Chernobyl released over one million times the background radiation into the environment-
And just what is this supposed to mean? Background radiation is a constant flow, Chernobyl was a one-off event. Perhaps you mean that at the reactor the radiation was one million times the background radiation immediately after the explosion, but that says absolutely nothing about fallout elsewhere. (And I'd like to see a cite for even that.)
in forms that would be devastating to the whole world.
More hyperbole. Radiation is radiation, that loaf of Wonder Bread emits exactly the same alpha, beta and gamma particles as a cloud of fallout.
The trees in the area soaked up a lot of the more vile isotopes released- but will not be able to do so again (they've already soaked up all they can...)
Now what on earth is this supposed to mean?
Dozens being killed? Try in the tens of thousands in the area (unless it's in a truly isolated region...).
The death toll was exactly 31. This includes those people who died from radiation sickness acquired in cleanup work.
Try in the millions of people adversely affected worldwide.
Yeah, radiation levels spiked for a week or two, to maybe twice the normal level. There is still considerable debate over how much of an effect this had on cancer rates -- mostly because they haven't found much correlation yet. Only in the hardest-hit area of the Ukraine itself are thyroid cancer rates noticeably up.
They were truly lucky at Chernobyl the last time- what about the next "oops"?
"Lucky"? Could you tell me precisely what could have gone more wrong?
At Chernobyl, they won't be able to pick up the pieces for hundreds of years.
Actually, reactors 1 and 2 were restarted quite soon after the accident. Fallout radiation has long since faded into the background in most places. The area rendered uninhabitable is comparable in size to your average East European coal strip mine.
Spent fuel (nuclear waste) is the second problem I mentioned. When the oil is finished burning, all your waste has gone up the stack, for better or worse. With nuclear power, the spent fuel rods must be kept until they decay to the point where they are no longer hazzardous.
There is a simple solution: launch the waste on a trajectory into the Sun, whose automatic fusion reprocessing plant is guaranteed to take care of the stuff. This is not feasible at the moment due to the exorbitant cost and high risks of launching something, but in 50 years at the latest it will be -- and by then we will probably have fusion.
You also have to remember that the longer something stays radioactive, the safer it is. Yes, an isotope with a half-life of 15 billion years will still have 50% sitting around after all that time; but it also means that each atom has a 50% chance of decaying once in all that time! Isotopes with short half-lives decay more rapidly and are hence more dangerous in the short term, but the intense radiation will not last for long.
I'm probably going to get roundly flamed for posting these heretical viewpoints, but as I happen to be serious, this isn't flamebait. =P
Nuclear Power as it stands is a dirty, nasty, dangerous business. We are playing with forces which we know can destroy us all, we are creating toxins and wastes that we hardly know how to deal with, and we are putting trust in that the next generations will solve our problems for us.
Nuclear power is considerably less dirty, nasty and dangerous than most practical alternatives today. A catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant (and Chernobyl was about as bad as it can get) might kill a few dozen people, but perfectly normal operation of a coal or oil burning power plant kills a lot more people by releasing all sorts of nasty chemicals into the atmosphere, which then cause lung cancer and similar diseases. (I recall seeing a figure of 28,000 deaths per year quoted, but I can't find a reference right not. Oh well.) Then you have coal mine accidents, general pollution, etc. "Forces that can destroy us all" is ludicrous hyperbole, even a loaf of bread is radioactive and it contains those same forces.
Anyone here going to tell me that greenhouse effect is not real?
I will tell you that it is too early to tell. Global temperatures are rising, but not in the way it should be according to the standard global warming thoery. The reason for it may well be unrelated, as the Earth's average temperature goes up and down anyway. Less than 20 years ago there was widespread fear of a new Ice Age, ie. global cooling, based on exactly the same data.
Just the same, if the global warming theory is correct, the problem is fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants produce next to no greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is not ideal, but solar and wind power just aren't going to cut it, now or quite possibly ever, for places like Finland.
Getting back on topic, most Russian nuclear reactors are sufficiently primitive in design that they have very little software to even worry about. Russian reactors have far worse problems than Y2K, despite everything I said above I don't exactly like living near both Sosnovyi Bor and Ignalina...
I see where they say that they give you the full prize money (right on their front page), but where do you get that their clients are faster? I searched their site high and low with no luck validating your statement. In the future please give reference points.
So DCypher clients are approximately 2x faster. The figures (which you can of course verify) are actually a bit on the low side, with the MMX core my K6-200 gets around 280 kkeys/s (compared to the 218 kkeys/s listed).
The way I see it, thanks to distributed.net's greater total horsepower the contest will be finished on time, so that's no reason to select them. With DCypher I get more money (and yes, should I win I will donate some to a charity of my own choosing -- right now d.net's top charity is d.net itself!) and, thanks to faster clients, my computing power is maximized.
USSR has led the way into space. It was the first one to launch a manned spacecraft, and the first one to have a man in open space (i.e. outside the rocked, in a space suite).
Yup, not to mention the first satellite in orbit, the first probes to the Moon and most planets, the first space station... The Soviet space program caught the US with its pants down, managing to catch up in ten years or so was the true miracle of the Apollo program.
Yup. I think it's a good hobby for a hacker: you tend to take a different approach to testing when your life is literally on the line...
What this doctor was trying to figure out, was if you are performing an underwater rescue of a diver, and that diver is unconscious, do you take him up slowly (and risk not having enough time to revive him), or do you drop his weight belt and "Air Mail" him to the surface (where hopefully someone else can start to revive the person immediately).
Neither. You latch yourself tightly onto the victim, fill his BCD, lift his head up and tilt it backwards so his mouth is facing towards the surface, and then propel him to the surface at normal maximum speed (10 m/min), taking care to vent the BCD as you go up. The weight belt is only dropped once you reach the surface (or if the victim doesn't have a functional BCD).
Basically, you can revive an unconscious person, but if they (or you) get an air embolism or rupture their lungs on the way up they are dead. DCS (the bends) and even plain old drowning act slowly compared to these two instant killers.
In order to test his theory, he used himself as the victim. He dove down to 40 ft, and had someone knock him unconscious (probably with a hypodermic needle or something), and they fired him up to the surface... They repeated this several times. As far as I know, he suffered no damage, and his tests were a success:)
And people have survived going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel, but that doesn't make it a smart thing to do...
Even now, the US government has an interest in trying to prevent strong crypto from existing outside this country, and in point of fact, most currently existing crypto DOES originate from inside US borders (SSH included)
Hmm? Tatu Ylönen is a Finnish programmer and SSH Communications Security Ltd is a Finnish company.
I don't care what you say about how much work it is to translate something. You didn't write it. Someone else wrote. Just cuz you translated it doesn't mean squat.
Have you ever tried translating? Any real translation above Babelfish's level is not only lots of grunt work, but most definitely a creative endeavor as well. Not only do you have to preserve the meaning of the original, you have to make it sound good in the target language. This can be extremely difficult -- translating Joyce's Ulysses into Japanese took 15 years! And the Bible is even worse, as there are a number of conflicting originals with plenty of hapax legomena (words that occur exactly once and whose meaning is unknown) and similar pitfalls.
So hell yes, if I work my butt off to translate soemething, I want my copyright on the translation. It should then be my decision whether I want to GPL the document or not.
So if the Kama sutra is for what you pleasing the wife, is the Diamond sutra what you need to read to get her to be your wife?:)
A serious answer to a question posed in jest:
No. The Kama Sutra is an overhyped antique version of The Joy of Sex, whereas the Diamond Sutra is one of the chapters of the Prajnaparamita ("Sutras of Transcendental Wisdom"), one of the most important works in the Mahayana canon. For example, Zen thought is largely based on the Prajnaparamita sutras, with the Diamond Sutra in a special role.
The literal meaning of "sutra" is just "thread", essentially a recording of a line of thought, and not all that different from sutras on Slashdot. =)
Somehow I suspect that making your own modifications to the Bible and redistributing it as a new and improved version would be frowned upon...
Can I copyright the bible and sue everyone for roylaity fees? Does it have a copy right on it, the bible that is?
Most individual translations of the Bible probably do, provided that they have been written in the past 50 years or so. Any copyrights on the original text(s) and many popular editions (eg. the KJV) have long since expired.
From what I hear, MDs are huge in Japan. The impression I got was that CDs are history over there, while MDs are everywhere.
Yes, MDs are huge in Japan, but not at the expense of CDs... at least not last year. The MD has, however, entirely replaced the cassette tape as the portable medium of choice.
MDs are also rapidly becoming very popular in Europe, portable MD players are selling like hotcakes. Prerecorded MDs are in short supply though: MDs are used almost exclusively for copying CDs, legally (for own use) and otherwise.
Ugh...we will all be better off when we stop repeating this disgusting piece of drivel. Can you explain for me why someone who has ability should be made the slave of someone who has less ability? It is a horrible, disgusting sentiment.
Yes, I'm sure your mother felt that way when she changed your dirty diapers. Would we be better off if she had pinched her nose and dumped your little, stinky, abilityless self in the trashcan?
A functional communist system requires that all its members participate willingly. This is why Israeli kibbutzim work and why your nappies got changed. Stalin, Mao & company tried to implement communism through armed coercion, with predictable results.
Mr. Xiaoping Deng was the man who ordered the massacre of hundreds of unarmed protesters, and that's the man you point to for reform?
Deng was an economic reformer, not a political one. Still, economic reforms are better than nothing, without Deng you wouldn't even have Linux in China. Another famed economic reformer was Mikhail Gorbachev, and he is now hailed as a hero for precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's probably only a matter of time until China has its own revolution -- but it may be a long time.
I've met many people from behind the Iron Curtain (e.g.: Russia, Romania, etc), not ONE would rather live in communism--most hated it. Futhermore, the problems with the USSR were about a lot more than just their economic system, it was their political and military ideology. Living under constant threat from the secret police is not just a minor difference in opinion, it violates human rights. Capitalism, despite its flaws, has many supporters. So please don't give me this moral relativism crap.
Hogwash indeed. Why is it so difficult for most Americans to distinguish the theory of communism from the dictatorships run under the name of communism? North Korea calls itself a People's Democratic Republic, is this a valid basis for critizing democracy?
Repeat after me: capitalism and communism are different economic models. Democracy and dictatorship are different political models.
There are dictatorial capitalist states, eg. Singapore, but there has never been a democratic communist state, and due to flaws in the otherwise admirable* theory it seems unlikely there will never be one. There have been some bona fide attempts, most notably Cuba, but of course the United States did (and continues to do) all it can to hamper this challenge to capitalism -- and these days Cuba has mostly abandoned its ideals.
* Yes, communism is an admirable theory. From each according to ability, to each according to need is a wonderful principle, it's just a shame that making it work on a large scale appears to be impossible. Capitalism works on the opposite principle: from each according to need, to each according to ability. Wonderful? Not if your need exceeds your ability.
Frankly I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner, seeing as how the Japanese always seem to adopt technology earlier than the US.
Personal computers are still relatively rare in Japan, largely due to the daunting problems imposed by the complexity of the Japanese script. All software must support multibyte characters in half a dozen incompatible 'standards', you need input frontends for converting phonetic input into the correct kanji, special keyboards with phonetic kana characters, etc. While the West has been typing away for several decades, Windows and Linux with full Japanese support have only been available for a few years. Previously the Mac (which has had much better internationalization for quite a while) and bizarre local workarounds (MSX, etc) had most of the market share, but the market stayed small due to high prices and limited support.
It's a widespread fallacy that countries only have the power to tax their own citizens. Most countries will tax their own citizens on their income, plus they tax all income earned within their country. If you're a US citizen drawing a salary in the UK, you quite often end up paying two lots of tax. Yopu have to hope for a favourable "double taxation treaty" to rescue you. It's never this simple.
The US is actually quite unusual in taxing its citizens when they work in foreign countries, although there is a $70,000 exemption (no tax paid on earnings of less than $70,000 while employed overseas). As a Finnish citizen, for instance, I don't have to pay any Finnish taxes on income I make abroad, as long as I spend at least 180 days outside the country per year. (This made quite a difference in Japan, where I paid 6% Japanese income tax instead of ~45% Finnish income tax.)
And again, the above paragraph is a simplification of 17,000 pages of international tax code, so don't put all your money in a Nauruan bank account based on this...
There is no point to switching to GNU/Linux 'just because'.
Of course not. Howeber, I do have plenty of reasons for switching over to GNU/Linux -- you listed quite a few of them -- but, because of those missing critical apps, I can't. Which annoys me. If there were Linux versions (or, better yet, free true equivalents) of Photoshop, CorelDraw and (ha!) Word/Excel, I could migrate and get the advantages of Linux.
In other words, a free OS with some closed software is better than a closed OS with lots of closed software. No?
But the real reason to use a free OS is freedom, which you don't seem to get (e.g., you want an MS Word reader). [...] More important than migrating to GNU/Linux is that you spend the 2 hours it takes to get the basics of (La)TeX down. (Try LyX, it's a WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX and very nice.) Ditching Word is more important than ditching NT.
I've been using LaTeX for over 5 years now. Rest assured, I don't want to use MS Word, the problem is that I need to be able to generate Word documents so others can read and modify them.
I don't see any problem with this. StarOffice allows you to "transparently import and export Word/Excel documents," and "is more compatible with Microsoft Office than any other Office suite." Each of those quotes came from Sun's StarOffice FAQ.
The point is, for an even slightly non-trivial document, there is no way you can do a Word-Star-Word conversion and end up with the same document -- which is what I need. =/
I'm curious, specifically what do you need from PhotoShop that The Gimp doesn't do?
The interface, for starters. It took me quite a while to grok Photoshop, but now I love it and can use it quite rapidly. Gimp's interface is convoluted and cluttered, it would take me a long time to "relearn" how to use it, and I would probably need to spend a lot of time configuring plugins, etc., to replicate some of Photoshop's more obscure features. Too much hassle and practically zero (direct) benefit.
A more recent version of CorelDraw that runs under Linux should be released, but I wouldn't be too surprised if CorelDraw for Windows ran under Wine.
Emulators are always a kludge, I much prefer native applications. (But is that "should be released" as in "Corel will release" or as in "Corel had better release"?)
WordPerfect 8 and StarOffice are both free for non-commercial use, and do a pretty good job. I like WordPerfect better from a resource utilization standpoint, but StarOffice does a good job of replacing the Office suite of programs.
Oh, I have little doubt that WP8 and StarOffice would be sufficient for my own needs; unlike PhotoShop and CorelDraw, I'm not particularly enamored of Word or Excel. The problem is that I need to be able to import and export Word/Excel to those people who don't/can't use anything else, and the few times I've tried this the results have been horrific. (Which is largely Microsoft's fault, as documents tend to get mangled even when importing Word 6.0 into Word 97...)
I don't give a rip if FooSoft port FooWare Pro to GNU/Linux---if they don't share the source.
You should. There are plenty of people out there -- like me -- who would migrate to Linux in the blink of an eye if they could get all the necessary software, even if it is commercial. I need Photoshop (no, Gimp does not cut it), I need CorelDraw (the only version available for Unix is an antique v3.5), and I need something that reads and writes MS Word and Excel well. Until these materialize (and I expect it's only a matter of time), I'm stuck on NT.
and we have an intelligence agency that, and get this, didnt know a country had nuclear weapons until they blew one up.
Actually, the world was aware of Pakistan's nuclear capability for quite a long time before the test blast. Quite a few nuclear countries -- eg. Israel -- have never officially announced that they have nukes, which lets them avoid IAEA inspections and trade sanctions, but they've allowed the fact to leak out, so the nukes can act as a deterrent to enemy attack.
What caught the spooks by surprise was the actual test, which they should have been able to spot by watching troop movements, etc. Still embarrassing, but not quite as bad as you're making out.
I have had the pleasure of talking to many youngsters, (11-13) in third world europe countries who code in assembly languages and run unix os. I should transfer to a finland for school, I will get a better education and for cheaper money, when I am done with my BS, just come back to the states, spend a year get a Master, and I am ready to roll.
Now that was truly incoherent. FYI, the term "third world" originates from the Cold War, when you had the "first world" (US & allies) versus the "second world" (USSR & allies), with everybody else lumped into the "third world". As most of these 3rd world countries were poor, over time the term came to mean a poor, undeveloped country (which is what Linus meant). Not a single country in Europe is truly "third world" by either definition, although Albania might come close. And I also don't buy the argument that Europe has worse computer equipment than the US, here in Finland public Internet access is certainly more widespread and funding for school computers is usually quite generous.
And while I'm at it, a quirk of the Finnish higher education system for engineers is that there is no B.Sc.: the first step on the academic ladder is "diploma engineer" (DI), which takes 5-6 years to complete and is considered roughly equivalent to M.Sc. The next stage is a "licentiate of technology" (TkL), which has no US equivalent, and finally just "doctor of technology", which is the same as in the States.
But your education would certainly cheaper -- it's free for Finnish citizens.
The japanese case is probably because Japan has fallen behind North America and Europe when it comes to networking and the like. It's more a cultural thing than anything else; Japan does very well when it comes to other aspects of computing.
Actually, it's a legal thing: Japanese law didn't differentiate between ATMs and "real" banks, so ATMs had to comply with bank opening hours. The law was changed, so now ATMs have more sensible opening hours.
For what it's worth, I found Japanese ATMs quite fascinating. Many allow you to deposit paper money, which is immediately counted and placed in your account! And instead of getting bank statements mailed home, Japanese banks still use a little bank book which records all your transactions; when you feed it in, the ATM actually turns the pages and locates the right row to print on automatically! (You don't have to always use your bank book, the card is enough, but you can get the transaction log 'dumped' into the book whenever you want.) All Japanese ATMs are networked together (like the US Cirrus system) so you can withdraw even from competitors' ATMs, although there may be a small charge. Now this is one area where I would like Europe to get its act together, as the only way I can get cash outside Finland is through VISA, even in the euro zone. =/
Slashdot Mirror
And just what is this supposed to mean? Background radiation is a constant flow, Chernobyl was a one-off event. Perhaps you mean that at the reactor the radiation was one million times the background radiation immediately after the explosion, but that says absolutely nothing about fallout elsewhere. (And I'd like to see a cite for even that.)
in forms that would be devastating to the whole world.
More hyperbole. Radiation is radiation, that loaf of Wonder Bread emits exactly the same alpha, beta and gamma particles as a cloud of fallout.
The trees in the area soaked up a lot of the more vile isotopes released- but will not be able to do so again (they've already soaked up all they can...)
Now what on earth is this supposed to mean?
Dozens being killed? Try in the tens of thousands in the area (unless it's in a truly isolated region...).
The death toll was exactly 31. This includes those people who died from radiation sickness acquired in cleanup work.
Try in the millions of people adversely affected worldwide.
Yeah, radiation levels spiked for a week or two, to maybe twice the normal level. There is still considerable debate over how much of an effect this had on cancer rates -- mostly because they haven't found much correlation yet. Only in the hardest-hit area of the Ukraine itself are thyroid cancer rates noticeably up.
They were truly lucky at Chernobyl the last time- what about the next "oops"?
"Lucky"? Could you tell me precisely what could have gone more wrong?
Cheers,
-j.
Actually, reactors 1 and 2 were restarted quite soon after the accident. Fallout radiation has long since faded into the background in most places. The area rendered uninhabitable is comparable in size to your average East European coal strip mine.
Spent fuel (nuclear waste) is the second problem I mentioned. When the oil is finished burning, all your waste has gone up the stack, for better or worse. With nuclear power, the spent fuel rods must be kept until they decay to the point where they are no longer hazzardous.
There is a simple solution: launch the waste on a trajectory into the Sun, whose automatic fusion reprocessing plant is guaranteed to take care of the stuff. This is not feasible at the moment due to the exorbitant cost and high risks of launching something, but in 50 years at the latest it will be -- and by then we will probably have fusion.
You also have to remember that the longer something stays radioactive, the safer it is. Yes, an isotope with a half-life of 15 billion years will still have 50% sitting around after all that time; but it also means that each atom has a 50% chance of decaying once in all that time! Isotopes with short half-lives decay more rapidly and are hence more dangerous in the short term, but the intense radiation will not last for long.
Cheers,
-j.
Nuclear Power as it stands is a dirty, nasty, dangerous business. We are playing with forces which we know can destroy us all, we are creating toxins and wastes that we hardly know how to deal with, and we are putting trust in that the next generations will solve our problems for us.
Nuclear power is considerably less dirty, nasty and dangerous than most practical alternatives today. A catastrophic failure of a nuclear power plant (and Chernobyl was about as bad as it can get) might kill a few dozen people, but perfectly normal operation of a coal or oil burning power plant kills a lot more people by releasing all sorts of nasty chemicals into the atmosphere, which then cause lung cancer and similar diseases. (I recall seeing a figure of 28,000 deaths per year quoted, but I can't find a reference right not. Oh well.) Then you have coal mine accidents, general pollution, etc. "Forces that can destroy us all" is ludicrous hyperbole, even a loaf of bread is radioactive and it contains those same forces.
Anyone here going to tell me that greenhouse effect is not real?
I will tell you that it is too early to tell. Global temperatures are rising, but not in the way it should be according to the standard global warming thoery. The reason for it may well be unrelated, as the Earth's average temperature goes up and down anyway. Less than 20 years ago there was widespread fear of a new Ice Age, ie. global cooling, based on exactly the same data.
Just the same, if the global warming theory is correct, the problem is fossil fuels. Nuclear power plants produce next to no greenhouse gases. Nuclear power is not ideal, but solar and wind power just aren't going to cut it, now or quite possibly ever, for places like Finland.
And a few links:
- http://www.oneworld.org/energy/
- http://www.newscientist. com/nsplus/insight/global/faq.html
Getting back on topic, most Russian nuclear reactors are sufficiently primitive in design that they have very little software to even worry about. Russian reactors have far worse problems than Y2K, despite everything I said above I don't exactly like living near both Sosnovyi Bor and Ignalina...A neutral view of most types of energy
The New Scientist's global warming FAQ
Cheers,
-j.
There's a link right on the front page:
http://24.141.28.12/cscstats/speed.html
So DCypher clients are approximately 2x faster. The figures (which you can of course verify) are actually a bit on the low side, with the MMX core my K6-200 gets around 280 kkeys/s (compared to the 218 kkeys/s listed).
The way I see it, thanks to distributed.net's greater total horsepower the contest will be finished on time, so that's no reason to select them. With DCypher I get more money (and yes, should I win I will donate some to a charity of my own choosing -- right now d.net's top charity is d.net itself!) and, thanks to faster clients, my computing power is maximized.
Cheers,
-j.
http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~mwa de/articles/chidoors.htm
Cheers,
-j.
Yup, not to mention the first satellite in orbit, the first probes to the Moon and most planets, the first space station... The Soviet space program caught the US with its pants down, managing to catch up in ten years or so was the true miracle of the Apollo program.
Cheers,
-j.
Yup. I think it's a good hobby for a hacker: you tend to take a different approach to testing when your life is literally on the line...
What this doctor was trying to figure out, was if you are performing an underwater rescue of a diver, and that diver is unconscious, do you take him up slowly (and risk not having enough time to revive him), or do you drop his weight belt and "Air Mail" him to the surface (where hopefully someone else can start to revive the person immediately).
Neither. You latch yourself tightly onto the victim, fill his BCD, lift his head up and tilt it backwards so his mouth is facing towards the surface, and then propel him to the surface at normal maximum speed (10 m/min), taking care to vent the BCD as you go up. The weight belt is only dropped once you reach the surface (or if the victim doesn't have a functional BCD).
Basically, you can revive an unconscious person, but if they (or you) get an air embolism or rupture their lungs on the way up they are dead. DCS (the bends) and even plain old drowning act slowly compared to these two instant killers.
In order to test his theory, he used himself as the victim. He dove down to 40 ft, and had someone knock him unconscious (probably with a hypodermic needle or something), and they fired him up to the surface... They repeated this several times. As far as I know, he suffered no damage, and his tests were a success :)
And people have survived going over the Niagara Falls in a barrel, but that doesn't make it a smart thing to do...
Cheers,
-j.
Hmm? Tatu Ylönen is a Finnish programmer and SSH Communications Security Ltd is a Finnish company.
Cheers,
-j.
Have you ever tried translating? Any real translation above Babelfish's level is not only lots of grunt work, but most definitely a creative endeavor as well. Not only do you have to preserve the meaning of the original, you have to make it sound good in the target language. This can be extremely difficult -- translating Joyce's Ulysses into Japanese took 15 years! And the Bible is even worse, as there are a number of conflicting originals with plenty of hapax legomena (words that occur exactly once and whose meaning is unknown) and similar pitfalls.
So hell yes, if I work my butt off to translate soemething, I want my copyright on the translation. It should then be my decision whether I want to GPL the document or not.
Cheers,
-j.
Oh, lots of them. Here's one:
http://www.io.com/~snewton/zen/diamndi x.html
Cheers,
-j.
A serious answer to a question posed in jest:
No. The Kama Sutra is an overhyped antique version of The Joy of Sex, whereas the Diamond Sutra is one of the chapters of the Prajnaparamita ("Sutras of Transcendental Wisdom"), one of the most important works in the Mahayana canon. For example, Zen thought is largely based on the Prajnaparamita sutras, with the Diamond Sutra in a special role.
The literal meaning of "sutra" is just "thread", essentially a recording of a line of thought, and not all that different from sutras on Slashdot. =)
Cheers,
-j.
Somehow I suspect that making your own modifications to the Bible and redistributing it as a new and improved version would be frowned upon...
Can I copyright the bible and sue everyone for roylaity fees?
Does it have a copy right on it, the bible that is?
Most individual translations of the Bible probably do, provided that they have been written in the past 50 years or so. Any copyrights on the original text(s) and many popular editions (eg. the KJV) have long since expired.
Cheers,
-j.
Yes, MDs are huge in Japan, but not at the expense of CDs... at least not last year. The MD has, however, entirely replaced the cassette tape as the portable medium of choice.
MDs are also rapidly becoming very popular in Europe, portable MD players are selling like hotcakes. Prerecorded MDs are in short supply though: MDs are used almost exclusively for copying CDs, legally (for own use) and otherwise.
Cheers,
-j.
Yes, I'm sure your mother felt that way when she changed your dirty diapers. Would we be better off if she had pinched her nose and dumped your little, stinky, abilityless self in the trashcan?
A functional communist system requires that all its members participate willingly. This is why Israeli kibbutzim work and why your nappies got changed. Stalin, Mao & company tried to implement communism through armed coercion, with predictable results.
Cheers,
-j.
Deng was an economic reformer, not a political one. Still, economic reforms are better than nothing, without Deng you wouldn't even have Linux in China. Another famed economic reformer was Mikhail Gorbachev, and he is now hailed as a hero for precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's probably only a matter of time until China has its own revolution -- but it may be a long time.
Cheers,
-j.
Hogwash indeed. Why is it so difficult for most Americans to distinguish the theory of communism from the dictatorships run under the name of communism? North Korea calls itself a People's Democratic Republic, is this a valid basis for critizing democracy?
Repeat after me: capitalism and communism are different economic models. Democracy and dictatorship are different political models.
There are dictatorial capitalist states, eg. Singapore, but there has never been a democratic communist state, and due to flaws in the otherwise admirable* theory it seems unlikely there will never be one. There have been some bona fide attempts, most notably Cuba, but of course the United States did (and continues to do) all it can to hamper this challenge to capitalism -- and these days Cuba has mostly abandoned its ideals.
* Yes, communism is an admirable theory. From each according to ability, to each according to need is a wonderful principle, it's just a shame that making it work on a large scale appears to be impossible. Capitalism works on the opposite principle: from each according to need, to each according to ability. Wonderful? Not if your need exceeds your ability.
Cheers,
-j.
Personal computers are still relatively rare in Japan, largely due to the daunting problems imposed by the complexity of the Japanese script. All software must support multibyte characters in half a dozen incompatible 'standards', you need input frontends for converting phonetic input into the correct kanji, special keyboards with phonetic kana characters, etc. While the West has been typing away for several decades, Windows and Linux with full Japanese support have only been available for a few years. Previously the Mac (which has had much better internationalization for quite a while) and bizarre local workarounds (MSX, etc) had most of the market share, but the market stayed small due to high prices and limited support.
Cheers,
-j.
The US is actually quite unusual in taxing its citizens when they work in foreign countries, although there is a $70,000 exemption (no tax paid on earnings of less than $70,000 while employed overseas). As a Finnish citizen, for instance, I don't have to pay any Finnish taxes on income I make abroad, as long as I spend at least 180 days outside the country per year. (This made quite a difference in Japan, where I paid 6% Japanese income tax instead of ~45% Finnish income tax.)
And again, the above paragraph is a simplification of 17,000 pages of international tax code, so don't put all your money in a Nauruan bank account based on this...
Cheers,
-j.
Of course not. Howeber, I do have plenty of reasons for switching over to GNU/Linux -- you listed quite a few of them -- but, because of those missing critical apps, I can't. Which annoys me. If there were Linux versions (or, better yet, free true equivalents) of Photoshop, CorelDraw and (ha!) Word/Excel, I could migrate and get the advantages of Linux.
In other words, a free OS with some closed software is better than a closed OS with lots of closed software. No?
But the real reason to use a free OS is freedom, which you don't seem to get (e.g., you want an MS Word reader). [...] More important than migrating to GNU/Linux is that you spend the 2 hours it takes to get the basics of (La)TeX down. (Try LyX, it's a WYSIWYG interface to LaTeX and very nice.) Ditching Word is more important than ditching NT.
I've been using LaTeX for over 5 years now. Rest assured, I don't want to use MS Word, the problem is that I need to be able to generate Word documents so others can read and modify them.
Cheers,
-j.
It seems that Sun has a rather odd definition of "transparent". Take a look at Star's own small print, embedded in a bunch of 2.5 MB PDF files: http://www.sun.com/products/sta roffice/filters.html.
The point is, for an even slightly non-trivial document, there is no way you can do a Word-Star-Word conversion and end up with the same document -- which is what I need. =/
Cheers,
-j.
The interface, for starters. It took me quite a while to grok Photoshop, but now I love it and can use it quite rapidly. Gimp's interface is convoluted and cluttered, it would take me a long time to "relearn" how to use it, and I would probably need to spend a lot of time configuring plugins, etc., to replicate some of Photoshop's more obscure features. Too much hassle and practically zero (direct) benefit.
A more recent version of CorelDraw that runs under Linux should be released, but I wouldn't be too surprised if CorelDraw for Windows ran under Wine.
Emulators are always a kludge, I much prefer native applications. (But is that "should be released" as in "Corel will release" or as in "Corel had better release"?)
WordPerfect 8 and StarOffice are both free for non-commercial use, and do a pretty good job. I like WordPerfect better from a resource utilization standpoint, but StarOffice does a good job of replacing the Office suite of programs.
Oh, I have little doubt that WP8 and StarOffice would be sufficient for my own needs; unlike PhotoShop and CorelDraw, I'm not particularly enamored of Word or Excel. The problem is that I need to be able to import and export Word/Excel to those people who don't/can't use anything else, and the few times I've tried this the results have been horrific. (Which is largely Microsoft's fault, as documents tend to get mangled even when importing Word 6.0 into Word 97...)
Cheers,
-j.
You should. There are plenty of people out there -- like me -- who would migrate to Linux in the blink of an eye if they could get all the necessary software, even if it is commercial. I need Photoshop (no, Gimp does not cut it), I need CorelDraw (the only version available for Unix is an antique v3.5), and I need something that reads and writes MS Word and Excel well. Until these materialize (and I expect it's only a matter of time), I'm stuck on NT.
Cheers,
-j.
Actually, the world was aware of Pakistan's nuclear capability for quite a long time before the test blast. Quite a few nuclear countries -- eg. Israel -- have never officially announced that they have nukes, which lets them avoid IAEA inspections and trade sanctions, but they've allowed the fact to leak out, so the nukes can act as a deterrent to enemy attack.
What caught the spooks by surprise was the actual test, which they should have been able to spot by watching troop movements, etc. Still embarrassing, but not quite as bad as you're making out.
Cheers,
-j.
Now that was truly incoherent. FYI, the term "third world" originates from the Cold War, when you had the "first world" (US & allies) versus the "second world" (USSR & allies), with everybody else lumped into the "third world". As most of these 3rd world countries were poor, over time the term came to mean a poor, undeveloped country (which is what Linus meant). Not a single country in Europe is truly "third world" by either definition, although Albania might come close. And I also don't buy the argument that Europe has worse computer equipment than the US, here in Finland public Internet access is certainly more widespread and funding for school computers is usually quite generous.
And while I'm at it, a quirk of the Finnish higher education system for engineers is that there is no B.Sc.: the first step on the academic ladder is "diploma engineer" (DI), which takes 5-6 years to complete and is considered roughly equivalent to M.Sc. The next stage is a "licentiate of technology" (TkL), which has no US equivalent, and finally just "doctor of technology", which is the same as in the States.
But your education would certainly cheaper -- it's free for Finnish citizens.
Cheers,
-j.
Actually, it's a legal thing: Japanese law didn't differentiate between ATMs and "real" banks, so ATMs had to comply with bank opening hours. The law was changed, so now ATMs have more sensible opening hours.
For what it's worth, I found Japanese ATMs quite fascinating. Many allow you to deposit paper money, which is immediately counted and placed in your account! And instead of getting bank statements mailed home, Japanese banks still use a little bank book which records all your transactions; when you feed it in, the ATM actually turns the pages and locates the right row to print on automatically! (You don't have to always use your bank book, the card is enough, but you can get the transaction log 'dumped' into the book whenever you want.) All Japanese ATMs are networked together (like the US Cirrus system) so you can withdraw even from competitors' ATMs, although there may be a small charge. Now this is one area where I would like Europe to get its act together, as the only way I can get cash outside Finland is through VISA, even in the euro zone. =/
Cheers,
-j.