Yes, you are. (No offense.) There are many of us who have older PPC boxes around, that are just dying to have a lean, stable OS installed so they can be put back to use. Besides, YDL is a PPC hardware distro, not an Apple hardware distro. There are a variety of reasons why PPC hardware is preferable in general to x86 hardware. YDL fills an important niche.
Agreed. Another good example is when the victim of the crime is a member of a certain "protected class". This makes no sense. A crime is a crime. People don't commit crimes against others because they like them. All that "hate crime" legislation does is further incite class warfare.
I think you're forgetting that when you walk out in PUBLIC (it's called that for a reason) you are no longer PRIVATE.
So? Don't I have the right to not be treated like a criminal, or a rat in a cage? I am a free man, and deserve a certain amount of respect due simply to that fact alone. "Stay out of my business, and I'll stay out of yours." This basic precept is part of what allows society to function.
You're right that we've never had complete anonymity. But neither did we waive all right to privacy, to have our lives recorded and possibly analyzed and dissected for eternity, by going out in public.
I object to being treated like I'm trespassing as soon as I leave the house.
You've hit the nail on the head. We are innocent until proven guilty. Every citizen has the right to not be treated like a criminal. Constant "panopticon" style surveillance is exactly that - treating every member of society like a criminal.
That's good to know. I wanted to use MySQL 4 when I got around to deploying slash. Since I'll be using an older box (albeit loaded on RAM to run slash), any speed I can squeeze out is a good thing.
However, for any other DB work I do, I'm beginning to lean more and more toward PostgreSQL. I used to be a MySQL bigot simply because that's what I knew, but PostgreSQL's merits have swayed me. Broader experience is always a good thing. Has anyone gotten slash to run on PostgreSQL yet? Last I heard the work was very preliminary.
A friend of my younger brother was over there a few years ago and had to ask my dad how to use the phone because he'd never seen a phone without a number-pad on it. Pathetic.
I ran into the same thing, but back in the summer of 1990. I had a summer job with the city, and had stopped in the grocery store to get a lunch snack. Some kid walked in after a swimming lesson and asked to use the phone. It was rotary, and the kid didn't know how to use it. There must have been many more rotary phones still in service then than now.
I always wanted to get one of those old crank phones, and get it to work somehow. That would be cool. It would be OK to gut it and mount a modern phone inside, but to actually get it to simply signal an operator to connect me (and accept incoming calls normally)...that would be cool.
My high school calculator ('87 I suppose?) is still going strong on the original battery. I bought two revisions of the el-506 since, both had a hard plastic slide-on cover that I thought would be nice, but both have flaked out and died. The D still balances my checkbook, converts bases, and does trig for me.
(My HS math teacher had a calculator from about 1970 that still worked at the time. It had red LEDs, which was cool compared to the boring black LCD displays ours had. The school had paid several hundred dollars for it. Funny to think my calculator is as old now as his was then. I wonder if his still works?)
I have an SE/30, dating to '89 or '90, that still runs wonderfully. I installed a 1.2 GB drive and bumped the RAM to 68 MB, and it runs NetBSD. I think my//gs still runs...
I remember a Guinness book record from the 80's, I don't know if it's been broken since, but there was a fire hall that had an old carbon-filament light bulb that still worked. They thought it dated to around 1910 or something like that. That's pretty cool.
The only reason I can think of for pagination is when the text is really long, maybe too long to take in one sitting like my masters' paper, breaking it up could help by letting the user bookmark the page he's on at the time. I suppose if you had in-document anchor points, that would work just as well. Single page documents are obviously easier to print for off-line viewing.
Opera will remember your exit state for all open tabs. If you accidentally close Opera, just restart and you're back where you were.
I use this all the time. I have a couple tabs open all day to newssites. In the evening I just close Opera and go home. In the morning, I launch Opera and there they are again.
I'd agree with that. I think part of the apathy stems from the sad voting method we use. When the method encourages the false "two-party system" concept, there's no incentive to look at alternatives because "they can't win anyway". And since the two big parties are so similar, they don't bother to get out to vote at all.
Sometimes I wish just half of those non-voters would show up to vote third party, any third party (which might even make a 4-way race pretty exciting, given the last voter turnouts I saw), just to throw a monkey wrench in the system. That's what it will take to make people realize we need to eliminate plurality voting in favor of Condorcet's method.
Fyi: I vote for both the Green party and the libertarian party. How strange that I'm on both sides of the fence huh?
If all the people who are just plain ticked off with the current system simply voted third party, any third party, there would probably be enough votes there to seriously challenge the D's and R's. I'm guessing there are a lot of Americans who are generally unsatisfied with the political world.
Yup, if I ever get enough spare time (my commute sucks!) to get Slash up and running myself, I have a few patches I'd like to code up. (I think I've mentioned them on slashcode before, can't remember if I made an actual feature request to sourceforge though.) Subscription's never been on my radar before, but maybe now I'll consider it.
True though. What about all the alpha geeks using Links/Lynx? They're not seeing the ads anyway, but now they miss out on seeing Mysterious Future posts? No benefit in subscribing, I guess.
I think some other way of flagging the story would be preferable. Precede the title with "MF", or wrap it in an EMphasis tag. Relying solely on color to convey information isn't reliable.
I'd like a cookie that would allow me to use my "ad-free" views in one location (home on my slow dialup) but not in another (work on the fat pipe). I don't mind seeing \. ads, and have actually found a couple interesting things I never would have discovered otherwise. But skipping those bandwidth-hogging ads at home would be useful, and might prompt me to subscribe.
As far as early posting for subscribers, I'd vote against it. The cardinal rule on \. is "post early" or you get drowned out, regardless of how insightful|informative|interesting|funny you are. Non-subscribers logging into a discussion with 100 posts and a couple dozen 4's and 5's already will likely not contribute as much. That would be a shame, and would reduce the quality of the forum for everyone, IMHO.
People would recycle Macs? Why? I've never seen one actually wear out. I'm using a 13-y.o. SE/30 running NetBSD at home. My 10-y.o. Centris 650 still boots, and I'm donating it. That's recycling. My main machine is 5 now, and will probably serve me another 2 years before I can upgrade, and then it will probably become a file server in a corner somewhere, or another donor/loaner.
You don't throw it out unless it's dead. And with Macs that takes awhile.
That's what I was saying. Large (populous) states wanted representation based on population. They wanted to represent the people. That's what we have in the HoR. Small states wanted equal representation. They wanted to represent the states. That's what we have in the Senate. These different representation methods are two ways of looking at the same thing - states are collections of many individuals, and they are unique political entities.
Try thinking about what others write for a few seconds after reading it before you try slamming them.
There's no way to be entirely proof against corruption. The best you can do is educate the people to make good choices, and implement a system that encourages them to vote and vote well. If someone's corrupt, they wouldn't last long, hopefully. Unfortunately, our gov't run schools produce mediocre students who are told that gov't is the solution to all problems, and the electoral process is so goofed up that most people stay home because they "can't make a difference anyway".
You're right, taking power away from Washington makes it less attractive to lobbyists. Reduce the scope of federal gov't to what the Constitution actually says, and most of that problem goes away. That's my goal as a CP member.
I think the Fourth Amendment is kind of a sibling to the Fifth Amendment. Whereas the Fifth protects us from having to testify against ourselves, the Fourth protects us from having our bodies, homes, things, and records (including electronic?) testify against us, at least without some kind of due process.
Interesting to think how the IRS "persuades" us to give up all our financial information then, in order to pay a "voluntary" tax, isn't it? "'Volunteer' your info, or go to jail." The tax protesters have a point. Otherwise why would the government back out of facing them directly?
If it weren't for the military, you would be speaking German right now. Thank God for the British and American forces in WWII. Martial law is no way to run society, but arguing that the military has no place in society at all is ignorant of reality.
But compulsory public education and government over-regulation of industry are tools of fascists and socialists...
Liberty is being secure in our effects. There's no "liberty violation" in locking our doors to keep out thieves. This is different than gov't locking us in our homes "for our own good".
Liberty is being secure in our persons. You can't kill someone else because they have the right to live! Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
Not violating others' rights, and others' not violating your rights - that's what liberty is. Don't equate liberty with license.
Don't knock "dead white men" simply because you don't understand what they said. Even if misattributed (it was Franklin, not Jefferson) the original saying is true, when understood in its intended sense.
The practice of awarding all EC votes to the candidate who gets 50%+1 vote doesn't seem terribly reasonable to me.
It doesn't even have to be 50%+1, it just has to be more votes than anyone else has. That's the problem of the plurality system. Jesse Ventura was elected governor in MN by only 38% backing him, which meant 62% opposed him. We'll never know if any of that 62% thought he was OK but just preferred someone else (meaning he was the best compromise), or if the 62% thought he was the worst candidate on the ballot (meaning exactly what a 38-62 vote implies). This is why we need voting reform, to get a preferential system like Condorcet.
Good points, otherwise. Democracy == mob rule, not good. The EC mitigates that effect somewhat, giving balance among the states that make up the republic.
Another problem is that third parties have a hard time getting on state ballots.
Yup. Many states' ballot access laws blatantly favor incumbents. "If you were on the ballot last time, pay a $15 fee. If you weren't, go collect a million signatures that meet the qualifications of the secretary of state." This keeps third parties out, and with them any chance of really reforming government. Make everyone follow the same rules. If it's fair for you, it's fair for me.
Between ballot access restrictions and plurality voting, the "two-party system" concept becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll find coalitions of parties as diverse as the Constitution, Green, and Libertarians working together to change these laws - that's got to tell you something. All they want is a fair chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you are. (No offense.) There are many of us who have older PPC boxes around, that are just dying to have a lean, stable OS installed so they can be put back to use. Besides, YDL is a PPC hardware distro, not an Apple hardware distro. There are a variety of reasons why PPC hardware is preferable in general to x86 hardware. YDL fills an important niche.
Agreed. Another good example is when the victim of the crime is a member of a certain "protected class". This makes no sense. A crime is a crime. People don't commit crimes against others because they like them. All that "hate crime" legislation does is further incite class warfare.
So? Don't I have the right to not be treated like a criminal, or a rat in a cage? I am a free man, and deserve a certain amount of respect due simply to that fact alone. "Stay out of my business, and I'll stay out of yours." This basic precept is part of what allows society to function.
You're right that we've never had complete anonymity. But neither did we waive all right to privacy, to have our lives recorded and possibly analyzed and dissected for eternity, by going out in public.
You've hit the nail on the head. We are innocent until proven guilty. Every citizen has the right to not be treated like a criminal. Constant "panopticon" style surveillance is exactly that - treating every member of society like a criminal.
That's good to know. I wanted to use MySQL 4 when I got around to deploying slash. Since I'll be using an older box (albeit loaded on RAM to run slash), any speed I can squeeze out is a good thing.
However, for any other DB work I do, I'm beginning to lean more and more toward PostgreSQL. I used to be a MySQL bigot simply because that's what I knew, but PostgreSQL's merits have swayed me. Broader experience is always a good thing. Has anyone gotten slash to run on PostgreSQL yet? Last I heard the work was very preliminary.
I ran into the same thing, but back in the summer of 1990. I had a summer job with the city, and had stopped in the grocery store to get a lunch snack. Some kid walked in after a swimming lesson and asked to use the phone. It was rotary, and the kid didn't know how to use it. There must have been many more rotary phones still in service then than now.
I always wanted to get one of those old crank phones, and get it to work somehow. That would be cool. It would be OK to gut it and mount a modern phone inside, but to actually get it to simply signal an operator to connect me (and accept incoming calls normally)...that would be cool.
My high school calculator ('87 I suppose?) is still going strong on the original battery. I bought two revisions of the el-506 since, both had a hard plastic slide-on cover that I thought would be nice, but both have flaked out and died. The D still balances my checkbook, converts bases, and does trig for me.
(My HS math teacher had a calculator from about 1970 that still worked at the time. It had red LEDs, which was cool compared to the boring black LCD displays ours had. The school had paid several hundred dollars for it. Funny to think my calculator is as old now as his was then. I wonder if his still works?)
I have an SE/30, dating to '89 or '90, that still runs wonderfully. I installed a 1.2 GB drive and bumped the RAM to 68 MB, and it runs NetBSD. I think my //gs still runs...
I remember a Guinness book record from the 80's, I don't know if it's been broken since, but there was a fire hall that had an old carbon-filament light bulb that still worked. They thought it dated to around 1910 or something like that. That's pretty cool.
The only reason I can think of for pagination is when the text is really long, maybe too long to take in one sitting like my masters' paper, breaking it up could help by letting the user bookmark the page he's on at the time. I suppose if you had in-document anchor points, that would work just as well. Single page documents are obviously easier to print for off-line viewing.
Opera will remember your exit state for all open tabs. If you accidentally close Opera, just restart and you're back where you were.
I use this all the time. I have a couple tabs open all day to news sites. In the evening I just close Opera and go home. In the morning, I launch Opera and there they are again.
I'd agree with that. I think part of the apathy stems from the sad voting method we use. When the method encourages the false "two-party system" concept, there's no incentive to look at alternatives because "they can't win anyway". And since the two big parties are so similar, they don't bother to get out to vote at all.
Sometimes I wish just half of those non-voters would show up to vote third party, any third party (which might even make a 4-way race pretty exciting, given the last voter turnouts I saw), just to throw a monkey wrench in the system. That's what it will take to make people realize we need to eliminate plurality voting in favor of Condorcet's method.
If all the people who are just plain ticked off with the current system simply voted third party, any third party, there would probably be enough votes there to seriously challenge the D's and R's. I'm guessing there are a lot of Americans who are generally unsatisfied with the political world.
Yup, if I ever get enough spare time (my commute sucks!) to get Slash up and running myself, I have a few patches I'd like to code up. (I think I've mentioned them on slashcode before, can't remember if I made an actual feature request to sourceforge though.) Subscription's never been on my radar before, but maybe now I'll consider it.
Heh, that's funny, that bit about BSD.
True though. What about all the alpha geeks using Links/Lynx? They're not seeing the ads anyway, but now they miss out on seeing Mysterious Future posts? No benefit in subscribing, I guess.
I think some other way of flagging the story would be preferable. Precede the title with "MF", or wrap it in an EMphasis tag. Relying solely on color to convey information isn't reliable.
I'd like a cookie that would allow me to use my "ad-free" views in one location (home on my slow dialup) but not in another (work on the fat pipe). I don't mind seeing \. ads, and have actually found a couple interesting things I never would have discovered otherwise. But skipping those bandwidth-hogging ads at home would be useful, and might prompt me to subscribe.
As far as early posting for subscribers, I'd vote against it. The cardinal rule on \. is "post early" or you get drowned out, regardless of how insightful|informative|interesting|funny you are. Non-subscribers logging into a discussion with 100 posts and a couple dozen 4's and 5's already will likely not contribute as much. That would be a shame, and would reduce the quality of the forum for everyone, IMHO.
This seems to be an appropriate follow-up to that. "Fighting drugs" is not the federal government's responsibility.
People would recycle Macs? Why? I've never seen one actually wear out. I'm using a 13-y.o. SE/30 running NetBSD at home. My 10-y.o. Centris 650 still boots, and I'm donating it. That's recycling. My main machine is 5 now, and will probably serve me another 2 years before I can upgrade, and then it will probably become a file server in a corner somewhere, or another donor/loaner.
You don't throw it out unless it's dead. And with Macs that takes awhile.
Judge Borg?
That's what I was saying. Large (populous) states wanted representation based on population. They wanted to represent the people. That's what we have in the HoR. Small states wanted equal representation. They wanted to represent the states. That's what we have in the Senate. These different representation methods are two ways of looking at the same thing - states are collections of many individuals, and they are unique political entities.
Try thinking about what others write for a few seconds after reading it before you try slamming them.
Ah, your position becomes clear now. Let me state this simply.
Once you grasp that, we'll have a common basis from which to debate. Until then I won't waste my time. Have a good day, sir.
There's no way to be entirely proof against corruption. The best you can do is educate the people to make good choices, and implement a system that encourages them to vote and vote well. If someone's corrupt, they wouldn't last long, hopefully. Unfortunately, our gov't run schools produce mediocre students who are told that gov't is the solution to all problems, and the electoral process is so goofed up that most people stay home because they "can't make a difference anyway".
You're right, taking power away from Washington makes it less attractive to lobbyists. Reduce the scope of federal gov't to what the Constitution actually says, and most of that problem goes away. That's my goal as a CP member.
Interesting to think how the IRS "persuades" us to give up all our financial information then, in order to pay a "voluntary" tax, isn't it? "'Volunteer' your info, or go to jail." The tax protesters have a point. Otherwise why would the government back out of facing them directly?
If it weren't for the military, you would be speaking German right now. Thank God for the British and American forces in WWII. Martial law is no way to run society, but arguing that the military has no place in society at all is ignorant of reality.
But compulsory public education and government over-regulation of industry are tools of fascists and socialists...
Liberty is being secure in our effects. There's no "liberty violation" in locking our doors to keep out thieves. This is different than gov't locking us in our homes "for our own good".
Liberty is being secure in our persons. You can't kill someone else because they have the right to live! Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
Not violating others' rights, and others' not violating your rights - that's what liberty is. Don't equate liberty with license.
Don't knock "dead white men" simply because you don't understand what they said. Even if misattributed (it was Franklin, not Jefferson) the original saying is true, when understood in its intended sense.
It doesn't even have to be 50%+1, it just has to be more votes than anyone else has. That's the problem of the plurality system. Jesse Ventura was elected governor in MN by only 38% backing him, which meant 62% opposed him. We'll never know if any of that 62% thought he was OK but just preferred someone else (meaning he was the best compromise), or if the 62% thought he was the worst candidate on the ballot (meaning exactly what a 38-62 vote implies). This is why we need voting reform, to get a preferential system like Condorcet.
Good points, otherwise. Democracy == mob rule, not good. The EC mitigates that effect somewhat, giving balance among the states that make up the republic.
Yup. Many states' ballot access laws blatantly favor incumbents. "If you were on the ballot last time, pay a $15 fee. If you weren't, go collect a million signatures that meet the qualifications of the secretary of state." This keeps third parties out, and with them any chance of really reforming government. Make everyone follow the same rules. If it's fair for you, it's fair for me.
Between ballot access restrictions and plurality voting, the "two-party system" concept becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll find coalitions of parties as diverse as the Constitution, Green, and Libertarians working together to change these laws - that's got to tell you something. All they want is a fair chance.