they don't understand evolution. in fact its a lot like compound interest; start with a little and wait a long time and eventually you'll have something. the following statement, for example, amounts to precisely that in my eyes.
'one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.'
thats all it takes. and yes, given enough time, they could turn into some sexually-reproductive organism, which, to use my earlier example, would be like getting monthly compounding;-)
i frankly see no reason for this retraction. there is no 'ammunition' here in any sense.
mr goat, i think its rather presumptuous of you to assume that mr ballmer doesn't get it. i also think that in light of this his commitment to traditional corporate culture is greater than you are admitting. he has no choice, none whatsoever, other than to pursue the course he is on. for one thing, his retirement depends on it. but for another thing, this really is about truth, justice and the american way.
i've always been curious about the communist trials in the 50's and everything that went on around them. we fought an ideological war against them, didn't we? and if thats the case, and i think it is, i'm' rather curious as to what were the reasons that our ideology was better than theirs? because they were pinkos? godless? no on has ever explained the qualitative advantages of capitalism to me (although i can expound on the disadvantages of communism, its not the same thing).
fear mongering, then, is the tactic that was used then. much as it is now. this is better for you: don't ask any questions. and no one did. which is interesting, because the ones who were doing the fear-mongering were the only ones who had anything to lose. much as it is now.
no, mr ballmer is very well aware of all this. and his speech smacks of an attempt at implicit understanding with all other like-minded technology businessmen that they are better off in the ecology of proft and bottom lines, and microsoft hegemony, of course.
there were other operating systems, ones that ran on x86 hardware. they were better than windows, too. the company that created one of them desperately tried to sell dual-boot systems (they had an excellent boot manager, for which i left the OS installed long after it had any relevance). as far the argument that they will be gone in 10 years, i find it highly unlikely; the barriers to entry are too many.
why didn't they get a manufacturer to ship dual-boot systems with their OS? because microsoft's OS licensing policy forbids it, it not by outright language, then by punitive cost measures. this was part of the focus of the department of justice's antitrust suit. as a matter of fact, even beige box companies used to force a copy of windows on individuals who purchased an entire system. microsoft's corporate policy is to force the entire world, if possible, to have only one choice. excuse me, let me correct myself; one choice in several flavors (think all the different vista incarnations that will be paraded in front of any future antitrust action as evidence of innovation and variety).
did i hear anyone say BeOS? no, i didn't think so:-(
no, i'm not going to say that living in the US is worse than living in China. it isn't. but i don't think thats the point of most of the posters who responded to you. their point is that we pretend we don't do anything of things when we do, whenever any issue of National ________ Security arises (fill in the blank, try petroleum for starters, or remove the blanks entirely).
no, living in china is definitely worse. but i'm more interested in trends. things are trending towards China in the US; this started after 9/11, but it actually deteriorated as time went on. why? well, look at the actions of karl rove; never cede power to your opponent if you can retain it. the 'republican century' is a quip that i believe can be ascribed to him.
now extend that. make sure that your state is never challenged. certainly not in the way that myanmar's rulers are currently being challenged. turkey's leaders were challenged once; they lost. so they threw a 'coup by memorandum'. and for that george bush calls them a 'democracy'.
so, in case i haven't made plain, thats what we're talking about, a government or style of government that can never be changed, at least not from the point of view of the current government.
answer me one question. not that i'm a communist (i'm not), but if it really was such an inferior system, what was everyone afraid of?
the problem is that i'm so far left, the liberals here seem like right-wingers. but everything in my post is true. i'm in favor of very liberal fiscal policy combined with very hawkish foreign policy. no more tax cuts, lots of R&D. is that so hard to understand?
i think you, my friend, are the only person who even comes close to understanding the scenario. the folks in boston (i lived there for 12 years), have this overwhelming sense of guilt about 9/11. not to mention the fact that security there has been breached in a rather serious manner since.
but back to the point; i live in new york, and my biggest nightmare is a terrorist team with a nuke on a hatteras 42, or on a hijacked blimp, and they set it off right over, or next to, wall street, because thats their target. i can see wall street out my window, its no more than 2 miles line-of-sight. and if i have to live in new york there's no place else i'd rather live. i nevertheless feel like i'm playing russian roulette.
these are barbarians; they destroyed 1200 year old religious monuments because they felt offended. but after having taken war to them (afghanistan), you can't ever go back to a state of peace in this struggle. that said, do you really think some 20-something chick asking about an arrival is a terrorist? was there anyone *big* on the plane she asked about? no? then whats the deal? i myself have taken artworks overseas that could have been mistaken for bombs. the first time i took it through security it was no big deal. after my flight was delayed for two hours and i went to have a cigarette i had a problem coming back in. the object was swabbed, etc. and after five minutes, if that, i was allowed to proceed.
hi tech won't win this war, satellites won't this war, only human intelligence will. its time we put the emphasis on human intelligence.
this would appear to be based on latent semantic analysis. see the wikipedia article for some of the math. the group behind much of the work in this field are at U of Colorado. they have a site here.
with Ubuntu you have a choice of three different NVidia drivers; new, normal, and legacy. you should probably use normal 'nvidia-kernel-' & 'nvidia-glx-'. if, on the other hand, you have a brand spanking new card, you will need the beta drivers direct from nvidia and you will have to install them yourself. in the event you choose to go that road do *not* install the linux-restricted-stuff - it will interfere with the drivers, and remember to re-install the drivers from recovery mode every time you upgrade the kernel more than a minor version (Ubuntu point releases, ie. 15-27 ->16-31 won't cause a problem).
did you read 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood? have you looked at population growth rates in the western world? in germany the government sends you a check once a month depending on the number of children you have. personally, i don't have to stretch my mind too far to imagination it.
i don't know where to begin, either you're a total idiot, or just another ditto-head, and frankly i can't tell the difference anymore. while your rights and liberties are being slowly^H^H^Hrapidly eroded, you sit back and say, "if you don't like it, leave." perhaps you'd care to comment on adequate controls in government as they apply to electronic communications by the executive branch staff? or even more so, on the number of executive orders made by the current administration?
foreigners, nationals of a country widely considered to be the most corrupt in the first world, have said to me, " its not that we're any more corrupt than you are, its just that you're professionals at it."
trust me, when it comes to electronic communications, you are every bit as monitored here as in china. why don't you google 'network packet monitor index'. the vendors returned by such a search will be those that contracted to the intelligence agencies years ago; the chinese use equipment cloned from such specifications.
and while you're on the subject of forced abortions, why don't you think about the possibly of forced pregnancy.
i have answered a similar question recently. you mention Dawkins, but you don't mention Dawkin's discussion of heredity being the defining quality of life, and then going on to discuss the work of Sol Spiegelman. look him up, he's in wikipedia.
no, its not a definitive theory, but i think its a little stronger than very tentative speculation; the origin of life could really be as simple as the replication of a short strand of RNA.
just reading this, because next month, or next year, some enterprising young congressman/senator/governor is going to suggest the same thing. and that folks, will be the day i leave the US for good, not that it might not happen sooner.
this has nothing to do with the security of the populace, and everything to do with making them afraid of ever doing anything to threaten the government. thats its only value. your credit rating? (by the way, those of you who don't live somewhere like new york might find it interesting that your credit rating is checked when you rent an apartment, itself another form of control, because those same people you're renting from can harm your credit rating by claiming unpaid/late rent, if for some reason they don't like you or you complain. it can be fixed, but the burden is on you).
i won't even think about what happens when you combine this with the installation of readers at polling places.
others have replied that life doesn't require a cell to automatically spring up, so i'll leave that part. one of the most compelling arguments for 'life' is that of Sol Spiegelman; do some research on Spiegelman's Monster. Richard Dawkins, in his book 'The Ancestor's Tale,' gives heredity as the single defining element of life. as far an explanation for the complexity of what we currently know as a cell, there is an ample amount of evidence for various cellular organs having been created by co-opted viruses. as has also been mentioned by others here, a cell requires a number of different constituents, even without going into things like mitochondria; see Harold Morowitz's book 'Mayonnaise and the Origins of Life", wherein he discusses the role of lipopolysaccharides in cell walls.
in short, life is a fairly improbable event, but its not infinitely improbable. its more like rather unlikely. when it comes to being alone, if you mean what are the odds that there are other sentient beings, its even lower. however, at the risk of veering into the metaphysical, perhaps you should peruse some of Rupert Sheldrake's work; anything that happens once increases the likelihood it will happen again.
Re:How will the FSF/GNU handle the GPL 3 revolt?
on
GCC 4.2.1 Released
·
· Score: 1
key contributors. key. the minds behind every algorithmic, procedural and computational operation in the galaxy, and you put them in a room with a slashbot?
when i decided to try linux, i tried Suse. i didn't like it. i tried FreeBSD, the install was as complicated as Solaris. i wound up using Sorcery/SourceMage.
now before i have to put on my flame retardant suit, let me qualify my statements. i had used MacOS until 7.11, and would not upgrade to 7.5. i had used NT since 3.5 (thats not a typo, i had to reinstall at least 3 times dues to kernel corruption), and once the hotfixes started coming out it was stable. i used BeOS, but when it reached the end of its life, just before the Dano 5.0 release, i decided to try linux. this meant a triple-boot system, using partitions on different discs, and using BeOS compliant hardware, much of which required special drivers just to work under NT.
Sorcery was the first distro that let me do it the way i wanted to do it, and SourceMage has continued that tradition. when considering a distro for a new computer, i tried Ubuntu 6.06 LTS release. what impressed me is that i was able to run the live CD on my work laptop, with all hardware recognized, and then install it to an external USB drive, and dual-boot it. i still run SourceMage on my servers, and probably always will. i know that its a PITA for all but advanced users, but that PITA contributed greatly to my knowledge of linux, and without it i wouldn't be able to: build a kernel; alter init; fix problematic program builds; and in general configure Ubuntu to my liking.
i recommend Ubuntu to anyone willing to try linux, burning CDs for them if they don't have broadband. and in my opinion thats why its become the popular choice.
this was precisely the case in Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where WayForward's first successful software product was software that would allow you posit an outcome and then describe how you would get there. Richard MacDuff can actually tell which version of the software is in use by various agencies by which bugs are exposed via their logic. Mr Adams' particularly surreal type of science fiction is the last thing i would have expected to come true.
Slashdot Mirror
they don't understand evolution. in fact its a lot like compound interest; start with a little and wait a long time and eventually you'll have something. the following statement, for example, amounts to precisely that in my eyes.
;-)
'one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.'
thats all it takes. and yes, given enough time, they could turn into some sexually-reproductive organism, which, to use my earlier example, would be like getting monthly compounding
i frankly see no reason for this retraction. there is no 'ammunition' here in any sense.
you'd be very surpised what you can find in a dumpster. try the ones near the dorms of any major university during the 3rd & 4th weeks of may.
i hate to be the one to bring it up, but Ubuntu 7.10 won't cost me a dime...
mr goat, i think its rather presumptuous of you to assume that mr ballmer doesn't get it. i also think that in light of this his commitment to traditional corporate culture is greater than you are admitting. he has no choice, none whatsoever, other than to pursue the course he is on. for one thing, his retirement depends on it. but for another thing, this really is about truth, justice and the american way.
i've always been curious about the communist trials in the 50's and everything that went on around them. we fought an ideological war against them, didn't we? and if thats the case, and i think it is, i'm' rather curious as to what were the reasons that our ideology was better than theirs? because they were pinkos? godless? no on has ever explained the qualitative advantages of capitalism to me (although i can expound on the disadvantages of communism, its not the same thing).
fear mongering, then, is the tactic that was used then. much as it is now. this is better for you: don't ask any questions. and no one did. which is interesting, because the ones who were doing the fear-mongering were the only ones who had anything to lose. much as it is now.
no, mr ballmer is very well aware of all this. and his speech smacks of an attempt at implicit understanding with all other like-minded technology businessmen that they are better off in the ecology of proft and bottom lines, and microsoft hegemony, of course.
there were other operating systems, ones that ran on x86 hardware. they were better than windows, too. the company that created one of them desperately tried to sell dual-boot systems (they had an excellent boot manager, for which i left the OS installed long after it had any relevance). as far the argument that they will be gone in 10 years, i find it highly unlikely; the barriers to entry are too many.
:-(
why didn't they get a manufacturer to ship dual-boot systems with their OS? because microsoft's OS licensing policy forbids it, it not by outright language, then by punitive cost measures. this was part of the focus of the department of justice's antitrust suit. as a matter of fact, even beige box companies used to force a copy of windows on individuals who purchased an entire system. microsoft's corporate policy is to force the entire world, if possible, to have only one choice. excuse me, let me correct myself; one choice in several flavors (think all the different vista incarnations that will be paraded in front of any future antitrust action as evidence of innovation and variety).
did i hear anyone say BeOS? no, i didn't think so
have a look at this user's first comment on this story here
no, i'm not going to say that living in the US is worse than living in China. it isn't. but i don't think thats the point of most of the posters who responded to you. their point is that we pretend we don't do anything of things when we do, whenever any issue of National ________ Security arises (fill in the blank, try petroleum for starters, or remove the blanks entirely).
no, living in china is definitely worse. but i'm more interested in trends. things are trending towards China in the US; this started after 9/11, but it actually deteriorated as time went on. why? well, look at the actions of karl rove; never cede power to your opponent if you can retain it. the 'republican century' is a quip that i believe can be ascribed to him.
now extend that. make sure that your state is never challenged. certainly not in the way that myanmar's rulers are currently being challenged. turkey's leaders were challenged once; they lost. so they threw a 'coup by memorandum'. and for that george bush calls them a 'democracy'.
so, in case i haven't made plain, thats what we're talking about, a government or style of government that can never be changed, at least not from the point of view of the current government.
answer me one question. not that i'm a communist (i'm not), but if it really was such an inferior system, what was everyone afraid of?
the problem is that i'm so far left, the liberals here seem like right-wingers. but everything in my post is true. i'm in favor of very liberal fiscal policy combined with very hawkish foreign policy. no more tax cuts, lots of R&D. is that so hard to understand?
i think you, my friend, are the only person who even comes close to understanding the scenario. the folks in boston (i lived there for 12 years), have this overwhelming sense of guilt about 9/11. not to mention the fact that security there has been breached in a rather serious manner since.
but back to the point; i live in new york, and my biggest nightmare is a terrorist team with a nuke on a hatteras 42, or on a hijacked blimp, and they set it off right over, or next to, wall street, because thats their target. i can see wall street out my window, its no more than 2 miles line-of-sight. and if i have to live in new york there's no place else i'd rather live. i nevertheless feel like i'm playing russian roulette.
these are barbarians; they destroyed 1200 year old religious monuments because they felt offended. but after having taken war to them (afghanistan), you can't ever go back to a state of peace in this struggle. that said, do you really think some 20-something chick asking about an arrival is a terrorist? was there anyone *big* on the plane she asked about? no? then whats the deal? i myself have taken artworks overseas that could have been mistaken for bombs. the first time i took it through security it was no big deal. after my flight was delayed for two hours and i went to have a cigarette i had a problem coming back in. the object was swabbed, etc. and after five minutes, if that, i was allowed to proceed.
hi tech won't win this war, satellites won't this war, only human intelligence will. its time we put the emphasis on human intelligence.
this would appear to be based on latent semantic analysis. see the wikipedia article for some of the math. the group behind much of the work in this field are at U of Colorado. they have a site here.
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
at the risk of being offtopic:
with Ubuntu you have a choice of three different NVidia drivers; new, normal, and legacy. you should probably use normal 'nvidia-kernel-' & 'nvidia-glx-'. if, on the other hand, you have a brand spanking new card, you will need the beta drivers direct from nvidia and you will have to install them yourself. in the event you choose to go that road do *not* install the linux-restricted-stuff - it will interfere with the drivers, and remember to re-install the drivers from recovery mode every time you upgrade the kernel more than a minor version (Ubuntu point releases, ie. 15-27 ->16-31 won't cause a problem).
did you read 'The Handmaid's Tale' by Margaret Atwood? have you looked at population growth rates in the western world? in germany the government sends you a check once a month depending on the number of children you have. personally, i don't have to stretch my mind too far to imagination it.
i don't know where to begin, either you're a total idiot, or just another ditto-head, and frankly i can't tell the difference anymore. while your rights and liberties are being slowly^H^H^Hrapidly eroded, you sit back and say, "if you don't like it, leave." perhaps you'd care to comment on adequate controls in government as they apply to electronic communications by the executive branch staff? or even more so, on the number of executive orders made by the current administration?
foreigners, nationals of a country widely considered to be the most corrupt in the first world, have said to me, " its not that we're any more corrupt than you are, its just that you're professionals at it."
trust me, when it comes to electronic communications, you are every bit as monitored here as in china. why don't you google 'network packet monitor index'. the vendors returned by such a search will be those that contracted to the intelligence agencies years ago; the chinese use equipment cloned from such specifications.
and while you're on the subject of forced abortions, why don't you think about the possibly of forced pregnancy.
i have answered a similar question recently. you mention Dawkins, but you don't mention Dawkin's discussion of heredity being the defining quality of life, and then going on to discuss the work of Sol Spiegelman. look him up, he's in wikipedia.
no, its not a definitive theory, but i think its a little stronger than very tentative speculation; the origin of life could really be as simple as the replication of a short strand of RNA.
you can't post and moderate, and i don't have any mod points right now anyway, but if i did, i would have modded you 'funny'.
just reading this, because next month, or next year, some enterprising young congressman/senator/governor is going to suggest the same thing. and that folks, will be the day i leave the US for good, not that it might not happen sooner.
this has nothing to do with the security of the populace, and everything to do with making them afraid of ever doing anything to threaten the government. thats its only value. your credit rating? (by the way, those of you who don't live somewhere like new york might find it interesting that your credit rating is checked when you rent an apartment, itself another form of control, because those same people you're renting from can harm your credit rating by claiming unpaid/late rent, if for some reason they don't like you or you complain. it can be fixed, but the burden is on you).
i won't even think about what happens when you combine this with the installation of readers at polling places.
oops...
others have replied that life doesn't require a cell to automatically spring up, so i'll leave that part. one of the most compelling arguments for 'life' is that of Sol Spiegelman; do some research on Spiegelman's Monster. Richard Dawkins, in his book 'The Ancestor's Tale,' gives heredity as the single defining element of life. as far an explanation for the complexity of what we currently know as a cell, there is an ample amount of evidence for various cellular organs having been created by co-opted viruses. as has also been mentioned by others here, a cell requires a number of different constituents, even without going into things like mitochondria; see Harold Morowitz's book 'Mayonnaise and the Origins of Life", wherein he discusses the role of lipopolysaccharides in cell walls.
in short, life is a fairly improbable event, but its not infinitely improbable. its more like rather unlikely. when it comes to being alone, if you mean what are the odds that there are other sentient beings, its even lower. however, at the risk of veering into the metaphysical, perhaps you should peruse some of Rupert Sheldrake's work; anything that happens once increases the likelihood it will happen again.
key contributors. key. the minds behind every algorithmic, procedural and computational operation in the galaxy, and you put them in a room with a slashbot?
firstly, this will be used to enforce the 'No Repetitive Beats' law.
and no, i'm not taking the piss.
and what, precisely, is to stop Apple from licensing said patent and employing the technology described therein?
nothing, as far as i can see. and Apple have shown, via the one-click Amazon patent that they're not averse to licensing questionable IP.
MPlayer's man page is too long for most people to read :-)
everyone does not _want_ everything now and wireless, but you have been made to think that you want them that way.
you've been made to think that way by a system that has successfully reduced your free time.
this system, like all organisms, doesn't want to perish, and is in the process consolidating its control.
when i decided to try linux, i tried Suse. i didn't like it. i tried FreeBSD, the install was as complicated as Solaris. i wound up using Sorcery/SourceMage.
now before i have to put on my flame retardant suit, let me qualify my statements. i had used MacOS until 7.11, and would not upgrade to 7.5. i had used NT since 3.5 (thats not a typo, i had to reinstall at least 3 times dues to kernel corruption), and once the hotfixes started coming out it was stable. i used BeOS, but when it reached the end of its life, just before the Dano 5.0 release, i decided to try linux. this meant a triple-boot system, using partitions on different discs, and using BeOS compliant hardware, much of which required special drivers just to work under NT.
Sorcery was the first distro that let me do it the way i wanted to do it, and SourceMage has continued that tradition. when considering a distro for a new computer, i tried Ubuntu 6.06 LTS release. what impressed me is that i was able to run the live CD on my work laptop, with all hardware recognized, and then install it to an external USB drive, and dual-boot it. i still run SourceMage on my servers, and probably always will. i know that its a PITA for all but advanced users, but that PITA contributed greatly to my knowledge of linux, and without it i wouldn't be able to: build a kernel; alter init; fix problematic program builds; and in general configure Ubuntu to my liking.
i recommend Ubuntu to anyone willing to try linux, burning CDs for them if they don't have broadband. and in my opinion thats why its become the popular choice.
this was precisely the case in Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where WayForward's first successful software product was software that would allow you posit an outcome and then describe how you would get there. Richard MacDuff can actually tell which version of the software is in use by various agencies by which bugs are exposed via their logic. Mr Adams' particularly surreal type of science fiction is the last thing i would have expected to come true.