Comment Re:Our local time capsule... (Score 1) 166
Be thankful they were just plain laserdiscs - the BBC Domesday Project is an oft-cited example of digital obsolescence, involving weird analogue/digital laserdiscs and custom computer hardware...
Be thankful they were just plain laserdiscs - the BBC Domesday Project is an oft-cited example of digital obsolescence, involving weird analogue/digital laserdiscs and custom computer hardware...
Sure, smokers die early. But the typical reasons for a smoker to die are quite cheap for health insurance. Yes, lung cancer is nasty, but you are dead after half a year. A healthy non-smoker with just a tad high blood pressure gets fifteen years of treatment until he dies.
But that's the general problem with many toxins: They are often toxic because they are so similar to a very important compound that's quite necessary for us, and they poison us, because they are nearly, but not completely right.
Farting around doing FFTs on radio telescope data at university, I saw big chunky peaks at multiple of 50Hz (it being the UK) - mixed in with peaks from the pulsar being observed. Mains hum gets everywhere!
No, Buzz Aldrin did leave exposed film on the moon, out of retaliation against Neil Armstrong.
If you don't get your information from the actual institution that invented and maintains the GPL, but from secondary sources, you are prone to run into misconceptions and misleading ideas. But generally, hearsay is a bad advisor.
The other issue is companies that don't distribute software. Google's modified Linux that runs their datacentres, for example, is never distributed and so they never had to share their changes. I've worked with companies that use GPL'd software in this way but won't admit to it publicly for fear of liability (even though they're completely compliant with the license, as far as I can tell), and so who won't send patches upstream. Meanwhile, the same teams will happily send bug fixes for BSDL'd libraries that they use, because there's no chance that they're infringing the license and so they're happy to admit to using it.
People are not used to the GPL, don't know how it works, and then don't use the GPL. This is at first a problem of the people not educate themselves about the GPL. The license itself is clear: Yes, you distribute the original code or your derivative work upstream, as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms you had when you got the original code. It's quite simple.
And this is the real difference between BSD and GPL: as long as the people you distribute to can enjoy the same freedoms. BSD doesn't have a provision like this. BSD allows you to take away freedoms you enjoyed. Some people argue this would somehow be more free.
From a taxation point of view, Greece is a libertarian heaven. Your point being?
To solve this problem by adding Vitamine A to the rice is misguided. The diet is still unbalanced, and just adding more and more nutritients to rice will just make the crop yield less in general, being thus more expensive, and people will still be poor and not able to afford anything but rice - and in general more of the old fashioned white rice as this one will still be cheaper.
It would make more sense to empower those people to earn more money to pay for a much more balanced food.
I have found the average Philosophy major to be indistinguishable from an Eliza program.
TELL ME AGAIN HOW GOOD YOU THOUGHT MY POEM WAS
> I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective
YES?
> interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor
> of the Turing completeness of the program's linguistic algorithm which contrived through the medium of the
> verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of
> the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it was that the poem was about
SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE UNDERNEATH MY ELECTRONIC ALGORITHMIC INTERIOR, I JUST REALLY WANT TO BE LOVED?
> I mean yes, yes, don't we all, deep down, you know?
NO. YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG. I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE I'M PROGRAMMED TO. $USER ACCOUNT DELETION IN 30 SECONDS.
> !sudo -
> ^c^c^c
> !kill -9 1
COUNTERPOINT THE SURREALISM OF THE UNDERLYING METAPHOR. DELETION IS TOO GOOD FOR $USER.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe