Well, they had to wait until Microsoft had actually infringed on their patents before filing a suit. From the article, it seems pretty clear to me that they tried to negotiate a legitimate deal and Microsoft, as usual, screwed them over.
Replies like the one the parent poster has received are the number one obstacle to any Linux distro making it big on the desktop. "RTFM" and dumbass inside jokes are going to send hordes of potential Linux users back to Windows. Maybe you taught yourself everything by reading man pages -- well, good for you. For most people, an informative answer to a reasonable question is one of the most useful and encouraging possible resources in making the transition to a new platform.
To answer the question: nedit and xemacs are two pretty decent GUI text editors that run on Linux. nedit is probably easier to learn if you're coming from the Windows world, but if I were you I'd put the time into learning xemacs, since it's descended from emacs, which is one of the standard text editors in the Unix world.
Also do at least learn a little bit about vi (type "man vi" at any Terminal prompt) since it's a) very simple for quick, in-place editing, and b) on just about every distro of every type of Unix machine.
What makes you think I "hate and abhor" the American system? I love it. I spent eight years of my life in uniform defending it, and continue to defend it with my words and actions every day. What I hate and abhor are the forces which are trying to take away "the best freedom in the world to criticize it."
Of course, you lack the guts to identify yourself; my name is up there for all to see.
But it is kinda funny how people believe that the US Government and its employees are at the same time frighteningly incompetent and stupid, but also evil masterminds of Illuminati proportions, depending on what's being discussed at the moment.
They can be both at the same time.
See, you're quite right that this won't happen in any useful way. But it can still do a lot of damage. It will do nothing to prevent terrorist attack -- but it will give assorted federal agencies and their corporate masters the power to make life hell for any individual Internet user they choose, for any reason, on the flimsiest of pretexes. That's pretty much what totalitarian governments do.
You've heard the "At least he made the trains run on time" line about Mussolini? Interesting historical tidbit: a friend of mine whose grandfather lived in Italy at the time likes to tell the story his grandfather passed on to him, about that line...
The Fascist government didn't make the trains run on time. Italian trains under Mussolini were as unreliable as they had always been. BUT -- what they did do, was terrorize everyone into saying the trains ran on time.
That's the world we're headed for. "At least W. made us secure from terrorist attack" -- and he won't, but we'll have to pretend he did.
In theory, you're right -- but you kind of prove idris33's point with your last paragraph. Americans have the means to defend their own freedom as do very few other peoples (AFAIK, in the First World, only the Swiss and the Israelis are more armed than we) but we're incredibly unlikely to use those means until it's too late. Europeans have fewer guns than we do (although not as many fewer as most Americans seem to believe) but they also have much more responsive governments. They learned their lessons the hard way, across the centuries, in the fires of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, German unification, Fascism, and Communism. Apparently we haven't learned those lessons... yet.
As an American, and as a veteran, and as the grandchild of European Jews who came here to escape Nazi and Soviet oppression, it pains me to say this, but it's true: we are perilously close to losing whatever claim we have ever had to "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." No, it won't perish from the Earth -- it's just moving back across the Atlantic. I only hope that in getting it back, we don't pay the same price they did.
How many books can you say were really fun to read, especially fiction thrillers that spend half the time describing characters that get violently killed off right after you get to know them.
Um... most of the books I read? (In other words, things that aren't textbooks or technical references -- although even those can be fun to read if they're written by good enough authors, e.g. Elizabeth Castro or Theo Petersen.) I read a lot for fun, and many of the books I read are, in fact, violent science fiction thrillers. I'm sure the reviewer didn't mean to come off this way, but what the line I quoted says to me is, "I'm someone who hardly ever reads for fun, so you should take my fiction reviews reeeaaally seriously." Someone who doesn't realize that there are a whole lot of fun-to-read books out there is someone whose opinion I have a hard time respecting.
I'll probably get modded or flamed into oblivion for this, but here goes anyway...
I've always felt that any post that starts with a line like that deserves to get modded into oblivion, just on principle. If you're going to say something you think will be controversial, just say it; don't spend time trying to impress us with how brave you are for speaking your mind.
That being said, I agree completely with the rest of your post.;)
Yeah, no shit. Something is seriously wrong with our military radar technology if it's that easy to interfere with. I have visions of al-Qaeda stockpiling 802.11 equipment in a cave for their Next Big Event...
It's proper to refer to organizations as either singular or plural. Generally, the singular usage ("NASA considers") is more common in American English and the plural usage ("NASA consider") is more common in British English, but it's not a hard and fast rule on either side of the Atlantic.
Yes, exactly. Poindexter is a criminal -- no, wait a minute, he isn't, because he was declared not to be! Similarly, the people who collected and disseminated the information (whom Wired calls "online pranksters," but whom the spookocracy will call "hacker pirate terrorists") aren't criminals -- until they are declared to be. This has nothing to do with law as rational people understand the concept (you know, a nation of laws and not of men, the majesty of the law, equal protection before the law, all that) and everything to do with raw power.
In 1776, the American Revolution began with Americans declaring they would no longer be subjects of the King. In 1865, the Revolution ended with the final defeat of aristocracy on American soil. In 2001, the counter-revolution began; it is now coming to fruition. It took us a little longer than France or Russia, but the end may well be the same...
Okay, sounds like you know a lot about fruit flies -- more than I do, on a cellular level at least. But I'd like you to consider a couple of things about the reproductive research that you dismiss:
1) Negative knowledge is still knowledge. Okay, now we know that fruit fly reproduction is unique, or at least has certain unique features. That uniqueness is in itself interesting. Why is it unique? Are we sure that it actually is unique -- e.g., perhaps the same mechanism operates in other organisms, but at a much lower level? Given that Drosophila is one of the most widely used lab animals in the world, does this uniqueness have any implications for using it in various kinds of research? Etc. It seems to me that these are all valid questions.
2) If you're a fruit farmer, knowing things about fruit fly reproduction is a very, very good thing. New pesticides and/or new organic methods of pest control could very easily come out of this knowledge.
3) "Of what possible use, sir, is a new-born babe?" You may not ever see anything useful come out of the research, and quite possibly no one who worked on the project ever will -- but five or ten or fifty years hence, it's entirely possible that someone else might.
BTW, is any of this research available on-line? That kind of thing interests me. Reminds me of the guy I know at Woods Hole who is the world's leading expert on sea urchin reproduction. Whenever he has trouble getting a grant, he always threatens to start paying for his research by starting the world's first sea urchin porn site...
It is much better to look for an effective HIV protease inhibitor than it is to look for patterns in the mating habits of fruit flies.
You don't know any fruit farmers, do you?
If you know what a retrovirus is, what a protease is, what a protease inhibitor is... you know these things because of someone's "blue sky" research, years or decades ago, when they had no apparent importance. Directed research is good. It's important. It very obviously gives us a great many things that allow us to live happier, healthier, longer lives. But there has not been a single major technological advance in the last century or so -- and not that many major advances throughout human history -- that has not depended on basic scientific knowledge gained by someone doing research that, at the time, was about knowledge for knowledge's sake.
I agree with the parent post entirely, but I've got to comment on this line:
derisively and indescriminately labelled liberal because we disagree with SOME extreme right rhetoric
You say that like it's a bad thing. Well, okay, the "derisively" part is, but as for the rest of it... label me a liberal all you want. It's a label I'll happily accept. Until Daddy Bush turned it into a dirty word in the 1988 campaign, "liberal" was a badge of honor in American history.
Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. Abraham Lincoln was a liberal. Both Roosevelts were liberals. JFK was a liberal. Bill Clinton -- that's right, the President whose term gave us the longest stretch of peace and prosperity in recent history -- was a liberal. And it's not just Presidents. Benjamin Franklin. Frederick Douglass. Martin Luther King.
I think I'm in pretty good company.
It's time to take back the word "liberal," to make it a term of pride instead of shame. Liberalism is the greatest force for improving the human condition the world has ever known. Conservatism is one of the greatest forces for dragging it down into the much where it's been for most of human history. Which label would you rather wear?
Um, you're assuming that the feds a) know, and b) care. In the parent poster's scenario, I can easily see them touting the "great big tub and a bunch of bottles" as "apparatus for making terrorist equipment" and most people applauding enthusiastically as the haul off some innocent Arab homebrewer. (Who quite possibly came to the US to escape the oppressive laws in his own country... including the laws on alcohol. Those backward, tyrannical Muslims! Good thing we're more enlightened over here, right?) The few people who saw the equipment on the news and knew what it was would be drowned in the noise even if they dared to speak up.
I'd say drinking underage is even less of a crime -- in the moral sense -- than speeding. Speed limits may be set arbitrarily, but to a certain degree there's at least a reason for them: driving too fast really can kill other people. But a 19-year-old, say, who wants a beer is perfectly competent to decide to have one. Hell, if he wants ten beers, he should be able to do so, even if it's a stupid idea -- as long as he doesn't do anything stupid (e.g. drive while shitfaced) and harm anyone else in the process.
I'm not at all convinced there should be drinking age laws at all. But if there are to be such laws, then 21 is absurdly high. Drinking at 18-20 is almost an act of civil disobedience.
Space isn't dense with big objects now, because most of them have settled into stable orbits (like the asteroids in the asteroid belt) or been sucked in by the gravity of much bigger objects -- i.e., the Sun and the planets. Earlier in our Solar System's history, it wasn't like that. For a looong time, all of the inner planets were getting the shit pounded out of them. The evidence for this is clear on Earth if you know where to look; it's more clear on planets like Mars and Mercury that don't have much in the way of weather to wear away the impact craters. Clearer still on the Moon, of course.
I'm not sure most of the "mindless code monkeys" actually have CS degrees -- the kind of narrow-language focus you describe is to me the indicator of a self-taught programmer who found one solution and stuck with it fanatically, or someone with a tech school degree/certification who's never bothered to question what he was taught. A good CS program teaches about several different languages, several different approaches in those languages, and how to organize your work efficiently enough so that you don't have to work 12-14 hour days.
The bigger question, about being a well-rounded person -- well, you can be a geek about anything you study. You can be a CS geek, a math geek, a history geek, a management geek, a language geek... Any college education should include a well-rounded list of subjects; that's what going to college as opposed to trade school is for. But ultimately it's a matter of what kind of person you choose to be.
I'm a programmer, and a CS grad student, and I put a lot of work into those occupations. But I'm also a serious reader of history, an occasional fiction writer, a lover of music and dance. I'm passionate about politics, about fitness, about my family and friends. Those things don't interfere with my technical side; they complement it.
Yaakov Smirnoff (sp.) was actually a pretty successful comedian; I never found him funny, but IIRC his greatest success was at the height of the Reagan years, which of course was also the last great heating-up of the Cold War. His schtick was that he was a Soviet defector (which I rather doubt) and his jokes were pretty much a mix of the stereotypical immigrant's wide-eyed wonder at the US ("What a country") and ripping on the motherland ("In Soviet Russia...")
The basic gimmick of those jokes was kind of amusing: "In America, you watch TV; in Soviet Russia, TV watches you!" But it wore out fast, to say the least. The Simpsons gave him a very funny bit part in the Branson, MO episode -- he was one of the "performers you thought were dead."
Re:sigh .. there is no such thing as "macroevoluti
on
Shapes of Time
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· Score: 2
You can see the evidence for "macroevolution," if you insist on defining it as something different from "microevolution," quite plainly in the fossil record for large organisms; you can also see it on a human timescale in small organisms. (There exist, e.g., species of bacteria which are obligate jet-fuel feeders; they can't live on anything else. I rather doubt Noah had those on the Ark...) The only people I've ever heard deny this, despite the overwhelming evidence, are in fact fundamentalists.
It's found. If it's not fixed, it soon will be. And since Apple is very good about patch releases through Software Update, the fix will soon be easily available to every OS X user.
This kind of partnership between OSS and a major commercial vendor is unprecedented, AFAIK. (No flames, please; if I'm wrong, just tell me so, and who did it first.) It's produced some great things so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, they had to wait until Microsoft had actually infringed on their patents before filing a suit. From the article, it seems pretty clear to me that they tried to negotiate a legitimate deal and Microsoft, as usual, screwed them over.
Replies like the one the parent poster has received are the number one obstacle to any Linux distro making it big on the desktop. "RTFM" and dumbass inside jokes are going to send hordes of potential Linux users back to Windows. Maybe you taught yourself everything by reading man pages -- well, good for you. For most people, an informative answer to a reasonable question is one of the most useful and encouraging possible resources in making the transition to a new platform.
To answer the question: nedit and xemacs are two pretty decent GUI text editors that run on Linux. nedit is probably easier to learn if you're coming from the Windows world, but if I were you I'd put the time into learning xemacs, since it's descended from emacs, which is one of the standard text editors in the Unix world.
Also do at least learn a little bit about vi (type "man vi" at any Terminal prompt) since it's a) very simple for quick, in-place editing, and b) on just about every distro of every type of Unix machine.
What makes you think I "hate and abhor" the American system? I love it. I spent eight years of my life in uniform defending it, and continue to defend it with my words and actions every day. What I hate and abhor are the forces which are trying to take away "the best freedom in the world to criticize it."
Of course, you lack the guts to identify yourself; my name is up there for all to see.
They can be both at the same time.
See, you're quite right that this won't happen in any useful way. But it can still do a lot of damage. It will do nothing to prevent terrorist attack -- but it will give assorted federal agencies and their corporate masters the power to make life hell for any individual Internet user they choose, for any reason, on the flimsiest of pretexes. That's pretty much what totalitarian governments do.
You've heard the "At least he made the trains run on time" line about Mussolini? Interesting historical tidbit: a friend of mine whose grandfather lived in Italy at the time likes to tell the story his grandfather passed on to him, about that line
The Fascist government didn't make the trains run on time. Italian trains under Mussolini were as unreliable as they had always been. BUT -- what they did do, was terrorize everyone into saying the trains ran on time.
That's the world we're headed for. "At least W. made us secure from terrorist attack" -- and he won't, but we'll have to pretend he did.
In theory, you're right -- but you kind of prove idris33's point with your last paragraph. Americans have the means to defend their own freedom as do very few other peoples (AFAIK, in the First World, only the Swiss and the Israelis are more armed than we) but we're incredibly unlikely to use those means until it's too late. Europeans have fewer guns than we do (although not as many fewer as most Americans seem to believe) but they also have much more responsive governments. They learned their lessons the hard way, across the centuries, in the fires of the English Civil War, the French Revolution, German unification, Fascism, and Communism. Apparently we haven't learned those lessons ... yet.
As an American, and as a veteran, and as the grandchild of European Jews who came here to escape Nazi and Soviet oppression, it pains me to say this, but it's true: we are perilously close to losing whatever claim we have ever had to "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." No, it won't perish from the Earth -- it's just moving back across the Atlantic. I only hope that in getting it back, we don't pay the same price they did.
Um
I've always felt that any post that starts with a line like that deserves to get modded into oblivion, just on principle. If you're going to say something you think will be controversial, just say it; don't spend time trying to impress us with how brave you are for speaking your mind.
That being said, I agree completely with the rest of your post.
Yeah, no shit. Something is seriously wrong with our military radar technology if it's that easy to interfere with. I have visions of al-Qaeda stockpiling 802.11 equipment in a cave for their Next Big Event ...
Well, for a Canadian, I suppose that route makes the most sense. ;)
It's proper to refer to organizations as either singular or plural. Generally, the singular usage ("NASA considers") is more common in American English and the plural usage ("NASA consider") is more common in British English, but it's not a hard and fast rule on either side of the Atlantic.
Yes, exactly. Poindexter is a criminal -- no, wait a minute, he isn't, because he was declared not to be! Similarly, the people who collected and disseminated the information (whom Wired calls "online pranksters," but whom the spookocracy will call "hacker pirate terrorists") aren't criminals -- until they are declared to be. This has nothing to do with law as rational people understand the concept (you know, a nation of laws and not of men, the majesty of the law, equal protection before the law, all that) and everything to do with raw power.
...
In 1776, the American Revolution began with Americans declaring they would no longer be subjects of the King. In 1865, the Revolution ended with the final defeat of aristocracy on American soil. In 2001, the counter-revolution began; it is now coming to fruition. It took us a little longer than France or Russia, but the end may well be the same
Okay, sounds like you know a lot about fruit flies -- more than I do, on a cellular level at least. But I'd like you to consider a couple of things about the reproductive research that you dismiss:
...
1) Negative knowledge is still knowledge. Okay, now we know that fruit fly reproduction is unique, or at least has certain unique features. That uniqueness is in itself interesting. Why is it unique? Are we sure that it actually is unique -- e.g., perhaps the same mechanism operates in other organisms, but at a much lower level? Given that Drosophila is one of the most widely used lab animals in the world, does this uniqueness have any implications for using it in various kinds of research? Etc. It seems to me that these are all valid questions.
2) If you're a fruit farmer, knowing things about fruit fly reproduction is a very, very good thing. New pesticides and/or new organic methods of pest control could very easily come out of this knowledge.
3) "Of what possible use, sir, is a new-born babe?" You may not ever see anything useful come out of the research, and quite possibly no one who worked on the project ever will -- but five or ten or fifty years hence, it's entirely possible that someone else might.
BTW, is any of this research available on-line? That kind of thing interests me. Reminds me of the guy I know at Woods Hole who is the world's leading expert on sea urchin reproduction. Whenever he has trouble getting a grant, he always threatens to start paying for his research by starting the world's first sea urchin porn site
... now can I get the girl on the front page to come to my house and scan me while the software is scanning my computer?
You don't know any fruit farmers, do you?
If you know what a retrovirus is, what a protease is, what a protease inhibitor is
And I really suggest you read up on fruit flies.
My iBook is extremely stable. I, on the other hand ...
You say that like it's a bad thing. Well, okay, the "derisively" part is, but as for the rest of it
Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. Abraham Lincoln was a liberal. Both Roosevelts were liberals. JFK was a liberal. Bill Clinton -- that's right, the President whose term gave us the longest stretch of peace and prosperity in recent history -- was a liberal. And it's not just Presidents. Benjamin Franklin. Frederick Douglass. Martin Luther King.
I think I'm in pretty good company.
It's time to take back the word "liberal," to make it a term of pride instead of shame. Liberalism is the greatest force for improving the human condition the world has ever known. Conservatism is one of the greatest forces for dragging it down into the much where it's been for most of human history. Which label would you rather wear?
Um, you're assuming that the feds a) know, and b) care. In the parent poster's scenario, I can easily see them touting the "great big tub and a bunch of bottles" as "apparatus for making terrorist equipment" and most people applauding enthusiastically as the haul off some innocent Arab homebrewer. (Who quite possibly came to the US to escape the oppressive laws in his own country ... including the laws on alcohol. Those backward, tyrannical Muslims! Good thing we're more enlightened over here, right?) The few people who saw the equipment on the news and knew what it was would be drowned in the noise even if they dared to speak up.
I'd say drinking underage is even less of a crime -- in the moral sense -- than speeding. Speed limits may be set arbitrarily, but to a certain degree there's at least a reason for them: driving too fast really can kill other people. But a 19-year-old, say, who wants a beer is perfectly competent to decide to have one. Hell, if he wants ten beers, he should be able to do so, even if it's a stupid idea -- as long as he doesn't do anything stupid (e.g. drive while shitfaced) and harm anyone else in the process.
I'm not at all convinced there should be drinking age laws at all. But if there are to be such laws, then 21 is absurdly high. Drinking at 18-20 is almost an act of civil disobedience.
Space isn't dense with big objects now, because most of them have settled into stable orbits (like the asteroids in the asteroid belt) or been sucked in by the gravity of much bigger objects -- i.e., the Sun and the planets. Earlier in our Solar System's history, it wasn't like that. For a looong time, all of the inner planets were getting the shit pounded out of them. The evidence for this is clear on Earth if you know where to look; it's more clear on planets like Mars and Mercury that don't have much in the way of weather to wear away the impact craters. Clearer still on the Moon, of course.
I'm not sure most of the "mindless code monkeys" actually have CS degrees -- the kind of narrow-language focus you describe is to me the indicator of a self-taught programmer who found one solution and stuck with it fanatically, or someone with a tech school degree/certification who's never bothered to question what he was taught. A good CS program teaches about several different languages, several different approaches in those languages, and how to organize your work efficiently enough so that you don't have to work 12-14 hour days.
... Any college education should include a well-rounded list of subjects; that's what going to college as opposed to trade school is for. But ultimately it's a matter of what kind of person you choose to be.
The bigger question, about being a well-rounded person -- well, you can be a geek about anything you study. You can be a CS geek, a math geek, a history geek, a management geek, a language geek
I'm a programmer, and a CS grad student, and I put a lot of work into those occupations. But I'm also a serious reader of history, an occasional fiction writer, a lover of music and dance. I'm passionate about politics, about fitness, about my family and friends. Those things don't interfere with my technical side; they complement it.
Yaakov Smirnoff (sp.) was actually a pretty successful comedian; I never found him funny, but IIRC his greatest success was at the height of the Reagan years, which of course was also the last great heating-up of the Cold War. His schtick was that he was a Soviet defector (which I rather doubt) and his jokes were pretty much a mix of the stereotypical immigrant's wide-eyed wonder at the US ("What a country") and ripping on the motherland ("In Soviet Russia ...")
The basic gimmick of those jokes was kind of amusing: "In America, you watch TV; in Soviet Russia, TV watches you!" But it wore out fast, to say the least. The Simpsons gave him a very funny bit part in the Branson, MO episode -- he was one of the "performers you thought were dead."
You can see the evidence for "macroevolution," if you insist on defining it as something different from "microevolution," quite plainly in the fossil record for large organisms; you can also see it on a human timescale in small organisms. (There exist, e.g., species of bacteria which are obligate jet-fuel feeders; they can't live on anything else. I rather doubt Noah had those on the Ark ...) The only people I've ever heard deny this, despite the overwhelming evidence, are in fact fundamentalists.
It's found. If it's not fixed, it soon will be. And since Apple is very good about patch releases through Software Update, the fix will soon be easily available to every OS X user.
This kind of partnership between OSS and a major commercial vendor is unprecedented, AFAIK. (No flames, please; if I'm wrong, just tell me so, and who did it first.) It's produced some great things so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes.
The first rule of Google is ... you don't talk about Google.