Presumably, a single report would never be used to identify a pothole, as that could easily be a fluke (maybe the user dropped their phone while driving through the area). Rather, you would want to wait until you'd gotten a reasonable number of reports from the same area to ensure that there actually is a pothole in the road; a convenient consequence of this would be that you could average the responses from that area, which should go a long way towards correcting for GPS inaccuracy. At very least it should be good enough that a city worker could find the pothole in the course of a couple minutes driving around...
Speak for yourself. I haven't used Windows in years, and I haven't suffered for it. Anytime I'm forced to open an office document (which is more often than you would think over the course of a CS degree), I just use Openoffice and everything works.
At least at University, I'm seeing more and more students primarily using free operating systems. In my CS courses especially, it's all over the place: a show-of-hands survey in one of my upper-levels recently had probably upwards of ten Linux users in a class of thirty. Of course, it's a lot more prevalent among CS students, but even among the less technical students Linux usage is extremely common. When I first got here, I was shocked when I would see a Linux laptop or two near me in a class...nowadays I'm a little surprised if I don't.
Free software may not be catching on as well as we would like with the older generations, but it most certainly is with the younger folks.
I would never wish such things on a person, but I am genuinely surprised that none of his burned customers ever tracked him down and beat him. You would think that ripping people off that blatantly when they can get a hold of your real name would be more dangerous...
This is nothing new...the federal government has been mandating safety features in cars for decades. Once seatbelts became available, they were mandated. Same deal for airbags. Now backup cameras are available, they're dirt cheap (relative to the cost of a new automobile, anyways), and they have the potential to save a lot of lives, not to mention property damage. And no, they won't ban all existing cars, just like they haven't banned cars from before the advent of seatbelts or airbags.
Sorry, I know you really wanted to uncover some vast conspiracy between the government and the auto manufacturers, but this is just business as usual...
Without a shred of evidence? You didn't even have to RTFA, they quoted sales figures in the summary. The buy-one-get-one offer may or may not be indicative of poor sales, but I would say that actual records of being outsold many times over by your competitors definitely indicates poor sales...
The update manager would bring you new versions of software daily, if they were putting new versions in the repositories daily. In reality, the Ubuntu maintainers only put bugfixes and security updates in the repositories, never new versions of software with new features.
Of course the job would still be possible. There's no reason the software you're using couldn't have been written in dozens of other languages. If anything, Java is going to be slower than most native languages.
Are you sure about that? I would assume that if you're selling a completely intangible product over the Internet, there's really no need to have a presence in any country other than your base of operations. At most, maybe support centers in countries that speak other languages primarily, if they constitute a large enough portion of your market...
Yep, at the moment using either one should be more or less the same thing. Just because the copyright changed hands doesn't mean the code became magically tainted.
The problem with your analogy is that Bob's actions were fundamentally caring and good in either case. A more appropriate analogy for our current engagements would be Bob going out and killing every bus driver he could find, because he considered them a danger to pedestrians, and he was willing to lay down his life to "protect" the public from that menace.
So basically what you're saying is that exercising sound ethical judgement is a bad thing, and that you consider it respectable for a person to sign up to take part in an oppressive foreign occupation because their motive may be to "protect us?"
In real life, it's actions that matter, not words. The tons of propaganda we get dumped on us daily about how the military is "protecting us" doesn't change the fact that they are not, in fact, protecting us, but rather enforcing our control over foreigners we have no business controlling. When you sign up for the military, you sign up for what they're doing, good or bad. The fact that they theoretically could do something good doesn't change the fact that you're signing up in the here and now for the bad.
Right, but I'm not talking about people who signed up a month before 9/11 and suddenly found themselves involved in an invasion they had no choice in. We've been in Afghanistan for what, nine years now? And a couple less for Iraq? Is there seriously anyone who hasn't had the chance to get out by now?
Ever heard of firefighters? They lay down their lives for others all the time, and their job description doesn't include killing. If you disagree with either of our current wars, then you must logically disagree with the soldiers fighting it, because every single one of them volunteered to serve or continue serving while those conflicts were ongoing. You can't very well claim "Well, I didn't sign up for this", when you did in fact sign up while you knew it was going on.
That's kind of a difficult distinction to make when the sword has volunteered itself, knowing exactly how it was to be wielded. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a single member of the military today who hasn't had the chance to get out since the beginning of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, which means that every one of them bears full responsibility for the decision to take part in those occupations. "Oppose the war, support the troops" is a great politically correct sentiment at all, but it's not logical at all when the troops all chose to participate in the war.
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
I've personally met vegan children who are perfectly normal, well-developed and healthy. There are healthy adults living today who have spent their entire lives vegan. Vegans compete and win in international athletics competitions (Carl Lewis, anyone? The guy won a gold medal in sprinting on a vegan diet), and you honestly expect me to believe that their growth is stunted? Whether a Vegan diet is healthy isn't even an issue any more, at least not for people who bother to educate themselves from reliable sources, instead of parroting the same uncited crap that gets repeated ad nauseum.
Please, stop spewing your pseudoscientific nonsense: this isn't the 40's, and now we have actual data about these issues that doesn't come from the meat industry's PR department.
The American Dietetic Association is selling me a bill of goods? Well shucks, it's a good thing such an enlightened AC showed up to show the error of my ways: what was I thinking, trusting research and facts over an anonymous poster's intuition? I'll be sure to rearrange my thinking going forward.
No, I don't. I'm sure there are animal products used in the production of some of the things I rely on for survival, but there's nothing I can do about that. Vegans avoid animal products to the greatest extent possible. Obviously we can't effect any change in society if we refuse to be a part of it at all.
As for the scarcity argument, are you kidding? You do realize that like 80% of the grain we grow is being consumed by animals that humans will eat later, right? There's plenty of room to grow plant food for everyone, it's the animals that we can't afford to keep growing grain for. Producing animal products is massively inefficient.
Of course, that "blubbery malnourished backside" nonsense (because it's not like vegans can be world-class athletes, or enjoy generally lower rates of heart disease and cancer) makes it obvious enough that you're just trolling, so I won't expect an intelligent response...
I'm not sure what I should go after first, the massive non-sequitur or the blatant naturalist fallacy. Perhaps I should start by asking you when was the last time you chased down, killed and ate an animal using nothing but your physical prowess and devilish cunning, since you seem to think that that's how modern humans acquire their animal products...not, you know, herding docile, tamed animals from the pens we keep them in their entire lives into narrow boxes where we can kill slaughter them without them ever having the opportunity to put up a fight.
Anyways, macho-man nonsense aside, whether or not we're physically capable of doing something has absolutely zero bearing on the morality of that action. I don't have any medical problem that keeps me from forcibly procreating, and my bifocal color vision, canine teeth, grasping hands, and mad endurance skills would certainly make it easy to hunt down, restrain and impregnate a woman to spread my superior predator genes, yet I'm pretty sure most of us would frown on that.
So now, if we may take a brief trip back to reality, we have no biological need to consume animal products (don't believe me, read the ADA's position paper on vegetarian diets), and producing them, any cruelty issues aside (since you clearly don't care about the feelings or pain of any creature too feeble to resist being hunted down and eaten by you), is grossly inefficient and utterly abominable for the environment (you'll want to read the UN report "Livestock's Long Shadow" for that one). But hey, if it makes you feel better to just put someone's lifestyle down with your super macho cave man fantasy, by all means go ahead, don't let silly things like facts get in your way.
tl;dr - If you think you can just dismiss a well-established philosophy or system of ethics with a single super-witty paragraph, you're not being clever, you're just being a douche. Trust me, you're not the first person to say "Umm we have pointy teeth so you should eat meat!"
I'm sure it would be convenient for the KDE folks, but wouldn't this be a little superfluous for everyone using Qt on non-KDE platforms? Qt is a pretty massive runtime as-is...piling in the KDE libraries seems to me like it would be adding a lot of weight for relatively little benefit to anyone other than KDE. I don't use KDE myself, but I have been developing for Qt for a while...anyone who knows more about the KDE libs feel free to correct me if there's actually some great benefit I'd yield from having the KDE libs included in Qt...
Would a car battery really be a big deal? Those things only put out like 12v, iirc. Admittedly, the USB port is only expecting 5, so it could wreak some havoc, but it might not; it's not like you're connecting it to a ridiculously, outlandishly higher voltage or anything. The car battery is all about being able to put out a ton of current, but as long as there's some resistance in the USB circuitry you won't get a whole lot of current flowing. Now, if you connected it to 120v AC, on the other hand...
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Presumably, a single report would never be used to identify a pothole, as that could easily be a fluke (maybe the user dropped their phone while driving through the area). Rather, you would want to wait until you'd gotten a reasonable number of reports from the same area to ensure that there actually is a pothole in the road; a convenient consequence of this would be that you could average the responses from that area, which should go a long way towards correcting for GPS inaccuracy. At very least it should be good enough that a city worker could find the pothole in the course of a couple minutes driving around...
Amazingly enough, this is the first semester (and this is my sixth semester here) that I've had a professor publish slides in PDF.
Speak for yourself. I haven't used Windows in years, and I haven't suffered for it. Anytime I'm forced to open an office document (which is more often than you would think over the course of a CS degree), I just use Openoffice and everything works.
At least at University, I'm seeing more and more students primarily using free operating systems. In my CS courses especially, it's all over the place: a show-of-hands survey in one of my upper-levels recently had probably upwards of ten Linux users in a class of thirty. Of course, it's a lot more prevalent among CS students, but even among the less technical students Linux usage is extremely common. When I first got here, I was shocked when I would see a Linux laptop or two near me in a class...nowadays I'm a little surprised if I don't.
Free software may not be catching on as well as we would like with the older generations, but it most certainly is with the younger folks.
In all seriousness, I'm horrified to see the potential abuses people will come up with for this.
"Still using MySQL? Man, you need to check out Cassandra! MySQL kept clashing with my every-user-gets-their-own-column architecture..."
If their custom UI is a separate application, then it is not covered. Kernel modifications most certainly are.
I was wondering the same thing after reading the article. My guess is that he probably has body guards who deal at his level of shadiness...
I would never wish such things on a person, but I am genuinely surprised that none of his burned customers ever tracked him down and beat him. You would think that ripping people off that blatantly when they can get a hold of your real name would be more dangerous...
This is nothing new...the federal government has been mandating safety features in cars for decades. Once seatbelts became available, they were mandated. Same deal for airbags. Now backup cameras are available, they're dirt cheap (relative to the cost of a new automobile, anyways), and they have the potential to save a lot of lives, not to mention property damage. And no, they won't ban all existing cars, just like they haven't banned cars from before the advent of seatbelts or airbags.
Sorry, I know you really wanted to uncover some vast conspiracy between the government and the auto manufacturers, but this is just business as usual...
Without a shred of evidence? You didn't even have to RTFA, they quoted sales figures in the summary. The buy-one-get-one offer may or may not be indicative of poor sales, but I would say that actual records of being outsold many times over by your competitors definitely indicates poor sales...
The update manager would bring you new versions of software daily, if they were putting new versions in the repositories daily. In reality, the Ubuntu maintainers only put bugfixes and security updates in the repositories, never new versions of software with new features.
Of course the job would still be possible. There's no reason the software you're using couldn't have been written in dozens of other languages. If anything, Java is going to be slower than most native languages.
Are you sure about that? I would assume that if you're selling a completely intangible product over the Internet, there's really no need to have a presence in any country other than your base of operations. At most, maybe support centers in countries that speak other languages primarily, if they constitute a large enough portion of your market...
No, I'm saying that the code didn't become proprietary when Oracle purchased it.
Yep, at the moment using either one should be more or less the same thing. Just because the copyright changed hands doesn't mean the code became magically tainted.
The problem with your analogy is that Bob's actions were fundamentally caring and good in either case. A more appropriate analogy for our current engagements would be Bob going out and killing every bus driver he could find, because he considered them a danger to pedestrians, and he was willing to lay down his life to "protect" the public from that menace.
So basically what you're saying is that exercising sound ethical judgement is a bad thing, and that you consider it respectable for a person to sign up to take part in an oppressive foreign occupation because their motive may be to "protect us?"
In real life, it's actions that matter, not words. The tons of propaganda we get dumped on us daily about how the military is "protecting us" doesn't change the fact that they are not, in fact, protecting us, but rather enforcing our control over foreigners we have no business controlling. When you sign up for the military, you sign up for what they're doing, good or bad. The fact that they theoretically could do something good doesn't change the fact that you're signing up in the here and now for the bad.
Right, but I'm not talking about people who signed up a month before 9/11 and suddenly found themselves involved in an invasion they had no choice in. We've been in Afghanistan for what, nine years now? And a couple less for Iraq? Is there seriously anyone who hasn't had the chance to get out by now?
Ever heard of firefighters? They lay down their lives for others all the time, and their job description doesn't include killing. If you disagree with either of our current wars, then you must logically disagree with the soldiers fighting it, because every single one of them volunteered to serve or continue serving while those conflicts were ongoing. You can't very well claim "Well, I didn't sign up for this", when you did in fact sign up while you knew it was going on.
That's kind of a difficult distinction to make when the sword has volunteered itself, knowing exactly how it was to be wielded. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a single member of the military today who hasn't had the chance to get out since the beginning of the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts, which means that every one of them bears full responsibility for the decision to take part in those occupations. "Oppose the war, support the troops" is a great politically correct sentiment at all, but it's not logical at all when the troops all chose to participate in the war.
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
I've personally met vegan children who are perfectly normal, well-developed and healthy. There are healthy adults living today who have spent their entire lives vegan. Vegans compete and win in international athletics competitions (Carl Lewis, anyone? The guy won a gold medal in sprinting on a vegan diet), and you honestly expect me to believe that their growth is stunted? Whether a Vegan diet is healthy isn't even an issue any more, at least not for people who bother to educate themselves from reliable sources, instead of parroting the same uncited crap that gets repeated ad nauseum.
Please, stop spewing your pseudoscientific nonsense: this isn't the 40's, and now we have actual data about these issues that doesn't come from the meat industry's PR department.
The American Dietetic Association is selling me a bill of goods? Well shucks, it's a good thing such an enlightened AC showed up to show the error of my ways: what was I thinking, trusting research and facts over an anonymous poster's intuition? I'll be sure to rearrange my thinking going forward.
No, I don't. I'm sure there are animal products used in the production of some of the things I rely on for survival, but there's nothing I can do about that. Vegans avoid animal products to the greatest extent possible. Obviously we can't effect any change in society if we refuse to be a part of it at all.
As for the scarcity argument, are you kidding? You do realize that like 80% of the grain we grow is being consumed by animals that humans will eat later, right? There's plenty of room to grow plant food for everyone, it's the animals that we can't afford to keep growing grain for. Producing animal products is massively inefficient.
Of course, that "blubbery malnourished backside" nonsense (because it's not like vegans can be world-class athletes, or enjoy generally lower rates of heart disease and cancer) makes it obvious enough that you're just trolling, so I won't expect an intelligent response...
I'm not sure what I should go after first, the massive non-sequitur or the blatant naturalist fallacy. Perhaps I should start by asking you when was the last time you chased down, killed and ate an animal using nothing but your physical prowess and devilish cunning, since you seem to think that that's how modern humans acquire their animal products...not, you know, herding docile, tamed animals from the pens we keep them in their entire lives into narrow boxes where we can kill slaughter them without them ever having the opportunity to put up a fight.
Anyways, macho-man nonsense aside, whether or not we're physically capable of doing something has absolutely zero bearing on the morality of that action. I don't have any medical problem that keeps me from forcibly procreating, and my bifocal color vision, canine teeth, grasping hands, and mad endurance skills would certainly make it easy to hunt down, restrain and impregnate a woman to spread my superior predator genes, yet I'm pretty sure most of us would frown on that.
So now, if we may take a brief trip back to reality, we have no biological need to consume animal products (don't believe me, read the ADA's position paper on vegetarian diets), and producing them, any cruelty issues aside (since you clearly don't care about the feelings or pain of any creature too feeble to resist being hunted down and eaten by you), is grossly inefficient and utterly abominable for the environment (you'll want to read the UN report "Livestock's Long Shadow" for that one). But hey, if it makes you feel better to just put someone's lifestyle down with your super macho cave man fantasy, by all means go ahead, don't let silly things like facts get in your way.
tl;dr - If you think you can just dismiss a well-established philosophy or system of ethics with a single super-witty paragraph, you're not being clever, you're just being a douche. Trust me, you're not the first person to say "Umm we have pointy teeth so you should eat meat!"
I'm sure it would be convenient for the KDE folks, but wouldn't this be a little superfluous for everyone using Qt on non-KDE platforms? Qt is a pretty massive runtime as-is...piling in the KDE libraries seems to me like it would be adding a lot of weight for relatively little benefit to anyone other than KDE. I don't use KDE myself, but I have been developing for Qt for a while...anyone who knows more about the KDE libs feel free to correct me if there's actually some great benefit I'd yield from having the KDE libs included in Qt...
Would a car battery really be a big deal? Those things only put out like 12v, iirc. Admittedly, the USB port is only expecting 5, so it could wreak some havoc, but it might not; it's not like you're connecting it to a ridiculously, outlandishly higher voltage or anything. The car battery is all about being able to put out a ton of current, but as long as there's some resistance in the USB circuitry you won't get a whole lot of current flowing. Now, if you connected it to 120v AC, on the other hand...