Chromium's codebase is two orders of magnitude larger than Firefox's. I'm not saying someone won't eventually do it, but this suggestion that the average code-savvy user can do it for himself is unrealistic at best.
There are a lot of people saying things like ``if we took this money and instead did x'' every time someone comes up with one of these plans, but at the end of the day, none of that money is actually being spent, neither on this nor on x. If we took the money from any of the vastly counterproductive things we waste money on (Iraq being the obvious example) rather than taking it from things that might actually work, we might actually get something done.
Is that supposed to be insightful? By the same token it's pointless to discuss her stances on technology-related matters because she doesn't single-handedly write and enforce every single law.
It's true that it's been known the Earth is round (well, spherical) for much longer than is generally believed in popular culture, but scientists and mathematicians aside, the average person did generally believe the Earth is flat (or just didn't think about it, which amounts to the same thing) until some time into the Dark Ages. ``Ancient Greek mathematicians knew the Earth was spherical'' is not the same thing as ``nobody ever believed the world was flat''.
Well, if they didn't break the law by coming here illegally, they wouldn't have that problem.
That argument doesn't become less stupid if you repeat it. The laws are unjust.
While I do like to help people when I can...it is about me and my country first when it comes down to it.
Why? Because of an accident of birth? There's nothing special about Americans that makes them better than Mexicans.
(...) especially when it starts to hurt me or my country.
It doesn't hurt your country nearly as much as you seem to want to think it does. Like I said, as threats to the American economy go, illegal immigration is way down on the scale. If you're really concerned about the economy, vote in some politicians who are competent to run one.
What is inhumane about wanting people to follow the law, and immigrate legally, if they want to work and hopefully become a citizen of the US?
If a law is being broken en masse, the law is broken in more than just that sense. Do you think people like living their lives in fear of being arrested and deported? If legal immigration was a viable option for these people, illegal immigration wouldn't be the problem it is.
What is inhumane about expecting people of a country, to try to fix their own country's corruption (...)
That's ironic, coming from an American, and again, very convenient. Of course, part of the reason Mexico's economy is in shambles is because of the raw deal they get from agreements like NAFTA. No economy exists in a vacuum, but shades of grey clearly don't enter into your reasoning.
For you to say illegals are abstract boogey men....means you must not live near, or have visited any states on the border with MX...they are VERY real, and spreading throughout the US.
You are the one treating them as abstract bogeymen. It's true they're very real, but the important part is that they're very real people. This bullshit about invasions and locking down borders is ridiculous. You're a human being first and an American second, and ignoring real suffering (and calling for people to make it worse) because you want to pretend Mexicans are a significant threat to the US economy (more so than, say, the record federal deficit, or the outsourcing of most of the American manufacturing base, or a war that costs about two billion dollars a week) is nothing short of sociopathic.
Illegal immigration is a problem, but not because of its effect on the US economy or because you feel violated in your manhood when someone waves a non-US flag on US soil; it's a problem because real people are suffering, and any solution is going to have to address that reality.
Because illegal workers are just abstract bogeymen who are only out to destroy the American Way of Life (tm), who should be locked away and/or deported as soon as possible? There's no human side to this at all? How beautifully convenient it must be to live in your world.
Millionaires can afford better healthcare than one underfunded state program is willing to provide, therefore socialised medicine doesn't work? Is that seriously the gist of your post? The fact that people modded you Insightful is frightening. It takes a special kind of selective blindness to be that ignorant.
And BTW, Gates, plug a second mouse to a Mac and you can control the cursor using two mice automatically without any further effort.
Windows has been able to do that since at least Windows 95 as well. That's not what he was talking about here.
There's some irony in complaining about how Gates has made a career out of stealing ideas, and then bringing up Apple as a counter-example. If anyone has been stretching the word ``innovation'' beyond all recognisability, it's Jobs.
(Not a Gates fan either, though, and as a rule, I'll take predictability over ``innovation'' in user interfaces any day.)
Higher power consumption != less eco-friendly. Gore's house has a much, much lower carbon footprint than the average American home because he gets nearly all of that energy he uses from solar and geothermal sources. Much of the reason that bill you're referring to was so high is because he's paying a premium to get his energy from clean sources. Maybe you were just trying to make an innocent joke, but that meme needs to die.
Gore isn't saying everyone needs to cut their energy consumption down to zero, he's saying people need to make an effort to be carbon-neutral, and he's making that effort himself.
I don't know who modded you Insightful, but AI research has produced many useful results. The fact that it hasn't produced HAL 9000 very much does not mean it's on the same level as parapsychology. Similarly, quantum physics is a real field of science, and quantum computing is based on solid scientific principles. This company may be a bunch of frauds, but if you want to suggest quantum physics is a massive conspiracy among the physicists of the world you're going to need more than just handwaving and pointing to a field of pseudoscience that never had the support of mainstream scientists.
So the fact that a prominent Republican blows the whistle on potential election fraud means the general opinion among Republicans isn't that Democrats calling for investigations before is just sour grapes? Seriously? I'm glad the one bringing this to attention is a Republican, since it might convince a few of them, as the grandparent suggested, but it's *you*, not the GP, who is bringing knee-jerk partisanship into this discussion.
It's odd to know your classical education has taught you that tyranny doesn't do any harm to a society's cultural output.
Reading comprehension is a skill you can learn. Nowhere did I say that, unless you're somehow laboring under the delusion that anything that isn't "capitalism" is tyranny.
Mind you I think it's quaint that there are still apologists for Imperial Rome. I guess you prefer Sparta to Athens and the Confederate States to the Union too. All of which assumes that you'd be in the tiny privileged minority in those states, but that's unlikely.
Perhaps you should stop projecting straw men. I have no love for ancient Rome as a society, but even less for people who deliberately misrepresent it to appear clever. Thank you, though, for removing all doubt regarding the issue of ignorance versus disingenuousness.
The only problem is that making production cars that are light and aerodynamic are against the will of the industry or something.
More like against safety regulations. There's something to be said for cars that don't shatter and kill their passengers when they hit something at 20 mph, even if they're a bit less efficient.
But when you consider that the Roman Empire ruled most of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for several hundred years, a shelf's worth of books is not impressive as their total literary output. The UK probably produces that in a few minutes.
The Roman Empire didn't rule nearly as much for the vast majority of its existence. It also had far fewer inhabitants than the UK does now for most of that time (at its peak it had about 88 million, but that didn't last long and almost all of those were illiterate, whereas the UK, with its 60 million, has a 99% literacy rate). Add to that the price of parchment and the fact that said parchment doesn't survive the passing of millennia very well (especially not when people are actively destroying as pagan and therefore heretical it much of that time, and are generally too illiterate for most of them to appreciate it for most of the rest), and it's not terribly surprising that little has been passed on to us.
That's an unfair comparison perhaps but I suspect that democratic Athens was much more productive, despite being centuries earlier.
Suspicions aren't the same thing as facts, and you are, in fact, wrong, as other posters have pointed out.
Technologically there seemed to be more or less total stagnation too. Almost everything around at the end of the empire was already invented when Augustus became the first Emperor. In fact most of it was invented by the Athenians.
The fact that you don't know about the technological progress does not mean it didn't happen. The Romans were the most advanced civilisation this side of China, and while much of their early technology was "stolen" from the Etruscans (not really, since the Etruscans ruled Rome for a bit and were eventually absorbed relatively peacefully into the nation long before they were an empire) and the Greeks, they certainly didn't lack innovators.
Much of the technology that is generally considered to be typically Roman (such as concrete, plumbing facilities, cranes, wagon technology, mechanized harvesting machines, domes, the arch in building practice, wine and oil presses, and glass blowing; yes, that's copy/pasted from Wikipedia) was indeed already invented by the first century, when Augustus was emperor, but that doesn't mean that's all they came up with or that those things weren't improved upon later on. It took later civilisations nearly a *millennium* to get to the point where Rome was by the time the empire fell. The Romans certainly didn't build and maintain dominion over nearly all of the known world at the time by sitting around doing nothing.
If you think, though, that technological progress was the fastest during the Republic because Rome had a middle class, you're an idiot. The middle class was always next to non-existent, and never a major driver of invention, even among the oh-so-inventive Greeks. The most advanced technology of the time was trinkets invented by mathematicians and engineers for their masters, and you'd be hard-pressed to defend them as being middle-class. Things like aqueducts and Roman roads are an exception, but they were designed and perfected by Roman engineers, based on their experiences watching slaves and laborers. Again, very much not the middle class.
tl;dr: sleeping through a few history classes is no substitute for a classical education, and while the Romans were quite an unpleasant people, underestimating and misrepresenting them and their achievements (either deliberately or through ignorance; I'm guessing a bit of both though more of the latter, given your "court jester" line earlier) for the sake of a cheap and bullshit point about piracy does them a great disservice. Your entire argument about "capitalist society" would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc ("correlation is not causation" is a more popular phrase on Slashdot, but Latin is more topical), but it's so poorly supported by dragging the Romans into it I'm loath to even give it that much credit.
Common anti-environmentalist talking point, and pretty much completely made up. A single unsubstantiated claim by some reporter in the '70s was dug up and seized on as ``the opinion of every climate scientist at the time''. A straw man, nothing more.
This isn't about hearing well, it's about hearing well in a particular range. Dogs have good ears because they're hunters, and chimpanzees have opposable thumbs because it helps with climbing (though they have indeed been used for making and using tools as well). There doesn't seem to be any other real explanation for being able to hear this well in that specific range, and like the summary said, maintaining sensitive sensory systems is quite expensive (much more so than just having a thumb in a different spot), so it's very unlikely this would have happened for no reason at all.
It's not at all ``jumping to conclusions'' to formulate hypotheses on the matter.
The evolution of the eye is actually very well understood. Even Darwin himself had a good idea of how it happened. You know that creationist quotemine that has Darwin saying that the eye evolving by natural selection seems at first glance to be "absurd in the highest possible degree"? In the book Darwin actually goes on to explain how it probably happened. I'm as surprised as you probably are that creationists tend to leave that bit out.
People who think waving their hands and shouting "goddidit" is a valid alternative to a scientific framework that has singlehandedly added four decades to our average life expectancy *are* ignorant hicks, no matter how much you want to pretend your superstitions have anything to do with reality. It's 2008; get your head out of your ass and join the rest of us in the post-Enlightenment world already.
Can you give one reason outside of Christian morality that this man shouldn't be tortured? (...) And don't use the "we'll become monsters too" excuse because it is based on Christian morality (because there is nothing special about humanity).
Wow. The only other time I've seen someone this ignorant of the origin of morality is when certain fundies try to stereotype atheists. I suggest you seek help.
A voice interface for something meant to be used in public places strikes me as a terrible idea, unless it uses a microphone quite close to your mouth, which is less than convenient. And if the 3D projector is supposed to replace the screen altogether, it's going to be pretty hard to have any privacy in public too. At least a laptop can be turned away from people.
Also, virtual keyboards suck ass. There's a lot to be said for tactile feedback, and a good reason that laser-projected keyboard hasn't taken off.
Slashdot Mirror
Chromium's codebase is two orders of magnitude larger than Firefox's.
I'm not saying someone won't eventually do it, but this suggestion that the average code-savvy user can do it for himself is unrealistic at best.
Do you know how big the Chromium source is? A fork is not going to be trivial.
There are a lot of people saying things like ``if we took this money and instead did x'' every time someone comes up with one of these plans, but at the end of the day, none of that money is actually being spent, neither on this nor on x.
If we took the money from any of the vastly counterproductive things we waste money on (Iraq being the obvious example) rather than taking it from things that might actually work, we might actually get something done.
Is that supposed to be insightful? By the same token it's pointless to discuss her stances on technology-related matters because she doesn't single-handedly write and enforce every single law.
It's true that it's been known the Earth is round (well, spherical) for much longer than is generally believed in popular culture, but scientists and mathematicians aside, the average person did generally believe the Earth is flat (or just didn't think about it, which amounts to the same thing) until some time into the Dark Ages.
``Ancient Greek mathematicians knew the Earth was spherical'' is not the same thing as ``nobody ever believed the world was flat''.
That's not what your immigration laws are doing.
Since it's obvious your ignorance is of the willful kind, there's no point in continuing here.
That argument doesn't become less stupid if you repeat it. The laws are unjust.
Why? Because of an accident of birth? There's nothing special about Americans that makes them better than Mexicans.
It doesn't hurt your country nearly as much as you seem to want to think it does. Like I said, as threats to the American economy go, illegal immigration is way down on the scale. If you're really concerned about the economy, vote in some politicians who are competent to run one.
If a law is being broken en masse, the law is broken in more than just that sense. Do you think people like living their lives in fear of being arrested and deported? If legal immigration was a viable option for these people, illegal immigration wouldn't be the problem it is.
That's ironic, coming from an American, and again, very convenient.
Of course, part of the reason Mexico's economy is in shambles is because of the raw deal they get from agreements like NAFTA. No economy exists in a vacuum, but shades of grey clearly don't enter into your reasoning.
You are the one treating them as abstract bogeymen. It's true they're very real, but the important part is that they're very real people. This bullshit about invasions and locking down borders is ridiculous. You're a human being first and an American second, and ignoring real suffering (and calling for people to make it worse) because you want to pretend Mexicans are a significant threat to the US economy (more so than, say, the record federal deficit, or the outsourcing of most of the American manufacturing base, or a war that costs about two billion dollars a week) is nothing short of sociopathic.
Illegal immigration is a problem, but not because of its effect on the US economy or because you feel violated in your manhood when someone waves a non-US flag on US soil; it's a problem because real people are suffering, and any solution is going to have to address that reality.
Because illegal workers are just abstract bogeymen who are only out to destroy the American Way of Life (tm), who should be locked away and/or deported as soon as possible? There's no human side to this at all?
How beautifully convenient it must be to live in your world.
Millionaires can afford better healthcare than one underfunded state program is willing to provide, therefore socialised medicine doesn't work? Is that seriously the gist of your post?
The fact that people modded you Insightful is frightening. It takes a special kind of selective blindness to be that ignorant.
Windows has been able to do that since at least Windows 95 as well. That's not what he was talking about here.
There's some irony in complaining about how Gates has made a career out of stealing ideas, and then bringing up Apple as a counter-example. If anyone has been stretching the word ``innovation'' beyond all recognisability, it's Jobs.
(Not a Gates fan either, though, and as a rule, I'll take predictability over ``innovation'' in user interfaces any day.)
Nova means the exact same thing in Spanish as it does in English. It very much is a word.
Higher power consumption != less eco-friendly. Gore's house has a much, much lower carbon footprint than the average American home because he gets nearly all of that energy he uses from solar and geothermal sources. Much of the reason that bill you're referring to was so high is because he's paying a premium to get his energy from clean sources.
Maybe you were just trying to make an innocent joke, but that meme needs to die.
Gore isn't saying everyone needs to cut their energy consumption down to zero, he's saying people need to make an effort to be carbon-neutral, and he's making that effort himself.
I don't know who modded you Insightful, but AI research has produced many useful results. The fact that it hasn't produced HAL 9000 very much does not mean it's on the same level as parapsychology.
Similarly, quantum physics is a real field of science, and quantum computing is based on solid scientific principles. This company may be a bunch of frauds, but if you want to suggest quantum physics is a massive conspiracy among the physicists of the world you're going to need more than just handwaving and pointing to a field of pseudoscience that never had the support of mainstream scientists.
So the fact that a prominent Republican blows the whistle on potential election fraud means the general opinion among Republicans isn't that Democrats calling for investigations before is just sour grapes? Seriously?
I'm glad the one bringing this to attention is a Republican, since it might convince a few of them, as the grandparent suggested, but it's *you*, not the GP, who is bringing knee-jerk partisanship into this discussion.
Reading comprehension is a skill you can learn. Nowhere did I say that, unless you're somehow laboring under the delusion that anything that isn't "capitalism" is tyranny.
Perhaps you should stop projecting straw men. I have no love for ancient Rome as a society, but even less for people who deliberately misrepresent it to appear clever.
Thank you, though, for removing all doubt regarding the issue of ignorance versus disingenuousness.
More like against safety regulations. There's something to be said for cars that don't shatter and kill their passengers when they hit something at 20 mph, even if they're a bit less efficient.
wtf people who enjoy the use of their limbs!
The Roman Empire didn't rule nearly as much for the vast majority of its existence. It also had far fewer inhabitants than the UK does now for most of that time (at its peak it had about 88 million, but that didn't last long and almost all of those were illiterate, whereas the UK, with its 60 million, has a 99% literacy rate). Add to that the price of parchment and the fact that said parchment doesn't survive the passing of millennia very well (especially not when people are actively destroying as pagan and therefore heretical it much of that time, and are generally too illiterate for most of them to appreciate it for most of the rest), and it's not terribly surprising that little has been passed on to us.
Suspicions aren't the same thing as facts, and you are, in fact, wrong, as other posters have pointed out.
The fact that you don't know about the technological progress does not mean it didn't happen. The Romans were the most advanced civilisation this side of China, and while much of their early technology was "stolen" from the Etruscans (not really, since the Etruscans ruled Rome for a bit and were eventually absorbed relatively peacefully into the nation long before they were an empire) and the Greeks, they certainly didn't lack innovators.
Much of the technology that is generally considered to be typically Roman (such as concrete, plumbing facilities, cranes, wagon technology, mechanized harvesting machines, domes, the arch in building practice, wine and oil presses, and glass blowing; yes, that's copy/pasted from Wikipedia) was indeed already invented by the first century, when Augustus was emperor, but that doesn't mean that's all they came up with or that those things weren't improved upon later on. It took later civilisations nearly a *millennium* to get to the point where Rome was by the time the empire fell. The Romans certainly didn't build and maintain dominion over nearly all of the known world at the time by sitting around doing nothing.
If you think, though, that technological progress was the fastest during the Republic because Rome had a middle class, you're an idiot. The middle class was always next to non-existent, and never a major driver of invention, even among the oh-so-inventive Greeks. The most advanced technology of the time was trinkets invented by mathematicians and engineers for their masters, and you'd be hard-pressed to defend them as being middle-class. Things like aqueducts and Roman roads are an exception, but they were designed and perfected by Roman engineers, based on their experiences watching slaves and laborers. Again, very much not the middle class.
tl;dr: sleeping through a few history classes is no substitute for a classical education, and while the Romans were quite an unpleasant people, underestimating and misrepresenting them and their achievements (either deliberately or through ignorance; I'm guessing a bit of both though more of the latter, given your "court jester" line earlier) for the sake of a cheap and bullshit point about piracy does them a great disservice.
Your entire argument about "capitalist society" would be a post hoc ergo propter hoc ("correlation is not causation" is a more popular phrase on Slashdot, but Latin is more topical), but it's so poorly supported by dragging the Romans into it I'm loath to even give it that much credit.
Common anti-environmentalist talking point, and pretty much completely made up. A single unsubstantiated claim by some reporter in the '70s was dug up and seized on as ``the opinion of every climate scientist at the time''.
A straw man, nothing more.
This isn't about hearing well, it's about hearing well in a particular range.
Dogs have good ears because they're hunters, and chimpanzees have opposable thumbs because it helps with climbing (though they have indeed been used for making and using tools as well). There doesn't seem to be any other real explanation for being able to hear this well in that specific range, and like the summary said, maintaining sensitive sensory systems is quite expensive (much more so than just having a thumb in a different spot), so it's very unlikely this would have happened for no reason at all.
It's not at all ``jumping to conclusions'' to formulate hypotheses on the matter.
The evolution of the eye is actually very well understood. Even Darwin himself had a good idea of how it happened.
You know that creationist quotemine that has Darwin saying that the eye evolving by natural selection seems at first glance to be "absurd in the highest possible degree"? In the book Darwin actually goes on to explain how it probably happened. I'm as surprised as you probably are that creationists tend to leave that bit out.
People who think waving their hands and shouting "goddidit" is a valid alternative to a scientific framework that has singlehandedly added four decades to our average life expectancy *are* ignorant hicks, no matter how much you want to pretend your superstitions have anything to do with reality.
It's 2008; get your head out of your ass and join the rest of us in the post-Enlightenment world already.
Which one of those links do you believe supports this story? Because none of them do.
Wow. The only other time I've seen someone this ignorant of the origin of morality is when certain fundies try to stereotype atheists.
I suggest you seek help.
A voice interface for something meant to be used in public places strikes me as a terrible idea, unless it uses a microphone quite close to your mouth, which is less than convenient.
And if the 3D projector is supposed to replace the screen altogether, it's going to be pretty hard to have any privacy in public too. At least a laptop can be turned away from people.
Also, virtual keyboards suck ass. There's a lot to be said for tactile feedback, and a good reason that laser-projected keyboard hasn't taken off.
I'll keep my physical laptop, thanks.