Yeah but if you're willing to throw the computer in the dumpster, then reformatting is an option. The question isn't buying a new computer versus cleaning the spyware, the question is buying a new computer versus formatting-and-reinstalling. I don't see anyway the former should be cheaper.
I am sure Porsche stick shift is difficult to drive. Does that mean we should get rid of it because the widely available Toyota Camry's can also go 150 mph?
Who said anything about getting rid of it? I don't see anyone or anybody arguing about getting rid of Linux. (Well, Bill Gates perhaps but that's just wishful thinking on his part.)
The article is talking about Linux competing with Windows. To use your analogy (which isn't exactly apt but we'll ignore that for the moment...), if Porshe wants to compete with Toyota and Ford and Chevy, they need to make a car that isn't so difficult to drive. If they're happy making highly technical sports cars, wonderful, but then their aim isn't to take over a large section of the market.
The automotive industry didn't revolve around people who can't drive. Why the hell should the computing industry revolve around moms and pops who can't use a computer in the first place?
The automotive industry DOES revolve around people who can't drive - if you define "drive" as taking a Porshe around a track at high speeds. The automotive industry revolves around people who are utterly incompetent at pushing an automobile to its limits. Porshe doesn't revolve around people who can't drive. (Actually, there are probably lots of people who buy Porshes who can't drive - but they THINK they can.) But Porshe is a niche market. If Linux wants to remain a niche OS - one aimed at geeks and the highly computer literate, then it's doing a fine job. (And I, for one, don't think that's its such a bad idea for it to remain that way.) But if Linux wants to be a mainstream desktop OS, then its not doing such a fine job and some things DO need to change.
You're on the right track, but you're missing the forest for the trees.
I'm one of those libertarians who'd like to see public education disappear. I agree that it isn't going to happen anytime soon. But improving the currect education system is just as much a pipe dream.
Education in the US of A is a political game, and the major players in the game aren't interested in giving students a good education. They're interested in getting more and more money pumped into the education systems. They're interested in getting teachers more money, and in getting more teachers hired. Whether or not Johnny can read is irrelevant except as a sound bite on why We Need More Money for Education.
And don't confuse the teachers with the teachers union. The education system is filled with genuine, caring teachers who do their damnedest to make sure that Johnny can read. And those teachers deserve to be paid for their efforts. But those teachers are just as much a cog in the machine as are the students, and the machine itself doesn't care about educating students.
And while many teachers do care and are trying to do their jobs, there are many teachers and many school administrators who are part of the problem, not the solution. They cheat and do whatever is necessary to make themselves and their schools look good. If you want to improve education, get the politics out of it. Our education system sucks, and it sucks because educating students is a side effect, not the point of the system.
Are you going to sit there and try to invent a new form of advertising that isn't patented by Google, or are you just going to say "screw it" and charge for the use of your site?
If charging for the use of your site were an option, lots more people would do it. Only a few special purpose sites are able to succesfully charge for access. For the rest of the sites, charging is equivalent to putting a padlock on the door. Admission fees don't work if no one is willing to pay to come in.
You can call it short-sighted, you can call it whatever you want, but the fact is the owners of most web sites are not innovators and never claimed to be.
Funny, all those non-innovators are trying to make money on the web, which was itself a brand new innovation little more than a decade ago. Every web site doesn't have to innovate. They simply have to follow along behind those that do.
Yes, that's how *nix does things. Small, sharp tools. Wonderful paradigm, and if you want to say that it's a better way to do things, well, someone may argue with you about it but I certainly won't. But, for better or worse, it's not how Windows does things. Monad looks to have lots of hooks into the Windows kernel and various low level functions that simply aren't available as an independent utility. It's still early, so it's difficult to say how things are going to turn out, but it seems likely that Monad will have capabilities and feathers that Cygwin/bash won't have. That'll be a huge boon to those of us who have no choice but to deal with Windows in our profession.
You could even argue that many of the techniques used by spyware are simply tools that are being misused. The "evil" comes in when they're used for "evil" purposes. Of course, the very term "spyware" is indicative of software that's used for evil purposes but that's circular logic. If the tools are used for evil purposes, it's classified as spyware. If it's spyware, it's evil.
You're absolutely correct. But it's equally correct to brainlessly agree with what self proclaimed expert pundits say.
Cookies aren't evil. They're legitimate tools that are quite useful. Like many other tools, they can be abused or misused for nefarious purposes.
If you want to make your computer extremely safe, just unplug the network or phone cable or take out the wireless card. You're still vulnerable to local attacks, but you're absolutely safe from network attacks. Of course, this largely defeats the purpose of having the computer in the first place, but that's true to a lesser extent of other practices too.
Security is often a tug of war between being safe and usefulness or ease of use. Blindly blocking capabilities because it might be unsafe, without understanding what the dangers are, is often effectively conducting a denial of service on yourself.
Because almost all new releases on DVD use double-layer. Meaning that making an actual copy would currently cost you $10-$15 per disc just for the DL blank, more than you can outright buy a legal copy of most movies on sale.
No, it just means that you rip the DVD, split it into two pieces and burn it to two DVD+-Rs that cost you a tad over a buck apiece. So you have to store two DVDs and change the disk in the middle of the movie. Not that big a deal.
Case fans can generate some audible noise in an environment designed for quiet, and is this really acceptable? Professional studios can acoustically isolate computers, making this a moot point, but home audio enthusiasts don't have this luxury. The question is, how much heat and voltage can be dumped by underclocking a given processor (down) while still retaining acceptable processing performance?
The purpose of this article is to take a very fast, very hot modern processor (in this case an AMD Athlon 64 4000+) and underclock it with an eye to comparing performance to levels of heat and voltage at below stock speeds. The Athlon 64 is currently the fastest available desktop processor, so we reasoned that reducing its speed to the point where it could be operated silently with a passive cooling system should still leave us with a powerful machine for everyday tasks.
I can't speak for all Americans, of course, but I don't look down on unions. I only dislike the laws that give unions special status and provide them with much of their power, and I dislike the way unions use their political clout in matters that don't directly relate to their members working conditions.
And that's the big issue. The law is (somewhat) irrelevant. If a customer buys a PC from a store with a piece of software preinstalled, they're going to expect it to be supported. With MS Office, the store can pass the buck to Microsoft. With Open Office, there's no such option.
No, the equality comparison operator is used when you're checking to see IF an equality exists, not asserting that the two are equal. It's almost always used in a conditional or loop. The GP post wasn't asking or checking to see if the two sides of the equation were equal. He was stating that the left side of the equation (NumberOfPiratedApps) is determined by the formula on the right side of the equation. The two can never be unequal, since the left side is defined by the right side, so it's redundant to compare them to see if they're equal.
That's why no one uses Apache - because they can pirate Microsoft's IIS. MySQL and PostgeSQL have no users because you can pirate SQL Server or Oracle.
Your response suggests that you seem to think that if enough people do something, it's OK, and that if it's not illegal, then it must be OK. Thanks for showing us all so clearly what kind of person you are.
How appropriate in a post concerning journalistic integrity, and one where O'Gara has been slammed for "snide comments" and "personal attacks." It's so nice to know that her detractors would never stoop to that sort of thing.
No, it is not predicated on that. It is my opinion, apparently shared by many others, that Sys-Con should refuse to run articles that violate journalistic ethics, period.
Who defines journalistic ethics? It's my position that it's defined by the industry itself. If it's behavior typically found in the press, it's hard to claim that it's a violation of journalistic ethics. It may very well be a violation of what you think journalistic ethics SHOULD be, but that's an entirely different argument.
I'm no fan of O'Gara. But she's no worse than scores of other reporters out there,
Most people learn in kindergarden that "But Johnny did it, too" is not an adequate excuse for bad behavior. The ones that don't learn it are sociopaths.
You're absolutely correct that the fact that it's common journalistic practice doesn't make it right. Fortunately, that wasn't the point that I was making. The argument that Sys-Con should refuse to run O'Gara's argument is predicated upon the assumption that her articles are particularly egregious. If that isn't the case, and I don't believe it is, then the ill will focused at Sys-Con is misplaced.
By the same token, should we accept celebrity stalking? Celebrity murders? Celebrity kidnapping? Hey, it happens when you put yourself in the spotlight, right? It's your own fault for speaking up and poking your head out.
The law and journalism actually recognize a difference between privacy rights of famous people and the rest of us. O'Gara crossed that line and should pay for it.
Stalking, murder and kidnapping are all crimes, regardless of whether the victim is a celebrity or a random stranger. Publishing addresses and/or phone numbers is not. Those things are matters of public record. If you feel that O'Gara broke a law, feel free to point out which law it was.
You haven't been paying attention: we live in such a place and we always have. You couldn't have a free press without some constraints on it, because otherwise the journalists themselves would be subject to the same kind of abuse.
I suspect you're talking about self-imposed constraints, not legal ones. Legal constraints are concerned with libel and such. If you feel that O'Gara violated those laws, feel free to specify exactly where and how.
PJ's articles stand on their own merits. It is TOTALLY irrelevant who she is (although if she is NOT a paralegal, her legal procedure comments would be much less persuasive.)
As for who is paying her, if anyone, that is totally irrelevant as well.
So next time there's a study published which claims that Microsoft has a lower TCO than Linux and it's revealed that the study was paid for by Microsoft, I trust you'll be on here posting that it's irrelevant who paid for the study, and that it stands totally on its own merit.
The reason I posted a link to the Google cache is so people can read for themselves and decide whether or not it was out of bounds. I think it was a bit on the sleazy side, but I don't think it was the abomination that many are claiming it to be.
I don't see that PJs religion was being mocked. It was mentioned, but I don't see merely mentioning it as mockery.
And the reason you won't find those details about the SCOX attorneys and such being published in a news story is that they're not news - the information is out there and available for anyone who cares to look. PJ choose to hide her identity. That makes people curious. And when people are curious, they're going to start digging.
Unless you're browsing at -1, you probably won't see this post for very long because someone will mark it as a troll or flamebait. It's neither. It's an honest, straitforward opinion.
I've been using Linux since '93. I'm writting this post on Firefox running on Gentoo, with a NAT'd internet connection supplied by a Debian server. I think SCO is a sleazy company looking to steal money and momentum from the success of Linux. I am extremely grateful for what PJ has done. Her contributions to the Linux community have been invaluable. But the simple fact is that PJ stepped up and made herself a public figure in an extremely controversial case. And there is no constitutional or guaranteed right to remain anonymous.
Public figures deal with this kind of poking and prying all the time. Celebrities deal with paparazi. Politicians deal with people digging into every nook and cranny of their life. Innocent, ordinary people who are thrust into the spotlight have all sorts of private details published and pored over.
I'm no fan of O'Gara. But she's no worse than scores of other reporters out there, and to claim her story was a gross violation of journalistic ethics is a biased response. (The Google cache of her story is still available. If you haven't read it, read it yourself.) If Daryl McBride's personal information had been published (and it seems like at some point it was, although I can't find the story now), everyone would be cheering the public's "right to know." Daryl has complained about threatening letters and phone calls, and fearing attack, and we haven't leaped to his defense and insisted on his right to privacy. But since it's our ox being gored, we're all ready to go to war.
The response to this piece by many zealots has been much more unethical than the publishing of the article. I realize that the response, in particular the DOS and threatening email, is attributal to only a small minority of OSS and Linux supporters, and that many of the leaders in the field have spoken out against them. But the denial of those actions has been almost perfunctory. We should be screaming about those who smear the Linux and OSS name with illegal and unethical attacks at least at the same volume we're screaming about O'Gara and Sys-Con.
If you choose to put yourself in the spotlight, you can expect to have the press breathing down your neck. You don't have to like it but you might as well get used to it. It's a part of American life. It's the obverse side of the "freedom of the press" coin. Would you really prefer to live in a place where the press is constrained? There are those reading Slashdot who do, in fact, live in such a place. Ask them which is preferable.
Unproven conjecture. Living cells are not simple little tinker toys, boy.
Yeah, I got your "boy" right here.
I have no idea what you think you're proving with those two links. That cell biology is complicated? Well, duh! But that doesn't start to prove that there's only one way it can happen. It's not only possible but very likely that if life does exist elsewhere in the universe, you'd be able to create charts that are just as complicated but completely different from the ones you linked.
No. I wasn't talking about "hasn't proven", I'm talking about "has shown that it won't work". He has walked through all of the possible alternatives and come up dry.
"...all of the possible alternatives...?" Demonstrate that all possible alternatives have been tried. Show your work. It's quite obvious that you're in WAY over your head here. You have no real idea what you're talking about, and spouting stuff you read elsewhere and linking to web sites you don't understand won't help you one bit.
The evidence you deny is there. I have neither the time nor the inclination to take you through basic science, mathematics and biology in an attempt to teach you enough to understand it. The information is out there if you want to learn it. If you want to remain ignorant, that's your choice.
How does V do that precisely? You stated that V is an invalid set, yet P1 makes no claims about the nature of V other than that each element of V must exist before V can be said to exist.
The definition of V is...the universal superset composed of everything that has been, is, or will be.
What part of "or will [exist]" contradicting "must exist before V can be said to exist" is it that you don't understand?
Uncaused phenomena is a much stronger claim than self-caused phenomena.
It is? Why? Self-caused phenomena necessarily imvolves a temporal paradox, since it involves a phenomenon having an effect before it exists. (Unless you're postulating that G has always existed. But since G el V, that would mean V has always existed, and you specificially rejected that.) Uncaused phenomena violates causality, but it isn't at all proven that causality is a universal vice local phenomena. (In other words, causality may apply within the universe but not to the universe.)
We thus have the principle of limitation, which asserts that, for every composite phenomenon A, A cannot be a cause of any of its components.
Now we can quibble over whether a single member set can be considered composite. It seems quite clear to me that it is not. g is not a composite phenomenon because it consists solely of G.
Certainly I'd quibble over that. More generally, I'd quiver over the existence of the limitation in the postulate. Why is it specified that P1 applies only to composite phenomena? What essential characteristic does composite phenomena have that non-composite phenomena lacks which leads to the distinction? What we have is an attempt to specificially define the postulates such that they lead to the conclusion we seek. This is commonly called "begging the quesion."
Er, we have no idea what the original conditions are like but we know that those molecules formed. How? An act of faith?
Well, no. You must have missed the part where I said we have strong evidence that they can form. Oh, wait, you didn't miss it because you quoted it the very next statement!
Sadly, not just any old complex organics will do, they have to be the right ones...
Unproven conjecture. Life may very well be possible with many different sets of molecules. The particular ones we utilize may be simply chance. We don't know.
"Complex", in this case, is at the level of some of the simplest amino acids, which is light-years short of any significant part of anything living,
We're talking about fragments of a meteorite. The meteorite is proof that complex organic molecules can form from natural processes. It isn't a comprehensive collection of all molecules that can possibly form.
even so some of the simplest necessary aminos can't be formed "by accident".
Proof? That Stanley hasn't formed them in his lab? No one has ever created a volcano in a lab either. Do we assume that they can't exist?
After the Miller-Urey experiment, Stanley's so far spent the rest of his life trying to make the other necessaries, and has so far discovered that (1) you can't; and (2) the conditions for his original experiment have never existed.
He has discovered no such thing as (1), any more than the thousands of man hours that went into attempts to fly prior to the Wright brothers proved that flight couldn't be achieved. Stanley is attempting to compress phenomenon that occurred over millions of years and in oceans of water into a test tube. That may or may not be possible.
There are mountains of evidence that point towards a natural progression of life over billions of years. The simple fact that we can't yet explain every facet of its occurrence isn't evidence that it didn't happen, nor is it evidence for any sort of Intelligent Design.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but if you're willing to throw the computer in the dumpster, then reformatting is an option. The question isn't buying a new computer versus cleaning the spyware, the question is buying a new computer versus formatting-and-reinstalling. I don't see anyway the former should be cheaper.
I am sure Porsche stick shift is difficult to drive. Does that mean we should get rid of it because the widely available Toyota Camry's can also go 150 mph?
Who said anything about getting rid of it? I don't see anyone or anybody arguing about getting rid of Linux. (Well, Bill Gates perhaps but that's just wishful thinking on his part.)
The article is talking about Linux competing with Windows. To use your analogy (which isn't exactly apt but we'll ignore that for the moment...), if Porshe wants to compete with Toyota and Ford and Chevy, they need to make a car that isn't so difficult to drive. If they're happy making highly technical sports cars, wonderful, but then their aim isn't to take over a large section of the market.
The automotive industry didn't revolve around people who can't drive. Why the hell should the computing industry revolve around moms and pops who can't use a computer in the first place?
The automotive industry DOES revolve around people who can't drive - if you define "drive" as taking a Porshe around a track at high speeds. The automotive industry revolves around people who are utterly incompetent at pushing an automobile to its limits. Porshe doesn't revolve around people who can't drive. (Actually, there are probably lots of people who buy Porshes who can't drive - but they THINK they can.) But Porshe is a niche market. If Linux wants to remain a niche OS - one aimed at geeks and the highly computer literate, then it's doing a fine job. (And I, for one, don't think that's its such a bad idea for it to remain that way.) But if Linux wants to be a mainstream desktop OS, then its not doing such a fine job and some things DO need to change.
You're on the right track, but you're missing the forest for the trees.
I'm one of those libertarians who'd like to see public education disappear. I agree that it isn't going to happen anytime soon. But improving the currect education system is just as much a pipe dream.
Education in the US of A is a political game, and the major players in the game aren't interested in giving students a good education. They're interested in getting more and more money pumped into the education systems. They're interested in getting teachers more money, and in getting more teachers hired. Whether or not Johnny can read is irrelevant except as a sound bite on why We Need More Money for Education.
And don't confuse the teachers with the teachers union. The education system is filled with genuine, caring teachers who do their damnedest to make sure that Johnny can read. And those teachers deserve to be paid for their efforts. But those teachers are just as much a cog in the machine as are the students, and the machine itself doesn't care about educating students.
And while many teachers do care and are trying to do their jobs, there are many teachers and many school administrators who are part of the problem, not the solution. They cheat and do whatever is necessary to make themselves and their schools look good. If you want to improve education, get the politics out of it. Our education system sucks, and it sucks because educating students is a side effect, not the point of the system.
Are you going to sit there and try to invent a new form of advertising that isn't patented by Google, or are you just going to say "screw it" and charge for the use of your site?
If charging for the use of your site were an option, lots more people would do it. Only a few special purpose sites are able to succesfully charge for access. For the rest of the sites, charging is equivalent to putting a padlock on the door. Admission fees don't work if no one is willing to pay to come in.
You can call it short-sighted, you can call it whatever you want, but the fact is the owners of most web sites are not innovators and never claimed to be.
Funny, all those non-innovators are trying to make money on the web, which was itself a brand new innovation little more than a decade ago. Every web site doesn't have to innovate. They simply have to follow along behind those that do.
Not to be an ass, but isn't that pretty much what I said?
Yes, that's how *nix does things. Small, sharp tools. Wonderful paradigm, and if you want to say that it's a better way to do things, well, someone may argue with you about it but I certainly won't. But, for better or worse, it's not how Windows does things. Monad looks to have lots of hooks into the Windows kernel and various low level functions that simply aren't available as an independent utility. It's still early, so it's difficult to say how things are going to turn out, but it seems likely that Monad will have capabilities and feathers that Cygwin/bash won't have. That'll be a huge boon to those of us who have no choice but to deal with Windows in our profession.
You could even argue that many of the techniques used by spyware are simply tools that are being misused. The "evil" comes in when they're used for "evil" purposes. Of course, the very term "spyware" is indicative of software that's used for evil purposes but that's circular logic. If the tools are used for evil purposes, it's classified as spyware. If it's spyware, it's evil.
Doh! That should be "But it's equally bad to brainlessly agree with what self proclaimed expert pundits say."
You're absolutely correct. But it's equally correct to brainlessly agree with what self proclaimed expert pundits say.
Cookies aren't evil. They're legitimate tools that are quite useful. Like many other tools, they can be abused or misused for nefarious purposes.
If you want to make your computer extremely safe, just unplug the network or phone cable or take out the wireless card. You're still vulnerable to local attacks, but you're absolutely safe from network attacks. Of course, this largely defeats the purpose of having the computer in the first place, but that's true to a lesser extent of other practices too.
Security is often a tug of war between being safe and usefulness or ease of use. Blindly blocking capabilities because it might be unsafe, without understanding what the dangers are, is often effectively conducting a denial of service on yourself.
Last time I bought, I paid $55 for a pack of 50. Guess they've come down since then.
Because almost all new releases on DVD use double-layer. Meaning that making an actual copy would currently cost you $10-$15 per disc just for the DL blank, more than you can outright buy a legal copy of most movies on sale.
No, it just means that you rip the DVD, split it into two pieces and burn it to two DVD+-Rs that cost you a tad over a buck apiece. So you have to store two DVDs and change the disk in the middle of the movie. Not that big a deal.
RTFA. From the article:
Case fans can generate some audible noise in an environment designed for quiet, and is this really acceptable? Professional studios can acoustically isolate computers, making this a moot point, but home audio enthusiasts don't have this luxury. The question is, how much heat and voltage can be dumped by underclocking a given processor (down) while still retaining acceptable processing performance?
The purpose of this article is to take a very fast, very hot modern processor (in this case an AMD Athlon 64 4000+) and underclock it with an eye to comparing performance to levels of heat and voltage at below stock speeds. The Athlon 64 is currently the fastest available desktop processor, so we reasoned that reducing its speed to the point where it could be operated silently with a passive cooling system should still leave us with a powerful machine for everyday tasks.
I can't speak for all Americans, of course, but I don't look down on unions. I only dislike the laws that give unions special status and provide them with much of their power, and I dislike the way unions use their political clout in matters that don't directly relate to their members working conditions.
And that's the big issue. The law is (somewhat) irrelevant. If a customer buys a PC from a store with a piece of software preinstalled, they're going to expect it to be supported. With MS Office, the store can pass the buck to Microsoft. With Open Office, there's no such option.
No, the equality comparison operator is used when you're checking to see IF an equality exists, not asserting that the two are equal. It's almost always used in a conditional or loop. The GP post wasn't asking or checking to see if the two sides of the equation were equal. He was stating that the left side of the equation (NumberOfPiratedApps) is determined by the formula on the right side of the equation. The two can never be unequal, since the left side is defined by the right side, so it's redundant to compare them to see if they're equal.
NumberOfPiratedApps == (NumberOfComputersSold * ExpectedAppsPerMachine) - NumberOfAppsLicensesSold
"==" is a comparison operator. You want an assignment - a single "=".
That's why no one uses Apache - because they can pirate Microsoft's IIS. MySQL and PostgeSQL have no users because you can pirate SQL Server or Oracle.
Your response suggests that you seem to think that if enough people do something, it's OK, and that if it's not illegal, then it must be OK. Thanks for showing us all so clearly what kind of person you are.
How appropriate in a post concerning journalistic integrity, and one where O'Gara has been slammed for "snide comments" and "personal attacks." It's so nice to know that her detractors would never stoop to that sort of thing.
No, it is not predicated on that. It is my opinion, apparently shared by many others, that Sys-Con should refuse to run articles that violate journalistic ethics, period.
Who defines journalistic ethics? It's my position that it's defined by the industry itself. If it's behavior typically found in the press, it's hard to claim that it's a violation of journalistic ethics. It may very well be a violation of what you think journalistic ethics SHOULD be, but that's an entirely different argument.
I'm no fan of O'Gara. But she's no worse than scores of other reporters out there,
Most people learn in kindergarden that "But Johnny did it, too" is not an adequate excuse for bad behavior. The ones that don't learn it are sociopaths.
You're absolutely correct that the fact that it's common journalistic practice doesn't make it right. Fortunately, that wasn't the point that I was making. The argument that Sys-Con should refuse to run O'Gara's argument is predicated upon the assumption that her articles are particularly egregious. If that isn't the case, and I don't believe it is, then the ill will focused at Sys-Con is misplaced.
By the same token, should we accept celebrity stalking? Celebrity murders? Celebrity kidnapping? Hey, it happens when you put yourself in the spotlight, right? It's your own fault for speaking up and poking your head out.
The law and journalism actually recognize a difference between privacy rights of famous people and the rest of us. O'Gara crossed that line and should pay for it.
Stalking, murder and kidnapping are all crimes, regardless of whether the victim is a celebrity or a random stranger. Publishing addresses and/or phone numbers is not. Those things are matters of public record. If you feel that O'Gara broke a law, feel free to point out which law it was.
You haven't been paying attention: we live in such a place and we always have. You couldn't have a free press without some constraints on it, because otherwise the journalists themselves would be subject to the same kind of abuse.
I suspect you're talking about self-imposed constraints, not legal ones. Legal constraints are concerned with libel and such. If you feel that O'Gara violated those laws, feel free to specify exactly where and how.
PJ's articles stand on their own merits. It is TOTALLY irrelevant who she is (although if she is NOT a paralegal, her legal procedure comments would be much less persuasive.)
As for who is paying her, if anyone, that is totally irrelevant as well.
So next time there's a study published which claims that Microsoft has a lower TCO than Linux and it's revealed that the study was paid for by Microsoft, I trust you'll be on here posting that it's irrelevant who paid for the study, and that it stands totally on its own merit.
The reason I posted a link to the Google cache is so people can read for themselves and decide whether or not it was out of bounds. I think it was a bit on the sleazy side, but I don't think it was the abomination that many are claiming it to be.
I don't see that PJs religion was being mocked. It was mentioned, but I don't see merely mentioning it as mockery.
And the reason you won't find those details about the SCOX attorneys and such being published in a news story is that they're not news - the information is out there and available for anyone who cares to look. PJ choose to hide her identity. That makes people curious. And when people are curious, they're going to start digging.
Unless you're browsing at -1, you probably won't see this post for very long because someone will mark it as a troll or flamebait. It's neither. It's an honest, straitforward opinion.
I've been using Linux since '93. I'm writting this post on Firefox running on Gentoo, with a NAT'd internet connection supplied by a Debian server. I think SCO is a sleazy company looking to steal money and momentum from the success of Linux. I am extremely grateful for what PJ has done. Her contributions to the Linux community have been invaluable. But the simple fact is that PJ stepped up and made herself a public figure in an extremely controversial case. And there is no constitutional or guaranteed right to remain anonymous.
Public figures deal with this kind of poking and prying all the time. Celebrities deal with paparazi. Politicians deal with people digging into every nook and cranny of their life. Innocent, ordinary people who are thrust into the spotlight have all sorts of private details published and pored over.
I'm no fan of O'Gara. But she's no worse than scores of other reporters out there, and to claim her story was a gross violation of journalistic ethics is a biased response. (The Google cache of her story is still available. If you haven't read it, read it yourself.) If Daryl McBride's personal information had been published (and it seems like at some point it was, although I can't find the story now), everyone would be cheering the public's "right to know." Daryl has complained about threatening letters and phone calls, and fearing attack, and we haven't leaped to his defense and insisted on his right to privacy. But since it's our ox being gored, we're all ready to go to war.
The response to this piece by many zealots has been much more unethical than the publishing of the article. I realize that the response, in particular the DOS and threatening email, is attributal to only a small minority of OSS and Linux supporters, and that many of the leaders in the field have spoken out against them. But the denial of those actions has been almost perfunctory. We should be screaming about those who smear the Linux and OSS name with illegal and unethical attacks at least at the same volume we're screaming about O'Gara and Sys-Con.
If you choose to put yourself in the spotlight, you can expect to have the press breathing down your neck. You don't have to like it but you might as well get used to it. It's a part of American life. It's the obverse side of the "freedom of the press" coin. Would you really prefer to live in a place where the press is constrained? There are those reading Slashdot who do, in fact, live in such a place. Ask them which is preferable.
Unproven conjecture. Living cells are not simple little tinker toys, boy.
Yeah, I got your "boy" right here.
I have no idea what you think you're proving with those two links. That cell biology is complicated? Well, duh! But that doesn't start to prove that there's only one way it can happen. It's not only possible but very likely that if life does exist elsewhere in the universe, you'd be able to create charts that are just as complicated but completely different from the ones you linked.
No. I wasn't talking about "hasn't proven", I'm talking about "has shown that it won't work". He has walked through all of the possible alternatives and come up dry.
"...all of the possible alternatives...?" Demonstrate that all possible alternatives have been tried. Show your work. It's quite obvious that you're in WAY over your head here. You have no real idea what you're talking about, and spouting stuff you read elsewhere and linking to web sites you don't understand won't help you one bit.
The evidence you deny is there. I have neither the time nor the inclination to take you through basic science, mathematics and biology in an attempt to teach you enough to understand it. The information is out there if you want to learn it. If you want to remain ignorant, that's your choice.
How does V do that precisely? You stated that V is an invalid set, yet P1 makes no claims about the nature of V other than that each element of V must exist before V can be said to exist.
...the universal superset composed of everything that has been, is, or will be.
The definition of V is
What part of "or will [exist]" contradicting "must exist before V can be said to exist" is it that you don't understand?
Uncaused phenomena is a much stronger claim than self-caused phenomena.
It is? Why? Self-caused phenomena necessarily imvolves a temporal paradox, since it involves a phenomenon having an effect before it exists. (Unless you're postulating that G has always existed. But since G el V, that would mean V has always existed, and you specificially rejected that.) Uncaused phenomena violates causality, but it isn't at all proven that causality is a universal vice local phenomena. (In other words, causality may apply within the universe but not to the universe.)
We thus have the principle of limitation, which asserts that, for every composite phenomenon A, A cannot be a cause of any of its components.
Now we can quibble over whether a single member set can be considered composite. It seems quite clear to me that it is not. g is not a composite phenomenon because it consists solely of G.
Certainly I'd quibble over that. More generally, I'd quiver over the existence of the limitation in the postulate. Why is it specified that P1 applies only to composite phenomena? What essential characteristic does composite phenomena have that non-composite phenomena lacks which leads to the distinction? What we have is an attempt to specificially define the postulates such that they lead to the conclusion we seek. This is commonly called "begging the quesion."
Er, we have no idea what the original conditions are like but we know that those molecules formed. How? An act of faith?
Well, no. You must have missed the part where I said we have strong evidence that they can form. Oh, wait, you didn't miss it because you quoted it the very next statement!
Sadly, not just any old complex organics will do, they have to be the right ones...
Unproven conjecture. Life may very well be possible with many different sets of molecules. The particular ones we utilize may be simply chance. We don't know.
"Complex", in this case, is at the level of some of the simplest amino acids, which is light-years short of any significant part of anything living,
We're talking about fragments of a meteorite. The meteorite is proof that complex organic molecules can form from natural processes. It isn't a comprehensive collection of all molecules that can possibly form.
even so some of the simplest necessary aminos can't be formed "by accident".
Proof? That Stanley hasn't formed them in his lab? No one has ever created a volcano in a lab either. Do we assume that they can't exist?
After the Miller-Urey experiment, Stanley's so far spent the rest of his life trying to make the other necessaries, and has so far discovered that (1) you can't; and (2) the conditions for his original experiment have never existed.
He has discovered no such thing as (1), any more than the thousands of man hours that went into attempts to fly prior to the Wright brothers proved that flight couldn't be achieved. Stanley is attempting to compress phenomenon that occurred over millions of years and in oceans of water into a test tube. That may or may not be possible.
There are mountains of evidence that point towards a natural progression of life over billions of years. The simple fact that we can't yet explain every facet of its occurrence isn't evidence that it didn't happen, nor is it evidence for any sort of Intelligent Design.