Remember that student government has no power
on
Open Source in Politics?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
They can lobby the state government over tuition, which might do some good, although the higher-ups are already doing that. They have less influence then the faculty senate, so it's unlikely they can do anything about professor quality. Libraries and campus safety are probably reasonable things to focus on, but in most cases, there's only so much student government can do, for good or ill. At my school (we're talking 2000-2004) the Black Caucus alone was more politically powerful than the undergraduate senate. Plus, this guy isn't running for president, just a regular senate slot.
So I think increasing Linux and open source adoption is a totally reasonable goal. There's probably a contingent of the IT department who are in favor of it already, and having the support of student government makes it that much easier to justify their plans. Sure, if I was the IT director, I wouldn't want students telling me what OS to run on the web server, say. But for the computer labs, why not? Reserve some machines for Linux, install Open Office and Firefox on the Windows ones, avoid IE-specific web content on University sites, etc. Sounds like a practical plan to me.
And yes, I know there's more to Baker's platform than this, I'm just addressing the part of it that the parent brought into question.
Because there's no journaling or shared-memory files being used, the repository can be safely accessed over a network filesystem and examined in a read-only environment.
I've only used it locally or over SSH, so I can't vouch for how robust it is with NFS in practice.
China is definitely not a Communist society in the way the USSR was. On the other hand it's still a single-party, totalitarian regime, despite having become a capitalist success story. Maybe we should reconsider the Clinton doctrine of capitalism -> democracy. And while I agree that the Internet as a whole is providing much needed knowledge to the Chinese people, I don't think Google can get away with this defense. When the government gets to choose what knowledge may be searched out, then it's no longer knowledge, it's propaganda. At least Google has reserved the right to report when it's censoring something.
I much prefer Wikipedia's approach. The Chinese Wikipedia covers topics like Falun Gong, and trusts that the Chinese government will respect their adherence to a neutral point of view. Though at the moment, they don't.
Once data is in a DRM system, you have no guarantees of what any future implementation will allow you to do with it. If iTunes 8 tightens the restrictions(by say, removing local streaming), and earlier versions no longer work with the Music Store or the latest OS, then what choice do you have?
Actually, there's an interesting legal question here. When you buy a song on the iTunes store, what exactly are you buying? A license of course, but a license to do what?
My sister's a big Buffy fan, but when she heard that line (it's in the first few minutes), she told me, "This sounds like it's the worst TV show ever!" In Joss' defense, though, the whole beginning of the pilot was rewritten to satisfy the Fox execs.
Red Hat is deeply involved in this project. They're building a distro specifically for its hardware platform and use model. We don't know whether Apple offered the same level of commitment.
OS X is not designed for low-end hardware. It barely runs with the 256MB of RAM their entry level models used to ship with, and its disk footprint is huge. It is possible to run in B&W, but it's not pleasant. I think Apple has made the right decision with resource-hungry technologies like Quartz, but it does restrict them to Apple-caliber hardware.
Keep in mind that the people involved in pugs are highly self-selected: they've been following the Perl 6 e-mail lists, and they know Haskell.
That's true of some contributors, but not all. Autrijus inspired many Perl hackers (camelfolk) to learn Haskell, and even got some in the Haskell community (lambdafolk) interested in Perl 6. But yeah, I think Pugs has been successful partly because there were so many people following along and wanting to join in on the Perl 6 implementation. Your average open source project doesn't have that.
Fair enough. Evolution (and cosmology for that matter) still have a lot left to explain. But to me, it's a smaller leap of faith to accept their truth than any one of the multitude of conflicting religious explanations. I do agree with you about some things being unexplainable, though. Lately I've started to think that human intelligence is that way, and that's why AI hasn't made any real headway. As Lyall Watson put it: "If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't". But I could well be wrong there.
And that's the more important thing, perhaps. Not what the particular standard of evidence is for you to change your beliefs, but that there is one. I mean, I'd be a much happier person if I were religious, and no longer had to fear my own mortality. But I'm just psychologically incapable of making such a commitment of belief without objective proof.
I used to listen to his radio show, Off The Hook, and while his ideology could be a bit much to take sometimes, I was always impressed by his shear stubbornness in standing up for hacker rights. He's been sued by Ford over domain name trademarks and the MPAA for linking to DeCSS, and fought both lawsuits to the finish. 2600 also supported Kevin Mitnick in a big way, when the EFF wouldn't. And HOPE is arguably the most important hacker conference on the planet. While I haven't read 2600 magazine in a while, from what I remember (circa mid/late 90's) it was always a bit uninteresting. And it certainly didn't compare to Phrack, which has always sort of been the peer reviewed journal of hackerdom. But there's more to 2600 than the magazine.
I'm actually in a related bind myself. I've written a small freeware app for Mac OS X; nothing too fancy, but it does have users. I'm about to come out with version 2.0 soon, and I'd like to give it a real icon. Since this is OS X the standard of art expected is way beyond my limits, so I'd probably have to hire a a real icon designer.
So for others who have done this: Are the prices for this sort of thing reasonable? What are the typical licensing terms for the art? Will some designers give discounts for freeware/OSS apps? Is there somewhere you can solict bids? I can't really afford to spend serious money on this, since it'd be coming out of my own pocket.
It's real simple. The corporation exists for the sole benefit of the shareholders. This isn't about being nice to anybody, it's business.
This attitude really frustrates me. If ethics are to mean anything, then they've got to apply everywhere, including to business. Sure you've got a financial obligation to your investors, but you've got moral obligations to your employees and customers, and they count for something too. Now maybe the interests of the business are, in the end, also in the best interest of the employees, but that's an assertion that needs an economic argument to support it. And of course you could argue that since everybody involved knew what they were getting into, they shouldn't complain about the rules. But corporations, LLCs, etc. are so common these days that white collar workers have very little choice. We can form unions and turn ethical issues into financial ones, but it's so much easier if executives give the moral concerns the weight they need in the first place.
Please realize I'm not accusing you personally of acting immorally, it's just that so many immoral decisions are justified by saying that the interests of the stockholder come first.
Actually the infants they're testing for this are between 6.5 to 9 months, and can't actually talk yet, so they aren't listening to what they say. Instead they do crazy stuff like tracking eye movement while playing different sounds in order to see what the infants are paying attention to. There's a lot of inference involved, of course, but it does seem to a least of kind of work.
For example, the original experiment they're referring to in the article involved a playing 20 minutes of simple artificial languages to the infants, and then testing them on different sound strings from it. The idea was that infants would respond differently to stuff they thought was a word in the language, than stuff that wasn't. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea.
Those too old for this competition or the ACM version should check out the ICFP programming contest. You can work from home, using any language you want, and you have three days to complete the task the give you (24 hours for the lightning division). Typically people work in small teams and use exotic stuff like Dylan, although last year's winning entry was in C++. If you win, you get a cash prize and the judges pronounce your implementation language "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."
That's not the only problem with the name. Some x86 kernels have a `make bzimage` build option to build a special big zipped image that does tricks to get around BIOS memory limits. But someone working on the m68k port, which doesn't have the limitation, thought that bzimage meant bzip'ed image, and so for a while the m68k kernel had the option of using a superior compression scheme in its bootloader. I think they finally removed it, though.
You might be interested to know that as of last year, Penn State was still using a Mac SE/30 as an AppleTalk server. I've actually got a picture of it somewhere, sitting across from a $100,000 Cisco router in the machine room.
There was a case in Pennsylvania, a couple decades ago, where a group managed to predict one of those daily lotto games. Although in that case they'd weighed down most of the balls with paint, which did make the problem at little simpler. The winning number? 6-6-6.
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Guy Fawkes day isn't until November.
They can lobby the state government over tuition, which might do some good, although the higher-ups are already doing that. They have less influence then the faculty senate, so it's unlikely they can do anything about professor quality. Libraries and campus safety are probably reasonable things to focus on, but in most cases, there's only so much student government can do, for good or ill. At my school (we're talking 2000-2004) the Black Caucus alone was more politically powerful than the undergraduate senate. Plus, this guy isn't running for president, just a regular senate slot.
So I think increasing Linux and open source adoption is a totally reasonable goal. There's probably a contingent of the IT department who are in favor of it already, and having the support of student government makes it that much easier to justify their plans. Sure, if I was the IT director, I wouldn't want students telling me what OS to run on the web server, say. But for the computer labs, why not? Reserve some machines for Linux, install Open Office and Firefox on the Windows ones, avoid IE-specific web content on University sites, etc. Sounds like a practical plan to me.
And yes, I know there's more to Baker's platform than this, I'm just addressing the part of it that the parent brought into question.
As of version 1.2 it's the default, and bsd-db is deprecated.
China is definitely not a Communist society in the way the USSR was. On the other hand it's still a single-party, totalitarian regime, despite having become a capitalist success story. Maybe we should reconsider the Clinton doctrine of capitalism -> democracy. And while I agree that the Internet as a whole is providing much needed knowledge to the Chinese people, I don't think Google can get away with this defense. When the government gets to choose what knowledge may be searched out, then it's no longer knowledge, it's propaganda. At least Google has reserved the right to report when it's censoring something.
I much prefer Wikipedia's approach. The Chinese Wikipedia covers topics like Falun Gong, and trusts that the Chinese government will respect their adherence to a neutral point of view. Though at the moment, they don't.
Once data is in a DRM system, you have no guarantees of what any future implementation will allow you to do with it. If iTunes 8 tightens the restrictions(by say, removing local streaming), and earlier versions no longer work with the Music Store or the latest OS, then what choice do you have?
Actually, there's an interesting legal question here. When you buy a song on the iTunes store, what exactly are you buying? A license of course, but a license to do what?
My sister's a big Buffy fan, but when she heard that line (it's in the first few minutes), she told me, "This sounds like it's the worst TV show ever!" In Joss' defense, though, the whole beginning of the pilot was rewritten to satisfy the Fox execs.
objective proof -> compelling, reproducible evidence
There, that's better.
And that's the more important thing, perhaps. Not what the particular standard of evidence is for you to change your beliefs, but that there is one. I mean, I'd be a much happier person if I were religious, and no longer had to fear my own mortality. But I'm just psychologically incapable of making such a commitment of belief without objective proof.
Or a SIGHUP.
Young Biff: Why don't you make like a tree and get out of here?
Old Biff: It's LEAVE, you idiot! "Make like a tree, and leave."
I used to listen to his radio show, Off The Hook, and while his ideology could be a bit much to take sometimes, I was always impressed by his shear stubbornness in standing up for hacker rights. He's been sued by Ford over domain name trademarks and the MPAA for linking to DeCSS, and fought both lawsuits to the finish. 2600 also supported Kevin Mitnick in a big way, when the EFF wouldn't. And HOPE is arguably the most important hacker conference on the planet. While I haven't read 2600 magazine in a while, from what I remember (circa mid/late 90's) it was always a bit uninteresting. And it certainly didn't compare to Phrack, which has always sort of been the peer reviewed journal of hackerdom. But there's more to 2600 than the magazine.
But then, what were you expecting?
I'm actually in a related bind myself. I've written a small freeware app for Mac OS X; nothing too fancy, but it does have users. I'm about to come out with version 2.0 soon, and I'd like to give it a real icon. Since this is OS X the standard of art expected is way beyond my limits, so I'd probably have to hire a a real icon designer.
So for others who have done this: Are the prices for this sort of thing reasonable? What are the typical licensing terms for the art? Will some designers give discounts for freeware/OSS apps? Is there somewhere you can solict bids? I can't really afford to spend serious money on this, since it'd be coming out of my own pocket.
This attitude really frustrates me. If ethics are to mean anything, then they've got to apply everywhere, including to business. Sure you've got a financial obligation to your investors, but you've got moral obligations to your employees and customers, and they count for something too. Now maybe the interests of the business are, in the end, also in the best interest of the employees, but that's an assertion that needs an economic argument to support it. And of course you could argue that since everybody involved knew what they were getting into, they shouldn't complain about the rules. But corporations, LLCs, etc. are so common these days that white collar workers have very little choice. We can form unions and turn ethical issues into financial ones, but it's so much easier if executives give the moral concerns the weight they need in the first place.
Please realize I'm not accusing you personally of acting immorally, it's just that so many immoral decisions are justified by saying that the interests of the stockholder come first.
For example, the original experiment they're referring to in the article involved a playing 20 minutes of simple artificial languages to the infants, and then testing them on different sound strings from it. The idea was that infants would respond differently to stuff they thought was a word in the language, than stuff that wasn't. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea.
Those too old for this competition or the ACM version should check out the ICFP programming contest. You can work from home, using any language you want, and you have three days to complete the task the give you (24 hours for the lightning division). Typically people work in small teams and use exotic stuff like Dylan, although last year's winning entry was in C++. If you win, you get a cash prize and the judges pronounce your implementation language "the programming tool of choice for discriminating hackers."
That's not the only problem with the name. Some x86 kernels have a `make bzimage` build option to build a special big zipped image that does tricks to get around BIOS memory limits. But someone working on the m68k port, which doesn't have the limitation, thought that bzimage meant bzip'ed image, and so for a while the m68k kernel had the option of using a superior compression scheme in its bootloader. I think they finally removed it, though.
This one, for instance.
Yeah, you tell him, "john_smith"!
I use old intell PII's as goatee combs
I read that as "goatse combs", and immediately regretted it.
You might be interested to know that as of last year, Penn State was still using a Mac SE/30 as an AppleTalk server. I've actually got a picture of it somewhere, sitting across from a $100,000 Cisco router in the machine room.
There was a case in Pennsylvania, a couple decades ago, where a group managed to predict one of those daily lotto games. Although in that case they'd weighed down most of the balls with paint, which did make the problem at little simpler. The winning number? 6-6-6.