This really amazes me. The inmates are running the asylum, I guess. I really don't get why these creationists are so sure that the Bible says that evolution can't have taken place. Denying the validity of evolution, and furthermore denying the right to evaluate its validity to students, is ridiculous and dangerous. The evidence for evolution is even stronger than for other widely accepted theories, but its imagined threatening quality makes it the target of people who can't tolerate the idea of humans and apes having a common ancestor. Give it up, guys! Take a trip to the Galapagos and look at the finches!
This is obviously no great move, but it's not too harmful either, because it says: (b) The Working Group shall undertake this review in the context of current Administration Internet policy, which includes support for industry self-regulation where possible, technology-neutral laws and regulations, and an appreciation of the Internet as an important medium both domestically and internationally for commerce and free speech. So it will be within that context, like it says, and hopefully the Working Group won't say anything stupid about free speech.
Reminds me of the scheme I read about a few months ago, where by sending in $20 or so, you could get your very own plot of land on the Moon! Just saying you're a country doesn't mean you are. Besides If I'm going to participate in a "virtual country" as a demonstration of nerd power or whatever, I want more power than picking the friggin' national anthem.
Reminds me of the scheme I red about a few months ago, where by sending in $20 or so, you could get your very own plot of land on the Moon! Just saying you're a country doesn't mean you are. Besides If I'm going to participate in a "virtual country" as a demonstration of nerd power or whatever, I want more power than picking the friggin' national anthem.
I'm not. I am not against good-looking GUIs (I use Enlightenment), and I would not immediately reject the idea on ground of speed and processor power, because toady's computers are ridiculously powerful, but I don't think 3D would be any advance. Sure, it would look awesome (remember Jurassic Park (the movie)?), but what would it do for you? It would be sort of nice for a file manager, so you could see the relationships between files, but that would only require one program to be rewritten. Other than that, it would just make things unnecessarily more complicated. If VR ever happens, then maybe there would be a point. But monitors are 2D and are likely to remain so, and it's just hard to think about 3D things. What are you gonna do, have 35 Netscape windows stacked in chronological order? I fail to see any advantage.
I agree with everything you've said, but I also wish there was support for a wider range of video hardware. Of course, moving away from X would make this problem a hundred times worse. So I don't think there's any reason to ditch X either. Since the advent of pretty window managers, it's everything I need.
I agree with everything you've said, but I also wish there was support for a wider range of video hardware. Of course, moving away from X would make this problem a hundred times worse. So I don't think there's any reason to ditch X either. Since the advent of pretty GUIs, it's everything I need.
Re:Good Thing/Bad Thing?
on
LinModems?
·
· Score: 1
Yes, Software Modems == Bad, but More Users == Good, as long as they understand the Linux philosophy. Therefore, Cheap Hardware == Cheap, especially since Linux is still at the point where people who want to use it aren't grandmas. They're still computer-literate, just not hackers. Since they're computer-literate, they're not buing their first computer. They're maybe buying a cheap one just to play with Linux. So this drives down the cost.
It's Nasa's equipment; they deserve to keep the profits. Another matter is how much of their resources they should be allowed to spend on nonscientific goals. I think that should be limited.
Congress has a history of being shortsighted. They hardly give Nasa any money, because the scientific and practical returns are not immediate. Same with Amtrak: it's fairly clear that a ubiquitous rail system would alleviate traffic and pollution problems, but it costs too much money in the short term.
I notice that among some other things, the new kernel will have at least some support for Winmodems. We all know that they're crap, but it's good news anyway, because lots of newbies don't know that. There's a lot of scorn among Linux users for anyone whose skills are anything below Guru. This is going to have to stop. A lot of people use Winmodems, and anything we do to make it easier for people with low-end hardware that the guy at Circuit City told them would be fine is great -- GNOME, Winmodem support, wheel mouse support, popular programs e.g. WordPerfect & Netscape. So this is a Good Thing (TM).
When I was in middle school, my friend Eli claimed that he and another kid, Chris, had built a rocket launcher using PVC tubing and Estes rocket engines. Frankly, I was inclined to believe him. They were that kind of guys.
You've managed to alienate the Linux/Internet/open-source community. Uh, no, Eric. Maybe AOL has, and maybe it hasn't. It's not for you to say. Regardless of whatever delusion you've been suffering under for the past few years, you're nothing but a gun nut who has no right to claim to represent the community. Maybe RMS does, but you certainly don't.
You're probably right about the same-age thing. But I said *in moderation*. I'm well aware of drunk driving. In most European countris, the drinking age is low, and because of the pervasiveness of alcohol, AFAIK there is not a bigger incidence of problems caused by drinking. People grow up with booze and don't feel the need to get piss-drunk at parties.
Wag the Dog was R! All it had was about a million uses of the F-word. No sex, no gore. Granted, the idea of total dishonesty on the part of the media and politicians is a little hard to stomach, but nothing a 9-year-old can't handle. A nine-year-old probably wouldn't understand everything, but he might, and even if not, he would still enjy himself. Replace he with she if it suits you. And it's not like everyone hasn't been hearing & using the F-word since they were 8.
I was recently in England, with my mom and other members of my chorus. We went to lots of pubs, and although I could have bought cigarettes (I'm 16, which is how old you have to be), I couldn't drink (the drinking age is 18 there). So in other words, I can kill myself, but I can't have a half-pint and enjoy myself. I don't see anything wrong with drinking in moderation, whereas smoking is repulsive as well as toxic.
I don't see what appalled you in what I wrote. I agree that "It is not the job of the government to play moral gardian." Although there is governmental pressure on the theaters to do this, they're doing it on their own because they wanna make money, even though it's wrong.
They were NOT socialists. They were Stalinists. You could even call them Communists, even though they weren't. I did know the difference between anarchists and libertarians. I should have made more distinction. The difference between socialists and communists, stalinists, etc. is even more dramatic. I do not advocate censorship, repression, nationalisation of all businesses, or some of the other hallmarks of Stalinists. I do advocate welfare, social justice, environmental protection, privacy rights, strong encryption, socialized health care,, high taxes for the rich and low taxes for the poor, and unionisation.
Damn straight. I'm a geek, and I'm an old-fashioned socialist/liberal. I agree with what he's saying, but that doesn't mean I'm libertarian. I think libertarians and anarchists have not really sat down and thought about what they're advocating. If you don't want a government or some kind of social structure, who's going to save the environment? Who's going to build roads? Who's going to prevent the Mafia from running everything (ahem, Russia)? That doesn't mean I don't think there should be limits on the government, but getting rid of it entirely is not a very good idea. Besides, I don't see that libertarianism has much to do with corporate policies.
But when you have kids in an unstable family, where the parents don't teach a good sense of values and morals in the first place, the addition of gatuitous [sic] violence doesn't help.
Uh, I guess, but it doesn't hurt, either. People have been doing fucked-up things (oh! your virgin ears (eyes?)) for a long, long, time. Much longer than media have existed.
Also, a quibble. I would hesitate before saying the US is the freest country in the world. I am American, but I visited Holland a couple of weeks ago, and they are a helluva lot freer than we are. They laugh at our foolish American prudishness. I have been watching an average of about fifty movies per year, of all types, for the past few years (I'm 16). I am still strongly pacifist, strongly feminist (I am male), and strongly opposed to discrimination, etc., even though I have seen a lot of sex and a lot of violence on-screen, and played Quake 3 a bit. My morals are in pretty good shape, thank you, even though the weak-minded will point to the cuss words I have used in this post as evidence that they aren't.
I do not agree that we have a "bad situation" in terms of morals, or that pop culture affects that meaningfully. We certainly have a bad situation in terms of poverty, religious and political extremism, intolerance, and many other issues. It could just as easily be argued, in fact more convincingly, that MTV and similar media have shortened our national attention span, and that CNN and the other cable news channels have created or encouraged our appetite for scandal and instant results to political events.
Instead of bitching about the government, why don't you take a look at the bigger picture, and issues such as the general degradation of the quality of life in the freest country in the world?
Uh, that's what we're doing. Censorship is a fundamental issue to any society. Do you think we'd be much of a country without the First Amendment? Without it, we would not have any meaningful discourse, and Whitewater would still be secret. Once you censor one thing based upon the principle that "it's in the national interest," you can censor anything else, and it makes little difference whether the "dangerous" ideas are societal or political in nature. Any discourse on the Sexual Revolution of the '60s could have been censored on grounds or prurience.
I agree. Here in good ole Amurrica, the U.S. of A., redneckes seem to be the dominant life-form. Nobody knows what a Socialist is -- they think it's the same as a Communist. Plus, they think they're all bad. Never mind that most first-world countries are socialist, e.g. Holland, England to some extent, etc.
I completely agree. I don't know what makes people so riled up and flamey. They're THE SAME! Well, almost. Different licenses, same goals. And the licenses aren't even that different. I also use Linux, and I also would not mind seeing FreeBSD get more hype.
I sort of agree. I don't think a good WYSIWIG word processor is too much to ask, and I don't think that you're not a real man unless you use LaTeX, but I do think that suites are a waste. I use WP7 Suite when I happen to be in Windows, and it includes Quattro Pro, Presentations, and God knows what-all other crap that nobody wants, but they bundle because they know that nobody wants it, but at least they can get another $20 for. I like Emacs, but I'm not about to use it to write essays in.
I want to know that about Motif and Qt, too. I use Netscape, which looks like it uses Motif, which is ugly, and I also play ksame, the KDE version of SameGame, both in Enlightenment/GNOME. There's a Gnome version of SameGame, but I don't like it. Anyway, I want all my programs to look the same. I'm not a programmer, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to write a script to convert Qt themes to GTK.
Slashdot Mirror
This really amazes me. The inmates are running the asylum, I guess. I really don't get why these creationists are so sure that the Bible says that evolution can't have taken place. Denying the validity of evolution, and furthermore denying the right to evaluate its validity to students, is ridiculous and dangerous. The evidence for evolution is even stronger than for other widely accepted theories, but its imagined threatening quality makes it the target of people who can't tolerate the idea of humans and apes having a common ancestor.
Give it up, guys! Take a trip to the Galapagos and look at the finches!
This is obviously no great move, but it's not too harmful either, because it says:
(b) The Working Group shall undertake this review in the context of current Administration Internet policy, which includes support for industry self-regulation where possible, technology-neutral laws and regulations, and an appreciation of the Internet as an important medium both domestically and internationally for commerce and free speech.
So it will be within that context, like it says, and hopefully the Working Group won't say anything stupid about free speech.
Reminds me of the scheme I read about a few months ago, where by sending in $20 or so, you could get your very own plot of land on the Moon! Just saying you're a country doesn't mean you are. Besides If I'm going to participate in a "virtual country" as a demonstration of nerd power or whatever, I want more power than picking the friggin' national anthem.
Reminds me of the scheme I red about a few months ago, where by sending in $20 or so, you could get your very own plot of land on the Moon! Just saying you're a country doesn't mean you are. Besides If I'm going to participate in a "virtual country" as a demonstration of nerd power or whatever, I want more power than picking the friggin' national anthem.
I'm not. I am not against good-looking GUIs (I use Enlightenment), and I would not immediately reject the idea on ground of speed and processor power, because toady's computers are ridiculously powerful, but I don't think 3D would be any advance. Sure, it would look awesome (remember Jurassic Park (the movie)?), but what would it do for you? It would be sort of nice for a file manager, so you could see the relationships between files, but that would only require one program to be rewritten. Other than that, it would just make things unnecessarily more complicated. If VR ever happens, then maybe there would be a point. But monitors are 2D and are likely to remain so, and it's just hard to think about 3D things. What are you gonna do, have 35 Netscape windows stacked in chronological order? I fail to see any advantage.
I agree with everything you've said, but I also wish there was support for a wider range of video hardware. Of course, moving away from X would make this problem a hundred times worse. So I don't think there's any reason to ditch X either. Since the advent of pretty window managers, it's everything I need.
I agree with everything you've said, but I also wish there was support for a wider range of video hardware. Of course, moving away from X would make this problem a hundred times worse. So I don't think there's any reason to ditch X either. Since the advent of pretty GUIs, it's everything I need.
Yes, Software Modems == Bad, but More Users == Good, as long as they understand the Linux philosophy. Therefore, Cheap Hardware == Cheap, especially since Linux is still at the point where people who want to use it aren't grandmas. They're still computer-literate, just not hackers. Since they're computer-literate, they're not buing their first computer. They're maybe buying a cheap one just to play with Linux. So this drives down the cost.
It's Nasa's equipment; they deserve to keep the profits. Another matter is how much of their resources they should be allowed to spend on nonscientific goals. I think that should be limited.
Congress has a history of being shortsighted. They hardly give Nasa any money, because the scientific and practical returns are not immediate. Same with Amtrak: it's fairly clear that a ubiquitous rail system would alleviate traffic and pollution problems, but it costs too much money in the short term.
I notice that among some other things, the new kernel will have at least some support for Winmodems. We all know that they're crap, but it's good news anyway, because lots of newbies don't know that. There's a lot of scorn among Linux users for anyone whose skills are anything below Guru. This is going to have to stop. A lot of people use Winmodems, and anything we do to make it easier for people with low-end hardware that the guy at Circuit City told them would be fine is great -- GNOME, Winmodem support, wheel mouse support, popular programs e.g. WordPerfect & Netscape. So this is a Good Thing (TM).
When I was in middle school, my friend Eli claimed that he and another kid, Chris, had built a rocket launcher using PVC tubing and Estes rocket engines. Frankly, I was inclined to believe him. They were that kind of guys.
My dad teaches at Caltech, and published this paper on his website.
You've managed to alienate the Linux/Internet/open-source community. Uh, no, Eric. Maybe AOL has, and maybe it hasn't. It's not for you to say. Regardless of whatever delusion you've been suffering under for the past few years, you're nothing but a gun nut who has no right to claim to represent the community. Maybe RMS does, but you certainly don't.
You're probably right about the same-age thing. But I said *in moderation*. I'm well aware of drunk driving. In most European countris, the drinking age is low, and because of the pervasiveness of alcohol, AFAIK there is not a bigger incidence of problems caused by drinking. People grow up with booze and don't feel the need to get piss-drunk at parties.
Wag the Dog was R! All it had was about a million uses of the F-word. No sex, no gore. Granted, the idea of total dishonesty on the part of the media and politicians is a little hard to stomach, but nothing a 9-year-old can't handle. A nine-year-old probably wouldn't understand everything, but he might, and even if not, he would still enjy himself. Replace he with she if it suits you. And it's not like everyone hasn't been hearing & using the F-word since they were 8.
I was recently in England, with my mom and other members of my chorus. We went to lots of pubs, and although I could have bought cigarettes (I'm 16, which is how old you have to be), I couldn't drink (the drinking age is 18 there). So in other words, I can kill myself, but I can't have a half-pint and enjoy myself. I don't see anything wrong with drinking in moderation, whereas smoking is repulsive as well as toxic.
I don't see what appalled you in what I wrote. I agree that "It is not the job of the government to play moral gardian." Although there is governmental pressure on the theaters to do this, they're doing it on their own because they wanna make money, even though it's wrong.
They were NOT socialists. They were Stalinists. You could even call them Communists, even though they weren't. I did know the difference between anarchists and libertarians. I should have made more distinction. The difference between socialists and communists, stalinists, etc. is even more dramatic. I do not advocate censorship, repression, nationalisation of all businesses, or some of the other hallmarks of Stalinists. I do advocate welfare, social justice, environmental protection, privacy rights, strong encryption, socialized health care,, high taxes for the rich and low taxes for the poor, and unionisation.
Damn straight. I'm a geek, and I'm an old-fashioned socialist/liberal. I agree with what he's saying, but that doesn't mean I'm libertarian. I think libertarians and anarchists have not really sat down and thought about what they're advocating. If you don't want a government or some kind of social structure, who's going to save the environment? Who's going to build roads? Who's going to prevent the Mafia from running everything (ahem, Russia)? That doesn't mean I don't think there should be limits on the government, but getting rid of it entirely is not a very good idea. Besides, I don't see that libertarianism has much to do with corporate policies.
Uh, I guess, but it doesn't hurt, either. People have been doing fucked-up things (oh! your virgin ears (eyes?)) for a long, long, time. Much longer than media have existed.
Also, a quibble. I would hesitate before saying the US is the freest country in the world. I am American, but I visited Holland a couple of weeks ago, and they are a helluva lot freer than we are. They laugh at our foolish American prudishness. I have been watching an average of about fifty movies per year, of all types, for the past few years (I'm 16). I am still strongly pacifist, strongly feminist (I am male), and strongly opposed to discrimination, etc., even though I have seen a lot of sex and a lot of violence on-screen, and played Quake 3 a bit. My morals are in pretty good shape, thank you, even though the weak-minded will point to the cuss words I have used in this post as evidence that they aren't.
I do not agree that we have a "bad situation" in terms of morals, or that pop culture affects that meaningfully. We certainly have a bad situation in terms of poverty, religious and political extremism, intolerance, and many other issues. It could just as easily be argued, in fact more convincingly, that MTV and similar media have shortened our national attention span, and that CNN and the other cable news channels have created or encouraged our appetite for scandal and instant results to political events.
Instead of bitching about the government, why don't you take a look at the bigger picture, and issues such as the general degradation of the quality of life in the freest country in the world?
Uh, that's what we're doing. Censorship is a fundamental issue to any society. Do you think we'd be much of a country without the First Amendment? Without it, we would not have any meaningful discourse, and Whitewater would still be secret. Once you censor one thing based upon the principle that "it's in the national interest," you can censor anything else, and it makes little difference whether the "dangerous" ideas are societal or political in nature. Any discourse on the Sexual Revolution of the '60s could have been censored on grounds or prurience.
I agree. Here in good ole Amurrica, the U.S. of A., redneckes seem to be the dominant life-form. Nobody knows what a Socialist is -- they think it's the same as a Communist. Plus, they think they're all bad. Never mind that most first-world countries are socialist, e.g. Holland, England to some extent, etc.
I agree. It's sometimes pretty hard to figure out where to find the thing you want to change.
I completely agree. I don't know what makes people so riled up and flamey. They're THE SAME! Well, almost. Different licenses, same goals. And the licenses aren't even that different. I also use Linux, and I also would not mind seeing FreeBSD get more hype.
I sort of agree. I don't think a good WYSIWIG word processor is too much to ask, and I don't think that you're not a real man unless you use LaTeX, but I do think that suites are a waste. I use WP7 Suite when I happen to be in Windows, and it includes Quattro Pro, Presentations, and God knows what-all other crap that nobody wants, but they bundle because they know that nobody wants it, but at least they can get another $20 for. I like Emacs, but I'm not about to use it to write essays in.
I want to know that about Motif and Qt, too. I use Netscape, which looks like it uses Motif, which is ugly, and I also play ksame, the KDE version of SameGame, both in Enlightenment/GNOME. There's a Gnome version of SameGame, but I don't like it. Anyway, I want all my programs to look the same. I'm not a programmer, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to write a script to convert Qt themes to GTK.