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User: Christianfreak

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  1. Re:The Vatican is killing thousands of Africans on Italian Police Censor "Blasphemous" Websites · · Score: 1

    Trying to tell people not to have sex is like telling them to stop eating. It IS necessary - no matter what you think.

    Funny I did it for 22 years and didn't have a problem. I'm still alive, and now I'm happily married.

    People choose to have sex. If they chose not it it would save a lot more people than condoms ever will, it is impossible to deny that.

  2. Re:Life on Overwhelmingly Large Telescope Closer to Reality · · Score: 2

    Even if we did find life or a planet that could be terraformed its not going to happen until we find a cheap quick way to travel across the vast distances of space.

    And on Terraformin: There are various theories
    on how Mars could be terraformed and how we could get there with current technology but I don't see too many people jumping in rockets to go and do it.

  3. Can have them just not download on Cracking Down on MP3s at the Office · · Score: 2

    Where I work we're not allowed to download them but they don't care if we have them especially if we show they came from CDs we own.

    I can understand it, legal issues, bandwidth and a time waster. Makes sense to me.

  4. Re:about fscking time on Pledge of Allegiance Ruled Unconstitutional · · Score: 1

    It's just been the last 50 years or so that we've been ignoring the "no law respecting an establishment of religion"

    That is unless you believe that the law was originally intended to keep the government out of the church rather than the other way around. In other words to keep the government from mandating a national religion not to keep the government from saying they ascribe to a certain religion.

    I think laws that say kids can't pray in school or bring Bibles for their own reading, or teachers can't say what they believe (not teach just say) is wrong and should be overturned... we're so worried about one group's right that we are ignoring several other group's rights and mandating that everyone have no belief in God.

    If the government wants to say "under God" in the pledge then I say they should be able to do that It not trampling anyone's rights. The alternative is to declare all current laws and the constitution itself unconstitutional as it was based on many Judeo-Christian traditions in the first place.

    Okay I've got my flame-suit on for the anti-religion crowd: you may fire away

  5. Re:The Sky Isn't Falling Yet on Will Microsoft Code-Checking Plans Cripple the GPL? · · Score: 2

    for ms-loving companies that don't have the budget of ebay it might not be worth it to go against ms's plans without prodding. who knows.

    Those are the companies that will win it for us if something like this happens. They don't have the money to "upgrade" to MS and all its wonderful lisensing practices. Its the Ebays that we have to worry about because thats where most people go and that's the people with the money to roll with whatever MS wants.

  6. Re:Advertising would help on Is Linux Dead? · · Score: 2

    Hell, a billboard costs $10,000/mo. in rural America

    I live in Abilene, Texas which is a city of about 100,000 people billboards here start as low $650 for 3 months for a small one. The most expensive one is for $5,400 that I can see and its for a year. These rates came from Lamar which is the owner of most billboards in this area.

    I agree with the parent poster, Linux needs some exposure. If the community could agree on that I'm sure we could come up with enough money to make it happen. Red Hat et. al. could afford some of these prices and I willing to bet that it would do better than online advertisements.

  7. Lawyers are strange beings on Lucas Confuses ScummVM With Abandonware · · Score: 1

    I say we need to be ready to set up a legal fund for these guys if the lawyers don't see it their way.

    The guys developing this are right of course but lawyers all too often are concerned about making money so its going to come down to whether they will go for money or do the right thing (tm).

    Too bad the entire US legal system breaks down as soon as you have someone with lots of money but I digress. Win or lose the case, the lawyer still gets paid ...

  8. Re:Oh NO!!!! on Macromedia Applies For OSI Certification · · Score: 2

    Well I'm a Perl developer that hates Cold Fusion and I'll give you some reasons other than "it being too easy" why.

    Now I will admit that I've had limited experiance with CF but this is what I've observed with it.

    1. Hard to separate HTML from actual logic code. Now I know a lot of languages that have this problem (PHP comes to mind). But when you're a web developer who has designers that don't always understand the logic behind a program, separating it makes a lot of since. (I know it is possible to separate but it still feels kludgy to me)

    2. CF runs in user space on the webserver. What I mean here is normally true on named virtual hosts. We do a lot of hosting at my company. We build websites for people. They have the username and password to get into their directories on the system. We can keep the Perl code in cgi-bin or in a perl directory and templates with HTML code that work with the perl in another directory, then the main HTML directory is fairly clean and the user can't go in and break something. With all the CF implementations I've seen everything would have to be in that HTML directory. We can't deny the user access so they can get in and mess with it. (and then call us when its broken).

    There may be ways around these problems but I've not seen them. For now I'll stick with Perl :) thanks.

  9. Re:And plenty of code space for more. on Evidence Found of Lake, Catastrophic Flood on Mars · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know I've asked the this question before: But why is it that everytime there's a story about life on other planets we have someone start talking about the "religious zealots" and how this is going to upset their faith? Like for some reason everyone who is religious will just pack their bags and go home and never give religion another thought.

    Well here's a thought... the vast majority of religious people (like the vast majority of the population) probably don't care if there is/was life on other planets. For those that do care the vast majority of them welcome the idea and want to know more about it (myself included).

    Yes there are some religious people who are short-sighted and have to put God in a box and declare that everything happened a certain way. For those of us who are not short-sighted its fairly easy to reconcile faith with science. We realize that God is much bigger than any science or logic. The Bible doesn't say that Evolution didn't happen, it just says that God had a hand in creating all that is. For all we know he used evolution to do it and put billions of life-forms all over the universe!

    Finally all this begs the question, Why do you care if some people believe that God created the world in a certain way? They have free speech, they don't seem to be here bothering you. If you believe their wrong fine but why bring them up here where has nothing to do with the topic at hand?

    Is it because you are equally short-sighted and believe that all religious people in the world believe a certain way because of the acts of a vocal few?

  10. Simple solution.... on IBM Dropping Laptop Linux Support · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Linux community right now doesn't really need a whole lot of support. If IBM would use hardware that already has decent and proven drivers in their laptops then there isn't too much to complain about, you can install Linux and be happy.

    Now of course if they make you buy it in the beginning with Windoze then we have some reason to complain.

  11. Re:Minidisc? on Philips Blue Laser Itty Bitty Disc Drive · · Score: 2

    That's very interesting, I honestly did not know that :)

    Maybe us Americans will get clued in this time! (I hope so because when minidisc was out I thought it was cool too).

  12. Minidisc? on Philips Blue Laser Itty Bitty Disc Drive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This looks pretty cool but one has to wonder if it will make it or if it will go the way of the minidisc. I guess the market will decide, but right now CD's are pretty entrenched (even with the MP3 players that are out now).

  13. Re:this frightens me. on Mandrake to Come Preloaded on Wal-Mart PCs · · Score: 2

    By that logic then most people shouldn't even own a computer. Its this kind of uppity "I'm smarter than the average user" that keeps Linux off the desktop.

    Linux has not yet become "dummy" enough for the vast majority of users and Mandrake makes it too easy to use

    What??? This is a contridiction! You can't have it both ways. Either its easy enough for Joe User or its not. And how can something be too easy to use? I find the command line easier to get around in than Window's (or Mandrake's for that matter) pretty little GUI but that's my opinion.

    It sounds like you want to have educated users before you bring Linux to the desktop, but the users aren't going to be educated until they have a choice to use it.

  14. Re:misuse of copyrights? on Why (Most) Software is so Bad · · Score: 2

    Your analogy doesn't work for two reasons.

    1. You don't open a book and immediatly see what went into creating it (the first draft, the printing, the distrubution etc.) You see the finished products, where as with software when you see the code you see the unfinished things as well and at least some of the steps it takes to go from that code to word processor on the screen.

    2. Users don't care whether software ... or books for that matter, infringe upon copywrite. They care if the book is good or if the software is installed on their computer already so they don't have to think to install it. I suppose if some default software (such as word) ever got bad enough that users might switch but for now it does mostly what it claims to do without too much headache so it gets used.

    I understand the closed-source camp's desire to keep the hood closed, they feel its easier to duplicate the process or use their own knowledge against them. The problem of closed source will go away when we stop seeing "intellectual property" as property to be bought and sold when it should just be shared.

  15. Re:1 battle. on AP reports on renewed "Browser War" · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is a troll but I'll bite.

    Mozilla is slow,

    Moz 1 beats IE on page loads. The slow part is start up and the only reason that IE can do it faster is that you load everything but the window when you start your computer!

    large

    well apps usually take all the memory they can get (at least on Linux) and me not running much right now top reports that its taking only 35 megs right now. That's not bad and moz will run on a machine with 16 megs.

    buggy at best

    I can count on one hand how many times moz has crashed on me since 0.96, oh maybe you're talking about IE only webpages. You should stay away from those anyway.

    The war of the browsers is over and IE won. Not because it's the better browser, but because everything is now written to be IE compatible rather that standards compliant.

    No not everything. I'm in charge of a web development team and we write standards complient code. We've designed dozens of sites, they all work and work right.

    And I'm not the only one either. I have visited maybe one site in the last few months that didn't show right in mozilla. So try it before just assuming things. Sweeping generalizations are bad.

  16. Re:I'm unimpressed with Mozilla. Opera, though... on AP reports on renewed "Browser War" · · Score: 2

    Mozilla 1.0 looks and feels (to me, anyway) just like the most recent versions of Netscape, which are inferior to IE.

    Not really sure what your complaint is. If its just that the default theme looks like Netscape 4x then change the theme. Its not hard and it ships with the Mozilla Modern theme which I find very pretty. Heck I read somewhere that there's a theme that makes it look like IE!

    The 'feel' is the same in someways but again the themes can change the button locations and there are tons of ways to customize. Just take a peek at the prefs menu before you dismiss it so easily.

  17. Terrorists on The Boy and his Breeder Reactor · · Score: 2

    And the US Government says that terrorist's don't have the resources to build an atomic device but a 17 year old kid can? Well at least we don't have mass hysteria.

  18. Re:Seems unconstitutional to me... on Monopolists Dropped Off At The County Line · · Score: 2

    Maybe you're missing the point. They aren't saying that they aren't going to allow people to buy Microsoft products in that county, they are saying that the county itself should no longer buy Microsoft products because of a provision in county law that says the county can't do business with a convected criminal.

    Microsoft has been found guilty of violating Anti-trust laws therefore technically the county is violating their provision by buying products from Microsoft.

    The government hasn't made any rules about spending money on microsoft products, so what rules are you suggesting they follow?

    The Government of this county has made a rule (see above), so in this county they should follow the rule. Of course it begs the question of weither or not people should be locked up for some of the outdated/stupid laws that are still on the books.

    Of course this whole thing is somewhat based on a technicality that never gets into the questions of 3rd party re-sellers or what the law was originally intended for in the first place. So unless these people have researched it then they may end up doing more harm than good. (I can just see the county raising taxes for a switch over)

  19. In other news ... on AllTheWeb Claims Bigger Index Than Google · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Windows declares itself better than linux,
    Gnome declares itself better than KDE
    Emacs declares itself better than VI
    PHP declares itself better than Perl ...

    Let the flames fly :)

  20. Re:Is it easy to call the Innernet? on Walmart Ships PCs with Lindows OS · · Score: 2

    "users can start up the learning curve and enjoy a crash & virus free existance."

    I don't know. Lindows is using Wine and I thought Wine's point was to bring on the Outlook viruses to Linux as well :)

    In all seriousness though Lindows can run Outlook it might actally be possible for a virus that's fairly self contained to execute in that environment. At the very least it could probably get at an Outlook address book.

  21. Re:Never accepted one on Is it Wrong to Accept an Employment Counter-Offer? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think it really depends on the size of the company. And the attitude of the boss.

    I work at a small ISP. I'm in a high enough position here to know a bit about the finacial shape of the company. If a recruiter came along and asked me to leave for me to even consider would have to be a very very good offer, but supposing I did and my current boss offered to match I would take it in a heart beat.

    At my company there are no shareholders and stock prices. Just an owner. Actually an owner who is very interested in what I do and respects my opinion on techincal issues that she doesn't understand. She is here everyday, dealing with customers and helping employees and just taking a value in everyone.

    So in short I don't make as much money as some people in the industry but I don't have to worry about losing my job. And I really enjoy working here. I can't see my boss holding the want for a little more money against me, maybe I'm delusional but I think I have found a 'job nirvana'

  22. Re:Changes in the TLD system i'd like to see on US Govt Wants to Control ICANN? · · Score: 2

    And people never have addresses, postal codes and telephone numbers changed due to the actions of third parties?

    Of course they do but we aren't talking about a grand scale, where at least a vast majority of people would have to change.

  23. Re:Java Problems... on Mozilla 1.1 Alpha Released · · Score: 2

    Strange, I've been playing there with mozilla since version .96 on Linux and I've never had a problem.

  24. A little short on technical details on Hollow Optical Fibres Can Now Process Signals · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd be interested to know exactly how it works. The article talks in length about heat and fluid changing the light but either I'm missing something or it doesn't really say how.

    Is it really changing the light or are they creating some kind of filter?

  25. Re:Changes in the TLD system i'd like to see on US Govt Wants to Control ICANN? · · Score: 2

    The problem with that is that it would create chaos.

    First off, there are tons of people who aren't going to want to give up their domains. They bought it first, how does anyone else have the right to it. Its like saying I have to own an American made car because I live in the US.

    Personally I have 4 domains. I don't want to give them up, I like them and I like to build websites it ridiculous to suggest that I have to confuse my userbase and tack 'us' to the end.

    Secondly even if everyone who owns a domain now agreed to it then it would create mass confusion on the Internet. Nobody would be able to find any of their favorite sites any more. DNS would be broken for a vast majority of people since tons of people have their nameservers specified with their ISP which has a .com or .net. /.ters like you and me would be able to fix it but tons and tons of people who are clueless about computers would be in the dark. It would be tech-support nightmare.

    I agree with an above poster: lets get rid of this trademark/copyright crap and make domains first come, first serve. Adding cc TLDs to everything would be confusing and would make the Internet more geographically fragmented. Not to mention you would need more laws to police it and make sure no one cheats. And it seems to be a consisous on /. that we don't need more laws.