Don't disagree with your opinion of the shallowness of most Linux reviews. Linux distributions are all essentially the same. They only differ in how badly the distributor has gummed up the works. So, naturally, reviews are shallow and pointless. It's rather like comparing one brand of white bread with another brand of white bread.
I'm not questioning the value of these so-called communties. I said that any distribution that doesn't work until the user goes online for help is a failed distribution.
Why should anyone marketing a Linux distribution be allowed the copout of failing to deliver a working system and failing to provide adequate support and documentation? Pointing users to their "community" might work for geeks and enthusiasts, but it won't work for normal folks.
Having access to knowledgable people online is as valuable a resource as having access to the same people offline. But, to follow your argument, receiving the benefits of that online community requires a working OS and apps. As I said, if you need to go online for help before you can get a distribution to work, it is a failed distribution.
Participation in a support community should be an option, not somethig that is required to use a tool effectively.
>> You can't possibly learn about a distro completely until you've also had a chance to explore its community surrounding it.
The market these consumer distributions are targetting -- home and corporate desktop users -- have little reason to be aware of any pseudo-community surrounding a distribution. If a distribution requires people to go online and start asking questions before it works, it is a failed distribution.
Linux enthusiasts and hobbyists comprise these so-called communities. These are people who are interested in Linux for its own sake, not as a means to an end. These are the people who will install a new OS just to play with it. On the other hand, pretty much everyone else could care less. For the people these distributions are targetting, Linux is about as interesting as their refrigerator. They don't want to depend on a refrigerator community, either.
Good, I'm happy for you. Europe is okay; I've lived there. Lots of old building and high taxes. And it's finally trying to eliminate its stupidity about borders, after producing most of the ills of the century and bearing the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of millions. And then you can count other European creations like Prussian militarism, fascism, naziism, socialism, communism, totalitarianism, and, generally, all the inane notions about statism that sucker people into trading their individual liberty for the glorification of the state, all in the name of nationalism and racism. And, of course, there's that matter of recurring genocide.(Don't forget the Armenians, although a lot of Europeans still can't convince themselves that Turkey is part of Europe...wrong genes and all that.)
So, enjoy the "superior quality" of your life in Europe, the land of czars and Bismarks; of mustard gas and trench war; of Napoleon and the guillotine; of Franco and Mussolini and Hitler; of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Srebrenica and all the rest.
And, no, I don't care if you are photographed and thumbprinted when you enter the U.S. Entering the U.S. is a privilege, not a right. So long as people from outside the country want to come here nad kill Americans, whatever we can do to find them and arrest them is just fine with me. It's the terrorists who are restricting my freedoms, not my government.
It's only guilt-ridden Euro-whining lefties who wallow in guilt about crimes commmited by terrorists. They'd blame the victim for getting in the way of a murderer's bullet.
>>...It's not surprising that big companies in the US, who might someday like to own all that land, don't mind it if the peasant farmers are driven off their land...> 'Foreign aid' programs create dependencies where they didn't exist before, and they destroy local economies.
Probably true, in some case, but not in others. The chain of dependency exists between corrupt and incompetent leaders and their "followers", who have been suckered into trading individual freedoms and prosperity for false pride in their leaders and their nation. (That's why it's called "nationalism".) What merit is there in taking pride in a country that is governed by criminals and fools who are making your life miserable?
Foreign aid sustains that chain of dependency because it helps sustain the local status quo.
It is right to give food to a starving man, but it is wrong to walk away and leave him in chains.
No: Time To Leave Earth Orbit and Keep Going
on
Dreams of the Moon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The ISS serves no current purpose other than to wrap a little bit of U.S.-Russian diplomacy in a patina of pseudo-research. In other words, it is a make-work project.
It ought not to be.
The only reason -- a compelling reason --for people to be in space is to Go Somehere Else. That's why it's called "Space Travel, not "Space Science Lab". The purpose of a space statoin in low-Earth orbit is this: Serve as a way station on the way to Somewhere Else: fuel depot, construction yard, launch and rendevous point.
We've spent billions of dollars, pounds, yen, euros, rubles, etc., building a station that helps us accomplish nothing. It's time to change things.
It is now more than 40 years after the first human flew to low-Earth orbit and returned. Having a space station go in the same low-Earth orbit pretending to do research is akin to having no aircraft flying in 1943, save for one flying in circles over Kitty Hawk.
(Kennedy's impetus re: Apollo may well have been to thwart the Soviets, but the accomplishment transcended that, and will again, when we return. It's also worth recalling that sound strategic and military reasons existed to prevent Soviet dominance in space.)
It's a waste of time to divert any money to "aid the starving populations". It's like buying heroin for a junkie. Yes, you need food if you're starving, but you also need help changing your culture, your economy and your government so you can feed yourself.
My "point" is what I said: I've met many people outside the U.S. who wanted to move to the U.S., and I know no one in the U.S. who wants to leave foranother country. I imagine that current, as well as historical, immigration data support that impression.
There are lots of reasons for that, obviously. It seems to me that the U.S. is one of the few countries where acceptance as a national (not as a citizen, which is merely a legal rite of passage) is not dependent on a person's genetic composition. In my experience, even in the democracies of Europe and certainly in the largely tribal societies of Afica and the MIddle East, immigrants and the assimilated children of immigrants may be accepted as legal citizens, but they are always viewed as "guests" in a country that belongs to the ancient tribes that migrated there first. THis is, of course, just another aspect of racism.
>> This fundamentally competitive attitude is something that Americans seem to inherently understand and embrace, whereas in other countries it is often frowned upon as distasteful.
There's much truth in that. Not to be arrogantly American and jingoistic, but this country really is different, for better or worse.
I've lived in several countries on four continents outside the U.S. In every country, it was common, and frequent, for someone to ask me if I knew anyone who could help them get a visa to the U.S., because they wanted to live there. I know no one who has ever wanted to leave the U.S. and live in any of those same countries.
And my point was to assert that the enforceability of the GPL remains in question until it is tested in the courts. Polite memos exchanged between small groups of developers will not do that. In the end, the GPL's credibility will depend on the courts willingness to enforce its use against people who willfully and deliberately violate its terms.
If there is no legal sanction for violating the GPL, then it depends on the "ethics" of individual people and organizations. That seems a pretty shaky foundation.
Why doesn't mplayer sue, if they think their intellectual property rights have been abused? Certainly seems more logical than posting unproven and potentially libelous assertions on their website.
Before someone says that they're just a small band of impoverished but brave open source developers who can't afford to pay lawyers....well, tough.
Civil claims don't get enfoirced as if by magic. If the broader open source community has no means to help individual developers enforce the GPL in court, then it will simply become unenforced and unenforceable.
The BBC -- growing ever more akin to their tabloid cousins -- does this story every New Year's. Anyone old enough to read ought to read the story a second time to eliminate all the scaffolding, sensationalism and speculation added by the Beeb.
Americans tend to treat the BBC with a lot more reverence than it has deserved lately.
And, yes, for those who weren't alive yet in 1973, the notion that Western nations might eventually sieze the oilfields if the OPEC nations didn't end the embargo was under public discussion. No secrets there.
I'm not going to play this game, because it will revolve around competing deinitions of "ethics". I believe in one defintion; you, almost certainly, believe in another.
For what it's worth, much of the pain and angst that people suffer in the name of ethics is largely semantic. I.e., a reactin to the power of words. We use words to describe reality, but typically forget the difference between the words and the reality.
For a crude example, consider the death of 4 individuals: One is murdered on a city street; the second is killed in a house fire trying to save his children; a third dies in a hospice after a legnth battle with cancer, and the fourth is killed in combat as a member of his country's army which was invading its helpless neighbor.
Typically, people would cast these deaths in a different light based their sense of ethics. Certainly, the causes and events surrounding the deaths differ.
From, the point of view of the dead person, death is death, And death reamins death, regardless of cause or surrounding events. Most importantly, death reamains death whether or not we use words like "murder", "heroic fire victim", "enemy fatality", "cancer patient", "violent crime", etc.
The words carry differing ethical weight and texture, but the reality of those four people is identical.
Yes, Reuters is a "huge newsgathering" organization, but inserting unattributed opinions into a news reports is not professional journalism.
If I wanted to determine the true impact of the initial failure to receive a signal from Beagle, Reuters, along with every other mainstream news outlet, is one of the last places I'd turn to for a credible response.
Profit is not "value-neutral". (Learned that euphemism in Sociology 101, eh?) Nothing is value neutral. (Among other things, that assumes a finite set of values on which everyone agrees.)
Profit is the primary motivation and objective of creating a business. It is the primary measure of success of a business and of the people managing that business. (No profit, no business.) As such, profit is the primary ethical oligation of the business. Profit isn't the only obligation of the business, but, witout profit, a business wouldn't exist, so the drive for profit by a business is as fundamentally necessary and as funamentally ethical as the drive to survive is among living beings. Other ethical issues are moot if an entity doesn't exist.
I agree aout the purpose of space travel. However, the reason it is expensive to put humans in space is that it is a government monopoly.
Imagine what would have happened to aviation if the government has prevented the Wrights from flying, continued funding Langley, and blocked all non-gov't aviation efforts. That's rather analogous to the approach governments -- all governments, not just the U.S. -- have taken toward space flight.
Put another way, where's the last place to look if you want something done in a cost-effective way?
All true, but sending a glorified toy instead of people isn't very satisfying, either. We put a few Surveyor machines on the moon, too, but no one celebrates them. There's a reason.
Robotic missions have their role in support of eventual crewed missions or to explore places people cannot, yet, reach. But, because science is not the primary reason for human space travel, robotic science missions cannot be the end game.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't disagree with your opinion of the shallowness of most Linux reviews. Linux distributions are all essentially the same. They only differ in how badly the distributor has gummed up the works. So, naturally, reviews are shallow and pointless. It's rather like comparing one brand of white bread with another brand of white bread.
I'm not questioning the value of these so-called communties. I said that any distribution that doesn't work until the user goes online for help is a failed distribution.
Why should anyone marketing a Linux distribution be allowed the copout of failing to deliver a working system and failing to provide adequate support and documentation? Pointing users to their "community" might work for geeks and enthusiasts, but it won't work for normal folks.
Having access to knowledgable people online is as valuable a resource as having access to the same people offline. But, to follow your argument, receiving the benefits of that online community requires a working OS and apps. As I said, if you need to go online for help before you can get a distribution to work, it is a failed distribution.
Participation in a support community should be an option, not somethig that is required to use a tool effectively.
>> You can't possibly learn about a distro completely until you've also had a chance to explore its community surrounding it.
The market these consumer distributions are targetting -- home and corporate desktop users -- have little reason to be aware of any pseudo-community surrounding a distribution. If a distribution requires people to go online and start asking questions before it works, it is a failed distribution.
Linux enthusiasts and hobbyists comprise these so-called communities. These are people who are interested in Linux for its own sake, not as a means to an end. These are the people who will install a new OS just to play with it. On the other hand, pretty much everyone else could care less. For the people these distributions are targetting, Linux is about as interesting as their refrigerator. They don't want to depend on a refrigerator community, either.
Good, I'm happy for you. Europe is okay; I've lived there. Lots of old building and high taxes. And it's finally trying to eliminate its stupidity about borders, after producing most of the ills of the century and bearing the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of millions. And then you can count other European creations like Prussian militarism, fascism, naziism, socialism, communism, totalitarianism, and, generally, all the inane notions about statism that sucker people into trading their individual liberty for the glorification of the state, all in the name of nationalism and racism. And, of course, there's that matter of recurring genocide.(Don't forget the Armenians, although a lot of Europeans still can't convince themselves that Turkey is part of Europe...wrong genes and all that.)
So, enjoy the "superior quality" of your life in Europe, the land of czars and Bismarks; of mustard gas and trench war; of Napoleon and the guillotine; of Franco and Mussolini and Hitler; of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Srebrenica and all the rest.
And, no, I don't care if you are photographed and thumbprinted when you enter the U.S. Entering the U.S. is a privilege, not a right. So long as people from outside the country want to come here nad kill Americans, whatever we can do to find them and arrest them is just fine with me. It's the terrorists who are restricting my freedoms, not my government.
It's only guilt-ridden Euro-whining lefties who wallow in guilt about crimes commmited by terrorists. They'd blame the victim for getting in the way of a murderer's bullet.
>> ...It's not surprising that big companies in the US, who might someday like to own all that land, don't mind it if the peasant farmers are driven off their land...> 'Foreign aid' programs create dependencies where they didn't exist before, and they destroy local economies.
Probably true, in some case, but not in others. The chain of dependency exists between corrupt and incompetent leaders and their "followers", who have been suckered into trading individual freedoms and prosperity for false pride in their leaders and their nation. (That's why it's called "nationalism".) What merit is there in taking pride in a country that is governed by criminals and fools who are making your life miserable?
Foreign aid sustains that chain of dependency because it helps sustain the local status quo.
It is right to give food to a starving man, but it is wrong to walk away and leave him in chains.
The ISS serves no current purpose other than to wrap a little bit of U.S.-Russian diplomacy in a patina of pseudo-research. In other words, it is a make-work project.
It ought not to be.
The only reason -- a compelling reason --for people to be in space is to Go Somehere Else. That's why it's called "Space Travel, not "Space Science Lab". The purpose of a space statoin in low-Earth orbit is this: Serve as a way station on the way to Somewhere Else: fuel depot, construction yard, launch and rendevous point.
We've spent billions of dollars, pounds, yen, euros, rubles, etc., building a station that helps us accomplish nothing. It's time to change things.
It is now more than 40 years after the first human flew to low-Earth orbit and returned. Having a space station go in the same low-Earth orbit pretending to do research is akin to having no aircraft flying in 1943, save for one flying in circles over Kitty Hawk.
(Kennedy's impetus re: Apollo may well have been to thwart the Soviets, but the accomplishment transcended that, and will again, when we return. It's also worth recalling that sound strategic and military reasons existed to prevent Soviet dominance in space.)
It's a waste of time to divert any money to "aid the starving populations". It's like buying heroin for a junkie. Yes, you need food if you're starving, but you also need help changing your culture, your economy and your government so you can feed yourself.
My "point" is what I said: I've met many people outside the U.S. who wanted to move to the U.S., and I know no one in the U.S. who wants to leave foranother country. I imagine that current, as well as historical, immigration data support that impression.
There are lots of reasons for that, obviously. It seems to me that the U.S. is one of the few countries where acceptance as a national (not as a citizen, which is merely a legal rite of passage) is not dependent on a person's genetic composition. In my experience, even in the democracies of Europe and certainly in the largely tribal societies of Afica and the MIddle East, immigrants and the assimilated children of immigrants may be accepted as legal citizens, but they are always viewed as "guests" in a country that belongs to the ancient tribes that migrated there first. THis is, of course, just another aspect of racism.
>> ...your statement (that no person living in the USA wishes to relocate) is simply not correct.
/. lack of precision.
Not what I said, is it?
Typical
>> This fundamentally competitive attitude is something that Americans seem to inherently understand and embrace, whereas in other countries it is often frowned upon as distasteful.
There's much truth in that. Not to be arrogantly American and jingoistic, but this country really is different, for better or worse.
I've lived in several countries on four continents outside the U.S. In every country, it was common, and frequent, for someone to ask me if I knew anyone who could help them get a visa to the U.S., because they wanted to live there. I know no one who has ever wanted to leave the U.S. and live in any of those same countries.
And my point was to assert that the enforceability of the GPL remains in question until it is tested in the courts. Polite memos exchanged between small groups of developers will not do that. In the end, the GPL's credibility will depend on the courts willingness to enforce its use against people who willfully and deliberately violate its terms.
If there is no legal sanction for violating the GPL, then it depends on the "ethics" of individual people and organizations. That seems a pretty shaky foundation.
You seem to think there's something wrong about using lawyers to protect your rights. Why?
Sending polite memos back and forth won't establish the legal enforceability of the GPL.
Why doesn't mplayer sue, if they think their intellectual property rights have been abused? Certainly seems more logical than posting unproven and potentially libelous assertions on their website.
Before someone says that they're just a small band of impoverished but brave open source developers who can't afford to pay lawyers....well, tough.
Civil claims don't get enfoirced as if by magic. If the broader open source community has no means to help individual developers enforce the GPL in court, then it will simply become unenforced and unenforceable.
They said it, so it must be true, right?
The next election, perhaps. How unconventional.
The BBC -- growing ever more akin to their tabloid cousins -- does this story every New Year's. Anyone old enough to read ought to read the story a second time to eliminate all the scaffolding, sensationalism and speculation added by the Beeb.
Americans tend to treat the BBC with a lot more reverence than it has deserved lately.
And, yes, for those who weren't alive yet in 1973, the notion that Western nations might eventually sieze the oilfields if the OPEC nations didn't end the embargo was under public discussion. No secrets there.
repeat
get(bill)
pay(bill)
delete(bill)
until (hell freezes over)
Gee, where could we find something like that??
I'm not going to play this game, because it will revolve around competing deinitions of "ethics". I believe in one defintion; you, almost certainly, believe in another.
For what it's worth, much of the pain and angst that people suffer in the name of ethics is largely semantic. I.e., a reactin to the power of words. We use words to describe reality, but typically forget the difference between the words and the reality.
For a crude example, consider the death of 4 individuals: One is murdered on a city street; the second is killed in a house fire trying to save his children; a third dies in a hospice after a legnth battle with cancer, and the fourth is killed in combat as a member of his country's army which was invading its helpless neighbor.
Typically, people would cast these deaths in a different light based their sense of ethics. Certainly, the causes and events surrounding the deaths differ.
From, the point of view of the dead person, death is death, And death reamins death, regardless of cause or surrounding events. Most importantly, death reamains death whether or not we use words like "murder", "heroic fire victim", "enemy fatality", "cancer patient", "violent crime", etc.
The words carry differing ethical weight and texture, but the reality of those four people is identical.
Good point: "Buy My Cadillac! By the way, I broke OnStar..."
Yes, Reuters is a "huge newsgathering" organization, but inserting unattributed opinions into a news reports is not professional journalism.
If I wanted to determine the true impact of the initial failure to receive a signal from Beagle, Reuters, along with every other mainstream news outlet, is one of the last places I'd turn to for a credible response.
I know nothing about GPS and OnStar, but why couldn't GM encypt the signal going out, preventing use of any other systems?
Frankly, I could buy a lot of maps for $400, but I would think about paying that for the emergency services.
Profit is not "value-neutral". (Learned that euphemism in Sociology 101, eh?) Nothing is value neutral. (Among other things, that assumes a finite set of values on which everyone agrees.)
Profit is the primary motivation and objective of creating a business. It is the primary measure of success of a business and of the people managing that business. (No profit, no business.) As such, profit is the primary ethical oligation of the business. Profit isn't the only obligation of the business, but, witout profit, a business wouldn't exist, so the drive for profit by a business is as fundamentally necessary and as funamentally ethical as the drive to survive is among living beings. Other ethical issues are moot if an entity doesn't exist.
I agree aout the purpose of space travel. However, the reason it is expensive to put humans in space is that it is a government monopoly.
Imagine what would have happened to aviation if the government has prevented the Wrights from flying, continued funding Langley, and blocked all non-gov't aviation efforts. That's rather analogous to the approach governments -- all governments, not just the U.S. -- have taken toward space flight.
Put another way, where's the last place to look if you want something done in a cost-effective way?
All true, but sending a glorified toy instead of people isn't very satisfying, either. We put a few Surveyor machines on the moon, too, but no one celebrates them. There's a reason.
Robotic missions have their role in support of eventual crewed missions or to explore places people cannot, yet, reach. But, because science is not the primary reason for human space travel, robotic science missions cannot be the end game.