Now if you where to define an "application" as a user-process that creates or has an active window, then most of those background processes would not cound as "applications" due to the fact that they only sit in the tray and only open a window when you click on them.
Of course someone may develop a threaded "loader" program to enable multiple applications to be loaded within the same user-process, thus bypassing the 3 application limit.
Even if the project itself hasn't achieved certain goals yet, it has definitely pushed the boundaries and created a whole new format for notebooks. We will get to the $100 laptop one day, and we are alot closer to it today than where a few years back.
Anyway would we have the EEE-PC if it was not for the OLPC???
Government supplied drugs do not need to be free, they could be produced commercially (with government quality controls), and sold through licensed chemists at market prices like other medicinal drugs. Due to the lack of patents, cost would be end up being similar to those of generic drugs. Not free, but cheap enough that an addiction could be sustained through legal employment without the need to resort to crime.
Government spending would be limited to licensing and regulatory oversight, such as it already does for other areas of commerce, which would be offset by sales tax. The cost of regulation would be far reduced from the current regulatory costs of police and prisons.
Would such a system increase drug use overall?
I believe statics from Holland after the decriminalization of cannabis showed an initial spike which tailed off after a few years and back to pre-decriminalization levels.
However decriminalization would likely increase the visibility of drug use within the non-drug using population. Many if not most drug users, use drugs responsibily and in moderation, while living normal and productive lives, but for obvious reasons generally don't discuss their drug use with non-drug users. Thus its usually when things go wrong that non-drug users will often first hear about a persons drug use.
Even if drug use where to increase, would the cost to society increase?
From a medical point of view, quality controls on production and the provision of medical quality information on effects, dosage, pharmacokinetics and drug-drug interactions (such as provided with prescription drugs), compared to buying a white power of unknown purity on the black market from a person without any associated information. Most recreational drugs can be relatively safe if used responsibily and in moderation, just like alcohol.
From a social point of view, even if assume a case of heavy addiction, it would least encourage enough responsibility to hold down a minimum wage job as a means of supporting their habit, which would be a far more reliable source of income over crime, which would also carry the risk of imprisonment without access to their drug of choice. Thus giving the addict an even greater incentive to stay within the law compared to non-addicts.
For many addicts, drug addiction is part of larger personal issues within their life, and sometimes a form of self-medication to deal with emotional issues, even if may even exacerbate the problems in the long run. However throwing them in prison will likely not address the underlying issues, exacerbate the persons problems and make steps such as employment that much harder to achieve, and also put solving the underlying issues even further out of reach.
As for the raging meth addict, if their addiction leads them to violence or anti-social behaviour, then they should be delt with like anybody else. A person should still be held accountable for their actions, even while under the influence (or while drunk).
If they can maintain their addiction while keeping their behaviour otherwise legally acceptable, then should be treated as a public-health issue, just like alcoholism. Without having to resort to crime to fund an addiction, their life is likely to be slightly less chaotic, and they are more likely to be able to discuss and eventually address their problems with the help and support of friends, family and their doctor.
Actually I fix this one within.bashrc, and create a wrapper function around vim, that detects if the file is editable or not, and asks if you want to prefix an sudo.
argc () {
count=0;
for arg in "$@"; do
if [[ ! "$arg" =~ '-' ]]; then count=$(($count+1)); fi;
done;
echo $count; }
vi () { if [[ `argc "$@"` > 1 ]]; then/usr/bin/vim $@;
elif [ $1 = '' ]; then/usr/bin/vim;
elif [ ! -f $1 ] || [ -w $1 ]; then/usr/bin/vim $@;
else
echo -n "File is readonly. Edit as root? (Y/n): "
read -n 1 yn; echo;
if [ "$yn" = 'n' ] || [ "$yn" = 'N' ];
then/usr/bin/vim $*;
else sudo/usr/bin/vim $*;
fi
fi
}
Use Ctrl-v and you can select a column of chars. You can copy, delete and paste them.
I have used this technique, along with vertical alignment of code, to quickly copy/paste a huge spreadsheet of expected results, into very exhaustive unit test code.
Also use:diffsplit <filename> to diff one file with another.
Use:diffget and:diffput to shift changes between the two files
Get the VCSCommand vim plugin (one of the most useful plugins, but there are many more), and do:VCSVimDiff r200 and get an interactive diff with your repository (svn,cvs,git) or things like:VCSBlame,:VCSCommit,:VCSLog,:VCSRevert etc
If you have two files open you can on diff mode using:diffthis and:diffoff
These are useful with prefixes::r!pwd (read `pwd` into to document):%!sort (sort all lines):'$lt;'>!sort | uniq (sort last visual selection, notice the pipe)
Another useful thing you can do is to bind a filter to a script, in your.vimrc, so you can yy pp a line, and get an instant commented debug line.
Note: My normal script has half a dozen regexps in the middle, for stripping out semicolons, function declarations, return statements, such that what gets printed is almost always a valid code statememnt. However slashdot can't tell my regexps apart from line line-noise and kept complaining about too many junk characters.
However its possible to write similar scripts for various languages, and for other simple tasks such as wrapping a for statement around an array variable.
Selecting a range in visual mode will actually set markers, thus you can select a range and do multiple:'s/FROM/TO/g replacements without having to reselect your lines.
Its useful when you do a replacement (:'<,'>s/FROM/TO/g), find its not quite right, undo (u), reload the last command from history (:<up>), correct it and retry.
The Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly on Christianity in part because it was damn expensive to reproduce books and most people couldn't read latin even if they had a copy. This gave them control over everyone who didn't want to go to hell. And they made damn sure everyone didn't want to go to hell.
The Church of Scientology doesn't have that luxury. Most people are literate, the information is in the common language (actually, I'm guessing more than one), and books are cheap to reproduce. So they have to use legal means to establish their monopoly. But they are using the same basic formula as the Catholic Church to control members and gain money.
The Church of Scientology has copyright and trademarks over the works/techniques of LRH. Most people are literate, but most Scientologists are heavily discouraged from reading/listening to anything critical of Scientology, which is termed "entheta" and would be considered a block to your spiritual progress. This gives them control over everybody who doesn't want "eternal damnation for all mankind". They use legal means to protect themselves against legal dangers, but they are using the same basic formula as the Catholic Church to control members and gain power, control and money.
The underlying issue here is the difference between scarcity based ecominics and abundance based economics.
Our current economic system is based around trying to address the problem of limited resources and a general situation of demand being greater than supply. The most scarce resources (relative to demand), have the highest monetary value, which restricts overall demand and rewards those who increase its supply. There are many perversions and inefficiencies within the system, and can create a lot of unnecessary work, but its worst except for the all the others so far.
Instead of using barter, we now use money. It is very fungible, but has no intrinsic value in of itself; its only value is based on its scarcity. For instance, if the US government simply printed enough money to give every man woman and child one million dollars, it would not instantly cure poverty (as we would all be millionaires), but rather cause sudden hyper-inflation as the value of money would adjust according to its newly perceived scarcity level.
The GPL is based on the underlying idea of abundance economics. We assume that supply can easily meet demand, and that value should be assigned based on natural abundance and intrinsic usefulness. The idea is to maximise the total "usefulness" in the system, rather than trying to optimise "who" has it.
With things like software, once the initial work has been invested to create it, the cost of making a second copy is negligible. Thus if we remove any artificial scarcities associated with it, such as a monetary cost, we can maximise its intrinsic value by offering everybody a copy (this assumes less people would want it if it had a monetary cost associated with it, and that bandwidth and storage space where sufficient).
Which is more valuable, diamonds or air? If we started charging for air, would it become more valuable? And how much money, time and effort would it cost to create and maintain a system to monitor usage, charge money for and prevent unauthorized breathing? What would be the side effects in society as a whole to setting up such a system?
While free software lacks some of the financially driven man-hours of commercial software, the lack of financial cost and proprietary software licensing, means various other things in the system can be greatly optimized, such as access to source code, community bug fixing and even the ability to simply apt-get install.
Scarcity is based on fear, and that seems to be a fairly big driving force in most of our lives. If we lose our jobs, we can't pay the rent or buy food, thus we are often willing to work doing things we don't really want to do. When the things we produce and trade suddenly become abundant, we become afraid that we will not be able to create "scarce" things for the purpose of trade.
Bill Gates did become the richest man on the planet through putting a toll booth on top of something that was naturally abundant. In essence, continually renting software rather than selling it. The issue Bill Gates raises is how society as a whole will manage to allocate man-hours for future software development, if we eliminate scarcity. It is possible, and has been demonstrated, but simply requires a different business model. Its one that has proven can work, but is unlikely to lead to the profits Microsoft is used to making. Its a question of what in the system should we aim to optimise, and what are the side effects of optimising it in a different way.
It was the same question asked at the dawn of the industrial revolution, when cheap factory made goods suddenly reduced the scarcity of manufactured goods, thus threatening the livelihoods of those making things by hand. The issue will get even worse when we start inventing functional replicators and the ability to copy information starts to extend to being able to copy physical objects.
The truth is that by reducing the number of man-hours required to produce products for our needs, we increased the amount of stuff we could individually have,
From a UK perspective, gun control mostly works if its fairly tight and almost nobody has a gun, and the system has been in place for a long time. Of course those who are determined can get one, but its still fairly rare (though recent media reports suggest there are growing numbers of guns in the UK).
For pre-mediated murders, gun ownership doesn't make a big difference (a knife is just as effective).
But in an tense incident, if there is a gun in the scene, its likely to get used, thus vastly increasing the chance of someone (the attacker, victim or bystander) accidentally getting killed or seriously hurt, compared to there being no gun.
Taking guns away from the law abiding citizens may not work, unless you can take almost all of the guns away from all the people.
A) They banned the use of the fair game policy years ago. "The practice of declaring people FAIR GAME will cease. FAIR GAME may not appear on any Ethics Order. It causes bad public relations. This P/L does not cancel any policy on the treatment or handling of an SP." as per HCOPL 21 Oct 68 Cancellation of Fair Game. In other words this says stop calling it "fair game", but still continue to apply it.
B) Disconnection may not seem like a good idea (I wouldn't be able to do it) but if you join Scientology I'd guess that you know what you are getting into. Nope, disconnection is what happens to suppressive and truly evil people. Growing up in the church, I never heard or knew of anybody who had been excommunicated or disconnected. Then people get declared, they tend to just move on, stop talking to all their friends and are not seen or heard about for a long time, maybe even not realizing that they have been declared - the ethics office will intervene if active communication is taking place. From the church's point of view, the purpose is not to publicly vilify or denounce them, but rather to make them silently disappear and be forgotten about by the local Scientology community. I have even heard they have gone as far as editing reprints of photos to remove declared individuals.
In 1984 newspeak lingo, the aim is to make them a non-person, and prevent their thoughtcrime from spreading to other members. The church is determined that its members win "the game".
Part of the problem is that even with the stuff the BBC produces itself, there are usally a miriad of "rights" thats had to be licenced (think music, screenrights rights, and other random royalties).
Part of the problem is that alot of contracts for dealing with IP "rights" are not based on selling "ownership", but rather "licencing" for a specific business/distrubution model. Change the model and you need to renegotiate all the contracts.
I half suspect that this loophole is semi-intentional. The higher-ups need to assure the "rights" holders that everything is secure, but beyond that illusion, allowing potentual loopholes in the DRM system isn't going to give anyone at the BBC any sleepless nights, assuming they are seen to address these issues and doesn't cause problems with negotiations.
But that 170 is only needed for a self contained population over tens of generations, the initial colony would only need to maintain itself until the cost of travel is reduced significantly, at which point you will likely get an influx of "pilgrims" seeking a better life on Mars.
Turn the question on its head, what is an acceptable level of genetic drift and inbreeding over say 5 generations or 125 years. Can tools such as genetic screening on pre-born babies and in planning a breeding program help to minimise the worst effects of inbreeding.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if you where to define an "application" as a user-process that creates or has an active window, then most of those background processes would not cound as "applications" due to the fact that they only sit in the tray and only open a window when you click on them.
Of course someone may develop a threaded "loader" program to enable multiple applications to be loaded within the same user-process, thus bypassing the 3 application limit.
Even if the project itself hasn't achieved certain goals yet, it has definitely pushed the boundaries and created a whole new format for notebooks. We will get to the $100 laptop one day, and we are alot closer to it today than where a few years back.
Anyway would we have the EEE-PC if it was not for the OLPC???
Government supplied drugs do not need to be free, they could be produced commercially (with government quality controls), and sold through licensed chemists at market prices like other medicinal drugs. Due to the lack of patents, cost would be end up being similar to those of generic drugs. Not free, but cheap enough that an addiction could be sustained through legal employment without the need to resort to crime.
Government spending would be limited to licensing and regulatory oversight, such as it already does for other areas of commerce, which would be offset by sales tax. The cost of regulation would be far reduced from the current regulatory costs of police and prisons.
Would such a system increase drug use overall?
I believe statics from Holland after the decriminalization of cannabis showed an initial spike which tailed off after a few years and back to pre-decriminalization levels.
However decriminalization would likely increase the visibility of drug use within the non-drug using population. Many if not most drug users, use drugs responsibily and in moderation, while living normal and productive lives, but for obvious reasons generally don't discuss their drug use with non-drug users. Thus its usually when things go wrong that non-drug users will often first hear about a persons drug use.
Even if drug use where to increase, would the cost to society increase?
From a medical point of view, quality controls on production and the provision of medical quality information on effects, dosage, pharmacokinetics and drug-drug interactions (such as provided with prescription drugs), compared to buying a white power of unknown purity on the black market from a person without any associated information. Most recreational drugs can be relatively safe if used responsibily and in moderation, just like alcohol.
From a social point of view, even if assume a case of heavy addiction, it would least encourage enough responsibility to hold down a minimum wage job as a means of supporting their habit, which would be a far more reliable source of income over crime, which would also carry the risk of imprisonment without access to their drug of choice. Thus giving the addict an even greater incentive to stay within the law compared to non-addicts.
For many addicts, drug addiction is part of larger personal issues within their life, and sometimes a form of self-medication to deal with emotional issues, even if may even exacerbate the problems in the long run. However throwing them in prison will likely not address the underlying issues, exacerbate the persons problems and make steps such as employment that much harder to achieve, and also put solving the underlying issues even further out of reach.
As for the raging meth addict, if their addiction leads them to violence or anti-social behaviour, then they should be delt with like anybody else. A person should still be held accountable for their actions, even while under the influence (or while drunk).
If they can maintain their addiction while keeping their behaviour otherwise legally acceptable, then should be treated as a public-health issue, just like alcoholism. Without having to resort to crime to fund an addiction, their life is likely to be slightly less chaotic, and they are more likely to be able to discuss and eventually address their problems with the help and support of friends, family and their doctor.
oops!
(2x == x) for x in (-inf, 0, inf)
(x^2 == x) for x in (-inf, -1, 0, 1, inf)
(2x == x) for x in (-inf, -1, 0, 1, inf)
Slartybartfast never really wanted to be god... he just happened to end up with the role.
if you like vimdiff, then did you know about :diffsplit <filename>, :diffthis, :diffoff
Or the VCSCommand plugin for doing vimdiff against a CVS/SVN/GIT repository :VCSVimDiff
Actually I fix this one within .bashrc, and create a wrapper function around vim, that detects if the file is editable or not, and asks if you want to prefix an sudo.
argc () {
count=0;
for arg in "$@"; do
if [[ ! "$arg" =~ '-' ]]; then count=$(($count+1)); fi;
done;
echo $count;
}
vi () { if [[ `argc "$@"` > 1 ]]; then /usr/bin/vim $@; /usr/bin/vim; /usr/bin/vim $@; /usr/bin/vim $*; /usr/bin/vim $*;
elif [ $1 = '' ]; then
elif [ ! -f $1 ] || [ -w $1 ]; then
else
echo -n "File is readonly. Edit as root? (Y/n): "
read -n 1 yn; echo;
if [ "$yn" = 'n' ] || [ "$yn" = 'N' ];
then
else sudo
fi
fi
}
Use Ctrl-v and you can select a column of chars. You can copy, delete and paste them.
I have used this technique, along with vertical alignment of code, to quickly copy/paste a huge spreadsheet of expected results, into very exhaustive unit test code.
Also use :diffsplit <filename> to diff one file with another.
Use :diffget and :diffput to shift changes between the two files
Get the VCSCommand vim plugin (one of the most useful plugins, but there are many more), and do :VCSVimDiff r200 and get an interactive diff with your repository (svn,cvs,git) or things like :VCSBlame, :VCSCommit, :VCSLog, :VCSRevert etc
If you have two files open you can on diff mode using :diffthis and :diffoff
:split <filename> (open new file in split) :vsplit % (open current file in vertical split) :only (close other splits) :tabnew :tabnext :tabprev (vim 7 tabs)
Ctrl-W Arrow (move around)
Ctrl-W 10+ (increase split size by 10 lines)
Ctrl-W 20- (decrease split size by 20 lines)
Ctrl-W = (make all splits equal)
:set filetype=perl :set filetype=html :set filetype=javascript
These are good for fixing your syntax highlighting if the extension doesn't match the filetype, or are editing code imbedded within a larger file.
You can also use this to select between per filetype vimrc files (different bindings, different tab settings etc).
~/.vim/ftplugin/perl.vim
~/.vim/ftplugin/html.vim
~/.vim/ftplugin/javascript.vim
<< will unindent
if you are in insert mode,
>> will indent,
will unindent, and
== will auto-indent
Better still :!nano %
This will open the currently open file in nano, without having to leave vim. Ctrl-X in nano will take you back to vim.
These are useful with prefixes: :r!pwd (read `pwd` into to document) :%!sort (sort all lines) :'$lt;'>!sort | uniq (sort last visual selection, notice the pipe)
Another useful thing you can do is to bind a filter to a script, in your .vimrc, so you can yy pp a line, and get an instant commented debug line.
map :.! ~/scripts/javascript-debug.pl==
#!/usr/bin/perl
while() {
($line = $_ ) =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//g;
($quote = $line) =~ s/'/\\'/g;
print "console.log('DEBUG: $quote ', $line);\n";
}
Note: My normal script has half a dozen regexps in the middle, for stripping out semicolons, function declarations, return statements, such that what gets printed is almost always a valid code statememnt. However slashdot can't tell my regexps apart from line line-noise and kept complaining about too many junk characters.
However its possible to write similar scripts for various languages, and for other simple tasks such as wrapping a for statement around an array variable.
Selecting a range in visual mode will actually set markers, thus you can select a range and do multiple :'s/FROM/TO/g replacements without having to reselect your lines.
Its useful when you do a replacement (:'<,'>s/FROM/TO/g), find its not quite right, undo (u), reload the last command from history (:<up>), correct it and retry.
:456
456gg
456G
All do the same thing, goto line 456
Let me fix that for you:
The Catholic Church enjoyed a monopoly on Christianity in part because it was damn expensive to reproduce books and most people couldn't read latin even if they had a copy. This gave them control over everyone who didn't want to go to hell. And they made damn sure everyone didn't want to go to hell.
The Church of Scientology doesn't have that luxury. Most people are literate, the information is in the common language (actually, I'm guessing more than one), and books are cheap to reproduce. So they have to use legal means to establish their monopoly. But they are using the same basic formula as the Catholic Church to control members and gain money.
The Church of Scientology has copyright and trademarks over the works/techniques of LRH. Most people are literate, but most Scientologists are heavily discouraged from reading/listening to anything critical of Scientology, which is termed "entheta" and would be considered a block to your spiritual progress. This gives them control over everybody who doesn't want "eternal damnation for all mankind". They use legal means to protect themselves against legal dangers, but they are using the same basic formula as the Catholic Church to control members and gain power, control and money.
The underlying issue here is the difference between scarcity based ecominics and abundance based economics.
Our current economic system is based around trying to address the problem of limited resources and a general situation of demand being greater than supply. The most scarce resources (relative to demand), have the highest monetary value, which restricts overall demand and rewards those who increase its supply. There are many perversions and inefficiencies within the system, and can create a lot of unnecessary work, but its worst except for the all the others so far.
Instead of using barter, we now use money. It is very fungible, but has no intrinsic value in of itself; its only value is based on its scarcity. For instance, if the US government simply printed enough money to give every man woman and child one million dollars, it would not instantly cure poverty (as we would all be millionaires), but rather cause sudden hyper-inflation as the value of money would adjust according to its newly perceived scarcity level.
The GPL is based on the underlying idea of abundance economics. We assume that supply can easily meet demand, and that value should be assigned based on natural abundance and intrinsic usefulness. The idea is to maximise the total "usefulness" in the system, rather than trying to optimise "who" has it.
With things like software, once the initial work has been invested to create it, the cost of making a second copy is negligible. Thus if we remove any artificial scarcities associated with it, such as a monetary cost, we can maximise its intrinsic value by offering everybody a copy (this assumes less people would want it if it had a monetary cost associated with it, and that bandwidth and storage space where sufficient).
Which is more valuable, diamonds or air? If we started charging for air, would it become more valuable? And how much money, time and effort would it cost to create and maintain a system to monitor usage, charge money for and prevent unauthorized breathing? What would be the side effects in society as a whole to setting up such a system?
While free software lacks some of the financially driven man-hours of commercial software, the lack of financial cost and proprietary software licensing, means various other things in the system can be greatly optimized, such as access to source code, community bug fixing and even the ability to simply apt-get install.
Scarcity is based on fear, and that seems to be a fairly big driving force in most of our lives. If we lose our jobs, we can't pay the rent or buy food, thus we are often willing to work doing things we don't really want to do. When the things we produce and trade suddenly become abundant, we become afraid that we will not be able to create "scarce" things for the purpose of trade.
Bill Gates did become the richest man on the planet through putting a toll booth on top of something that was naturally abundant. In essence, continually renting software rather than selling it. The issue Bill Gates raises is how society as a whole will manage to allocate man-hours for future software development, if we eliminate scarcity. It is possible, and has been demonstrated, but simply requires a different business model. Its one that has proven can work, but is unlikely to lead to the profits Microsoft is used to making. Its a question of what in the system should we aim to optimise, and what are the side effects of optimising it in a different way.
It was the same question asked at the dawn of the industrial revolution, when cheap factory made goods suddenly reduced the scarcity of manufactured goods, thus threatening the livelihoods of those making things by hand. The issue will get even worse when we start inventing functional replicators and the ability to copy information starts to extend to being able to copy physical objects.
The truth is that by reducing the number of man-hours required to produce products for our needs, we increased the amount of stuff we could individually have,
"For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." - Genesis 3:5
From a UK perspective, gun control mostly works if its fairly tight and almost nobody has a gun, and the system has been in place for a long time. Of course those who are determined can get one, but its still fairly rare (though recent media reports suggest there are growing numbers of guns in the UK).
For pre-mediated murders, gun ownership doesn't make a big difference (a knife is just as effective).
But in an tense incident, if there is a gun in the scene, its likely to get used, thus vastly increasing the chance of someone (the attacker, victim or bystander) accidentally getting killed or seriously hurt, compared to there being no gun.
Taking guns away from the law abiding citizens may not work, unless you can take almost all of the guns away from all the people.
In 1984 newspeak lingo, the aim is to make them a non-person, and prevent their thoughtcrime from spreading to other members. The church is determined that its members win "the game".
Part of the problem is that even with the stuff the BBC produces itself, there are usally a miriad of "rights" thats had to be licenced (think music, screenrights rights, and other random royalties).
Part of the problem is that alot of contracts for dealing with IP "rights" are not based on selling "ownership", but rather "licencing" for a specific business/distrubution model. Change the model and you need to renegotiate all the contracts.
I half suspect that this loophole is semi-intentional. The higher-ups need to assure the "rights" holders that everything is secure, but beyond that illusion, allowing potentual loopholes in the DRM system isn't going to give anyone at the BBC any sleepless nights, assuming they are seen to address these issues and doesn't cause problems with negotiations.
But that 170 is only needed for a self contained population over tens of generations, the initial colony would only need to maintain itself until the cost of travel is reduced significantly, at which point you will likely get an influx of "pilgrims" seeking a better life on Mars.
Turn the question on its head, what is an acceptable level of genetic drift and inbreeding over say 5 generations or 125 years. Can tools such as genetic screening on pre-born babies and in planning a breeding program help to minimise the worst effects of inbreeding.