I could say that Pluto is just a 2,500 mile-wide hunk of ice.
You could say that, but you'd be wrong. It's only 1,413 miles wide, smaller than the Moon, as you'd have discovered had you read the article. This has a lot to do with why the Rose Center demoted it.
I'd say a center devoted to astronomical education has a whole lot more authority to decide what is and is not a planet than the general public. Pluto has the composition of a comet and shares an orbit with 70 other objects that are definitely comets. Ergo it's a comet, albeit a large one.
Well, you see, we fought a revolution because of how disgusted we were with the way the government we had at the time was interfering in our affairs. That government was so invasive, and so incompetent that we've never really trusted any government since.
It's not our problem if the resident of the UK think that exact same government is just the cat's meow.
A special tax on gasoline to compensate banks that have been robbed. All bank robbers use gasoline in their getaway cars.
An additional tax on water, to compensate law enforcement agencies for drug enforcement costs. Water is widely used in the cultivation of cannabis and other narcotic plants.
A tax on wood, for the same purpose. Wood is used in the construction of most buildings that are converted to meth labs.
A tax on Italian food. As everyone knows from the movies, most Mafia business is conducted in Italian restaurants.
A Twinkie tax, the proceeds of which will go to the victims of those murdered by crazed junk food addicts.
A pen tax, used to compensate copyright holders whose works are illegally copied out by hand.
And to think most governments are missing out on all these...
The article reminded me of the episode where it was Mrs. Slocombe's birthday and the rest of the staff all chipped in for a gift. After giving it to her they passed the box around making cryptic comments about it, like "I've always wanted one of those!" "I've never actually seen one before!" "Oh, I've had one for years. I don't know what I'd do without it."
Carr seems not to notice that not a single one of his concerns about the Internet could not also apply to the print media. Print was much more pervasive in its heyday, when every major city had 4 or 5 major newspapers, than the Internet is likely to be even 10 years from now, but nobody ever dreamed of regulating it. All newspapers, even nowadays, print unmitigated drivel from time to time, but they're only liable for it if it causes harm to someone. Carr offers no compelling reason to hold online content to a stricter legal standard than that.
1? I doubt it applies, and probably the opposite is true. An angel or VC would probably be pleased to see a bloated dot-com trim some employees. They'd likely see it as a responsible act to make the company more viable and be more willing to pony up some cash.
2? Unforseeable? Anyone who didn't see the dot-com crash coming had his head stuck up where the sun don't shine. Do any of these companies have a business plan that involves taking in enough money to meet expenses?
No doubt they'll try to invoke 1) or 2), but who'd believe it?
So now all the lawsuits can be kept inhouse, right? They only need one legal team so costs are kept way down, the discovery phase will take nowhere near as long since all the documents are kept in the same office, and they win no matter which way the ruling goes.
As far as I can see, this is a win-win deal any way you look at it!
Perhaps, although if you want to get really technical, an email isn't communication until it's sent. The FBI is doing the interception before that happens, and they see no incoming emails with this scheme. It's rather akin to bugging a room where someone's talking on the telephone.
I'm far more comfortable with this sort of approach, where a single individual is monitored after law enforcement officials go through appropriate due process, than I could ever be with something like Carnivore which, with a slip of the configuration file, can indiscriminately intercept communications from anyone on the network.
This isn't really any different than what the FBI goes through to put a tap on the telephone line. When they're going after organized crime, this sort of thing is both necessary and proper -- as long as it is governed by due process of law and nobody's privacy is needlessly invaded.
The point-zero software problem is *not* a good thing, and it's not really a valid excuse for this situation. It's an industry-wide embarrassment that Transmeta is no more immune to than any other company. If anything, this proves that they do not walk on water no matter how famous any of their employees happen to be.
I honestly don't think it makes Transmeta look particularly good to mention that certain companies are notorious for treating their customers very poorly indeed when problems arise. If you think that it's OK for a company to foist defective products on the public and then not take any responsibility for them, then I wish you everything you expect.
Hey, this is version 1.0 of a product with a significant software component. Of course it doesn't work right!
It could have been worse. If Transmeta were more like M$ they'd have shipped several million units before announcing the problem, and then charged you for an "upgrade" to fix the bug. If they were more like Intel they'd just deny that anyone should care, and you'd have to show that you had a good reason for caring before they'd replace the chip.
Is it my imagination or does this seem strange for a company that seems to understand
the Open Source idea?
No, it's not at all strange. They're supporting the distro they actually know. How much money do you expect a for profit company to devote to supporting a product they neither sell nor have anything to do with the development of? And it's not just one product, there's easily a half-dozen distros that can be thought of as "major brands," and if IBM supports one they have no excuse for not supporting them all. Sure, they might make a small minority of their customers happy this way, but it can hardly be worth it for them.
That's ridiculous. It's a good thing to teach people to program, regardless of the slant of the instruction (ok, maybe not if it's BASIC/VB etc), because the foundation can be applied to anything.
I think it was exactly the point of the rant that programming was not really being taught. The Windows API was being taught. Without algorithms, without being required to approach a more general class of problems, where's the programming? Where's the foundation?
The Manifesto itself demonstrates why online documents without links are a pain. Look at that list of documents at the end. (Interestingly, only two of them are gopher sites; the rest are http or nntp.) Wouldn't it be convenient to be able to just click on one of them and have the referenced document delivered to your browser? And here they're citing the lack of links within documents as an advantage.
The academics also hailed the Silicon Valley as the world's pre-eminent "technopole"--a "land of hyperbole and image" where lucrative jobs are more abundant than palm trees, and uninitiated technophiles make life-transforming "pilgrimages to a sacred center."
Well, palm trees aren't native to this part of the world, so I should hope that jobs of any description are more abundant than they are here.
The city of San Jose has been planting quite a few of the things (trees, not jobs) as part of it's downtown renewal project. They look stupid.
The BRA comment was obviously a joke, like the one in Russia about Putin travelling to America to instruct Americans in how to hold a democratic election. If you get so upset about it, perhaps it touched a nerve?
No more than any other mediocre joke after the first dozen or so repetitions.
I prefer our system where a party that gets more than 4% gets representation.
And which system would that be exactly? "Anonymous Coward" sounds pretty much the same no matter where he's from.
Besides, a party with far fewer votes than that, taken nationally, can gain representation in Congress. All it takes is for a majority of the voters in a single Congressional district to elect one. This is not at all unheard of. There are currently a number of independents, people affiliated with *no* party, in Congress right now.
Perhaps this is the reason countries with this system usually have an election turnout of over 80%, while it is called a success if less than 40% of voters quit in disgust in the US?
You make the common (both domestically and abroad) mistake of imuputing far more power to the President than he actually posesses. Although he is both the head of state and of government and has sole authority to conduct foreign policy, the only power he has over the legislature is the threat of a veto, and he cannot introduce legislation himself. The party of the President is not necessarily - in fact, almost never is - the party with a majority in Congress. Amazing when you consider there are only two parties in Congress these days, not counting independents.
But what you call "disgust" most observers call "apathy." Most nonvoters aren't interested enough in politics to get disgusted. It's possible to see this as a good thing (although I admit it's a bit of a stretch): Many Americans have such confidence in both parties they feel they can afford to be apathetic. They believe that no matter who wins there will be competent leadership - or at least, leadership that's no more incompetent than usual.
And how would that differ from the state of your democracy now, eh?
Ah, so you're not paying attention either. The current Congress has one more session before adjourning for the year, which they do every year regardless of elections as a matter of routine business. Bill Clinton, who is still (sadly) our President, remains in office until the new President is sworn in on January 20, 2001. A new President is never officially elected until the Electoral College meets in December anyway.
Besides, all rhetoric aside, the U.S. is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy.
How will any president from this election have any legitimacy?
Check out the U.S. Constitution. You'll find there's provision to deal with situations even more disturbed than this one. This is nothing, really. Research the election of Rutherford B. Hayes sometime.
A friend in Sweden tells me that the U.S.A. is now being referred to as the B.R.A., the Banana Republic of America.
This from a socialist country with a monarchy and a parliament. Your friend and his compatriots must not pay much attention to local politics in other industrialized countries with a parliamentary system, like, say, France, the UK, or.. oh, I don't know, Sweden. In these countries when no party has a clear majority, days or even weeks pass before a viable coalition can be formed and in the meantime they have no government.
I wasn't suggesting some vast government conspiracy, but class division in society suggests that your average elector is not your average american citizen, and therefore may have patrician views that don't reflect the popular will.
Did someone give you a history book to read recently? "Patrician," "plebe..." This ain't Rome, dude.
But in any event, you're wrong. The local paper out here profiled a few of the state's electors after the last presidential election. They're mostly ordinary folks, party rank-and-file, campaign workers or longstanding party faithful. They're about as patrician as you are.
Also, I find it amusing that you refer to my comment as paranoid, since you're the one saying that they would vote for Bush because they are chosen by the victorious party. If you're against Bush, then that is a paranoid statemtent, if you are for him, then it is an arrogant one.
I see you can't read, either. I had said:
If Bush wins in the recount, then all the electors in Florida will be Republicans who the party leadership is certain will vote for Bush.
What part of "if" do you not understand? Or, like Clinton, do you require definitions for even short words?
And yes, this is paranoia: Electorals can vote against public opinion in the case we plebes vote in someone that the current government thinks is a threat to the status-quo. How's that for democracy?
You evidently think there is some vast, secret government conspiracy controlling the votes of the electors. That's pure nonsense. The political parties supporting the candidates control the electors. This all above-board and not a secret to anyone who hasn't got his head stuck up where the sun don't shine. Go back to your X-Files fan club and stay out of serious political discussions, you're underqualified for them.
Oh yeah, and it's "electors", not "electorals." And the U.S.A. is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It's a democratic republic. Try reading books without pictures and word balloons in them sometime, you might learn something.
This asinine remark is "Insightful"? "-1: Paranoid" is more like it. Here's a civics lesson:
The electors are chosen by the victorious party as people who can reliably vote as that party directs. If Bush wins in the recount, then all the electors in Florida will be Republicans who the party leadership is certain will vote for Bush.
The "current government" has no control over the electors, who meet in their own states, not Washington DC. The are generally not people currently in public office and are not beholden to any governmental authority.
If it were a "pure" Democracy, where all that mattered was the percentage of popular vote the election would be over.
If the US were a "pure Democracy" we wouldn't have elected representatives at all. All legislation would be passed by the direct vote of the franchised population.
Now wouldn't that be nice? All our laws would be passed by the civic equivalent of first-posters: assholes with no jobs and far too much spare time on their hands.
Slashdot Mirror
You could say that, but you'd be wrong. It's only 1,413 miles wide, smaller than the Moon, as you'd have discovered had you read the article. This has a lot to do with why the Rose Center demoted it.
I'd say a center devoted to astronomical education has a whole lot more authority to decide what is and is not a planet than the general public. Pluto has the composition of a comet and shares an orbit with 70 other objects that are definitely comets. Ergo it's a comet, albeit a large one.
It's not our problem if the resident of the UK think that exact same government is just the cat's meow.
And to think most governments are missing out on all these...
Every device in my house playas (sic) CD-R's
What, the toaster too? And the coffee maker? And the refrigerator? Where can I get ones like that?!
They never do tell you what it is.
Carr seems not to notice that not a single one of his concerns about the Internet could not also apply to the print media. Print was much more pervasive in its heyday, when every major city had 4 or 5 major newspapers, than the Internet is likely to be even 10 years from now, but nobody ever dreamed of regulating it. All newspapers, even nowadays, print unmitigated drivel from time to time, but they're only liable for it if it causes harm to someone. Carr offers no compelling reason to hold online content to a stricter legal standard than that.
2? Unforseeable? Anyone who didn't see the dot-com crash coming had his head stuck up where the sun don't shine. Do any of these companies have a business plan that involves taking in enough money to meet expenses?
No doubt they'll try to invoke 1) or 2), but who'd believe it?
As far as I can see, this is a win-win deal any way you look at it!
Perhaps, although if you want to get really technical, an email isn't communication until it's sent. The FBI is doing the interception before that happens, and they see no incoming emails with this scheme. It's rather akin to bugging a room where someone's talking on the telephone.
This isn't really any different than what the FBI goes through to put a tap on the telephone line. When they're going after organized crime, this sort of thing is both necessary and proper -- as long as it is governed by due process of law and nobody's privacy is needlessly invaded.
Indeed. Perhaps LaTeX should be examined, not as a replacement for HTML, but for Acrobat.
I honestly don't think it makes Transmeta look particularly good to mention that certain companies are notorious for treating their customers very poorly indeed when problems arise. If you think that it's OK for a company to foist defective products on the public and then not take any responsibility for them, then I wish you everything you expect.
It could have been worse. If Transmeta were more like M$ they'd have shipped several million units before announcing the problem, and then charged you for an "upgrade" to fix the bug. If they were more like Intel they'd just deny that anyone should care, and you'd have to show that you had a good reason for caring before they'd replace the chip.
No, it's not at all strange. They're supporting the distro they actually know. How much money do you expect a for profit company to devote to supporting a product they neither sell nor have anything to do with the development of? And it's not just one product, there's easily a half-dozen distros that can be thought of as "major brands," and if IBM supports one they have no excuse for not supporting them all. Sure, they might make a small minority of their customers happy this way, but it can hardly be worth it for them.
I think it was exactly the point of the rant that programming was not really being taught. The Windows API was being taught. Without algorithms, without being required to approach a more general class of problems, where's the programming? Where's the foundation?
Sadly, the moderators have stopped paying attention. You had some good stuff here.
Sheesh!
Oh, YES! HURD: The Pascal of Operating Systems!
The city of San Jose has been planting quite a few of the things (trees, not jobs) as part of it's downtown renewal project. They look stupid.
No more than any other mediocre joke after the first dozen or so repetitions.
I prefer our system where a party that gets more than 4% gets representation.
And which system would that be exactly? "Anonymous Coward" sounds pretty much the same no matter where he's from.
Besides, a party with far fewer votes than that, taken nationally, can gain representation in Congress. All it takes is for a majority of the voters in a single Congressional district to elect one. This is not at all unheard of. There are currently a number of independents, people affiliated with *no* party, in Congress right now.
Perhaps this is the reason countries with this system usually have an election turnout of over 80%, while it is called a success if less than 40% of voters quit in disgust in the US?
You make the common (both domestically and abroad) mistake of imuputing far more power to the President than he actually posesses. Although he is both the head of state and of government and has sole authority to conduct foreign policy, the only power he has over the legislature is the threat of a veto, and he cannot introduce legislation himself. The party of the President is not necessarily - in fact, almost never is - the party with a majority in Congress. Amazing when you consider there are only two parties in Congress these days, not counting independents.
But what you call "disgust" most observers call "apathy." Most nonvoters aren't interested enough in politics to get disgusted. It's possible to see this as a good thing (although I admit it's a bit of a stretch): Many Americans have such confidence in both parties they feel they can afford to be apathetic. They believe that no matter who wins there will be competent leadership - or at least, leadership that's no more incompetent than usual.
And how would that differ from the state of your democracy now, eh?
Ah, so you're not paying attention either. The current Congress has one more session before adjourning for the year, which they do every year regardless of elections as a matter of routine business. Bill Clinton, who is still (sadly) our President, remains in office until the new President is sworn in on January 20, 2001. A new President is never officially elected until the Electoral College meets in December anyway.
Besides, all rhetoric aside, the U.S. is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy.
How will any president from this election have any legitimacy?
Check out the U.S. Constitution. You'll find there's provision to deal with situations even more disturbed than this one. This is nothing, really. Research the election of Rutherford B. Hayes sometime.
This from a socialist country with a monarchy and a parliament. Your friend and his compatriots must not pay much attention to local politics in other industrialized countries with a parliamentary system, like, say, France, the UK, or.. oh, I don't know, Sweden. In these countries when no party has a clear majority, days or even weeks pass before a viable coalition can be formed and in the meantime they have no government.
We're a long way from that kind of chaos.
Did someone give you a history book to read recently? "Patrician," "plebe..." This ain't Rome, dude.
But in any event, you're wrong. The local paper out here profiled a few of the state's electors after the last presidential election. They're mostly ordinary folks, party rank-and-file, campaign workers or longstanding party faithful. They're about as patrician as you are.
I see you can't read, either. I had said:
If Bush wins in the recount, then all the electors in Florida will be Republicans who the party leadership is certain will vote for Bush.
What part of "if" do you not understand? Or, like Clinton, do you require definitions for even short words?
And yes, this is paranoia: Electorals can vote against public opinion in the case we plebes vote in someone that the current government thinks is a threat to the status-quo. How's that for democracy?
You evidently think there is some vast, secret government conspiracy controlling the votes of the electors. That's pure nonsense. The political parties supporting the candidates control the electors. This all above-board and not a secret to anyone who hasn't got his head stuck up where the sun don't shine. Go back to your X-Files fan club and stay out of serious political discussions, you're underqualified for them.
Oh yeah, and it's "electors", not "electorals." And the U.S.A. is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It's a democratic republic. Try reading books without pictures and word balloons in them sometime, you might learn something.
- The electors are chosen by the victorious party as people who can reliably vote as that party directs. If Bush wins in the recount, then all the electors in Florida will be Republicans who the party leadership is certain will vote for Bush.
- The "current government" has no control over the electors, who meet in their own states, not Washington DC. The are generally not people currently in public office and are not beholden to any governmental authority.
Now go out there and get a life.If the US were a "pure Democracy" we wouldn't have elected representatives at all. All legislation would be passed by the direct vote of the franchised population.
Now wouldn't that be nice? All our laws would be passed by the civic equivalent of first-posters: assholes with no jobs and far too much spare time on their hands.