SO beacuse we are American, we can't point out injustices being done to other people? becasue we want everybody to have a life that doesn't mean working 16 hours a day just to survive you lash out qt us?
I'm so going to get modded down for participating in this flame... but here goes.
I must say that I do find that a bit hypocritical.
You will undoubtedly ask why.
Quite simple, really: your lifestyle depends on people who work 16 hours a day in those sweatshops.
For those people - with whom you sympathise so great a deal - to have a better standard of living, only one thing is needed: money.
If they were better paid, they wouldn't have to work so much.
However, if they were paid better, there would be no reason for your companies to move their production to such countries; the companies do it not for some humane or humanitarian reason, but for profit: spend as little as possible while making it, earn as much as possible while selling it.
Or, in a summarised version for/.-ers:
1. Move production to und(erd)eveloped countries.
2. Pay the workers cheap.
3. Sell the product expensive.
4. Profit!!!
So, if those workers were paid better (for example, just as well as they would be paid in the US), the companies would decide to save up on transport costs and move production back to the US.
For example, I live in Croatia, where our ever brilliant governments sold the Croatian telecomunications monopolist to Deutsche Telekom.
They bought the shares, raised the prices, exploited their monopolistic position just as microsoft does and made us, the users, pay them back the money they'd spent for buying the company. I definitely cannot think of another reason for aDSL to be about five times more expensive in Croatia than in Germany, especially as it is provided by the same company; they really deserve the name Teuer-Com [teuer meaning expensive in German]
This is a typical capitalistic behaviour - and i'm not trolling: look at the name of the doctrine and you'll see what's in its centre. Profit.
So no, you can't point out injustices being done to other people as long as it is you doing the injustice. I'd even quote you a quote from the Bible, but I'm not that familiar with the English translation.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not lashing out at you personally. I have got nothing against you; you probably work hard and pay your taxes and buy the insanely expensive stuff just because some corporate managers have to make a lot of money.
Here in Croatia, the capitalistic system is on a rampage. It has got so bad that some people claim that slaves in Ancient Rome (not to mention Ancient Greece, especially Athens) had much better lives: they worked hard, but they knew they'd have a home to sleep in and some food and clothes. In capitalism, workers just have to work; nobody cares whether they'll have enough for a decent living.
The real news here, if I can interpret the press release correctly, is not that the nanoparticle is the trojan horse, but that its small size *allowed* the researchers to construct the trojan horse.
If I recall my Illiad[1] correctly, the Trojan horse was the carrier, just like this nano-thingamagig. inside the horse were the soldiers, just like the alchemical cancer poison in this case.
So i'd say the analogy is quite OK, thank you.
So you're saying the're actually downloading a Windows installation?
So whoever runs it, installs Windows instad of OS X.
Sounds like:
1) Leak info that your competitor's product is available as a.torrent.
2) Leak your own product instead.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Having conquered both the worlds of x86 and PPC, Microsoft and only Microsoft remains the one and true Master of Piracy.
There are also some Caucasian languages that only have one or two vowels (a and shwa), but 70+ consonants; they most certainly have many words without any vowels.
And to correct myself on a tiny little bit: English can also have certain consonants act as vowels - phonetically. Bicycle has three syllables, but only two vowels are pronounced; however, all are spelled out, which is the only thing that matters to typists.
I can't think of a language where there are words not containing vowels.
I can.
My native Croatian would be the first to come to mind (it is my native tongue, after all) - there are not many words that contain no vowels, but they do exist. "Vrt" (garden), "vrh" (summit, point, top), "smrt" (death), "krt" (male mole), "prt" (archaic word for tablecloth and/or a path in snow), "trg" (city square), "trk" (the act of running), "brk" (moustache), "mrk" (dark/brown/frowning), "smrk" [s+caron] (water hose), "smrklj" [s+caron] (whatever you call the stuff that runs out of your nose and which you pick after it hardens, believing there's nobody watching)... I'm quite certain there are a few more.
Some languages, unlike English and, say, Italian, can have certain consonants act as vowels - most often it is a 'r', 'l', 'm' or 'n'. One of them is the language that English speakers refer to as Sanskrit, while it is really called 'sanskrt'.
You can use everything else on your machine, but you can't the package that you're installing from source, whether it be from a tarball, an SRPM, Gentoo ports, or FreeBSD ports, until it's built.
Can't say that I've noticed...
I know I've kept using OpenOffice.org during those three days it took compiling a new version.
Naturally, I couldn't use the new version until it was compiled.
... which makes them different from other deities... how exactly?
Gods come a dime a dozen; I, for one, can name many more gods than i can Linux administrators.
Finally, if you need a god, you can invent one; if you need a Linux administrator, you have to go on a quest to find one and persuade him to get up from his computer.
And why is "Linux Admins" not "linux admins"... they're NOT God.
Um... no.
They are root, which is about two orders of magnitude more powerful than any god or pantheon of your choice.
They are so powerful that all the letters in the syntagm should be capitalised, but in their infinite mercy and wisdom they are satisfied with just the capitalised initials. That way, you don't scream LINUX ADMINS! every time you type it, which means they have more time for looking for pr0n.
And btw, IQ doesn't really measure imagination at all.
Well, in a way it does.
In an extremely limited way, but it still does... or at least tries to.
I fail to see how you could solve a problem you have never seen before without some sort of imagination... BTW, what do I lack if I cannot see that?;)
Whatever... IQ tests are crap anyway... they just give you something to brag about if you don't have anything else.
I once lurked in the Croatian Mensa's forum; those people are a laugh. And they think I would pay 70 kn (approx. $12) for a unique opportunity of trying their test and just possibly becoming a member of their organisation. Anyone who pays that kind of money should get their IQ score adjusted by -70 points.
BTW, Down's does equal mental retardation; however, it does not mean that a person with Down's cannot accomplish anything. If Bush could become the President of USA, there is hope for all retarded people...
Next on Jerry Springer: Im retardared so I gone in to Politix.
Oh, wait...
All the drive and ambition in the world is not going to turn someone with an IQ of 100 into a successful scientist.
Wrong.
I recall reading about a guy with Down's syndrome obtaining a Ph.D. in maths, a year or two back.
He may be retarded, but is obviously a better mathematician than I'll ever be. And he did it exclusively because he was motivated.
IQ isn't everything... actually, it means very little - I only regard it as a measure of imagination and speed, while success requires imagination and focus (i.e. inspiration and perspiration, respectively).
If I had any mod points, I'd mod you up as Insightful.
Here's why: whenever there's news like this, people lose their perspective. This is practically non-news in itself; Linux can't grow at the same speed all the time, nor can that speed always increase.
When you mentioned the 2nd derivative, it actually all clicked into place for me; I knew intuitively that this doesn't mean a thing, but it's been a while since I last bothered with maths. Let's see what this means: there is a Linux install base x. Then it doubles to 2x. Growth rate: 100%.
Next, it grows by "only" 50%, so the new install base is 3x. The growth rate has decreased by 50%, although another x number of people installed Linux, just like before.
I've noticed people have a tendency to treat any info on 'growth rate slowing' as 'losing market', and have had trouble explaining it wasn't so.
This is non-news, or nearly so. There is still growth; it just isn't exponential (and thank all the Greek Pantheon for that; it just means Linux isn't a MLM scheme).
I'm trying to find the reasoning behind adding this. The only thing I can think of off-hand is that it would allow multiple instances of Windows on one machine, but then again, they already allow you to boot different versions of Windows on one machine. So now I'm back at square one.
Yes, it would allow multiple instances of windows on one machine - at the same time.
This is actually good news for everyone wanting to play good old games... especially on 64-bit CPUs with 64-bit OSs (if I understood the compatibility problems correctly).
Actually, it is not really important; machine translation is not likely to be that good for literary works anyway.
However, if we could get machines translating all the millions of intensely boring legal documents emerging from the UN or EU (since all the documents have to be translated to all the official languages of the EU ASAP), it would get all those translators pretty much fired, but probably not altogether unhappy - they are usually the ones that are good enough to get a new job easily.
Let's face it: Not even human translators are often up to the challenge of translating literary works; HHGttG and Terry Pratchett are some of the most perfect examples, since they use such an amount of wordplay that would drive even the most experienced translators to drink and/or madness. BTW, translations of Pratchett's books to Croatian are just plain awful.
Anyway, since even human translators have difficulty with literary works - especially poetry, since not only the meaning must remain the same, but also the meter has to be adapted to the target language (i.e. English is an iambic language, while Croatian Standard is trochaeic), then rhyme... I just wouldn't trust a computer with that... at least not at this techlevel.
Technical documentation, legalese... are much different. I used to work as a translator of technical documentation (instruction manuals) and it is so very dull... Always the very same things, always the same phrases... On the good side, I now know how to install, handle and program anything, from VCRs to oil pumps (not much use, though, as I don't own either). Anyway, that is a job best left to computers; the only excitement comes from Italian translations of English texts and Korean translations of Chinese texts to English; then you have to play the guessing game and invent the whole text from scratch - and no, you don't get to see the device you're describing. Everything else is copy/paste, find/replace and a lot of text formatting. When computers can manage that on their own, I'll be quite happy; and if they (or 'we', as I have chosen this as my line of study and future line of work) manage to build a machine translator that will successfully translate literature without some heavy AI, I'll be most sincerely amazed.
Then I'll disbelieve it and start looking for the human they'd put inside the computer.
E.g., if you read the very first page of the review, about the MX1000: "As with optical mice, if you don?t make use of it for several seconds, the battery indicator turns off and the mouse goes into power saving mode."
Now I am a hardcore twitch-gamer, and let me tell you that those power saving delays are what gets you killed in multi-player. You end up doing weird stuff like slightly waving the scope around when you wait for a target as a sniper, because otherwise you have that brief wake-up delay when you do need the mouse.
Would it kill them to put a sensor on the mouse?
For instance, some kind of a touch sensor that closes the circuit when touched... so it needn't even be a powered sensor, but rather something mechanical, pressure-sensitive; so when your hand is on the mouse, it is powered; as soon as you remove your hand, it's off.
I mean, how difficult can it be?
Disclaimer: I am a very poor student.
If, by any chance, someone in the mouse-making business is reading this and likes it, now you know I can't afford to sue you, so do knock yourself out.
But I won't mind a free copy of the mouse.
Therefore, in a rape case, this can be construed as criminal intent.
This is good news for all Slashdot users; now you are gong to have sex at least in the eyes of the law...
Furthermore, I normally keep my penis hidden in my pants, which obviously means I know that's wrong and am trying to hide it.
As a consequence, criminal intent could not be established for flashing pervs; they do not seem to be hiding anything, at least... so that's OK.
And to think I actually complain about Croatian judicial system, which is merely inefficient...
*This is not a latest discovery, nor bragging; I really do need that** to prove my point.
** Please stop that.
Slashdot Mirror
I must say that I do find that a bit hypocritical.
You will undoubtedly ask why.
Quite simple, really: your lifestyle depends on people who work 16 hours a day in those sweatshops.
For those people - with whom you sympathise so great a deal - to have a better standard of living, only one thing is needed: money.
If they were better paid, they wouldn't have to work so much.
However, if they were paid better, there would be no reason for your companies to move their production to such countries; the companies do it not for some humane or humanitarian reason, but for profit: spend as little as possible while making it, earn as much as possible while selling it.
Or, in a summarised version for /.-ers:
1. Move production to und(erd)eveloped countries.
2. Pay the workers cheap.
3. Sell the product expensive.
4. Profit!!!
So, if those workers were paid better (for example, just as well as they would be paid in the US), the companies would decide to save up on transport costs and move production back to the US.
For example, I live in Croatia, where our ever brilliant governments sold the Croatian telecomunications monopolist to Deutsche Telekom.
They bought the shares, raised the prices, exploited their monopolistic position just as microsoft does and made us, the users, pay them back the money they'd spent for buying the company. I definitely cannot think of another reason for aDSL to be about five times more expensive in Croatia than in Germany, especially as it is provided by the same company; they really deserve the name Teuer-Com [teuer meaning expensive in German]
This is a typical capitalistic behaviour - and i'm not trolling: look at the name of the doctrine and you'll see what's in its centre. Profit.
So no, you can't point out injustices being done to other people as long as it is you doing the injustice. I'd even quote you a quote from the Bible, but I'm not that familiar with the English translation.
Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not lashing out at you personally. I have got nothing against you; you probably work hard and pay your taxes and buy the insanely expensive stuff just because some corporate managers have to make a lot of money.
Here in Croatia, the capitalistic system is on a rampage. It has got so bad that some people claim that slaves in Ancient Rome (not to mention Ancient Greece, especially Athens) had much better lives: they worked hard, but they knew they'd have a home to sleep in and some food and clothes. In capitalism, workers just have to work; nobody cares whether they'll have enough for a decent living.
Carry on, nothing to see here...
And it's all from Micro soft.
Yeah, I know it's lame.
So i'd say the analogy is quite OK, thank you.
[1] The Homer's one, not the UserFriendly author.
So you're saying the're actually downloading a Windows installation?
So whoever runs it, installs Windows instad of OS X. .torrent.
Sounds like:
1) Leak info that your competitor's product is available as a
2) Leak your own product instead.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Having conquered both the worlds of x86 and PPC, Microsoft and only Microsoft remains the one and true Master of Piracy.
AFAIK Semitic alphabets only note consonants, and vowels are just marked - if necessary (not obligatory).
I do not know how they type, though, and how would that reflect on Dvorak.
There are also some Caucasian languages that only have one or two vowels (a and shwa), but 70+ consonants; they most certainly have many words without any vowels.
And to correct myself on a tiny little bit: English can also have certain consonants act as vowels - phonetically. Bicycle has three syllables, but only two vowels are pronounced; however, all are spelled out, which is the only thing that matters to typists.
My native Croatian would be the first to come to mind (it is my native tongue, after all) - there are not many words that contain no vowels, but they do exist. "Vrt" (garden), "vrh" (summit, point, top), "smrt" (death), "krt" (male mole), "prt" (archaic word for tablecloth and/or a path in snow), "trg" (city square), "trk" (the act of running), "brk" (moustache), "mrk" (dark/brown/frowning), "smrk" [s+caron] (water hose), "smrklj" [s+caron] (whatever you call the stuff that runs out of your nose and which you pick after it hardens, believing there's nobody watching)... I'm quite certain there are a few more.
Some languages, unlike English and, say, Italian, can have certain consonants act as vowels - most often it is a 'r', 'l', 'm' or 'n'. One of them is the language that English speakers refer to as Sanskrit, while it is really called 'sanskrt'.
I know I've kept using OpenOffice.org during those three days it took compiling a new version.
Naturally, I couldn't use the new version until it was compiled.
Gods come a dime a dozen; I, for one, can name many more gods than i can Linux administrators.
Finally, if you need a god, you can invent one; if you need a Linux administrator, you have to go on a quest to find one and persuade him to get up from his computer.
They are root, which is about two orders of magnitude more powerful than any god or pantheon of your choice.
They are so powerful that all the letters in the syntagm should be capitalised, but in their infinite mercy and wisdom they are satisfied with just the capitalised initials. That way, you don't scream LINUX ADMINS! every time you type it, which means they have more time for looking for pr0n.
It's quite well thought out, really...
In an extremely limited way, but it still does... or at least tries to.
I fail to see how you could solve a problem you have never seen before without some sort of imagination... BTW, what do I lack if I cannot see that?
Whatever... IQ tests are crap anyway... they just give you something to brag about if you don't have anything else.
I once lurked in the Croatian Mensa's forum; those people are a laugh. And they think I would pay 70 kn (approx. $12) for a unique opportunity of trying their test and just possibly becoming a member of their organisation. Anyone who pays that kind of money should get their IQ score adjusted by -70 points.
BTW, Down's does equal mental retardation; however, it does not mean that a person with Down's cannot accomplish anything. If Bush could become the President of USA, there is hope for all retarded people...
Next on Jerry Springer: Im retardared so I gone in to Politix.
Oh, wait...
I recall reading about a guy with Down's syndrome obtaining a Ph.D. in maths, a year or two back.
He may be retarded, but is obviously a better mathematician than I'll ever be. And he did it exclusively because he was motivated.
IQ isn't everything... actually, it means very little - I only regard it as a measure of imagination and speed, while success requires imagination and focus (i.e. inspiration and perspiration, respectively).
Here's why: whenever there's news like this, people lose their perspective. This is practically non-news in itself; Linux can't grow at the same speed all the time, nor can that speed always increase.
When you mentioned the 2nd derivative, it actually all clicked into place for me; I knew intuitively that this doesn't mean a thing, but it's been a while since I last bothered with maths. Let's see what this means:
there is a Linux install base x. Then it doubles to 2x. Growth rate: 100%.
Next, it grows by "only" 50%, so the new install base is 3x. The growth rate has decreased by 50%, although another x number of people installed Linux, just like before.
I've noticed people have a tendency to treat any info on 'growth rate slowing' as 'losing market', and have had trouble explaining it wasn't so.
This is non-news, or nearly so. There is still growth; it just isn't exponential (and thank all the Greek Pantheon for that; it just means Linux isn't a MLM scheme).
I so much prefer maths to marketspeak.
This is actually good news for everyone wanting to play good old games... especially on 64-bit CPUs with 64-bit OSs (if I understood the compatibility problems correctly).
... ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Füh--- Hey, wait a minute... I'd thought that was a Windows meme!
(I distinctly recall reading the very same comment yesterday on some other topic)
However, if we could get machines translating all the millions of intensely boring legal documents emerging from the UN or EU (since all the documents have to be translated to all the official languages of the EU ASAP), it would get all those translators pretty much fired, but probably not altogether unhappy - they are usually the ones that are good enough to get a new job easily.
Let's face it: Not even human translators are often up to the challenge of translating literary works; HHGttG and Terry Pratchett are some of the most perfect examples, since they use such an amount of wordplay that would drive even the most experienced translators to drink and/or madness. BTW, translations of Pratchett's books to Croatian are just plain awful.
Anyway, since even human translators have difficulty with literary works - especially poetry, since not only the meaning must remain the same, but also the meter has to be adapted to the target language (i.e. English is an iambic language, while Croatian Standard is trochaeic), then rhyme... I just wouldn't trust a computer with that... at least not at this techlevel.
Technical documentation, legalese... are much different. I used to work as a translator of technical documentation (instruction manuals) and it is so very dull... Always the very same things, always the same phrases... On the good side, I now know how to install, handle and program anything, from VCRs to oil pumps (not much use, though, as I don't own either). Anyway, that is a job best left to computers; the only excitement comes from Italian translations of English texts and Korean translations of Chinese texts to English; then you have to play the guessing game and invent the whole text from scratch - and no, you don't get to see the device you're describing. Everything else is copy/paste, find/replace and a lot of text formatting. When computers can manage that on their own, I'll be quite happy; and if they (or 'we', as I have chosen this as my line of study and future line of work) manage to build a machine translator that will successfully translate literature without some heavy AI, I'll be most sincerely amazed.
Then I'll disbelieve it and start looking for the human they'd put inside the computer.
Sorry... what was I saying?
You just had to mention the frolicking kitten, although you know what can happen to it.e _by_M2Ys4U.jpg
You insensitive clod.
Please, think of the kittens.
http://fs5.deviantart.com/i/2004/328/d/9/Everytim
Would it kill them to put a sensor on the mouse?
For instance, some kind of a touch sensor that closes the circuit when touched... so it needn't even be a powered sensor, but rather something mechanical, pressure-sensitive; so when your hand is on the mouse, it is powered; as soon as you remove your hand, it's off.
I mean, how difficult can it be?
Disclaimer: I am a very poor student.
If, by any chance, someone in the mouse-making business is reading this and likes it, now you know I can't afford to sue you, so do knock yourself out.
But I won't mind a free copy of the mouse.
On more than one level.
You see? There is a silver lining.
It does seem rather obvious... maybe just a leetle too obvious...
It's called rot13, if you haven't noticed.
How old were the kids again?
It all makes sense now...
Note to self: move in with my next-door neighbours. They live on #19.
Therefore, in a rape case, this can be construed as criminal intent.
This is good news for all Slashdot users; now you are gong to have sex at least in the eyes of the law...
Furthermore, I normally keep my penis hidden in my pants, which obviously means I know that's wrong and am trying to hide it.
As a consequence, criminal intent could not be established for flashing pervs; they do not seem to be hiding anything, at least... so that's OK.
And to think I actually complain about Croatian judicial system, which is merely inefficient...
*This is not a latest discovery, nor bragging; I really do need that** to prove my point.
** Please stop that.
I do not speak Ukrainian, so I might be wrong. It might not be a presentation; the other words are definitely correct.