It denies the insidious influence of white supremacy, heteronormativity, cissexism, etc. For diversity to be truly meaningful, it needs to actually fight against the oppressors and not just be complacent.
It seems to me that most people think of different forms of prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ableism and so on) as being distinct problems. I have a different viewpoint, which is that different forms of prejudice are not really distinct problems in their own right, but rather are different symptoms of an underlying problem. I do not say that to dismiss any particular form of prejudice as being "not a problem". Rather, I say it for two reasons.
First, racism against, say, African Americans probably different to racism against, say, Chinese people. Likewise, deaf people probably experience ableism prejudice differently to blind people, people in wheelchairs, or amputees. It is common for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals to have different experiences of sexuality-based prejudice. So if you tried to count all the different subgroups of people who experience prejudice in different ways, you would end up with thousands or perhaps millions of different kinds of prejudice. Occam's razor suggests that there can't really be that many distinct forms of prejudice. Hence, the many different forms of prejudice are likely to be different symptoms of a more "unifying" problem.
Second, if you do any reading about psychological biases, you may well get the feeling that some psychological biases offer a (partial) explanation for prejudice. Confirmation bias is a prime example.
If my intuition is right that most/all forms of prejudice springs from psychological biases, then I don't think it will ever be possible to eradicate prejudice entirely, because psychological biases appear to be fundamental to being human. However, if awareness of psychological biases were to be widely taught, then I think this would help to reduce the severity of multiple forms of prejudice because being aware of one's psychological biases could help to guard oneself against them.
A lot of Vern Unsworth's criticisms of Elon Musk are contradicted by many of Elon Musk's tweets (most of which pre-date the criticisms).
During a video interview, Vern Unsworth was asked for his opinion on Musk's submarine, and he responded, "He can stick his submarine where it hurts. It just had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like. The submarine, I believe, was about 5 foot 5 inches long, rigid, so it wouldn't have gone round corners, or around any obstacles. It wouldn't have made the first 50 metres into the cave from the dive start point. Just a PR stunt."
The interviewer then asked, "But he went into the cave, Tuesday?"
Vern Unsworth responded, "And was asked to leave very quickly. And so he should have been."
From what I read on Elon Musk's twitter feed: (1) Musk had exchanged emails with at least one of the cave divers (Musk posted a copy of the emails on his twitter feed) showing that the diver(s) wanted Musk to develop the submarine as a back-up rescue option; (2) Musk got confirmation from the diver(s) that the planned submarine was small/slim enough to be navigated around tight bends in the tunnels; (3) Musk not only made the initial submarine, but also made (or at least planned to make) a second submarine that was 30cm shorter (thus making it more nimble), plus an inflatable dummy which could be used on a dry run to test that the real submarines could successfully make the journey without risk of causing a blockage (if the inflatable dummy gets jammed in a tight corner, then just puncture it to remove it); (4) a team of SpaceX engineers worked for about 48 hours almost non-stop to develop the submarine; (5) Musk used a swimming pool near the SpaceX factory to carry out a test of the submarine's manoeuvrability before flying it to Thailand; (6) contrary to what Vern Unsworth claimed about Musk being asked to leave the cave, Musk tweeted, "Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Their navy seals escorted us in - total opposite of wanting us to leave".
I also read somewhere (either on Elon Musk's twitter feed or in a newspaper article) that another company had also been asked to see if it would be possible to make a small enough submarine, but the other company was unable to do so.
One newspaper article stated that Vern Unsworth is a caver with detailed knowledge of the cave system but is not a diver. This might go some way towards explaining the disconnect between Musk's and Unsworth's viewpoints: Musk had been in contact with divers who believed the submarine could work, and that its dimensions made it nimble enough for the tight corners and passages, and encouraged Musk (and a second company) to develop it as a backup rescue option; but perhaps those divers had not discussed this submarine backup plan with Unsworth, so Unsworth had assumed incorrectly that Musk didn't know enough to be able to help with the rescue". If this is true, then it could be argued that Vern Unsworth's comments were gratuitously insulting, untrue, and even defamatory. After all, despite Musk agreeing specifications with the divers, apparently he managed to develop something that was not fit for purpose. To me, that sounds like Unsworth was claiming Musk is an incompetent engineer. It is unsurprising that Elon Musk lost his temper and chose to respond with (presumably) untrue and defamatory insults. Unfortunate, but unsurprising.
I recall a case of a privately-run prison in the US that was paid a certain amount from the government for each prisoner it held. To increase profits, the prison paid a kickback to a local judge every time he sentenced somebody to serve prison time. I can imagine something similar happening with this kind of website, but with kickbacks being paid to police officers.
For example, officer 1 arrests 100 people, but only 3 pay to get their details removed from the website, so he gets a small kickback. In contrast, officer 2 arrests only 20 people but 15 of them pay to get their details removed from the website, so he gets a larger kickback. The higher extortion rate of officer 2 might be due to demographic profiling, perhaps assisted by AI.
The successful use of demographic profiling and AI suggests that there may not necessarily be a noticeable spike in arrest rates to warn about such corruption.
I have come across anecdotes about a person's depression being due to them being wrapped up in their own concerns, but when they decided to help other people they discovered that they were also helping themselves because their depression started to lift. As an example of such an anecdote, the start of the semi-biographical movie "Patch Adams" (starring Robin Williams) concerns the main character who enters a mental health hospital due to feelings of depression after his father's death. While there, he strikes up friendships with other patients, tries to cheer them up, and sees that their and his mental health improves. As a result, he discharges himself from hospital and enters medical school so he can have a career helping other people.
So, apparently being unselfish can make you depressed, but it can also help you escape depression. I read the TFM but it is light on details and the main study is behind a paywall. My hypothesis is that feeling bad for the misfortunes of others and doing nothing to ease that misfortune might make you depressed, but feeling empathy for the misfortunes of others and actively trying to help them can give you a sense of purpose, which in turn can bring satisfaction and happiness. As a side effect, working to help others can also increase your social circle and sense of community, which, in turn, are likely to be beneficial for your mental health.
The changing meanings of words happens outside of technical fields too. For example, today's meaning of the terms "gay" and "queer" is different to their meanings less than a century ago.
However, the misrepresentation of "Creative Commons licenses are open source licenses" did not occur because of something akin to Chinese Whispers over the course of many years. Instead, the misrepresentation occurred at source: within the Creative Commons organisation.
I am not saying that the CC licenses are somehow bad. Rather, I am saying it is misleading to refer to them as being open-source licenses, since they are not.
Several times per year I see these stories that yet another university is switching to some form of "open" textbooks, and readers are left to infer that "open" means "open source" (in this particular case, the OP and the article linked to both explicitly use the term "open source"). Typically, the text books in question are released under a Creative Commons (CC) license, but none of those CC licenses actually meet the requirements of the open-source definition. In particular none of the CC licenses requires that the textbook be made available in an editable format, and several repositories of "open" textbooks seem to provide books only in non-editable formats, such as PDF or online HTML. Aside from the "must provide source code" requirement of the open-source definition, which all of the CC licenses violate, 4 of the 6 licenses also contain "no commercial use allowed" and/or "you are not allowed to modify it" clauses, both of which are also forbidden by the open source software definition.
Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about people making books available free of charge. All I am complaining about is the misuse of the label "open source" to refer to free-of-charge books that are provided under a CC license, since CC licenses do not classify as being "open source".
You have misunderstood the point I was trying to make. The problem I have is with the misuse of the term "open source" to refer to stuff that is more accurately called "freeware".
I welcome the existence of free-of-charge textbooks. But it seems to me that much of what is available on various textbook repositories does not meet the "open source" definition. For example, it is common for textbooks to have a copyright licence that does not grant people the right to use a book commercially. That is against the open-source definition. Likewise, it is common for the textbooks to be provided only in a read-only format, such as PDF or as HTML that can be browsed on a website. It is very rare to be able to download the "source" of the book, for example, as a LaTeX, Word or Libre Office document. Thus, even if the copyright license allows people to modify a book, the lack of source code makes this infeasible.
I mean, the only rational explanation is that the Nazis were using mind control devices on their own people to force them to be inhuman monsters. There was probably some resistance among the ranks, but that was quickly countered with the electrodes and Jewish antennae. As an American, I find it impossible to believe that an entire nation could voluntarily have chosen to have done the things that Nazi Germany did.
On the other hand, if they weren't controlled by mind control, then the only logical explanation is that Germans are monsters that enjoy doing horrible things to humans.
You might want to read the excellent book "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram, or at least the Wikipedia article that summarises it.
Also, it is worth noting that Hitler did not suddenly start the Holocaust. Rather, when he came to power in 1933, he put in several years of preparation to demonise Jews. He did this by a combination of techniques, including: introducing increasingly more severe anti-Jewish laws; changing the school curriculum to teach his theory about racial hierarchies; taking control of the German newspapers and radio stations so he could disseminate propaganda to the German population; censoring any woks of art, literature, music and science that had been created by Jewish people; and requiring all children to join Hitler Youth.
It is an important stepping stone to have the "viie" (Vim Implemented in Emacs) editor. The next step is to implement Emacs using vim's built-in scripting language, thus giving us the "eiiv" editor. Then it should be a trivial final step to get the "eiiviie" (Emacs Implement In Vim Implemented In Emacs) editor. This tool will serve two important purposes:
1. It can be used to teach the concept of recursion (and mulual recursion) in Computing 101 courses at university.
2. It will give Linux an opportunity to play catch-up with Microsoft bloatware.
Are you sure you're really receiver-focused when you write all that stuff? Most people don't want to read that much text to use, say a configuration parser. If it takes people 10 hours to dig through your documentation and 1 hour to actually write the code, you're probably not doing it right. Sometimes less is more.
In the case of my configuration-file parser, a new user just needs to open the Getting Started manual and read two short chapters: Overview of Config4* syntax and Overview of the Config4* API. I would be surprised if doing that would take more than 30 minutes. And having done that, it would then take the new user about 5 minutes to write working code.
There is an old joke: "The definition of promiscuous is somebody who has more sex than you do". From reading TFA and some of the comments on slashdot, I get the feeling that the definition of documentation is equally subjective and self-serving for developers. Some developers think that writing documentation means adding comments to code. Others feel it involves writing Javadoc/Doxygen-style comments at the start of every class and method, and then generating HTML from that. Yet others feel that documentation hasn't been written unless it involves an architectural description.
When I am working on my own open-source projects, I feel that documentation isn't complete until I have written a few hundred pages of text that aim to be cover most/all of the following: (1) API reference guide, (2) programming tutorial, (3) user guide, (4) architectural guide, and (5) suggestions for "future work" that I hope other people will volunteer to do. Yes, I recognise that I am a bit extreme in the amount of effort I put into writing documentation. However, it does enable me to elaborate on the thesis of TFA: attempting to write such a comprehensive amount of documentation often highlights not just coding bugs, but also architectural flaws. This causes me to work in an iterative manner. I implement a first draft version of the code. Then I start documenting it, and when I encounter a part of the software that is difficult to explain, I realise that I need to re-architect the code base a bit. So I do that, and then get back to writing documentation, which causes me to notice another difficult-to-explain issue with the code. Working in this manner is slow, and I suspect it wouldn't work in a business with time-to-market pressures, but I find it gives excellent results in my own, non-time-pressured open-source projects. I touched on this issue in the documentation for one of my open-source projects.
I stopped for about a year and a half and recovered my health. However, as time went on my social and work circle as well as my family were too difficult to be around since they all are either wine snobs, after work happy hour drinkers, or simply unwilling to not drink around me. I didn't feel the desire to drink as strongly as before, but I felt left out of pretty much everything they were doing.
I don't drink alcohol because I have some sort of allergy or intolerance to it. As a teenager and young adult, I tried socialising with friends in bars. They would drink alcohol while I drank a soda or water. Eventually I gave up trying to socialise in such places. It boiled down to something somebody one said to me: "Those who are sober don't make good company for those who aren't. And vice versa."
I also have concerns about the Creative Commons set of licenses.
First, four of the six Creative Commons licenses are not "open source" since they prohibit modification and/or commercial use. There is nothing wrong with that per se; my gripe is that Creative Commons seem happy to let people assume that their licenses are open source.
Second, Creative Commons do not provide txt/Word/RTF/LaTeX/whatever versions of their licenses that you can download and embed into a book you are writing. Instead, the copyright page of your book is supposed to just tell readers that they can find the text of the license on a website or by writing to a specific postal address. So what happens if: (1) the Creative Commons organisation's postal address changes, and (2) they forget to renew their domain name and a cyber squatter buys it and holds it to ransom for millions of dollars? (More realistically, what happens if in, say, 20 years time, the Creative Commons organisation goes bankrupt and shuts down operations.) Now the license page of your book tells readers that it is licensed under terms that they cannot verify.
Third, the Creative Commons have gone through 5 versions of licenses (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.5 and 3.0) in just over 4 years and (as far as I know) there is no forwards or backwards compatibility between the different versions.
"Angered at Righthaven’s behavior, a Las Vegas federal judge unsealed the company’s heretofore confidential agreement [...]"
Not that I'm complaining, but... what did Righthaven do to anger the judge? Were their lawyers being dicks? Was the contract itself what angered the judge? Truly, I'd like to know.
You can find the answer to your question in the final two paragraphs of the first link in the/. summary. I'd like to quote those two paragraphs for your convenience. But then, according to the thrust of the article, I might be sued for copyright infringement.
I would hope that everyone would find something even more important to do during their last weeks than fix gnome bugs.
The article written by Adrian Hands' son states, "Adrian Hands loved free software / open source." This means Mr Hands spent the last few weeks of his life working on something he loved, and which happened to be of benefit to others. Off hand, I can't think of a better, more important way for a person to spend the last few weeks of their life. Sure, you might say that he could have spent some time talking to loved ones. But who says he didn't do that too?
you know that it was as such, when the perpetrators of the case first merrily publish blog posts titled 'how to take revenge on him through legal system', telling how disgruntled women should abuse the legal system to exact revenge on males, and then delete the post once the internet community becomes aware of it.
That is untrue, and the newspaper article you cited when asked for a source is incorrect. The woman did write a blog article that offered advice on how to get revenge, but the blog article did not suggest using (or abusing) the legal system to do so.
And another fun fact, Woman A has posted an essay on her blog about using the legal system to extract revenge on men who have wronged a woman romantically.
That particular "fun fact" is incorrect. Woman A's blog article did not state anything at all about using the legal system.
Earlier this year, Sarah is reported to have posted a telling entry on her website, which she has since removed. But a copy has been retrieved and widely circulated on the internet.
Entitled ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge’, it explains how women can use courts to get their own back on unfaithful lovers.
Step 7 says: ‘Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did.’ (The highlighting of text is Sarah’s own.)
The newspaper article was very misleading in its characterisation of the blog posting. The only occurrence of "legal" (or any related word) was in the title of the blog article, and that should be read as "7 steps to taking revenge without breaking the law" rather than as "7 steps to taking revenge by talking legal action". The blog posting did not suggest using the courts to get revenge.
The very first step in the blog article stated: "It is almost always better to forgive than to avenge".
Steps 3 and 7 in the blog article suggest that the form of revenge you take should be similar to and in proportion to how you feel you have been wronged.
To characterise the blog article as a recipe for how to bring false accusations of rape against a person is incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
It denies the insidious influence of white supremacy, heteronormativity, cissexism, etc. For diversity to be truly meaningful, it needs to actually fight against the oppressors and not just be complacent.
It seems to me that most people think of different forms of prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ableism and so on) as being distinct problems. I have a different viewpoint, which is that different forms of prejudice are not really distinct problems in their own right, but rather are different symptoms of an underlying problem. I do not say that to dismiss any particular form of prejudice as being "not a problem". Rather, I say it for two reasons.
First, racism against, say, African Americans probably different to racism against, say, Chinese people. Likewise, deaf people probably experience ableism prejudice differently to blind people, people in wheelchairs, or amputees. It is common for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals to have different experiences of sexuality-based prejudice. So if you tried to count all the different subgroups of people who experience prejudice in different ways, you would end up with thousands or perhaps millions of different kinds of prejudice. Occam's razor suggests that there can't really be that many distinct forms of prejudice. Hence, the many different forms of prejudice are likely to be different symptoms of a more "unifying" problem.
Second, if you do any reading about psychological biases, you may well get the feeling that some psychological biases offer a (partial) explanation for prejudice. Confirmation bias is a prime example.
If my intuition is right that most/all forms of prejudice springs from psychological biases, then I don't think it will ever be possible to eradicate prejudice entirely, because psychological biases appear to be fundamental to being human. However, if awareness of psychological biases were to be widely taught, then I think this would help to reduce the severity of multiple forms of prejudice because being aware of one's psychological biases could help to guard oneself against them.
I hope it wasn't Bumblebee, or my son will be devastated.
A lot of Vern Unsworth's criticisms of Elon Musk are contradicted by many of Elon Musk's tweets (most of which pre-date the criticisms).
During a video interview, Vern Unsworth was asked for his opinion on Musk's submarine, and he responded, "He can stick his submarine where it hurts. It just had absolutely no chance of working. He had no conception of what the cave passage was like. The submarine, I believe, was about 5 foot 5 inches long, rigid, so it wouldn't have gone round corners, or around any obstacles. It wouldn't have made the first 50 metres into the cave from the dive start point. Just a PR stunt." The interviewer then asked, "But he went into the cave, Tuesday?" Vern Unsworth responded, "And was asked to leave very quickly. And so he should have been."
From what I read on Elon Musk's twitter feed: (1) Musk had exchanged emails with at least one of the cave divers (Musk posted a copy of the emails on his twitter feed) showing that the diver(s) wanted Musk to develop the submarine as a back-up rescue option; (2) Musk got confirmation from the diver(s) that the planned submarine was small/slim enough to be navigated around tight bends in the tunnels; (3) Musk not only made the initial submarine, but also made (or at least planned to make) a second submarine that was 30cm shorter (thus making it more nimble), plus an inflatable dummy which could be used on a dry run to test that the real submarines could successfully make the journey without risk of causing a blockage (if the inflatable dummy gets jammed in a tight corner, then just puncture it to remove it); (4) a team of SpaceX engineers worked for about 48 hours almost non-stop to develop the submarine; (5) Musk used a swimming pool near the SpaceX factory to carry out a test of the submarine's manoeuvrability before flying it to Thailand; (6) contrary to what Vern Unsworth claimed about Musk being asked to leave the cave, Musk tweeted, "Only people in sight were the Thai navy/army guys, who were great. Their navy seals escorted us in - total opposite of wanting us to leave".
I also read somewhere (either on Elon Musk's twitter feed or in a newspaper article) that another company had also been asked to see if it would be possible to make a small enough submarine, but the other company was unable to do so.
One newspaper article stated that Vern Unsworth is a caver with detailed knowledge of the cave system but is not a diver. This might go some way towards explaining the disconnect between Musk's and Unsworth's viewpoints: Musk had been in contact with divers who believed the submarine could work, and that its dimensions made it nimble enough for the tight corners and passages, and encouraged Musk (and a second company) to develop it as a backup rescue option; but perhaps those divers had not discussed this submarine backup plan with Unsworth, so Unsworth had assumed incorrectly that Musk didn't know enough to be able to help with the rescue". If this is true, then it could be argued that Vern Unsworth's comments were gratuitously insulting, untrue, and even defamatory. After all, despite Musk agreeing specifications with the divers, apparently he managed to develop something that was not fit for purpose. To me, that sounds like Unsworth was claiming Musk is an incompetent engineer. It is unsurprising that Elon Musk lost his temper and chose to respond with (presumably) untrue and defamatory insults. Unfortunate, but unsurprising.
I recall a case of a privately-run prison in the US that was paid a certain amount from the government for each prisoner it held. To increase profits, the prison paid a kickback to a local judge every time he sentenced somebody to serve prison time. I can imagine something similar happening with this kind of website, but with kickbacks being paid to police officers.
For example, officer 1 arrests 100 people, but only 3 pay to get their details removed from the website, so he gets a small kickback. In contrast, officer 2 arrests only 20 people but 15 of them pay to get their details removed from the website, so he gets a larger kickback. The higher extortion rate of officer 2 might be due to demographic profiling, perhaps assisted by AI.
The successful use of demographic profiling and AI suggests that there may not necessarily be a noticeable spike in arrest rates to warn about such corruption.
I have come across anecdotes about a person's depression being due to them being wrapped up in their own concerns, but when they decided to help other people they discovered that they were also helping themselves because their depression started to lift. As an example of such an anecdote, the start of the semi-biographical movie "Patch Adams" (starring Robin Williams) concerns the main character who enters a mental health hospital due to feelings of depression after his father's death. While there, he strikes up friendships with other patients, tries to cheer them up, and sees that their and his mental health improves. As a result, he discharges himself from hospital and enters medical school so he can have a career helping other people.
So, apparently being unselfish can make you depressed, but it can also help you escape depression. I read the TFM but it is light on details and the main study is behind a paywall. My hypothesis is that feeling bad for the misfortunes of others and doing nothing to ease that misfortune might make you depressed, but feeling empathy for the misfortunes of others and actively trying to help them can give you a sense of purpose, which in turn can bring satisfaction and happiness. As a side effect, working to help others can also increase your social circle and sense of community, which, in turn, are likely to be beneficial for your mental health.
The changing meanings of words happens outside of technical fields too. For example, today's meaning of the terms "gay" and "queer" is different to their meanings less than a century ago. However, the misrepresentation of "Creative Commons licenses are open source licenses" did not occur because of something akin to Chinese Whispers over the course of many years. Instead, the misrepresentation occurred at source: within the Creative Commons organisation.
I am not saying that the CC licenses are somehow bad. Rather, I am saying it is misleading to refer to them as being open-source licenses, since they are not.
Several times per year I see these stories that yet another university is switching to some form of "open" textbooks, and readers are left to infer that "open" means "open source" (in this particular case, the OP and the article linked to both explicitly use the term "open source"). Typically, the text books in question are released under a Creative Commons (CC) license, but none of those CC licenses actually meet the requirements of the open-source definition. In particular none of the CC licenses requires that the textbook be made available in an editable format, and several repositories of "open" textbooks seem to provide books only in non-editable formats, such as PDF or online HTML. Aside from the "must provide source code" requirement of the open-source definition, which all of the CC licenses violate, 4 of the 6 licenses also contain "no commercial use allowed" and/or "you are not allowed to modify it" clauses, both of which are also forbidden by the open source software definition.
Don't get me wrong. I am not complaining about people making books available free of charge. All I am complaining about is the misuse of the label "open source" to refer to free-of-charge books that are provided under a CC license, since CC licenses do not classify as being "open source".
You have misunderstood the point I was trying to make. The problem I have is with the misuse of the term "open source" to refer to stuff that is more accurately called "freeware".
I welcome the existence of free-of-charge textbooks. But it seems to me that much of what is available on various textbook repositories does not meet the "open source" definition. For example, it is common for textbooks to have a copyright licence that does not grant people the right to use a book commercially. That is against the open-source definition. Likewise, it is common for the textbooks to be provided only in a read-only format, such as PDF or as HTML that can be browsed on a website. It is very rare to be able to download the "source" of the book, for example, as a LaTeX, Word or Libre Office document. Thus, even if the copyright license allows people to modify a book, the lack of source code makes this infeasible.
I mean, the only rational explanation is that the Nazis were using mind control devices on their own people to force them to be inhuman monsters. There was probably some resistance among the ranks, but that was quickly countered with the electrodes and Jewish antennae. As an American, I find it impossible to believe that an entire nation could voluntarily have chosen to have done the things that Nazi Germany did.
On the other hand, if they weren't controlled by mind control, then the only logical explanation is that Germans are monsters that enjoy doing horrible things to humans.
You might want to read the excellent book "Obedience to Authority" by Stanley Milgram, or at least the Wikipedia article that summarises it.
Also, it is worth noting that Hitler did not suddenly start the Holocaust. Rather, when he came to power in 1933, he put in several years of preparation to demonise Jews. He did this by a combination of techniques, including: introducing increasingly more severe anti-Jewish laws; changing the school curriculum to teach his theory about racial hierarchies; taking control of the German newspapers and radio stations so he could disseminate propaganda to the German population; censoring any woks of art, literature, music and science that had been created by Jewish people; and requiring all children to join Hitler Youth.
The Dilbert Killer Application cartoon seems relevant.
It is an important stepping stone to have the "viie" (Vim Implemented in Emacs) editor. The next step is to implement Emacs using vim's built-in scripting language, thus giving us the "eiiv" editor. Then it should be a trivial final step to get the "eiiviie" (Emacs Implement In Vim Implemented In Emacs) editor. This tool will serve two important purposes:
1. It can be used to teach the concept of recursion (and mulual recursion) in Computing 101 courses at university.
2. It will give Linux an opportunity to play catch-up with Microsoft bloatware.
sorry whats the point other than gee whiz factor?
I would have thought that was obvious: it's the possibility of having a Beowulf cluster of keyboards.
Are you sure you're really receiver-focused when you write all that stuff? Most people don't want to read that much text to use, say a configuration parser. If it takes people 10 hours to dig through your documentation and 1 hour to actually write the code, you're probably not doing it right. Sometimes less is more.
In the case of my configuration-file parser, a new user just needs to open the Getting Started manual and read two short chapters: Overview of Config4* syntax and Overview of the Config4* API. I would be surprised if doing that would take more than 30 minutes. And having done that, it would then take the new user about 5 minutes to write working code.
There is an old joke: "The definition of promiscuous is somebody who has more sex than you do". From reading TFA and some of the comments on slashdot, I get the feeling that the definition of documentation is equally subjective and self-serving for developers. Some developers think that writing documentation means adding comments to code. Others feel it involves writing Javadoc/Doxygen-style comments at the start of every class and method, and then generating HTML from that. Yet others feel that documentation hasn't been written unless it involves an architectural description.
When I am working on my own open-source projects, I feel that documentation isn't complete until I have written a few hundred pages of text that aim to be cover most/all of the following: (1) API reference guide, (2) programming tutorial, (3) user guide, (4) architectural guide, and (5) suggestions for "future work" that I hope other people will volunteer to do. Yes, I recognise that I am a bit extreme in the amount of effort I put into writing documentation. However, it does enable me to elaborate on the thesis of TFA: attempting to write such a comprehensive amount of documentation often highlights not just coding bugs, but also architectural flaws. This causes me to work in an iterative manner. I implement a first draft version of the code. Then I start documenting it, and when I encounter a part of the software that is difficult to explain, I realise that I need to re-architect the code base a bit. So I do that, and then get back to writing documentation, which causes me to notice another difficult-to-explain issue with the code. Working in this manner is slow, and I suspect it wouldn't work in a business with time-to-market pressures, but I find it gives excellent results in my own, non-time-pressured open-source projects. I touched on this issue in the documentation for one of my open-source projects.
I stopped for about a year and a half and recovered my health. However, as time went on my social and work circle as well as my family were too difficult to be around since they all are either wine snobs, after work happy hour drinkers, or simply unwilling to not drink around me. I didn't feel the desire to drink as strongly as before, but I felt left out of pretty much everything they were doing.
I don't drink alcohol because I have some sort of allergy or intolerance to it. As a teenager and young adult, I tried socialising with friends in bars. They would drink alcohol while I drank a soda or water. Eventually I gave up trying to socialise in such places. It boiled down to something somebody one said to me: "Those who are sober don't make good company for those who aren't. And vice versa."
I also have concerns about the Creative Commons set of licenses.
First, four of the six Creative Commons licenses are not "open source" since they prohibit modification and/or commercial use. There is nothing wrong with that per se; my gripe is that Creative Commons seem happy to let people assume that their licenses are open source.
Second, Creative Commons do not provide txt/Word/RTF/LaTeX/whatever versions of their licenses that you can download and embed into a book you are writing. Instead, the copyright page of your book is supposed to just tell readers that they can find the text of the license on a website or by writing to a specific postal address. So what happens if: (1) the Creative Commons organisation's postal address changes, and (2) they forget to renew their domain name and a cyber squatter buys it and holds it to ransom for millions of dollars? (More realistically, what happens if in, say, 20 years time, the Creative Commons organisation goes bankrupt and shuts down operations.) Now the license page of your book tells readers that it is licensed under terms that they cannot verify.
Third, the Creative Commons have gone through 5 versions of licenses (1.0, 2.0, 2.1, 2.5 and 3.0) in just over 4 years and (as far as I know) there is no forwards or backwards compatibility between the different versions.
"Angered at Righthaven’s behavior, a Las Vegas federal judge unsealed the company’s heretofore confidential agreement [...]"
Not that I'm complaining, but... what did Righthaven do to anger the judge? Were their lawyers being dicks? Was the contract itself what angered the judge? Truly, I'd like to know.
You can find the answer to your question in the final two paragraphs of the first link in the /. summary. I'd like to quote those two paragraphs for your convenience. But then, according to the thrust of the article, I might be sued for copyright infringement.
I would hope that everyone would find something even more important to do during their last weeks than fix gnome bugs.
The article written by Adrian Hands' son states, "Adrian Hands loved free software / open source." This means Mr Hands spent the last few weeks of his life working on something he loved, and which happened to be of benefit to others. Off hand, I can't think of a better, more important way for a person to spend the last few weeks of their life. Sure, you might say that he could have spent some time talking to loved ones. But who says he didn't do that too?
Like this one.
With this belated public recognition of UNIX, I predict that, finally, 2011 will be the year of UNIX on the desktop.
you know that it was as such, when the perpetrators of the case first merrily publish blog posts titled 'how to take revenge on him through legal system', telling how disgruntled women should abuse the legal system to exact revenge on males, and then delete the post once the internet community becomes aware of it.
That is untrue, and the newspaper article you cited when asked for a source is incorrect. The woman did write a blog article that offered advice on how to get revenge, but the blog article did not suggest using (or abusing) the legal system to do so.
Read an English translation of the blog article if you want to check.
And another fun fact, Woman A has posted an essay on her blog about using the legal system to extract revenge on men who have wronged a woman romantically.
That particular "fun fact" is incorrect. Woman A's blog article did not state anything at all about using the legal system.
From the provided link:
Earlier this year, Sarah is reported to have posted a telling entry on her website, which she has since removed. But a copy has been retrieved and widely circulated on the internet. Entitled ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge’, it explains how women can use courts to get their own back on unfaithful lovers. Step 7 says: ‘Go to it and keep your goal in sight. Make sure your victim suffers just as you did.’ (The highlighting of text is Sarah’s own.)
The newspaper article was very misleading in its characterisation of the blog posting. The only occurrence of "legal" (or any related word) was in the title of the blog article, and that should be read as "7 steps to taking revenge without breaking the law" rather than as "7 steps to taking revenge by talking legal action". The blog posting did not suggest using the courts to get revenge.
The very first step in the blog article stated: "It is almost always better to forgive than to avenge".
Steps 3 and 7 in the blog article suggest that the form of revenge you take should be similar to and in proportion to how you feel you have been wronged.
To characterise the blog article as a recipe for how to bring false accusations of rape against a person is incorrect.
For anyone who is interested, here is a translation of the blog article.
It is clear to me that inaccuracies in the media and on the Internet are demonising not just the accused but also (at least one of) his accusers.