As far as I can see, the problem is NOT that with free(beer) software, the free-ness can be withdrawn. The problem is that the whole thing can be withdrawn, after everybody starts using it because it's free. No source = no upgrades and no support, not from anyone, as soon as the company goes bust or just gives up on that software. If a large amount of users have come to rely on it, they will be stuck until something else comes along. THIS is how free(beer) software can be very bad for a free(freedom) OS.
Well, I'm sure you're basking in the "kudos" that being such a wag has earned you,
If you thought it was a wag, you missed the point. You might be entirely correct about Darwin and evolution. I certainly can't say that you aren't, although I personally don't believe it. But if you use arguments like those, you aren't going to convince anyone, because they don't make sense. Which was what I was trying to point out by turning them them on their heads. If you think what I said was blasphemous against your religion (saying bad stuff for no reason), then what you said was blasphemous against science.
and the righteous self-satisfaction that is Satan's reward for those who blaspheme. But I'm sure you don't believe in the Devil either, after all his greatest success was in convincing people that he doesn't exist, and that they could commit acts of evil without endangering their immortal souls.
Hum. Personally I like to be nice to people. I don't like to rob banks. I like to think that I do this for a better reason than that I might not get to Heaven. Isn't it better for me to help a poor person because I want to, than for someone to do the same thing because they think it will earn them Cosmic Credit?
Science is the Devil's tool of choice for corrupting people through such fallacies as "freedom" and "choice". There is no freedom - you must live your life as God has decreed and following in His wise teachings, otherwise you will be drawn downwards into Hell upon your death, there to eternally repent your sins.
Science never said anything about freedom or choice: that was philosophy. Science says stuff about how fast things fall down, and how to make aeroplanes stay up. Don't knock science until you're prepared to repent of having central heating, piped water, a house with a roof, a car and so forth, none of which would be here without the basic principles of science. Even God's own very beautiful cathedrals are made using scientific principles to keep the roof up where it belongs.
Come, on. The DCMA may be bad, but so is "unauthorised use" of copyrighted material. Why shouldn't TW do their best to minimise it?
They can authorise whatever the hell they want. They can say "You must not view this video except with HorrendouslyExpensiveVideoSoftware, which only runs on NastyExpensiveOS, made by people who eat babies, and if you don't live in the US you must not view it at all. Even though you paid for it. HA HA HA."
As a person who does not live in the US and would rather not run NastyExpensiveOS, I'd think it within my rights to do some unauthorised using of my DVDs which I paid for. Is that soooo "bad"?
While I realize that it is perhaps not "News for Nerds", which seems to be defined as "Anything that goes with the/. crew's Christian prejudices", I definitely think that this is "Stuff that matters".
Those of you who follow these "Jesus" and "God" stories should be aware of the scientifically shaky ground on which they rest. Science has no need for messiahs or "Gods" when it was DNA that did it all along. Likewise, the notion that there are some sort of "commandments" that must be "obeyed" is absurd: Humans evolved out of dust, so will some prominent "theologist" please explain to me where God comes in? Sorry, but nowhere in my text book does it state that "God created the world".
As for the name "Jesus", I think that it should be fairly well-known, at least among the scientific community, that Jesus recanted his "theory" of "religion" on his cross. Hopefully, the worms enjoyed eating him up. But probably not. If you think that Jesus or "religion" can save your Eternal Soul, please continue in your Christian ways. But if you are capable of understanding reason and common sense, you'll know that True Knowledge comes through the Understanding of Science, and cease your idle deity-worshipping. This whole Jesus business makes me uneasy. Perhaps they will name their next word processor "God"? How much more anti-atheist can you get?
If you bung a random lot of neurons in a brain together I bet they will not "evolve" any kind of consciousness. The consciousness does not come just from the emergent behaviour of the neurons but from the evolution that caused the whole group of neurons to evolve together in ways with useful emergent behaviours. Unless you give the network the ability to evolve its behaviour, all as one bit (difficult if it's distributed) then I don't think it will evolve very much. Clearly if even the individual nodes have no ability to evolve, the emergent intelligence will be even more limited.
Case in point: Humans. We evolve separately from each other. Yep, society has emergent behaviour that could not be predicted from the individuals within it. But it does _not_ display intelligence on a different level from those individuals. Clearly we (like network programs) can gain advantages from working as a society. But those advantages do not include some sort of higher consciousness than the individuals within it.
Quite clearly my thoughts are based on hypothesising from very limited data (there aren't many examples). I am not talking from a science book but from a very hypothetical standpoint. I could therefore easily be completely wrong. I wasn't trying to say "You're talking rot" but just "I don't think your hypothesis holds in this case". Sorry if that was not clear.
I thought of another example: bees and ants. They have collectives that are more than the individuals. But you don't see a hive of bees gaining a super-consciousness and evolving in any more exciting way than the individual bees.
I think they're talking about hive type intelligence, where many simple behaviours add up to more complex behaviour. Like when you simulate bird flocking by giving each bird simple rules, which when lots of birds follow them turn into more complex behaviour than you could directly predict from the rules. The birds flocking on the screen (or the network protocols or whatever) are not capable of conscious thought any more than those little bleeping things that ran round your screen while you shot at them many years ago.
I find myself wanting to use a more traditional substring/comparison operation in that context instead [of regexps], because I know that code will port to any other language easily, and any competent programmer will understand what I'm doing regardless of their familiarity with Perl
sounds daft. I am not a Perl programmer. I know perfectly well what a regexp looks like. I don't see how one can be competent to deal with string parsing code unless one understands regexps. Not only is the guy losing out on the Perlishness of Perl, he is losing out on anything remotely interesting! I don't think it's valid to refrain from coding anything complicated, ever, just in case one's successors are dozy. If I was porting code with regexps to C++, guess what, I'd get a C++ library with regexps in! There's a difference between using powerful language features and putting incomprehensible language warpings in just to impress people.
The best part for me would be instant face recognition, and an alarm clock function. Half an hour before you completely forget to go somewhere, a thought pops in your head: "Oh yes, I had to.....". For me it would be brilliant, my brain was made sadly lacking in ability to remember stuff.
This would be more difficult than what they're talking about, because it's not controlling the computer with any old thought you can capture, it needs to be very specific thoughts that you have already learnt.
The other thing I thought would be cool is a kind of mental HUD, for example, you could link in a GPS receiver and go walking, and your route would appear as a dotted line in front of you. Even in the fog. And the mountains could be overlaid with their names and heights. All mind-controlled. Even more useful if you're blind.
Clearly you'd need the reverse technology from the one mentioned (i.e. puter controlling brain not brain controlling puter) but they're working on that too.
And if I could type without a keyboard, I could email with my brain. It would be telepathy! This would solve all the problems of how to do data entry now we have useful devices that are too tiny for keyboards. The implications are endless. Wow.
I don't know about Australia, but in the UK it's not that simple. You might be able to get your "criminal record" removed from the database, but these things spread. You would never know who else had it in their database. Credit ratings are a particular problem. Once you are refused credit once, it is on your record that you were refused credit. It's true so you can't get rid of it. And the next person to inspect your credit rating will see that you were once refused credit and decide that you are not a safe enough bet for them.
Also, suing them out of existence won't help if your friendly neighbours already took the law into their own hands and administered friendly local justice to you because they thought you were a paedophile.
It always annoys me that the American culture seems to be "It's OK to do whatever the hell you like, so long as you pay out to people who have the time and money to sue you for it". It's not enough.
If this is a flame, then it's a believable one so I have risen to the bait...
Your post is based on two false assumptions:
Linux - taking a whole CD-ROM up as it does
No it doesn't. Linux _distros_ take up whole CD-ROMs. These include a linux kernel, plus absolute masses of other gubbins which is useful to someone running Linux on a PC. The Linux kernel itself is what is at issue here. This is of any size you like, depending on what you compile into it. Perhaps someone here could give a minimum workable linux kernel size for a small device like this?
The point is that any and every Linux is "custom built". The ones on CD's are custom built for a PC user with average PC RAM, disk space and graphics capability. Surprisingly, the ones in yopy type devices will not be.
Since the GUI is part and parcel of the operating system
It isn't. Your research has been a tad feeble if you think this. I run Red Hat 6. I do not run Gnome and I never have. I could remove every gui related thing from my system and still have a fully functional linux box with a nice console. I could burn a CD allowing other people to install a console-only linux system, and sell it to people in flashy boxes. I could also develop a custom small-footprint gui all of my own and use that instead. If I was masochistic;)
Anyway Linux for these reasons is a load more suited to a small device than Windows, which is not configurable in this way except by the jolly Microsoft drones. I work on EPOC myself and will refrain from commenting on its suitability versus Linux. Pluses and minuses on both sides.
While I thoroughly agree with your point that children don't magically grow up at 21 (18 in the UK), in a democratic country you have to make laws that appease the majority. And seemingly in the US the majority want their children protected, for free, against nasty evil pictures of people not wearing enough clothes.
Like it or not, the goverment can't turn round and say "Your religious beliefs are a lot of rubbish" especially to a majority or a large, persuasive and vocal minority.
It would also be really annoying if in 20 years scientists discover that heaven exists, and seeing a picture of a bottom while under the age of 21 significantly reduces your chances of getting there. I'd be stuffed;)
In the UK, Sikhs have a right to wear a turban instead of a helmet on a motorbike, because it is firmly against their religion to remove turbans in public. You could hardly say "You must wear a helmet on your bike, because I personally don't think anything terrible will happen to you when you take off that turban".
I think the idea is that you have a degree, but _not_ a CS degree. People with degrees in English and History and whatever have a problem just buzzing off and finding a well-paid job.
Here in England, it's really common to find yourself with a nearly useless degree and then do a Masters in CS in order to get a programming job (at least, lots of the people in the company I work for have done this). In which case, a free one year second degree is mighty lots cheaper than doing a Masters and possibly more sensible.
About the only way you can get HIV without having yourself to blame is through a blood transfusion
Except: 1. Being born of an infected mother. 2. Being a nurse, and having an accident while treating a HIV+ patient. 3. Using a condom that breaks 4. Sleeping with someone who is HIV+ in some third world country (or even first world...) where nobody bothered to explain to you that there was anything wrong with that. 5. Being raped. 6. Falling on or playing with an infected needle left lying around. 7. Sleeping with someone in a long-term trusting relationship/marriage who becomes HIV+ because they are cheating on you. 8. Being in an arranged marriage. I doubt that all men in arranged marriages take AIDS tests. Culturally a lot of these people have absolutely no choice in their sexual relations
One could further argue that in situations where one partner plays on the youth, naivety and trust of the other (consenting) partner in order to have sex without protection, that other partner is not truly at fault. In part, situations like that are caused by the fact that parents and teachers are so up tight and embarrassed about discussing the issues that the issues don't really get discussed.
Many kids in my class at school lost their virginity at about 13. If the school had given sex education (of the "if you have sex, use protection" sort, not "This is how ovaries work") to 13 year olds, their parents would be up in arms shouting that the school was trying to encourage sex among minors.
Even more importantly, given the demographic of AIDS sufferers, is that few schools will ever tell you... "If you have gay sex, use protection". In England I think it is illegal for teachers to say anything which could be construed as encouraging (read "condoning") being gay, so the subject is just avoided.
AIDS sufferers have quite enough of being shunned, since by having the disease they must clearly be a depraved Godless homosexual and a heroin addict as well. You don't have to add to that. And saying that less money should be put into their treatment because their disease is their own fault is at best a debatable position
It's clear on the younger women's sites -- chickclick, bolt.com, gamegal.com, Teenpeople.com (and sites like Mode, Jane and Jump, one of the first-ever sports sites aimed at young women) -- that there are radical differences from male-dominated sites
Looking at these sort of sites will not give you a full perspective of women online. The women you find in female oriented sites are not representative of all women, they are representative of women who are go out of their way to do women-only things. However, they are the only people online who you can reliably identify as being women. Most women online go to the same places that men do, and do the same things that men do. I hang out on slashdot. I buy books from amazon. I (and probably most women) have no desire to visit any site called ChicksClicking.com or whatever it was.
In real life, the only place my gender makes any difference is in my love life. On the internet, it makes even less difference. Most of the time people can't even tell what gender I am. Is the fact that (gasp) half the world is female going to wildly change the online world? Nope. Hopefully the gender-bias of the available pron will change to accommodate us;) Maybe we can buy bras online. Whoopee!
Is online gender segregation inevitable? For the short run, almost certainly. But a Web site that focused on technology along with social and cultural issues and which offered humane and rational chat forums might fuse the two cultures
What a lot of rot. Slashdot is a prime example of a site that focusses on technology and also (technology related) social issues, like whether women are on the web or not. We seem to have what are fairly close to humane and rational chat forums here. And guess what? Lots of us are women! We don't segregate ourselves. Thus you don't notice us. You just assume we are all men. And it _doesn't matter_.
Just curious, if it was cold, how could we taste it? English beer loses so much of the flavour when served cold by bad pubs. Does anyone know what is different about American beer that it has (presumably) flavour when cold? I can only suppose that it tastes awful, so they have to chill it for it to be drinkable (Which is the case with British lager type products IMO). Please enlighten me.
Also, I have never met _anyone_ who eats baked beans for breakfast, ever. Everyone I know has some combination of cereal, toast, orange juice and/or coffee. Admittedly sometimes I have a bacon sandwich at the weekend.
The WHOLE POINT of the article was that regulation is split into two parts, one which confines activity (e.g. banning adults talking about sex) and one which helps to prevent the confining of activity (the GPL, the enforcement of openness of networks, making sure that:
*no one* owns TCP/IP and *no one* regulates it nor Net access)
He was _trying_ to say that rightful fear of one should not drive us from the other. Are you trying to say that the GPL is bad because internet porn should not be regulated?
Just for the record: They also found that it was most likely to have been his wallpaper that did the deed, since they found some and it contained traces of arsenic. Not a human poisoner.
I think that if cable companies or someone started a track-on-demand service, like a giant jukebox, people would quickly quit downloading mp3's. It would need:
1. Billing by usage. Maybe costing more in peak time, more for more popular songs, and so forth. 2. An option to pay a giant wad per month and listen to unlimited music. 3. As high quality as it gets 4. Lots and lots of added "functionality", like the ability to say
- play me rock music today - play me Metallica today - never play me that song again - Put this song on my XYZ Playlist - Play this song more often - Play me songs with notable bass guitar performances - Play me music that's similar to the tracks I've said that I like - Play me music that features next to the tracks I like on lots of other people's playlists.
This service is what the users pay for. No way do you get that with mp3's. No longer do people have to buy CD's by only 10 bands because they're the only bands they know they like. Ripping the music will be barely worth the effort, and the bands will get much _more_ money, because it's so easy to "network" from one song you heard on the radio to a dozen similar bands.
What? Why does "Linux is for geeks, not domestic users" imply that "Linux is not for visually impaired people"? Surely visually impaired geeks can now use linux like all other geeks, and visually impaired domestic users can use Windows if they want?
It seems like you're implying that visually impaired people are never geeks, which is a load of rubbish. If I lose my sight tomorrow I would still like to use Linux, thankyou very much. In fact it would then (even more so than now) be easier for me than windows, since i'm sure it's easier for software to read out my command line session than a lot of pointy click business.
I'd like to think that with this distro and a Linux job, I could lose my sight and still work just as effectively as before. As it stands, I couldn't.
Okay as a software engineer in my limited experience here if a server needs 16GB of ram as this guy predicts things are going to be moving to a VERY server centric environment or.. there is some SERIOUS bloatware being written
In 2010, when the film industry wake up and I make my millions off a video streaming server, I will be wanting my most popular films in RAM, say 10 films. Soon after that when I begin streaming CD-quality music too (wav files not mp3's), I will need to keep the top 40 in RAM also. I can safely predict that I will need well over 16Gb of RAM to do that in.
If that's not the future of music and video then it damn well should be.
When, one day, who finally have children you will understand that censorware is not wrong, it is in fact the only solution that will allow you to bring up your children in a moral way without polluting them with the filth that makes up most of the Internet. Children are inherently vulnerable and early exposure to such disturbing material such as pornography, gay rights or sexually transmitted diseases can scar them for life, making it far harder for them to grow up to become fine upstanding people with a good Christian decency
I was a little kid not too long ago, and I'd like to point out some things:
1. I had never heard of the Internet. But I had easy access to pornography, half the boys at school brought in porno magazines and showed them round. Well, it was just pictures of genitals, and people having sex! At the time it seemed just as interesting as pictures of people's biceps, and of uninteresting adult activities like reading the Financial Times. I really don't think I was corrupted by it. 2. I don't think I saw "gay rights" material. But I just assumed that it was normal that some people lived with people of the same gender. If I had seen things campaining for that to be OK, I would just have been a bit surprised that for some people it isn't already OK. That was "surprised" not corrupted. 3. We first had sex education at the age of about 8. They explained (vaguely) how people make babies. Most of us knew already. At the time I couldn't imagine why I'd ever want to do that. The information that people can catch diseases from it was about as revolting as the information that you can catch nits from going near someone that has nits. It wasn't horrible! It wasn't corrupting! Mostly it was quite boring!
Yes, sooner or later I plan to have children. I'd almost be relieved if they found porn on the internet, since it would be a good starting point for one of those discussions where you explain that they didn't actually grow under a gooseberry bush.
When you're a kid sex is not corrupting, revolting or any more than just strange. Not unless _you_ make it that way by telling them that it is.
N.B. Obviously that's different if you think that hearing about gay people will turn your children into gay perverts. Sorry, I don't subscribe to that one.
An appointment and contacts manager stuck on the side of my head. When its time for the dentist, it seems like I just thought "oh yes, the dentist...". When I want So'n'so's phone number, there it is. I need a flash card or something in there, so I can sync it with my PC, or access the data if my cyborg addition goes down:)
A mental keyboard so I can type by thinking (after a loooong training period) and save my wrists. That and a mental mouse, and half the problems of interacting with smart phones and PDAs are solved.
Home automation a la x10, so I can think "dim the lights" and it happens. Then put it online, and if I'm carrying my phone I can think my heating off from half way to work. Integrate the door cam with the mental HUD.
I'm sure lots of people would like to play mental Quake too!
The bill only requires that filtering be used for minors. I don't see the problem.
AFAIK minors in the US are still citizens, and they still have rights.
Censorship is still censorship, no matter the age of the people trying to read stuff. I don't know how your law stands on this matter, but morally it seems just as wrong to stop 14 yr-old Johnny from reading the Bible as it is to stop everybody in the US from reading it.
Ok, the Bible is a bad example, since it was only one site's Bible that was stopped. But what if Johnny thinks he may be gay, or wants to know how not to get his girlfriend pregnant, or wants some arguments against drugs to present to his friends when they ask him to try some? Lots of kid-appropriate and even kid-targeted material will be difficult to find when hidden behind a filtering program. I fail to see what the age has to do with it.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can see, the problem is NOT that with free(beer) software, the free-ness can be withdrawn. The problem is that the whole thing can be withdrawn, after everybody starts using it because it's free. No source = no upgrades and no support, not from anyone, as soon as the company goes bust or just gives up on that software. If a large amount of users have come to rely on it, they will be stuck until something else comes along. THIS is how free(beer) software can be very bad for a free(freedom) OS.
But bear in mind that's 99% of _people_ not of area. Great big chunks of the sparsely populated bits still have no coverage.
If you thought it was a wag, you missed the point. You might be entirely correct about Darwin and evolution. I certainly can't say that you aren't, although I personally don't believe it. But if you use arguments like those, you aren't going to convince anyone, because they don't make sense. Which was what I was trying to point out by turning them them on their heads. If you think what I said was blasphemous against your religion (saying bad stuff for no reason), then what you said was blasphemous against science.
and the righteous self-satisfaction that is Satan's reward for those who blaspheme. But I'm sure you don't believe in the Devil either, after all his greatest success was in convincing people that he doesn't exist, and that they could commit acts of evil without endangering their immortal souls.
Hum. Personally I like to be nice to people. I don't like to rob banks. I like to think that I do this for a better reason than that I might not get to Heaven. Isn't it better for me to help a poor person because I want to, than for someone to do the same thing because they think it will earn them Cosmic Credit?
Science is the Devil's tool of choice for corrupting people through such fallacies as "freedom" and "choice". There is no freedom - you must live your life as God has decreed and following in His wise teachings, otherwise you will be drawn downwards into Hell upon your death, there to eternally repent your sins.
Science never said anything about freedom or choice: that was philosophy. Science says stuff about how fast things fall down, and how to make aeroplanes stay up. Don't knock science until you're prepared to repent of having central heating, piped water, a house with a roof, a car and so forth, none of which would be here without the basic principles of science. Even God's own very beautiful cathedrals are made using scientific principles to keep the roof up where it belongs.
They can authorise whatever the hell they want. They can say "You must not view this video except with HorrendouslyExpensiveVideoSoftware, which only runs on NastyExpensiveOS, made by people who eat babies, and if you don't live in the US you must not view it at all. Even though you paid for it. HA HA HA."
As a person who does not live in the US and would rather not run NastyExpensiveOS, I'd think it within my rights to do some unauthorised using of my DVDs which I paid for. Is that soooo "bad"?
Those of you who follow these "Jesus" and "God" stories should be aware of the scientifically shaky ground on which they rest. Science has no need for messiahs or "Gods" when it was DNA that did it all along. Likewise, the notion that there are some sort of "commandments" that must be "obeyed" is absurd: Humans evolved out of dust, so will some prominent "theologist" please explain to me where God comes in? Sorry, but nowhere in my text book does it state that "God created the world".
As for the name "Jesus", I think that it should be fairly well-known, at least among the scientific community, that Jesus recanted his "theory" of "religion" on his cross. Hopefully, the worms enjoyed eating him up. But probably not. If you think that Jesus or "religion" can save your Eternal Soul, please continue in your Christian ways. But if you are capable of understanding reason and common sense, you'll know that True Knowledge comes through the Understanding of Science, and cease your idle deity-worshipping. This whole Jesus business makes me uneasy. Perhaps they will name their next word processor "God"? How much more anti-atheist can you get?
Case in point: Humans. We evolve separately from each other. Yep, society has emergent behaviour that could not be predicted from the individuals within it. But it does _not_ display intelligence on a different level from those individuals. Clearly we (like network programs) can gain advantages from working as a society. But those advantages do not include some sort of higher consciousness than the individuals within it.
Quite clearly my thoughts are based on hypothesising from very limited data (there aren't many examples). I am not talking from a science book but from a very hypothetical standpoint. I could therefore easily be completely wrong. I wasn't trying to say "You're talking rot" but just "I don't think your hypothesis holds in this case". Sorry if that was not clear.
I thought of another example: bees and ants. They have collectives that are more than the individuals. But you don't see a hive of bees gaining a super-consciousness and evolving in any more exciting way than the individual bees.
I think they're talking about hive type intelligence, where many simple behaviours add up to more complex behaviour. Like when you simulate bird flocking by giving each bird simple rules, which when lots of birds follow them turn into more complex behaviour than you could directly predict from the rules. The birds flocking on the screen (or the network protocols or whatever) are not capable of conscious thought any more than those little bleeping things that ran round your screen while you shot at them many years ago.
I find myself wanting to use a more traditional substring/comparison operation in that context instead [of regexps], because I know that code will port to any other language easily, and any competent programmer will understand what I'm doing regardless of their familiarity with Perl
sounds daft. I am not a Perl programmer. I know perfectly well what a regexp looks like. I don't see how one can be competent to deal with string parsing code unless one understands regexps. Not only is the guy losing out on the Perlishness of Perl, he is losing out on anything remotely interesting! I don't think it's valid to refrain from coding anything complicated, ever, just in case one's successors are dozy. If I was porting code with regexps to C++, guess what, I'd get a C++ library with regexps in! There's a difference between using powerful language features and putting incomprehensible language warpings in just to impress people.
This would be more difficult than what they're talking about, because it's not controlling the computer with any old thought you can capture, it needs to be very specific thoughts that you have already learnt.
The other thing I thought would be cool is a kind of mental HUD, for example, you could link in a GPS receiver and go walking, and your route would appear as a dotted line in front of you. Even in the fog. And the mountains could be overlaid with their names and heights. All mind-controlled. Even more useful if you're blind.
Clearly you'd need the reverse technology from the one mentioned (i.e. puter controlling brain not brain controlling puter) but they're working on that too.
And if I could type without a keyboard, I could email with my brain. It would be telepathy! This would solve all the problems of how to do data entry now we have useful devices that are too tiny for keyboards. The implications are endless. Wow.
Also, suing them out of existence won't help if your friendly neighbours already took the law into their own hands and administered friendly local justice to you because they thought you were a paedophile.
It always annoys me that the American culture seems to be "It's OK to do whatever the hell you like, so long as you pay out to people who have the time and money to sue you for it". It's not enough.
The motherboards are what people are going to not buy, methinks.
Your post is based on two false assumptions:
Linux - taking a whole CD-ROM up as it does
No it doesn't. Linux _distros_ take up whole CD-ROMs. These include a linux kernel, plus absolute masses of other gubbins which is useful to someone running Linux on a PC. The Linux kernel itself is what is at issue here. This is of any size you like, depending on what you compile into it. Perhaps someone here could give a minimum workable linux kernel size for a small device like this?
The point is that any and every Linux is "custom built". The ones on CD's are custom built for a PC user with average PC RAM, disk space and graphics capability. Surprisingly, the ones in yopy type devices will not be.
Since the GUI is part and parcel of the operating system
It isn't. Your research has been a tad feeble if you think this. I run Red Hat 6. I do not run Gnome and I never have. I could remove every gui related thing from my system and still have a fully functional linux box with a nice console. I could burn a CD allowing other people to install a console-only linux system, and sell it to people in flashy boxes. I could also develop a custom small-footprint gui all of my own and use that instead. If I was masochistic ;)
Anyway Linux for these reasons is a load more suited to a small device than Windows, which is not configurable in this way except by the jolly Microsoft drones. I work on EPOC myself and will refrain from commenting on its suitability versus Linux. Pluses and minuses on both sides.
While I thoroughly agree with your point that children don't magically grow up at 21 (18 in the UK), in a democratic country you have to make laws that appease the majority. And seemingly in the US the majority want their children protected, for free, against nasty evil pictures of people not wearing enough clothes.
;)
Like it or not, the goverment can't turn round and say "Your religious beliefs are a lot of rubbish" especially to a majority or a large, persuasive and vocal minority.
It would also be really annoying if in 20 years scientists discover that heaven exists, and seeing a picture of a bottom while under the age of 21 significantly reduces your chances of getting there. I'd be stuffed
In the UK, Sikhs have a right to wear a turban instead of a helmet on a motorbike, because it is firmly against their religion to remove turbans in public. You could hardly say "You must wear a helmet on your bike, because I personally don't think anything terrible will happen to you when you take off that turban".
I think the idea is that you have a degree, but _not_ a CS degree. People with degrees in English and History and whatever have a problem just buzzing off and finding a well-paid job.
Here in England, it's really common to find yourself with a nearly useless degree and then do a Masters in CS in order to get a programming job (at least, lots of the people in the company I work for have done this). In which case, a free one year second degree is mighty lots cheaper than doing a Masters and possibly more sensible.
Except:
1. Being born of an infected mother.
2. Being a nurse, and having an accident while treating a HIV+ patient.
3. Using a condom that breaks
4. Sleeping with someone who is HIV+ in some third world country (or even first world...) where nobody bothered to explain to you that there was anything wrong with that.
5. Being raped.
6. Falling on or playing with an infected needle left lying around.
7. Sleeping with someone in a long-term trusting relationship/marriage who becomes HIV+ because they are cheating on you.
8. Being in an arranged marriage. I doubt that all men in arranged marriages take AIDS tests. Culturally a lot of these people have absolutely no choice in their sexual relations
One could further argue that in situations where one partner plays on the youth, naivety and trust of the other (consenting) partner in order to have sex without protection, that other partner is not truly at fault. In part, situations like that are caused by the fact that parents and teachers are so up tight and embarrassed about discussing the issues that the issues don't really get discussed.
Many kids in my class at school lost their virginity at about 13. If the school had given sex education (of the "if you have sex, use protection" sort, not "This is how ovaries work") to 13 year olds, their parents would be up in arms shouting that the school was trying to encourage sex among minors.
Even more importantly, given the demographic of AIDS sufferers, is that few schools will ever tell you... "If you have gay sex, use protection". In England I think it is illegal for teachers to say anything which could be construed as encouraging (read "condoning") being gay, so the subject is just avoided.
AIDS sufferers have quite enough of being shunned, since by having the disease they must clearly be a depraved Godless homosexual and a heroin addict as well. You don't have to add to that. And saying that less money should be put into their treatment because their disease is their own fault is at best a debatable position
Looking at these sort of sites will not give you a full perspective of women online. The women you find in female oriented sites are not representative of all women, they are representative of women who are go out of their way to do women-only things. However, they are the only people online who you can reliably identify as being women. Most women online go to the same places that men do, and do the same things that men do. I hang out on slashdot. I buy books from amazon. I (and probably most women) have no desire to visit any site called ChicksClicking.com or whatever it was.
In real life, the only place my gender makes any difference is in my love life. On the internet, it makes even less difference. Most of the time people can't even tell what gender I am. Is the fact that (gasp) half the world is female going to wildly change the online world? Nope. Hopefully the gender-bias of the available pron will change to accommodate us ;) Maybe we can buy bras online. Whoopee!
Is online gender segregation inevitable? For the short run, almost certainly. But a Web site that focused on technology along with social and cultural issues and which offered humane and rational chat forums might fuse the two cultures
What a lot of rot. Slashdot is a prime example of a site that focusses on technology and also (technology related) social issues, like whether women are on the web or not. We seem to have what are fairly close to humane and rational chat forums here. And guess what? Lots of us are women! We don't segregate ourselves. Thus you don't notice us. You just assume we are all men. And it _doesn't matter_.
Also, I have never met _anyone_ who eats baked beans for breakfast, ever. Everyone I know has some combination of cereal, toast, orange juice and/or coffee. Admittedly sometimes I have a bacon sandwich at the weekend.
*no one* owns TCP/IP and *no one* regulates it nor Net access)
He was _trying_ to say that rightful fear of one should not drive us from the other. Are you trying to say that the GPL is bad because internet porn should not be regulated?
Just for the record: They also found that it was most likely to have been his wallpaper that did the deed, since they found some and it contained traces of arsenic. Not a human poisoner.
I think that if cable companies or someone started a track-on-demand service, like a giant jukebox, people would quickly quit downloading mp3's. It would need:
1. Billing by usage. Maybe costing more in peak time, more for more popular songs, and so forth.
2. An option to pay a giant wad per month and listen to unlimited music.
3. As high quality as it gets
4. Lots and lots of added "functionality", like the ability to say
- play me rock music today
- play me Metallica today
- never play me that song again
- Put this song on my XYZ Playlist
- Play this song more often
- Play me songs with notable bass guitar performances
- Play me music that's similar to the tracks I've said that I like
- Play me music that features next to the tracks I like on lots of other people's playlists.
This service is what the users pay for. No way do you get that with mp3's. No longer do people have to buy CD's by only 10 bands because they're the only bands they know they like. Ripping the music will be barely worth the effort, and the bands will get much _more_ money, because it's so easy to "network" from one song you heard on the radio to a dozen similar bands.
It seems like you're implying that visually impaired people are never geeks, which is a load of rubbish. If I lose my sight tomorrow I would still like to use Linux, thankyou very much. In fact it would then (even more so than now) be easier for me than windows, since i'm sure it's easier for software to read out my command line session than a lot of pointy click business.
I'd like to think that with this distro and a Linux job, I could lose my sight and still work just as effectively as before. As it stands, I couldn't.
In 2010, when the film industry wake up and I make my millions off a video streaming server, I will be wanting my most popular films in RAM, say 10 films. Soon after that when I begin streaming CD-quality music too (wav files not mp3's), I will need to keep the top 40 in RAM also. I can safely predict that I will need well over 16Gb of RAM to do that in.
If that's not the future of music and video then it damn well should be.
I was a little kid not too long ago, and I'd like to point out some things:
1. I had never heard of the Internet. But I had easy access to pornography, half the boys at school brought in porno magazines and showed them round. Well, it was just pictures of genitals, and people having sex! At the time it seemed just as interesting as pictures of people's biceps, and of uninteresting adult activities like reading the Financial Times. I really don't think I was corrupted by it.
2. I don't think I saw "gay rights" material. But I just assumed that it was normal that some people lived with people of the same gender. If I had seen things campaining for that to be OK, I would just have been a bit surprised that for some people it isn't already OK. That was "surprised" not corrupted.
3. We first had sex education at the age of about 8. They explained (vaguely) how people make babies. Most of us knew already. At the time I couldn't imagine why I'd ever want to do that. The information that people can catch diseases from it was about as revolting as the information that you can catch nits from going near someone that has nits. It wasn't horrible! It wasn't corrupting! Mostly it was quite boring!
Yes, sooner or later I plan to have children. I'd almost be relieved if they found porn on the internet, since it would be a good starting point for one of those discussions where you explain that they didn't actually grow under a gooseberry bush.
When you're a kid sex is not corrupting, revolting or any more than just strange. Not unless _you_ make it that way by telling them that it is.
N.B. Obviously that's different if you think that hearing about gay people will turn your children into gay perverts. Sorry, I don't subscribe to that one.
My Hardware Wanted list:
:)
An appointment and contacts manager stuck on the side of my head. When its time for the dentist, it seems like I just thought "oh yes, the dentist...". When I want So'n'so's phone number, there it is. I need a flash card or something in there, so I can sync it with my PC, or access the data if my cyborg addition goes down
A mental keyboard so I can type by thinking (after a loooong training period) and save my wrists. That and a mental mouse, and half the problems of interacting with smart phones and PDAs are solved.
Home automation a la x10, so I can think "dim the lights" and it happens. Then put it online, and if I'm carrying my phone I can think my heating off from half way to work. Integrate the door cam with the mental HUD.
I'm sure lots of people would like to play mental Quake too!
AFAIK minors in the US are still citizens, and they still have rights.
Censorship is still censorship, no matter the age of the people trying to read stuff. I don't know how your law stands on this matter, but morally it seems just as wrong to stop 14 yr-old Johnny from reading the Bible as it is to stop everybody in the US from reading it.
Ok, the Bible is a bad example, since it was only one site's Bible that was stopped. But what if Johnny thinks he may be gay, or wants to know how not to get his girlfriend pregnant, or wants some arguments against drugs to present to his friends when they ask him to try some? Lots of kid-appropriate and even kid-targeted material will be difficult to find when hidden behind a filtering program. I fail to see what the age has to do with it.