I was probably about the same age, but I was raised in an atheist family, and it just didn't occur to me -- Christian symbolism was mostly lost on me, though if someone had pointed it out I probably would have noticed. This, even though I was probably just as educated about Christianity as most children (maybe more) -- it's a question of what symbols you use to make sense of the world. Devout Christians use Christian symbolism all the time, so it's natural.
Most people I tell about the Christian symbolism are rather surprised, even though they read it as a child. Maybe that's a sign of our secular times...
Could CompactFlash or SmartMedia be a reasonably non-proprietary replacement? I believe there are multiple manufacturers of the media, and there certainly are many manufacturers of the drives. They aren't that cheap, but they are far more reliable than floppies, and flexible in size.
Maybe the alternative could be those USB storage devices, since USB isn't proprietary, and (quite) modern OSes support such storage devices natively.
Both these have significant backward-compatibility issues, but at least they are better than Zip. And anything but floppies will have compatibility issues -- except the internet itself, of course, since all usable computers by definition have internet access (and that truly has become the replacement for floppies).
I would recommend rereading Narnia if you don't understand where the ban is coming from. I would not recommend rereading them if you have fond memories -- I did, and the rereading ruined them for me.
I honestly don't think it matters that much -- while as an adult the religious content is obvious, as a child I didn't have the slightest idea. But that might be even worse.
The last book, though, is totally fucked up. There's a weird incident at the train station in the beginning, just before they get transported to Narnia, and then it goes into this false-prophet story, where the false prophet (a monkey) brings about the destruction of the world of Narnia through his heresy (why mere heresy ends the world is a little fuzzy in the book, though). The dwarves, who do not properly submit to authority in the process, end up in their own hell. Most others end up going across the ocean, obviously heaven, and there the children meet up with their parents. Luckily (!), the rest of their family died in a train accident just before they left, so they are all rejoined.
Really awful. The rest of the books aren't written that well, though some are better than others. They all present strongly traditional Christian ethics -- obedience, intrinsic moral authority, etc. Honestly, not something I'd want my children to learn, but when I have children I'll probably let them read it anyway.
Unlike, say, Greek Mythology, I think there are significantly concerns about prescribing Narnia in schools. First, it is aimed at children of an age where they don't have a lot of critical skills. It is also stealth-Christian -- unlike the Bible, it is not obviously Christian, and if you don't read it yourself as an adult, you won't realize that your children are reading such strongly Christian books. But, in my opinion, it is better to give children lots of (potentially conflicting) moral influences, and let them develop their own ideas from that.
When the critics propose putting atheist books in elementary school curriculums (like His Dark Materials), then I'll be more impressed the arguments for Narnia.
That was my first thought as well -- HTTP and HTML are really very simple ways to create complex GUIs (since all the rendering is on the client, and the protocol is very simple).
But on second thought I imagine it could make sense in some situations. I can imagine there are places where the stateless interaction of HTTP/HTML would be awkward. For instance, if you wanted to give live updates of some statistic (temperature, weight, etc). As a UI, HTTP/HTML is much better for control than monitoring or passive interaction.
Of course, you could use a much simpler protocol, like another poster suggested, with a custom client that rendered the results. But VNC, like HTTP/HTML, is a portable and well-documented protocol, with extremely clear semantics.
My impression when Crusoe was announced, was that the x86 instruction set was very important to them -- it's a much easier thing to emulate efficiently. A RISC instruction set (as in PowerPC) is much more difficult -- since now you're translating from RISC to RISC (since the internal instruction set is more-or-less RISC as well). You can decompose CISC instructions efficiently, but there's nothing to decompose with RISC -- the instructions are already simple.
The other potential seemed to be that they'd create different cores with different optimizations -- the first one, Crusoe, being power-efficient, another one could be optimized towards floating point, another to integer operations, etc. But that hasn't happened.
Alternate architectures would be interesting -- at least PPC. In a Mac, it could allow efficient Windows emulation... but that seems like less and less of an issue, as portable applications usually mean web-based, and non-web applications usually have Mac alternatives. At least, I don't think Apple is enthusiastic about Windows emulation, and without Apple PPC is useless, since they won't have MacOS. Other non-x86 architectures don't seem important -- there's little software available for ARM or SPARC that won't be ported to x86 if there's demand.
It's like with languages -- if you know English, learning a second language is no longer that important. Transmeta started out learning the English of the instruction sets -- x86 -- and there's little incentive to learning other languages. Even if some programs started out with different machine languages, they all learn to speak x86 eventually.
X18 is an example of a modern-day stack machine (also a Forth machine -- forth and stacks are pretty much the same thing). It's in contrast to the register-based design of traditional chips.
Maybe this is true -- I just know that small businesses can't do this sort of thing. Of course, mere rules don't really apply to something like Microsoft.
Tax law does not allow you to take deductions on the retail price of your donations -- only the actual cost. In this case, it would be the cost of media.
Of course, how you value the donation in press releases doesn't have to be related to how you value it to the IRS.
Can someone explain where the hydrogen comes from for these fuel cells? I've heard a variety of things, but no one seems to commit to anything.
One possibility is that it comes from oil, which seems like a wash. It could come from plant products, but if ethanol is any indication, that's an even bigger wash (i.e., you use more energy in farming than you get from the product -- maybe hydrogen production is more efficient, but I doubt it's that much more productive).
Would it be produced from water or other plentiful sources, using electricity, at power plants? This would be useful for unreliable power sources, like wind, which could just produce as much H as they possible, without having to meet instantaneous demand. But would this hydrogen really be efficient? How much more power would we have to produce to power all these fuel cells? And will this distribution network be any more efficient than the current power grid?
I've heard this before: imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car... what are they talking about? Cars don't generate power. Nothing generates power -- power exists, and we harness it. So what power are these cars supposed to be harnessing? Great reservoirs of hydrogen of which I am unaware? Fossil fuels? Some plant mass that produces hydrogen much more efficiently than corn?
(This post is entirely uninformative -- I'm just really keen to hear answers)
While I think you are mostly correct in this post, it doesn't relate to the article. Macs are close to the cost of an equivalent PC. However, Macs are expensive. These two things are not contradictory. You cannot buy a Mac for $400 -- you can buy a PC for that much. PCs are cheaper. You argue that they are not just cheaper by price, but also by quality -- that doesn't change the fact that Macs are more expensive, and it doesn't change the fact that price is a bias on the study.
More than suspicion -- we know what their motives are. The case against MS wasn't based on their actions -- it was based on extensive evidence of their intensions. To my knowledge, there has been no purge to remove these sinister elements from Microsoft. It is only reasonable to assume (not just suspect) that there are anti-competetive motives behind every strategic move MS makes.
Sadly, electric vehicles don't work in northern climates, but a little vehicle like the Sparrow would be nice for city driving, where most vehicles seem excessive. The Smart seems a lot like this -- sadly not available in the US. At 58mpg, it's pretty efficient without (AFAIK) using an unconventional engine (it's just very small). Size is probably the biggest energy-saving attribute of the Sparrow as well (moreso than fuel type).
The first page of the sited article quotes exactly the given numbers:
Pimentel's report, to be published in the 2001 edition of the Encyclopedia for Physical Sciences and Technology in September, says that producing ethanol is more trouble than it's worth: 131,000 British thermal units of energy are required to produce one gallon of ethanol, but a gallon will only give you about 77,000 Btu of fuel energy.
In other words, producing ethanol results in a net loss of energy.
So, I guess, ethanol is not a renewable energy source -- not because it is not renewable (it is), but because it is not an energy source.
It isn't strictly a population problem. The population of the earth could go much, much higher before the planet would be exausted. Some people on the planet use much more resources than others. For instance, I heard someone note that for an American family to have 2 children instead of 3 is like an Indian woman stopping at merely 64 children. I can tell you -- there are a lot more Indian women having less than 64 children than American's stopping at 2.
Not that population isn't an important part of the problem, but our resource usage is a bigger part. Though, honestly, I think the population problem should be much, much easier to fix -- lots condoms and easy availability of the pill would go a long, long ways. Bush, however, is fighting this as we speak. Okay, he's probably asleep now -- but when he wakes up he'll be back fighting it.
The ONLY question here is that they used GPS to enforce their contract. And having used Budget before, I can say that there is a cause in their contract that says "We reserve the right to use technological measures to enforce limitations imposed within this contract".
The problem (in my mind) isn't really that they are tracking you to enforce their rules. It is that they are tracking you, and collecting significant information on you without your knowledge. It is the person who never violates the contract that has been violated -- moreso because they will never realize it.
For instance, does Budget immediately and permanently destroy all information about your activities if they are not outside of your contract? Do they have measures to protect the security of your information from crackers? What information exactly do they collect? All information could be attained by law enforcement agencies, almost arbitrarily since PATRIOT. Destroying information won't help if the police get there first and make the people quietly keep the information.
They need to have a clear notification that all your movement in the car is tracked. And it shouldn't just be in the contract -- it's not about the contract at all. They need a big sticker on the dashboard, saying "We track all your movement". That they can use that information to fine you is part of the contract.
Of course, clearly presented with this information, Budget's revenue would probably drop
precipitously as people would be seriously spooked by having their movements tracked. But that's as it should be. It's not a free market if parties are uninformed about the products being exchanged.
Windows installers (generally) work, but they don't leave you knowing what they've done. You can't find out who a file belongs to, for instance. And have you ever noticed how, on uninstall, you always get messages about unused DLLs? Windows ought to simply know that the DLL is unused... but it can't, because of the adhoc install system.
Serious problems occur in Windows too, especially if you don't use the normal defaults. There's lots of variables in Windows that are kept in the registry, but are almost always the same. E.g., Windows is kept in C:\Windows. If you mess with these, it is not uncommon that installers will break.
I admit RPM-based packaging isn't great -- the package information isn't quite right (e.g., file depends), and of course there are simply bad packages (which happen in Windows too, but you are just less likely to install alpha software on Windows).
Debian, however, works like a dream. RPM-based distros have been improving, so there's hope for them too. Though they are unlikely to ever achieve the culture that Debian has, and the strong policies Debian uses, coupled with the inclusive nature of the development process.
you dont try and use windows-update to install photoshop, so why the hell are linux programmers doing the same?
Adobe doesn't have access to windows-update. If you could install or update all your Windows software as easily as windows-update allows, that would be a tremendous feature. It can't happen, because MS charges all sorts of tolls, and the proprietary model makes cooperation very difficult.
Centralized package management is great. I have 1400 packages installed on my system. A lot of them are libraries, and a lot of them are only required as dependencies, but even if only a hundred of them are real pieces of software, that's still way too many for an interactive installer to work.
Windows gets by because proprietary applications tend to be designed in a monolithic way. Each application has much more functionality (so you need fewer applications) and they don't depend or interact with each other very much (so dependency management isn't that important). And Windows installers still suck, because each installer is ad hoc.
And they still haven't given out any real evidence, except for a badly faked video tape confession. Why they would need to fake a video tape if they had real evidence...
But how would that be different than what we just did in Afganistan? There was an organization in that country that caused serious damage to the United States. We ordered the ruling government (the Taliban) to turn over the terrorists or we'd go in there and do it ourselves. They didn't so we did.
Moral arguments aside, that last sentence is not true. The taliban didn't hand them over, so we bombed the country, and never found Osama bin Laden, and who knows what else we didn't find. We got rid of the Taliban, which was not the direct source of the problem. We didn't win. I don't see any particular reason to believe anything that happened in Afghanistan has helped stop terrorism.
We fucked Afghanistan up pretty badly though. Again, that is not a win. We've already helped fuck up Colombia pretty well too. That hasn't helped. Fucking Colombia harder doesn't seem to be a very good answer.
Yes, Bill Gates is a capitalist. But come to think of it, so am I. And so are almost all Americans.
Most Americans are capitalists? Having a garden in your back yard doesn't make you a farmer, and owning a few stocks doesn't make you a capitalist. Most Americans aren't capitalists, because they don't get most of their income from capital, they get it from labor.
If you don't like it, turn that dial to NPR or PBS and rock out.
Damn straight. It doesn't take the market to make good news -- quite the opposite. Actual people make decisions in NPR and PBS -- good people, who have some journalistic integrity, and that integrity isn't managed into oblivion. Getting my news from any other radio or TV is just an excercise in frustration (though there are many other good online and print news sources where profit isn't the bottom line).
My only complaint is that there aren't other competing public institutions (Pacifica being a potential competitor to NPR, but it's not even on the radio where I live). I was very unhappy with NPR when it opposed low-power radio stations... I felt like it was trying to monopolize its niche at the expense of the very concept of public radio.
I was reading another comment about how Palladium was a response to the commoditization of computers... your bringing up Walmart makes me think of the other way to battle commoditization: vertical integration.
Walmart sells a ton of commodities -- things that are effectively unbranded and rather generic. Its suppliers don't make a ton of money, I imagine, but Walmart does because of their processes. Walmart is actually pretty good for the consumer, even if it is lousy for the producer. And I think Walmart is the perfect advocate for the commoditization of computers.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, but I feel like Walmart really can do the right thing every so often -- I was impressed with their recent challenge to Visa.
I find web interfaces to be very awkward for photo albums. It separates out the various steps -- you download the images, you sort, crop, and rotate them, then you upload them (often forced to do so one-by-one), then you annotate them.
You need a non-web interface to do this work, and then use XMLRPC or something similar to actually upload the image to the website.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people I tell about the Christian symbolism are rather surprised, even though they read it as a child. Maybe that's a sign of our secular times...
Then you need the Stadium Pal
Maybe the alternative could be those USB storage devices, since USB isn't proprietary, and (quite) modern OSes support such storage devices natively.
Both these have significant backward-compatibility issues, but at least they are better than Zip. And anything but floppies will have compatibility issues -- except the internet itself, of course, since all usable computers by definition have internet access (and that truly has become the replacement for floppies).
I honestly don't think it matters that much -- while as an adult the religious content is obvious, as a child I didn't have the slightest idea. But that might be even worse.
The last book, though, is totally fucked up. There's a weird incident at the train station in the beginning, just before they get transported to Narnia, and then it goes into this false-prophet story, where the false prophet (a monkey) brings about the destruction of the world of Narnia through his heresy (why mere heresy ends the world is a little fuzzy in the book, though). The dwarves, who do not properly submit to authority in the process, end up in their own hell. Most others end up going across the ocean, obviously heaven, and there the children meet up with their parents. Luckily (!), the rest of their family died in a train accident just before they left, so they are all rejoined.
Really awful. The rest of the books aren't written that well, though some are better than others. They all present strongly traditional Christian ethics -- obedience, intrinsic moral authority, etc. Honestly, not something I'd want my children to learn, but when I have children I'll probably let them read it anyway.
Unlike, say, Greek Mythology, I think there are significantly concerns about prescribing Narnia in schools. First, it is aimed at children of an age where they don't have a lot of critical skills. It is also stealth-Christian -- unlike the Bible, it is not obviously Christian, and if you don't read it yourself as an adult, you won't realize that your children are reading such strongly Christian books. But, in my opinion, it is better to give children lots of (potentially conflicting) moral influences, and let them develop their own ideas from that.
When the critics propose putting atheist books in elementary school curriculums (like His Dark Materials), then I'll be more impressed the arguments for Narnia.
But on second thought I imagine it could make sense in some situations. I can imagine there are places where the stateless interaction of HTTP/HTML would be awkward. For instance, if you wanted to give live updates of some statistic (temperature, weight, etc). As a UI, HTTP/HTML is much better for control than monitoring or passive interaction.
Of course, you could use a much simpler protocol, like another poster suggested, with a custom client that rendered the results. But VNC, like HTTP/HTML, is a portable and well-documented protocol, with extremely clear semantics.
The other potential seemed to be that they'd create different cores with different optimizations -- the first one, Crusoe, being power-efficient, another one could be optimized towards floating point, another to integer operations, etc. But that hasn't happened.
Alternate architectures would be interesting -- at least PPC. In a Mac, it could allow efficient Windows emulation... but that seems like less and less of an issue, as portable applications usually mean web-based, and non-web applications usually have Mac alternatives. At least, I don't think Apple is enthusiastic about Windows emulation, and without Apple PPC is useless, since they won't have MacOS. Other non-x86 architectures don't seem important -- there's little software available for ARM or SPARC that won't be ported to x86 if there's demand.
It's like with languages -- if you know English, learning a second language is no longer that important. Transmeta started out learning the English of the instruction sets -- x86 -- and there's little incentive to learning other languages. Even if some programs started out with different machine languages, they all learn to speak x86 eventually.
X18 is an example of a modern-day stack machine (also a Forth machine -- forth and stacks are pretty much the same thing). It's in contrast to the register-based design of traditional chips.
Maybe this is true -- I just know that small businesses can't do this sort of thing. Of course, mere rules don't really apply to something like Microsoft.
Tax law does not allow you to take deductions on the retail price of your donations -- only the actual cost. In this case, it would be the cost of media. Of course, how you value the donation in press releases doesn't have to be related to how you value it to the IRS.
One possibility is that it comes from oil, which seems like a wash. It could come from plant products, but if ethanol is any indication, that's an even bigger wash (i.e., you use more energy in farming than you get from the product -- maybe hydrogen production is more efficient, but I doubt it's that much more productive).
Would it be produced from water or other plentiful sources, using electricity, at power plants? This would be useful for unreliable power sources, like wind, which could just produce as much H as they possible, without having to meet instantaneous demand. But would this hydrogen really be efficient? How much more power would we have to produce to power all these fuel cells? And will this distribution network be any more efficient than the current power grid?
I've heard this before: imagine powering your house with the excess electricity generated by your car... what are they talking about? Cars don't generate power. Nothing generates power -- power exists, and we harness it. So what power are these cars supposed to be harnessing? Great reservoirs of hydrogen of which I am unaware? Fossil fuels? Some plant mass that produces hydrogen much more efficiently than corn?
(This post is entirely uninformative -- I'm just really keen to hear answers)
While I think you are mostly correct in this post, it doesn't relate to the article. Macs are close to the cost of an equivalent PC. However, Macs are expensive. These two things are not contradictory. You cannot buy a Mac for $400 -- you can buy a PC for that much. PCs are cheaper. You argue that they are not just cheaper by price, but also by quality -- that doesn't change the fact that Macs are more expensive, and it doesn't change the fact that price is a bias on the study.
More than suspicion -- we know what their motives are. The case against MS wasn't based on their actions -- it was based on extensive evidence of their intensions. To my knowledge, there has been no purge to remove these sinister elements from Microsoft. It is only reasonable to assume (not just suspect) that there are anti-competetive motives behind every strategic move MS makes.
Sadly, electric vehicles don't work in northern climates, but a little vehicle like the Sparrow would be nice for city driving, where most vehicles seem excessive. The Smart seems a lot like this -- sadly not available in the US. At 58mpg, it's pretty efficient without (AFAIK) using an unconventional engine (it's just very small). Size is probably the biggest energy-saving attribute of the Sparrow as well (moreso than fuel type).
Not that population isn't an important part of the problem, but our resource usage is a bigger part. Though, honestly, I think the population problem should be much, much easier to fix -- lots condoms and easy availability of the pill would go a long, long ways. Bush, however, is fighting this as we speak. Okay, he's probably asleep now -- but when he wakes up he'll be back fighting it.
For instance, does Budget immediately and permanently destroy all information about your activities if they are not outside of your contract? Do they have measures to protect the security of your information from crackers? What information exactly do they collect? All information could be attained by law enforcement agencies, almost arbitrarily since PATRIOT. Destroying information won't help if the police get there first and make the people quietly keep the information.
They need to have a clear notification that all your movement in the car is tracked. And it shouldn't just be in the contract -- it's not about the contract at all. They need a big sticker on the dashboard, saying "We track all your movement". That they can use that information to fine you is part of the contract.
Of course, clearly presented with this information, Budget's revenue would probably drop precipitously as people would be seriously spooked by having their movements tracked. But that's as it should be. It's not a free market if parties are uninformed about the products being exchanged.
Serious problems occur in Windows too, especially if you don't use the normal defaults. There's lots of variables in Windows that are kept in the registry, but are almost always the same. E.g., Windows is kept in C:\Windows. If you mess with these, it is not uncommon that installers will break.
I admit RPM-based packaging isn't great -- the package information isn't quite right (e.g., file depends), and of course there are simply bad packages (which happen in Windows too, but you are just less likely to install alpha software on Windows).
Debian, however, works like a dream. RPM-based distros have been improving, so there's hope for them too. Though they are unlikely to ever achieve the culture that Debian has, and the strong policies Debian uses, coupled with the inclusive nature of the development process.
Centralized package management is great. I have 1400 packages installed on my system. A lot of them are libraries, and a lot of them are only required as dependencies, but even if only a hundred of them are real pieces of software, that's still way too many for an interactive installer to work.
Windows gets by because proprietary applications tend to be designed in a monolithic way. Each application has much more functionality (so you need fewer applications) and they don't depend or interact with each other very much (so dependency management isn't that important). And Windows installers still suck, because each installer is ad hoc.
And they still haven't given out any real evidence, except for a badly faked video tape confession. Why they would need to fake a video tape if they had real evidence...
We fucked Afghanistan up pretty badly though. Again, that is not a win. We've already helped fuck up Colombia pretty well too. That hasn't helped. Fucking Colombia harder doesn't seem to be a very good answer.
My only complaint is that there aren't other competing public institutions (Pacifica being a potential competitor to NPR, but it's not even on the radio where I live). I was very unhappy with NPR when it opposed low-power radio stations... I felt like it was trying to monopolize its niche at the expense of the very concept of public radio.
Walmart sells a ton of commodities -- things that are effectively unbranded and rather generic. Its suppliers don't make a ton of money, I imagine, but Walmart does because of their processes. Walmart is actually pretty good for the consumer, even if it is lousy for the producer. And I think Walmart is the perfect advocate for the commoditization of computers.
Politics makes strange bedfellows, but I feel like Walmart really can do the right thing every so often -- I was impressed with their recent challenge to Visa.
You need a non-web interface to do this work, and then use XMLRPC or something similar to actually upload the image to the website.