So why do we still use a tape archiver for our downloaded/uploaded and backup archives in this era when hard drive arrays have totally and utterly outmoded tape drives for the average user?
Because it still works? It's not as if there aren't alternatives (7zip comes to mind), it's just that this is already on all unixes already and so becomes the default. If tar was not adequate for the job, one of the alternatives would have taken over long ago.
What nonsensical parameters do you use for tar? To extract, you type the name of the program, the operation you want, the option to use a file, what compression you are using (if any), and the location of the file you want to extract. That comes down to: 'tar --extract --file --bzip2 file.tar.bz2'. How is that unintuitive (keeping in mind that --file is needed because it's a tape archiver and you are using it to a different purpose)?
I see your point. I think what you are describing as limits on our understanding are really limits on our ability to imagine. I can understand what 100 cupcakes is. I cannot, however imagine 100 cupcakes. It is similar with the hard math equation. I can (with the proper training and ability) understand the equation. That does not mean I can imagine solving it. If we are to take understanding something as fully imagining it then no one would understand quantities larger than about 8. Maybe it's bad reasoning on my part but if that's all understanding is, the ability to visualize something in it's entirity, then it's a pretty useless term (especially since it becomes a synonym from imagination).
I think I understand what you are saying, but it seems to me to just be an extension of the 'we can't do it now so it can't be done' kind of thinking. If we were able to take a snapshot of a working brain and understand it's state and how it works, there should be no reason it would not be possible to predict what would happen given certain inputs. To make the case that it is un-understandable just because we don't know what those inputs are going to be means that anything mutable is not understandable. My typing this comment would make my computer un-understandable.
As for emergent behaviours, even complex behaviours that come from simple rules are still explainable in terms of those simple rules (though it is cumbersome to do so). Someone brought up the game of life as an example. Yes, emergent behaviours happen with it, but they still are capable of being expressed in term of the simple rules by virtue of the fact that all the game is capable of is executing those simple rules.
If a system capable of being understood could not act intelligently, then why the hell do we even bother studying the human brain? And further, any attempt at creating artificial intelligence would rely on us not knowing what the hell we are doing?
I am tired of this kind of blanket assumption that anything humans can do that we don't understand or know how to reproduce artificially is somehow incapable of ever being understood or reproduced. We are not so special as to invalidate the existence of the mechanical processes that make us work.
So what? It's not my fault that research moves fast. It's also not my fault that women are capable of having children. I fail to see how saying that women who want to work with equality to men should just choose to not use the extra functionality that their sex gives them.
Saying that women should not be held to the same work standards as men is sexist. Especially when it is only ever by choice that a woman would ever be pregnant.
I am with you on this. The first time I tried linux was with RedHat 7. It didn't work like Windows and I couldn't figure out how to do anything in bash (other than change directories and such because RH thoughtfully aliased dir to ls) so I gave up and reinstalled Windows. It wasn't until a few years later that I read pretty much everything in the philosophy section of the GNU site that I decided to try again. I didn't switch because it was easier (though after learning the basics it was), because it was faster (it was), or because it had a better desktop shell (I had been using blackbox and ESharp instead of explorer for quite some time). I switched and stuck with it because I liked the idea and philosophy of Free Software.
You can install KMplayer to get around it. It takes a few more steps than normal, but it works (and from my subjective experience is much faster running than the normal nspluginviewer way). Here are instructions for doing it: http://mikearthur.co.uk/?p=171
The majority of native English speakers are American. So to most of the English speaking world, football is the game played with the oblong ball and soccer is the one with the round one. If you insist on using a minority dialect of English you should really stop being so sensitive when the majority doesn't use it.
Unfortunately, if you give a bunch of religous zealots democracy they will vote to stone you to death and revert to a dictatorship.
I am utterly confused. I never expected such anti-Americanism on/. You are talking about the US, right? The United States in not a democracy, never has been. Democracy is an insanely stupid form of government. What we have is a constitutional republic. As another poster said, perhaps it is our actual system of government we should be exporting, and not the sanctioned mob rule that is democracy.
> This isn't for killing 'someone', it for poking big holes in things that are very hard.
If you have that much energy, though, then surely lasers become a more practical alternative? Lasers can't be shot on a trajectory to hit something 1000 miles away. Nor can they cause much damage outside of where they hit.
So you are admit to trying to patent software and then expect us to feel sorry for you because a patent troll is defeating your attempts? Quite frankly, if you are trying to patent software, you don't deserve any pity for having trouble doing so.
The FSF doesn't develop any software. They are an advocacy organization. Their big stake in this is not wether or not piracy is wrong or wether the defendants are guilty. What they are concerned with is the effect these cases might have on copyright law.
Not saying I totally agree with this but there is some logic to the idea that if you would rather live in slavery than die, you are, at least in some small way, okay with the idea of being owned.
I think this is highly dependent on the point of view. Who is "they". The company? The owners? Are the owners the company, or not?
My view is this: As soon as you can sue the investors instead of the company when the company does something bad, the investors can get their dividends tax-free, since the investors would have paid it already on their income from their share of the company. But as long as they have created a pseudo-person in the form of a corporation to protect themselves from the company's actions, that pseudo-person has to pay it's own taxes.
If the investors don't want to be taxed in addition to the company being taxed, they need to personally accept all responsibility (including possible jail time and fines) for what the company does.
I don't really consider 3rd and 3.5 to be much different, but even if 3.5 is considered to be completely separate from 3rd then it will still be very close to 5 years since any major revision or change.
When 4th Edition comes out it will have been about 8 years since the 3rd edition books came out. Being mad because they were inconsiderate enough to release a new set of rules after that length of time seems a bit silly to me. Especially since the new edition coming out in no way makes the version you have less fun to play.
How come you aren't pissed that they made a 3rd Edition in the first place? How dare they give you a new system to use!
This would be a great thing for those who want to help out the small businesses in their area. They can go out and literally put them on the map. The more people that are aware the small shops exist, the more likely people will be to shop there.
I know that I, for one, don't neglect smaller shops because I would rather go to Target. For the most part, I do it because I am unaware that there even is a small shop that could serve my needs.
The question is who has more money for a long legal war.
Nope, that's not the question. The real question is who has more customers that can be sued for patent infringement.
Being a consumer in no way protects you against patent infringement lawsuits. So, even if no one has enough money to challenge MicrSoft on the patent issue, many groups have enough money to bully MicroSoft customers until it decides to stop with the patent threats/suits.
Other states could benefit from California doing this as well. Just like cars all over the US are manufactured, in the most part, to CA specifications and tolerances to serve it's huge market, so too could this result in (hopefully) well tested machines being available to all the other states.
Maybe he just wasn't hit by enough microwaves for it to really matter. For one, it's a small creature and therefore doesn't have as much space to collect radiant energy on. And second, microwaves are quite large in comparison to the average sized gnat and are too big to hit it. At least that's what I have gathered from my limited knowledge of the subject most of which I came to learn by explanations of why the sky is blue (the longer wavelengths don't get scattered by the molecules of air, which I take to mean that the molecules are too small).
How long will it be until something like this is implemented to "punish" those that are late on paying their bill or for people who decide they want to switch service providers?
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So why do we still use a tape archiver for our downloaded/uploaded and backup archives in this era when hard drive arrays have totally and utterly outmoded tape drives for the average user?
Because it still works? It's not as if there aren't alternatives (7zip comes to mind), it's just that this is already on all unixes already and so becomes the default. If tar was not adequate for the job, one of the alternatives would have taken over long ago.
What nonsensical parameters do you use for tar? To extract, you type the name of the program, the operation you want, the option to use a file, what compression you are using (if any), and the location of the file you want to extract. That comes down to: 'tar --extract --file --bzip2 file.tar.bz2'. How is that unintuitive (keeping in mind that --file is needed because it's a tape archiver and you are using it to a different purpose)?
I see your point. I think what you are describing as limits on our understanding are really limits on our ability to imagine. I can understand what 100 cupcakes is. I cannot, however imagine 100 cupcakes. It is similar with the hard math equation. I can (with the proper training and ability) understand the equation. That does not mean I can imagine solving it. If we are to take understanding something as fully imagining it then no one would understand quantities larger than about 8. Maybe it's bad reasoning on my part but if that's all understanding is, the ability to visualize something in it's entirity, then it's a pretty useless term (especially since it becomes a synonym from imagination).
I think I understand what you are saying, but it seems to me to just be an extension of the 'we can't do it now so it can't be done' kind of thinking. If we were able to take a snapshot of a working brain and understand it's state and how it works, there should be no reason it would not be possible to predict what would happen given certain inputs. To make the case that it is un-understandable just because we don't know what those inputs are going to be means that anything mutable is not understandable. My typing this comment would make my computer un-understandable.
As for emergent behaviours, even complex behaviours that come from simple rules are still explainable in terms of those simple rules (though it is cumbersome to do so). Someone brought up the game of life as an example. Yes, emergent behaviours happen with it, but they still are capable of being expressed in term of the simple rules by virtue of the fact that all the game is capable of is executing those simple rules.
If a system capable of being understood could not act intelligently, then why the hell do we even bother studying the human brain? And further, any attempt at creating artificial intelligence would rely on us not knowing what the hell we are doing?
I am tired of this kind of blanket assumption that anything humans can do that we don't understand or know how to reproduce artificially is somehow incapable of ever being understood or reproduced. We are not so special as to invalidate the existence of the mechanical processes that make us work.
So what? It's not my fault that research moves fast. It's also not my fault that women are capable of having children. I fail to see how saying that women who want to work with equality to men should just choose to not use the extra functionality that their sex gives them.
Saying that women should not be held to the same work standards as men is sexist. Especially when it is only ever by choice that a woman would ever be pregnant.
Here are just a few ways to avoid getting pregnant:
If you still want a child but don't want to have pregnancy affect your job you can stop being so vain and selfish and adopt a child.
I am with you on this. The first time I tried linux was with RedHat 7. It didn't work like Windows and I couldn't figure out how to do anything in bash (other than change directories and such because RH thoughtfully aliased dir to ls) so I gave up and reinstalled Windows. It wasn't until a few years later that I read pretty much everything in the philosophy section of the GNU site that I decided to try again. I didn't switch because it was easier (though after learning the basics it was), because it was faster (it was), or because it had a better desktop shell (I had been using blackbox and ESharp instead of explorer for quite some time). I switched and stuck with it because I liked the idea and philosophy of Free Software.
You can install KMplayer to get around it. It takes a few more steps than normal, but it works (and from my subjective experience is much faster running than the normal nspluginviewer way). Here are instructions for doing it: http://mikearthur.co.uk/?p=171
The majority of native English speakers are American. So to most of the English speaking world, football is the game played with the oblong ball and soccer is the one with the round one. If you insist on using a minority dialect of English you should really stop being so sensitive when the majority doesn't use it.
This has already been fixed: http://vizzzion.org/?blogentry=806
If you have that much energy, though, then surely lasers become a more practical alternative?
Lasers can't be shot on a trajectory to hit something 1000 miles away. Nor can they cause much damage outside of where they hit.
So you are admit to trying to patent software and then expect us to feel sorry for you because a patent troll is defeating your attempts? Quite frankly, if you are trying to patent software, you don't deserve any pity for having trouble doing so.
The FSF doesn't develop any software. They are an advocacy organization. Their big stake in this is not wether or not piracy is wrong or wether the defendants are guilty. What they are concerned with is the effect these cases might have on copyright law.
Not saying I totally agree with this but there is some logic to the idea that if you would rather live in slavery than die, you are, at least in some small way, okay with the idea of being owned.
I think this is highly dependent on the point of view. Who is "they". The company? The owners? Are the owners the company, or not?
My view is this: As soon as you can sue the investors instead of the company when the company does something bad, the investors can get their dividends tax-free, since the investors would have paid it already on their income from their share of the company. But as long as they have created a pseudo-person in the form of a corporation to protect themselves from the company's actions, that pseudo-person has to pay it's own taxes.
If the investors don't want to be taxed in addition to the company being taxed, they need to personally accept all responsibility (including possible jail time and fines) for what the company does.
I don't really consider 3rd and 3.5 to be much different, but even if 3.5 is considered to be completely separate from 3rd then it will still be very close to 5 years since any major revision or change.
When 4th Edition comes out it will have been about 8 years since the 3rd edition books came out. Being mad because they were inconsiderate enough to release a new set of rules after that length of time seems a bit silly to me. Especially since the new edition coming out in no way makes the version you have less fun to play.
How come you aren't pissed that they made a 3rd Edition in the first place? How dare they give you a new system to use!
This would be a great thing for those who want to help out the small businesses in their area. They can go out and literally put them on the map. The more people that are aware the small shops exist, the more likely people will be to shop there.
I know that I, for one, don't neglect smaller shops because I would rather go to Target. For the most part, I do it because I am unaware that there even is a small shop that could serve my needs.
The book he was talking about was the Bible numbnuts.
The question is who has more money for a long legal war.
Nope, that's not the question. The real question is who has more customers that can be sued for patent infringement.
Being a consumer in no way protects you against patent infringement lawsuits. So, even if no one has enough money to challenge MicrSoft on the patent issue, many groups have enough money to bully MicroSoft customers until it decides to stop with the patent threats/suits.
Other states could benefit from California doing this as well. Just like cars all over the US are manufactured, in the most part, to CA specifications and tolerances to serve it's huge market, so too could this result in (hopefully) well tested machines being available to all the other states.
Maybe he just wasn't hit by enough microwaves for it to really matter. For one, it's a small creature and therefore doesn't have as much space to collect radiant energy on. And second, microwaves are quite large in comparison to the average sized gnat and are too big to hit it. At least that's what I have gathered from my limited knowledge of the subject most of which I came to learn by explanations of why the sky is blue (the longer wavelengths don't get scattered by the molecules of air, which I take to mean that the molecules are too small).
How long will it be until something like this is implemented to "punish" those that are late on paying their bill or for people who decide they want to switch service providers?