Wow, I'm way behind then, still on the "H"s. But, I gotta ask you, why, why, why wasn't this distro named the "Hungry Heifer"? Just to bring it back on topic, was it fear of copyright infringement by the folks behind "Cheers"?
Missed opportunity, IMO
Dean
A DMCA take-down notice contains a sword statement that you are acting on behalf of the copyright owner. This means that it would be perjury to file a fake take-down notice, and also means that there's a strict audit trail pointing back to whoever authorised the take-down.
if that's all it took, then people would start posting fake notices (ie committing fraud) for the groups they OPPOSE, thus preventing the legitimate copyright holder from keeping their copyright.
Wow, I admire your ability to "think like the enemy." That hadn't even occurred to me. Scary thing is you might be right...
I also liked the very reasonable $8 / MB charge once you go over your first 8MB. Give one of these to your kids for a couple of hours in the car and you might have a nasty surprise!
The proper way to tell what should be fixed is not how easy it is to mitigate. It's how expensive it is to mitigate versus the value of doing so. And note that neither of those are measured in dollars - they're measured in a much more abstract concept, "worth".
Weigh the chance and danger of an iPod bursting into flame on a plane (extremely low, and extremely low, multiplied together) versus the compounded irritation of every traveler in America being unable to bring the most popular music player on the planet with them on a plane (extremely high, times a huge number.) Sure, it would be easy to fix . . . but it's just not worth it.
Thanks for posting that; I'm glad I read it before posting my own rant -- directed at the submitter. It would have been something like:
The world cannot be made a safe place, especially for morons like you! Idiots who think that excessive regulation, bans of whatever they don't like and "safety is always worth any cost" piss me off. No, there is always a cost. Roads could be safer, at the cost of longer travel times and/or higher taxes. Hell, why not make all restaurants serve heart-friendly tofu-burgers? Individuals have rights, and society has an obligation to protect the interests and safety of the majority, and the minority. Your fear of iPods, unjustified based on the evidence to date, does not imply that I shouldn't be able to carry one onto a plane.
Yeah, thanks for preventing me from posting that...
If you aren't incompetent, you should be able to compete with a company that's late to market with a knockoff of your product.
Yeah, but...
People in some positions -- senior designers, engineers, and so on -- have enough inside knowledge, gained over time at one employer, that makes them more valuable to a competitor than to their current employer, as they've already learned some things that the competitor hasn't. It's even worse for salespeople, who can take contacts and relationships built up over years at the expense of the current employer.
I believe there is a place for non-compete agreements, provided they are limited in time, geography and area of business.
A justice system that ignores basic inalienable rights by definition has no authority in that regard. Sadly we've allowed those in higher positions of power to abuse our liberties with little to no resistance.
Just as your right to swing your fist stops where it meets my nose, your right to free speech is not absolute. You don't have the right to shout "FIRE!" in a crowded is one oft-quoted example. Similarly, your right to continuously defame me in public is not an absolute right. If I ask a judge to tell you to stop, and perhaps seek damages through a libel suit, and he agrees, you stop. If he wants to consider the evidence further, but wants to avoid further damage to my reputation in the interim, he can and likely will ask you to stop for a while until the verdict is in. In other words, these are not 'inalienable' rights, if by that you mean they have no limits. Nowhere. Not in any jurisdiction you can think of, for many good reasons.
Further, if you had checked the site in question, you would read text like:
The catalyst for this site is a shady and morally bankrupt accountant named Michael Stiassny...
which is clearly defamatory, and therefore reasonable grounds for a suit and/or requesting a cease-and-desist order.
So... you can get off your high horse now. It doesn't fit here.
Well, this would certainly be great if true -- the impact of increased global temperatures and higher availability of CO2 means that plant life booms, sequestering CO2. But...
Consider the source. The summary links to two rather untrustworthy sources of global warming information. Why are there no links to the actual study? Maybe the lack of appropriate links is, in it's own way, part of the story. Colour me sceptical.
Before Win95, Apple has a small but real Market, IBM made noise with OS/2, someone was pushing GEOS (came with my multimedia upgrade kit at some point), and most computers booted to DOS and ran Wordperfect 5.1/DOS and or LOTUS 1-2-3 and connected to the Netware box. Even if most OEMs shipped with Windows 3.11, computers didn't always boot it. The real data was a 3270 terminal away. Microsoft's high-end OSes NT Workstation was a novelty, NT Server was an also ran.
With Windows 95, they took over the desktop... DOS was hidden, OS/2 defeated, and with Office 95 shipping WELL before Wordperfect ported to Win32... With Win95 they grabbed a desktop monopoly, Office monopoly, and pushed NT Server as highly competitive with Netware and inevitably overtaking them.
I think you've hit the two critical points, one technical one business. From a technical point of view, Win 95 hid|did away with DOS, providing a "real" graphical OS for the first time. From a business point of view, OS/2 had the then-considerable backing of IBM. Win 95 broke compatibility (probably for business reasons as much as technical) and Windows became the acknowledged winner in what had been a battle.
Yeah, I know USENET still exist, but pretty much everything these days happens on either mailing lists or web forums which both lack a lot of features that USENET had back then 20 years ago.
Hey, I still use USENET daily, but "a lot of features"? 72-character lines of ASCII text? That's about as feature-rich as a bar in Sudan. (But, just how I like it, dinosaur that I am.)
Yes there is a lot in psychology that is guessing. But they are guesses that match real world behavior. But to call it a complete pseudoscience is flat out wrong.
Try volunteering to spend some time in/around psych hospitals, and pull the other leg: it squirts Ovaltine!
Most private hospitals are simply cash cows. The usual psychobabble they throw at the parents keeps them happy, while a "healthy" dose of medication keeps the patients calm, if not content. Overmedication is rampant, and I'll use an example I saw:
"Kent" had been restrained after Monday's fracas over his phone time, and his medication had been bumped up. Flash forward to Wednesday, where he's in the hallway, drying his hair VERY slowly with a hair dryer......but it wasn't, sadly, plugged in to the wall. Kent never noticed due to his new "therapeutic medication regimen". This is a pretty regular occurance, believe me.
So yeah, pardon if some of us are cynical.
I don't mind cynicism -- I encourage it, in fact. But why are you using examples from psychiatry to attack psychology?
It's misleading to those of us who avoid marketing-speak. Save me from "98% fewer colors..." -- how about "only 2% of the colors..." which is unambiguous.
(And, yes, I think the person who came up with "97% fat free" to describe 3% fat should be killed. Slowly and painfully.)
The fact is, you have to kill these people before they are able to kill you.
Regardless of whether one supports one side or the other of this debate, or somewhere in the middle as perhaps the majority of posts on this thread, that sentiment is certainly offensive to all points of view. Advocating killing of people because you think they might commit a crime in the future should automatically disqualify you from ever being able to purchase a lethal weapon. Unfortunately, you probably live in the USA and automatically qualify.
Four million Palestinians arriving in Israel (pop 7million) form a majority
You must work for Clinton campaign. But in any case, not all refugees will choose to return, and I am sure limiting the number of returnees to, say, 200K per year in order to facilitate their assimilation in the society can be negotiated. Returned refugees will in fact become Israeli citizens and be able to vote. However, in the meantime they will be subject to Israeli laws and end up with long prison sentences if they show any violent tendencies which are unavoidable for Hamas supporters. By the time, return is complete, immigrants will have profitable jobs and their children will have assimilated into the host culture. It's highly unlikely that they will still vote for a militant political party.
True, "Israel's Jewish character" may become a thing on the past and Jews will have to learn to live side-by-side with muslims and see their children enter mixed marriages. Let them adjust like the rest of the world did. Prejudice is no excuse for taking land away from people who lived their for a hundred generations.
The right of return, in my opinion, and most who have looked at this, is a non-starter. I suspect most of the Palestinians talking about it know that. It's a bargaining chip, like everything in this debate, that they know they will have to give up, but hold to it until Israel throws something their way. Israel hasn't, so they keep talking about it.
Any peace will result in land swaps, so Israel can keep some of it's less-offensive settlements, giving up the right of return, mutual recognition of the right to exist, and to statehood, and a shared Jerusulum. At the moment, politicians on both sides are afraid to acknowledge it in public, but that's the calculus.
My opinion, but based on a lot of reading, also the opinion of many scholars.
Well, I do live in South-East Asia (Indonesia), and I'm not as concerned about the latency issues as everyone else seems to be. The reason is that, for most people, internet access is slow anyway. Home connections are all capped at 128kb/s, even in the capital city. Cell phone time is dirt cheap, text messages even cheaper, so VOIP is not that big a concern for us (BTW, North Americans really get ripped off by phone companies). A 1/2 second latency delay in opening a web page isn't that big a deal, if it will take 10-20 seconds to get the page anyway.
For people outside the big cities, I think this could be A Good Thing indeed.
Dean
You know what I was thinking would be cool?
A day organised where all web developers can band together and intentionally not make their sites work for IE, just for one day.
I can't think of anything that would be a more effective protest. A single day where every IE user couldn't access a significant number of sites might make Microsoft sit up and take notice.
Ummm.... well, would that also include the sites where they would need to go to download alternative browsers?
I don't think it's so important how long it takes for a cargo to get somewhere so much as it's important that it get there when it's scheduled to do so, not earlier and not later. Modern manufacturing, to say nothing of port operations, rail schedules, et cetera, are pretty reliant on things being delivered at a certain hour on a certain day. If a boat happens to come in a day late or something, everything is flung out of synchrony -- you have to pay workers who are doing nothing, because the boat isn't there yet, and you have to hire other guys at overtime rates when the boat does come in, and meanwhile you've missed your rail connection and your factory has run out of raw materials or your showroom has run out of the popular new model of widget...
That's true from the shipping customer's point of view, but not from the point of view of the owner of the ship. If a run can take 5 days or 7 days, the owner can run 365/7 = 52 or 365/5 = 73 trips per year. Since the capital cost of the ship is by far the most significant cost (perhaps second to fuel, I'm not sure) the time makes a big difference to the profitability of the ship.
I'm consistently amazed by how they let anyone who ISN'T in a hard science/math program get away without really ever understanding anything about science or math. A huge number of people don't have enough backing in the scientific method to have a basic sense of what is or isn't a fact - even in simple real world cases they can physically deal with. (Like how to fix household items, how to tell if a circuit is blown, how to debug RCA connections to their TV, etc.) And don't have enough backing in math to convert measurement units or tell if they got the right change.
And to be clear, while I think higher education ought to take some responsibility for ensuring that the graduates have at least a small degree of well roundedness, I think the main problem in US education is much, much earlier.
I'd have to agree with both your points. Science is good and useful in many, many areas of everyday life. Not knowing at least a little bit about how the world works limits your view unacceptably, IMO. I think it cuts both ways, though. When I was doing my engineering degree, students took (only, unless you wanted more work) 3 non-technical electives. I wanted to take an English course, but was advised against it, and accepted their recommendation of a thoroughly boring economics course. I would have been a more rounded graduate if I had followed my instincts and taken something completely artsy.
I also agree that middle / high school is the place to introduce science education. I was absolutely thrilled when I got to my son's school Open House, and was able to ask his science teacher if they taught the scientific method. Her answer, "Of course, it's the foundation of how we teach science," was exactly what I wanted to hear.
I thought you might have a point until you said "Heck even Ubuntu (currently the distro that most nearly meets these requirements) has at least three variations.".
Just what is wrong with having 3 variations of Ubuntu? They're all Ubuntu, i.e. they're binary compatible with each other. If you make an Ubuntu package, that package will work on Kubuntu and Xubuntu as well. The package manager will install any dependencies you might need. The differences between the Ubuntu editions are smaller than differences between Vista Home, Vista Professional, Vista Ultimate and whatever the other 3 Vista editions are called. Just like a.exe will work on different Vista editions, a.deb will work fine on different Ubuntu editions.
Now, I'm not arguing that that.deb may not work on other Linux distros, but I really don't understand why you're complaining about Ubuntu havving different editions. I really don't see the problem.
Maybe that's part of the problem?
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I'd like to suggest that having multiple choices does benefit those with a few years of Linux under their belts, but is anathema for those thinking about adopting it (or any new technology). Users need to be confident that they are doing the right thing before they change, and they simply can't. There's no single "Linux" to install, and they won't be confident they are doing the right thing if they don't even know which version of Linux they should choose. This is currently a bigger problem than drivers or hardware incompatibilities (although these are still too daunting).
No business would ever try to launch a new product by offering hundreds of different versions, with different brand and model names, at the same time. Yet this is actually what the potential Linux user is faced with. Maybe/. types are too anti-corporate to want to understand basic marketing, but that doesn't change the facts.
I'm disappointed nobody has promoted the obvious solution: Get Paul Newman to reprise his "Cool Hand Luke" role, and cut down the parking meters. Win-win -- even the MPIAA might like it, if they can sell a few DVDs of an old movie (but a classic, IMO). I doubt Paul would get the jail time Luke did, but that might be the one drawback.
You know, you don't HAVE to buy a machine from Dell or anyone else. Someone with enough motivation to learn how can purchase the proper parts and build their own PC or server.
I did this around Christmas 2005. I bought all the parts, and put them under the Christmas tree, then my conmputer-crazed 13 year old and I assembled it. It took me a lot longer than I thought it would, but we got it up and running. BTW, I used to do technical support some 20 years ago, and did my fair share of taking things apart and putting them back together. (Anyone else remember plugging 64k RAM chips onto an IBM PC motherboard?)
This thing has been spewing thousands of cubic metres a day of fairly foul mud for many months now. There are two alternative explanations of why it started. The one most people around here (cynics all) believe is that the drilling caused the mud flow because the drilling company didn't install casing as they went, which is standard procedure -- especially in a populated area. Casing, after all, costs money. There is an alternative position, that it was caused by an earthquake two days earlier. The earthquake view has been taken up by the Indonesian Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare because (you'll love this) his family owns 50% of the well.
IANA Geologist, but as it happens a friend of mine is in the oil well service business, and there is a method that has worked in the past: pumping, as fast as possible, dense liquid into the well (through a couple of new wells drilled to intersect the source). I mean really, really dense liquid, really a suspension of heavy fine powders with additives to adjust the viscosity. It sinks under the mud and blocks the source. Incidentally, this only works if it was caused by the drilling, not the earthquake nearby. This method would cost millions of dollars (a few mil just for the heavy liquid, because you need a LOT of it).
Here's the problem with the concrete balls. If they get don't work, I would imagine that they could get down far enough that they would interfere with the flow of the heavy liquid, removing that possibility. This looks like the ultimate in "penny wise, pound foolish" to me.
Classic HP 15C. Graphing is for sissies. Best form factor ever (sideways, punch with both thumbs)
Right on. I'm glad someone else suggested this, I was beginning to think I was 20 years older than everyone else here. My 15C was stolen at some point in my first job, then I went back to business school (in 1990) so bought the HP 12C. Still got it, still works fine. Those HPs are reliable and fast (once you understand the syntax).
But I'm scratching my head: Why would you want a calculator in class?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I'm way behind then, still on the "H"s. But, I gotta ask you, why, why, why wasn't this distro named the "Hungry Heifer"? Just to bring it back on topic, was it fear of copyright infringement by the folks behind "Cheers"? Missed opportunity, IMO Dean
Thanks. That's what I'd hoped
Wow, I admire your ability to "think like the enemy." That hadn't even occurred to me. Scary thing is you might be right...
Memo to self: think more like a conspiracy
I also liked the very reasonable $8 / MB charge once you go over your first 8MB. Give one of these to your kids for a couple of hours in the car and you might have a nasty surprise!
Thanks for posting that; I'm glad I read it before posting my own rant -- directed at the submitter. It would have been something like:
The world cannot be made a safe place, especially for morons like you! Idiots who think that excessive regulation, bans of whatever they don't like and "safety is always worth any cost" piss me off. No, there is always a cost. Roads could be safer, at the cost of longer travel times and/or higher taxes. Hell, why not make all restaurants serve heart-friendly tofu-burgers? Individuals have rights, and society has an obligation to protect the interests and safety of the majority, and the minority. Your fear of iPods, unjustified based on the evidence to date, does not imply that I shouldn't be able to carry one onto a plane.
Yeah, thanks for preventing me from posting that...
People in some positions -- senior designers, engineers, and so on -- have enough inside knowledge, gained over time at one employer, that makes them more valuable to a competitor than to their current employer, as they've already learned some things that the competitor hasn't. It's even worse for salespeople, who can take contacts and relationships built up over years at the expense of the current employer.
I believe there is a place for non-compete agreements, provided they are limited in time, geography and area of business.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324
Further, if you had checked the site in question, you would read text like:
which is clearly defamatory, and therefore reasonable grounds for a suit and/or requesting a cease-and-desist order.So... you can get off your high horse now. It doesn't fit here.
Consider the source. The summary links to two rather untrustworthy sources of global warming information. Why are there no links to the actual study? Maybe the lack of appropriate links is, in it's own way, part of the story. Colour me sceptical.
(And, yes, I think the person who came up with "97% fat free" to describe 3% fat should be killed. Slowly and painfully.)
I'm not surprised you posted AC. Sigh.
The right of return, in my opinion, and most who have looked at this, is a non-starter. I suspect most of the Palestinians talking about it know that. It's a bargaining chip, like everything in this debate, that they know they will have to give up, but hold to it until Israel throws something their way. Israel hasn't, so they keep talking about it.
Any peace will result in land swaps, so Israel can keep some of it's less-offensive settlements, giving up the right of return, mutual recognition of the right to exist, and to statehood, and a shared Jerusulum. At the moment, politicians on both sides are afraid to acknowledge it in public, but that's the calculus.
My opinion, but based on a lot of reading, also the opinion of many scholars.
Well, I do live in South-East Asia (Indonesia), and I'm not as concerned about the latency issues as everyone else seems to be. The reason is that, for most people, internet access is slow anyway. Home connections are all capped at 128kb/s, even in the capital city. Cell phone time is dirt cheap, text messages even cheaper, so VOIP is not that big a concern for us (BTW, North Americans really get ripped off by phone companies). A 1/2 second latency delay in opening a web page isn't that big a deal, if it will take 10-20 seconds to get the page anyway. For people outside the big cities, I think this could be A Good Thing indeed. Dean
I smell an implementation issue.
I also agree that middle / high school is the place to introduce science education. I was absolutely thrilled when I got to my son's school Open House, and was able to ask his science teacher if they taught the scientific method. Her answer, "Of course, it's the foundation of how we teach science," was exactly what I wanted to hear.
I'm not picking on you in particular, but I'd like to suggest that having multiple choices does benefit those with a few years of Linux under their belts, but is anathema for those thinking about adopting it (or any new technology). Users need to be confident that they are doing the right thing before they change, and they simply can't. There's no single "Linux" to install, and they won't be confident they are doing the right thing if they don't even know which version of Linux they should choose. This is currently a bigger problem than drivers or hardware incompatibilities (although these are still too daunting).
No business would ever try to launch a new product by offering hundreds of different versions, with different brand and model names, at the same time. Yet this is actually what the potential Linux user is faced with. Maybe /. types are too anti-corporate to want to understand basic marketing, but that doesn't change the facts.
I'm disappointed nobody has promoted the obvious solution: Get Paul Newman to reprise his "Cool Hand Luke" role, and cut down the parking meters. Win-win -- even the MPIAA might like it, if they can sell a few DVDs of an old movie (but a classic, IMO). I doubt Paul would get the jail time Luke did, but that might be the one drawback.
Oh boy, is this ever a mistake.
This thing has been spewing thousands of cubic metres a day of fairly foul mud for many months now. There are two alternative explanations of why it started. The one most people around here (cynics all) believe is that the drilling caused the mud flow because the drilling company didn't install casing as they went, which is standard procedure -- especially in a populated area. Casing, after all, costs money. There is an alternative position, that it was caused by an earthquake two days earlier. The earthquake view has been taken up by the Indonesian Coordinating Minister for People's Welfare because (you'll love this) his family owns 50% of the well.
IANA Geologist, but as it happens a friend of mine is in the oil well service business, and there is a method that has worked in the past: pumping, as fast as possible, dense liquid into the well (through a couple of new wells drilled to intersect the source). I mean really, really dense liquid, really a suspension of heavy fine powders with additives to adjust the viscosity. It sinks under the mud and blocks the source. Incidentally, this only works if it was caused by the drilling, not the earthquake nearby. This method would cost millions of dollars (a few mil just for the heavy liquid, because you need a LOT of it).
Here's the problem with the concrete balls. If they get don't work, I would imagine that they could get down far enough that they would interfere with the flow of the heavy liquid, removing that possibility. This looks like the ultimate in "penny wise, pound foolish" to me.
Dean in beautiful downtown Jakarta
But I'm scratching my head: Why would you want a calculator in class?