Well, if you buy that DVD drive, you're paying your patent royalties, so you should be entitled to install the codecs on your system without paying more. Check the Medibuntu repositories.
Canonical probably doesn't mind if their sales are low, they just want to offer a legal and easy way to install these software patent encumbered codecs for their customers. I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't turning much of a profit on this.
Seriously though, a software only DVD player should not cost more than $10
I think it should not cost anything, but the fact that the MPEG-2 codec is patent encumbered in some countries makes it expensive. There are plenty of free media players which can play DVDs using the right codec plugin.
You can do the same thing with Ubuntu using the Medibuntu repository. Those packages are in a different repository because they violate software patents in some countries, so if you do not live in one of those countries, you can install those packages legally. (Check your local laws, install at your own risk, if it breaks, you get to keep both parts, &c.)
I suppose you have a Reasonable Excuse to read some good literature now. It's Character Forming. I'm not a Recent Convert, but I do think that coming back to complain would be Unacceptable Behaviour, and I'd have to use my Attitude Adjuster in a Frank Exchange of Views. Unless it was an Honest Mistake.
negative temperature is real. It is actually hotter than the hottest positive temperature. I imagine it would look something like Jessica Alba in bed with my girlfriend.
But if it's 11 billion years away, it happened in a very young universe with much fewer heavier elements, making it a lot less likely for life to have developed back then.
Can't they just put that stuff inside the Help menu, near the About Firefox item?
Also, why the need for this EULA at all? Free Software isn't supposed to need a EULA. The legal text (in the Help menu) should just need to mention the OSI-approved licence it is distributed under, plus the trademark status and possibly restrictive licence of the artwork.
Also, there are enviroments that no bacteria can evolve to survive in, at least from their current state, either because it is just too hostile to life, or because it is too different from their usual environment that they can't adapt quickly enough, because it requires changing too many genes.
The hostile environment option is probably not so nice for us either, you wouldn't want to heat your kitchen top to 3000 degrees to sterilize it, because that would be unpractical and dangerous. But no organism could survive that, their molecules would just crack. Incidentally, this is sort of what an autoclave does. Make stuff hot enough to kill everything.
The different environment option consists of altering the environment to one that is lethal to the microorganisms, but not in such an extreme way. If the change is fast and drastic enough, they won't have time to evolve resistance to it and will die. Microorganisms are sensitive to changes in e.g. temperature, acidity, and salinity of the environment. We humans have a tough skin that protects us from the environment, we have heating and cooling mechanisms, and regulate our bodies' acidity and salinity. Single-celled organisms do not have these luxuries, and are much more likely to perish if the environment changes drastically.
Yeah, and the modest "pre-christian" farmer lived in paradise:
drink water from a river that people in the upstream village shit in
get ill from unhygienic circumstances (bad water, handling manure, then handling food, infectious diseases)
inavailability of medicines such as antibiotics
bad food, especially in winter
bad weather wiping out your crops
drafty houses
dying of old age by age 40
losing a significant amount of your children while they are very young, something that is widely recognized as the worst thing that can happen to anyone
rampaging Roman armies come to steal your grain and kids (for reinforcement or entertainment, depending on their gender)
have you ever read old myths and legends? People with a bit of power had serious ego problems back then, and would sometimes kill you if they thought you looked at them funny, and get away with it. This is still somewhat of a problem, but has mostly been contained these days
people were generally more aggressive, because there was no insurance or social security, so you had to look tough and intimidate potential enemies to make them think twice about stealing your cows
On the plus side:
no reality tv
no Microsoft Windows
no DRM
no SUVs
no anime
no DMCA
no Jehova's Witnesses
Overall, I think the world is getting better and people are getting nicer. Of course pollution, climate change, and concentration of wealth and power are big problems that affect us all and need to be handled.
Even the poor people in rich countries nowadays have it much better than the poor people thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, the poor people would starve, nowadays they can grow grossly obese while watching the above-mentioned tv programs (albeit on a crappy old CRT instead of a big-screen plasma screen).
Compared to the "pre-christian" farmer, we live in heaven. You're just someone who'll never be satisfied, and expects everything to be handed to you on a platter. The world owes you nothing, you just happened to be born, and it is up to you to survive. Just use your advanced human superpower called cooperation, which has allowed us to bring the bigger, stronger, and faster animals to the brink of extinction, while we are slow, weak, and have tiny teeth and no claws.
Humans are the ultimate zerg rush, kekeke!
But you just sit there, complaining about how hard it is today, and how much better you imagine it must have been in the past.
Creationism / Intelligent Design isn't a theory. The only "evidence" for it is some text in a book and some fake photoshopped pictures of digs of four meter tall humanoid skeletons.
It is not reasonable to present both evolution by natural selection, which has mountains of evidence behind it, and creationism / ID as equally plausible scientific theories. The only role Creationism / ID should play in a science class is as an example of a nonscientific explanation of how we came to be here.
What missing links are you talking about? More fossils are unearthed every day, and regularly, they discover a new species of hominid that fits in between two known species. Then you'll just whine about the missing links between the older known species and the newly discovered ones, ad infinitum. Take the real numbers: there's an infinite amount of them between any two integers. The "missing link" between 1 and 2 would be e.g. 1.5, and that would give rise to two new "missing links" -- one between 1 and 1.5, and the other between 1.5 and 2. This could go on and on forever (no barrel-throwing monkeys at the end, though).
Of course they should not let students be ignorant of the fact that many people prefer to believe some old book instead of a theory that's been debated and improved for 150 years by thousands of very smart and diligent scientists, all trying to disprove (parts of) it, and replace it with new ideas -- that would make them very famous and allow them to hold a speech in Stockholm. There is no conspiracy to push evolution by scientists who are afraid of religion or something like that. It would require thousands of intelligent and ambitious people to willfully forego their chance at the Nobel Prize. Never gonna happen.
It comes down to this: evolution by natural selection is a good theory that explains the wide variety of life found on this rock, and which makes biology make sense, and creationism and ID are just the LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU yelling of desperate religious people.
Yeah, too bad Dell had to rush things, and they are offering 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB SSDs in their new laptot. If they'd waited a bit, they could just have put one of these babies in all of them as standard. Although, 60 cents might be too expensive for a Dell!
Leeches, as used back in the bad old days, are not good medicine. Those doctors back then didn't know that, because they believed that ill people have bad blood in them, and leeches must be used to suck it out. Complete bollocks in retrospect.
Medicine does in many cases work, and nowadays it is a science, with double-blind tests for new medicines. Engineering used to be bad: look at all the centuries-old buildings with their massively overengineered walls, and the puny bridges they used to build way back, and what the application of mathematics has done to the discipline: now we have skyscrapers and huge bridges, all over the world.
So, unless you want to live in a mud hut and die of dysentery on your trek to the west in search of a new food source, yes, the application of math and science to human needs has drastically improved our lives.
Faith healings? Of course! That's why nobody died from infectious diseases back in the dark ages, when people were so much more pious! Hey, that's the solution to the health insurance problems in the USA: if you get ill, go to church and have people pray for you, and in exchange, you'll pray for other people when they get ill, it's almost like BitTorrent!
Wigglesworth believed that God had cured him of hemorrhoids, and much of his ministry was focused on faith healing. He avoided medical treatment as far as possible, despite suffering from kidney stones in his later years. In his books, Wigglesworth said he refused any surgical procedure stating that no knife would ever touch his body either in life or death. This was substantiated by a friend, Albert Hibbert, who stated in his book 'Smith Wigglesworth: The Secret of His Power" that no autopsy was ever performed after Wigglesworth's death. Wigglesworth even claimed that God had allowed him to raise several persons from the dead.
This isn't positing the existence of multiple universes at all. This is about the question why the universal constants are what they are, and what would have happened if they were different.
So, if MS forks Apache, will they still be able to call it Apache, or will they have to make up a new name for trademark reasons? If so, it'll just be another fork, won't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you buy that DVD drive, you're paying your patent royalties, so you should be entitled to install the codecs on your system without paying more. Check the Medibuntu repositories.
Canonical probably doesn't mind if their sales are low, they just want to offer a legal and easy way to install these software patent encumbered codecs for their customers. I wouldn't be surprised if they aren't turning much of a profit on this.
Seriously though, a software only DVD player should not cost more than $10
I think it should not cost anything, but the fact that the MPEG-2 codec is patent encumbered in some countries makes it expensive. There are plenty of free media players which can play DVDs using the right codec plugin.
You can do the same thing with Ubuntu using the Medibuntu repository. Those packages are in a different repository because they violate software patents in some countries, so if you do not live in one of those countries, you can install those packages legally. (Check your local laws, install at your own risk, if it breaks, you get to keep both parts, &c.)
truthlieness
Nice one!
Try a prepare statement sometime. How many escaping functions does PHP have these days?
I can make the most profitable product in the World unprofitable with some legal and creative accounting.
Like movies?
Don't worry, it's here to help. Whether you want it to or not.
I suppose you have a Reasonable Excuse to read some good literature now. It's Character Forming. I'm not a Recent Convert, but I do think that coming back to complain would be Unacceptable Behaviour, and I'd have to use my Attitude Adjuster in a Frank Exchange of Views. Unless it was an Honest Mistake.
(Yes, I referred to Wikipedia on this one ;-] )
negative temperature is real. It is actually hotter than the hottest positive temperature. I imagine it would look something like Jessica Alba in bed with my girlfriend.
That would be an imaginary temperature...
It's already happened...
But if it's 11 billion years away, it happened in a very young universe with much fewer heavier elements, making it a lot less likely for life to have developed back then.
I know that, I just did not formulate it accurately enough, but thank you for your well-written and clear post.
Can't they just put that stuff inside the Help menu, near the About Firefox item?
Also, why the need for this EULA at all? Free Software isn't supposed to need a EULA. The legal text (in the Help menu) should just need to mention the OSI-approved licence it is distributed under, plus the trademark status and possibly restrictive licence of the artwork.
Also, there are enviroments that no bacteria can evolve to survive in, at least from their current state, either because it is just too hostile to life, or because it is too different from their usual environment that they can't adapt quickly enough, because it requires changing too many genes.
The hostile environment option is probably not so nice for us either, you wouldn't want to heat your kitchen top to 3000 degrees to sterilize it, because that would be unpractical and dangerous. But no organism could survive that, their molecules would just crack. Incidentally, this is sort of what an autoclave does. Make stuff hot enough to kill everything.
The different environment option consists of altering the environment to one that is lethal to the microorganisms, but not in such an extreme way. If the change is fast and drastic enough, they won't have time to evolve resistance to it and will die. Microorganisms are sensitive to changes in e.g. temperature, acidity, and salinity of the environment. We humans have a tough skin that protects us from the environment, we have heating and cooling mechanisms, and regulate our bodies' acidity and salinity. Single-celled organisms do not have these luxuries, and are much more likely to perish if the environment changes drastically.
Yeah, and the modest "pre-christian" farmer lived in paradise:
On the plus side:
Overall, I think the world is getting better and people are getting nicer. Of course pollution, climate change, and concentration of wealth and power are big problems that affect us all and need to be handled.
Even the poor people in rich countries nowadays have it much better than the poor people thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, the poor people would starve, nowadays they can grow grossly obese while watching the above-mentioned tv programs (albeit on a crappy old CRT instead of a big-screen plasma screen).
Compared to the "pre-christian" farmer, we live in heaven. You're just someone who'll never be satisfied, and expects everything to be handed to you on a platter. The world owes you nothing, you just happened to be born, and it is up to you to survive. Just use your advanced human superpower called cooperation, which has allowed us to bring the bigger, stronger, and faster animals to the brink of extinction, while we are slow, weak, and have tiny teeth and no claws.
Humans are the ultimate zerg rush, kekeke!
But you just sit there, complaining about how hard it is today, and how much better you imagine it must have been in the past.
Creationism / Intelligent Design isn't a theory. The only "evidence" for it is some text in a book and some fake photoshopped pictures of digs of four meter tall humanoid skeletons.
It is not reasonable to present both evolution by natural selection, which has mountains of evidence behind it, and creationism / ID as equally plausible scientific theories. The only role Creationism / ID should play in a science class is as an example of a nonscientific explanation of how we came to be here.
What missing links are you talking about? More fossils are unearthed every day, and regularly, they discover a new species of hominid that fits in between two known species. Then you'll just whine about the missing links between the older known species and the newly discovered ones, ad infinitum. Take the real numbers: there's an infinite amount of them between any two integers. The "missing link" between 1 and 2 would be e.g. 1.5, and that would give rise to two new "missing links" -- one between 1 and 1.5, and the other between 1.5 and 2. This could go on and on forever (no barrel-throwing monkeys at the end, though).
Of course they should not let students be ignorant of the fact that many people prefer to believe some old book instead of a theory that's been debated and improved for 150 years by thousands of very smart and diligent scientists, all trying to disprove (parts of) it, and replace it with new ideas -- that would make them very famous and allow them to hold a speech in Stockholm. There is no conspiracy to push evolution by scientists who are afraid of religion or something like that. It would require thousands of intelligent and ambitious people to willfully forego their chance at the Nobel Prize. Never gonna happen.
It comes down to this: evolution by natural selection is a good theory that explains the wide variety of life found on this rock, and which makes biology make sense, and creationism and ID are just the LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU yelling of desperate religious people.
Yeah, too bad Dell had to rush things, and they are offering 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB SSDs in their new laptot. If they'd waited a bit, they could just have put one of these babies in all of them as standard. Although, 60 cents might be too expensive for a Dell!
Why? They're almost free at 60 cents each :-P
Leeches, as used back in the bad old days, are not good medicine. Those doctors back then didn't know that, because they believed that ill people have bad blood in them, and leeches must be used to suck it out. Complete bollocks in retrospect.
Medicine does in many cases work, and nowadays it is a science, with double-blind tests for new medicines. Engineering used to be bad: look at all the centuries-old buildings with their massively overengineered walls, and the puny bridges they used to build way back, and what the application of mathematics has done to the discipline: now we have skyscrapers and huge bridges, all over the world.
So, unless you want to live in a mud hut and die of dysentery on your trek to the west in search of a new food source, yes, the application of math and science to human needs has drastically improved our lives.
Faith healings? Of course! That's why nobody died from infectious diseases back in the dark ages, when people were so much more pious! Hey, that's the solution to the health insurance problems in the USA: if you get ill, go to church and have people pray for you, and in exchange, you'll pray for other people when they get ill, it's almost like BitTorrent!
From the Wikipedia page:
Healing claims
Wigglesworth believed that God had cured him of hemorrhoids, and much of his ministry was focused on faith healing. He avoided medical treatment as far as possible, despite suffering from kidney stones in his later years. In his books, Wigglesworth said he refused any surgical procedure stating that no knife would ever touch his body either in life or death. This was substantiated by a friend, Albert Hibbert, who stated in his book 'Smith Wigglesworth: The Secret of His Power" that no autopsy was ever performed after Wigglesworth's death. Wigglesworth even claimed that God had allowed him to raise several persons from the dead.
I think this speaks for itself.
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2001/01/perl_god.html
Likewise, I find that the basic premises of medicine seem to be faulty. Again, our lives don't improve greatly with our medical knowledge
Good luck with your leech therapy, dude.
This isn't positing the existence of multiple universes at all. This is about the question why the universal constants are what they are, and what would have happened if they were different.
Something completely different from M-theory.
Beware the alien, the mutant, the heretic...
So, if MS forks Apache, will they still be able to call it Apache, or will they have to make up a new name for trademark reasons? If so, it'll just be another fork, won't it?
So, are you on the no-fly list yet?
"Oh, tough talk for someone with only one Fields medal!" -- Wernstrom (to Farnsworth)