And it would be smart to store the key/passphrase on paper in a safe, in case you get hit by a bus and your partner/assistant urgently needs a client's file. IANAL.
This is why "statesman != politician", but "politician == criminal".
Buddy, if you think American politicians are criminals, you've had a sheltered life. My wife's great-grandfather was shot by Communists and thrown in a river just because he owned a business. In a totally different country, my great-grandfather's parents were murdered because they were nobility and the ruling nobility decided to seize their estates. 20th/21st century Americans? Small time at best. You don't know how good you have it.
Ah, don't you mean the easiest way to promote crime?
Depends on your definition of "crime." Taking away people's freedoms can be effective in preventing "crime" meaning doing harm to others, but of course it's even more effective in promoting "crime" meaning doing things the government says you're not permitted to do. The more laws get past, the more stark the distinction between those two definitions becomes.
Really? Come on now, I own a rifle, does that mean I shoot people? I have strong encryption on my hard drive, does that make me a terrorist?
No, but having those things mean you have the ability to do things the government doesn't want you to do. The easiest way to prevent crime is to take away everyone's freedom.
Personally, I want EVERY government training program to be training people is skills the real free market considers useless. Don't you?
As a citizen, I would say, "no." I don't want the government to waste effort training people in skills that are useless in the marketplace. I do not, in general, want the government to do stupid things. I fail to see how that would benefit me at all.
This is Slashdot, so I don't expect everyone to RTFA or anything before sounding off, but seriously: there are two approaches mentioned in the article. One of them sounds totally reckless because of its unpredictable consequences; the other is not nearly as daft:
Another geoengineering option he mentioned was the use of so-called artificial trees to suck carbon dioxide -- the chief human-caused greenhouse gas -- out of the air and store it.
Now, I have serious questions about that approach as well, but it seems to me a lot more reasonable that trying to tinker with the Earth's albedo.
It's only the rules that are open source, not adventures and campaign setting material. So, for example, the Forgotten Realms (most popular RPG setting of all time) is WotC's intellectual property and under their total control.
However, WotC cannot stop other companies making D&D-like games, settings, adventures, and products for 3.x rules -- as long as they're not called "D&D". Several companies are still doing that. Which makes WotC's move to take themselves out of the 3.x market especially stupid. In the hopes of driving more players to 4E, they're ceding the 3.x legacy market to their competitors.
Back when Wizards of the Coast took over D&D, one of the striking things then-Vice President Ryan Dancey said was that TSR (the former publisher) has obviously not listened to customers and had lost relevancy for that reason.
Now, Ryan Dancey is no longer at WotC, and WotC is not listening to customers, and what do you know? WotC is losing relevancy. People are going to buy the products they want, in the format they want, from the retailer they want, and you can never make them buy something different. It's as simple as that.
Fortunately the 3.x rules are open source so D&D can never die, in spite of WotC's seemingly intentional efforts to run their business into the ground. It just can't be called D&D for trademark reasons.
Good news for you: a number of popular Windows games (such as Civ 4) run well in Wine. (hint: look up "winetricks" and use that) Some versions of MS money are reported to work, though I have not tried them. You might instead want to try installing GNUCash for Windows and see how easy it is to migrate your data.
As to your dual-boot issues: I have not had the same problem as you, but I do sympathize. I think dual-boot support has come a long way in the past few years. If you back up your Windows registry before you install Linux, you should at least not have to re-install all your apps if things go wrong.
This would make a lot of sense for training Marines, but why a mass market game? They say they want to tell their stories, but that's what memoirs are for. Looks to me like they are out to make a buck.
"The books are still available at the respective libraries."
What a reasonable person would consider "available" has changed since 1990. Some kind of machine assistance (full-text search today, semantic Web tomorrow) is increasingly important to making information discoverable and usable. A non-digitized book sitting in the stacks cannot be evaluated except by going to the library, getting physical access, and physically paging through it. This reminds me of the the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the bypass-construction plans were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory of the basement of the Planning Office.
In other words, the library catalogue as it existed c. 1990 is obsolete, and the catalogue of the 21st century is full text search. A book that can't be searched, can't be catalgoued.
Well put. That's my point, and why I said "[t]his is not to understate the importance of his work." I am not so much putting down Alcubierre as I am putting down the summary, which asserts he "figured out how to build a warp drive." Not true, and Alcubierre would probably be the first one to tell you that.
What Alcubierre did was prove that faster-than-light travel within a bubble of spacetime does not conflict with the laws of general relativity. What he didn't do was figure out exactly how to generate that bubble of spacetime. In fact I don't believe any laboratory experiments were involved.
In other words, he was pretty damn far from figuring out how to build anything. This is not to understate the importance of his work -- he never claimed to have invented anything practical or even to have set out to invent anything.
Yeah. Without a court ruling one way or the other, we have no indication whether Microsoft's strategy Free/Open Source software using patents (see the Halloween Documents) will be upheld by the courts. That sword is still dangling over Linux and other F/OSS developers.
Anyone who feels that their faith is threatened by evolution either doesn't understand evolution, or doesn't understand that science is about verifying falsifiable, naturalistic models of reality.
And doesn't understand jack about theology, either.
It's really the only way to have some kind of paid file sharing and still preserve individual "ownership" of copyright (as opposed to corporate "ownership"). If I were a Canadian musician, I'd be glad to be offered a chance to opt-out of this system (though I would probably not actually opt-out).
You're being extremely disingenuous by suggesting that the possibility of life arising at more than one place/time is not being considered by scientists.
No, I'm suggesting that a textbook that claims life arose from one common origin is disingenuous.
You didn't RTFA, did you? Two specific proposals on the table:
If the new curriculum passes, he says he will insist that high-school biology textbooks point out specific aspects of the fossil record that, in his view, undermine the theory that all life on Earth is descended from primitive scraps of genetic material that first emerged in the primordial muck about 3.9 billion years ago
Depending on what those "specific aspects" are, this could in fact be actual, hard science in these textbooks.
He also wants the texts to make the case that individual cells are far too complex to have evolved by chance mutation and natural selection
But this claim is bollocks... Yeah, and I don't think a photon could ever be a wave and a particle at the same time, because gosh, that just doesn't fit my preconceptions. It's more a comment that he doesn't want to believe in evolution, than anything resembling evidence.
This chairman is clearly incompetent in science -- not because he disbelieves evolution, but because he can't or won't distinguish a scientific argument from a non-scientific one.
P.S. I'm inclined to think his first category of evidence also boils down to "I don't think this could work" but since TFA lacks details I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
A good scientist would also doubt that all life on Earth descended from one common ancestor. Who is to say for, for example, that early life didn't arise spontaneously in more than one place at (approximately) the same geologic time?
The difference between science and religion is that science can change when new evidence becomes available. When I was in grade school, Pluto was a planet and dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Pointing out areas in evolutionary biology where evidence is lacking, or conclusions are uncertain, would be fully compatible with a rigorous scientific education.
But if the pro-evolution camp were to admit that it's OK to question scientific conclusions, that would open up the possibility of the religious right getting something they want. Atheists would generally rather misrepresent science than do that.
Slashdot Mirror
They call it a "city," but it looks to me like just another housing development (with a solar-energy gimmick, as opposed to a golf-course gimmick).
I don't know about the merits of clean coal, but anyone who spouts made-up verbs like those must have his head up his ass.
And it would be smart to store the key/passphrase on paper in a safe, in case you get hit by a bus and your partner/assistant urgently needs a client's file. IANAL.
Buddy, if you think American politicians are criminals, you've had a sheltered life. My wife's great-grandfather was shot by Communists and thrown in a river just because he owned a business. In a totally different country, my great-grandfather's parents were murdered because they were nobility and the ruling nobility decided to seize their estates. 20th/21st century Americans? Small time at best. You don't know how good you have it.
Depends on your definition of "crime." Taking away people's freedoms can be effective in preventing "crime" meaning doing harm to others, but of course it's even more effective in promoting "crime" meaning doing things the government says you're not permitted to do. The more laws get past, the more stark the distinction between those two definitions becomes.
No, but having those things mean you have the ability to do things the government doesn't want you to do. The easiest way to prevent crime is to take away everyone's freedom.
As a citizen, I would say, "no." I don't want the government to waste effort training people in skills that are useless in the marketplace. I do not, in general, want the government to do stupid things. I fail to see how that would benefit me at all.
Except the part about the new product being better than the open one. ;-)
Now, I have serious questions about that approach as well, but it seems to me a lot more reasonable that trying to tinker with the Earth's albedo.
It's only the rules that are open source, not adventures and campaign setting material. So, for example, the Forgotten Realms (most popular RPG setting of all time) is WotC's intellectual property and under their total control.
However, WotC cannot stop other companies making D&D-like games, settings, adventures, and products for 3.x rules -- as long as they're not called "D&D". Several companies are still doing that. Which makes WotC's move to take themselves out of the 3.x market especially stupid. In the hopes of driving more players to 4E, they're ceding the 3.x legacy market to their competitors.
Back when Wizards of the Coast took over D&D, one of the striking things then-Vice President Ryan Dancey said was that TSR (the former publisher) has obviously not listened to customers and had lost relevancy for that reason.
Now, Ryan Dancey is no longer at WotC, and WotC is not listening to customers, and what do you know? WotC is losing relevancy. People are going to buy the products they want, in the format they want, from the retailer they want, and you can never make them buy something different. It's as simple as that.
Fortunately the 3.x rules are open source so D&D can never die, in spite of WotC's seemingly intentional efforts to run their business into the ground. It just can't be called D&D for trademark reasons.
Good news for you: a number of popular Windows games (such as Civ 4) run well in Wine. (hint: look up "winetricks" and use that) Some versions of MS money are reported to work, though I have not tried them. You might instead want to try installing GNUCash for Windows and see how easy it is to migrate your data.
As to your dual-boot issues: I have not had the same problem as you, but I do sympathize. I think dual-boot support has come a long way in the past few years. If you back up your Windows registry before you install Linux, you should at least not have to re-install all your apps if things go wrong.
This would make a lot of sense for training Marines, but why a mass market game? They say they want to tell their stories, but that's what memoirs are for. Looks to me like they are out to make a buck.
What a reasonable person would consider "available" has changed since 1990. Some kind of machine assistance (full-text search today, semantic Web tomorrow) is increasingly important to making information discoverable and usable. A non-digitized book sitting in the stacks cannot be evaluated except by going to the library, getting physical access, and physically paging through it. This reminds me of the the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the bypass-construction plans were on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory of the basement of the Planning Office.
In other words, the library catalogue as it existed c. 1990 is obsolete, and the catalogue of the 21st century is full text search. A book that can't be searched, can't be catalgoued.
"Sounds like Da Vinci and his helicopter to me."
Well put. That's my point, and why I said "[t]his is not to understate the importance of his work." I am not so much putting down Alcubierre as I am putting down the summary, which asserts he "figured out how to build a warp drive." Not true, and Alcubierre would probably be the first one to tell you that.
What Alcubierre did was prove that faster-than-light travel within a bubble of spacetime does not conflict with the laws of general relativity. What he didn't do was figure out exactly how to generate that bubble of spacetime. In fact I don't believe any laboratory experiments were involved.
In other words, he was pretty damn far from figuring out how to build anything. This is not to understate the importance of his work -- he never claimed to have invented anything practical or even to have set out to invent anything.
NSA started SELinux but stopped development several years ago. Or at least, stopped sharing what they developed. ;-)
FAT is so... 1980's. Although it's a pity TomTom had to settle, FAT support seems like a feature unlikely to be missed.
Yeah. Without a court ruling one way or the other, we have no indication whether Microsoft's strategy Free/Open Source software using patents (see the Halloween Documents) will be upheld by the courts. That sword is still dangling over Linux and other F/OSS developers.
And doesn't understand jack about theology, either.
It's really the only way to have some kind of paid file sharing and still preserve individual "ownership" of copyright (as opposed to corporate "ownership"). If I were a Canadian musician, I'd be glad to be offered a chance to opt-out of this system (though I would probably not actually opt-out).
No, I'm suggesting that a textbook that claims life arose from one common origin is disingenuous.
And if when Steam goes out of business you can still play the game.
You didn't RTFA, did you? Two specific proposals on the table:
Depending on what those "specific aspects" are, this could in fact be actual, hard science in these textbooks.
But this claim is bollocks... Yeah, and I don't think a photon could ever be a wave and a particle at the same time, because gosh, that just doesn't fit my preconceptions. It's more a comment that he doesn't want to believe in evolution, than anything resembling evidence.
This chairman is clearly incompetent in science -- not because he disbelieves evolution, but because he can't or won't distinguish a scientific argument from a non-scientific one.
P.S. I'm inclined to think his first category of evidence also boils down to "I don't think this could work" but since TFA lacks details I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
A good scientist would also doubt that all life on Earth descended from one common ancestor. Who is to say for, for example, that early life didn't arise spontaneously in more than one place at (approximately) the same geologic time?
The difference between science and religion is that science can change when new evidence becomes available. When I was in grade school, Pluto was a planet and dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Pointing out areas in evolutionary biology where evidence is lacking, or conclusions are uncertain, would be fully compatible with a rigorous scientific education.
But if the pro-evolution camp were to admit that it's OK to question scientific conclusions, that would open up the possibility of the religious right getting something they want. Atheists would generally rather misrepresent science than do that.