Pics are on thing, home addresses are another, and you are at least bordering on asshole territory by implying that the two can be treated as equivalent. But maybe you're merely confused about the situtation or haven't thought it through properly, so I'll hold off on assigning you any motives.:)
Posting pics is perfectly reasonable for both sides, as long as they're taken in public, and aren't being exploited commercially. A little more reasonable for the couple, since the cops are public servants, but no big deal on either side, really.
Posting home addresses by either side is way beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Even in retaliation for a similar offense, it would have been morally questionable. As a retaliation for the perfectly reasonable behavior of posting pics? Utterly contemptible! The cops were way out of line here!
I dunno about video games, but there's already two board games. The first one, based on the comic, is actually pretty good. The second one, based on the show, sucks. Big surprise, eh?
Based on that precedent, I'll probably skip the video game based on the show, and wait for the small indie game based on the comic.:)
mbox is just an ASCII file. maildir imposes some requirements for allowable directory names. Moving mbox files is just moving the file. maildir entails moving a directory structure, and multiple files. mbox is efficient, a bunch of emails in a single file. maildir creates a file for every email. mbox is simply easier to deal with for archiving emails.
mbox is just an ASCII file. maildir imposes some requirements for allowable directory names.
Non sequitor. The mbox format has exactly the same naming restriction as maildir--the only difference is that the restrictions are on filenames rather than directory names. But I'm not aware of any modern OS that has different naming restrictions for files vs. directories. So mbox and maildir have exactly the same naming limitations.
Moving mbox files is just moving the file. maildir entails moving a directory structure, and multiple files.
Which is usually exactly as easy as moving a single file, and even unusual cases (moving to a different filesystem on *nix), is still pretty darn easy. A cp -r followed by rm -r will usually suffice.
mbox is efficient
Unless you ever want to delete an email. Then you've got to rewrite the whole friggin' file from that point on. Which greatly increases the chance of corruption. Especially if you're doing it dozens of times a day. Which is a pretty standard use case.
Maildir does use fewer inodes (or fat entries, or whatever), but aside from that, I see nothing particularly efficient about it, and if you're worried about inode depletion, you're doing something wrong.
mbox is simply easier to deal with for archiving emails.
Well, gzip is ever so slightly easier than tar czf, but not enough that I'd ever notice.
I was hesitant about maildir many years ago, but after finally taking the plunge, I've been more than happy with the result.
Debian-testing ships development software but it also updates it. This is fine. It is what it says it is. Ubuntu doesn't update, so why ship Debian-testing packages?
Ubuntu does update, including backporting (some) fixes, but otherwise, I agree with you.
Ubuntu realized there were people who wanted software that was well-tested and reliable, and also the latest-and-greatest. The fact that these are incompatible requirements wasn't a problem, because anyone silly enough to want that won't notice if you offer software that's neither. Which is exactly what Ubuntu offers.:)
Of course, I've been using Debian unstable on my desktop for about a decade, and it's been reasonably stable the whole time, despite the name. There's an annoying glitch every couple of years, but I can easily live with that. Nothing catastrophic so far. Aptitude warns me about potential incompatibilities, and lets me put packages on hold temporarily till they're resolved. I think Debian unstable is a distro whose qualities are often overlooked because of the scary name. Up-to-date, but not quite bleeding-edge (those go in the experimental repository), rolling-updates, quick turnarounds on problems. Debian's reputation for being old and out-of-date only applies if you ignore the majority of what they produce. The testing and unstable repos are actually a pretty decent match in quality and reliability for many other vendors' official releases.
Others have commented on just how widespread Linux really is these days, but that overlooks another reason why this is not news: CERN has been active in the Linux community since the '90s! I remember running into CERN scientists over here to talk about their use of Linux at Linuxworld around '98 or so. Back then, they were basically rolling their own in-house distro, but I'm not surprised to hear they're using Scientific Linux now. Five'll getcha ten that they've had a hand in the development of Scientific Linux. Indeed, if you go to https://www.scientificlinux.org/ you'll see, right at the top of the page: "SL is a Linux Release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities..." So, they're using the Linux they helped develop! Boy, there's some shocking news!
Funny, but I'm sure you don't believe any of those people were hired because of union contracts. They were hired because someone had a perception that their well-known names would help persuade the public to spend money. Having a famous name that helps sell movies is a skill of sorts, and it's one of the few that Paris Hilton has ever displayed--she's a first class attention whore*--and, like it or not, that's a valuable skill in Hollywood.
* No, I don' t think she's any other sort of whore, nor do I think it's appropriate to criticize women for being promiscuous when men get admired for the same thing. And, in fact, I do actually admire people with the balls to admit their promiscuity, even if it's someone like Hilton. There's plenty of reasons to dislike her, but her sexual behavior isn't one, unless you're a puritanical little twat who isn't fit for grown-up society.
Yes, and since it's original nickname was "the Goddamn Particle", it's also proof that we're all damned to hell!:)
(Both nicknames actually come from the fact that it was goddamn hard to find--as hard to find as physical proof of the gods. And now that we (may) have found it, the name "god particle" no longer technically applies.)
Technically, it was known as the "Goddamn particle". Someone, unfortunately, dropped the "damn" part, and the whole "god particle" nonsense exploded from there.
(No, I'm not joking, though I may be oversimplifying a little.)
Relativity (special relativity, that is) is pretty damn central to our understanding of quantum field theory
Which is why I read his "relativity" as "General Relativity". It may have been technically ambiguous to leave out the word "general", but there was only one reasonable interpretation of his statement, and pretending to be confused is very much a case of the Mathematician's Answer*--correct, uninformative, and useless.
Anyone who would potentially be confused by his "relativity" probably doesn't know enough about any form of relativity to actually be confused.:)
* warning: link leads to TVTropes, which may eat your brain.
Because, as Einstein's famous General Theory of Relativity explained, gravity is not just a force between two masses like you were taught at school, it's actually a curvature of the geometry of space-time.
That's... debatable. Modeling it as the curvature of the geometry of space-time has worked remarkably well--better than any other model anyone has come up with--but so far, nobody has been able to integrate that model with the Standard Model of QM. We still lack a solid model of quantum gravity. There are several as-yet-unproved models around, some of which are more consistent with the notion of curved space-time than others, but we don't know which is correct.
Quantum gravity is technically outside the domain of both GR and the Standard Model, and we're going to need a modified something to explain everything. Even if that modified something turns out to be some intermediate effect that allows the Standard Model and GR to both be correct in their respective domains. Which is possible, but I think most physicists expect us to find that either the SM of QM or GR will eventually be shown to be no more than a reasonable approximation, much as Newtonian gravity was in its day. What sort of appoximation is a completely open question, though.
Anyway, this latest discovery is a triumph for the Standard Model, not GR. Resolving the differences between SM & GR is a battle for another day. But it's important to remember that we're dealing with models here, and the actual universe is what it is, whether or not it perfectly fits our models. Well... when I say important, I mean, possibly worth keeping in the back of your mind. Most physicists find it more useful to ignore the quandry, accepting that there eventually will be a resolution, and take both SM and GR at face value, since they've both proven correct in every test we've been able to devise.:)
passing classwork and the bar means you have the intellect to pass those tests -- you can still very well be an idiot* (depending on one's definition of 'idiot').
Technically, the phrase in dispute was complete idiot. The ability to finish law school and pass the bar shows a lack of idiocy in some domain. At worst, I don't think he can be called much more than 90% idiot.:)
Gee, as soon as I finish getting my legal advice from Slashdot, maybe I'll head over to LawBlog to see if they can help me debug some of my Python code....:)
Always interesting to see the categories different parts of academia place each other in. The post's author is calling math, physics and comp-sci "natural sciences" and apparently considers statistics to be "social science".
I think you misread. He's not calling statistics a social science. He's asking how to teach "hard" math (statistics) to students whose background is in "soft" social sciences.
First thing to do is to get emacs and get the doctor watson mode working.
Doctor mode (M-x doctor). I'm not sure what a "doctor watson" mode would be. Would it be like the old movie version? Follow you around and act dumb to try to make you seem smarter, and occasionally exclaim, "that's simply astounding!", and "I don't know how you do it"?
Leave it to slashdot to invalidate the law by using a question mark for something that's not even a question!:)
In any case, I think the law only applies to questions that have yes/no answers, and not, for example, to questions like "Who Stole the Mona Lisa?", "What is the Effect of Coffee on Sleeplessness?", "Where Will the Enema Bandit Strike Next?", "When Will the Bridge Re-Open?" or "Why Can't Johnny Read?"
If they don't care, why did they ask? Note that the question was about Linux support, so the opinion of Microsoft shills is probably of much less interest to them than mine.
Anyway, the thread is filled with people saying that nothing but opening their hardware will do. That's just silly. Why wouldn't their contributions be welcomed, and improve my/our image of the company? Contrariwise, for the large numbers of us who don't buy NVidia cards because of the non-free drivers, why would a lack of change in that department affect our willingness to buy their cards?
What if trying to donate on behalf of your company, which still uses MS on the desktop, but has a server room filled with FSF software (in other words, if you're a typical modern company).
Citation needed. Bringing obviously-faked evidence into a courtroom seems like a strong counter-example to this claim.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Wait, now you're saying they are stupid?:)
More likely the FSF home page, with all of its talk about "free software" was classified by MS's filters as a warez site.
That might make sense if it had been classified as a warez site. But it wasn't. If I had to make an honest guess, mine would be an in-house joke used during testing that got left in when they went live.
That's assuming they do fix it and apologize. Otherwise, I think we're back to malice.;)
Any or all contributions will be welcomed, and will improve my image of the company. Improvements that don't involve opening up the HW mean still no sales here, but I will have a better image of the company.:)
I just used the script expressly provided for the purpose, and followed the clear instructions that came with it. If you think the script is so horrible, feel free to file a bug report and see if the maintainer agrees. As for why I don't want yet another silly daemon running, well, it's because I don't want yet another silly daemon running. Call it personal taste if you will, but it's been working well enough to meet my needs for over a decade now (I"ve replaced all the hardware, but it's been the same logical system throughout).
Yeah, I kinda get that. Still, it seems like it's harder than it ought to be to use something other than the default. When I set up a system, it generally asks me what I want to use for DNS, but never asks what I want to use for NTP.
Package pools, I think, are slightly different, since they're distro-specific and take a lot of space, and even a moderate-sized organization may be unwilling to host their own mirrors for all the distros they use internally. Still, I certainly wouldn't object to the distros making it little easier to do so for companies that want to.
I've always wondered about the defaults to have every RH/Debian/Suse/Ubuntu/etc. box talk directly to the pool. I know that for years, the pool has been considered fully sufficient to meet these needs, but it just always struck me as more efficient for an organization to run its own NTP server--one machine talking to the pool--and have other machines in the organization talk to that, rather than having all the machines in the organization talk to the pool.
For home use, I actually use ntpupdate in a once-a-day cron job, rather than having a full ntpd talking to the pool all day long. It was a little more work to set up (which is also something I wish could be addressed), but combined with automatic drift correction, it seems more than adequate for my needs.
Not that I want to discourage people from contributing to the pool! That's a great idea. I just think it might also be beneficial if people learned to be less abusive of the pool, and if distro makers made it easier to not abuse the pool.
Slashdot Mirror
Pics are on thing, home addresses are another, and you are at least bordering on asshole territory by implying that the two can be treated as equivalent. But maybe you're merely confused about the situtation or haven't thought it through properly, so I'll hold off on assigning you any motives. :)
Posting pics is perfectly reasonable for both sides, as long as they're taken in public, and aren't being exploited commercially. A little more reasonable for the couple, since the cops are public servants, but no big deal on either side, really.
Posting home addresses by either side is way beyond the boundaries of acceptable behavior. Even in retaliation for a similar offense, it would have been morally questionable. As a retaliation for the perfectly reasonable behavior of posting pics? Utterly contemptible! The cops were way out of line here!
And now you just have to hope that your brother doesn't read slashdot! ;)
I dunno about video games, but there's already two board games. The first one, based on the comic, is actually pretty good. The second one, based on the show, sucks. Big surprise, eh?
Based on that precedent, I'll probably skip the video game based on the show, and wait for the small indie game based on the comic. :)
mbox is just an ASCII file. maildir imposes some requirements for allowable directory names. Moving mbox files is just moving the file. maildir entails moving a directory structure, and multiple files. mbox is efficient, a bunch of emails in a single file. maildir creates a file for every email. mbox is simply easier to deal with for archiving emails.
mbox is just an ASCII file. maildir imposes some requirements for allowable directory names.
Non sequitor. The mbox format has exactly the same naming restriction as maildir--the only difference is that the restrictions are on filenames rather than directory names. But I'm not aware of any modern OS that has different naming restrictions for files vs. directories. So mbox and maildir have exactly the same naming limitations.
Moving mbox files is just moving the file. maildir entails moving a directory structure, and multiple files.
Which is usually exactly as easy as moving a single file, and even unusual cases (moving to a different filesystem on *nix), is still pretty darn easy. A cp -r followed by rm -r will usually suffice.
mbox is efficient
Unless you ever want to delete an email. Then you've got to rewrite the whole friggin' file from that point on. Which greatly increases the chance of corruption. Especially if you're doing it dozens of times a day. Which is a pretty standard use case.
Maildir does use fewer inodes (or fat entries, or whatever), but aside from that, I see nothing particularly efficient about it, and if you're worried about inode depletion, you're doing something wrong.
mbox is simply easier to deal with for archiving emails.
Well, gzip is ever so slightly easier than tar czf, but not enough that I'd ever notice.
I was hesitant about maildir many years ago, but after finally taking the plunge, I've been more than happy with the result.
Debian-testing ships development software but it also updates it. This is fine. It is what it says it is. Ubuntu doesn't update, so why ship Debian-testing packages?
Ubuntu does update, including backporting (some) fixes, but otherwise, I agree with you.
Ubuntu realized there were people who wanted software that was well-tested and reliable, and also the latest-and-greatest. The fact that these are incompatible requirements wasn't a problem, because anyone silly enough to want that won't notice if you offer software that's neither. Which is exactly what Ubuntu offers. :)
Of course, I've been using Debian unstable on my desktop for about a decade, and it's been reasonably stable the whole time, despite the name. There's an annoying glitch every couple of years, but I can easily live with that. Nothing catastrophic so far. Aptitude warns me about potential incompatibilities, and lets me put packages on hold temporarily till they're resolved. I think Debian unstable is a distro whose qualities are often overlooked because of the scary name. Up-to-date, but not quite bleeding-edge (those go in the experimental repository), rolling-updates, quick turnarounds on problems. Debian's reputation for being old and out-of-date only applies if you ignore the majority of what they produce. The testing and unstable repos are actually a pretty decent match in quality and reliability for many other vendors' official releases.
Others have commented on just how widespread Linux really is these days, but that overlooks another reason why this is not news: CERN has been active in the Linux community since the '90s! I remember running into CERN scientists over here to talk about their use of Linux at Linuxworld around '98 or so. Back then, they were basically rolling their own in-house distro, but I'm not surprised to hear they're using Scientific Linux now. Five'll getcha ten that they've had a hand in the development of Scientific Linux. Indeed, if you go to https://www.scientificlinux.org/ you'll see, right at the top of the page: "SL is a Linux Release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities..." So, they're using the Linux they helped develop! Boy, there's some shocking news!
Funny, but I'm sure you don't believe any of those people were hired because of union contracts. They were hired because someone had a perception that their well-known names would help persuade the public to spend money. Having a famous name that helps sell movies is a skill of sorts, and it's one of the few that Paris Hilton has ever displayed--she's a first class attention whore*--and, like it or not, that's a valuable skill in Hollywood.
* No, I don' t think she's any other sort of whore, nor do I think it's appropriate to criticize women for being promiscuous when men get admired for the same thing. And, in fact, I do actually admire people with the balls to admit their promiscuity, even if it's someone like Hilton. There's plenty of reasons to dislike her, but her sexual behavior isn't one, unless you're a puritanical little twat who isn't fit for grown-up society.
Yes, and since it's original nickname was "the Goddamn Particle", it's also proof that we're all damned to hell! :)
(Both nicknames actually come from the fact that it was goddamn hard to find--as hard to find as physical proof of the gods. And now that we (may) have found it, the name "god particle" no longer technically applies.)
Technically, it was known as the "Goddamn particle". Someone, unfortunately, dropped the "damn" part, and the whole "god particle" nonsense exploded from there.
(No, I'm not joking, though I may be oversimplifying a little.)
Relativity (special relativity, that is) is pretty damn central to our understanding of quantum field theory
Which is why I read his "relativity" as "General Relativity". It may have been technically ambiguous to leave out the word "general", but there was only one reasonable interpretation of his statement, and pretending to be confused is very much a case of the Mathematician's Answer*--correct, uninformative, and useless.
Anyone who would potentially be confused by his "relativity" probably doesn't know enough about any form of relativity to actually be confused. :)
* warning: link leads to TVTropes, which may eat your brain.
Because, as Einstein's famous General Theory of Relativity explained, gravity is not just a force between two masses like you were taught at school, it's actually a curvature of the geometry of space-time.
That's ... debatable. Modeling it as the curvature of the geometry of space-time has worked remarkably well--better than any other model anyone has come up with--but so far, nobody has been able to integrate that model with the Standard Model of QM. We still lack a solid model of quantum gravity. There are several as-yet-unproved models around, some of which are more consistent with the notion of curved space-time than others, but we don't know which is correct.
Quantum gravity is technically outside the domain of both GR and the Standard Model, and we're going to need a modified something to explain everything. Even if that modified something turns out to be some intermediate effect that allows the Standard Model and GR to both be correct in their respective domains. Which is possible, but I think most physicists expect us to find that either the SM of QM or GR will eventually be shown to be no more than a reasonable approximation, much as Newtonian gravity was in its day. What sort of appoximation is a completely open question, though.
Anyway, this latest discovery is a triumph for the Standard Model, not GR. Resolving the differences between SM & GR is a battle for another day. But it's important to remember that we're dealing with models here, and the actual universe is what it is, whether or not it perfectly fits our models. Well ... when I say important, I mean, possibly worth keeping in the back of your mind. Most physicists find it more useful to ignore the quandry, accepting that there eventually will be a resolution, and take both SM and GR at face value, since they've both proven correct in every test we've been able to devise. :)
passing classwork and the bar means you have the intellect to pass those tests -- you can still very well be an idiot* (depending on one's definition of 'idiot').
Technically, the phrase in dispute was complete idiot. The ability to finish law school and pass the bar shows a lack of idiocy in some domain. At worst, I don't think he can be called much more than 90% idiot. :)
Gee, as soon as I finish getting my legal advice from Slashdot, maybe I'll head over to LawBlog to see if they can help me debug some of my Python code.... :)
Maybe you should look into Firebird. The most slogan-free database engine in the world. :)
Oh, sorry, right over my head, whoosh. Oh well. Still, it was a fun opportunity for me to tease the slashdot "editors" again. :)
Always interesting to see the categories different parts of academia place each other in. The post's author is calling math, physics and comp-sci "natural sciences" and apparently considers statistics to be "social science".
I think you misread. He's not calling statistics a social science. He's asking how to teach "hard" math (statistics) to students whose background is in "soft" social sciences.
First thing to do is to get emacs and get the doctor watson mode working.
Doctor mode (M-x doctor). I'm not sure what a "doctor watson" mode would be. Would it be like the old movie version? Follow you around and act dumb to try to make you seem smarter, and occasionally exclaim, "that's simply astounding!", and "I don't know how you do it"?
Leave it to slashdot to invalidate the law by using a question mark for something that's not even a question! :)
In any case, I think the law only applies to questions that have yes/no answers, and not, for example, to questions like "Who Stole the Mona Lisa?", "What is the Effect of Coffee on Sleeplessness?", "Where Will the Enema Bandit Strike Next?", "When Will the Bridge Re-Open?" or "Why Can't Johnny Read?"
If they don't care, why did they ask? Note that the question was about Linux support, so the opinion of Microsoft shills is probably of much less interest to them than mine.
Anyway, the thread is filled with people saying that nothing but opening their hardware will do. That's just silly. Why wouldn't their contributions be welcomed, and improve my/our image of the company? Contrariwise, for the large numbers of us who don't buy NVidia cards because of the non-free drivers, why would a lack of change in that department affect our willingness to buy their cards?
What if trying to donate on behalf of your company, which still uses MS on the desktop, but has a server room filled with FSF software (in other words, if you're a typical modern company).
No, MS aren't stupid.
Citation needed. Bringing obviously-faked evidence into a courtroom seems like a strong counter-example to this claim.
Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.
Wait, now you're saying they are stupid? :)
More likely the FSF home page, with all of its talk about "free software" was classified by MS's filters as a warez site.
That might make sense if it had been classified as a warez site. But it wasn't. If I had to make an honest guess, mine would be an in-house joke used during testing that got left in when they went live.
That's assuming they do fix it and apologize. Otherwise, I think we're back to malice. ;)
Any or all contributions will be welcomed, and will improve my image of the company. Improvements that don't involve opening up the HW mean still no sales here, but I will have a better image of the company. :)
I just used the script expressly provided for the purpose, and followed the clear instructions that came with it. If you think the script is so horrible, feel free to file a bug report and see if the maintainer agrees. As for why I don't want yet another silly daemon running, well, it's because I don't want yet another silly daemon running. Call it personal taste if you will, but it's been working well enough to meet my needs for over a decade now (I"ve replaced all the hardware, but it's been the same logical system throughout).
Yeah, I kinda get that. Still, it seems like it's harder than it ought to be to use something other than the default. When I set up a system, it generally asks me what I want to use for DNS, but never asks what I want to use for NTP.
Package pools, I think, are slightly different, since they're distro-specific and take a lot of space, and even a moderate-sized organization may be unwilling to host their own mirrors for all the distros they use internally. Still, I certainly wouldn't object to the distros making it little easier to do so for companies that want to.
I've always wondered about the defaults to have every RH/Debian/Suse/Ubuntu/etc. box talk directly to the pool. I know that for years, the pool has been considered fully sufficient to meet these needs, but it just always struck me as more efficient for an organization to run its own NTP server--one machine talking to the pool--and have other machines in the organization talk to that, rather than having all the machines in the organization talk to the pool.
For home use, I actually use ntpupdate in a once-a-day cron job, rather than having a full ntpd talking to the pool all day long. It was a little more work to set up (which is also something I wish could be addressed), but combined with automatic drift correction, it seems more than adequate for my needs.
Not that I want to discourage people from contributing to the pool! That's a great idea. I just think it might also be beneficial if people learned to be less abusive of the pool, and if distro makers made it easier to not abuse the pool.