As an aside comment, note that the shame of nakedness is just our current social tabou, in the past many societies didn't care about nakedness.
It's possible that mass surveillance occur in the future but frankly I doubt that it will occur in the private space: there are still laws which protect privacy.
In the public space, camera usage will increase of course.
Note that this behaviour is pretty much specific to the USA: in France we tend to have the opposite: nudity is ok, violence is not. Which I find quite logical (but I'm French).
I suspect that the USA are like this due to religion (blech).
>Within an hour I had KDE configured to look exactly like my gnome desktop
I suspect that this 'look alike' is rather shallow: Gnome use word as buttons actions while KDE tend to use OK/Cancel (a pity I like better KDE but not this part), I doubt that you could change that..
> she has been usign it and happy with it (I talked to her the other day) for several weeks now.
Wait until she has to go to an IE only website, or make a resume: you'd better explain her to use PDF and not to send an OOo document, otherwise..
I hope you have explained this to her otherwise you're irresponsible.
Sure it's less work to maintain a Linux than Windows, but we're living in a Windows world you know so using Linux creates some problems sometimes, if she's a beginner, she'll have a hard time working around those problems.
Funny, this post has made me realise that MySQL is the C++ of the database: by default it's very fast but unsafe, if you use it appropriatedly you can get additionnal security but it's hard to do.
The IT world is slowly but surely using language with better security feature by default than C++, I hope the DB programmers will do the same thing, maybe we'll see less 'DB corrupted' webpages..
> 3. Small size, for smaller radar image, and/or better survivability.
Of course, the small size wouldn't never be because it comes from a reduction of the weight so also a reduction of the price to put the satellite in orbit?
And probably all space technologies are "dual use".
> that's when the opportunity will come to shop around and look at alternatives
Except that 1) Vista will come preinstalled, Linux won't. 2) Vista will run nearly all the old application perfectly, Linux won't. 3) Vista will probably be able to look like XP, which many enterprise will use to reduce resource usage and to reduce retraining cost.
I doubt that there will be significant retraining cost when going to Vista if the users keep the same application and the IT services configure the Vista PC to look like XP: much more would be needed to switch to Linux.
Granted Linux has several advantages such as security, but retraining cost is definitely a problem.
You two are defining Eugenism differently: you're defining Eugenism as 'standardising on a few set of genes', the GP is defining Eugening as 'selecting genes' and when you select you can select for standardisation (likely) or for randomness: it's unlikely but it's possible.
Yes, there is a genetic concept about race, it is about breeding: when X can reproduce with Y, they belong to the same race. This is a very different concept from our cultural human races as 'black', 'white', etc.
>>No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically. >Really? Explain that to my black friend in 8th grade as he suffered during a sickle-cell anemia crisis.
Studies have shown that there are very little genetic differences between men 'of different color': sometimes two black men can be more different than a black man or a white man.
Now of course 'different' is quite difficult to measure, how do you take into account all the parts of the ADN does all the parts have the same value, etc..
That said, yes our concept of 'black race' or 'white race' is quite cultural: how could it be otherwise when it started before you could do DNA analysis!!
> Muslims and Africans of the poorest nature all exist, most without technology, or arts
-Without technology? Last I heard they are not living like monkeys, they don't have access to modern technology ok, but they still use a lot of technology. -Without arts?? Sure they don't have britney spears, but that's not a big loss. I don't know how you view these people but I can assure you that they like to sing, dance, draw, etc..
I can't quite decide if your comment is stupid or racist.. Probably both.
As for their evolutionnary success, you're quite right: evolution is about survival: they live so they are as successfull as you: some could say even more successfull as they tend to have more children (even after taking into account the childs early death): population in these country is growing..
>> I'm now of the opinion that the "managed" languages are a short-term abberation, unless they adopt an ANDF type "freeze" approach. That is where the bytecodes are pre-compiled once into machine code, just like a traditional compiler.
I've always thought that ANDF approach wasn't so good as compiling the bytecodes could take a long time for say a 100MB binary.. At least with a JIT, you only compile what you need (the loops). What's your rationale for preferring ANDF approach? It's not used very much nowadays..
Well, I tend to be understand this kind of thing: in my (big) enterprise, it took me 9 month to buy a CD writer (they were still "expensive" at around 300$ at the time), when you have to deal with that kind of stupidity (everything done by our IT department take ages, is expensive, give ridiculous little resources, etc), the temptation to say "f*, I'll do it myself" is high..
My point was more that as an administrator, your job is to communicate with the user to solve his problem, not just remove a 'rogue FTP site on the spot' because it may harm security.
>> B) Microsoft can't program worth shit. >That's silly and just not the reality.
So how do you explain that MS Office is a piece of shit which produce so much corrupted documents? For their OS they have the (valid) explanation that they don't control drivers written by HW manufacturer and that if a driver misbehave the OS can't really do something about it.
MS Office while one of the more profitable software in the world is far from being crashfree and corruption free, why is-it so?
Because they concentrate only on the number of features without trying to make them really robust (and I mean robust as flight control software which should be doable given their enormous profits).
So it even worse, it's not that they can't program well, it's that they choose not to.. Most company can say it's because they are limitated by the money they can spent that they don't produce flawless programs, but Microsoft with its huge benefits hasn't such limitation..
Bah their short term greed may perhaps be their long term loss, if they don't change.
> If one of my admins sets up a rogue FTP site "to help a user" then when I find out it's not secure and shut it down
Well, why don't you warn them before that they have made something not acceptable and find a replacement solution before 'shutting it down' (or at least warning them before doing so). If you loose say a 1Mi$ contract because you stopped the rogue FTP site without warning, I'd find normal that *you'd* be fired (not the other guys).
And finding a replacement solution is not necessarily having 10 custom FTP site around. Also you have to ask yourself, if the admin made a rogue FTP site, maybe your IT service is not responsive enough to users needs?
Note that all this doesn't prevent providing a warning to the admin who did it, that he will be fired next time he does this kind of thing (well if he did this without trying to use the 'normal' way, if he did and your services were too slow to react, well that's your damn fault, don't put the blame on others).
> Similarly, preservation of write boundaries is a useless gimmick that is rarely needed, and when it is needed, can be easily implemented in user code.
I disagree here: most application work with messages, it seems quite wasteful to loose this information in the protocol layer just to have it reconstructed by the application on both ends.
On the whole I think that this is a gain of CPU (very small sure but still a gain), and above all a way to reduce complexity: it's much easier to preserve information the network layer than to have each application recontruct this information in a different way with each time additionnal complexity and the possibility of bugs.
> People reject OpenOffice and reject even Mac, because they don't know any different.
Bah, that's a stupid generalisation, at work we use Linux and the (now old) version of OOo that we tried didn't open correctly our document (the not-so complex template used within the company is badly rendered), so we use CrossOver Office and while it works, quite often it goes berseck and use 100% CPU and it's slow too (on P4 monsters with lots of memory).
Sure, we still use Linux, but managing.doc documents (the de facto standard right now) and IE only website (which are not rare) is a pain, so there are objective reason why it's difficult to use Linux on the desktop site so stop saying that the only reason that people don't use Linux is the marketing or that it is different.
> but that it's changing too quickly, and for the worse.
Too quickly? I wonder if it didn't change even faster when people didn't know reading & writing. As for the worse, your parent probably also complained about the language you used (as mine did), so I would take this with a grain of salt..
That's the reason of course, even though I don't quite understand why people would pay such high price for those suborbital flights instead of using 'vomit comet' planes to experiment weightlessness or skydiving (ok freefalling isn't weightlessness expect for the first few second and only when you jump from a slow moving aircraft or helicopter).
I wonder why some are trying to sell suborbital fly and (almost) noone is selling 'vomit comet' rides to the normal guys: this should be a lot more affordable!
I was thinking about fencing, especially saber where it hurts quite a bit.
I remember that as a kid our fencing teacher was always saying to go fast but without weight in saber fencing, but the reality is that kids go 'banzaï' with the saber and that you have to put an additionnal sweat shirt to reduce the pain.
Being wacked with a slalom pole or a saber seems similar so it should work for the body, of course not the helmet..
Slashdot Mirror
> Why should the planets NOT be named after Roman gods, if that is historically exactly what has been done?
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Why wouldn't it be acceptable?
Why should planets/asteroids only be named after gods?
IMHO Xena is a name that more people know that all the name you gave, so it's easier to remember thus it's a better name.
As an aside comment, note that the shame of nakedness is just our current social tabou, in the past many societies didn't care about nakedness.
It's possible that mass surveillance occur in the future but frankly I doubt that it will occur in the private space: there are still laws which protect privacy.
In the public space, camera usage will increase of course.
Note that this behaviour is pretty much specific to the USA: in France we tend to have the opposite: nudity is ok, violence is not.
Which I find quite logical (but I'm French).
I suspect that the USA are like this due to religion (blech).
>Within an hour I had KDE configured to look exactly like my gnome desktop
I suspect that this 'look alike' is rather shallow: Gnome use word as buttons actions while KDE tend to use OK/Cancel (a pity I like better KDE but not this part), I doubt that you could change that..
>The U.S. however, has no national health for everyone, only for the "needy"
Maybe this is the problem, not Walmart's behaviour.
Think about it, France, Northen Europe countries have national health for everyone and it doesn't seem so bad..
> she has been usign it and happy with it (I talked to her the other day) for several weeks now.
Wait until she has to go to an IE only website, or make a resume: you'd better explain her to use PDF and not to send an OOo document, otherwise..
I hope you have explained this to her otherwise you're irresponsible.
Sure it's less work to maintain a Linux than Windows, but we're living in a Windows world you know so using Linux creates some problems sometimes, if she's a beginner, she'll have a hard time working around those problems.
Funny, this post has made me realise that MySQL is the C++ of the database: by default it's very fast but unsafe, if you use it appropriatedly you can get additionnal security but it's hard to do.
The IT world is slowly but surely using language with better security feature by default than C++, I hope the DB programmers will do the same thing, maybe we'll see less 'DB corrupted' webpages..
> 3. Small size, for smaller radar image, and/or better survivability.
Of course, the small size wouldn't never be because it comes from a reduction of the weight so also a reduction of the price to put the satellite in orbit?
And probably all space technologies are "dual use".
> that's when the opportunity will come to shop around and look at alternatives
Except that
1) Vista will come preinstalled, Linux won't.
2) Vista will run nearly all the old application perfectly, Linux won't.
3) Vista will probably be able to look like XP, which many enterprise will use to reduce resource usage and to reduce retraining cost.
I doubt that there will be significant retraining cost when going to Vista if the users keep the same application and the IT services configure the Vista PC to look like XP: much more would be needed to switch to Linux.
Granted Linux has several advantages such as security, but retraining cost is definitely a problem.
>But that's the point of Eugenics at all:
You two are defining Eugenism differently: you're defining Eugenism as 'standardising on a few set of genes', the GP is defining Eugening as 'selecting genes' and when you select you can select for standardisation (likely) or for randomness: it's unlikely but it's possible.
>>>Genetically, we have a concept called races.
Yes, there is a genetic concept about race, it is about breeding: when X can reproduce with Y, they belong to the same race.
This is a very different concept from our cultural human races as 'black', 'white', etc.
>>No, we don't. Race is cultural, and is of little interest genetically.
>Really? Explain that to my black friend in 8th grade as he suffered during a sickle-cell anemia crisis.
Studies have shown that there are very little genetic differences between men 'of different color': sometimes two black men can be more different than a black man or a white man.
Now of course 'different' is quite difficult to measure, how do you take into account all the parts of the ADN does all the parts have the same value, etc..
That said, yes our concept of 'black race' or 'white race' is quite cultural: how could it be otherwise when it started before you could do DNA analysis!!
> Muslims and Africans of the poorest nature all exist, most without technology, or arts
-Without technology?
Last I heard they are not living like monkeys, they don't have access to modern technology ok, but they still use a lot of technology.
-Without arts??
Sure they don't have britney spears, but that's not a big loss. I don't know how you view these people but I can assure you that they like to sing, dance, draw, etc..
I can't quite decide if your comment is stupid or racist.. Probably both.
As for their evolutionnary success, you're quite right: evolution is about survival: they live so they are as successfull as you: some could say even more successfull as they tend to have more children (even after taking into account the childs early death): population in these country is growing..
>> Evolution can stop. Just stop breeding and clone for reproduction.
Except that our current success rate for humane cloning is very close to 0.
> Abandoning sexual reproduction would not stop evolution. Organisms would continue to change by mutation.
You're right but it would reduce quite a lot the speed of evolution: sex is an important factor in diversity.
>>
I'm now of the opinion that the "managed" languages are a short-term abberation, unless they adopt an ANDF type "freeze" approach. That is where the bytecodes are pre-compiled once into machine code, just like a traditional compiler.
I've always thought that ANDF approach wasn't so good as compiling the bytecodes could take a long time for say a 100MB binary.. At least with a JIT, you only compile what you need (the loops).
What's your rationale for preferring ANDF approach?
It's not used very much nowadays..
No, it's the basic rule: your freedom ends where someoneelse freedom is begining.
But was your distributed JVM failsafe?
IOW what happened when one of the computer in the distributed JVM fails?
That said, I agree about the high price though.
> Or why not just fire him on the spot?
Well, I tend to be understand this kind of thing: in my (big) enterprise, it took me 9 month to buy a CD writer (they were still "expensive" at around 300$ at the time), when you have to deal with that kind of stupidity (everything done by our IT department take ages, is expensive, give ridiculous little resources, etc), the temptation to say "f*, I'll do it myself" is high..
My point was more that as an administrator, your job is to communicate with the user to solve his problem, not just remove a 'rogue FTP site on the spot' because it may harm security.
>> B) Microsoft can't program worth shit.
>That's silly and just not the reality.
So how do you explain that MS Office is a piece of shit which produce so much corrupted documents?
For their OS they have the (valid) explanation that they don't control drivers written by HW manufacturer and that if a driver misbehave the OS can't really do something about it.
MS Office while one of the more profitable software in the world is far from being crashfree and corruption free, why is-it so?
Because they concentrate only on the number of features without trying to make them really robust (and I mean robust as flight control software which should be doable given their enormous profits).
So it even worse, it's not that they can't program well, it's that they choose not to.. Most company can say it's because they are limitated by the money they can spent that they don't produce flawless programs, but Microsoft with its huge benefits hasn't such limitation..
Bah their short term greed may perhaps be their long term loss, if they don't change.
> If one of my admins sets up a rogue FTP site "to help a user" then when I find out it's not secure and shut it down
Well, why don't you warn them before that they have made something not acceptable and find a replacement solution before 'shutting it down' (or at least warning them before doing so).
If you loose say a 1Mi$ contract because you stopped the rogue FTP site without warning, I'd find normal that *you'd* be fired (not the other guys).
And finding a replacement solution is not necessarily having 10 custom FTP site around. Also you have to ask yourself, if the admin made a rogue FTP site, maybe your IT service is not responsive enough to users needs?
Note that all this doesn't prevent providing a warning to the admin who did it, that he will be fired next time he does this kind of thing (well if he did this without trying to use the 'normal' way, if he did and your services were too slow to react, well that's your damn fault, don't put the blame on others).
> Similarly, preservation of write boundaries is a useless gimmick that is rarely needed, and when it is needed, can be easily implemented in user code.
I disagree here: most application work with messages, it seems quite wasteful to loose this information in the protocol layer just to have it reconstructed by the application on both ends.
On the whole I think that this is a gain of CPU (very small sure but still a gain), and above all a way to reduce complexity: it's much easier to preserve information the network layer than to have each application recontruct this information in a different way with each time additionnal complexity and the possibility of bugs.
> People reject OpenOffice and reject even Mac, because they don't know any different.
.doc documents (the de facto standard right now) and IE only website (which are not rare) is a pain, so there are objective reason why it's difficult to use Linux on the desktop site so stop saying that the only reason that people don't use Linux is the marketing or that it is different.
Bah, that's a stupid generalisation, at work we use Linux and the (now old) version of OOo that we tried didn't open correctly our document (the not-so complex template used within the company is badly rendered), so we use CrossOver Office and while it works, quite often it goes berseck and use 100% CPU and it's slow too (on P4 monsters with lots of memory).
Sure, we still use Linux, but managing
> but that it's changing too quickly, and for the worse.
Too quickly? I wonder if it didn't change even faster when people didn't know reading & writing.
As for the worse, your parent probably also complained about the language you used (as mine did), so I would take this with a grain of salt..
>The ultimate thrill ride?
That's the reason of course, even though I don't quite understand why people would pay such high price for those suborbital flights instead of using 'vomit comet' planes to experiment weightlessness or skydiving (ok freefalling isn't weightlessness expect for the first few second and only when you jump from a slow moving aircraft or helicopter).
I wonder why some are trying to sell suborbital fly and (almost) noone is selling 'vomit comet' rides to the normal guys: this should be a lot more affordable!
I was thinking about fencing, especially saber where it hurts quite a bit.
I remember that as a kid our fencing teacher was always saying to go fast but without weight in saber fencing, but the reality is that kids go 'banzaï' with the saber and that you have to put an additionnal sweat shirt to reduce the pain.
Being wacked with a slalom pole or a saber seems similar so it should work for the body, of course not the helmet..