Methinks you are misremembering and have misplaced the decimal point. I had a 10MB hard drive on my Tandy Color Computer 3 in 1988. It was a surplused out MIniscribe and a seperate Adaptec MFM to SCSI interface.
By 1990 I had a PC with an 85MB drive. I suspect that 'Bigfoot' drive you mention was 800MB.
Had he been willing to see the opportunity he would have adopted the Linux kernel (Linus wasn't willing to make Linux an official GNU project with copyright assignment) as an interium solution and completed GNU. Had the FSF got its act together and put out a complete bootable distribution of Linux + GNU + X with their official seal of approval it would almost certainly become (had it not sucked, been updated, etc) the primary distribution and we wouldn't have had most of the others because they wouldn't have had a reason to exist. And if they ever finished HURD they could have, like Debian is doing now, began offering a distro with that as the kernel and the users would have decided which they liked.
A GNU with only FSF copyrighted code was and is never going to happen (no attempt is even being made at things like X for example) so what was the objection to putting Linux in to get to a complete bootable GNU system? Once Linus adopted GPL2 as the license all the parts were in place to produce GNU 1.0 but they waited for HURD. Their fault.
Yea, and nowadays the networkmanager applet sucks up 20MB of resident set. Somehow I managed to have a graphical desktop with Netscape run on a machine with 8MB of RAM total and run well with 16MB. Granted it was Netscape 0.9 on an 8bit display but still. Then I ran RedHat 4.x on an old clunker laptop with a 486SX and 40MB ram and ran Netscape 4.x with 16bit color. Now Fedora has trouble installing if you don't have a GB of ram. And we wonder why we got left out of the embedded world. Yes it all 'runs linux' but doesn't run any of the modern graphical stacks because they are more bloated than even Windows. Had we worried more about keeping our apps lean and mean Android wouldn't have been required. The GNOMES are hellbent on making a tablet interface without realizing that none of the existing hardware can run GNOME because it is too bloated.
Yup, and if it doesn't end in 2012 it certainly will in Jan 2013 when an Aggie is sworn in as POTUS. The exploding heads of everyone on the east coast will cause the earth to go out of orbit and crash into the sun.
But I'm putting my money on everything going Foom! next year before the elections ever get a chance to happen. Too many signs and portents to ignore. Today's is just one in a string that the world is going to hell in a bucket. Buy lots of food, buy some gold and then some guns to protect the food and gold and get ready to hunker down.
> They've managed it since "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame".
Yea, and I never bought into the walled garden that was the iPod either. and guess what, iPods aren't especially selling well, of course a big part of that was separate music players are basically a dead idea. Then they had the iPhone dominate the smartphone space for a couple of years because Windows Mobile blew goat and Palm was in the hands of idiots. But now they are #3 in smartphones and falling. So then they put iOS on a bigger screen and birthed the tablet craze. They are still #1 there but by Xmas I suspect they will be hard pressed to keep the crown and by next year I'd put a C note on them falling off their perch. So unless you think Steve can pull yet another rabbit out of his hat and invent yet another category defining product that can produce billions in sales, sell AAPL short. But I won't be going short on em as long as Steve is alive because he just might do it.
But as for Apple being dominant in PCs, smartphones or tablets in two years the odds are pretty much zilch. Because of their corporate DNA as a premium brand experience working against them wanting to remain a volume player in any market, especially if they can't rake in 50% profit margins and now they have their market cap demanding they produce insane profits to justify the stock price. Longterm, all consumer electronics tends to become a low margin high volume business, something Apple has never been interested in participating in. It also tends toward commodification, something else Apple doesn't believe in.
> Putting all Android devices in the same column opposite the iPhone is the same fanboy thinking..
No it isn't. Retailers don't really care if the Android devices are from a multitude of OEMs, they can stack em on the shelf beside each other because customers divide into iOS and Android nicely, Android customers not caring so much whose badge is on the product they are considering so much as which version of Android is loaded on it. Carriers don't care. App authors don't care, an App that works on an HTC handset works equally well on a Motorola handset with the same version of Android and same basic hardware. And doesn't work on an iPhone.... even if Apple allows it to be sold after the porting effort.
See the PC for how this works in the real world, the hardware is abstracted away by the operating system. Hardware maker hate this of course and have been trying to differentiate their Windows and Android offerings since day one but when they actually succeed customers end up hating it if they can't easily remove it.
> But nothing is beating the iPhone. It just so happens that every competitor has the same OS.
That is the same fanboy thinking (or lack of) that says Apple is beating the PC because they are (at times, depending on how you count...) the #1 selling brand. And if the competition is Apple vs. Dell Apple outselling Dell would make them #1, but that is a dumb way to look at the industry. It is Apple vs ALL of the Windows PC vendors and Apple is lucky to get into double digits when they only count retail sales, or just look at laptops or some other way to make Apple look bigger than they are.
Android is soundly whipping Apple in the smartphone space. Most counts still have RIM beating Apple. Apple had a brief moment but it is fading. Now they are having another moment in the tablet space while Android catches up. But Apple has a critical limitation, the urgent need to make 50 points on every sale to justify their market cap that is currently only challenged by Exxon-Mobil. They are selling cheap consumer electronics made by Chinese slave labor just like everyone else, only they expect to make fifty points. That can only happen when they can catch the rest of the consumer electronics industry with their pants down, which they have proven their ability to manage a few times now. But it never lasts long.
> You have a sad, strange definition of religion, my friend.
No, it is you with too limited and constraining a definition. Science cannot answer the big questions. Reason can't. Many have tried, many believed it could. Millions lie in the mass graves that resulted every time those people achieved power. Science can answer WHAT the universe is. Not that it has done so yet, but we have only been at it for a few thousand years even if you define 'science' rather loosely. I'd say science starts with the invention of the scientific method so we have only been at it for a few hundred years so feel confident in BELIEVING that it will eventually deliver an explanation of WHAT the universe is. But science, by any current understanding of the idea, can never answer WHY the universe is or even if that question has any meaning. It can't supply an answer to what our place in that universe is, how we should organize our lives, culture, civilizations, etc.
The big questions, the ones that really matter, are all still open and anyone who thinks they have the ultimate answers (or the Ultimate Question for the Douglas Adams fans.) is deeply in the hold of a religious faith. Any system that proposes an organized philosophical worldview is basically a religion. Whether it is the teachings of Budda, Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Ayn Rand, Marx/Lennin or modern Secular Humanism as taught in American schools. All transcend reason and depend on an appeal to faith at some point, which is where they become a religion.
> Who are saying that "the debate is settled"? Certainly not scientists,
I agree that by any sensible definition of 'science' they aren't. Science isn't decided by a vote. No matter how popular or beautiful a theory is, it must fall to ONE stubborn fact or it isn't science anymore. But by the circular logic that prevails today 'climate scientist' is defined as those who study climate change and man's destruction of the climate. Anyone who doesn't believe in AGW is thus declared to NOT be a climate scientist and that therefore 'all' climate scientists agree that AGW is real and almost all agree the only solution is socialism. More importantly the funding decisions (mostly politicians invested in the proposed solution to AGW) are being made almost entirely based on the 'settled science' theory. The people in charge of the 'reputable' (similar circular definition) science journals are all deeply invested in the group think of settled science theory.
> Despite the religious right's attempt to make it appear impotent...
What the hell are you talking about? The fundies are using the establishment clause on the grounds that Secular Humanism IS the establishment of a state religion. And they are correct. Look at this thread if you don't believe me. Every defender of this ruling falls back on an argument based on the notion that the teacher can't be fired for speaking The Truth. Well friend, any time somebody starts blabbering on about having The One Truth he is almost always in religious territory.
> But the faithful are pretty dangerous people at times when they feel they have to defend their faith.
True enough but some are more dangerous than others. Take those who are godless for example, believing that the ends justify the means. When the utopia their 'faith' (theory) expects doesn't actually occur when they achieve power they never give up, they always double down and make a hell on earth. See Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jung Il, Stalin, Castro, Hitler. The worst the Christians ever did was the Inquisition. Islam is taking the evil up to a new level but they still have a way to descend to reach Progressive body counts. Too bad Islam appears intent on taking the Satanic Crown for making a Hell on Earth.
> The question before that court was whether the classroom instructor had the > authority to overrule the authority of the elected body responsible for setting policy.
Any attempt to answer "Life, The Universe and Everything" is religion[1]. So basically what we have here is the schools mandating teachers only teach the official State religion. Which of course perfectly fits Politically Correct teaching where in the NewSpeak 'tolerance' is defined as people of every skin pigmentation, mating preference and gender identity coming together to think exactly the same and being intolerant in the extreme to anyone who thinks even slightly different. And it is of course no accident that the official religion is totalitarian; everything within the State, nothing without.
[1] Religion being a word that does not require a belief in a old white guy in the sky. or even a pantheon of bearded white guys in the sky. Any attempt to explain the big questions that science cannot (but too many believe it can) answer is religion. Otherwise we have several very old religions which wouldn't fit the definition. The problem is that science can tackle a lot of questions as to WHAT the universe is but it can't answer WHY. Nor can it probe one femtosecond beyond the big bang and remain science. But all too many people think science CAN supply a complete philosophical/religious system.
> There's no reason to declare Linux, or any of these operating systems dead...
From my POV it is. I run public labs in a public library setting and have been using GNOME since 0.x days because you can drop a random user in front of it and they can figure it out.. You could have done the same with KDE up through the 3.x series but 4.x is different enough I suspect I'd have problems. GNOME 3 I don't wonder, I know I'd have problems. None of the other desktops are suitable out of the box but if I invested enough time I think I could make XFCE work. That is my perspective, Linux as usable by folks off the street. When I can no longer buy hardware that works with distros old enough to still be shipping a working desktop I will be forced to Windows. Hopefully this fiasco won't last that long, I am not the only one who actually uses Linux in a public setting so some solution should get worked out. I'm just bitchin' because this situation is so dumb.
> UNIX was built on the idea that the filesystem is the centre of the operating system. > Clearly, they have forgotten that.
Nope. They (along with folk like Poettering) are members of the UNIX Haters Club. They know UNIX, they just hate it with every fiber of their being. They want to replace the UNIX Way, they disagree over exactly what the brave new future looks like but they know what they don't like.
We allowed unassimilated immigrants commit access to our cultural heritage. There is a lesson in this in/for the meatspace immigration debates.
If you want icons on the desktop you have to accept they will be in random order every time you login.
That the file manager won't show thumbnails.
That even after you do a force remove of gnome-power-manager you still have issues. Yes you can configure xfce to leave power on when you close the lid if AC power is connected. But if you then yank the plug it will stay running until the battery dies. Yank the plug and then close the lid and it does the right thing.
Desktop links that work in GNOME don't work in XFCE. Unless a.desktop file opens a terminal the process doesn't inherit the environment so no SSH_AGENT so no remote X apps automagically launching.
These are all bugs in F15. Hopefully they won't be for long and then we can all kiss GNOME goodbye. But they also need to offer an option for XFCE to be preconfigured to look like GNOME (ok, Windows) out of the chute for a new user. Then I could roll out an updated lab image for our public labs.
This! The GNOMEs could go as insane as the wanted to and not cause much harm if RedHat didn't enable them. If Fedora announced it was making GNOME Desktop an alternate spin for F17 the problem would be over. Port the old Gnome parts to Gtk3 and put the standard desktop oriented desktop back as the default environment. Then the diehard GNOMEs could officially declare they are doing a tablet OS to compete with MeeGo and Android and go off and either succeed or fail without harming the rest of the FreeDesktop efforts. But too many GNOMEs draw a paycheck at RedHat and are decisionmakers in the Fedora Project.
Back when GNOME was working with Sun on usability this probably wouldn't have happened either.
In the end it isn't the horrid UI of GNOME3 that scares the crap out of so many of us mortal users, it is the corrosive attitude radiating from the GNOME camp, exemplified by the article under discussion here. They don't care if we don't like it. Because they know better what we should want and are intent on 'giving' it to us if they have to come to our house and ram it down our throats. Because they are convinced they are RIGHT and will of course eventually learn to love it and admit we were wrong.
I can make the quite reasonable (to me at least) argument that there is no way I could deploy GNOME3 in a public lab because the same users who almost instantly know how to use GNOME2 wouldn't have a clue what to do with GNOME3. And they don''t care. I could try to migrate to something else but what? KDE is also pretty weird (but pretty and actually usable with user training) these days, I can wrangle XFCE into shape for my own use but it isn't ready for the general public. The small fry desktop environments are oriented for UNIX heads or embedded (Enlightenment). Unify is as bad as GNOME. So what is left? Stay on RHEL6/Fedora14/Ubuntu10.04 for the forseeable future and eventualy declare Linux a dead end when hardware support peters out? Migrate to Windows? What is the official suggestion? Come on GNOMEs, lets hear it.
> considering that the stations they closed had protestors on the tracks, blocking trains from leaving.
Easy problem. Toot Toot, chugga chugga. They WILL get out of the way because even a douchebag hipster knows who wins train vs meatsack. It is an attitude problem, nobody has the balls to make the choo choo go anymore so a few idiots can bring civilization to a halt.
What idiots. They leave the cell phone repeaters on and stop the trains. Hello! What is the primary purpose of BART? Phones or trains/buses?
> my phone can see the printer via wifi and it detects make/model and sends a request to the internet, > where my print job is magically turned into something recognized by the printer.
Someday.... Meanwhile today a Linux or Mac with CUPS works. Some printers even support it native. Imagine today you wander into a WiFi net with a CUPS server and you just see printers magically appear in your list. You get a PPD delivered automagically so you see all of its features, color, duplex, paper trays and finishing options, everything. It is beautiful.
Sounds like we just need to get CUPS into the iCrap, Windows (think it can do IPP but it isn't installed normally) and most important a direct implementation hosted on the cheap WiFi capable printers.
> Yes, it stopped it in a blink in Belfast in the 70s and 80s. Oh, wait...
Um, perhaps your knowledge of history is really that defective or you are trolling....
There is a world of difference between a riot/breakdown of civil order and the IRA. The IRA represented a non-trivial percentage of the local population wanting to succeed from the British Empire badly enough to fight an unconventional war over it. And still, had the British been the Empire of old do you really think it would have drug out for decades in a bloody stalemate? You can't really compare an organized revolutionary movement with (minority) public support across all social classes and international backing with some welfare cases rioting and looting.
> > Isn't it common practice to shoot looters on the act?
> Not in civilized^Wdecadent countries.
There, fixed it for ya. Only a hundred years ago it was universal law that looters were to be shot. Even in the horrors of WWII the US's Uniform Code of Military Justice and I believe similar laws of the Allied forces forbade looting. Up to fifty years ago lawlessness like London is experiencing would have been met with deadly force a few hours into the first night of violence. And it would have stopped. The problem is we have become too civilized (read decadent) to have the will to live. Our civilization no longer believes it has the moral authority to impose its will by force and enforce the order it professes to believe in on the barbarian hordes it itself has mostly created.
> >... just putting enough police/army on the streets and nicking the little bastards in the act? > Wasn't that the strategy they actually applied now?
Since more police obviously didn't work I'd say it is too late for police, time to admit things have progressed to insurrection and general lawlessness and roll the army in. Slap a curfew down and announce that anyone not in army, police, or fire and rescue uniforms after dark will be stopped. Anyone without a real good reason (i.e. emergency) gets arrested on the spot. Anyone who doesn't instantly submit will be shot (to wound if possible) and anyone caught in the act of looting will be executed on the spot. It is how civilized people used to keep order and it worked. It would work now. First night they would have to shoot a few who just wouldn't believe the government had the nads to follow through but that would be the last night of disorder. The police would be able to handle things on their own again in a couple of days.
> > What these so called "leaders" don't understand is the same social networks > > used to organize these actions are also being used by the public...
> From the debate, it sounds to me more like they want to somehow censor (or monitor?) > its use for criminal activity...
No, I suspect the original poster is right. These riots aren't caused by facebook or twitter and the sad fact that the looters are organizing there doesn't change the fact that the government has proven it lacks the will to keep order. That is why the riots continue every night, because the looters discovered that the government won't stop them any more.
Now the citizens are banding together to protect themselves. To the government this is even more frightening than the looters themselves. Defense from outlaws and establishing the rule of law are the principle defining acts of a GOVERNMENT. If the old one is toothless and unable to perform its basic duties the citizenry just might establish a new one. The government isn't mustering the militia for riot control, they are just standing by watching the city burn while the militia musters itself, in fact shopkeepers intent in defending their property rightly fear the police more than the looters. But when the smoke clears, if the old government can't stand up to a few hooligans how would they stand up to a citizenry who became self motivated, organized, quite likely well armed and totally pissed off at the government that forced them to become these things. That is what the current government fears.
This is what happens when a government becomes totally hollowed out in a quest to become a medical and pension plan with guns. Eventually you don't have the money for guns anymore.
And the warning signs are everywhere in the US that the violence could erupt here anytime, who knows what the trigger event will be. Certainly nobody expected shooting one crack dealer would trigger the end of the current British government but that is what is probably going to happen. The question now is whether the current PM goes or whether the whole society flames out.
> Both nations continue to accrue debt but the United States is a higher risk for defaulting?
Yes. The UK is actually taking steps to rein in its welfare state. That makes the long term prospects of a default on their debt lower than our risk since we are doubling down on the stupid. Remember who is looking at bond ratings, people who are buying instruments with maturity dates up to thirty years out. Could you REALLY buy a thirty year bond and sleep soundly, believing there is zero risk of the US defaulting or inflating its way out of the unsustainable debt trajectory it is currently on? Well if your answer is anything short of "No way in hell could that EVAH happen" then AA+ it is. AA+ means our debt is considered safe, but there is that little seed of doubt in the back of your mind... the negative outlook means that little seed is more likely to sprout than rot.
> Intended or not, corporations saw Social Security as a excuse...
Sorry to rain on your progressive emotion based rant but have you considered a reality based rationale? If the Feds are raking off ~15% for SS, another couple of points for Medicare, another few points go into various other funds before we even start talking about withholding actual income taxes, there isn't any budget left for a company pension plan. And don't forget medical. And in today's more changing world people don't work thirty years for the same company. These days many companies don't last thirty years. Having your paycheck AND pension tied to the longterm health of a single company probably isn't the smartest thing to do.
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> Jeebus! You had a 40MB hard drive in 1992?!?!
Methinks you are misremembering and have misplaced the decimal point. I had a 10MB hard drive on my Tandy Color Computer 3 in 1988. It was a surplused out MIniscribe and a seperate Adaptec MFM to SCSI interface.
By 1990 I had a PC with an 85MB drive. I suspect that 'Bigfoot' drive you mention was 800MB.
No, that is RMS being bitter.
Had he been willing to see the opportunity he would have adopted the Linux kernel (Linus wasn't willing to make Linux an official GNU project with copyright assignment) as an interium solution and completed GNU. Had the FSF got its act together and put out a complete bootable distribution of Linux + GNU + X with their official seal of approval it would almost certainly become (had it not sucked, been updated, etc) the primary distribution and we wouldn't have had most of the others because they wouldn't have had a reason to exist. And if they ever finished HURD they could have, like Debian is doing now, began offering a distro with that as the kernel and the users would have decided which they liked.
A GNU with only FSF copyrighted code was and is never going to happen (no attempt is even being made at things like X for example) so what was the objection to putting Linux in to get to a complete bootable GNU system? Once Linus adopted GPL2 as the license all the parts were in place to produce GNU 1.0 but they waited for HURD. Their fault.
Yea, and nowadays the networkmanager applet sucks up 20MB of resident set. Somehow I managed to have a graphical desktop with Netscape run on a machine with 8MB of RAM total and run well with 16MB. Granted it was Netscape 0.9 on an 8bit display but still. Then I ran RedHat 4.x on an old clunker laptop with a 486SX and 40MB ram and ran Netscape 4.x with 16bit color. Now Fedora has trouble installing if you don't have a GB of ram. And we wonder why we got left out of the embedded world. Yes it all 'runs linux' but doesn't run any of the modern graphical stacks because they are more bloated than even Windows. Had we worried more about keeping our apps lean and mean Android wouldn't have been required. The GNOMES are hellbent on making a tablet interface without realizing that none of the existing hardware can run GNOME because it is too bloated.
Yup, and if it doesn't end in 2012 it certainly will in Jan 2013 when an Aggie is sworn in as POTUS. The exploding heads of everyone on the east coast will cause the earth to go out of orbit and crash into the sun.
But I'm putting my money on everything going Foom! next year before the elections ever get a chance to happen. Too many signs and portents to ignore. Today's is just one in a string that the world is going to hell in a bucket. Buy lots of food, buy some gold and then some guns to protect the food and gold and get ready to hunker down.
Well as long as it is just FoxNews who cares, right? Now if NETCRAFT confirms it......
Gotta hit all of the slashdot memes today.
> They've managed it since "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame".
Yea, and I never bought into the walled garden that was the iPod either. and guess what, iPods aren't especially selling well, of course a big part of that was separate music players are basically a dead idea. Then they had the iPhone dominate the smartphone space for a couple of years because Windows Mobile blew goat and Palm was in the hands of idiots. But now they are #3 in smartphones and falling. So then they put iOS on a bigger screen and birthed the tablet craze. They are still #1 there but by Xmas I suspect they will be hard pressed to keep the crown and by next year I'd put a C note on them falling off their perch. So unless you think Steve can pull yet another rabbit out of his hat and invent yet another category defining product that can produce billions in sales, sell AAPL short. But I won't be going short on em as long as Steve is alive because he just might do it.
But as for Apple being dominant in PCs, smartphones or tablets in two years the odds are pretty much zilch. Because of their corporate DNA as a premium brand experience working against them wanting to remain a volume player in any market, especially if they can't rake in 50% profit margins and now they have their market cap demanding they produce insane profits to justify the stock price. Longterm, all consumer electronics tends to become a low margin high volume business, something Apple has never been interested in participating in. It also tends toward commodification, something else Apple doesn't believe in.
> Putting all Android devices in the same column opposite the iPhone is the same fanboy thinking..
No it isn't. Retailers don't really care if the Android devices are from a multitude of OEMs, they can stack em on the shelf beside each other because customers divide into iOS and Android nicely, Android customers not caring so much whose badge is on the product they are considering so much as which version of Android is loaded on it. Carriers don't care. App authors don't care, an App that works on an HTC handset works equally well on a Motorola handset with the same version of Android and same basic hardware. And doesn't work on an iPhone.... even if Apple allows it to be sold after the porting effort.
See the PC for how this works in the real world, the hardware is abstracted away by the operating system. Hardware maker hate this of course and have been trying to differentiate their Windows and Android offerings since day one but when they actually succeed customers end up hating it if they can't easily remove it.
> But nothing is beating the iPhone. It just so happens that every competitor has the same OS.
That is the same fanboy thinking (or lack of) that says Apple is beating the PC because they are (at times, depending on how you count...) the #1 selling brand. And if the competition is Apple vs. Dell Apple outselling Dell would make them #1, but that is a dumb way to look at the industry. It is Apple vs ALL of the Windows PC vendors and Apple is lucky to get into double digits when they only count retail sales, or just look at laptops or some other way to make Apple look bigger than they are.
Android is soundly whipping Apple in the smartphone space. Most counts still have RIM beating Apple. Apple had a brief moment but it is fading. Now they are having another moment in the tablet space while Android catches up. But Apple has a critical limitation, the urgent need to make 50 points on every sale to justify their market cap that is currently only challenged by Exxon-Mobil. They are selling cheap consumer electronics made by Chinese slave labor just like everyone else, only they expect to make fifty points. That can only happen when they can catch the rest of the consumer electronics industry with their pants down, which they have proven their ability to manage a few times now. But it never lasts long.
> You have a sad, strange definition of religion, my friend.
No, it is you with too limited and constraining a definition. Science cannot answer the big questions. Reason can't. Many have tried, many believed it could. Millions lie in the mass graves that resulted every time those people achieved power. Science can answer WHAT the universe is. Not that it has done so yet, but we have only been at it for a few thousand years even if you define 'science' rather loosely. I'd say science starts with the invention of the scientific method so we have only been at it for a few hundred years so feel confident in BELIEVING that it will eventually deliver an explanation of WHAT the universe is. But science, by any current understanding of the idea, can never answer WHY the universe is or even if that question has any meaning. It can't supply an answer to what our place in that universe is, how we should organize our lives, culture, civilizations, etc.
The big questions, the ones that really matter, are all still open and anyone who thinks they have the ultimate answers (or the Ultimate Question for the Douglas Adams fans.) is deeply in the hold of a religious faith. Any system that proposes an organized philosophical worldview is basically a religion. Whether it is the teachings of Budda, Jesus, Mohammad, Moses, Ayn Rand, Marx/Lennin or modern Secular Humanism as taught in American schools. All transcend reason and depend on an appeal to faith at some point, which is where they become a religion.
> Who are saying that "the debate is settled"? Certainly not scientists,
I agree that by any sensible definition of 'science' they aren't. Science isn't decided by a vote. No matter how popular or beautiful a theory is, it must fall to ONE stubborn fact or it isn't science anymore. But by the circular logic that prevails today 'climate scientist' is defined as those who study climate change and man's destruction of the climate. Anyone who doesn't believe in AGW is thus declared to NOT be a climate scientist and that therefore 'all' climate scientists agree that AGW is real and almost all agree the only solution is socialism. More importantly the funding decisions (mostly politicians invested in the proposed solution to AGW) are being made almost entirely based on the 'settled science' theory. The people in charge of the 'reputable' (similar circular definition) science journals are all deeply invested in the group think of settled science theory.
> Despite the religious right's attempt to make it appear impotent...
What the hell are you talking about? The fundies are using the establishment clause on the grounds that Secular Humanism IS the establishment of a state religion. And they are correct. Look at this thread if you don't believe me. Every defender of this ruling falls back on an argument based on the notion that the teacher can't be fired for speaking The Truth. Well friend, any time somebody starts blabbering on about having The One Truth he is almost always in religious territory.
> But the faithful are pretty dangerous people at times when they feel they have to defend their faith.
True enough but some are more dangerous than others. Take those who are godless for example, believing that the ends justify the means. When the utopia their 'faith' (theory) expects doesn't actually occur when they achieve power they never give up, they always double down and make a hell on earth. See Mao, Pol Pot, Kim Jung Il, Stalin, Castro, Hitler. The worst the Christians ever did was the Inquisition. Islam is taking the evil up to a new level but they still have a way to descend to reach Progressive body counts. Too bad Islam appears intent on taking the Satanic Crown for making a Hell on Earth.
> The question before that court was whether the classroom instructor had the
> authority to overrule the authority of the elected body responsible for setting policy.
Any attempt to answer "Life, The Universe and Everything" is religion[1]. So basically what we have here is the schools mandating teachers only teach the official State religion. Which of course perfectly fits Politically Correct teaching where in the NewSpeak 'tolerance' is defined as people of every skin pigmentation, mating preference and gender identity coming together to think exactly the same and being intolerant in the extreme to anyone who thinks even slightly different. And it is of course no accident that the official religion is totalitarian; everything within the State, nothing without.
[1] Religion being a word that does not require a belief in a old white guy in the sky. or even a pantheon of bearded white guys in the sky. Any attempt to explain the big questions that science cannot (but too many believe it can) answer is religion. Otherwise we have several very old religions which wouldn't fit the definition. The problem is that science can tackle a lot of questions as to WHAT the universe is but it can't answer WHY. Nor can it probe one femtosecond beyond the big bang and remain science. But all too many people think science CAN supply a complete philosophical/religious system.
> There's no reason to declare Linux, or any of these operating systems dead...
From my POV it is. I run public labs in a public library setting and have been using GNOME since 0.x days because you can drop a random user in front of it and they can figure it out.. You could have done the same with KDE up through the 3.x series but 4.x is different enough I suspect I'd have problems. GNOME 3 I don't wonder, I know I'd have problems. None of the other desktops are suitable out of the box but if I invested enough time I think I could make XFCE work. That is my perspective, Linux as usable by folks off the street. When I can no longer buy hardware that works with distros old enough to still be shipping a working desktop I will be forced to Windows. Hopefully this fiasco won't last that long, I am not the only one who actually uses Linux in a public setting so some solution should get worked out. I'm just bitchin' because this situation is so dumb.
> UNIX was built on the idea that the filesystem is the centre of the operating system.
> Clearly, they have forgotten that.
Nope. They (along with folk like Poettering) are members of the UNIX Haters Club. They know UNIX, they just hate it with every fiber of their being. They want to replace the UNIX Way, they disagree over exactly what the brave new future looks like but they know what they don't like.
We allowed unassimilated immigrants commit access to our cultural heritage. There is a lesson in this in/for the meatspace immigration debates.
> You should try XFCE.
I'm there. But it ain't perfect.
If you want icons on the desktop you have to accept they will be in random order every time you login.
That the file manager won't show thumbnails.
That even after you do a force remove of gnome-power-manager you still have issues. Yes you can configure xfce to leave power on when you close the lid if AC power is connected. But if you then yank the plug it will stay running until the battery dies. Yank the plug and then close the lid and it does the right thing.
Desktop links that work in GNOME don't work in XFCE. Unless a .desktop file opens a terminal the process doesn't inherit the environment so no SSH_AGENT so no remote X apps automagically launching.
These are all bugs in F15. Hopefully they won't be for long and then we can all kiss GNOME goodbye. But they also need to offer an option for XFCE to be preconfigured to look like GNOME (ok, Windows) out of the chute for a new user. Then I could roll out an updated lab image for our public labs.
This! The GNOMEs could go as insane as the wanted to and not cause much harm if RedHat didn't enable them. If Fedora announced it was making GNOME Desktop an alternate spin for F17 the problem would be over. Port the old Gnome parts to Gtk3 and put the standard desktop oriented desktop back as the default environment. Then the diehard GNOMEs could officially declare they are doing a tablet OS to compete with MeeGo and Android and go off and either succeed or fail without harming the rest of the FreeDesktop efforts. But too many GNOMEs draw a paycheck at RedHat and are decisionmakers in the Fedora Project.
Back when GNOME was working with Sun on usability this probably wouldn't have happened either.
In the end it isn't the horrid UI of GNOME3 that scares the crap out of so many of us mortal users, it is the corrosive attitude radiating from the GNOME camp, exemplified by the article under discussion here. They don't care if we don't like it. Because they know better what we should want and are intent on 'giving' it to us if they have to come to our house and ram it down our throats. Because they are convinced they are RIGHT and will of course eventually learn to love it and admit we were wrong.
I can make the quite reasonable (to me at least) argument that there is no way I could deploy GNOME3 in a public lab because the same users who almost instantly know how to use GNOME2 wouldn't have a clue what to do with GNOME3. And they don''t care. I could try to migrate to something else but what? KDE is also pretty weird (but pretty and actually usable with user training) these days, I can wrangle XFCE into shape for my own use but it isn't ready for the general public. The small fry desktop environments are oriented for UNIX heads or embedded (Enlightenment). Unify is as bad as GNOME. So what is left? Stay on RHEL6/Fedora14/Ubuntu10.04 for the forseeable future and eventualy declare Linux a dead end when hardware support peters out? Migrate to Windows? What is the official suggestion? Come on GNOMEs, lets hear it.
> considering that the stations they closed had protestors on the tracks, blocking trains from leaving.
Easy problem. Toot Toot, chugga chugga. They WILL get out of the way because even a douchebag hipster knows who wins train vs meatsack. It is an attitude problem, nobody has the balls to make the choo choo go anymore so a few idiots can bring civilization to a halt.
What idiots. They leave the cell phone repeaters on and stop the trains. Hello! What is the primary purpose of BART? Phones or trains/buses?
> my phone can see the printer via wifi and it detects make/model and sends a request to the internet,
> where my print job is magically turned into something recognized by the printer.
Someday.... Meanwhile today a Linux or Mac with CUPS works. Some printers even support it native. Imagine today you wander into a WiFi net with a CUPS server and you just see printers magically appear in your list. You get a PPD delivered automagically so you see all of its features, color, duplex, paper trays and finishing options, everything. It is beautiful.
Sounds like we just need to get CUPS into the iCrap, Windows (think it can do IPP but it isn't installed normally) and most important a direct implementation hosted on the cheap WiFi capable printers.
> Yes, it stopped it in a blink in Belfast in the 70s and 80s. Oh, wait...
Um, perhaps your knowledge of history is really that defective or you are trolling....
There is a world of difference between a riot/breakdown of civil order and the IRA. The IRA represented a non-trivial percentage of the local population wanting to succeed from the British Empire badly enough to fight an unconventional war over it. And still, had the British been the Empire of old do you really think it would have drug out for decades in a bloody stalemate? You can't really compare an organized revolutionary movement with (minority) public support across all social classes and international backing with some welfare cases rioting and looting.
> > Isn't it common practice to shoot looters on the act?
> Not in civilized^Wdecadent countries.
There, fixed it for ya. Only a hundred years ago it was universal law that looters were to be shot. Even in the horrors of WWII the US's Uniform Code of Military Justice and I believe similar laws of the Allied forces forbade looting. Up to fifty years ago lawlessness like London is experiencing would have been met with deadly force a few hours into the first night of violence. And it would have stopped. The problem is we have become too civilized (read decadent) to have the will to live. Our civilization no longer believes it has the moral authority to impose its will by force and enforce the order it professes to believe in on the barbarian hordes it itself has mostly created.
> > ... just putting enough police/army on the streets and nicking the little bastards in the act?
> Wasn't that the strategy they actually applied now?
Since more police obviously didn't work I'd say it is too late for police, time to admit things have progressed to insurrection and general lawlessness and roll the army in. Slap a curfew down and announce that anyone not in army, police, or fire and rescue uniforms after dark will be stopped. Anyone without a real good reason (i.e. emergency) gets arrested on the spot. Anyone who doesn't instantly submit will be shot (to wound if possible) and anyone caught in the act of looting will be executed on the spot. It is how civilized people used to keep order and it worked. It would work now. First night they would have to shoot a few who just wouldn't believe the government had the nads to follow through but that would be the last night of disorder. The police would be able to handle things on their own again in a couple of days.
> > What these so called "leaders" don't understand is the same social networks
> > used to organize these actions are also being used by the public...
> From the debate, it sounds to me more like they want to somehow censor (or monitor?)
> its use for criminal activity...
No, I suspect the original poster is right. These riots aren't caused by facebook or twitter and the sad fact that the looters are organizing there doesn't change the fact that the government has proven it lacks the will to keep order. That is why the riots continue every night, because the looters discovered that the government won't stop them any more.
Now the citizens are banding together to protect themselves. To the government this is even more frightening than the looters themselves. Defense from outlaws and establishing the rule of law are the principle defining acts of a GOVERNMENT. If the old one is toothless and unable to perform its basic duties the citizenry just might establish a new one. The government isn't mustering the militia for riot control, they are just standing by watching the city burn while the militia musters itself, in fact shopkeepers intent in defending their property rightly fear the police more than the looters. But when the smoke clears, if the old government can't stand up to a few hooligans how would they stand up to a citizenry who became self motivated, organized, quite likely well armed and totally pissed off at the government that forced them to become these things. That is what the current government fears.
This is what happens when a government becomes totally hollowed out in a quest to become a medical and pension plan with guns. Eventually you don't have the money for guns anymore.
And the warning signs are everywhere in the US that the violence could erupt here anytime, who knows what the trigger event will be. Certainly nobody expected shooting one crack dealer would trigger the end of the current British government but that is what is probably going to happen. The question now is whether the current PM goes or whether the whole society flames out.
> Both nations continue to accrue debt but the United States is a higher risk for defaulting?
Yes. The UK is actually taking steps to rein in its welfare state. That makes the long term prospects of a default on their debt lower than our risk since we are doubling down on the stupid. Remember who is looking at bond ratings, people who are buying instruments with maturity dates up to thirty years out. Could you REALLY buy a thirty year bond and sleep soundly, believing there is zero risk of the US defaulting or inflating its way out of the unsustainable debt trajectory it is currently on? Well if your answer is anything short of "No way in hell could that EVAH happen" then AA+ it is. AA+ means our debt is considered safe, but there is that little seed of doubt in the back of your mind... the negative outlook means that little seed is more likely to sprout than rot.
> Intended or not, corporations saw Social Security as a excuse...
Sorry to rain on your progressive emotion based rant but have you considered a reality based rationale? If the Feds are raking off ~15% for SS, another couple of points for Medicare, another few points go into various other funds before we even start talking about withholding actual income taxes, there isn't any budget left for a company pension plan. And don't forget medical. And in today's more changing world people don't work thirty years for the same company. These days many companies don't last thirty years. Having your paycheck AND pension tied to the longterm health of a single company probably isn't the smartest thing to do.