The very day Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott became a co-sponsor of the bill, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, the Disney Political Action Committee donated $1,000 to his campaign chest; within a month, it had also sent $20,000 in soft money to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. [...] There is no better example that I can imagine, literally, of Congress caving in to small, highly focused special interests.
Hm, that does put those recent statements of the ex-Echelon guy about corruption outside of the US in a rather ironic light, doesn't it?
For me, at least, spam is not near as big a problem as are circulars - at least in the realm of how many I receive per day.
Well, in the country I come from (Germany) it costs me almost no effort to get no circulars at all. A simple sticker on the mailbox stating "No Ads" is sufficient. Is there no such thing in the US? Pity it isn't that easy to get rid of spam once and for all...
the "Peaceful Revolution" in the former GDR, the fall of the Berlin wall and German reunification
the "Good Friday Agreement" (and hopefully soon lasting peace) in Northern-Ireland
the liberation of Nelson Mandela and the end of separatism in South Africa
the end of socialism and the end of the suppression in most eastern European countries - hell, most of them are even on the waiting list for the EU now
the introduction of the Euro
and many more...
That's a hell of a lot of important historic events. As "historic events" go, I'd say the millenium is amongst the least important ones - so who cares?
Correct if I'm wrong but I think that sound quality mainly depends of speakers/amplifiers, so if you play dvd-audio with normal stereos you get worse sound quality than with high-end cd system
Widespread myth, that. Fact is, the further you get to the front of the HiFi chain, the better the quality must be. Reason: Each and every mistake your source (i.e. turntable/arm/cartridge (in that order), CD player, tape deck, etc.) makes cannot be corrected by the amplifier or the speakers. In many cases it will even be, well, amplified...
Hence, there's a fair chance that a CD player with a high-end amplifier and high-end speakers sounds worse than a high-end record-player (plus suitable preamp) or DVD player (if they keep the promises they make about quality - I have yet to listen to one) with an average amp/speakers.
The transition to digital audio (via CD) was easy for most people to make, since the difference in quality was obvious.
No, unfortunately it's not. Of course, the music industry wants us to believe it, as they were able to make oodles of money out of the changeover from LP to CD, but it wasn't quality. Try pitting a high-end, state-of-the-art record player versus a CD (quality recordings assumed) and be surprised.
Of course, in the "budget", consumer standard realm, the quality difference was obvious - and that in combination with the "easier handling" was good enough to get the majority to spend money on perceived upgrades.
(Now, where have I seen such tactic before outside the music business...:-})
Which is one of the reasons why this whole DVD encryption business is so flaming annoying, as I'd actually be interested in finding out whether the new system finally has a chance of matching analogue techniques - but not with the mess they're making out of it now, no sir!
So we'll see what happens. I'm sticking to my 2500 LPs, my kilobuck phono cartridge, [...]
Amen to that, even if I'll probably never manage to collect that many vinyls... It's getting harder these days, though there seems to be a revival taking place: More and more titles are released on LP as well - or re-released (180g and suchlikes...).
My friend, you obviously never had the chance to sit down in a comfortable chair in a quiet room in front of the speakers of a high quality stereo for an hour or two... Ahhh.... Bliss!:-)
IIRC, the idea is to crank up the sampling rate and the bitrate to improve the quality of sound reproduction - to *finally* be able to compete with decent vinyl LPs on decent record players... Until then give me an LP anytime.
Cheerio,
Thomas
Re:Dandy for Windows, but bites for other OS's
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
As for other OSes: SunOS/Solaris Sparcs have had similar keys (Meta or "Diamond") for ages and I usually use them for tasks like desktop switching and the likes. I sorely miss them on the PC, as mine doesn't have the *doze keys (which can be programmed to function as "Meta" as well). And don't the Apples have their "Apple" keys as well?
TRi
Re:German keyboards are even worse
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
Now this is stupid - sorry. Localised keyboards were - in most cases - not build for programmers, but for typists. And those folks - surprise! - are far more interested in having the special characters of a given language close at hand than they would be in having characters like "[" or "}" close at hand. I myself was pretty glad to have a German keyboard while writing my thesis, as all umlauts were easily typed. Of course, I ran into slight problems with brackets (we're talking LaTeX here), but that was easily remedied by a couple of well placed keyboard macros in XEmacs (which already has good shortcuts for LaTeX anyway, at least with auxtex). One could also argue the other way round: It is unfortunate that all programming languages seem to be centered around the U.S. keyboard layout - highly annoying indeed... >:->
Do you have faintest idea about the communism? Were you born in one? Well, I was, and I've lived much of my life in it.
With all due respect: I doubt that. Why? Because there hasn't been a single communist country on this planet so far. There have been oodles of half-assed dictatorships using whatever excuses and lables to keep their people down but there hasn't been a single communist state. And why? Because communism is the same as true christianity (and other religions and other -isms): It's utopia. It'll always fail due to mankinds inherent selfishness. Same goes for capitalism, by the way.
Of course you are. The latest rumours going round are that the NSA uses Echelon for business espionage for US companies as well - and they don't care whom they spy on, be it friend or enemy. Of course, most European gouvernements don't want to touch on this topic, as officially, the US are still our allies and friends. I believe the "friends" part when it comes to the US people, but not when it comes to businesses... My opinion is: Get rid of all that stuff.
I found the article and test very intesting. I don't buy the conspiracy theory at all. IMHO the test is a valid one - what would the experience by of a "typical" Corporate type user who sets up a web server.
Well, I tend to agree. However, I wonder: Would that '"typical" Corporate type user' also not apply any service packs to NT? If so, was NT installed "out-of-the-box" in that test or with service packs applied? What would be a "comparable patchlevel" for both systems in such a test?
The way I see it, there are several possible reasons for the paper flood:
Handling 1: You simply can't take your electronic notes to a meeting - at least not that easily
Handling 2: Nothing is as portable as a sheet of paper - you can read through it everywhere, whereas for electronic texts, you need to sit down in front of a screen or at least own a laptop or similar (which is not as nice to handle)
Handling 3: Ever tried to mark an important text passage in a PDF file you didn't write yourself and to which you only have read access?
Distrust: Most people still have a very deep distrust when it comes to computers. The fear to loose informations in case of a crash is always there. Unfortunately, over the past years, this fear has been nourished by the shoddy quality of most consumer computer products (H/W and S/W), like e.g. by a certain company in Redmond... (SCNR).
Ergonomy: Even with very good monitors, many people (including me) find text on paper easier on the eyes than text on screens.
I wonder how these obtacles could be overcome - something like "electronic paper", maybe. It would have to be extremely easy to use, however, otherwise it won't catch on.
For the most part,/. is widely viewed by American Internet users.
Hm - do you mean American or U.S.? America is still a bit bigger than the U.S., last I checked...;-)
As for U.S. freedom: Sure, the problem is just that the freedom seems to stop rather abruptly as as soon as somebody else manages to get one of these weird U.S. patents and thinks you're infringing on it or when you do anthing related to cryptography and try to export it. Yup, looks like freedom... >:-> Not to mention all those funny state laws that go round the Internet to amuse the rest of the world - wasn't there even a state(district/whatever) where it's illegal to have sex before marriage or suchlike? Very free indeed...
Take it with a pinch of salt, though. I'm actually convinced that overall the U.S.A. aren't any more or less free than any other working democracy on this planet. I just get the impression that different countries seem to have very different notions of freedom - and I doubt that it's possible to judge one to be better than the other.
Yes and no - probably some bad code on the page. The text is there (the "complete story" link is just a pointer into the same page a bit lower), just doesn't get displayed. Use Lynx to access that page and you can read it.
I wonder. I was thinking about the implications of speech recognition quite a while ago and my personal conclusion was that it's way overrated. In many of nowaday's office situations, I'd deem it highly impractical. Imagine your typical, large office with let's say some 40 or 50 cubicles. Now imagine all of these people trying to get their respective computers to do what they want by voice. Can you imagine the noise level in that office? The amount of chattering? Horrifying! Background noise in a large office is bad enough as is without everybody talking to their computers as well, thank you very much...
What I'll probably never understand (being a Christian myself - Roman Catholic, actually, though I don't think John Paul would like me very much...) is, why on earth are there so many self proclaimed Christians who have so little faith? You don't seem to have much trust in our God, do you? Because if you did, you wouldn't see His/Her position threatened by things like evolution - because there simply is no contradiction! Yes, I believe that the evolution theory got it (mostly) right - but does that mean there is no God? No! Not at all. There still is and there always will be room for God, even if Mankind progresses more and more in their quest to understand the world. I can see that myself - daily, as I'm an electronics engineer. Taking things apart to find out how they work is part of my job - but it hasn't killed my belief at all. Quite the contrary - the more I learn about how our world ticks, right down into the smallest details, the more I am amazed and fascinated - and convinced, that it is somehow God's work as well.
As for why Christians tend to get slagged more than others: Simple, really - among still existing religions with a horrible history, Christianity is probably the biggest one. Over the last centuries, Christians went out of their way to show how much Christians can violate the very base of their own faith. How many missionaries brought the sword instead of God's word? How many people died at the hands of some inquisitor, just because they happened to interpret Christianity differently from him? How often did the Churches suppress, threaten, kill and maim - even each other! And even nowadays, they still don't stop (ab)using their "faith" as an excuse for anything up to murder (Northern Ireland, anybody?). How many hypoctitical gouvernments are there, who swear an oath on the Bible - and then order the next shipload of weapons? Can't see many Christians speaking up against the last military budget or against pollution (a Sin against God's nature!)!? That dark history is hard to get rid off, very hard - even I find it difficult at times to justify the fact that I'm still a member of a Christian church. Too much hypocrism. Amazing, that I still keep faith and hope...
If I am correct, you are not required to teach biblical creation, then why force another belief just because it is considered to be a scientific theory (which has not been proved). [...] Surley this is good thing, that it is no longer required to teach a belief that has not been proved
I hope you're aware of the danger that lies in this statement. If you have any experience in science at all, you will undoubtedly be aware that basically nothing can be proven in the field of sciences - only disproven (as was pointed out by another comment in this thread). Now, if I take your statement and this fact about sciences, the obvious conclusion would be that no science should be taught at our schools, wouldn't it? I doubt that that was your intention - or was it?
Also, might it be possible to hit MS for all the reverse engineering they do?
Makes me wonder: If you're not even allowed to take their software apart, how do you prove that they did reverse engineer parts of it? Or, to take this further: How, for example, could we prove that they're using GPLed stuff?
Errm - nobody forces you to configure fvwm to look like Windows... Before switching to Window Maker, I was using fvwm2 for two years and it never looked even close to Windows...
First off, a well designed NT box is faster and more stable than Linux. Period. You can argue personal experience all you want, but all that means is that you don't know how to build an NT box.
Yeah, that's about the classic answer one hears when complaining about NT's reliability. Funny thing is: MS claims that a) "NT is easy to administer" and b) "NT is reliable". Now, your statement proves that at least one of those statements must be wrong...
Well, if spelling and grammar become less and less important, so will understanding each other... The human brain's parser is quite fault tolerant but has its limits...:-}
Slashdot Mirror
The very day Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott became a co-sponsor of the bill, the Center for Responsive Politics reports, the Disney Political Action Committee donated $1,000 to his campaign chest; within a month, it had also sent $20,000 in soft money to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
[...]
There is no better example that I can imagine, literally, of Congress caving in to small, highly focused special interests.
Hm, that does put those recent statements of the ex-Echelon guy about corruption outside of the US in a rather ironic light, doesn't it?
Argathin
For me, at least, spam is not near as big a problem as are circulars - at least in the realm of how many I receive per day.
Well, in the country I come from (Germany) it costs me almost no effort to get no circulars at all. A simple sticker on the mailbox stating "No Ads" is sufficient. Is there no such thing in the US?
Pity it isn't that easy to get rid of spam once and for all...
Argathin
That's a hell of a lot of important historic events. As "historic events" go, I'd say the millenium is amongst the least important ones - so who cares?
My EUR0.02,
Thomas
Correct if I'm wrong but I think that sound quality mainly depends of speakers/amplifiers, so if you play dvd-audio with normal stereos you get worse sound quality than with high-end cd system
Widespread myth, that. Fact is, the further you get to the front of the HiFi chain, the better the quality must be. Reason: Each and every mistake your source (i.e. turntable/arm/cartridge (in that order), CD player, tape deck, etc.) makes cannot be corrected by the amplifier or the speakers. In many cases it will even be, well, amplified...
Hence, there's a fair chance that a CD player with a high-end amplifier and high-end speakers sounds worse than a high-end record-player (plus suitable preamp) or DVD player (if they keep the promises they make about quality - I have yet to listen to one) with an average amp/speakers.
Cheerio,
Thomas
The transition to digital audio (via CD) was easy for most people to make, since the difference in quality was obvious.
:-})
No, unfortunately it's not. Of course, the music industry wants us to believe it, as they were able to make oodles of money out of the changeover from LP to CD, but it wasn't quality. Try pitting a high-end, state-of-the-art record player versus a CD (quality recordings assumed) and be surprised.
Of course, in the "budget", consumer standard realm, the quality difference was obvious - and that in combination with the "easier handling" was good enough to get the majority to spend money on perceived upgrades.
(Now, where have I seen such tactic before outside the music business...
Which is one of the reasons why this whole DVD encryption business is so flaming annoying, as I'd actually be interested in finding out whether the new system finally has a chance of matching analogue techniques - but not with the mess they're making out of it now, no sir!
Cheerio,
Thomas
So we'll see what happens. I'm sticking to my 2500 LPs, my kilobuck phono cartridge, [...]
Amen to that, even if I'll probably never manage to collect that many vinyls... It's getting harder these days, though there seems to be a revival taking place: More and more titles are released on LP as well - or re-released (180g and suchlikes...).
Thomas
My friend, you obviously never had the chance to sit down in a comfortable chair in a quiet room in front of the speakers of a high quality stereo for an hour or two... Ahhh.... Bliss! :-)
Thomas
IIRC, the idea is to crank up the sampling rate and the bitrate to improve the quality of sound reproduction - to *finally* be able to compete with decent vinyl LPs on decent record players...
Until then give me an LP anytime.
Cheerio,
Thomas
As for other OSes: SunOS/Solaris Sparcs have had similar keys (Meta or "Diamond") for ages and I usually use them for tasks like desktop switching and the likes. I sorely miss them on the PC, as mine doesn't have the *doze keys (which can be programmed to function as "Meta" as well).
And don't the Apples have their "Apple" keys as well?
TRi
Now this is stupid - sorry. Localised keyboards were - in most cases - not build for programmers, but for typists. And those folks - surprise! - are far more interested in having the special characters of a given language close at hand than they would be in having characters like "[" or "}" close at hand. I myself was pretty glad to have a German keyboard while writing my thesis, as all umlauts were easily typed. Of course, I ran into slight problems with brackets (we're talking LaTeX here), but that was easily remedied by a couple of well placed keyboard macros in XEmacs (which already has good shortcuts for LaTeX anyway, at least with auxtex).
One could also argue the other way round: It is unfortunate that all programming languages seem to be centered around the U.S. keyboard layout - highly annoying indeed... >:->
Cheerio,
TRi
Do you have faintest idea about the communism? Were you born in one? Well, I was, and I've lived much of my life in it.
With all due respect: I doubt that. Why? Because there hasn't been a single communist country on this planet so far. There have been oodles of half-assed dictatorships using whatever excuses and lables to keep their people down but there hasn't been a single communist state.
And why? Because communism is the same as true christianity (and other religions and other -isms): It's utopia. It'll always fail due to mankinds inherent selfishness. Same goes for capitalism, by the way.
Cheerio,
Thomas
(im in the UK, so it doesnt affect me, sorry)
Of course you are. The latest rumours going round are that
the NSA uses Echelon for business espionage for US companies
as well - and they don't care whom they spy on,
be it friend or enemy. Of course, most European gouvernements
don't want to touch on this topic, as officially, the US are still
our allies and friends.
I believe the "friends" part when it comes to the US people,
but not when it comes to businesses...
My opinion is: Get rid of all that stuff.
My EUR0.02,
Thomas
Have you seen the corresponding standard?
And both of them seem to ISO as well...
Pity that they want £20.- from non-members to get any of them...
Thomas
I found the article and test very intesting. I don't buy the conspiracy theory at all. IMHO the test is a valid one - what would the experience by of a "typical" Corporate type user who sets up a web server.
Well, I tend to agree. However, I wonder: Would that '"typical" Corporate type user' also not apply any service packs to NT? If so, was NT installed "out-of-the-box" in that test or with service packs applied? What would be a "comparable patchlevel" for both systems in such a test?
Any thoughts?
Thomas
I wonder how these obtacles could be overcome - something like "electronic paper", maybe. It would have to be extremely easy to use, however, otherwise it won't catch on.
My 2 Eurocent,
Thomas
For the most part, /. is widely viewed by American Internet users.
;-)
Hm - do you mean American or U.S.? America is still a bit bigger than the U.S., last I checked...
As for U.S. freedom: Sure, the problem is just that the freedom seems to stop rather abruptly as as soon as somebody else manages to get one of these weird U.S. patents and thinks you're infringing on it or when you do anthing related to cryptography and try to export it. Yup, looks like freedom... >:->
Not to mention all those funny state laws that go round the Internet to amuse the rest of the world - wasn't there even a state(district/whatever) where it's illegal to have sex before marriage or suchlike? Very free indeed...
Take it with a pinch of salt, though. I'm actually convinced that overall the U.S.A. aren't any more or less free than any other working democracy on this planet. I just get the impression that different countries seem to have very different notions of freedom - and I doubt that it's possible to judge one to be better than the other.
HAND.
Argathin
Yes and no - probably some bad code on the page. The text is there (the "complete story" link is just a pointer into the same page a bit lower), just doesn't get displayed.
Use Lynx to access that page and you can read it.
Argathin
I wonder. I was thinking about the implications of speech recognition quite a while ago and my personal conclusion was that it's way overrated. In many of nowaday's office situations, I'd deem it highly impractical. Imagine your typical, large office with let's say some 40 or 50 cubicles. Now imagine all of these people trying to get their respective computers to do what they want by voice. Can you imagine the noise level in that office? The amount of chattering? Horrifying!
Background noise in a large office is bad enough as is without everybody talking to their computers as well, thank you very much...
Argathin
What I'll probably never understand (being a Christian myself - Roman Catholic, actually, though I don't think John Paul would like me very much...) is, why on earth are there so many self proclaimed Christians who have so little faith? You don't seem to have much trust in our God, do you? Because if you did, you wouldn't see His/Her position threatened by things like evolution - because there simply is no contradiction! Yes, I believe that the evolution theory got it (mostly) right - but does that mean there is no God? No! Not at all. There still is and there always will be room for God, even if Mankind progresses more and more in their quest to understand the world.
I can see that myself - daily, as I'm an electronics engineer. Taking things apart to find out how they work is part of my job - but it hasn't killed my belief at all. Quite the contrary - the more I learn about how our world ticks, right down into the smallest details, the more I am amazed and fascinated - and convinced, that it is somehow God's work as well.
As for why Christians tend to get slagged more than others: Simple, really - among still existing religions with a horrible history, Christianity is probably the biggest one. Over the last centuries, Christians went out of their way to show how much Christians can violate the very base of their own faith. How many missionaries brought the sword instead of God's word? How many people died at the hands of some inquisitor, just because they happened to interpret Christianity differently from him? How often did the Churches suppress, threaten, kill and maim - even each other! And even nowadays, they still don't stop (ab)using their "faith" as an excuse for anything up to murder (Northern Ireland, anybody?). How many hypoctitical gouvernments are there, who swear an oath on the Bible - and then order the next shipload of weapons? Can't see many Christians speaking up against the last military budget or against pollution (a Sin against God's nature!)!?
That dark history is hard to get rid off, very hard - even I find it difficult at times to justify the fact that I'm still a member of a Christian church. Too much hypocrism.
Amazing, that I still keep faith and hope...
Argathin
If I am correct, you are not required to teach biblical creation, then why force another belief just because it is considered to be a scientific theory (which has not been proved).
[...]
Surley this is good thing, that it is no longer required to teach a belief that has not been proved
I hope you're aware of the danger that lies in this statement. If you have any experience in science at all, you will undoubtedly be aware that basically nothing can be proven in the field of sciences - only disproven (as was pointed out by another comment in this thread).
Now, if I take your statement and this fact about sciences, the obvious conclusion would be that no science should be taught at our schools, wouldn't it? I doubt that that was your intention - or was it?
Argathin
Also, might it be possible to hit MS for all the reverse engineering they do?
Makes me wonder: If you're not even allowed to take their software apart, how do you prove that they did reverse engineer parts of it?
Or, to take this further: How, for example, could we prove that they're using GPLed stuff?
Worried (even though not located in U.S.A.),
Argathin
[fwvm / Windows look]
Errm - nobody forces you to configure fvwm to look like Windows... Before switching to Window Maker, I was using fvwm2 for two years and it never looked even close to Windows...
Ciao,
Argathin
First off, a well designed NT box is faster and more stable than Linux. Period. You can argue personal experience all you want, but all that means is that you don't know how to build an NT box.
Yeah, that's about the classic answer one hears when complaining about NT's reliability. Funny thing is: MS claims that a) "NT is easy to administer" and b) "NT is reliable". Now, your statement proves that at least one of those statements must be wrong...
Argathin
Contrary to English, the grammar etc. is extremely simple.
;-)
Since when does English have grammar? Just follow any exchange in English on the Web or Usenet and you'll see what I mean...
Argathin
Well, if spelling and grammar become less and less important, so will understanding each other... The human brain's parser is quite fault tolerant but has its limits... :-}
;-)
See also: Euro-English for the extreme...
Argathin (who's European, too)