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I caught a bit of this last night. My favourite quote came from Stallman: "Giving the Linus Torvalds Award to the Free Software Foundation is a bit like giving the Han Solo Award to the Rebel Alliance."

I had to track down this quote this morning after hearing it last night.

"A proof is a proof. What kind of a proof? It's a proof. A proof is a proof. And when you have a good proof, it's because it's proven."
- a former world leader

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

Any sufficiently advanced program is indistinguishable from sentience.

I guess they could I just come up with an acronym that fit the name Asimov. A bit like: 'The Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society'. i.e. 'CLITORIS'. another red dward ref

It's no surprise that a politician asked for the thing, or even that he found someone to write it. Politicians have never been the shining example of morality that they tell us they are. That's just the nature of the job. As Douglas Adams said, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President..."

That doesn't mean his prototype got used, of course. It just means that (a) such a beast is possible (which we already knew), and (b) politicians want it (which we already knew).

Now, if he'd been an employee of Diebold instead, THAT would be news.

Sherlock Homes quotations

If you go look at the page context of those images, you notice that the dates (of those with dates at all) show nothing earlier* than January this year, months before the torture story broke. Abu Ghraib was a well-known prison BEFORE it's latest claim to infamy, so it's not surprising there are SOME pics. I think a modified form of Hanlon's Razor applies here: Never attribute to censorship that which can be adequately explained by inefficiency.

* I saw one story dated 11/8/2004 about a brit journalist being freed after being held as a POW by the Iraqi army at Abu Ghraib, but seing as how the Iraqis had been out of command of Abu Ghraib for 16 months at that date, I suspect the date is in error.

Actually Gates has refuted that quote.

I respond here in the hope that one or two readers who might be considering voting for Bush might be persuaded to vote instead for the world's obvious choice (anyone else!) - the election seems so close that just a few votes might change the result.

And I think it is justifiable to call this the "most important" election, not merely because of the looming appointment of a few supreme court judges, but because (like the rest of the world) I think it is obvious that the American voters made a huge mistake in letting Bush run the country (and hence greatly affect the rest of the world) the last four years. I would have thought that the huge loss of liberties inherent in the Patriot Act would make this mistake clear for most Slashdot readers - even those who support the war in Iraq. This election is important because America must rectify that mistake before it goes further down the slippery slope.

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." Ref: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Watterson

More answers to that one.

More on this oft-bastardized quote from another Wikimedia project.

Of course, it's the Republican administration. Because we all know that the DOJ is staffed entirely by technically savvy individuals, who no doubt understand all the possible nuances and implications of Microsoft's choice of file format.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Why is it that Hanlon's Razor only gets ignored when it's politically convenient?

"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

(Testimony to the House of Representatives, 1982)" (source)

I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. 'I think the puppet on the right shares my beliefs.' 'I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking.' 'Hey, wait a minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!'

You make an interesting point when taken by itself and without the background of this thread:

From what is liberty the freedow from? (Liberty implies freedom, but freedom from what?)

"...in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven..." as found in Article VII (emphasis mine)

But, I don't mean to dispute your point of discrimination. It's a very good point. But, I believe, in the light of such a quote as John Adams':

"We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people . It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." (emphasis mine)

there are requirements that make things like democracy and liberty properly work and that those things are based upon that which brings the least amount of harm to the doers of such things and their fellow country men and women.

And that is precisely what is being argued here: right and wrong.
That which is morality and that which is depravity.

Again, I ask:

From what is liberty the freedom from?

I think that was the first president Bush http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_H._W._Bush

A digital thing lasts forever.

Like Bush, once Jack says something, he can't back off from it:

"In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless." (2002 interview with Harvard Political Review's Derek Slater)

(from Wikiquote)

--Rob

He's like an older, less dyslexic Bush!

Seems young George is a constant source of amusement (and frustration) to many of us.

In much the same way as John Prescott is over here (in the UK).

Some choice quotes:

• "I would like to make some start in my speech."
• "The city of York already is a city, as is my own city of Hull is a city, and that I think is the definition of city and town."
• "If I decide it is right to make a statement to this house, that's what I do, that's what I have done, and it didn't come from anybody else."
• "At the end of the day it's a negotiated settlement, they're always the more difficult ways of finding acts of violence or unilateral actions like this will not help, and we just see the matter escalating from day to day, again just walk the table - that's still the only solution!"

More here and here.

If education has gone downhill since he was a lad, we're all in trouble!

"But, with all of the terrorist threats lately, bringing passport documents into the digital world is sure to increase security."

Benjamin Franklin once said
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.

<pedant>
> 1st they laugh at you
> 2nd they fight you
> then you win
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
</pedant>

Bill Hicks died from pancreatic cancer on February 26, 1994.

He was a stand up comedian known for his controversial political topics, showing a --fairly uncommon-- tendency to tell the simple, naked truth.

I wish all the Bills out there were the same... yes Mr. Gates, I am talking to you :)))

Here there are some of his quotes.

In these strange days we are living, we cannot afford forgetting his humour.

[todays wikiquote]

Try letting her lose on Wiki software. Start on the basics such as triple quotes and wikitables, then work up on harder stuff such as Templates and Variables. There are hundreds of wiki's about, gov wild! The best wiki's around are the Wikimedia wiki's such as Wikipedia,Wikiquote and Wikibooks. You will have fun, plus you will learn stuff other than programming! Also check out the cool round tab trick, a reason for you IE users to upgrade to firefox already!

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -- John. F. Kennedy

--Mike--

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

* Source: these words were first used by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire, as a paraphrase of Voltaire's statements in Essay on Tolerance where he asserts: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privelege to do so too", but its ultimate origin may lie in a letter to M. le Riche (February 6, 1770): "Monsieur l'abbe, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."

Agreed, "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." sums it up. ...No, wait, that's way too general for the given context, hmm.. (Ignorance alert: I actually never even considered the origins of that particular phrase* - thanks for the pointer!).

*) For folks matching me in cluelessness: I believe KFG's referring to the quote**

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (The Life of Reason, 1905)

**) But "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child," seems applicable too.

Agreed, "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." sums it up. ...No, wait, that's way too general for the given context, hmm.. (Ignorance alert: I actually never even considered the origins of that particular phrase* - thanks for the pointer!).

*) For folks matching me in cluelessness: I believe KFG's referring to the quote**

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (The Life of Reason, 1905)

**) But "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child," seems applicable too.

MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.

Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:

• section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
• automatic image rescaling
• LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
• message transclusion - create messages that can be used
• namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
• plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)