask to see my papers.
"10 and 2" is no longer suggested, if you have a steering-wheel airbag. "9 and 3" or "8 and 4" is the new consensus, to avoid injury to your arms and help you maintain control of the vehicle if necessary after the airbag deploys. I prefer 8 and 4 because it lets me do the most turning without having to reposition both hands, and it's just more comfortable if the wheel has the right hand-holds there.
It's because they changed the metaphor from "having priority" to "being nice." If a process is more nice, it lets other processes use CPU time first. If it is less nice, it hogs it all for itself.
It's confusing if you are used to thinking in terms of priority, but it makes sense after the first few times you see it.
Re:OpenDocument As Default is Great!
on
KOffice 1.5 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
OpenOffice format is different from OpenDocument format (confusing, I know). I presume the filter on that page refers to the old-style OpenOffice formats which used extensions like.sxw,.sxc, etc. The new OpenDocument format, which OpenOffice has now switched to, uses extensions like.odt,.ods, etc.
Since KOffice saves in OpenDocument format by default now, I would guess they don't list it as an "import/export filter."
Well, that one doesn't even have the same *number* of letters... so I guess that means you're free to start marketing comic books under that name any time now. Just don't tell me what they're going to be about, please.:)
If you're running "rogue applications", you've got bigger problems.
But you shouldn't, which is exactly the GP's point. There's no reason the OS shouldn't solve those problems for you. Proper software management should not depend on all programs being well-behaved, nor should it depend on every program being in your package manager.
Of course, rather than arguing about whether centralized locations (/bin,/lib,/etc) are better or worse than segregated programs (/Programs/Xorg/6.8.2/), maybe we could just use an automated system of symlinks to get the benefits of both. Heck, while we're at it we could break the dependence on a centralized package manager too, by letting people install from source (or even third-party binary) while maintaining the same restrictions on the program tree. Oh wait, already been done.:) (Sorry, couldn't resist the plug for my current choice of desktop OS. It seemed pretty relevant to this discussion.)
The ideal mechanism for software management is for the OS to only permit software to be installed in a specific directory tree, one per application, instead of allowing software to sprinkle DLLs all over the place. Installation should be a recorded transaction which can be replayed in reverse by the OS to verify that software has truly been removed. This, along with really good privilege separation, will ensure that rogue applications cannot evade detection and removal. Too bad Linux doesn't do any of this...
GoboLinux does. That's why I like it so much. (Well, that and the fact that both source and binary installs are first-class citizens). To remove a program completely, delete a folder (and run a script to automatically clean up some symlinks if you feel like being tidy). During the install, programs are only given write permissions in a specific folder, so this scheme is enforced by the system even if a badly behaved programs tries to put things outside its target directory.
It even goes one further than your suggestion, by separating directories by version number as well. If the different versions of the same program/library have differently-named files they can simply co-exist, and if they have conflicting names then it's a simple switch to decide which one you want to be "active."
The cool part: most programs don't require any modification to compile/install properly using the GoboLinux-provided installer (including anything based on autoconf or a decent Makefile, or standard Perl/Python apps).
This will only speak to the top end, but I compared the IMDb lists for top 50 movies from 2000-present against the top 250 of all time. There are 42 movies in the top 250 from the past 6 years, which isn't too bad at all, even considering that recent movies have a bit of a bias due to initial popularity. Also, a substantial fraction of them are foreign and/or did not see a wide box office release. However, even given those caveats, it seems like excellent movies are still being produced at similar rates.
I think your questions gets more at the split between "movies worth watching" and "crap movies" though, which I can't compare as easily.
If anyone knows how to download it and convert it please tell me, I would love to have a copy of it localy.
It should be trivial in mplayer, although I'm not at home so I can't try it with your particular stream. I just recently did the same thing with another realmedia stream. You need a *little* command-line knowledge though. Get mplayer for your platform (Windows, Linux etc.), and also download the "essential codec pack" for your system [warning: not legal in many countries, since it includes binary codecs for real player and other proprietary formats]. Once you have done that, so it is capable of decoding realmedia streams, enter at the command line one of the following.
To output a realmedia stream to the current directory: mplayer -dumpstream "http://[address]"
To output an uncompressed WAV file [warning: very large] to the current directory, for easier converting to mp3 or format of choice: mplayer -ao pcm "http://[address]" (You can also do this command to the saved realplayer stream with mplayer -ao pcm [stream_filename]).
If it can't connect to the stream, try saving the.rm file to disk and viewing it as text, and copy the rtsp://[address] link from the file to use directly on the command line instead of the other http:/// address. In your case, the link is "rtsp://152.3.208.146:554/spring06/cspd/01232006.r m?cloakport=80,554,7070".
If mplayer can play it, then it can save it. There are even mplayer plugins for Firefox that will play streaming media in-browser and also automatically save it all for you, although I haven't had the best of luck configuring those properly on my Linux system, and I am content doing it manually using the command-line method above.
Knoppmyth, the MythTV distro built around Knoppix, publishes some "reference platforms" spec that they promise to support fairly well in all future versions, and which get the job done fairly nicely. They have only published one system so far ("Dragon"), a single-tuner box. You can either buy it pre-assembled and installed for $1450, or get all the components individually for about $1200 minus whatever parts you might already have.
I happened to have an extra hard drive and dvd drive lying around, so I bought the rest of the spec mostly from NewEgg and built a Dragon myself, and haven't had any hardware problems so far. It holds up under the load of recording one stream and watching another off the hard drive just fine, and their attention to noise level means that even though I didn't put in the recommended extra-quiet CPU fan, the box itself is inaudible when I'm actually watching anything. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a Linux-based HTPC, either pre-built or from scratch.
I didn't have the time (or experience with the relevant issues) to get into a meaningful discussion, so my alternative would have been to not post at all. You may think that would be preferable, but I just found it humorous that there would be two misspellings so close to each other, both of which became other real english words (and thus wouldn't have been caught by spell-check), in an otherwise quite well-written post.
Off-topic, sure, but not all of us think that off-topic deserves to be a negative modifier.
Yes, and the parent poster is saying that current prices reflect future shortages, which is empirically true. If someone could sell copper for $20 a pound in 20 years when the developing requires large quantities of it and there is a shortage, why the hell would they sell it for $2 a pound now? Holding onto it would give them a huge risk-free return if this guy is so sure of a future shortage. The current price should be higher as soon as that information became known, because of the potential for profit.
This can be observed when companies announce changes in their projected future earnings. Even if the earnings are only projected to start going up 5 years from now, the stock takes an immediate jump to a higher price because that's the present value of the future earnings. This is well-observed in the market, and applies to future "earnings" of being able to sell copper just as well.
The fact that current prices haven't risen significantly indicates that the people with the most to gain or lose from future price changes don't yet believe the shortage hype.
While we're at it, why not an "intelligent html" edit mode? I like being able to add links, but I also like being able to hit enter to make a linebreak.
Hey, me too:). Have you tried the "Plain Old Text" option? HTML code is interpreted (for example italics or a link), as are line breaks. This post was written as "Plain Old Text."
Maybe it's just a poorly-chosen name, but it seems to be what you are asking for.
[load irony mode]Leave the premises - as in their current location, or leave the premesis - as in... er... "No entry found for premesis. Did you mean pyemesis?"[unload irony mode]
NB: don't look up pyemesis if you've eaten recently. Blech.
Am I reading this "benchmark" correctly? Did he base his results on a sample size of 1?
From TFA: "NOTE5: All tests were run 3 times and the average was taken, if any tests were questionable, they were re-run and checked with the previous average for consistency."
Thanks for phrasing your post in an authentic question instead of just a flame like it could have been. I'll try to give you at least some of the reasons why a society full of people like the GP wouldn't just degenerate into violent lawlessness...
Even if you want to take a purely "immediate self-interest" viewpoint, kill or be killed will get you killed at some point, whereas live and let live tends to keep you alive. In other words, we voluntarily choose to live in societies based on law, because we are personally much better off living in such a society. We get a benefit (very few people do bad stuff to us) by consenting not to do bad things to other people on a whim. If you often go an extra step to be nice to people, you become known for that, which might carry its own benefits as well depending on your society.
However, you are making a false assumption that atheism (or lack of afterlife) implies a lack of morals. Someone can practice a strict moral code for reasons other than religion, such as a personal sense of honor and pride in upholding a higher standard, or a wish to be remembered for something even after they die. Many practitioners of belief systems like Buddhism or Shinto don't describe themselves as "religious," because they aren't concerned as much with the spirituality of those beliefs as with their implications to secular life and everyday human behavior.
Also, note that there are ways for evolution to select for traits which are bad for the individual who has them, but better for the whole society. I won't get into it, but if you're interested you can read up on Evolution and Altruism, for example at the Wikipedia entry on Altruism or a bit more in depth here.
A feature I like in KDE is the ability to give window-specific settings that stick to windows based on a variety of criteria, including window title and program-defined "role." You can then set pretty much any window action available, such as resize, location, always-on-top/bottom, maximized/minimized, put it in the taskbar or not, prevent stealing focus, etc. These settings can either be forced at all times, or just set as the default whenever that type of window opens.
For example, I want to make sure my IM away messages, as well as conversations with certain people, are always visible so I don't forget about them. I have them set to appear on every desktop and always-on-top by default, with only a click of a button on the title bar to toggle either option if I decide I don't want it. I also force certain apps like Thunderbird to always appear in a specific virtual desktop in order to keep things sorted, and I have many apps like Firefox open maximized because I almost always use them that way.
It's really quite an easy feature to use, too... It auto-detects the relevant window properties if you launch the settings dialog by right-clicking on a window title bar. All of the options are straightforward, so you can easily add settings to a window without having to muck around in some other program or control center to get it to do what you want. It's a pretty intuitive feature for a window manager/desktop to be able to recognize and treat different programs' windows differently, and KDE's implementation of the concept is spot on.
That's the main feature I would have added to his article. The one I like most that he covered is the kioslaves. Want to copy files over SSH? Just use sftp://[location] in konqueror and browse, drag and drop like normal. Want to save a file from a text program to a remote SSH location? put sftp://[location] into the "save as" dialog and save it directly from the application. Because the ioslaves are universal, you can expect to take advantage of them in the same way throughout pretty much all KDE apps.
The argument is not particularly different, except that he probably believes stem cell research will be very fruitful in comparison to many other areas. It also happens to be his specialty, which is presumably why he argues for it specifically.
The problem with your justification of "balance" is that the existing procedures lean too far towards the side of caution in approving drugs and treatments. The number of people who die from improperly approved drugs is miniscule compared to the number who die during testing periods of treatments that could have saved them. He knows about the balance, and he wants to shift it closer to the middle, in order to have fewer people suffer and/or die. Seems like a good idea to me.
(The other factor, which you did not address, is that people should have *choice* over their own treatments. That way, if they actually do prefer the current level of testing, they can choose to wait a few years after each drug is released before taking it.)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the points you raised, but they weren't what I was referring to.
Nobody is talking about private entities requiring an ID for a service they provide you. You are not guaranteed a right to take out a loan from any bank, so they should be able to set whatever conditions they want. Also, when there is probable cause that you have committed a crime, such as robbing a bank, nobody is saying the police don't have a right to find out for sure who you are. You've hit on the two major exceptions, which is fine... but we're talking about the other cases.
This is about police demanding (at the threat of arrest) to see a specific ID without any probable cause (and when the government is not providing any privilege to you. For example, a government-owned bank could check ID when giving you a loan, or allowing you onto a secure military facility.) However, if a private bank does not want to check your ID, there should not be a government agent forcing them to. Revoking their FDIC Insurance, sure, but not forcing them absolutely. There should be no requirement to give the government your ID when engaged in a legal agreement with another private party, or when in public and breaking no law.
we are all required to carry a state ID already.
Incorrect. You are not even required to own one (at least in many states), although that makes it hard or impossible to apply for a job, vote, and whatnot. But you are definitely not required to carry it with you when out and about. Even if you have it on you, you are not required to show it to anyone provided you identify yourself in some other way, such as verbally. Please stop spreading misinformation.
I've carried a state ID for over 20 years, and I've never had anyone ask to see my papers.
Haven't flown in the last 5 years, then?
"10 and 2" is no longer suggested, if you have a steering-wheel airbag. "9 and 3" or "8 and 4" is the new consensus, to avoid injury to your arms and help you maintain control of the vehicle if necessary after the airbag deploys. I prefer 8 and 4 because it lets me do the most turning without having to reposition both hands, and it's just more comfortable if the wheel has the right hand-holds there.
. html or http://www.dmv.ca.gov/about/senior/safety/driver.h tm)
(See for example http://www.mpi.mb.ca/english/dr_tips/handposition
It's because they changed the metaphor from "having priority" to "being nice." If a process is more nice, it lets other processes use CPU time first. If it is less nice, it hogs it all for itself.
It's confusing if you are used to thinking in terms of priority, but it makes sense after the first few times you see it.
OpenOffice format is different from OpenDocument format (confusing, I know). I presume the filter on that page refers to the old-style OpenOffice formats which used extensions like .sxw, .sxc, etc. The new OpenDocument format, which OpenOffice has now switched to, uses extensions like .odt, .ods, etc.
Since KOffice saves in OpenDocument format by default now, I would guess they don't list it as an "import/export filter."
Looking at this comment I found, the author makes a good counter-arguement: no.
Our Herpes
:)
Pure Horse
He so pure
See ho purr
Well, that one doesn't even have the same *number* of letters... so I guess that means you're free to start marketing comic books under that name any time now. Just don't tell me what they're going to be about, please.
If you're running "rogue applications", you've got bigger problems.
:) (Sorry, couldn't resist the plug for my current choice of desktop OS. It seemed pretty relevant to this discussion.)
But you shouldn't, which is exactly the GP's point. There's no reason the OS shouldn't solve those problems for you. Proper software management should not depend on all programs being well-behaved, nor should it depend on every program being in your package manager.
Of course, rather than arguing about whether centralized locations (/bin,/lib,/etc) are better or worse than segregated programs (/Programs/Xorg/6.8.2/), maybe we could just use an automated system of symlinks to get the benefits of both. Heck, while we're at it we could break the dependence on a centralized package manager too, by letting people install from source (or even third-party binary) while maintaining the same restrictions on the program tree. Oh wait, already been done.
The ideal mechanism for software management is for the OS to only permit software to be installed in a specific directory tree, one per application, instead of allowing software to sprinkle DLLs all over the place. Installation should be a recorded transaction which can be replayed in reverse by the OS to verify that software has truly been removed. This, along with really good privilege separation, will ensure that rogue applications cannot evade detection and removal.
Too bad Linux doesn't do any of this...
GoboLinux does. That's why I like it so much. (Well, that and the fact that both source and binary installs are first-class citizens). To remove a program completely, delete a folder (and run a script to automatically clean up some symlinks if you feel like being tidy). During the install, programs are only given write permissions in a specific folder, so this scheme is enforced by the system even if a badly behaved programs tries to put things outside its target directory.
It even goes one further than your suggestion, by separating directories by version number as well. If the different versions of the same program/library have differently-named files they can simply co-exist, and if they have conflicting names then it's a simple switch to decide which one you want to be "active."
The cool part: most programs don't require any modification to compile/install properly using the GoboLinux-provided installer (including anything based on autoconf or a decent Makefile, or standard Perl/Python apps).
This will only speak to the top end, but I compared the IMDb lists for top 50 movies from 2000-present against the top 250 of all time. There are 42 movies in the top 250 from the past 6 years, which isn't too bad at all, even considering that recent movies have a bit of a bias due to initial popularity. Also, a substantial fraction of them are foreign and/or did not see a wide box office release. However, even given those caveats, it seems like excellent movies are still being produced at similar rates.
I think your questions gets more at the split between "movies worth watching" and "crap movies" though, which I can't compare as easily.
If anyone knows how to download it and convert it please tell me, I would love to have a copy of it localy.
.rm file to disk and viewing it as text, and copy the rtsp://[address] link from the file to use directly on the command line instead of the other http:/// address. In your case, the link is "rtsp://152.3.208.146:554/spring06/cspd/01232006.r m?cloakport=80,554,7070".
It should be trivial in mplayer, although I'm not at home so I can't try it with your particular stream. I just recently did the same thing with another realmedia stream. You need a *little* command-line knowledge though. Get mplayer for your platform (Windows, Linux etc.), and also download the "essential codec pack" for your system [warning: not legal in many countries, since it includes binary codecs for real player and other proprietary formats]. Once you have done that, so it is capable of decoding realmedia streams, enter at the command line one of the following.
To output a realmedia stream to the current directory:
mplayer -dumpstream "http://[address]"
To output an uncompressed WAV file [warning: very large] to the current directory, for easier converting to mp3 or format of choice:
mplayer -ao pcm "http://[address]"
(You can also do this command to the saved realplayer stream with mplayer -ao pcm [stream_filename]).
If it can't connect to the stream, try saving the
If mplayer can play it, then it can save it. There are even mplayer plugins for Firefox that will play streaming media in-browser and also automatically save it all for you, although I haven't had the best of luck configuring those properly on my Linux system, and I am content doing it manually using the command-line method above.
Knoppmyth, the MythTV distro built around Knoppix, publishes some "reference platforms" spec that they promise to support fairly well in all future versions, and which get the job done fairly nicely. They have only published one system so far ("Dragon"), a single-tuner box. You can either buy it pre-assembled and installed for $1450, or get all the components individually for about $1200 minus whatever parts you might already have.
I happened to have an extra hard drive and dvd drive lying around, so I bought the rest of the spec mostly from NewEgg and built a Dragon myself, and haven't had any hardware problems so far. It holds up under the load of recording one stream and watching another off the hard drive just fine, and their attention to noise level means that even though I didn't put in the recommended extra-quiet CPU fan, the box itself is inaudible when I'm actually watching anything. Highly recommended for anyone who wants a Linux-based HTPC, either pre-built or from scratch.
I didn't have the time (or experience with the relevant issues) to get into a meaningful discussion, so my alternative would have been to not post at all. You may think that would be preferable, but I just found it humorous that there would be two misspellings so close to each other, both of which became other real english words (and thus wouldn't have been caught by spell-check), in an otherwise quite well-written post.
Off-topic, sure, but not all of us think that off-topic deserves to be a negative modifier.
My rational stands on its one
;). (At least he didn't also mess up "it's"...)
Remember, kids: spell-check is not a substitute for proofreading
Yes, and the parent poster is saying that current prices reflect future shortages, which is empirically true. If someone could sell copper for $20 a pound in 20 years when the developing requires large quantities of it and there is a shortage, why the hell would they sell it for $2 a pound now? Holding onto it would give them a huge risk-free return if this guy is so sure of a future shortage. The current price should be higher as soon as that information became known, because of the potential for profit.
This can be observed when companies announce changes in their projected future earnings. Even if the earnings are only projected to start going up 5 years from now, the stock takes an immediate jump to a higher price because that's the present value of the future earnings. This is well-observed in the market, and applies to future "earnings" of being able to sell copper just as well.
The fact that current prices haven't risen significantly indicates that the people with the most to gain or lose from future price changes don't yet believe the shortage hype.
While we're at it, why not an "intelligent html" edit mode? I like being able to add links, but I also like being able to hit enter to make a linebreak.
:). Have you tried the "Plain Old Text" option? HTML code is interpreted (for example italics or a link), as are line breaks. This post was written as "Plain Old Text."
Hey, me too
Maybe it's just a poorly-chosen name, but it seems to be what you are asking for.
[load irony mode]Leave the premises - as in their current location, or leave the premesis - as in... er... "No entry found for premesis. Did you mean pyemesis?"[unload irony mode]
NB: don't look up pyemesis if you've eaten recently. Blech.
Am I reading this "benchmark" correctly? Did he base his results on a sample size of 1?
From TFA: "NOTE5: All tests were run 3 times and the average was taken, if any tests were questionable, they were re-run and checked with the previous average for consistency."
Now if somebody could link me up with a tiny footprint version of Linux to throw on my key, I would be set!
:)
Does "damn small" count as tiny?
http://damnsmalllinux.org/
Thanks for phrasing your post in an authentic question instead of just a flame like it could have been. I'll try to give you at least some of the reasons why a society full of people like the GP wouldn't just degenerate into violent lawlessness...
Even if you want to take a purely "immediate self-interest" viewpoint, kill or be killed will get you killed at some point, whereas live and let live tends to keep you alive. In other words, we voluntarily choose to live in societies based on law, because we are personally much better off living in such a society. We get a benefit (very few people do bad stuff to us) by consenting not to do bad things to other people on a whim. If you often go an extra step to be nice to people, you become known for that, which might carry its own benefits as well depending on your society.
However, you are making a false assumption that atheism (or lack of afterlife) implies a lack of morals. Someone can practice a strict moral code for reasons other than religion, such as a personal sense of honor and pride in upholding a higher standard, or a wish to be remembered for something even after they die. Many practitioners of belief systems like Buddhism or Shinto don't describe themselves as "religious," because they aren't concerned as much with the spirituality of those beliefs as with their implications to secular life and everyday human behavior.
Also, note that there are ways for evolution to select for traits which are bad for the individual who has them, but better for the whole society. I won't get into it, but if you're interested you can read up on Evolution and Altruism, for example at the Wikipedia entry on Altruism or a bit more in depth here.
A feature I like in KDE is the ability to give window-specific settings that stick to windows based on a variety of criteria, including window title and program-defined "role." You can then set pretty much any window action available, such as resize, location, always-on-top/bottom, maximized/minimized, put it in the taskbar or not, prevent stealing focus, etc. These settings can either be forced at all times, or just set as the default whenever that type of window opens.
For example, I want to make sure my IM away messages, as well as conversations with certain people, are always visible so I don't forget about them. I have them set to appear on every desktop and always-on-top by default, with only a click of a button on the title bar to toggle either option if I decide I don't want it. I also force certain apps like Thunderbird to always appear in a specific virtual desktop in order to keep things sorted, and I have many apps like Firefox open maximized because I almost always use them that way.
It's really quite an easy feature to use, too... It auto-detects the relevant window properties if you launch the settings dialog by right-clicking on a window title bar. All of the options are straightforward, so you can easily add settings to a window without having to muck around in some other program or control center to get it to do what you want. It's a pretty intuitive feature for a window manager/desktop to be able to recognize and treat different programs' windows differently, and KDE's implementation of the concept is spot on.
That's the main feature I would have added to his article. The one I like most that he covered is the kioslaves. Want to copy files over SSH? Just use sftp://[location] in konqueror and browse, drag and drop like normal. Want to save a file from a text program to a remote SSH location? put sftp://[location] into the "save as" dialog and save it directly from the application. Because the ioslaves are universal, you can expect to take advantage of them in the same way throughout pretty much all KDE apps.
The argument is not particularly different, except that he probably believes stem cell research will be very fruitful in comparison to many other areas. It also happens to be his specialty, which is presumably why he argues for it specifically.
The problem with your justification of "balance" is that the existing procedures lean too far towards the side of caution in approving drugs and treatments. The number of people who die from improperly approved drugs is miniscule compared to the number who die during testing periods of treatments that could have saved them. He knows about the balance, and he wants to shift it closer to the middle, in order to have fewer people suffer and/or die. Seems like a good idea to me.
(The other factor, which you did not address, is that people should have *choice* over their own treatments. That way, if they actually do prefer the current level of testing, they can choose to wait a few years after each drug is released before taking it.)
Meh, classical music just isn't that popular nowadays. I think we should go for an electric guitar overthrow of the RIAA instead.
No clue why he didn't just make it a regular link.
To be completely honest, I don't care if his xbox is freezing up from overheating, I don't recall microsoft promising that the xbox would not overheat
It's called an "implied warrant of merchantability."