Then maybe people should just stop assuming and write in a gender-neutral way.
Maybe people should just realize that "he" is the gender-neutral pronoun in English! All you dipshits butchering the language in the name of "political-correctness" can kiss my ass!
"They" is the modern gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun in American English. You're thinking of the 'Universal He' which is a poetic device of referring to mankind as 'He'.
To be gender neutral you can't just assume they're male. And any woman who is willing to endure the sexism and bullish male majority online deserves plenty of respect.
At first thought it might seem like the only way to limit the birthrate would be draconian or orwellian methods - nothing palatable to be sure. However, the truth is much simpler than that.
There is a long-observed direct corrolation between poverty and birth rate. Societies with greater poverty have higher birthrate. Even in China it's commom for city-dwellers to observe the 1-child rule, but poor farmers still have families of 6 or 7 simply because they need all the labor to help create an income. The same is true in the slums of Calcutta where children are needed to rifle through trash piles looking for recyclable goods. This happens across all the great poverty centers: Manilla, Bangkok, Mumbai, Calcutta, Nairobi, Cairo, etc.
Japan is a perfect example of the opposite. They have a NEGATIVE birthrate because the affluence of their society has led many to chose not to have children.
The solution to overpopulation will come hand-in-hand with our solution to many other injustices: great a fair distribution of resources and we'll be able to live sustainable on our planet.
It's true that Google is a for-profit company, but it's clear that they have other goals that push them along.
There's a vibe that I get from that company that they care about making the internet useful. Also, Google employees get less than industry standard pay and they dont' complain - they enjoy doing what they do.
Yeah, they like money, but the care about more than that.
You're assuming a lot about these terrorists - and you're largely wrong.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. To suggest that they are a different kind of person, or even a different kind of military force is incorrect. Terrorism is no more than warfare committed by those who do not have the resources for traditional warfare. If Al-Qaida had tanks and carriers you can bet they wouldn't be relying on secret suicide missions and bus explosions. Rather, they'd be sending whole battalions into cities and killing everything inside them - like we did in Fallujah.
A good example of the other side of this coin is America's own history. We remember our independance as if we were fighting oppression and tyrrany. In reality, we were fighting taxes and an abusive overseas economy. At the same time we were perpetrating terrible slaughters of native american communities. Some of the earliest American war strategy was developed after we realized that it was much more effective to simply kill native women and children rather than have to bother with their warriors. Or in the Phillipine war - when our generals gave orders to kill every male ten-years-old and over and it was a one-sided massacre for the duration of the war.
So when you say "you cannot negociate with these idiots, so kill them now" you're forgetting a lot of history. Yes we have to stand up to bullies and be wary of those who would grab for power, but don't classify terrorists as anything other than another another group fighting for what they want - just like us.
I wasn't aware that IE could be 'released' - previous versions were so spaghetti-string coded and tied into Windows that all you could do was try to 'integrate' it into your system and PRAY that it didn't render your OS inoperable.
It's hard for me to imagine that there's an IE7 package out there that has all the files and configuration required to run it and doesn't choke every system it's installed on. If there is, MS has come a long way.
I recognize that ASP has some advantages in the way it handles components - especially third-party components, but VBScript is a nasty language. It compromises much of it's flexibility in the name of user friendliness, but then fails to be all that friendly.
Ruby is an example of what VBScript should have been but completely failed at. PHP is, at it's heard, a procedural language but very robust and powerful applications have been built with it that would have taken many times more lines of code were they to have been written in VBScript for ASP. WordPress, for example, is highly modular and OO. I've looked at a few of it's core functions and converted them in my head to VBScript - it usually takes about 4 times as many lines of code and an awful lot of intermediate steps to do the exact same thing.
VBScript is okay if it's all you've got, but I wouldn't recommend anybody choose it over Ruby, PHP, or maybe even Perl.
Well, the facts are fairly clear. If Gates wanted to win the hearts of people who could afford his software he'd fight cancer. Cancer is a disease of the rich because it's one of the few that we can't hide from behind walls of affluence.
He's pumping money into fighting a disease that is known as a killer of the poor. It's mostly children and mostly in small, poor, non-computer-using communities where malaria is a killer. Piracy is rampant in Africa (a large center for malaria victims) and there's no real hope of getting them to fork out money to MS anytime soon.
I would agree that he may be looking at the larger picture. But he's still being generous - you can't fault him for that. Paul Allen spent $200 million on a yacht that has two helicopters. It costs him $20 million a year to keep the thing and he's never on it. Gates has given $20 billion to fight aids and now this to malaria. Of the two, who would you fault as the selfish bastard?
Then some new wave of local news bloggers will form a syndicate that borrows from blogging and wiki technologies. There will be a demand for a single site that can link you to people reporting on news in your area and that demand will be filled.
It's not hard to imagine that someone would report local news as a hobby and as a community service and even make some money by having their local hardware store sponsor them. The golden rule in blogging is to find a niche and dominate it, so this news form would actually be quite attractive to many bloggers. Local news won't die, not as long as hosting is cheap and ads are easy to come by.
I got my bachelor's degree in Linguistics at the University of Washington and one of the topics we worked on heavily was syntax structure and computational linguistics. The driving force behind much of that department is to progress the knowledge of language to the point where it can be completely digitized.
The problem with Star-Trek-like speech converters is not in algorithms, language itself, or the computer models we use to represent it. The problem with perfect speech translation is language itself. Language is constantly changing, varied even among small groups of native speakers of the same language, and most of the time no two people use the same word the same way.
An example: To an editor the term newspaper means a product of labor which is created and published on a regular schedule. To a person who has a problem with a housefly newspaper means an instrument with some heft which can be used to crush small insects. It's the same object from a different perspective.
The best we can try to do is find patterns and approximate meanings based on statistical analysis of sources that have already been translated by humans. Combining this with some rudimentary patterns of morphology and sentence structure will allow us to get close. Most of the time we'll be able to get the meaning across.
Naval sonar isn't just a nuisance - it's a very serious problem. I live in Seattle and there have been whale-damaging amplitutes of sonar received in the Puget Sound that came all the way from California. Active sonar actually kills or seriously maims aquatic life (especially marine mammals who use echolocation).
This isn't a meaningless, treehugging, war-ignoring request being made to the navy. What the navy is doing is the equivalent of old-time whaling in terms of the effect it's having - except it hurts even more than whales.
Wow, I'd like to comment on this but all of the software you just mentioned is such expensive, proprietary software for systems I'll never possibly manage that I have no real idea what's going on with this IT disaster.
I guess I'm just not sure how such reliable companies using expensive, supposedly reliable products could have been involved in such a failure.
I doubt that Google's webclips is the same thing - webclips is hardly a convenient way to read your feeds.
On that topic though, has anyone else noticed that webclips in Gmail is content-targeted? Because of this, anytime you look in your "Spam" folder you get recipes for "Spam & eggs"
When I search for answers to any generic linux issue the Gentoo wiki invariably has the answer. They've already got such good documentation that live support is only useful to the kind of people that... well... shouldn't be using Gentoo.
It's a common fallacy to think that "they" hate us because of our freedom, luxuries, etc.. The truth is that the people who hate us feel victimized by us. In the middle east especially there is no difference in their minds between the military of Israel and of the US. As for the rest of the world, well, the last 150 years of market-colonialism like in Hawaii, the Phillipines, Guam, Japan, and damn near everywhere else gives people good cause to hate us.
As for population, it's a known fact that civilizations with a higher standard of living produce fewer offspring. Japan, for instance, has a negative population growth right now. Few people are advocating a third-world welfare system. Better than that would be to stop our self-serving foreign policies and stop forcing foreign countries to do things they don't want. A short list of evil things we're currently doing:
forcing open markets for our goods with NAFTA/CAFTA removing farmer subsidies for all countries that have taken a loan from the WB/IMF (while continuing to subsidize our farmers) creating hellish working environments in Mexican border factories the School of the Americas where we train terrorists to remove South American governments we don't like Invading the Middle East without the rest of the world believing we have just cause to do so
Will the cost of the extra bandwidth/hosting equal 9 million over the next couple of years? I can't imagine that it would. The investment firm probably expects to make back double what it put in (at least). That'd mean that they expect studios to pay $18M or more over the next several years. To do this they'd have to convince the studios that they'd be saving money over traditional distribution methods.
With the constant improvements in bandwidth and server potential it's hard to imagine a system so large that it would be cost efficient to pay $16M for bittorrent stuff rather than straight hosting.
Also, why do they need a proprietary bittorent technology? Couldn't any company that wanted to move forward with bittorrent distrubition just use the currently GPLed version or build an in-house one (for way less than the millions of bucks talked about here)?
Is it worthwhile to limit the advances of potentially destructive sciences like this one or is it an inevitability?
It seems to be that the way to keep the world safe from nuclear (or something else we may now uncover) holocaust is not to limit the technology that will be used as tools, but to increase the quality of life of any civilization desperate enough to commit mass-murder in an organized way.
don't forget that MS could fail to turn a profit for two or three years and continue to make its payroll in full. There's some level of security when you have $20bil+ in the bank.
You must, of course, keep in mind what the men you quote were trying to protect. They were owners of large pieces of property, they had considerable power in trade,colonial rule, banking, landlording, etc. They believed democracy was the most unstable and useless form of government for the new Union because it would first require a complete destruction of the present economic system. In other words, there would need to be justice in land rights and some significant break in the power of the upper class.
Alexander Hamilton (designer of the Stock Market, treasury, and most of our early economic theory) believed that a representative government in which the participants could be changed every few years based on the will of the people was "too unstable" for civilized government. He believed that there should be a 'President for Life' and established legislators who were unremovable.
In essence, we are not a democracy because our founders did not believe it was a good system. That is not to say that the masses of workers on whose backs the colonies were build agreed with the preservation of a stable but unjust system.
I've been saving up for the 2405FPW 24" for a while. It keeps dropping in price and you can find it on ebay now for ~$700. If we're talking about getting a good display there's no way anything can beat the 2405FPW. It's the same technology as the 2005 but bigger.
Slashdot Mirror
To be gender neutral you can't just assume they're male. And any woman who is willing to endure the sexism and bullish male majority online deserves plenty of respect.
[Credentials: B.A. in Linguistics]
At first thought it might seem like the only way to limit the birthrate would be draconian or orwellian methods - nothing palatable to be sure. However, the truth is much simpler than that.
There is a long-observed direct corrolation between poverty and birth rate. Societies with greater poverty have higher birthrate. Even in China it's commom for city-dwellers to observe the 1-child rule, but poor farmers still have families of 6 or 7 simply because they need all the labor to help create an income. The same is true in the slums of Calcutta where children are needed to rifle through trash piles looking for recyclable goods. This happens across all the great poverty centers: Manilla, Bangkok, Mumbai, Calcutta, Nairobi, Cairo, etc.
Japan is a perfect example of the opposite. They have a NEGATIVE birthrate because the affluence of their society has led many to chose not to have children.
The solution to overpopulation will come hand-in-hand with our solution to many other injustices: great a fair distribution of resources and we'll be able to live sustainable on our planet.
The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that the movie industry lost $5.4 billion last year due to piracy.
Meanwhile, everyone else estimates that they continued to make record profits.
This guy's from the country in question
It's true that Google is a for-profit company, but it's clear that they have other goals that push them along.
There's a vibe that I get from that company that they care about making the internet useful. Also, Google employees get less than industry standard pay and they dont' complain - they enjoy doing what they do.
Yeah, they like money, but the care about more than that.
You're assuming a lot about these terrorists - and you're largely wrong.
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. To suggest that they are a different kind of person, or even a different kind of military force is incorrect. Terrorism is no more than warfare committed by those who do not have the resources for traditional warfare. If Al-Qaida had tanks and carriers you can bet they wouldn't be relying on secret suicide missions and bus explosions. Rather, they'd be sending whole battalions into cities and killing everything inside them - like we did in Fallujah.
A good example of the other side of this coin is America's own history. We remember our independance as if we were fighting oppression and tyrrany. In reality, we were fighting taxes and an abusive overseas economy. At the same time we were perpetrating terrible slaughters of native american communities. Some of the earliest American war strategy was developed after we realized that it was much more effective to simply kill native women and children rather than have to bother with their warriors. Or in the Phillipine war - when our generals gave orders to kill every male ten-years-old and over and it was a one-sided massacre for the duration of the war.
So when you say "you cannot negociate with these idiots, so kill them now" you're forgetting a lot of history. Yes we have to stand up to bullies and be wary of those who would grab for power, but don't classify terrorists as anything other than another another group fighting for what they want - just like us.
I wasn't aware that IE could be 'released' - previous versions were so spaghetti-string coded and tied into Windows that all you could do was try to 'integrate' it into your system and PRAY that it didn't render your OS inoperable.
It's hard for me to imagine that there's an IE7 package out there that has all the files and configuration required to run it and doesn't choke every system it's installed on. If there is, MS has come a long way.
I recognize that ASP has some advantages in the way it handles components - especially third-party components, but VBScript is a nasty language. It compromises much of it's flexibility in the name of user friendliness, but then fails to be all that friendly.
Ruby is an example of what VBScript should have been but completely failed at. PHP is, at it's heard, a procedural language but very robust and powerful applications have been built with it that would have taken many times more lines of code were they to have been written in VBScript for ASP. WordPress, for example, is highly modular and OO. I've looked at a few of it's core functions and converted them in my head to VBScript - it usually takes about 4 times as many lines of code and an awful lot of intermediate steps to do the exact same thing.
VBScript is okay if it's all you've got, but I wouldn't recommend anybody choose it over Ruby, PHP, or maybe even Perl.
Well, the facts are fairly clear. If Gates wanted to win the hearts of people who could afford his software he'd fight cancer. Cancer is a disease of the rich because it's one of the few that we can't hide from behind walls of affluence.
He's pumping money into fighting a disease that is known as a killer of the poor. It's mostly children and mostly in small, poor, non-computer-using communities where malaria is a killer. Piracy is rampant in Africa (a large center for malaria victims) and there's no real hope of getting them to fork out money to MS anytime soon.
I would agree that he may be looking at the larger picture. But he's still being generous - you can't fault him for that. Paul Allen spent $200 million on a yacht that has two helicopters. It costs him $20 million a year to keep the thing and he's never on it. Gates has given $20 billion to fight aids and now this to malaria. Of the two, who would you fault as the selfish bastard?
Then some new wave of local news bloggers will form a syndicate that borrows from blogging and wiki technologies. There will be a demand for a single site that can link you to people reporting on news in your area and that demand will be filled.
It's not hard to imagine that someone would report local news as a hobby and as a community service and even make some money by having their local hardware store sponsor them. The golden rule in blogging is to find a niche and dominate it, so this news form would actually be quite attractive to many bloggers. Local news won't die, not as long as hosting is cheap and ads are easy to come by.
I got my bachelor's degree in Linguistics at the University of Washington and one of the topics we worked on heavily was syntax structure and computational linguistics. The driving force behind much of that department is to progress the knowledge of language to the point where it can be completely digitized.
The problem with Star-Trek-like speech converters is not in algorithms, language itself, or the computer models we use to represent it. The problem with perfect speech translation is language itself. Language is constantly changing, varied even among small groups of native speakers of the same language, and most of the time no two people use the same word the same way.
An example: To an editor the term newspaper means a product of labor which is created and published on a regular schedule. To a person who has a problem with a housefly newspaper means an instrument with some heft which can be used to crush small insects. It's the same object from a different perspective.
The best we can try to do is find patterns and approximate meanings based on statistical analysis of sources that have already been translated by humans. Combining this with some rudimentary patterns of morphology and sentence structure will allow us to get close. Most of the time we'll be able to get the meaning across.
I think that's the best we'll ever be able to do.
While it has trouble with saving games (i.e. it doesn't) CivIII has been running on wine for a while.
I don't even have 3d acceleration enabled and my 1.6ghz, 64MB, 1GB system can run CivIII just fine under Gentoo Linux.
A better question: why are you using exclusively Pentium-M's for your servers? Is this an array of high-latency laptops?
Naval sonar isn't just a nuisance - it's a very serious problem. I live in Seattle and there have been whale-damaging amplitutes of sonar received in the Puget Sound that came all the way from California. Active sonar actually kills or seriously maims aquatic life (especially marine mammals who use echolocation).
This isn't a meaningless, treehugging, war-ignoring request being made to the navy. What the navy is doing is the equivalent of old-time whaling in terms of the effect it's having - except it hurts even more than whales.
Wow, I'd like to comment on this but all of the software you just mentioned is such expensive, proprietary software for systems I'll never possibly manage that I have no real idea what's going on with this IT disaster.
I guess I'm just not sure how such reliable companies using expensive, supposedly reliable products could have been involved in such a failure.
I doubt that Google's webclips is the same thing - webclips is hardly a convenient way to read your feeds.
On that topic though, has anyone else noticed that webclips in Gmail is content-targeted? Because of this, anytime you look in your "Spam" folder you get recipes for "Spam & eggs"
When I search for answers to any generic linux issue the Gentoo wiki invariably has the answer. They've already got such good documentation that live support is only useful to the kind of people that... well... shouldn't be using Gentoo.
I didn't particularly need expository dialogue to figure that out.
Good, because expository dialogue is... not exactly George Lucas' strong suit.
It's a common fallacy to think that "they" hate us because of our freedom, luxuries, etc.. The truth is that the people who hate us feel victimized by us. In the middle east especially there is no difference in their minds between the military of Israel and of the US. As for the rest of the world, well, the last 150 years of market-colonialism like in Hawaii, the Phillipines, Guam, Japan, and damn near everywhere else gives people good cause to hate us.
As for population, it's a known fact that civilizations with a higher standard of living produce fewer offspring. Japan, for instance, has a negative population growth right now. Few people are advocating a third-world welfare system. Better than that would be to stop our self-serving foreign policies and stop forcing foreign countries to do things they don't want. A short list of evil things we're currently doing:
forcing open markets for our goods with NAFTA/CAFTA
removing farmer subsidies for all countries that have taken a loan from the WB/IMF (while continuing to subsidize our farmers)
creating hellish working environments in Mexican border factories
the School of the Americas where we train terrorists to remove South American governments we don't like
Invading the Middle East without the rest of the world believing we have just cause to do so
That's why they hate us.
It's not a matter of writing a check and mailing it to the third-world. It's a matter of figuratively taking our boot off their neck.
Will the cost of the extra bandwidth/hosting equal 9 million over the next couple of years? I can't imagine that it would. The investment firm probably expects to make back double what it put in (at least). That'd mean that they expect studios to pay $18M or more over the next several years. To do this they'd have to convince the studios that they'd be saving money over traditional distribution methods.
With the constant improvements in bandwidth and server potential it's hard to imagine a system so large that it would be cost efficient to pay $16M for bittorrent stuff rather than straight hosting.
Also, why do they need a proprietary bittorent technology? Couldn't any company that wanted to move forward with bittorrent distrubition just use the currently GPLed version or build an in-house one (for way less than the millions of bucks talked about here)?
Is it worthwhile to limit the advances of potentially destructive sciences like this one or is it an inevitability?
It seems to be that the way to keep the world safe from nuclear (or something else we may now uncover) holocaust is not to limit the technology that will be used as tools, but to increase the quality of life of any civilization desperate enough to commit mass-murder in an organized way.
don't forget that MS could fail to turn a profit for two or three years and continue to make its payroll in full. There's some level of security when you have $20bil+ in the bank.
You must, of course, keep in mind what the men you quote were trying to protect. They were owners of large pieces of property, they had considerable power in trade,colonial rule, banking, landlording, etc. They believed democracy was the most unstable and useless form of government for the new Union because it would first require a complete destruction of the present economic system. In other words, there would need to be justice in land rights and some significant break in the power of the upper class.
Alexander Hamilton (designer of the Stock Market, treasury, and most of our early economic theory) believed that a representative government in which the participants could be changed every few years based on the will of the people was "too unstable" for civilized government. He believed that there should be a 'President for Life' and established legislators who were unremovable.
In essence, we are not a democracy because our founders did not believe it was a good system. That is not to say that the masses of workers on whose backs the colonies were build agreed with the preservation of a stable but unjust system.
I've been saving up for the 2405FPW 24" for a while. It keeps dropping in price and you can find it on ebay now for ~$700. If we're talking about getting a good display there's no way anything can beat the 2405FPW. It's the same technology as the 2005 but bigger.